15

“I bet you’ve been looking forward to this visit,” my mother said as she drove.

I chose my words carefully. “I’m very curious to see what it’s like down there.”

She nodded, and for a minute or two, I did not feel that we were enemies. She did not want me to go, and, although I was excited, I was frightened of the plane trip, and reluctant to commit myself to a place I had never visited. I could suddenly be taken sick, I thought, and then call my father. One of those viruses that hit people so quickly they practically go in their pants. These things happen. Life is full of bad surprises.

But I knew my father was probably at that moment getting his house ready for me, and looking forward to picking me up at the airport, and I did not want to disappoint him. It was an odd feeling, as if I were an adult and my father were a little boy whose feelings I did not want to hurt.

“You’ll have a good time,” she said. She said it as if it would be a bad thing for me to have a good time, but that I was the sort of creature who would have fun wherever I was.

“I’ll probably hate it,” I responded, in a voice that was surprisingly weak. “It’s just a bunch of Republicans down there. Old geezers with spotted hands with the hots for teenagers in bikinis. They don’t have any style down there. Probably all drive gigantic cars that get about a mile per gallon. And smog that would wither a statue.”

She readjusted her hands on the steering wheel. “Maybe.”

“You’ve been down there,” I said.

“I was born in San Diego.”

“It’s only the weekend,” I said, pointlessly.

She dropped me off at the curb at the Oakland Airport, and had tears in her eyes as she waved. I hefted my backpack and watched her taillights enter the necklace of tail-lights that looped away from the airport.

The automatic door opened without a sound and I was in a brightly lit place filled with people going somewhere. Everyone there seemed selected to represent some type: businessman, overweight retiree, nervous college student; no one was an individual. I worked my shoulder muscles, wondering how I looked to everyone else.

“Do you want to check any luggage?” asked the man with freckles. He moved quickly, sorting papers, punching keys on a computer, then looked at me again, his eyebrows in a question. I lowered my backpack onto the scale, dismally certain that some gorilla in Orange County would throw my pack onto the pavement so hard the bottle of rum Angela had slipped me would explode. Freckleface clipped a tab around the handle. “Gate sixteen,” he said.

“Gate sixteen,” I murmured, and shuffled like a zombie across the dazzling floor. Desperate for something normal to do, some act which I knew how to perform, I found the door labeled MEN, with a drawing of a stick figure in a business suit. I peed with chilly fingers on my faucet, working out every little drop.

A security guard in a blue uniform stepped into the men’s room like he was doing a pervert count, but he didn’t even glance around. I tucked my spigot back in quickly, but he simply took a place at a urinal and I realized that this was an unofficial visit. Instead of a gun, the guard wore a holstered radio, like he could knock people down with words.

The water out of the cold tap seemed warm on my fingers, and the pink powder from the soap dispenser was as gritty as sand and didn’t dissolve for a long time. I shook my dripping hands and watched the security guard punch a button and hold his hands before a blower. I wiped my hands on my pants.

The stewardess showed us how to breathe through an oxygen mask. She was pretty in a ticky-tacky way, with sprayed brunette just-so hair, and long beige fingernails that matched her lipstick. The president of the airline smiled at me from the cover of a magazine. In his hands, he held a miniature jetliner just like the one I sat in. I wanted to be reassured by this. He had competent gray hair, and his hands looked like they knew how to do things that mattered. Would he let us ride in a plane that had anything wrong with it? I peered into the vomit bag like I expected it to contain my lunch.

The mint-breathed business suit in the seat next to me cracked his attaché case. He flipped through manila folders as the plane shifted and rocked over the dark runway, not taking off, but not staying still, either, traveling about as fast as a car looking for a parking place. I wanted to think peaceful thoughts, but it was like trying to grab carp in the big, placid fish pond at the Oakland Museum.

For a moment, I felt like Mead. Not simply remembering him, but being him, flesh and bone. I was Mead sitting in an airplane, ready to leave everything.

The plane flew. I felt foolish for having been afraid, and watched the crush of lights out the window.