The jet dipped, bounced, and woke me up.
I pushed the call button.
Just a nightmare, the stewardess said, and I nodded, and she brought me a martini and wiped my brow and then held my hand for a while.
Over Miami we went into a holding pattern. I was sick, but I fell in love.
When I told her so, the stewardess smiled and said it was the martini, or altitude sickness.
We circled over the Everglades at ten thousand feet.
She said my skin was green—pale green, she said, like a Martian. Then she gave my hand a squeeze. She asked if I was feeling better. I said I felt fine, I was in love.
The stewardess crossed her legs. She was tall and slim, with space-blue eyes and yellow hair and a pair of wings on her collar and a name tag at her breast that said Bobbi.
“Bobbi what?” I asked, but again she smiled, and after a moment she told me names didn’t matter. There were company policies, and private policies, too. But in any case names didn’t matter, did they? I thought about it as we banked over the Atlantic. No, I decided, names did not necessarily matter. But without names, I asked, how would we get married? I told her we had to be practical. Bobbi smiled at this and said it seemed a bit sudden. I agreed with her. Things sometimes happened suddenly, I said, even things that could not happen. Passion, for instance, and commitment. Her eyes were cryptic. Was this a line? she asked. It was not a line. She took the olive from my martini and fed it to me, saying I needed vitamins, I should find a nice beach somewhere and stretch out and bake away the bad dreams. She told me to close my eyes. I was sick and the plane was circling through fog. What about love? I asked. Could we run away together? How many children would she want? Over the Everglades she looked at me and said, You’re crazy, you know that? I knew. Bobbi nodded. Then I told her as much as there was time to tell. I told her about the dynamic. It was crushing, I said. How much was real? Was she real? I told her I was caught up by current events. I couldn’t separate right from wrong. I needed a hideout. Would she mind saving my life? Could we find an island somewhere?
“Bobbi what?” I asked, but she only smiled.
The plane seemed to wobble for a moment, then stabilized. The fog was gone and there were stars and blinking lights. I listened to the engines.
Later, very softly, Bobbi talked about flight and books and travel and poetry. Poetry, she said, that was her first love. Would I care to hear a poem? Very much, I said. And she recited one about a violet sunset over Hudson Bay. A remarkable piece of work, I thought; I asked what it meant. She gave me a long secret look and explained that poems do not mean, that art is like grass and dreams, like people holding hands in the sky, that meanings are merely names, just as grass is a name, but that grass would still be grass without its name. I did not fully understand this. What I understood was love, and I asked if we could go away to Hudson Bay. Watch the sunsets? Live happily? Build a cabin in the woods? She said no, but she touched my face. She recited Auden and Frost and Emily Dickinson, then several of her own poems, and I thought about Sarah, and how sick I was, and lost, and in love.
I drifted away for a time. Just hovering, on hold, and when I looked up I was alone.
To what extent, I wondered, was it real?
A hard landing—too much torque. There was again the problem of gravity.
At the ramp, I waited for the plane to empty out. She was gone. But when I put my coat on, I found a poem pinned to the pocket—Martian Travel—and it was signed Bobbi. That much was real. The words didn’t matter. It had to do with flight and fantasy and pale green skin, which was hard to follow, but it seemed meaningful despite the absence of meaning. There was some grass tucked into the fold. Plain dried grass, yet fragrant, and a postscript which explained that the grass expressed her deepest feelings for me.
We spent two days in a motel on the outskirts of Miami. The grass, I kept thinking. I couldn’t match it to the real world. When I was well enough to travel, Sarah rented a van and fixed up a bed in back, pillows and blankets.
“Home free,” she said.
We made Key West in just under four hours. There was blue water and sickness and jungly greens and a fierce sun that made my eyes burn. What did it mean? The pieces wouldn’t fit. A white stucco house, I remember, and Ned Rafferty said, “Hang tight,” and he helped me inside, where it was cool, and then I felt the disease. Chills turning to fever. It was true illness. Emotional burnout, too, but the rest was physical. I remember a ceiling fan spinning over my bed. A heavy rain, then dense humidity; faces bobbing up—Tina Roebuck peeling an orange, Ned Rafferty wringing out a washcloth and folding it across my forehead. There were voices, too. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. And cooking smells. And intense heat, and doors swinging open, and a radio at low volume in another room. The smells were tropical. At times I’d seem to float away on one of those leisurely space walks. Nowhere to land, I’d think, and I’d be circling over the Everglades, airborne, all flight and fantasy.
“It’s done,” Sarah kept telling me.
She was patient. At night, when the chills came, she would come close and whisper, “End of the road.”
Key Wasted, Tina called it. There was no war here, and no clamor, just the tropical numbs.
Over that first month we took things slow. Hour by hour, quiet meals and quiet conversation. The patterns were entirely domestic. Tina did the shopping and cooking, Rafferty tended a small garden out back. For me, it was recovery. Safe, I’d think. A safe house, a safe neighborhood, and the underground seemed tidy and languid. There were no choices to make; the killing was elsewhere. Our little bungalow was situated at the edge of Old Town, near the cemetery, on a narrow, dead-end lane that was prosperous with window boxes and sunlight. No one talked politics. If this was the movement, I decided, the movement was fine, because nothing moved. Our neighbors were property owners and retired naval officers and widows and watercolorists. The houses were painted in pastels. In the yards were many flowers and pruned shrubs. During the day, from my bedroom window, I’d watch people passing by in their bright clothes, and at night I could hear radios tuned to the Voice of Havana.
I’d hear myself thinking: Where am I?
On the lam, I’d think. Then I’d smile. What, I wondered, was a lam? And why did it sound so corny and sad?
“There now,” Sarah would say. “Sleep it off.”
But my dreams were unwholesome. Criminal and outlandish. One night I was Custer. Another night I was chased through a forest by men with torches and silver badges—“Shame!” they were yelling—but I put my head down and ran. I dreamed of dishonor. I dreamed of dragnets and posses and box canyons and dead ends. “Shame!” my father yelled, but I couldn’t stop running. And then, dreaming, but also awake, I came to a country where there was great quiet and peace. It was a country without language, without names for shame and dishonor. Here, there was nothing worth dying for, not liberty or justice or national sovereignty, and nothing worth killing for. It was a country peopled by apostates and mutineers, those who had dropped their arms in battle, runaways and deserters and turncoats and men with faint hearts.