Bob’s special package arrived in the mail in a plain brown padded envelope. The mailman handed it to Bob on the porch along with a water bill, a postcard from one of Bob’s ex-students written in the south of France, a flyer for discount muffler inspections, and a free pouch of shampoo called Lumio. The mailman was shorter than Bob but younger and carried himself straighter, and made a habit of looking each of his householders in the eye as he said, “Good morning.” Bob looked him right back but made a funny noise in his throat – “ghnihhr” – when he realized what had finally arrived.
“A bit cool today,” the mailman said. It was grey and many of the chimneys in the neighbourhood were showing smoke for the first time that fall. But the mailman was in walking shorts and had worked up a sweat. His face glistened and Bob thought, How can he still be so fat? Walking like this every day.
“Hope you finish before the rain,” Bob said, holding the special package and the discount muffler inspection in just the same way, as if all pieces of mail were created equal. He allowed himself a quick glance. The company logo, Lighthouse, was discreetly stamped on the top left, and the package was addressed to R. Sterling.
“Anything?” Julia asked when Bob stepped back into the house, an old, solid, respectable home that Bob had bought with his first wife, Stephanie, when he’d landed tenure. He had loved the solemn bearing of it then, but it was dark on sombre days. The windows were original, with diamond-shaped panes set in lead. Bob was stiff from the night of bad sleep. He turned back into the hall and suffered a moment’s awareness of how closed-in the place made him feel. Though Julia had managed her best with it before the baby – she’d done over the living room and had had a wall taken out upstairs to open up the master bedroom – it reeked of Stephanie still. Her mirror in the hall, her wallpaper with the iris pattern in the den, her hand-stencilled border linking room to room.
“I’m just about off,” Bob said. His briefcase was right there in the hall beside his packed bag and he knelt to click it open quickly and put his package inside. But his fingers fumbled with the combination. Calm down, he thought, and he tried to breathe deeply. He put the package and the rest of the mail on the oak floor to give the lock his proper attention. But Matthew erupted from the kitchen pulling a thumpy plastic elephant that scattered the mail.
“Shit!” Bob roared and the boy flooded into tears, ran back to Julia, who hugged him quickly, smoothed his brown curls.
“Bob,” she said softly, but with an edge so that he understood perfectly.
The taxi pulled up in the driveway and honked. Bob opened the case, retrieved the package from the floor, put it inside and snapped the lid shut again. “I’m sorry,” he said, straightening. “I’m sorry, Matthew.” He nuzzled the boy’s neck. Matthew kept his face buried in Julia’s front. “I wish I didn’t have to go,” Bob said, and kissed Julia on the cheek, nuzzled her earlobe. He felt a wave of tenderness for her as she stood in her frayed yellow sweatsuit, the sleep still in her warm brown eyes, her blonde hair, not natural any more, but the colouring suited her, wisps tucked behind one ear and straying over the other – a surge of love and appreciation for her beauty. Little as she tried, she was still striking.
She turned for a proper kiss but the taxi honked again and Bob had already stepped away to pick up the rest of his luggage.
“Hey,” she said at the door. Bob was halfway down the steps but stopped, took three strides back to her, and kissed her on the mouth.
“I wish you could go with me,” he said. His voice was gentle and deep, his eyes soft with what he knew was a look of self-mocking, a sense of the absurdities of the world and his own position. “Next time,” he said and kissed her again.
“You’ll get lipstick,” she said and wet her thumb, rubbed it off his lips.
It wasn’t a long ride to the airport. The route skirted the university and along the Rideau Canal. Ottawa was subdued, the colours muted and wet, the sky choked with gnarly clouds and the vague threat of winter, a dull chill, a starkness where the leaves had left the trees, the sudden thickness of people’s clothing. The roads were congested with workaday government and high-tech types on their way in for nine o’clock. Bob studied their faces: doomed-looking, numb-eyed men and women clutching their coffee cups, rolling forward a few feet then stopping, their shoulders hunched already, backs aching.
The taxi driver said the forecast was for rain then and Bob made an appropriate reply, his face composed, as if there were no special package in his briefcase. As if he hadn’t ordered it from an Internet company five weeks ago and conducted a detailed correspondence to tack down his measurements – hip point to hip point, belly button to base of the spine, the average size of his penis and testicles (measured in bath water, resting) – his skin colour (porcelain-beige, pale), his pubic-hair type (basic black, mince, but with traces of heather-brown). Bob asked, “Does your business pick up in the rain?” and the driver told him all about it. It wasn’t such a simple thing. It depended on what type of rain it was, what time of day, what season. A really hard rain in the morning in the summer might mean that people decide to call a cab to get to work, or they might just stay home. A light rain in January that made everything icy slick …
“Yes,” Bob said, following him and not following.
“All I know, the really heavy rain, the traffic is crap,” the driver said, and Bob nodded in solidarity.
“We should all stay home in a heavy rain,” Bob said. “Stay home and take taxis!”
She was waiting for him by the ticket counter. It had all been arranged, and yet when she stood up he felt giddy and a new sense of awe. She was tall and wiry and womanly and twenty-one, in black hip-hugging pants that twenty-one-year-olds used to wear when Bob was twenty-one. With flared legs and rounded, pocketless bottoms and even damn near the same ridiculous cloggy skyscraper shoes from the olden days. And her maroon leather jacket was open to reveal a clingy black top several sizes too small. Nobody could get away with clothes like that. Except if you were twenty-one and immortal.
“Professor Sterling,” she said, stepping towards him. She had sunglasses tipped high on her head, holding back her shoulder-length black satin hair. She looked like she belonged in a glossy magazine, a certain kind of immortal of the instant. But more than that, Bob knew this girl had an intensely intriguing spirit. She was Sienna Chu, half-Chinese, half-Irish, and her eyes were ever-so-slightly crossed so Bob couldn’t tell if she was looking directly at him or away.
“Please, call me Bob. Everyone in the department calls me Bob.” He touched her arm briefly, put his briefcase down – he was dragging his main luggage behind him on little wheels. “Well, isn’t this marvellous!” he exclaimed, gesturing vaguely so that he might mean the occasion, the day, the airport, or perhaps just life in general.
“I am so excited! I’ve never been to a Poe conference before.” She blushed, it was endearing, and she had no further need to be endearing, he was already teetering on the edge of total endearment.
“Where’s your ticket, Sienna?”
Helen in the English-department office had booked her into economy, which was ludicrous. Bob marched her straight to the booth to upgrade her to business class. “Some things in life are not worth stinting on,” he said. “If we’re going to die a ragged, awful, cruel death, then it should be in great comfort, with plenty of leg room, a champagne glass at our lips, and smart, good-looking attendants to look after our every whim.”
Bob waited for her reaction, but she apparently chose not to react, looked away instead like a princess who doesn’t have to listen if she doesn’t want to. But she did let Bob pay the difference, then take her to the restaurant to buy her a proper breakfast: two eggs and sausage, toast, hash browns, coffee. “You can’t trust the food on the plane,” he said. “Even in business class. Alcohol, certainly, but I have a friend in catering and the stories he tells me!” She gobbled down her food like a starving child. He tried not to stare at the soft taper of her fingers, the smooth heaven of her throat.
“They say the same about residence food,” she said.
“Don’t get me started on residence food!” he exclaimed, too loud. People looked at them from other tables. But he couldn’t help it, he was utterly alive, he felt like shouting. “Don’t get me started,” he repeated in a more normal voice. “I have seen them taking the bodies out at night. Poor, anonymous freshmen who paid the ultimate price for coveting the custard pie. It’s scandalous, there’s been a cover-up for years. The parents are bought off by the multinational that owns every college catering company in the Western world!” He was babbling but couldn’t help himself.
“No wonder you like Poe so much,” she said, and pulled out the conference brochure. “I really want to hear Solinger on Poe’s concept of women,” she said.
“Oh, Poe and his women. Don’t get me started!” Bob said. But it was too late, he was already started. There was Eliza Poe, Poe’s actress mother, who outshone her shiftless husband so badly and died so young, penniless, a charity case after having played more than three hundred parts. And Poe’s wife and cousin, Virginia – Sissy – fourteen when they married, who lingered for years on her deathbed, the relentless cough of the white plague, tuberculosis, her skin pale, deathly beautiful, tinted with night sweats, too pink in pallor. The poor dear, saddled with Poe, a dead-poor, luckless, mercurial poet, scathing critic, inventor of the detective story, author of all those cryptic tales, wildly ambitious, jealous, driven, haunted, alcoholic, unstable, brilliant, morose, half-starved, bitter, possibly mad.
“Curiously,” Bob said, glancing at his watch – he didn’t want to miss the flight, and giddy as he was he could see himself doing it – “Curiously enough, one time Poe almost got a government job. It was as if the gods were playing with him. Prominent writers used to get cushy jobs back then –”
“Yes, you said,” Sienna cut in. “I remember you mentioned this in class.”
“Did I?” Bob asked. “Yes, probably. My God, the old professor has started repeating himself.”
She might have interjected something about him not really being old, but instead she said, “His name was actually published for the post, wasn’t it?”
“Yes! Well, it was Pogue, under the list of new appointments, and Poe inquired and was apparently told the name was his, garbled by the press. He was all set for the swearing-in. At last, a government job! He waited and waited …”
“Should we get going, Professor Sterling?” Sienna asked. “Bob, I mean.”
“Yes, we should,” Bob said, but stayed a moment more just to look at her. Then while they were walking to the departures gate they passed a mirrored wall at which Bob couldn’t help glancing. He was struck, as he had been several times lately, by a feeling of being an impostor, but quite a good one: solid-looking, squarish, fleshy, yes, but tanned, too, and prosperous and well turned out. She was gorgeous, a real head-turner. But he too had a presence, didn’t look hopelessly drowned beside her.
There was an annoying delay in the customs line-up which Bob hadn’t figured on. Being Canadian, he found it hard to consider the United States an entirely foreign country, and he’d forgotten about this small matter. Time really was pressing now, so he sent Sienna into another line down the row. Then he waited patiently while a young woman with an English accent and seven rings in her cheek showed her passport, answered one question, then was let through. She was followed by a raggedy, intense man with a sickly pale face and dust on his jacket who squinted at the customs officer like a known criminal, also said only a few words, and was similarly waved through.
“Next!” the customs officer said, staring at Bob. He pulled his luggage up to the yellow line, stood with his briefcase under his arm.
“Name?”
“Uh, Bob Sterling. Professor Bob Sterling.”
“From?”
“From here. From, uh, Ottawa.”
“Destination?”
“New York City.”
“Purpose of trip?”
“Oh, uh -” Bob couldn’t seem to get the rattle out of his voice. He felt suddenly and completely guilty. “I’m going to New York for the Poe conference at Columbia University.” Then he added, “Edgar Allan Poe. The writer.”
“You’ll be there for how long?”
“What’s today, Friday? Till Sunday.” That was better. His voice sounded more normal. The customs officer was a plain-looking woman, her uniform puffed-out and sexless, her face quite blank: pale blue eyes behind wispy brown lashes. In her identity-tag photo she looked as if she was being busted for drug possession. Rebecca Williams.
“Do you have anything to declare?” It was a standard question, and it may have been the way she ran all the words together that made Bob pause to consider that, given his age and stage and position, perhaps he had, or at least ought to have, things to declare. She didn’t mean it in a philosophical way, of course, and he realized it nearly right away, but for an instant he tried to think what he could possibly say to excuse himself, as if she had seen into his soul and was demanding some sort of justification or analysis.
“Uh, no,” he said, finally.
She asked something else, too quickly to catch, and again Bob had to ask her to repeat herself.
“Could you open your briefcase please?”
“Oh, I, uh, I just have the one piece of luggage,” Bob said, turning to gesture to his suitcase behind him. She was staring at him so hard he finally looked – clown-like, he thought – down at the briefcase tucked under his arm. He’d been clutching it so hard he’d forgotten it was there. “Oh gosh, yes!” he said, smiling and blustering. He almost started to explain about absent-minded professors, how he could be walking down the street completely absorbed in some thought or other …
“Your briefcase, sir,” she said, rather harshly. “Could you open it?”
“Oh, this!” Bob said, still clutching it.
Sienna was waiting for him now beyond the customs line. People of all stripes were turning to look at her as they filed past.
“Here it is,” Bob said softly, and placed the briefcase on the inspection table, fiddled self-consciously with the lock. Finally, after too much effort, it fell open.
Rebecca Williams flicked through several things. “What’s this?” she asked. She held up the special package.
“That’s nothing,” he said quickly. “I just threw it in there. It came in the mail today.”
“What is it?” she asked slowly, enunciating every syllable, as if talking to a second-language learner.
“It’s a tape of a famous lecture on Poe’s view of poetics and transcendence, in light of his struggles with the Transcendentalists,” Bob said. Then, meeting her blank expression, he added, “It’s an academic cassette.”
“I’m sorry?”
“What’s the value?”
“Oh, uh, it’s completely useless to almost anyone. But to me -” And then he stopped himself. She was looking at him with near-malice. “Twenty-five dollars,” Bob said.
There was a terrible moment in which it looked as if she was going to open the package anyway. She’d hooked her sharp thumbnail under an edge, and at the same time was eyeing his suitcase. Bob willed himself to appear absolutely calm and innocent, despite his rising panic.
“Could you open your other bag?” she asked, and closed the lid of the briefcase, leaving the special package unopened inside.
Bob hoisted the suitcase onto the table. Sienna gave him a bright smile when he looked up, terror-stricken.
The customs officer unzipped Bob’s bag and rummaged through his things: spare shirts, trousers, and socks, the Silverman biography of Poe, and an old copy of the complete tales and poems too bulky for his briefcase. Then she got to the padded black lace bra and panties, the nylons and purple silk slip and red satin corset at the bottom of the bag. She didn’t hold them up but simply fingered through them, pausing with each new discovery.
“Those are, uh, some of my wife’s things,” he said, feebly. His face was flushed crimson and he was aware that his breath rattled in shallow, rapid little wheezes. He tried to calm himself but couldn’t.
“Your wife?” Williams asked, deadpan.
“She’s uh, she’s waiting for me. Over there,” Bob said. He pointed slightly in Sienna’s direction.
Rebecca Williams – small, pasty-faced Rebecca Williams with the limp brown hair and washed-out eyes – looked at the stunning Sienna for what seemed to Bob like thirty or forty years. Finally she turned back to him.
“All right. You can go,” she said. Not a flicker of light behind those eyes. “Have a good stay.”
Bob zipped up his bag, collected his briefcase, and wandered, dazed, to where Sienna was waiting.
“Boy, she really put you through it,” Sienna said.
“I need a drink,” he said.
Bob had a moment of nausea right before liftoff. He let Sienna have the window seat and tried to study his hands and breathe deeply. A video screen two seats in front of them showed calm, responsible people in life jackets sliding down an inflated rescue chute into … what? An angry ocean below? A sea of flames and death? Into the abyss off the screen.
“I just … I am so moved by this,” Sienna said. “It’s a miracle, the earth so still below. Whenever I’m taking off I have a sense of how large the planet is. It seems smaller when we’re on the ground.”
She was trying to be sophisticated and Bob felt more sophisticated just knowing that. She had also, some weeks before, given him a sheaf of poems to read. They were in his briefcase and he planned to discuss them with her on this trip. They were extraordinary. Everything about her, in fact, was extraordinary, but for the moment Bob had to concentrate on mentally pulling the plane away from the ground, to grease the connections and hoist up the wheels and ensure the electronic system didn’t catch fire, to clear the pilot’s neural pathways to allow for correct decisions.
It was an odd thing, this flight anxiety, a minor case he’d developed only after the break-up with Stephanie, although his near-disaster at customs was now contributing as well. It was as if he were being reminded that the end – death – was not just a theoretical, logical outcome, but inescapable and, quite possibly, imminent. Little mistakes erased entire lives. Valves gave out. Veins blew up to the size of balloons then burst. An argument in the morning with an ex-lover and a drink too many, a finger on the wrong switch, someone asleep at the air-control tower because the union failed to negotiate rest time and management squeezed an extra dollar …
In large part the feeling went away after they levelled off. His breathing eased, heart rate subsided. It wasn’t so bad, after all, as far as anxiety could go.
He ordered a Scotch for himself and Sienna took a brandy and sipped it competently, her lips leaving a small red mark on the edge of the glass. Bob took her hand and squeezed it gently, then let it go. “You are an astonishing poet,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I am just … well, I was amazed by many of the poems. Really striking work. We’ll go over it in detail, if you want. But I just meant to tell you …”
Oh, how she blushed! There is nothing a poet would rather hear more and Bob knew it, but he meant what he said, and his words made him feel even more deeply.
“You have a talent, Sienna, and it’s something that can’t be taught. I mean, one can get people to think more deeply and carefully about how they use words. But there’s a sensibility that simply is there or it isn’t. A lot of students show their work to me, I can’t tell you. I’m happy to look at it. But most student writing is, well, dross. But your writing …”
How she hung on his words. He could feel her heat rising. It was heady and he had a sense that he had to be careful, for himself as well as for her.
“Well, I don’t want to go on about it,” he said. “But you have a resonance, a sense of complexity of life and spirit.” He fumbled under the seat to pull up his briefcase, fought again with the combination before freeing the lid. There was the special package, still, thank God, wrapped in its thick brown envelope, and there were his conference papers, and there on the bottom was Sienna’s poetry. The first poem was “Night-time in Cellophane,” which Bob read quietly out loud:
“It’s very … evocative,” he said, fighting for a proper word. “I’m having a hard time describing it. You know, when a brain gets older it calcifies. That’s why it usually takes young people with nimble, unconventional minds to string together words like this. ‘Thunderslips and aphids.’ Wonderful! It’s nonsense, on one plane, and yet it has a resonance of received wisdom. Do you know what I mean?” She nodded but looked at the poem, not him. “ ‘There are no confectioneries here.’ It’s Joycean. I don’t mean to puff you up, but it took him years to string together words like this, the layers of different meanings. ‘Cumulonimbus nipplewort.’ Beautifully playful. And then: ‘kites / cut by the wind.’ Extraordinary!”
“I like doing things with reality,” she said. “I like cracked lenses. Throwing words, the way they go together.”
“Precisely! You’ve taken the words and put them together. And nobody else on earth would have done it the same way. It’s authentic, completely unique. Mystifying, and yet -” And yet what? He took a breath, then said, “Poe was also one of the few people in his day to realize that in poetry the words, the sounds, are far more important than their mere meaning.” He paused, then began reciting: “ ‘Once upon a midnight dreary, While I pondered weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore -’ You see, the sound is the beauty of it. ‘While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, / As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door -’ ”
Her smile was the sun blessing the earth as seen from an airplane miles above the ground and Bob was acutely conscious of his good fortune, to be with her, to be him, in his skin, his privileged position. It must have been something like what Poe felt at those private parties in his honour when he would stand in the middle of the drawing room holding a glass of wine and recite the entire eighteen verses of “The Raven,” the words spilling so felicitously one to the next, the eyes of all riveted upon him, every female wondering what it would be like to be married to a famous poet, a sensitive, suffering soul, a genius mind, wayward boy.
They talked easily, comfortably, with an energy that did strange things to time, made Bob unsure, at one point, whether the flight had just begun or had lasted weeks and weeks. It was an unsettling state because he felt as if he had no control. He gave in to it, and then was ripped awake, back to the old reality.
“I’m sorry,” Bob said, closing the briefcase and standing abruptly. “Back in a minute.” He didn’t want to appear flustered, but his digestion was delicate and there was usually little warning. He was halfway down the aisle when he realized he’d brought his briefcase with him, and had an idle thought that he should return it, but decided to keep going. Bob struggled into the little cubicle, locked it, then lowered his trousers and backside in one efficient movement that almost ended in disaster since the toilet seat had been left up. But he caught himself in time using the handrail on the right side, managed to reach behind and drop the seat, then settled down … to an expulsion of gas, that was all. Still, it would’ve been embarrassing enough.
He stayed to coax his bowels, idly opened his briefcase and took out the special package. It felt insubstantial, not something for which one would pay $149.95. Bob opened it gently. The object was encased in plastic bubble wrap and, once freed, looked at first glance like a woggly sea creature not meant to be exposed to the light of day. There were three long dangly straps, like tentacles, and in the middle puffed-out balls of pubic hair – too light; they didn’t quite get the colour – and an ancient, irregular … mouth.
This isn’t the right time and place, he thought, and refolded it in its bubble wrap. He then tried returning the bubble wrap to the envelope but it didn’t want to go. It had been tight to begin with and now the bubble wrap and purchase had somehow become too big to fit back in the envelope. The more he tried the more the envelope ripped.
There was a sheet of instructions.
Welcome to your new Lighthouse® Portable Vagina®. The PVII® has been design engineered using the finest latex and synthetic hair to bring the closest possible approximation to natural, working female functions. Please follow the installation and maintenance instructions carefully so you can enjoy your new vagina for years to come.
Bob looked at the diagrams. They showed, in stages, two detached hands, large, but with longish, almost female nails, wrapping the straps around the hips and under the pubic area, then fastening them behind with discreet metal hooks. Another pair of detached hands tucked the penis and testicles into a pouch that rested behind the vagina. An insert showed how a man, properly fitted, could pee while sitting down using the latex vagina.
Great care has been taken to ensure that when worn properly all normal female urinary functions can be performed using the PVII®. Please note that, as with a natural vagina, you will have to wipe yourself after peeing. The PVII® should also be soaked daily for thirty minutes in warm water and baking soda and then rinsed with fresh water and lightly towelled dry after use. To ensure a long and full lifespan for your PVII®, do not wear it more than five hours per day.
Bob looked at his watch, peered at the instructions again, and half stood, to get a better sense of how the thing would fit. The pouch for his male organs felt firm and secure, and the straps had just enough elastic to pull it all comfortably, but not so much that his circulation was at risk. The hooks were not so easy. He fiddled, got them the wrong way round several times before it finally felt right. When it was all in order, thin, smooth latex flaps neatly folded over to hide the hooks. The skin colour was remarkable, and Bob liked having lighter pubic hair – it looked younger.
But oh my, to glance down at a beautifully discreet vagina, to feel so tucked-up and transformed! It was wonderful. He looked at himself in the ugly, dully lit mirror of the airplane washroom. Or rather, he looked at the vagina, fine as it was, perfectly passable, and with a trick of the mind didn’t focus on the trousers and underpants wrapped at his knees, at the hairy belly button, the ponderous suit, the tops of his shaggy legs.
He sat again. It felt … remarkable. A little cramped. He couldn’t push his thighs together too harshly. My new toy, he thought, and chuckled to himself in the safety of the little washroom thirty thousand feet above the ground. Every vibration of the airplane was magnified in the tiny chamber and the smell of disinfectant and other people’s waste products should have been nauseating, he thought. But this was a bubble of magic, a pause outside the normal, like sex or a compelling dream.
He had a pee. It was extraordinary. It took the longest time to allow himself to release, then when he did there was a moment of horror as the urine went … well, somewhere, but not out his new urethral outlet. It seemed to get caught up in the tubing of the mechanism. But after a pause there it was, gushing out in a series of fine streams, exactly with a feminine peeing noise: wshhh! wshhh! He had to be careful to tilt his pelvis downward and direct the stream, and to keep his thighs apart so that he wouldn’t make a mess. He dutifully wiped the latex and artificial hair with toilet paper. It didn’t feel at all like his own tissue – it was rubbery and dead. But the illusion was striking.
Someone tried the door then and Bob froze. But the door was locked, of course it was, and right away he could hear the sound of the adjacent door opening and then the lock being rattled shut. The shock startled him enough, however, to make him remember that Sienna would wonder why he’d been gone so long. He stood up then and reached around to fiddle with the clasps at the back of the PVII®. Just as he managed to unhook one of them, the pouch holding back his penis and testicles released, and with it a shocking amount of urine fell onto his trousers and underpants. He was too surprised to curse, right away. Then he did curse, and reached down to stop the last drips, but brushed the contraption instead and released a last rain of pee. He almost ripped the hooks, then, trying to get the thing off, and the tension of his last tug sent the creature whirling crazily and spraying a mist around the cubicle, on the mirror and door, his trousers and shoes and jacket.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” he said, and flung the vagina into the sink. His trousers were soaked at the crotch almost as badly as if he’d peed himself without any artificial help. He pulled up his shorts and pants but realized it was no good, there was a dark, wet, smelly stain down his front. He took off his shoes then - the floor of the cubicle was wet and he shivered with revulsion – and stepped out of his trousers and underpants. At that moment the airplane tilted and Bob was thrown against the wall and bonked his knee hard on the handrail. The airplane levelled and Bob picked up his trousers, which now had grit stains on both legs to go with the urine and water marks. He took a deep, calming breath, then said “Shit!” seven times in succession.
The seatbelt light began strobing and there was a gentle knock at the door. A flight attendant said, “We will be landing soon. Could you please return to your seat and buckle in when you’re ready?”
“Certainly,” Bob said, his voice somehow sounding calm and deep and unconcerned. Landing soon did not mean right away. He looked at his watch. He would have at least fifteen, maybe even twenty minutes, he thought. No need to panic. Though he could feel the tilt of the plane, had to adjust his balance as he washed off the portable vagina and dried it carefully on paper towelling. He reinserted it in the bubble wrap and then spent a bit too long trying to fit it back into the torn envelope. He forced himself to focus and prevail. Finally, when the package was safely back in his briefcase he allowed himself to check his watch again. My God! It didn’t seem possible. Nearly six minutes had passed already. He picked up his urine-stained trousers and ran tap water over the crotch, briskly rubbed in liquid hand soap and rinsed. He tried to wet just the worst-stained section but the plane dipped and much of the rest of the trousers got soaked. Little bounces of turbulence followed and Bob fought to keep from ending up in the toilet himself. He barked his shin against the seat, stepped back and tripped over his shoes, then sat hard on his opened briefcase. One of the supports snapped and a clasp bit him on the buttocks like a rat.
“Jesus!” he shrieked.
“Are you all right, sir?” the attendant asked outside the door, her voice superficially calm but infused with concern. Bob didn’t answer right away and the attendant pressed, “Do you want us to come in?”
“No! No! I’m fine!” Bob asserted, trying hard to sound fine. He clambered back to his feet, grasped the door handle firmly in case they tried to open it. Of course they could unlock it from the outside if they wanted, he thought.
“You should return to your seat immediately, sir. The landing light is on.”
“Yes. Thank you. I’ll be finished in a minute,” Bob said.
He picked up his drenched underwear then, stuffed it in the waste bin and wrung out his trousers in the sink. They were almost entirely wet now, besides being stained and badly wrinkled. He looked around for a hot-air hand dryer but there wasn’t one, there were just paper towels from the bin. Useless, practically, but he pulled out several, spread them along the legs of his trousers, then rolled the trousers and pressed down to squeeze out the moisture. He could feel the precious minutes sprinting away.
He quickly unrolled his trousers, withdrew the damp paper towelling, stuffed it in the waste bin, then brushed at the many wet flecks of brown residue left by the paper. Five minutes left, perhaps seven. He took the last of the dry paper towels and repeated the process, rolling and squeezing. His ears popped as the plane headed earthward. He swallowed hard three times, furiously unrolled and brushed at his trousers. Awful, sodden disaster. He twisted one last time, harvested a few more grudging drops. Trapped, he thought. There was nothing else he could do. Reluctantly he stepped into the sorry pants, pulled them up. The plane began rattling as if the wings were going to fall off. He zipped and buckled himself, then shoved his wet socked feet into his shoes and tied the laces. His briefcase was ruined. He could force the top down but then the back left corner would spring out.
“Excuse me, sir. Please take your seat now!” came the flight attendant’s voice outside the door. “Are you okay?”
“Yes! Yes!” he said. He unlocked the door so that the occupancy light would go off. But he took an extra moment to examine himself in the mirror: he was dishevelled, filthy, pale with panic. He splashed water on his face, ran his fingers through his hair, smiled bravely. Then he propped his broken briefcase on the tiny sink and pressed the various corners in a final effort to make things right. He was still fiddling with it when the plane touched down on the runway, bounced once before all wheels smoothed onto the tarmac. Bob was thrown in the air and jammed his hand against the light fixture on the ceiling before he came slamming back down. He felt his back wrench and then when the engine thrusters reversed to slow the plane he caromed off the toilet and into the far wall. “Hnnn,” he said, like a hockey player slammed against the boards, but too dopey by now to react any more sharply. Despite himself he laughed.
Finally the plane stopped. He could hear people gathering their belongings. He picked up his injured briefcase, clasped it under his arm to keep the contents from spilling out, looked at his reflection one last time.
There was nothing else for it. He pulled open the door, stepped out cautiously.
A young flight attendant was upon him at once. “Are you all right, sir?” she asked. She was tall and slightly heavy, had dark red hair pulled back severely and overly anxious make-up.
Bob held his briefcase in front of his trousers, pressed it closed in the corners with his hands. “It’s okay,” he muttered, then he brightened, gave her a clear-eyed smile. “I’m fine,” he said.
The aisle was jammed with people waiting to deplane. Sienna stood, looked at him with concern. Bob gave her a hurried wave, then began wedging his way back to his seat. He was full of the oddity of the moment, a precarious sense of how the next step might change everything, take him over the precipice he’d been walking so long he’d almost forgotten it was there. He should have been terrified, but he had an oddly detached thought. In my shoes, right now, he thought, a twenty-five year-old would flee in panic; a fifteen year-old would kill himself! But I’m fifty-four.
And there she was, gorgeous, confused, twenty-one, looking at him with such a questioning gaze. “It’s just madness,” he imagined saying to her. Calmly, soothingly. “It’s just a little madness.”
“There you are!” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” And really he was. “It was awful!” he said. “You wouldn’t believe it. I turned on the tap -”
“My God, you’re all wet!” she said.
“– and water started spraying everywhere. It was ridiculous. And the door was jammed so I couldn’t open it.”
She started laughing. She was magnificent. Her teeth looked as if they’d been stolen from a toothpaste commercial and her eyes shone dark as a northern lake in August under a wild moon. Stop it, he thought. Stop being so damned irresistible.
“I’ve never -” he started to say, but he had, of course, and he would again. And he didn’t need to finish, either, because the line was moving now, he just had to put one foot in front of the other and keep his face composed.