Kirsty, whose own mother had died at forty-seven years of age when her Cessna spiralled into the Gulf of Mexico on a flight into Tampa, had made the mistake of trying to comfort him with a yard of undigested Zen the night he returned from LA. She had told him about Alec’s call, and then said, ‘You know, suffering comes from our inability to accept transience.’ And while he had accepted the truth of this, he had also known that her understanding of it was as feeble as his own, that she was pretending to a wisdom she had not earned, and it immediately sparked one of their sadder and more frenzied exchanges. In the lamplit kitchen, amid all the gleaming domestic hardware Sun Valley General had provided, they threw out remarks reckless of any consideration for justice or accuracy, a blind verbal lashing-out.
‘You want Ella to hear this?’ she had asked, when Larry, still fogged with the drink and drugs he had consumed at T. Bone’s, began to raise his voice. Hands on hips, a cartoon of the shrewish wife, she demanded to know what he had been doing in LA, and when she seemed, quite rightly, not to believe his heavily edited version of how he had spent the previous twelve hours, he had almost choked on his indignation. Her own life offered him little in the way of material for reproaches (he had come to think of this as a form of meanness) and, for lack of anything intelligent to say, anything pertinent, he accused her of carrying on with her guru, her Jap, Mr Transience, and for this, quite rightly, she had flung the remains of her OJ at him and walked out, pausing at the door to hiss: ‘I used to admire you.’
What was depressing was how quickly they could reach this stage, as if each had become specifically what the other could not tolerate, though on the following day he had apologized – a mute, somewhat cowardly apology – buying her a jar of her favourite black olives from Molinari’s on Columbus Avenue. He had left them on the breakfast bar and then spied on her from the hall as she fished them out of the oil with her fingers. It was the moment he might have gone to her – there were only three good steps between them – the moment he might have settled his hands on her shoulders and said the necessary things. But distances in a marriage – in his at least – were deceptive, and he had remained by the door, perverse and voyeuristic, watching his wife eat olives and slick her cheeks with grease when she pushed away a tear.
Someone tried the door again. ‘Later!’ called Larry. He was busy with the contents of his wash bag, turning them out on to the narrow steel shelf by the basin. Safety razor, multivitamins, deodorant, painkillers. Two spare canisters for Ella’s inhaler. A smoke-brown plastic bottle of Deroxat; five foil sheets of Xanax; a bottle of Luvox, a box of Paxil, a condom, nail-clippers, toothbrush, eye-drops, tweezers. He swallowed a Xanax and a Deroxat, and cleaned his teeth, then blew his nose, noting that his snot was streaked with blood from a last big line of adulterated powder woofed up from a CD cover in the spare room while Kirsty and Ella had waited outside in the Cherokee.
The blue-and-red capsules he had taken from Ranch’s cabinet were in a vinyl side pocket of the wash bag, still wrapped in the same sheet of tangerine toilet paper. He had not looked at them since that afternoon in the Valley, though he had often brooded on them, their nearness inspiring dark and melodramatic thoughts. There were three of them – one slightly larger than the other two. Sex and death. Or nothing at all, nothing but a crooked doctor’s invention, or some story dreamed up by Ranch to amuse the girls, so that even now he was down there in the annexe with Rosinne and Jo-babe, laughing at how the soap-opera guy had fallen for his spiel. Shoulda seen his eyes pop! Man, he just wanted to eat them right there!
Yet something in the sheer improbability, the fantasticalness of it all, suggested to Larry that the pills were precisely what Ranch had said they were, and that somewhere in Las Vegas there was a man with the necessary lethal knowledge to prepare them. But whatever the truth of it, this was the perfect occasion to be rid of them, right now, as they flew over one of those dwindling zones of the planet nobody pretended to own. Yet even as he imagined them spilling almost weightlessly from some duct in the plane’s gleaming underbelly, he was watching his hands carefully wrap them again and return them to their pocket in the wash bag. They were an asset he was not yet prepared to relinquish. Soon, of course, very soon. But not yet.
Going back to his seat, he watched the film continue its run on a score of angled screens. There were bonnets and carriages, and English hills of surpassing loveliness. The gentlemen frowned at each other and bowed, while the ladies waited for secret notes to be passed.
Ella, her colouring book on her lap, her crayon held in the tenseless curl of her fingers, looked as though sleep had caught her very suddenly. Sister Kim smiled and nodded. Larry thanked her. Her smile widened.
‘I know what you are,’ she whispered. ‘At convent we have television too, sometimes.’
‘Will you say a prayer when we land?’ asked Larry.
She said that she would. ‘Jesus is pilot,’ she said.
He laid a blanket over his daughter’s legs and reclined his seat. He was tired again, physically sluggish, but agitated by what seemed like a great backlog of thinking. He could not decide whether there were a great many decisions to be made, or none at all; whether his situation warranted some explosion of energy, some drama of action, or if he should simply wait and see; if indeed there was nothing he could do that would make the slightest difference. He could not save Alice – what manner of angel could? It seemed unlikely he could save his own marriage. And if that should fail, he did not, in all honesty, know if he would have the mettle, the knowhow, to save himself.
He took the earplugs from their bag and sealed off his skull from the sighs and little disgruntlements of his fellow passengers. He closed his eyes and made an effort to focus on transience, but it was too harsh a lesson. He was a child still, and like everyone else, with the possible exception of Mr Endo, he was swimming against the current and would be swept away. At the back of this was the spectre of an overwhelming loneliness, of a place where nobody would stay with you because nobody could. And this was what he was supposed to accept? Where was the comfort in it? What kind of courage did this letting go require? Clearly more than he had to offer. He would have to rely on quite different weapons – weakness for example – and, as he fell, not into sleep but into some parallel condition unique to the long-haul passenger, he began to imagine, and even to believe, despite the fact that in such a dearth of good air one could not entirely trust such ideas, that the last good road left open to him was failure itself. And this he decided to call hope.
4
The discussion in the little room lasted for over an hour. The window was closed – indeed, it looked to be sealed – and it was not long before they started to sweat and grow irritable. Emil, his beard shaved to the contour of his jaw, delivered a concise though thoroughly partisan analysis of Balkan politics, while the young woman, with her narrow skull, her high cheekbones, her face sloping back to the eyes, where the skin was slightly puffy and discoloured as if she were not quite well, a chronic insomniac perhaps, confined herself to asides about the international conspiracy of indifference that ignored those disasters it found unprofitable to address: the ‘no oil’ argument. László played devil’s advocate. When Emil asserted that the Albanian people, in the guise of the ancient Illyrians, had been the true first inhabitants of Kosovo, he pointed out that there was no real evidence for this, no monuments or reliable texts, nothing but a few fragile linguistic coincidences. Was it not the case that the independence movement in Kosovo was another scheme for the old ambition of a Greater Albania? And what of the legality of it? Why should the Serbs give it away?