Luck and Death at the Edge of the World

Fifteen: Airportlandia

LAX is bigger now than it was when I was growing up, but it has the same feeling that it had then of being a neverland -- something that exists in the interstices between actual places.  It isn’t part of L.A., or even California.  It’s really an outpost of Airportlandia, like JFK International or Berlin-Tegel.  It’s part of a land that lies somewhere between departures and arrivals.

I watch security go through my shoulder bag.  I have no luggage to check.  When they’re done, I board, then wait while the plane taxis and eventually abandons the ground entirely.

I've always loved flying – the sense of adventure, and that wonderful feeling of dislocation from the events and people you deal with every day.  I love living for a while in Airportlandia.

When first I mustered out of the Forces there was a period at the very beginning when my nightmares never really stopped, awake or asleep.

In the waking world people on fire walked past me on the street, nightmare creatures hiding behind human faces spoke in tongues on the subway, and my own body refused to obey me, first energized to the point of trembling, then slow and torpid, then so sensitive to the touch that I couldn’t stand the friction of my own clothes.

And while I slept?  I watched couples who were already dead make love one last messy time before they would let themselves rest forever, I heard a riot of noise erupt from a burning stable full of horses caught in their stalls, I saw a family of corpses sitting in a darkened living room in front of a television that played garish colored light across their faces.

Every ten or twenty days I’d dose myself with Nightshade and drop like a rock, then remain unconscious for three or four days.  If I dreamed during those times, I never remembered it.

Then I discovered that the one time the nightmares stopped was when I was on a plane and I fell in love with flying all over again.  At 10,000 metres above the Earth, no ghost could reach me.  Up here, the world was no longer complicated – it was reduced to this plane, these five-hundred people, and the clouds outside the window.  Bad things might wait for me back home, might even lie ahead when I landed, but they weren’t right here, right now, beside me on the plane.  It was the first peace I’d had in ages.

I started flying a lot.  I didn’t need a job yet – I’d rarely spent much of my pay while I was in the Forces, so I had a sizeable nest egg.  I could coast for a year or two if I needed to, just flying from one place to another.  I didn’t care where I went, making stops in Moscow, London, Sao Paulo.  I became addicted to the relief of being in the sky.

One day, I decided to challenge myself and booked a ticket to Mexico.  Not Tijuana – that would have been a bridge too far – but Mexico City, just like the flight I’m on now.  I happened to be seated next to David Halldórsson.

I didn’t know him then, but I noticed him right away, mostly because amidst the pre-flight jostling and scurrying he was uniquely composed.  We weren’t off the ground yet, but he already seemed to project that sense of calm that I could only find once I was up in the clouds.  At the same time, he was clearly wearing a military shell, so he had to be Forces, which wasn’t a common path to serenity.  I introduced myself and asked him what pharmaceuticals he could recommend.

“Oh, I never use them these days,” he said lightly.  “I take medicine for physical stuff, antibiotics or whatever, but I don’t mess around with anything psychoactive anymore.”

I didn’t think much of it until he started to get comfortable, taking off his jacket, balling it up, and using it to give himself some lumbar support.  He sat back and crossed his arms in front of him and that was when I saw his tattoos.  One of them said “Tijuana” in bright red ink, with a stylized death’s head to the left, a skeletal version of the Mexican eagle to the right, and dates that I knew all too well underneath.