I. AIRPORT

Lucky I got my ticket just before the departure. On the same day when it hit me all of a sudden - now or never! It was Wednesday, July 16, the perfect day, the peak of summer vacations. All popular destinations had been hopelessly sold out, but, well, things happen. The instant someone was canceling a reservation, Angela, my travel agent, with her enigmatic Maori smile and lilac-colored fingernails quivering lightly over the keyboard, had intercepted the refusal in flight. That's how I got the last available seat with the great international carrier. The catch, however, was something else - not the incredible window seat, not the confirmation of my personal luck, not even the destination - arguably the best in the world. The jack pot was the purpose of my journey. Everything was going my way that Wednesday. Since the moment I woke up in the morning, everything as if had conspired to amaze me. That's why I decided to amaze myself even more. What am I waiting for? - I said to myself. Now or never, today is my fateful day, the time to put the whole thing behind me and bring home to New York my Lulu, my green-eyed sweet morsel of France.

I said good-bye to Max who dropped me at the TWA terminal, to spare him waiting for the departure and the usual parking hassles. I had registered my ticket, attached labels to my suitcase, only to the heaviest one which I'd checked in with the luggage clerk, slipped my passport together with the boarding pass into my breast pocket and - bingo! Finally I realized that I am the happiest man on the planet. Wandering carefree and happy under the huge resonant shell of Saarinen's air terminal, I felt like I had already arrived. Look, nothing but routine technicalities separated me from my Parisian sweetheart. The beautiful peaceful twilight was floating outside the windows. The vanishing bright blue day was gradually becoming dark lilac, the color of Angela's fingernails or closer to the occasion that of the Paris sky. With just several hours of flight between me and my girl, it seemed, I vaguely could distinguish in the air that Lulu's favorite Lancome perfume, also the sweetish gasoline stink of the Champs-Elysees, and that indispensable fidgety Bal-Musette beginning to throb in my ears - `one-two-three, one-two-three...', turning my head around the waltzing tune properly accentuated with sneezes and sobs of the accordion.

The Belle France washed with waters of the same Atlantic, felt right around the corner. My Boeing-747 had already arrived from Athens this afternoon, and I could see it from afar among the intercontinental liners under maintenance on tarmac of the airfield.

Near the registration desk, I found myself a comfortable chair, lit a cigarette, nonchalantly snapping a magazine from the vacant seat nearby, and, oops! - Right on the cover there's story of the ValuJet. The magazine was full of the troublesome photos of the airplane debris, with the text too much revolting to my taste, describing how in the muddy Floridian swamps, alligators were feeding on passengers - the recent visitors of the Disney World. This rotten curiosity instinct making us so obsessed with troubles of others, made me to read the article to the end. My strangely stinking cigarette was getting me nauseous. I looked around me at my fellow-travelers standing in the registration line; with the article fresh on my mind I couldn't help seeing them turned bloodless, stripped naked like logs of wood, shredded violently in a pulp mill and scattered all over in the common mix with the ridiculous goodies from their own suitcases. Adrenaline rush ejected me from my chair. I started running aimlessly, trying to shake the witchcraft off, reproaching myself - Why should I care about it, this rarest, incredible tragedy? I'm not going to any Florida swamps, anyway not on the what-the-name... must be some new, inexperienced airline? Running in circles I had my point - I was looking for some irrefutable reason to logically eliminate the impact of the unsettling story. I came back, found the ill-fated magazine and trashed it deeply in the waste basket; as deep as I could. I became really angry, you know, sort of delirious even. It happens to me when I blow my fuse all of a sudden; when I'm having these 'episodes' of excessive pathological sensitivity and have the dark clouds of premonitions nearly suffocating me. Sometimes, among the absolute wellness I can find myself sweating profusely, anticipating an actual fever waiting for me in the wings for tomorrow. Or, I can drive people crazy with no apparent rationale, refusing, say, to cross an empty quiet highway - the site of a multiple car collision going to happen in a short while. Or else, I'd refuse to take part in an attractive business proposition which is doomed to flop of course very soon, to sheer amazement of its overconfident participants. Am I a hypochondriac, or perhaps a psycho? Or rather I have been born like that, endowed genetically with the extrasensory features?

Take the airplanes for example; not exactly an aficionado of air travel, I fly as everybody else does. As a teenager, remember, I had been toying for a while with idea of becoming a fearless jet pilot "striking the clouds through like a bolt of lightning". In retrospective, I guess, I could have simply tried to win at the time over a babe from my school who appreciated anything reckless. And nowadays, though boarding a plane is not exactly on my dream list, I'm still way behind of the fantastic record of the renowned fantast Sir Isaac Asimov who had never-ever agreed to fly in his life. Gosh, I'm not crazy like that, not at all! If necessary I always find a way to mobilize my discipline and common sense. Say, I'd remind myself of the proverbial wisdom that statistically the highway death rate is much higher then that of air travel; that the airplanes, as a joke goes, do occasionally nosedive but always hitting passenger trains on the ground below (ha-ha). Of course I dread this famous feeling of a chicken egg rolling loose in a carton, handled by somebody whom I don't know and have no way to control. Fear of flying that's right. Whenever possible I'd rather prefer boredom you know - counting all these electric poles, pump-houses, station cabins flashing by in my train window - I'd be rather glad for hours stay watching the same boring landscape or napping absolutely happily lulled with the rickety-rock of a passenger train. When there's a choice I mean.

This time I had no room for the hesitation like this. This time was to choose between the long overdue marriage and my ridiculous anxiety complex.

There's a trick for boosting my moral that I have developed - the facial so-to-say self-hypnotic routine. Usually it works wonders for me. That time I had been watching people around me, checking peculiarities of their moods and behavior, analyzing expressions of their eyes. Then, having been satisfied with the way they look, as a Supreme Being I decided that no evil is allowed near such a lovely crowd. So, I took a deep breath and decreed that everything is going to be okay.

In the JFK, among the people on the registration line I singled out one well-built strong macho guy with the pepper-n-salt beard. Flashing his toothy lupine grin, he was flirting with a tall and slim partner - a sophisticated lady type. Behind them in line, there were also some nice elderly couples, studying the long booklets of Michelin guide, a slender teenager girl trying to balance on her toes like a ballerina, and a beautiful young woman having the posture of a real dancer, who while pretending to support the girl, tickled her instead. They were knocking each others foreheads hysterically laughing, having good time. The way the young woman looked, she could make a veritable twin sister to my Lulu. I remember wished to join the girls in their game to finally purge the Florida horror stories from my system.

...And then, a surreal thing had happened. I stepped outside just for a smoke, as I thought, to the outer driveway area where yellow-checkered taxis were incessantly circulating to and from. All my senses were tight and sharp with the exciting journey ahead of me; as I mentioned, I was capable smell in the Queens air the special Parisian breeze; I was a medium who had reached the super heightened level of awareness in the search for signs and predictions. So, from the corner of my eye I had been following a colorful spot somewhere far away at the driveway. The spot happened to be a city bus ready to start moving... And I did it... I mean - I hopped on that bus and went back home. The idea of `hopping' was probably nothing but just a vague reflective notion in my mind at the moment. Subconsciously I could be attracted somehow, say, to a sympathetic young couple who was meddling in the bus open doors which were about to close. My powerful empathy made me feel that I was doing the same. My head was encumbered with so many things at the time - Paris, Lulu, the marriage... Yes, that's me; I could have just easily jumped like that, absent-mindedly, you know, anticipating something wrong waiting for me in the dark.

Strange, but, at the same time, I remember and quite vividly another course of events as well. When, after more than an hourly delay, the plane boarding had been announced at long last. Happy that the waiting is over, all of us we rushed through a connecting tunnel into the Boeing's entrails. As it goes, the people were hastily finding their seats, jokingly elbowing each other, picking up magazines and newspapers. Lucky again, I happen to get a seat right across the aisle from that pretty girl reminding my Lulu. I even volunteered to help putting her bags into the overhead luggage compartment. In the comfortable interior, surrounded with the nice people, everybody felt completely at home. Never mind what is going on behind the thin aluminum cabin walls, here inside, there is the human territory, relaxing and cozy. Due to the usual distractions keeping me busy I didn't even notice how the plane had maneuvered toward a take-off runway, accelerated and weightlessly left the ground. "Lulu" glanced once and again in my direction, and when by chance our eyes met, she would give me a certain look as if being perfectly aware of my whimsical fantasies on her account. Under the wings of our plane, the jagged Long Island coastline kept stretching and swaying in the darkening evening of mid-July...

Could it have really happened? I mean, could have I really left the airport even before the plane boarding started? Quite possible that I had actually hopped on the departing bus, following my animal survival instincts, or did it pursuing another idea bothering me very much at the time - wishing to check on my mother who was seriously ill in hospital then. Above all, I could have been also preoccupied and with my professional obsession - with a pretty strange painting which I tried to complete prior to my departure. The latter, this ambiguous pictorial etude of mine, I will better describe in more detail because that's where, I suspect, an explanation is hidden, sort of a clue to a weird and incredible story I'm about to tell you now.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-04