James Siegel - Detour

“Is there a problem here?” one of the men addressed Rosa.

She hesitated, then shook her head. “No, it’s all right,” she said. “Mr. Breidbart’s going back to his seat.”

Mr. Breidbart went back to his seat.

The plane was already one hour late.

He had seventeen hours left.

SIXTEEN

They were showing a comedy with Reese Witherspoon. Paul knew it was a comedy because several passengers were laughing.

He was watching the movie too. He had no idea what it was about.

Something was wrong with his stomach—other than the obvious. When he touched it, it felt tight as a bongo drum. He could play “Wipe Out” on it. He was increasingly nauseous.

I will not throw up, he told himself.

If he threw up the condoms, he’d have to swallow them again; it had been hard enough to get them down the first time. Each swallow had triggered a reflexive urge to vomit. How had he managed it exactly? By using various and only half-successful stratagems.

First he’d pictured Joanna and Joelle sitting in that room—focused on the end benefit. That worked only for a while. So he’d changed tack, imagined each condom as a kind of local delicacy—a strange-tasting delicacy, even a repulsive one, but one that as a politically correct visitor he felt honor-bound to try.

When that didn’t work either, when he gagged and almost brought everything back up, he’d thought of them as individual doses of medicine . Something prescribed to save his life—his life and theirs.

Somehow he’d managed to get all thirty-six down.

The hard part was keeping them there.

The plane had taken off two hours behind schedule. In order to avoid an unexpected turbulence over the Caribbean, the pilot had climbed to thirty thousand feet. This would add time to the flight, the pilot explained, but better late than bumpy, he added in that neutral midwestern twang every pilot in the world seemed to speak with. He was amending the flight path with their comfort in mind.

Paul’s comfort was in negative integers.

Negative numbers had always fascinated him. They were the dark side of the moon, the antimatter of the numerical universe that he called home. He was traveling through this universe now.

“Are you all right?” the man next to him asked. Evidently, he wasn’t watching the Reese Witherspoon movie. He was watching Paul. Paul looked weird.

“Just a little nauseous,” Paul answered.

The man seemed to pull back. Somehow he’d increased the physical distance between them without actually moving. Paul understood— nausea was the last word you wanted to hear during a long flight. Next to bomb, of course.

One of his industry’s standard jokes: Did you hear about the actuary who brought a fake bomb onto a plane? He wanted to decrease the chances there’d be another bomb on the plane.

Ha, ha.

“You want me to call the flight attendant?” the man asked warily.

“No. I’ll be fine.” Paul could feel individual beads of sweat on his forehead. His stomach was rumbling like thunder before a deluge.

“Well, okay,” the man said. He didn’t look like it was okay.

Paul tried to lose himself in the movie again. Reese was a lawyer or something. She kept saying cute things and smiled a lot.

He was going to throw up.

Paul stood and made his way to the business-class lavatory. Only it was occupied and someone else was waiting to use it. A mother holding her four-year-old boy by the hand. The boy was shuffling his feet and periodically grabbing at the crotch of his pants.

“He has to go,” the mother said apologetically.

Paul peered through the half-opened curtain leading to first class. No one was waiting at that lavatory. He went through the curtain toward the front of the plane.

“Excuse me, sir.”

A flight attendant had materialized out of nowhere. He was slim, young, but very determined-looking. Right now he was determined that Paul, a business-class passenger, not make it into the first-class lavatory.

“We like you to use the lavatory in your section,” he said.

“So would I. Only it’s occupied. So—”

“If you’ll just wait until the lavatory is available,” the man interrupted.

“I can’t wait. I’m not feeling well.”

The first-class passengers were all looking at him. Paul could feel their eyes boring into his back. In the hierarchy of planedom, they were Brahmins and he was an Untouchable. This might have embarrassed him in his previous life. But in this life he was a drug smuggler about to upchuck his illicit cargo into the aisle, so he didn’t care. He needed to get to that bathroom.

The flight attendant, whose name was Roland, was looking him over as if trying to ascertain if he was telling the truth. Was he really sick, or was he attempting to con his way into the glories of the first-class lavatory?

Paul didn’t wait for him to decide. He moved forward, physically brushing past a defeated-looking Roland. He entered the bathroom and shut the door.

His nausea had reached a pretty much unendurable level.

He looked at himself in the mirror. His face was pasty and wet.

He closed his eyes.

He pictured Joanna shut in that airless room. Sitting on that filthy mattress. Alone. He wondered if she was praying for him, revisiting the faith of her youth, when she’d dutifully gone to confession every Sunday and renounced her girlish sins. He hoped so.

I will not throw up. He said this not just to himself, but to God. Okay, they weren’t exactly on a first-name basis, but he was willing to give it a shot. He was ready to let bygones be bygones and become friends.

Don’t let me throw up.

Rephrased now as an actual prayer, a plea from someone in need of a little godly intervention.

He took deep breaths. He splashed cold water onto his face. He clenched his hands into fists. He purposely avoided looking at the toilet, which seemed like a visual invitation to upchuck the drugs.

It worked.

He felt his nausea subsiding. He was still queasy, but he could actually imagine making it back to his seat without vomiting. Maybe there was something to this religious stuff, after all. Maybe even a jaded God had been moved to pity.

Someone knocked on the door.

“What’s going on in there?”

Roland. Still sounding kind of indignant.

“I’m coming out,” Paul said.

“Fine.”

A minute later Paul opened the door and maneuvered past Roland, who smelled strongly of lavender. He made it back to his seat, where the man next to him eyed him suspiciously.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

Paul nodded. He turned onto his side and closed his eyes. He couldn’t sleep, but he’d pretend to.

He had two hours left till customs.

THERE WAS A DOG AT THE BOTTOM OF THE ESCALATOR.

A German shepherd with a thick black harness around it.

Paul couldn’t see who had hold of that harness, because the ceiling sloped to the angle of the escalator and restricted his vision.

It could be a blind person, he thought. A beggar with one of those white cups in his hand and a sign that said I am blind. Please help me.

Or it could be the other kind of person who would be holding a harnessed dog in an international airport. Waiting for a flight from Colombia.

He thought about turning around and heading back up against the flow. The escalator was packed—he’d never make it.

The escalator seemed to be moving at SLP speed, the slowest setting on your typical VCR. The person holding the dog was filling in by small increments, as if he were being drawn by a sketch artist in Washington Square Park.

First the shoes.

Black, sturdy, thick soles. Not necessarily a blind person’s shoes, but not necessarily not.