The jet at rest on the tarmac with the light blinking on its belly. The steady pulse, dull-bright-dull, seems like code from benevolent higher beings. But it’s really just some dumb thing we made, the same shit that makes the lights work on your dryer and alarm clock.

The weird bottoming out right after the plane takes off, like everyone on board subconsciously doesn’t want to fly.

Memories of Flying as a Child

I stood by the giant window at JFK, looking out at the sunny tarmac. A TWA 707, possibly our plane, waited at the gate. The big red stripe and the letters on the tail signaled a dimension of mystery and beauty apart from my world back home of walking in the woods. An elderly couple appeared you’d describe as kindly. The woman handed me a yellow butterscotch in its twisted little wrapper. When I found Mom she took it away. Don’t accept candy from strangers, she said.

As soon as the light went bing the man I sat behind reclined and lit a cigarette. The stewardess’s cart clattered with soda cans and baby liquor bottles. I had peanuts and ginger ale. Dinner was lasagna, hot and salty in the smoky atmosphere. The presentation excited me: the foil tight around the edges of the dish, the undressed iceberg and tomato salad, the dense and pale roll. And something strange and colorful and sweet. Utensils wrapped in plastic. We face forward when we eat on a plane. We do not face each other. Not that we really eat. It’s not about eating. I poked apart the pasta layers with my fork. I knew I’d be vomiting by the time we land.

The cabin was dark and still. On the screen a purple dune buggy bounced along the beach. I raised the window shade. The sky above the clouds was yellow, red and deep, dark blue. Was it sunset, sunrise, I don’t know. On the screen a man was getting acupuncture. The practitioner rotated each needle, an act that appeared devious and cruel but might bring healing forces into play.

I walked alone by the chain link fence outside Luxembourg Airport thinking if they could only see me now. My classmates from that awful year in Paris. If they could only see me in my winter jacket out there in the jet fuel-scented air. Me in my place, them in theirs. Planes taxiing in the distance with the logos on their tails. Much like the one that was to take me home. I could see myself the way they’d see me. If they could only see me now.

My sister and I took turns going to the toilet to steal soap. It was stacked in a dispenser, little paper-wrapped bars with TWA. I don’t know what we ever did with them. They seemed so precious in the air. Stewardesses would give us things, playing cards with a picture of a plane flying over the sunny Rocky Mountains, and I’d wonder how they took a picture of the plane. They gave us little wing pins, junior flight crew pins. Socks.

We sat in a dimly lit terminal at an odd hour of the night, waiting for our connection. Outside a squall covered the planes and tugs and luggage carts in a dusting of snow.

I stood by the checkout at the newsstand in JFK. I couldn’t see above the counter and the lady couldn’t see me. That’s what I figured anyway as she tended to a customer. At arm's reach before me sat rows upon rows of candy: gums on top, Dentyne, Wrigleys in blues and yellows and greens, Dubble Bubble and Bazooka; in the middle Necco Wafers, Smarties, Chuckles and Dots; the chocolate down below: Charleston Chews and Milky Ways, Reese’s, Kit Kats, Crunch. I took a roll of Life Savers. How was I not supposed to? I concealed it in the front of my waistband and walked away. On the plane it fell down my pants leg and rolled along the cabin floor. Mom saw it and said did you steal this, I said yes, full of fear, and she grabbed me by the shoulders and scolded me and said you may have one if you share them with your sister.

The planes look slow and lumbering as they take off and land, almost like you could catch up to them by foot, grab hold of the fuselage.

I love the names on the planes. Like Kalitta on the 747s, a familiar-sounding name, I thought maybe just from every other airport I’ve been to in my life. I looked it up and saw it’s Connie Kalitta, drag racer, Beau Bridges in “Heart Like a Wheel.”

The artificial intelligence took us through unfamiliar streets, the types where bashed-up cars are parked and weeds grow through the sidewalks. “In one thousand feet, turn right,” she says, and we obey.

At a stop light I observed a used car lot. CROWN FORD PRE-OWNED, it said, and all the letters were immaculate blue and white, the logo we all know below. I marveled at the correctness of it all, the font, the kearning. The folks at headquarters must be hands-on. But then as I rolled away I noticed the entire block of text was off-center on the concrete facade. Not by much. Only by an inch or two. But enough.

On the Belt Parkway we watched as the planes came in. There’s always one that surprises you, that appears right out of the trees and blots out the sun.

At the party she didn’t speak to us except to say excuse me. But at least we stayed until after she left.

The plane from the tail cam looked Christlike in the rain in the morning.

Outside you couldn’t see anything but the wing. The instructions regarding step here, don’t step there. For maintenance personnel and monsters from the Twilight Zone.

Charles de Gaulle smells of piss and perfume in equal measure. The piss has gotten more pronounced over the years, renovations deferred, maintenance budgets cut. Rate your experience with a sad face or a smile.

The jetlag dreams were difficult. An enormous project at work, as big as the sky, impossible to complete. But I had to try.

Adventures in Smoking, pt. 3

When we got sick of playing guitar Jeff and I would walk out to the dike between the airport and the reservoir. Watch the planes come in. Little ones—Cessnas—turning in big, wobbly arcs around the water and over our heads to land. Some higher, some lower, some so low you could almost touch. I remember one swooped down below us, pulled up just in time to buzz our heads, trying to scare us, and it did. And we smoked.

We drank if we had anything to drink, and we smoked pot when we had it, but we smoked all the time.

Back at his house we smoked between tunes. I would light one up and stick it between the strings and the headstock, then play, letting ashes fall wherever. Jeff had a burn mark there on his. We’d take a break and sit cross-legged around the ashtray and listen to his hissy tape of Starlight Theatre, Kansas City, Missouri, August 3rd, 1982. Franklin’s Tower. To Lay Me Down.

Unlikely memories keep coming back to me. Like when I was on a plane out of Vegas, maybe ten years ago, maybe twenty. That sad flight when you’ve probably lost more money than you should, and there’s a part of you that wishes you could stay longer and lose some more. In that state of mind I was struck by a conversation in the row behind me. Two young men were talking—friends or maybe cousins who’d been in Vegas together for a family reunion or bachelor party or something. One was cheerily talking about his dad, how they’d left him at the bar sipping Johnny Walker Blue, and that he knew he’d be perfectly happy there while everyone younger went gambling and clubbing. He sounded proud of his dad—proud that he was there, proud of what he drank, proud of what he did and didn’t do. The happy family scene he depicted, of the patriarch indulging his brood, maybe living vicariously through them, was annoying and poignant in equal measure, somehow.

You enter a new realm when you walk down that jetway to the plane. From the unhappy bustle of the terminal, the lines for bad food, the flatscreen watching over all to remind them of the even greater misery outside, to the hush of the carpeted, windowless, downward slope, reeking of jet fuel suddenly, an uncivilized odor—no one would ever tolerate it for more than a minute but it’s intoxicating—to the independent nation of the plane, where there’s an otherworldly hum and colored lights glow from nowhere, and you can’t get reception now for some reason, and there’s a Muzak version of “Every Breath You Take” playing soft and low.

I wondered briefly tonight whether “The Americans” was an allegory for the opioid epidemic. A middle-class family on a suburban street. Everything looks OK. But the parents are absent unpredictably. Sometimes they return home bruised, maybe missing a tooth. They go to great lengths to explain it all away. And when one day their child sees a crack in reality, and confronts them, they turn it into a family secret. Us versus them. You can’t tell anyone. But the child knows: there’s something Mommy and Daddy love more than me.

How many people live in homes where the sound of jet airplanes routinely pierces the silence, interrupting conversation, requiring the brief rewinding of video programming? A lot, I bet. I really noticed them tonight. Flight paths might have been low on account of the rain. But I like it. Imagining all those people up there, on their way—somewhere, or home.

As the plane descended over the farms and little towns, I wondered what we looked like from the ground. I considered the size of the cars on the highway from up here and got a pretty good idea, I thought. Not too big really. But not too small. Was there someone down there, maybe a young boy, who looked up and wished he was aboard?

At the party in New Hyde Park, out on Long Island, I was hoping the flight path of the planes taking off from JFK—or landing, who can ever really tell?—would be right above the house, as it was last year, but it wasn’t; the planes were off to the side a ways, disappearing behind the giant gray water tower and reappearing after a strangely long time for something so big that’s moving through the sky.

Jackie played on the well-tended lawn, sometimes by herself, sometimes trying to keep up with big kids. It was cloudy but it never did seem like it was going to rain. The sun came out later, blinding us on our ride home. On the Kosciuszko Bridge you could barely stand to see the Skyline.

An older couple, he a bit underdressed for the weather, in a cap, looking a little like Bernie Madoff that time he was harried by reporters on his way to his apartment, she with big frizzy hair, dyed red.

"So they still haven't found that plane!" he declared. "Strange!"

I felt queasy. Disgusted at myself for having drunk that terrible wine after the gin and tonic on the plane. Two gin and tonics would have been so much better. But I had the wine, the merlot, as recommended by the stewardess. Save 15% on a pairing with a snack.

So I tried to rest my aching head as our driver took us from the airport across the island. There was a detour around a chasm in the road that opened in the rains last Christmas Eve. The driver told us a car had come upon it, with two older men and an eleven-year-old boy. They drove straight into the ravine and only the kid survived. Everywhere else holiday shoppers were stranded in stores, left to sleep on top of tables and shelves as the flood came in. Tour-is-m! our driver said. That’s what the island needs. That’s how the island survives.

We wound through the rainforest with its steep hills and giant ferns. Observed the local life: kids playing, a beggar and his dog, people walking home from shopping with their burdens on their heads.

We drove into Castries, where the cruise ships all come in. A rain came and went in about five minutes. Finally we got to our villa by the sea. I took two painkillers and drank a beer, and began to feel better.

The map they show you when you're flying, that pixelly view of the plane's progress, deepens the sense you're in another world, with place names you've never heard of—Haworth, New York; Godthab, Greenland, Timmins and Chicoutimi—and sideways views of the planet, where north is west and south is east.

There was some news this morning about the Concorde that crashed—some criminal suit was settled, or dismissed. I remembered the eerie video footage, taken by a trucker on the highway that borders Charles de Gaulle. In my mind I can see the trucker’s shadowy silhouette, alternating his gaze between the road ahead and the object of his camera lens. But of course you couldn’t see him. That’s in my imagination. You could see the stricken SST, head held up in desperation, drifting slowly over the roofs of hotels and factories, its engine a ball of flame.

Two Unusual Things I Saw Today

There were two unusual things I saw today. At work, after walking past the enormous, illuminated globe, set halfway into the floor, in the art deco lobby, and holding my wallet over the turnstile scanner to scan my badge. Holding it. Moving it around in a tight little circle until suddenly, the two metal bars swung open with a faint little hum and let me in. I walked past the newsstand that still said “CIGARS” on a sign above the entrance. I turned left and in the middle of the row of elevators on my bank—13 to 26—there was a shock of milky brown coffee on the floor. Full cup. Still hot, maybe. The elevators were gone and no one else was waiting. I leaned across the splatter to touch the button. Up.

After work, when I exited the subway station on Eighth Avenue and Ninth Street, there was a little crowd by the top of the steps. They were gathered around a telescope, perched on a tripod, about six inches wide and three feet long. A bespectacled young man hunched over the thing, squinting in the viewfinder, while others hovered, awaiting their turn. Every passerby looked up. An airplane crossed the sky. Could they be looking at airplanes? I thought that might be funny. Maybe they could glimpse a little scene from the cozy little world inside the cabin: a man fussing with a tiny bag of pretzels. His wife wearily paging through the TV series: drama category of the seat-back touchscreen in-flight entertainment programming. The moon was awful bright tonight. They had to be looking at it. You couldn’t see much else.

You Never Take Candy from Strangers

There was a quick storm that left beads of rain on the office windows. There’s a hole in the sky up on the right where the sun was shining this whole time. But the clouds are moving fast. They cover it up. They let it shine again.

I can see 14th Street from here—from 26th. Just the intersection with Eighth. All the way Downtown the rising Freedom Tower glitters from behind a shroud.

I’m in an odd little annex to the main room on the floor. The 13th floor. 12A if you want to know the truth. There’s a glass partition between us in here and everybody else, as though we’re exhibits in a diorama, or they are.

In the front corner of our space two steps lead to a door that opens upon a strange space behind a parapet. A walkway, except it’s not for anyone to walk. There’s a gutter there, and two industrial air conditioners. It’s the sort of door that no one’s ever meant to open, leading to a place that no one’s ever meant to go.

It reminds me of being about five or six at JFK Airport. We were going to France. I was excited—as usual. The clean and modern, formal space. The candy stands and restaurants and bars. All the people walking by so resolute.

My mom and I ambled through the passageways, looking at the planes. There was ours, a TWA 707, in peppermint-stick white and red stripes in the sun. I saw a door that led to the graveled roof of the concourse below. A door you should not open. A door you must not open.

An old lady with lipstick on appeared. She leaned over me, saying what a cute boy, what a nice boy. She handed me a Jolly Rancher. I took it.

“What do we say?” Mom said.

“Thank you.”

And the lady was out of sight. My mom demanded it from me.

“Why?” I protested.

“Because you never take candy from strangers.”

The Enterprise - 15

Cindy Metzger was in charge of public relations, or press relations, or whatever you want to call it that amounts to PR. She was friendly, attractive. A bit discombobulated. She always had a sleepy look, like she'd just spilled out of bed. The following morning, she sent me a draft of the name-change press release from her room at The Prison. She called me up a few minutes later. It was seven something, her time.

"Did you get it?" she asked.

"Looking at it now."

"Ugh. Ugh!"

"What's wrong?"

"Judy wants the final draft on her desk, first thing in the morning. I was up all night writing this."

"I think it looks pretty good. I–"

"God fucking dammit."

"What?"

"My hair. My fucking hair. There's no fucking hair dryer in this fucking place."

"I'm going to send you back a version."

"Does it look OK?"

"It looks good. There's just a couple of–"

"Can I just tell you what a cunt she is?"

"Sure."

"I got here late yesterday. I was supposed to meet her at the office. The plane was late. She acted like it was my fault."

"Damn."

"THE PLANE WAS LATE."

"I know."

"Do I fly the fucking plane? Am I the pilot of the plane?"

"Right."

"Am I the co-pilot? Am I that other fucking person in the cockpit?"

"Exactly."

"Am I the air fucking traffic controller?"

"Yeah! No."

"Do I look like the guy who waves the fucking little sticks around? Do I look like that guy?"

"You do not."

"The fucking little orange sticks?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"So HOW IS IT MY FAULT THAT THE PLANE WAS LATE?"

"I don't see a way how."

"So then she sends me all these fucking changes to the press release. Like she couldn't have sent them last week. For Christ's sake."

"Good Lord."

"And so here I am, at the fucking Prison, with my hair still fucking wet," she concluded in a weary singsong.

"Yeah. God."

She broke into soft sobs.

"Are you OK?" I asked.

"I don't know how much more of this I can take!"

"It'll be OK," I reassured. "I'm sure it'll be OK, I think."

"Thanks Paul," she said with a sniff and a halting sigh.

"I'm sending you the doc in five minutes."

"Thank you. Thank you."

The Enterprise - 9

David and I had twenty minutes or so before our flight to San Francisco. I followed him up the stairs of the Continental departures terminal at Newark Airport.

"Let's go to the lounge!" he exclaimed like a child, and led me to the hushed and privileged sanctuary. We'd used our miles to upgrade to first class, at his insistence. An elegant woman welcomed us between the double doors and showed us in with a gracious bow.

Inside, we sat in silence at the bar. It was like any other airport bar. More or less. But you couldn't see out a window to look at any planes. I liked to look at the planes.

David's left leg fidgeted maniacally. He checked his watch.

"Guess we better get going!" he said.

We were on a mission to better understand our users. Or to better understand our product, as there were in fact no users yet. To understand what a prospective user might expect from the Product, such as it was. In anticipation of launch – with the shot clock in the lower twenties – an idea had been floated around senior management that David and I should fly out to assist in the conduct of a round of usability testing. We were at our desks on a conference call with them – Sam, Neil, Bill, Elaine and Judy, the West Coast-based Vice President of Product Development.

"We need some end users to poke some holes," Judy explained.

Mutters of approval and encouraging sentiments followed. Judy proposed a Tuesday and a Wednesday in early November, not two weeks away, and David and I were told to make plans.

Now we floated high above the Rockies in vast leather seats, warm nuts and whiskey arrayed on the wide flats of our armrests.

David drove us in the rental from the airport down Route 101 to Silicon Valley. As we approached our destination we gazed left and right at the gleaming industrial parks, immaculately landscaped, housing the intrepid startups that would still beat back against the season's dismal tide, repositories of vain aspirations and tragic dreams, some, perhaps, destined to be spared.

One of these companies was ours.

In the tracks which hold the inside legs of the window seats there is a trail of dirt and debris: gum wrappers and headphone plugs and peanut halves, like dry river junk.