THE PLANE IS DUE to take off in a little over an hour and he’ll arrive quite early in Sendai, a place he has never been before. Connecting flights to Tokyo have recently resumed, and are being temporarily stepped up to alleviate the emergency in the northeast of the country. Cheaper flights were available from Narita, but they arrived later and he prefers to get going as soon as possible. He has always found it nerve-racking to travel only hours before it grows dark.
As he crosses the squares of the central hall at Haneda, feeling like a pawn on a board with ill-defined edges, Mr. Watanabe reflects that he knows some foreign airports better than the ones in his own country. As if domestic tourism were something of a contradiction, and long-distance flights made more sense for aircraft. It occurs to him now that this notion, which he actively cultivated as a youth, has eventually created a paradox: nearby destinations have become exotic.
When the war ended, the Japanese government lost control over the airport he is now walking through. Only the birds could fly wherever they pleased. Although, he reflects again, don’t birds also obey the dictates of a higher power? It was more than ten years before flights returned to normal. International flights were moved to Narita. As people began to travel more, the facilities at Haneda were expanded, until the international terminal there reopened and a conflict of interest arose between the two airports. Now the companies that operate them compete, not always cordially, for ascendancy over the clouds. Where there is sky, there are storms, as his father used to say.
The soles of his shoes glide past the shops, which cover an increasingly wide area. They no longer build airports that house shops, Watanabe says to himself, rather shopping malls that house airplanes. That morning the airport is only semi-operational: there are more concerns than passengers. Over and above the warnings and evacuations, fear is still palpable. Panic has two speeds, he reflects. One is running, flight. The other—staying put, immobility—is worse for trade.
Watanabe finds the departure screens, locates the gate, retains the flight number almost unintentionally. He is so used to planes that occasionally he forgets that they fly, the same way he finds it strange sometimes that trains don’t take off from the tracks. Although the train would take him about the same length of time, he has chosen to fly. To make a radical break with his point of departure.
In his experience, each form of transport alters him as a passenger. Flights inoculate him with distance, a break in his perspective that inclines him toward small revelations. Trains immerse him in a state of gradual contemplation. His emotions in a railway carriage don’t usually change all at once: the flow of the landscape sets a process in motion. Buses transmit a sort of earthly determination. The straining engine, the difficulty of the terrain, the patience of the driver reaffirm him in his plans.
After many migrations, Watanabe no longer feels that airports are neutral places, devoid of identity. Quite the opposite. He senses in them an overwhelming compactness; they contain too many superimposed places. The state, the customs, the law, the police, fear, business, farewells, greetings: everything is concentrated in the same space, filled to bursting. He places his luggage on the moving walkway. He sighs with relief. Then, behind him, he sees a young man pushing past everyone like a skier slaloming between poles.
It occurs to him that, if they could, many passengers would prefer to cut out the waiting. They’d choose to disintegrate and reappear instantly somewhere else. And yet, precisely because everything is much faster, the places of delay seem vital to him. Whenever he is about to travel, his sedentary hemisphere clings to stillness, while his nomadic hemisphere anticipates movement. The collision of these two forces gives him a feeling of being lost that makes it impossible for him to know where he wants to be. Perhaps the secret mission of airports and stations is to resolve that doubt.
The nervous youth passes him without the slightest consideration, banging into him with his backpack, and continues on his way toward the realm of confusion. Mr. Watanabe feels piqued when he sees that the boy hasn’t even turned around to apologize. Farther along, a young girl in sports gear lets him go ahead of her at the security check. He can’t help feeling offended again, this time for different reasons. He smiles, accepts, and regrets it.
With the passage of the years, his perceptions of space as well as time have changed. Entering an airport gives him a feeling of vulnerability he never experienced before. Increasingly, traveling seems to depend on passengers’ ability to react. Therein, Watanabe observes, lies the subtle but constant aggression it exercises over people his age. An elderly person is a soft target. A target of what? Of nothing. Of everything.
At the security check, it’s easier to see how the different rhythms aren’t purely physical. Compared with that purposeless hurrying, that banging into things they pass, that precious energy young people squander, is the cautious slowness of the elderly. At its heart is a weariness that isn’t exactly bodily. A weariness resembling a conclusion. Our bodies have understood, he reflects, that however fast we run we cannot escape. It’s a sort of awareness that’s been communicated to our muscles.
Of course, there is also the envy, the emotion he experiences when he contemplates the determination of the most youthful passengers. At the opposite end of life, he is nonetheless in the same line as they are. Rather than fellow travelers, to him they seem like beings he has come to bid farewell to.
As he walks through the scanner arch, Mr. Watanabe involuntarily closes his eyes. Metal detectors still make him nervous. Exposed, disarmed, faced with a weapon that knows everything about him.
The plane seat receives his weight with a creak like a hinge, as though by sitting there he has opened a door. Watanabe sighs, adjusts the safety belt, and undoes the top button of his trousers.
Flights to the Northeast still haven’t gone back to normal, and there are quite a few empty seats. He turns to glance down the aisle and discovers a strange harmony in the half-full plane. Head, space, head, space. One of the few exceptions is the row behind him, where two brothers are playing on a tablet, cheek to cheek, creating a bicephalous child. Their mother, motionless, grazes the porthole with her nose.
From what he can deduce according to the things they say and do, the other passengers seem to be traveling for family or work reasons. He is probably the only person heading for the prefecture of Miyagi out of choice. And yet, he has as many if not more reasons than any of them.
When the surrounding landscape grows hazy and the wheels leave the tarmac and the noise of the turbines grows louder and the aisle tilts as if everything were toppling backward, the children burst into shrieks of laughter, excited and scared by that invisible force pressing them back into their seats. Their mother asks them to be quiet. They fall silent for an instant then start up again. Infected by their amazement, Mr. Watanabe imagines birds applauding.
Then it occurs to him that this would be a perfect moment to have an accident. There, listening to laughter and imagining birds.
Soon afterward, he falls asleep.
The flight attendant wakes him, pointing at his safety belt. The plane is beginning its descent. Why is his safety belt undone? Could he have loosened it, to be more comfortable, while he was asleep? He turns toward the row behind. The boys look at him and giggle.
The wheels touch down, bounce, start to roll. The brothers clap their hands. The pilot’s voice welcomes them to Sendai airport. As soon as the plane comes to a halt, the passengers around him stand up. They are not unaware they’ll have to wait a few more minutes, and yet, there they are, huddled awkwardly, sniffing at their imminent exit.
Is this what we are? he wonders, also rising to his feet. A horde of impatient creatures waiting for the signal to stampede? Even though we all know where we’ll end up, we do everything we can to hasten our arrival.
The line advances. Feet move in the direction of the light at the far end. Bodies pile up. And Mr. Watanabe sticks his head outside.
The morning is clean and sharp. The shadows appear cut out with scissors, he notes, still under the influence of the two brothers. As he descends the steps from the aircraft, he recalls Gitoku’s little poem:
A clear sky.
There from whence I came
I now return.
As soon as he reaches the terminal, he stops to check his phone. The backlog of message alerts increasingly irritates him. Where the hell is the comfort of having it all there, immediately available, when every commitment and appointment has become equally instantaneous? This proliferation of notifications and updates not only forces him to live at a pace he never chose, it also disrupts the mental order of his priorities, conferring upon the most recent things an importance they don’t actually have.
With a sigh, powerless to resist the contradiction, Mr. Watanabe quickly checks his new messages.
He finds a lengthy email from this Pinedo fellow. Pinedo again! Who seems incapable of taking no for an answer. He slides his finger down the text, imagining he is placing it on the journalist’s lips, imploring him to be silent.
This time, the language flows and is to some extent graceful, Watanabe admits, as he skims Pinedo’s detailed explanations. A friend in common, Mariela, gave him his contact details. Some time ago she told him about the et cetera, et cetera, he apologizes wholeheartedly for not having explained this to him before, but it wasn’t easy given the brusqueness of their previous exchanges, during which he regrets not having been able to convey the true et cetera behind his article, so he finally decided to choose this method of communication, which while less personal allows more time for reflection et cetera, in the hope that he isn’t bothering him too much by sending him, with all due et cetera, a brief list of questions, which if he would be kind enough to et cetera, the different ways of forgetting, et cetera, against this habit of dividing by country the tragedies that et cetera, collective memory of people affected by et cetera, et cetera.
By now this is a question of honor: no means no, even for a Japanese who once lived in Argentina. So, exasperated, Mr. Watanabe deletes the message even before he has finished reading it.
He resumes pushing his little red suitcase, which now seems to offer some resistance, as if its load had grown heavier. Then he stops in his tracks. He takes out his phone again. He buys something, pays for it, and types in the details of an addressee: Ariel Kerlin. Avenida Independencia three three et cetera, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, et cetera.