erin gourley
flight
They kill the engine and the air becomes stagnant. He hears the rush of jet engines, watches clouds of dust swirl past the small airlocked window, and follows the other planes as they bank to the west through his patch of sky. 10:57 according to his phone. Thirty minutes late.
He thinks about asking a staff member ¿qué pasa con el vuelo? Although if the plane’s not moving then it’s not moving, and there’s not much he can do about it. He takes an altitude tablet for the ache blooming inside his skull and thinks of home. The temperature rises.
Por favor mantengan la calma. El vuelo llegará un poco tarde a Lima.
Forty minutes, fifty, an hour, two. He opens the Stephen King novel from his backpack. It’s absurd, sentences and paragraphs and pages and chapters all strung together. Page 87 begins with a disembodied half-sentence. It hangs at the top of the page, useless unless he turns back to find the rest of it. He scrapes the pages together, flicks through the book, and settles on page 139. It’s a fresh start, the beginning of a new chapter, but the irregular white space surrounding the letters becomes unbearable. He claps the book shut.
Someone is breathing loudly. It’s audible over the chatter and disruption that bubbles up as other passengers notice that take-off is muy muy tarde. The woman to his left raises an eyebrow and gestures at him, and he realises that he’s hyperventilating. He exhales and tries to breathe normally, but he can’t. He folds down the tray table, rests his head on it, and continues. His thoughts surface as islands of nothing, panic, nothing, panic, nothing. Wide oceans hang between them.
He is on board a sinking boat and the passengers are dancing a waltz in the ballroom, and it’s definitely a scene from Titanic but the boat is sinking sinking and there are no lifeboats at all no floating planks of wood just the ballroom going dark the waltz still playing and the passengers starting to scream, and the rocking of the sea as the water seeps in through the large glass windows which were showing a vista of home but now it’s like a submarine just darkness and cold and darkness and cold and that rocking again and –
¡Señor!
It’s the air hostess. They are about to take off and the tray table is still supporting his head.
*
The plane lands in Lima three hours late, his connecting flight long gone. He walks out into the suffocating city noise and chooses one of the waiting taxis. The traffic, the coastline, and the street vendors selling packets of lollies and nuts roll past while the taxi driver rambles about his twelve-year-old daughter who loves to sing. He wants her to be una estrella. Lima is the same as before – ochre cliffs, permanent white cloud, flat streets without drains. Dust coats everything. They come to a stop.
¿Tú me recoge aquí a las cuatro?
Sí, señor.
The man at the front desk is confused when he walks in.
You were supposed to arrive to Bolivia now, ¿no?
I only need the room for a few hours. He stares at the dark wood panelling. Just give me a key. I don’t care how much it costs.
Vale, señor. He takes the cramped elevator to the third floor.
The room is plain: a double bed, a cupboard, a grainy TV, an en suite, one of those laminated tourist guides, stock images of Barranco’s attractions in gold plastic frames. The pictures are faded miniatures of places he visited three weeks ago. His memories, squashed into two dimensions. He’s sure there was something special about La Feria market and Tostaduria Bisetti café. He knows how to get there and what to order, but he can’t remember the taste of the food.
The window opens into an internal courtyard. It’s dark and quiet. He exhales and sits on the bed. The stickiness of travel needs to go. He peels off his clothes and walks across to the bathroom. In the shower he sobs, briefly tasting the salt of his tears before the hot water washes them away. When the pressure plummets, he silences his crying and his shoulders shake under a trickle of cold water. His phone starts to ring on the bed. He snatches a towel and runs, nearly slipping on the tiled floor.
Hello?
Hi honey. He barely recognises her slow voice on the end of the line.
How are you? What’s happening?
Tell me about your trip. I want to hear about the condors.
He tells her about the condors, how they were like black shadows in the sky, how it was the wrong season but six of them appeared and swept over the group. Like they controlled the wind rather than the other way around. If he could go back in time and create an ancient religion, condors would pull the fabric of night over the sun.
I’m sorry that I can’t be there, Mum. I’m trying.
There’s nothing you can do. Dad’s been on the phone a lot, two phones sometimes, with the airlines.
I know. It’s hard.
Everyone is here. It’s been nice to see them all.
Yeah, Uncle Dave sent me a photo.
All the kids, too. I hadn’t seen them in ages.
That’s nice.
It is.
I’ve got you an alpaca jersey. It’s really soft.
Alpaca wool is lovely.
There’s a muffled electronic sound, someone’s hand over the microphone. Then Dad’s voice.
She had to go. We’ll try and call you tomorrow, I think it will be three o’clock in Argentina.
Thanks.
The rest of the afternoon is punctuated by crying and thinking and opening endless new tabs to search Skyscanner/Expedia/Kayak for faster routes home. He walks to the Metro down the street to buy Oreos and Ritz crackers and bottled water. They give him the wrong change and he doesn’t argue. One of the coins is a New Zealand ten-cent piece. The one currency that he would recognise. He throws it onto the pavement as he walks back to the hotel. It rolls away, ringing.
*
This time, the taxi driver shows him a five-minute video of his daughter singing to Katy Perry. Some reaction is warranted, so he smiles and nods his head. ¡Qué guay! His forced enthusiasm is too loud for the car. The driver turns up the radio and fixes his eyes on the road. In the passenger seat, he stares at his phone. Lock, unlock, lock, unlock. The sun is setting over the sea, behind a thin gauze of cloud, and everything is golden. He takes a video and snaps it to his friends. Three people reply. He leaves their snaps unopened and leans his head against the window.
They curve off from the coastal motorway and drive inland through crowded streets. Horns blare and the air is thick with exhaust fumes. He accidentally meets the eyes of a street vendor, who pushes a bag of sweets at him.
¡No tengo cambio, lo siento! His yell is hoarse and the street vendor flinches.
The volume increases when they hit the airport bottleneck. Ahead, he watches tail lights dance forward. The cars gain a metre for every sudden stop. His driver matches their rhythm, closing just-opened gaps then slamming on the brakes. Each time, with a lo siento señor, the driver turns to glance at his face. He gives a thumbs-up because he’s not sure how else to respond.
But it’s just a matter of waiting, like everything, and eventually they will get there. The taxi driver tells him this in Spanish, with a lot of hand gestures. La espera, la espera, la espera. Eventually, they do get there. The driver takes a ticket and the barrier lets them through.
*
It’s midnight as the plane leaves Lima and the sky is orange with light from the port. If you lived on Tatooine, this is the kind of daylight you’d get, he thinks. Cargo ships pass under them and begin to slip beneath the foggy layer of cloud. The dull lights get smaller and smaller until there is only darkness.
He is on the back of a condor, smooth and gliding through the air and it’s definitely a scene from The Lord of the Rings and the winds beneath them are buffeting them up and down and up and down they are at the mercy of changing air temperatures, cold winds and pockets of warmth, but it’s okay because the air currents know where they need to go he can see home in the distance over the Pacific Ocean just their house by itself on the hill and somewhere within it his family, but there’s not enough wind the condor is descending into the canyon circling a dead body and he can’t see the face and –
¿Qué comida te gustaría? Before he feels the cold window against his face and the thrumming of the plane, the smell of meat is everywhere. He opens his eyes, wincing, and grabs a menu from the seat pocket.
Canelones, por favor. The vegetarian option. The hostess passes him a tray of food divided into four: crackers and white cheese, the tinfoiled plate of canelones, fruit salad in a plastic dome, and a sponge cake in its wrapper. Un café y vino blanco, también. He removes the cake from its plastic wrapper and eats it whole. It sticks to the roof of his mouth. He washes it down with the acrid wine. The coffee scalds his tongue, so he cradles it for a few more minutes before taking another sip. Two hours left until they land in Buenos Aires. There, he has to wait thirteen hours for the next flight.
They say there’s an airport in Singapore with trees, a shopping mall, and five movie theatres. He imagines sinking into darkness and watching superhero movies. He could stack the time away in ninety-minute blocks of action. Eight-and-a-half movies would get him to thirteen hours. They might have those sleeping pods too.
Ministro Pistarini International Airport has no movie theatres or sleeping pods. He emerges from the flight at 09:00 to find endless beige linoleum. His next flight is at 22:00. The benches and floor reflect the fluorescent lighting, as if to emphasise how difficult it would be to sleep there.
He opens his laptop and finds a hotel. It has a good review from Chris, another New Zealander:
My wife and I loved our stay here. Carla was a wonderful hostess and gave us everything we needed.
He types:
I just need a room until this evening, when I can catch my flight home.
Then he walks into the hot, still air of Argentina, a country he has never visited, and gets in another taxi.
He achieves passenger-seat zen on this ride by letting things slip by and trying to think as little as possible. It works for a few seconds at a time. He only realises they’re lost when the driver asks him for directions.
¿Aquí?
No sé.
He focuses on the scenery and tries not to think again. They drive for a while, past fields of maize and farmhouses.
¿Aquí?
No sé. If he were more fluent in Spanish, he might laugh and say how would I know, mate? I didn’t even know this city had farmland.
They pass: a fruit market next to traffic lights, a sandwich shop with three Nescafé signs, leafy oak trees, a fountain, cobbled streets, villas that look like they belong to the Argentinian equivalent of nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, black fences with ornate security spikes, a woman walking four Dulux dogs, a book shop, everything but his hotel.
He turns on data, fairly sure that his roaming plan doesn’t extend to Argentina, and opens Google Maps.
*
The air is still and the blue sky seems endless. He is winding his way back towards the hotel, which is really a large house with whitewashed walls and a shady garden. He has been out for lunch, on Carla’s recommendation, to a beef place.
¡Sólo estás aquí por un día, así debes probar la carne!
She gave him directions to the restaurant and he walked there, sweating. The waitress stared at him. Beef is usually a group activity and he sat alone at a table, underdressed in shorts and a t-shirt. The waitress gave no indication that his order could feed a family of four until she emerged from the kitchen carrying two loaves of bread with olive oil and a platter of butterflied beef.
He ate most of it. The waitress kept checking back. The beef was coated with chilli and his eyes began to water halfway through the meal. As he blew his nose on a napkin, he couldn’t stop thinking about dead cows and how raising a cow in this dry country would have some incalculably large environmental cost. All so that he could try carne argentina. The cow, dissolving in his stomach acid, is now dragged along as he detours down side streets in the afternoon heat.
He stumbles across a square with park benches and a bronze statue encrusted in bird poop. His mouth feels dry. The pigeons eye him up, thrusting their necks in and out. They think he has food. His hands are empty and he holds his palms up.
Lo siento.
He doesn’t know why he feels the need to apologise to the pigeons. But he does know that the dense mass of bread and beef is unsettled in his stomach. Fuck. He vomits, loudly, on the paving stones of a deserted square in Buenos Aires. The pigeons start to eat it. He tries to shoo them with his hands but they refuse to fly away. They continue to peck and more birds descend, so he gives up. He wipes the bile from his mouth, lips still stinging from the chilli oil, and continues to wander.
He returns to the hotel at 15:00. No phone call. He lies on top of the crisp white hotel sheets and tries not to think about why.
The Peruvian clouds did not prepare him for Argentina’s baking sun. He can feel the glow spreading to his cheeks. How embarrassing, if he’s sunburnt when he needs to be serious and dark-clothed. Mum always tells him stories of childhood summers up north, unable to sleep because it was so much hotter than Auckland. At least, it felt that way when you had been bodysurfing all day without sunblock.
Dad texts him:
Sorry for not calling. She not awake. Txt when at BA airport. Thx
He replies:
No worries, hope everything is okay. Will do
*
Jorgé, Carla’s husband, is not a taxi driver, but he agrees to drive to the airport for $50. He tries to tell Jorgé about his ordeal this morning. El conductor no pudo encontrar tu casa, y ahora, quizás tu supe la ruta al aeropuerto mejor que al conductor.
The anecdote gets him a confused smile. He waves to Carla and swings his bag into the back. Jorgé has a Ford ute and it feels like home to hoist himself into the passenger seat.
They don’t talk much. Even the ute is quiet. The roads are well-sealed highways with bright streetlights that stretch into the distance. There’s a roaring in the background. Jorgé breaks the silence to tell him that there is a big football game on tonight, pointing towards a stadium. He can’t figure out where it is in the dark, but the cheers carry at a constant volume for the whole trip.
The same football game is playing inside the airport. People crowd around TVs in duty-free bars. He orders a coke and starts to watch, hoping that the game or the sugar will keep him awake. A man points at him excitedly when the red team scores a goal (he’s wearing a red jacket) and he nods. When that team wins, he’s pulled into a painful hug.
*
The crew tells them that the Auckland weather forecast is rain as the city lights shrink away. He watches The Office for five minutes. Dwight plots to kill Angela’s cat, which is not something he can laugh at right now. He unplugs his headphones to listen to Abbey Road on his phone. Maxwell is a straight-up psychopath, worse than Dwight. He switches to a different episode of The Office and turns down the volume.
Mostly, he stares at the screen with the plane’s progress. They are crawling across South America and home only becomes real when they fall off the edge of the continent.
He is in the dark at midday but it feels totally normal, it’s pitch black and a mild nor’westerly blows and beneath his feet grains of sand warmed by an unseen sun pile themselves up, he can smell the salt of the sea on the breeze hear the crash of the ocean and the sound tells him the waves are glassy and even and powerful and he knows it’s home, he’s home, and it will be any wave now because they’re perfect for bodysurfing, so he listens to the rolling surf and the tide sucks in around his ankles rising creeping up his spine and he shivers and the water ripples over his back like the flutter of wings, and he waits in the dark with the tides hissing over him for days weeks months seasons years in and out and in and out but she never makes it to shore.
He doesn’t wake as the plane passes over all the time zones that divide the Pacific. When he does stir, an hour before landing, his face is wet with tears.
*
His bones feel empty as he steps off the plane. Auckland’s humid, sweet air hangs from his shoulders. 06:02. He switches off flight mode, hands shaking, and watches the missed calls roll in.
He sends a text to Dad:
Landed in Akl
His phone rings.
Erin Gourley studies English and Law in Dunedin. Her less creative work can be found in Critic. When she’s not studying, she returns to her hometown, Napier, and remembers what it’s like to feel the sun.