The mood on the flight is full of optimism. The catering trolley is on its way. Lena’s voice can be heard over the hum of the aircraft. She has fallen into one of those random in-flight conversations with a passenger sitting next to her. They have strayed onto the subject of insects. Driving up from Princeton, the woman beside her says, she arrived at the airport parking facility and was surprised to find there were no insects on the windscreen. She can remember driving home at night with her father and the headlights shining through a cloud of insects. As a child, the woman says, she loved the job of cleaning the car, hosing off the dried flies and moths. Often you had to scrape them off with a stick.
To reciprocate, Lena tells the woman about a time she was on holidays in Ireland, when she left the bedroom window of the cottage in Cork open and woke up in the middle of the night with the room covered in bugs. She had left the light on and by the time she awoke the whole room was moving. All kinds of bugs on the walls, swirling around the light bulb.
Oh my God, the woman beside her says. Did you have to go and sleep somewhere else?
Lena gives a short laugh. An affectionate laugh, turned inwards.
No, she says. She couldn’t move. She could not even walk across the room through the cloud of flying things to reach the door. She was too scared. Or maybe too embarrassed. All she could do was cover up and hide until she fell asleep again.
In the morning, Lena says, most of them were gone.
At this point, I have the urge to contribute. A book wants to get out there and speak up. I want to tell them that I spent two years on the shelf right next to a small book on insects. It was written by a French author who went out into his garden one day and had the idea of recording all the different species he found there. He named them. Made drawings of them and collected them in his journal as if they were part of his family. It was full of warmth, that book. We became great friends. It was the happiest time of my life, living with all that buzzing, like a constant summer.
But this is absurd.
I cannot speak directly to Lena. I remain a silent passenger. I am nothing until my story is set in motion by a reader. What is it they say about reading – it’s like thinking with somebody else’s brain? Stepping inside the mind of the other.
And how I crave a reader. Somebody to breathe life back into my pages.
We (us books) tend to stay out of live situations. We talk among ourselves in libraries at night. You think public libraries are quiet places. You should hear the racket, the debates, the sheer volume of opinions going back and forth along the shelves until dawn. Everyone talking at once. It’s like an enormous thought-fight. Like an ongoing trial in which each book throws in its own piece of evidence without any conclusive verdict ever being reached. Some books are louder than others. Some downright overbearing and full of self-regard. Some droning on like endless lectures, grinding out warnings. Some brightly feel-good, well dressed, trapped inside their own plot. Some just being themselves, speaking only when they have something to say. At times it’s hard to get a word in – the sound of voices rises to a humming din, all cutting across each other like a parliament in session, until the librarian returns in the morning and the hush is restored.
When the food trays arrive, Lena’s fellow passenger returns to the subject of insects. In Africa, she says, she once tasted a burger made of flies. You won’t believe this, she says. Huge swarms of flies drifting over Lake Victoria. The children catch them so their parents can make black burgers that contain five times as much protein as beef burgers.
Lena smiles.
After dinner, the woman decides to watch a movie with a story set in outer space. Lena is going to listen to some music. She puts the earbuds in and closes her eyes. With her foot, she gently pushes the bag in which I lie awake on my back under the seat in front of her.
For a while, everyone is asleep.
And when the plane lands, when the passengers get ready to disembark and start looking at their phones, when they gather their belongings and avoid things falling out that might injure other passengers, it seems for a moment that they have all been turned into books like me. Each one of them a novel, standing in a crowded aisle, ready to be set in motion. Full of thought. Full of self-fabrication. Eyes loaded with possibility. Like a passenger manifest of alternative plots, waiting for the doors of the aircraft to be opened.
Lena stands up and finds herself being watched from behind, a man trying to guess her story. She is wearing a green leather jacket that has become scuffed at the elbows. Her jeans are torn. There is a tattoo, a gecko, emerging from the shoulder onto her neck. She throws a wave of hair across the top of her head. Her eyes are instantly engaging, shaking off the observer with a smile. Her smile could be said to be prominent. She grew up with a mouth full of overcrowded teeth. She likes to describe the marriage between her mother and father as a random, ill-fitting assembly of German-Irish teeth, like a three-dimensional printout of their incompatibility. A mixture of her father’s pragmatism and her mother’s devotion to dramatic climax. It took years to straighten them out. Now she smiles easily, with an expression that will remind some people of photos taken of Bianca Jagger at late-night parties, seen with Andy Warhol and other celebrities who lived it up long before Lena was born.
She reaches into her bag and takes out her phone – a message to Mike to let him know that she’s arrived. The passengers slowly begin to move towards the door. All these narratives glancing around to make sure nothing is left behind before they walk away along corridors following the signs for exit and baggage, holding out their passports when they reach border control.