On your trip to heaven you can't check your baggage. All you're allowed is a single carry-on. Johnny clutches his, a vinyl suitcase as cracked as an old car seat. Where did that suitcase come from? He's never seen it before in his life. He walked through the airport's sliding doors and -- poof! -- the thing was in his hand.
Once inside those sliding doors he wanted to pause to get his bearings, but the crowd pushed him along. "To your gates, people!" a stewardess in a brown polyester pantsuit called out. "To your gates!" So now Johnny is marching mechanically, not knowing where he's heading. The terminal is jam-packed, people wandering in circles with their carry-on bags. Lots of old folks, lots of gray heads. Not many teenagers like Johnny, although there are a few. There are even a few babies. Gnome-faced tots strapped into strollers pushed by stewardesses whose nametags all read "Brenda." Some of the babies are dozing; some are bawling. Some of the old people are also bawling.
An old man with a bald head mottled with sunspots is waving thick-fingered hands and yelling, "Helen, where are you?" One of the Brendas approaches the man, takes him by the arm. "Sir, let's get you to Gate 37. Your flight's waiting." Two big white stickers marked "37" are stuck to the man's shirt, one on his chest, one on his back. Passengers all have these numbered stickers. You'd think they were running a marathon. That marathon look is heightened by their outfits: T-shirts, shorts, sweatpants, sweatshirts. Plus everybody is wearing running shoes. There are no leather shoes here. Leather is dead cow and, as a Brenda will later tell Johnny, "Heaven's no place for dead things."
Hanging from the ceiling of the terminal are big signs -- green background, white lettering like those you see on a highway. They all say: PROCEED TO THE GATE NUMBER MARKED ON YOUR SHIRT. Johnny looks down at his shirt. His number happens to be his age, 16 (although the number looks like 91 from his perspective). Johnny has on cargo shorts with big pockets and a purple, tie-dyed T-shirt. These clothes don't belong to him. Where did they come from? Maybe Maggie picked them out. For all he knows she packed the suitcase. Maggie is his mother. She used to wear tie-dyed dresses as a hippie in the seventies. Thinking of Maggie, he feels a tickle in his sinuses, a sting in his eyes. He can't start blubbering. He doesn't. He forces himself to keep moving. He weaves in and out of the other passengers, who traipse along with startled faces and gaping mouths. Think of little kids being sent away to camp for the first time. These people are scared stiff. They gawk at one another, at the Brendas. And at the airport itself, a series of bland gray terminals with gates radiating from their circumference.
Linking the terminals are aboveground tunnels, kind of like tubes in a hamster cage. Johnny steps onto one of the moving sidewalks crossing through these tunnels. The bouncy floor reminds him of diving boards (Johnny's a swimmer, a real dolphin in the water).
"Please don't place your suitcase on the handrail," a Brenda in the requisite brown polyester pantsuit calls to him.
He removes his bag and stares out the glass sides of the hamster tube. Parked outside are the airplanes. The guy ahead of him is also looking out the window. "I expected supersonic jets," he mutters. "You know, the kind with pointy nosecones." He fingers his mustache, which is stiff and black like the brush on a vacuum cleaner. "But those babies look like 727s. I thought all the 727s got grounded years ago, or shipped to the Third World. Man, we're riding into the great beyond on shoddy equipment."
The man gives Johnny a slow blink. "Ronald L. Simmons." He extends a hand. Crouching on his forearm is a leopard tattoo.
"Johnny," Johnny says and shakes the man's hand.
"You look kind of familiar-like, kid," he says. "You from the tri-state area?"
"No, from around Chicago," Johnny says. "And before that from around Boston." And before that, around San Francisco, although why go into all the details?
"Tri-state area born and bred," says Ronald L., touching a thumb to his chest. "Born, bred and dead," he says. He pauses, then bursts out laughing. Flashes a few gold molars. "Born, bred and dead," he repeats, this time under his breath. He wipes a meaty hand across red eyes. "I never should've taken my Harley out during that last storm. Tonado weather. Was I nuts or what?"
Johnny sees the number on Ronald's T-shirt: 12. That must mean he won't be on Johnny's flight. Good. Johnny doesn't feel up to small talk. "Small talk," Maggie always says, "is neither small nor talk."
"Was I fucking nuts or what?" Ronald L. repeats. He rubs his eyes again. "At least my Harley was better equipped than those saggy-ass 727s."
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The last time Johnny took a plane, he flew on a 767 to Paris, Maggie's favorite city. Maggie wanted to smoke a joint on-board to calm her fear-of-flying jitters. She settled for red wine. Too much red wine. She upchucked in the airplane's tiny restroom. Poor Maggie. For Christ's sake don't let him cry. Don't let him get teary like Ronald L. or like the woman with the sunburnt face standing nearby who wipes mascara-smudged eyes and snorts, "They don't even offer a goddamn duty-free."
At the end of the moving sidewalk Johnny pitches forward. Leaves Roland L. behind. Johnny is off. He walks to his gate as if programmed. All the passengers are like duck-lings waddling around in search of their mamas. At Gate 16, people line up at a check-in counter manned by a black Brenda with strings of beads in her braided hair. An abacus -- that's what those beads remind Johnny of. Maggie collects abacuses (she's a school teacher after all). Years ago she taught Johnny to add and subtract on an abacus strung with green beads, just like those green beads in the Brenda's hair. To distract himself and quell his quaking fear, Johnny plays a bead game in his head: each passenger in the lineup is a bead to subtract. He watches the passengers as they check in one by one and then head down another hamster tube to the plane. As they shuffle into that tube, many of them glance back into the terminal. Their expressions crumple. They're hoping for a friendly face to see them off, maybe somebody who'll throw them a kiss, but nobody's there but a horde of strangers.
Behind Johnny in the lineup stands the sunburnt lady. She's in a jogging suit. Up and down the arms and legs of that suit run double white lines like highway lines you shouldn't cross. To nobody in particular this lady says, "If there's a meal onboard, pray it's nut-free."
Johnny turns to glance at her.
"A walnut in a garden salad is what got me here in the first place," she explains.
"Choking?" Johnny mutters.
"Anaphylactic shock," the lady replies.
Johnny doesn't want to have this conversation. How'd you go? Oh, what a pity! And how'd you go? So he nods and turns back around. The lady keeps yapping. Where are the customs agents? she wants to know. The tightened security? The machines to X-ray their suitcases? Where are the armed guards? "How can I be sure some of you people aren't carrying explosives?" Now she's yelling. "Have you got razor blades in the heels of your shoes? Firecrackers shoved up your ass?"
A big blonde Brenda comes over to talk to the walnut lady, to soothe her. "You need a hand to hold, honey," the blonde Brenda says with her Texas accent. From the corner of his eye Johnny sees the walnut lady grab hold of that hand.
When it's Johnny's turn to check in, the beaded Brenda goes through the regular procedure. She pats the counter so he'll lift up his suitcase. Then she zips the case open and fishes through. A striped cotton sweater like those the French wear. A paisley polo. A pair of boxers with a pattern of orange blowfish. Stripes and bright squiggly patterns! Whose god-awful clothes are these? Not his. He likes solids. Usually dark colors, though he makes an exception for green because a girl named Kat Olsen once told him green played up his eyes.
"Where the dickens is your file?" the beaded Brenda says. She's got a gap between her front teeth you could stick a drinking straw through. She's got her hands on his boxer shorts. Embarrassing even if those shorts aren't his. "A-ha," she says. "Found it." From an inside pocket of the suitcase she pulls out a purple file folder. Licks a finger, turns a page.
"You Johnny Henzel?"
"That's right," Johnny mutters.
"Born in Boston, Massachusetts."
"Yeah."
She says his birth date. A nod from Johnny. She slides his file back into the suitcase. Zips the case up. With a red pencil she strikes his name off her passenger list. Then she peels the number 16 from the front and back of his shirt, rolls the stickers into a ball, and tosses the ball into a garbage bin. "I've given you a window seat, honey," she says scrawling his name and seat number on a scrap of paper. She hands him the scrap. "Something tells me you're a young man who wants to see where he's going."
There's not much to see. The 727 shudders down the runway and lifts off with a tremble that draws a shriek from a few passengers. Below, other than the airport, Johnny sees only endless forests. A mix of leafy trees and conifers. The plane rises higher. Bores into a bank of gray clouds until visibility is zero.
Who's piloting this plane anyway? Beats Johnny. He keeps expecting the pilot to make an announcement. "This is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard Air Paradise" or some such thing. But maybe the intercom is kaput. Ronald L. was right: the equipment looks shoddy. Overhead compart-ments rattle. Lights flicker. Seat coverings, an ugly brown and orange zigzag design, shine from being rubbed by too many backs and butts. Seatbelts are frayed. Even the little pocket in front of Johnny's legs, the one for holding magazines, is torn half off. Johnny checks that pocket for the safety features card. Nope, there isn't one. And why didn't a Brenda do a demo at the front, how to put on the oxygen mask and slide out the escape hatch? No one even told the passengers to buckle up. So despite their decrepitude maybe these planes never crash.
Seated next to Johnny is a brawny guy with a boxy skull like a bull's. He turns to Johnny. "My wife Annie, she's al-ways saying to me, 'Stew, you've got the imagination of a clothes peg.' But I showed Annie, didn't I?"
"Excuse me?" Johnny says.
"Well, you do realize this is all in my head." He pats his crewcut. "This is all a dream."
"A dream?"
"That's what I said." Stew chuckles, then waves his baseball-mitt hands around. "Those people sitting across the aisle, that stewardess pushing her cart, and even you kid -- you're all cast in my dream. You've all got cameo rolls. And lucky you, you even got a speaking part."
"So how long have you been dreaming?"
"For hours I guess," Stew says.
"A long dream."
"Damn right it's long. Has to be. You know how long open-heart surgery lasts? Seven hours! Seven friggin' hours working on my ticker."
Open-heart surgery. Johnny touches a hand to his own heart. A faint beating.
"By my calculations I'm in recovery now. Sleeping off the anesthetic." He holds up an arm and twists the skin on his beefy biceps. "One of these times I'll pinch myself awake and you people will all vanish." He nods knowingly.
What should Johnny say? You'll never wake up, man. He can't say that. He feels sorry for Stew with his big bovine head. At least Johnny does till Stew reaches over and pinches him hard on his biceps. Johnny's yelp is drowned out by the sudden wail of a woman from the rear of the plane.
"I'll wake up soon and you kid, you'll disappear!"
A Brenda wheels her cart by. The black Brenda with the braids. The one Johnny thinks of as his Brenda. Stew pinches her in the leg and she slaps his hand. "Honey, you settle down now," she says.
"Can I have a beer?" Stew asks.
"We've got some nice cold water for you boys," Brenda says. "And some fresh made granola bars." She hands them each a plastic cup of water and a granola bar wrapped in cellophane.
Johnny lowers his tray. It's the yellow color of bad teeth. He's not hungry or thirsty. Still the water glides down his throat. The granola, though, is like pebbles in his mouth. A few seats back a woman's voice says, "Is that granola nut-free? 'Cause nuts are what got me here in the first place."
The Brenda calls out to everyone, "You folks eat slowly now. Your stomachs need time to readjust."
Johnny feels nauseated. Jetlagged already.
After his snack Stew announces he'll have a snooze. He says that if he sleeps in his dream, he's bound to wake up in his real life. "That sounds logical, doesn't it, kid? Do the opposite of what they expect."
"Who's they?" Johnny mumbles.
"The powers that be," Stew says. "The big guy in the sky." Stew pinches Johnny again, but not as hard this time, and then stretches out. One leg juts into Johnny's space; one arm hogs the armrest between them. Johnny leans toward the window and stares out. Nothing but wisps of gray and white. In the seat in front of him a woman's voice is mumbling her Hail Marys. He hears the cadence but not the words. Running through Johnny's head is the playground rhyme "Hail Mary, full of grace, a hippo's ass and a donkey's face."
Does Johnny believe in a god? In his sixteen years he's never given the question much thought. Maggie always tells people they're agnostics. When he was six, he worried that agnostics couldn't celebrate Christmas (Rob O'Reilley, a wise man in the school's Christmas pageant, put this idea into Johnny's head). But Maggie contradicted Rob: agnostics did share the Christmas spirit. "Little-known fact," she said, "agnostics invented eggnog." The original spelling of "agnostics," according to Maggie, was in fact "eggnogstics." This Johnny believed till he was at least eleven.
She told him that the gospels in the Bible were written by Matt, Mark, Luke and Rick. The gospel according to Rick was her favorite, she said, because he was more happy-go-lucky than the other evangelists. He smoked pot and liked to surf.
The stories Maggie tells.
He could have done without a few of those stories.
Still her weird vision of things sometimes proves pro-phetic. For instance, her view of heaven. "All those white robes those angels wear, I don't buy it," she'd say. "I mean, wouldn't those robes get dirty really fast? Especially after a spaghetti meal. And is there a dry cleaner's in heaven? Chlorine bleach?"
At the front and middle of the plane, two Brendas pull down movie screens, which unroll like the maps in Johnny's old classroom. "We've got something to show y'all," says the braided Brenda. "A little in-flight movie to ease your entry."
Sunshine glints through the plane's windows, so the Brendas ask passengers to lower the blinds. Johnny pulls his down. The film begins. No high definition here. The film is black and white and a bit blurry, like the old sitcoms Maggie used to watch on TV. An elderly couple walk through a path in a forest. They wear straw hats and cotton sweaters tied around their shoulders. They look like the attractive gray-haired models you see in ads for retirement savings plans. Sun dapples through the trees. Leaves flutter down. There's no sound, but in Johnny's head he hears twigs cracking un-derfoot. The man and woman emerge from the forest and standing before them is an apartment tower. Must be twenty stories high. Across the screen run the words A WHOLE NEW WORLD.
Cheesy, Johnny thinks. Beside him a sleeping Stew shifts in his seat, kicks Johnny in the calf. Light snores whistle through his nose.
Onscreen the man and woman (Johnny baptizes them Ralph and Betty after Ralph and Betty Engelstad, an older couple whose garage he recently painted) wander through their new home. Their apartment in that tower seems to be a single room, like a room in a college dorm. A small space, but neat: the tucked-in sheets on the double bed could bounce coins. The camera scans. Behind a Japanese-type screen is a sink, as well as a bidet (which Johnny recognizes from his trip to Paris). Overhead a ceiling fan slowly spins. Ralph sits at a writing table composing a letter on a legal pad. Betty sits in an armchair reading a book. She sits stiffly as if demonstrating proper posture. Soon the couple get whisked to the cafeteria. Betty points to dishes on a wire rack behind a glass panel. Ralph's eyes light up when he's handed a dish of lasagna. Betty looks at Ralph as if to say, Watch your waistline, buster. And then they're off playing tennis to lose those extra pounds. Cut to an aerobics class where they do lunges with sweatbands across their forehead.
"Looks like a friggin' fat farm," says the walnut lady from a few seats back.
"Shush up," says a Brenda.
Ralph and Betty cycle down a street on old ten-speeds. A narrow street with no cars, only bikes. People on the sidewalk wave. Hello there, Ralph and Betty Engelstad! Hello there! The couple bikes past apartment towers and brick low-rises resembling suburban high schools. Ugly architecture, Johnny thinks. For some reason he expected something weirder. Maybe the undulating designs and dripping facades of Gaudi, that Spanish architect Maggie likes, the guy people nicknamed "god's architect."
Now Ralph and Betty descend steps into an underground tunnel. Turns out to be a subway. Hung on a wall is a map of the system with its subway lines overlapping like spaghetti on a plate. At the top of the map are the words THE BOA. Plus a logo of a coiled snake. Ralph scratches his head. Betty lays an index finger against her lips. Oh, how confusing this subway system is! (Poor Ralph and Betty have zero acting talent.) Lucky for them another couple wanders by to direct the newcomers. Now Betty wanders through a huge clothing store. Racks and racks of shirts. She flips through, holds a frilly blouse to her chest. Meanwhile, Ralph seems to be at a petting zoo. A whole pen of wooly sheep: black, white, grey. You can practically hear their bleating even though there's no soundtrack. There are no other animals at this zoo. Scratch that because the camera has just zoomed in on a billy goat. Horns spiral from its head. A beard descends from its chin. Ralph seems smitten by this goat. He holds the animal's face in his hand like a grandma embracing a child. He rubs the animal's ears. Pats its rump.
All noise in the plane has ceased. No more crying. No more yelling. Not even the walnut lady interrupts. People are transfixed. Even Stew has stopped snoring.
The film goes on. Betty planting petunias in a flowerbed. Ralph kicking a ball in a game of soccer. Betty donning a bathing cap and diving into a swimming pool. Both of them attentive in a classroom as a teacher taps a blackboard with a pointer stick. On and on the film plays.
Now Ralph and Betty are in the hallway of an apartment building. They knock on a door. It opens. A woman stands there. A young version of Betty. Same weak chin, same knob of a nose. Surprise, surprise! Lots of hugs and kisses. It's a reunion of sorts. Maybe the woman is a daughter they'd lost years ago and have tracked down.
Johnny still feels nauseated. Wind pockets bounce the plane, and he feels even queasier. There's no barf bag in his seat pocket. None in Stew's either. Should he call out for a Brenda. Raise his hand. Should he wake Stew?
Stew begins talking in his sleep. He cries out for his wife. "Annie, Annie, please help me! God, please help me!"
The man's arm falls into Johnny's lap. Johnny picks up Stew's meaty hand, pats the back of it gently. "It's okay, man. It's okay," he whispers.
Stew wakes with a start. Pulls his hand away. Jerks his head in every direction. Wild-eyed. Then he stares at Johnny uncomprehendingly.
"What the fuck are you still doing here?" he says.
In the tiny restroom at the back of the plane, Johnny examines his face in the mirror. He has tried to vomit, but nothing came up. Now he sticks out his tongue. Says ahhh. Has he always had that pasty coating at the back of his tongue? Probably ground-up granola. He pulls back his lips to expose his gums. He expects gray or at least a greenish tinge, but his gums are an obscenely healthy pink.
Johnny spits into the little bowl of a sink. Then he unzips and tries to pee into the toilet. If he can produce bodily fluids, he's not that bad off, right? A weak trickle comes out. With the plane's rocking, the drops of pee land on the side of the toilet bowl. After zipping up, he pulls a tissue from a dispenser in the wall and mops up. A cavernous bellow comes from the toilet when he flushes the tissue down.
He inspects his arms. He spent the summer as a housepainter, and on his left elbow is a smudge of yellow from the Engelstads' garage, a job he finished the day before school started back up. He suddenly realizes something. He stares at his face. Then pulls his T-shirt over his head. For god's sake he still has a tan! (All summer he worked outside with-out a shirt despite skin-cancer warnings from Maggie, who looked like a mime with that white sunblock smeared all over her face).
He touches a hand to his chest. Places his palm over his heart as if to pledge allegiance. Again the faint chug-chug. His ticker, as Stew called his own heart. Johnny holds two fingers against his neck. He'd like to time his pulse. He glances at his wrist, to a ring of paler skin, the ghost of the watch no longer strapped there. What's happened to his big clunky watch? Confiscated with his real clothes, he guesses.
A comforting image comes to mind: Maggie at home winding his watch, holding it to her ear to hear its ticking, the sound synchronized with the beating of Johnny's heart right now. His eyes close. One hand lifts to his chest. A soothing feeling washes over him. Harmony. Then the feeling drains away.
His eyes blink open.
He glances in the mirror.
For a split second the face staring back is not his own.
The face belongs to a boy. He's only a boy. Younger than Johnny. Fourteen years old. Fifteen tops. The first time Johnny sees the kid is his first day at his new high school. Johnny is running down an empty hall lined with lockers. Morning bell rang fifteen minutes ago. Shit, shit, shit, he's late on his first day at William McKinley High. His sneakers squeak against polished wood. He turns a corner and there's the kid, standing all alone. Johnny thinks, Hallway monitor. He thinks, Crap, a detention on my first day. He slows down. The kid is blond, the kind of blond you see in Sweden: white feathery hair like a domestic duck. A constellation of pimples dots the boy's forehead. He's got on khaki pants and an ox-ford shirt with a button-down collar. Slung over one shoulder is a book bag the orange color of traffic cones. Cut me some slack. I'm new here, Johnny is about to say when the kid lifts his arm straight up. At the end of his arm is a gun.
A gun. What kind? Don't ask Johnny. Maggie wouldn't even let him have a water pistol as a kid. It's a handgun. It has a barrel, a trigger. It's too big for that kid's hands. And it's shaking. That gun is trembling as if it's scared of Johnny.
Despite his fear a joke flashes in Johnny's mind: You hall monitors take your job way too seriously. He doesn't say it though. He says nothing. The kid's face is twisting. It's turning red. A rage is gurgling up. Johnny is six feet from the gun. If he turns and runs, the bullet will hit his backpack. His gym clothes, his new binders, his brown-bag lunch will act as a buffer. He wants to turn but can't. He holds his breath. Stares into the kid's face. Those blinking, panicky eyes. Pale blue eyes. The clenched teeth.
Through the door of a nearby classroom comes a jumble of sound. Chairs scraping. Chalk squeaking on a blackboard. Voices mumbling. A teacher's warning: "Plagiarism, people, is grounds for suspension."
The kid and Johnny, they don't make a sound. They exchange not a word. Johnny's heart pounds. Finally the kid's face goes slack. The rage seems to empty out. He lowers his arm.
Thank you, Johnny mouths the words. He takes a step back.
The kid raises his arm and fires.
"You all right in there?"
Johnny is sitting on the floor of the plane's restroom. One arm hugs his knees to his chest, both knees smudged with yellow paint. The other arm holds his bunched-up T-shirt to his face. The bodily fluid marking the tie-dyed pattern is tears. Plus some snot from his nose.
"Honey, are you okay?"
It's Brenda's voice. His Brenda with the beads.
"Yeah, sure." His voice cracks. "I'm fine."
Fit as a fiddle, he thinks.
"Well, we've landed, honey. You should come out now."
The plane rumbled and shook as it dropped down from the clouds. In that clatter and din Johnny let himself cry.
"Welcome home!" Brenda says.
He croaks, "Be right out."
He lifts himself off the floor. Runs the tap, splashes water over his eyes. Puts on his wrinkled tee and rubs away the snot.
I'll be okay, I'll be okay, he tells himself.
Worse comes to worse he can always adopt a goat.