Ethereal - Page 3

I belong here: this place has been constructed for me. I am doing the right thing here, spending money, going somewhere, believing in technology. I am not alone, but I can feel independent here, as I have chosen my route among the thousands available. A trace of adventure remains for me, in spite of the schedules and the many others going where I am going. I am on the move, taking to the skies, getting where I'm going as fast as possible. As long as I purchase a ticket, I am welcomed, offered a sense of belonging and comfort here. What's more, that belonging is temporary and anonymous: perfect.

These days, you wear what's enough. If you're flying to a conference and running directly there, you suit up. If you're meeting a lover for a holiday, you wear your favorite new jeans, perhaps tighter than you'd want to wear for a long flight under other circumstances. If you're not going anywhere where it matters what you look like upon arrival, you wear the hideous Velcro sandals and the assorted exercise wear or pajama separates that you would like to think double as street clothes. People used to dress for travel, as my family did when I was small. My sisters and I wore our finest frilly dresses, even for trips that stretched into a second full day, to destinations like Taipei, Taiwan and all the way back to Washington. The youngest of us were bedwetters, and seatwetters when we traveled. I wonder about the alternate wardrobes, and if my mother carried other starched dresses. We did not question our delight in making a nice impression on the world.

Air travel used to make you really something. If you'd flown to Paris, France, you were "broadened." Now nearly everyone has flown to lots of places, and it's clear it doesn't often improve a person. Or at least, on a large scale, it doesn't appear to advance the species. And being subjected to so much inconvenience and discomfort during transport, we are probably learning to hate rather than love one another's cultures. Strange currency, languages, customs-think of how stressful, I mean broadening, the experience of a foreign airport can be. And we're so tired, we are dehydrated, our necks are sore, we have been given such small portions of the tasteless food. It was worth it when no one else had done this and wouldn't know how wretchedly ordinary and humiliating the suffering could be. All that's left is to make it routine, so we are here to compete with the traveling salesperson flying first class who acts as if it's not worth mentioning, as if the difference is only time and money between one place and another.

I'd brought my Salvation Army coat with me when I visited my father in tropical Sri Lanka, knowing that I'd return to cold weather in Pittsburgh. It was a beautifully funky, drapey coat from the forties in the only color I wore, gray. A narrow line of black velvet around the collar made the coat my favorite of several I'd collected for less than a dollar. I was saying good-bye to Daddy at the airport now, since my college graduation gift of a visit had run out after eight months. I was to go back to the States and get a job. I was full of dread, but making the most of the last few moments to be the baby of the family, taunting Daddy like a ten-year-old. Suddenly a smirk appeared on his face and I knew he had me on something, as always happened. He pointed to the seat behind me, where I had laid my coat. A mass of flies careened and swooped above it, an embarrassingly visible melee. The months of heat had ripened the old woolen coat, which I had not thought to dry clean. People around, dressed elegantly in silk saris, looked on.

Looking at people as they walk by, you begin to imagine you understand something about humanity. You see character in carriage. The swagger in this one makes you loathe him; the mincing, hurried step of that one fills you with contempt. The alikeness of people in a crowd makes points of difference seem clear. There are so many with similar shoes that a strikingly stylish pair draws you up short. You look quickly up at her face-is she interesting? intelligent? beautiful? You fall in love very quickly, with her and her lover-so elegant, solemn, young-bearing themselves with such mild coolness. You want to tell them they affect you this way, but of course your staring is bad enough. They look back at you, invaded, investigative.

Most people are caught in the moment, in the exertion of hauling, in the hunt for the gate. They are only alert to "getting there." They are not playing to anyone; they've cast their ways away. They are really who they are now-their natures show. What intimacy! We can't deny it, even if we don't want anything to do with intimacy with strangers. If we do, the opportunities are everywhere to enter open doorways. We look to see who is looking, in that way. We wonder at ourselves, out in public practically naked, as in a dream. The atmosphere is sensuous, brazen; the eye contact is sumptuous.

In Santa Fe, I take my husband to the airport. Nobody's there. We pass a clock with no hands. No planes come in; no sound is heard. There isn't a newsstand. Nothing to buy. In the spare waiting room, two or three people sit on stylish wooden couches. How is this place related to O'Hare or Heathrow? Only in the drained, slack look of faces leaving or left, faces no longer animated by love or necessity. Waiting there, I remember a time at our own airport in Tampa, crowded with stranded, crumpled travelers. A little girl walked by, her hand in her mother's, as we sat against our bags on the floor. With a voice full of concern, she called out to us, "Where's your Mommy?"

Always the place is dreary, wearing out visibly. Stains and chips and tears work their steady ways. The lighting tends to be patchy, either too bright or dim. The music is saddening; its thin veneer of cheer worsens the sinking effect upon the heart. The pervasive imperfection that will never change, even if it is made new or attended to regularly, is similarly disheartening. In the midst of this, people take on its meager, disintegrating look: our appearances seem to whine, "This is the best I can do!"

What's difficult is examining yourself, which comes from thinking you're being examined. You don't want to be watched as you're watching most of the time. You wonder if everyone is only pretending to be in a very important private space. Have they not lost hope of becoming something in the eyes of a stranger, yet are afraid to see absence reflected there if they make eye contact? If you turn yourself on like a TV and no one watches you, after you have committed to being present, this is a bad surprise. We want to be like televisions with fine planned programming for viewers. We'd also very much like to avoid appearing when we are not prepared to be seen. This is becoming possible, but not everyone understands the "off" signal yet, and so there are still awkward moments when people examine you and you have to think about what they see.

Japan Airlines certificate dated Aug. 25, 1960: my one whole bone not left in the riverbed... Proclamation of the Seven Deities of Good Fortune KNOW YE BY THESE PRESENTS that, having entered the ethereal realm of the Sun, the Sky and the Moon, while spanning the Pacific on the wings of the Courier, Miss Lisa C. Birnbaum has crossed the International Dateline, and thus has jumbled Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow from their mundane, time-worn order.

The longing to be lost to the world a little while, when you're merely on the way to Pittsburgh, can overtake you. Perhaps you won't return from Pittsburgh the same, or very different, but you'll have been suspended out of context, without your usual meanings, your home outside your self, your evident history of transit. You may find that mystery seeps in-a sweeter air leaks through the gates!-as you wait to enter not merely a plane, all of a sudden, but the sky.

Lisa Birnbaum is a professor at the University of Tampa. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol and is forthcoming in Connecticut Review.