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Someone asked me to write a piece for a book about art that makes us cry. I've done something this morning and I feel I'd like it to reach some kind of immediate audience.
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For maybe thirty minutes, an hour into the flight, I feel like Dean Martin. Suit jacket off; loosened the burnt-orange tie at the neck. (Always makes you feel way more relaxed than if you weren’t wearing a tie in the first place.) By morning, I’m going to present a bleary, oily, stubbled face to the customs desk at Dallas Fort-Worth, have a guy look from me to the circa-97 passport picture as if to say, this is you? You wish. But for now, I feel like Dean Martin, and flying feels the way they promised it would, in the 1960s. Jazz on the earphones. A passably cute stewardess leans across with my gin and tonic, and though it comes in a plastic tumbler with a mini-bag of mini-pretzels, and the lady inches away to your left has got the exact same thing, you can kid yourself that flying’s still the high life.
And then the in-flight movie kicks in – or the in-flight entertainment system, because of course these days you’re flipping between sit-coms, arcade games and maps of the world on this thing, but in this old-school Vegas mood you’re thinking of it as the in-flight movie. It’s some Adam Sandler flick. He’s in the Jimmy Stewart role again, playing some decent everyman who gets given a magical remote control – don’t ask me how or why, I’d flipped to watch five minutes of Friends at this point – and for a while, it’s all hunky dory. He mutes his wife when she’s bending his ear at the dinner table, and slows time down when he’s watching a hot piece of skirt; you get the picture. Slapstick bullshit like that. Anyway, as you can guess, he takes it too far and the gift becomes a curse. He realises he was so desperate to jump thru time to get promotion, he fast-forwarded past his kids growing up and he’s alienated his wife. The remote’s started thinking it knows best, making decisions without him.
I order another gin, stretch my legs. We’re above the black Atlantic. I squeeze back into my seat and the movie’s changed. It’s the same flick, but it’s shifted gears. Adam Sandler’s woken up in the 2020s, with another block of his life lost. His wife’s left him, his kids have grown up fat and slutty, and he’s got cancer. Yeah, and his dog died, too. And his dad. His dad died and he didn’t even know it. If I was at home watching this on DVD, I’d be checking the back of the box – what the fuck! I thought this was a comedy. The stewardess fetches my gin and tonic. The lights dim. The movie gets darker. Sandler goes back in time to the moment he last saw his dad, and snubbed him. He’s standing there, a mute witness, unable to touch; watching himself treat his old man like shit, and knowing that’s the last time. He reaches out a ghostly hand, mouths I love you across time and space. His dad looks through him, resigned and hurt.
The gin’s making things swimmy. I can’t quite believe the way this movie’s playing out. The guy who gave Sandler the remote confesses he’s the Angel of Death. Sandler’s catapulted forward from his dad’s gravestone to the penultimate scene in his own life: he’s at his son’s wedding, excluded from the family. His heart can’t take it, and he wakes up a final time on his deathbed, in some future hospital. The guy’s lived the past thirty years in glimpses and snatches. Now his grown-up kids are leaning over him, saying goodbye. His son takes off, saying he’s going to cancel his honeymoon for some work deal. Sandler needs to persuade him not to go the same route. He crawls out into the rain, chasing his son… dying without the life-support. Lying on the road. They crowd around him, overflowing with forgiveness and love. The screen goes dark for the credits, and I’m staring at my dim reflection, emotionally exhausted. My chest’s tight, my throat’s clogged, my heart’s drained. As I blink, wetness spills down my right cheek; the side turned to the dark window, the side nobody can see.
And I’m thinking, not for the first time: why do these cheese’n’cornball movies work me over this way? Maybe I’m a sucker for sentiment, but they always get to me most up here, on an airplane. With only strangers for company, and your own reflection, and the black Atlantic, miles across and miles below. Glancing around, you check on your fellow-travellers who, a few hours into the flight, are staring at tiny screens, reading in their own small pools of light, or leaning back, abandoned; eyes shut, mouths open. The lady on your left has put her book away, covered herself with the tartan blanket and closed herself off from the world with an eye-mask. Adults tucking themselves in for the night, twitching in sleep. Something touching about the way we all settle to this common level, miles above the world and between continents – sharing this space, trusting each other as we lower our guards, regress a little. Except on a plane, when did you last sleep surrounded by strangers? School dormitory… the nursery nap. In this limbo, rules are suspended.
Academics have a word they love to use for shit like this. Liminal. Crossing the threshold into liminal, in-between space. But it’s true in this case, and the crossing is a rough one. Every take-off, every landing, I have thirty seconds of thinking I could seriously die here. The engines protesting at the impossibility of the whole idea as they take the final approach down the runway, racing at stupid, daredevil speed with a fuck it, OK here we go then, then tear you off the ground, ripping probabilities, daring gravity. In the first moments of lift-off, before we’ve straightened out, found our height and started facing the humdrum of eight hours in the air, the idea that this silver coffin could plunge from the sky seems very real and pressing. Of course, a bit of turbulence or engine trouble makes people panic these days – it lowers the barriers further. Apparently it’s not uncommon for strangers to start praying together, or hugging the guy in the next seat. You can understand the impulse, more immediate since 9/11. This airplane could become a bullet, a missile. This could be the start of your final scene.
So every take-off, I get that brief flash of life before your eyes - a show-reel of life unfinished, of things left unsaid, things never done. I’d die now without having been to Sydney. I’d die without kids. I’d die without having told anyone in my family I loved them, since maybe ten years ago.
And up here in limbo, drifting above the ocean in a coffin full of strangers, some heavy-handed Hollywood fable can prod those buttons for me, force out a stray tear. I punch the remote, turn off the TV screen. I’m getting the germ of a headache, a little nagging kernel in my skull; my head’s dry from the alcohol, the height, the stale air. I pull a mask over my eyes, prop the miniature pillow against the windowglass, position myself for a few hours of hard, broken sleep. I wasn’t crying. Nobody saw me crying. Ignore that shit I told you just now. It was just the gin talking. |
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