Black Box
I can hear the pilot radioing that the plane is losing altitude. I can hear a flight attendant following standard procedure, asking for all passengers to help a child with their oxygen masks before putting on their own. I hear the calm and trained voice of the co-pilot, announcing to the crew and passengers to embrace for impact, to hold onto their love ones, to know that they can use their seat cushions as an inflatable device if they end up floating in an open sea for days. I hear the pilot yelling: Mayday! Mayday! And then there’s static.
I can’t remember everything exactly. I have to rewind and fast-forward, rewind and—yes, it’s like I have a block box shackled around my ankle. It’s clamped down, pressurized, locked tight, and painted bright red; it sits in the belly of the plane.
It only floats in an open ocean, surrounded by debris, when there is tragedy, when an electrical failure or a broken fuel line or when a fertilizer bomb detonates. Everything prior to hitting ocean water—temperature, fuel levels, air pressure, altitude, speed, and voices—is recorded.
Yesterday, I broke off from an airplane, like a wheel or an engine or some other crucial part, and floated in the clouds for a few nanoseconds. I didn’t have a parachute to save myself that day. I looked down at my feet and saw the Earth and its many eyes looking up at me: the Sunshine 60 Building, the streets, the highway, the roofs of apartment buildings; the damn people, the spectators, they all gawked at me as I smashed through the roof of a glass hotel building in downtown Tokyo, through the gilded chandelier on the 10th floor, through the concrete and metal beams of the third floor and then plopped down onto a satin sheet bed on the 1st floor, with my hands over my eyes.
I was sitting in this hotel room, honey, in Tokyo, somewhere buried under the metal and glass of this high-rise. I was sitting there smoking a cigarette and wiping the lipstick off my lips on the bed sheets. She was in the bathroom; she said she needed to piss afterward. But I didn’t know she was in the bathtub, sliding down on the white-titled wall. She was wearing red lipstick; she kissed me all over with it. And she had on a black bra and panties too. I didn’t know her bones and muscles and tendons were swollen with heroin, that her legs were failing her as she slid down into the bathtub. I didn’t know she was some kind of junky. I didn’t know that her were lips were turning blue, that she was overdosing. I didn’t know that she gripped the shower curtain, tore off some of the rings, crumbled, and slid into the tub, and smacked her head on the faucet.
I heard someone moaning, but only from the Japanese soap opera glowing on the television screen. The hotel room was dark. The volume was turned up a lot. I blew the last blue coils of cigarette smoke from my lips. I swallowed a mouthful of Chardonnay from the glass in my other hand. I felt turned on again. I wanted to fuck, again. But the room was spinning; the drama on the television was spinning, gyrating, convulsing, like a kaleidoscope. I couldn’t control anything, anything at all. I fell back on the bed, dropping the bottle and the cigarette, and stared for minutes, for a very long time I think, at the stucco ceiling above me; it shifted into crinkled shapes from the television glow. I traced the contours and perfect symmetry, over every ridge and chasm as the girl in the bathroom was bleeding. I lied there and couldn’t do anything. I tried to get up (I really did), but my legs were numb. I could not connect my brain to the tendons and to the muscles. My mouth was dry and salty. The room smelled like sex. My eyelids closed. I passed out. Yes, I passed out.
Do you remember when I had that business meeting? I was on a bullet train heading for Tokyo. I left the station twenty minutes ago and was about to arrive there in fifteen. The train was speeding through the countryside (going very fast) at 321 km an hour. It was almost about to achieve its 2nd speed record since it was commissioned a week before.
On that day, I was wearing that new Armani suit that you had custom tailored for me in New York, with that gold pen in the front pocket, the one you gave to me for my 32nd birthday. I was dressed for the occasion. I was also wearing a white dress shirt with a pleated front, a black tie, and a pair of shined shoes. I appeared refined and well assured. Everything was charming.
I was reading the Wall Street Journal, and over the edge of the newspaper I saw this attendant handing out champagne; she rolled her tiny cart down the aisle toward me. I know you said I could look but not grope, which you said was natural. And you often looked at other guys, and commented on them, and gossiped about them, and even flirted with them. I hated that. In the back of my mind, yes, I detested you when you talked business with someone’s husband while I sat in the corner of the expensive party, dipping my lips in a glass of wine. You would ask which girl at the business party I would go home with that night. You would snicker and point to that girl and this girl. Which celebrity I would go home with? Angelina Jolie, of course. You: Heath Ledger.
So I was reading the Wall Street Journal, but I was not reading the numbers, I was reading this girl’s ass and thighs, writhing underneath her tight, blue suit. She rolled her cart of jingling glasses to me, and I almost, I was almost about to say something stupid to her.
“Would you like a glass of champagne sir, courtesy of the Central Japan Railways for being a passenger on the first manmade machine to achieve a 300km an hour speed record?” She said that to me in this saucy British accent. She definitely wasn’t from Japan.
“Did they tell you to say that?” I said to her, squinting at her, positioning my face in front of her face.
“What do mean by that, sir?”
“Oh, c’mon, do you really have to say all that?”
“It’s what we’ve been told, sir. Would you like a glass of champagne?”
“Do you know when we’ll be arriving?”
“Very shortly, sir. We’ll be achieving a world speed record soon.”
She bent down to adjust the pillow behind me and my eyes—I tried and tried and tried—but I couldn’t avoid glancing at the slit between her breasts. My ears were burning. I looked up. Her face was so smooth and pale except for a little cut under her nose. It was fresh cut—maybe a cold sore, I’m not sure—but it wasn’t bleeding. She was like this little ceramic doll. Her eyes were tiny and brown, like little raisons, with thick globs of mascara under them. And her hair, even though it was tied underneath the ridiculous hat she was wearing, it had a slight blue tint to it. I thought she was a dancer or performer or something like that, working this menial job to support a habit or two (yes, a habit or two). But her hat: it was this tall blue pyramid with a train on top of it, and it almost slid off her head and into my lap as she bent down to adjust my pillow.
“Do you want any champagne, sir?”
“Do you know why,” I whispered, “do you know why you’re working on this train.”
“Excuse me?”
The train was now at 345km an hour, or so the conductor announced over the loud speaker.
“I can offer you something else.” I whispered to her again. I was hesitant, but I replaced a champagne glass with my hotel card on her little tray, “anything whatsoever.”
She didn’t say anything and looked at me with a blank expression, rolling her tray up the aisle.
So I looked out the window. Power lines were zipping by. I heard thick wind against the window and watched the tiny towns and tall hills disappear almost faster than my mind could recognize them as those objects, and also what was happening now with this girl. Dirt roads faded to factories and warehouses and the bungalows dissolved to tall high-rises. Even a pale sun appeared to be sliding backward on the pane of glass.
I remember a little girl about three seats ahead me, wearing a blue and red school uniform; she was standing in the aisle and sticking her tongue out at me. She looked like the champagne attendant. She was bubbly (sort of like our son) and had her legs outstretched in the aisle in the shape of a V. Her plush, rosy cheeks deflated, however, when her mother yanked her back into her seat. A baby screamed. A man behind me was coughing a lot. And my cell phone rang in my pocket:
“Hello,” I said to you, “Yes, I know of should have done this and that. Yes, I’ll be home tomorrow. So what? I can buy Christmas gifts for the kids next week.” I cupped my hand over the mouthpiece. “I’m in a very important meeting now, honey.”—But I really wasn’t in a meeting at all—“Call me in hour.”
If I could reverse everything and fast-forward it again, if I could change the incident, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be smoking another cigarette. The tray of champagne, without an attendant holding onto it, would be rolling down the aisle and crashing into a seat in front of me. The little girl would be screaming. The man would be shouting for assistance; his wife had broken her arm. I would be squeezing the armrests, biting down on my tongue, thinking about you and my two boys.
Fast-forward: an electrical failure would cause the breaks on this train to fail. The first two cars would be unlatched from the three others in attempt to slow the fastest manmade machine on Earth. But inertia and friction would be certain, and I would feel that, as well as the four hundred other passengers, as the train car would crunch into the next one and the next one and—it would be like squeezing a thousand ton soda can. The sides would squeeze outward, parts of the steel frame would bend and shatter, fuel lines would break, high voltage electrical wires would tear open, window panes would blow out; and a high-speed engine, carrying a belly of fuel, would explode.
Everything would then freeze. I would be in midair now, with my legs broken. I would be looking down at a row of passenger seats, with a man and a woman chocked in the smoke and fire. I would see the shattered champagne glasses, the crying girl (now bloody), and several other people fixed in midair. Suddenly, I would have the option to press fast-forward and die. I would also have the option to press reverse and be there, sitting in my seat, telling the attendant: “No thank you, I don’t drink.” And then I would go back to reading my newspaper.
But that’s not how it happened, honey. I can’t simply press a button and change it. I can’t change it, I can’t.
That night, I didn’t decide to be granted an option of having a luxury suite in the Hilton hotel in Tokyo. Within those many skyscrapers in the city, I was there in the bedroom, by myself at first, spitting out figures on my laptop for the meeting the next day. I didn’t decide to be served London broil and sushi (yes, it was a special combo platter) for dinner that night, and have only two glasses of wine (only two, at first), at the bar downstairs. I didn’t decide for her to look me up on the Internet and call the number of my cell phone rather than the number on the hotel card. She was savvy and didn’t want to get caught. I didn’t decide to hear Neil Diamond’s voice—which I know is probably, most likely, absolutely-positively your favorite singer of all time—but I didn’t decide to hear that song, “Solitary Man,” in the hotel lobby, even when I was alone in the elevator with this girl, even when I was alone kissing this girl while she was unbuttoning my shirt.
But I did decide to pull her into my hotel room and flick off all the lights and smoke a cigarette and pour two glasses of wine. I did decide to open the window and stick my hand outside to catch some raindrops (it was rainy that night), and spray her and myself with rainwater. Her name was Caroline.
“You’re getting wet, Caroline.” I said to her.
I splashed rainwater on my face and her face. Somewhere on this routine of today—alarm, shower, shit, cereal, lunch, work, dinner, and fuck—yes, I did decide to fuck her that night. She decided to fuck me, of course, after asking me to pay her. I refused at first. I did. But she slid a hand in my pants and the other in my back pocket to slip my wallet.
I took a long, hard drag from my cigarette and blew it on the window; I remember the blue smoke twisting in front of me for a second until it was sucked out the window.
I fucked her. Her name was Caroline. I knew I was one of the most dependable board members for my company. I knew this would be scandalizing. But I fucked her. I would have a meeting the next day—boring talk for boring business people: “Jack, what exactly does this line of this graph mean?” Someone would say, with a MBA from Harvard or Yale, and I would shake my head and redirect the meeting into a different area. That’s my specialty: giving direction and discipline and setting an example for the company.
Caroline had a soft lisp when she talked dirty words to me while she unzipped my pants. She was wearing this purple and red knitted scarf and a skin-tight skirt with rhynestones on the front of it.
One of my secretaries in New York typed up this brilliant memo, outlining how this employee and that employee had such a lousy record for productivity, accusing them (but tactfully) of taking too much sick time, questioning management, that sort of thing. I liked it. And I let everybody go on that list. I also gave my secretary a promotion.
But I will be honest; you were not fucking me anymore. For years you talked about this guy and that guy and asked me about this girl and that girl, but, but you wouldn’t even kiss me goodnight sometimes. My wife, you, you—yes, I was planning on leaving you soon. I was miserable.
“The boys will have a hard time,” you’d probably say, “they wouldn’t cope well between two households.”
Bullshit. Caroline was only twenty years old. I paid her to fuck me, and I did. But I didn’t pay for her to go into the bathroom and to inject herself with smack. I didn’t pay for me to pass out and for her to die.
I was floating in the clouds, honey, for what seemed like hours. I had this thing, this black box shackled to my ankle, recording every breath and palpation, every whisper and conversation in my mind. I didn’t find her body until around five in the morning, and I knew she was already dead. I just sat there on the toilet seat, in that Tokyo hotel room, lit another cigarette, and stared at her sprawled out in the bathtub. There was some water dribbling on her face from the faucet, so I turned it off. I also tore off the shower curtain and wrapped her body in it; her brown raisin eyes glared at me through the green translucent plastic.
And then the telephone rang and then I got up, dressed myself, took the elevator down to the lobby and sprinted out of the hotel without saying goodbye to the doorman. I probably looked peculiar for taking a jog in the rain, in the early morning, with just a crumpled dress shirt and pants. It was pouring outside and I dragged myself through a tangle mess of neon lights, dirty sushi bars, cars almost driving into me, people almost laughing at me, until both of my legs were burning. I stood under the canopy of some kind of pawnshop, the rainwater dribbling on my shoulder, with my shirt and pants soaked and sticking to my skin. A police officer began walking across the street, and I ran in the other direction. Three others were soon chasing me down the alley, through someone’s home, and back out onto the streets. They caught me and pushed my forehead down on the wet pavement to handcuff me. I couldn’t comprehend anything that they were shouting at me.
The damn people, the spectators, they all gawked at me as I crashed through the roof of an glass hotel building in downtown Tokyo, through the gilded chandelier on the 10th floor, through the concrete and metal beams of the third floor, and now I was handcuffed and sitting in a flashing red and blue police car, with my hands over my eyes.
“Didn’t you love me anymore?” you said to me afterward.
And what did I say to you, what did I say in response to such a simple question? I shook my head.
Originally published for anderbo.com