So the lingering images of Buchanan Street, the blunt Celtic face of the Other Kevin, and the prospect of sudden, violent death on takeoff worried our Kevin enough to distract him from his pretty seatmate, a long-limbed Asian American girl some twenty-five years younger than he who had already curled next to the window with youthful limberness, and who had plunged into a fat paperback even before Kevin got on the plane at Metro. He folded his suit coat and laid it flat on somebody’s garment bag in the overhead, and settling into the aisle seat he exchanged a glance and a smile with the young woman, who was reading, it turned out, a mass-market edition of The Joy Luck Club. An Asian girl reading Amy Tan — at first this seemed kind of predictable to Kevin, and then kind of redundant, a coals-to-Newcastle kind of thing. What could Amy Tan tell this girl that she didn’t already know? Then his Ann Arbor brainpan brimmed over with guilt again and he thought, maybe I should be reading Amy Tan, what do I know? He’s never read the book, but he’s seen the movie, a glossy melodrama — he saw it with Beth, years ago — and mainly what he remembers is a series of yuppie young women whining about their jobs and their boyfriends, until they’re flattened by their no-nonsense immigrant mothers, who say things like, hey, you think you got it bad, back in China I had to drown my baby.
But as the plane lurched back from the gate and rumbled slowly out to the runway, thoughts of the Other Kevin and of terrorist Lebanese busboys from Dearborn drove Kevin to ignore the girl and peer anxiously past her instead into the predawn gloom beyond the glare of the runway, where of course he couldn’t see a thing. She glanced at him a couple of times, probably thinking that he was just another melancholy middle-aged guy checking her out, and maybe he was, just a little bit. She wore jeans and a green camisole top with teensy little straps, and she had kicked off her sandals to tuck her heels under the tight denim curve of her rump. While scanning the bright amber-and-green circuit board of suburban Detroit below — I-94 streaming with white lights one way, red the other — for the telltale flash and blinding streak of a shoulder- fired missile, Kevin managed to admire how the straps of her camisole angled over her collarbone, how the jagged cut of her hair brushed the long, smooth slope of her shoulders, and, when she fixed him with a clear, brown-eyed gaze, how the golden nose stud twinkled in her left nostril.
“Do you want to switch?” she said to him in a flat, midwestern accent like his own.
“It’s okay,” he said, forcing a laugh. “It’s just that I don’t like to fly.” Especially not today, he almost added, but why belabor the obvious?
“Then maybe you shouldn’t look out the window,” she said evenly, her thumbs keeping The Joy Luck Club pried apart in her lap.
“Well,” he said, “you’re right.” He shifted his backside in his seat. He folded and refolded his fingers over the buckle of his seat belt. He refocused his gaze down the aisle. “That’s a good idea.”
But now, enduring an ear-popping descent into Texas, where there may or may not be fewer Arab terrorists — fewer Lebanese restaurants, perhaps, but more Middle Eastern students of petroleum engineering — Kevin shifts uneasily in his seat. During the flight, out of Stinger range at thirty thousand feet (or so Kevin hopes, he really has no idea), his imagination had shifted again to the Other Kevin, the baby-faced Scottish jihadist, the freckled Islamo-Celt, and Kevin found himself profiling every person who walked past him down the aisle to the bathroom: every young guy in jeans, to be sure, especially the dark or swarthy or bearded ones, but also pale guys his own age in polo shirts and Dockers, and even the weary blond stewardess with the crow’s feet. Who knows what she might be embittered about? High over southern Illinois or Missouri, Kevin wasn’t thinking of Stingers, but of rogue bottles of shampoo and mouthwash, holding household chemicals that the guy in Dockers could mix in the tiny bathroom sink and then spark with the battery from his iPod or his cell phone, blowing a hole in the plane, sucking everybody out one at a time through the toilet like Goldfinger at the end of Goldfinger. Still, perhaps because the latest bombs in the news were backpack devices in subway cars, Orange Alert this time around hasn’t meant the confiscation of personal grooming products, but in the last year or two, Kevin has been on flights whose passengers were relieved of shampoo, mouthwash, toothpaste, shaving gel, sunblock, cologne, perfume, moisturizer, not to mention any implement for the care of one’s nails: clippers, scissors, nail files, emery boards. On those flights Kevin saw a vision of a new world in the sky, a dirtier, scruffier world with planes full of passengers unshaven, unwashed, unscented, untanned, undeodorized, unmoisturized, and unmanicured, their untrimmed nails inching over the armrests they gripped so tightly.
But right now, descending into Austin, Kevin’s thinking is old schooclass="underline" he’s thinking that whatever gets them is going to be a good, old-fashioned, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile, and he glances once more past Ms. Joy Luck and through the sun glaring in the scratches across the little oval of window. All he can see is a dull silver expanse of wing, dinged and dented and streaked, and beyond the wing a little wedge of desiccated brown ranch land sectioned by white dirt roads and fence lines and littered with tin-roofed houses and metallic trailers and oblong stock ponds full of greenish water. Even if the plane splits open like a piñata, he won’t have far to fall. He angles from side to side, wondering what’s the point of these fucking little windows if you can’t see anything, and his heart begins to pound almost as if he’s actually glimpsed the silver streak of the Stinger atop its billowing gush of smoke. Joy Luck was right — he’s better off on the aisle, where he won’t be able to see anything, where he won’t know what’s coming until it’s too late. Even if he were able to watch the entire, fatal, rising arc of the missile, he’s just another Pringle in the Pringles can gliding belly down out of the sky, with no control over the plane, no say over his fate. What would he do if he actually saw it coming? Clutch Joy Luck’s hand for that last moment of human contact? Tighten his seat belt? Put his head between his knees? Pray?
His seatmate lifts her eyebrow at him. She’s barely moved for three hours, except to shift her knees from one side to the other. The thick sheaf of pages in her lap has shifted inexorably from right to left, unread to read. She says, “Maybe you should’ve sat here. You’d have felt less, you know.” She wobbles her hand in the air.