IN THE SECOND HOUR of a six-hour flight, the woman sitting next to me looked up from the book she’d been reading, or pretending to read, and said, “I am fleeing.”
We were on our way from New York to San Francisco. I had a cousin there who was trying to start a landscaping business, planting native succulents to replace the lawns people were tearing up because of the drought. He had called to ask if I wanted to go in on this venture with him. We had never been close, but I think he knew I didn’t have much else going on at the time.
“I’m sorry?” I said to my neighbor.
“I am in flight,” she repeated, as if annoyed that I had not been paying attention when she said it the first time, “which is the noun form of the verb to fly, but also to flee.”
Okay, I thought, here we go.
“For a long time, in fact,” she said, “and until quite recently, fly and flee were used interchangeably, to mean run away, escape.”
She spoke with an accent that to me sounded central European—Czech, Bulgarian, something like that, but really I had no idea. I didn’t know what history she might have been speaking from.
The Fasten Seat Belt sign was illuminated, and so accordingly my seat belt was fastened low and tight across my hips. The No Smoking sign was also illuminated, as it must always be, because it exists—because the possibility that one might be allowed to smoke has already been written into the language of airplanes and cannot be unwritten except at a cost of many millions of dollars, and so now the airplanes must continually remind you that no, you will not be allowed to smoke.
“To fly:” she was saying, “to escape the earth.”
How was I supposed to respond to that? Like all normal people, I go to great lengths to avoid striking up conversations with strangers on airplanes. I keep a book open in my hands, my eyes trained on it at all times, even if I am not actually reading it. A hardcover is best, something thick and heavy, preferably Russian. Tolstoy is ideal. At the slightest stirring from my neighbor I stare intently at the page before me and furrow my brow in a way that I hope conveys that whatever they are about to say to me had better be more important than the collapse of traditional morality and the question of what it means to lead a good life. I keep earbuds in my ears, music playing just loud enough to let my neighbors know that I can’t hear them, but not so loud that they will want to ask me to turn it down, since then we would be talking, and who knows where that might lead? Nothing is worse than knowing exactly how long you’ll have to continue to be charming, to smile and make sounds of empathetic agreement, to think of new questions to ask so that the conversation can continue. Well, one thing is worse, and that is that the conversation does not continue. The silence you enter into then is not at all the happy, innocent silence you had foolishly left behind a moment ago. It is strained, awkward, full of guilt and unuttered apology. You are two human beings who have been forced to admit, without even being able to say so aloud, that you have no interests in common. The embarrassment is total. You are staring at the miniature television screen in front of you as if into an abyss.
The flight clock displayed on that miniature screen said three hours, twenty-eight minutes to San Francisco. Here we go.
“What are you fleeing?” I said. I thought since she had brought it up that she would want to talk about it, but in fact she was oddly cagey.
“The earth,” she said, “as I told you.” She turned back to the window, but a moment later she added, as if realizing that, having interrupted my reading, she owed me a bit more than that, “But more specifically, New Jersey.”
“Ah,” I said, aiming for the sound of empathetic assent. “What’s in New Jersey?”
“You haven’t been?” she said. “Oh, it’s a big and diverse and fascinating place. There are old faded industrial cities, immigrant communities from all over the world, rolling, meadowish countryside full of horses and horse people, the Pine Barrens, a mythical creature called the Jersey Devil—”
“No,” I cut her off, “I’ve been to New Jersey. I meant what’s in New Jersey for you? What is it that you feel you need to flee from?”
“Excuse me,” she said. “You don’t flee from something. You just flee that thing. To flee already implies the idea of going away, so the preposition is unnecessary. It’s redundant.”
A voice came over the intercom, perhaps the pilot’s. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be experiencing some mild turbulence for the next several minutes. We ask that you please remain seated with your seat belts fastened.”
A moment later the body of the plane began to shudder and pitch slightly from side to side, like an insomniac trying to find a position in his bed that will allow him to sleep. There was a lightness in my stomach that meant we were falling perhaps hundreds of feet down the back of a wave of air, and then a heaviness in my legs as we rose up the face of the next wave. All of this was routine. No one that I could see looked even slightly alarmed, but my neighbor became silent and looked out the window, which meant, since she was in the middle seat, that she had to look across the body of the sleeping man to her right.
She was older than I had thought—maybe forty, maybe a little older even. She had fine but deep creases at the corners of her eyes and her mouth. Her hair, which she wore in a guileless ponytail, was going gray along the temples, but was so pale anyway that it was hard to tell the blond from the gray.
She might have been married or not, might have had children or not. It might have been her husband or her children she was fleeing.
The outfit she wore looked almost American but not. I don’t know what it was exactly. Her boot-cut jeans maybe, a little too artificially distressed at the hips and the backs of the knees.
She was fleeing New Jersey, and she wanted to talk about it but did not want to talk about it.
How readily the slightest coincidence leads us to believe what we want to believe anyway: that the world outside ourselves corresponds with whatever is going on in our minds. In the paper that morning I had read that the Department of Justice was investigating some three hundred Bosnian immigrants on the suspicion that they had in fact participated in the atrocities committed against Bosnian Muslims and Croatians in the 1990s. Thousands of people had fled in those days, had arrived in the United States and in Western Europe in flight from the nightmare that had arisen in the place that had been their home, and amid this chaos it had been impossible, apparently, to sort with perfect accuracy the perpetrators from the victims. In the article there was a photo of a middle-aged woman being led in handcuffs toward a white police van. The caption said that her name was Cvetka Basíc, that for twenty years she had worked as head cook in the cafeteria at Colonial Middle School, in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, that in 1995, in Srebrenica, she had tied men to chairs and forced them to drink gasoline, to drink the blood of their friends and neighbors, before she shot them.
How old would my neighbor have been in 1995? Twenty, twenty-five? She looked so slight, so unintimidating, but give her a gun. Let her stand in the company of others who also have guns and who are on her side. Easily she was old enough to have poured gasoline down someone’s throat as he sat helplessly praying, waiting for the bullet that would kill him.
On the other hand, easily too she might have had gasoline poured down her own throat, seen it poured down the throats of the people she loved.
I thought of what frozen fields she might have crawled through on her hands and knees at twilight, all her family trailing behind her, the hills rising over them as if they were already bodies wombed in the body of the earth, the edge of the woods dark as an open mouth. How the place that had been her home might have become alien to her, and she to it.
In the dark she might have whispered the names of her children, her sister, her mother and father, just to hear them reply in their own voices, “I am still here.”
Maybe then in the last light sparrows rose from the grass on the hilltops above and flew over them, and it was as though the birds were trailing black thread behind their wings, to sew up the gaps in the earth where the sky showed through.
How bound she would have felt to the earth then.
To flee, to fly.
“I had an affair with my sister’s husband,” my neighbor said. She touched the back of my hand with the tips of her fingers as she said this, but the gesture was not romantic. We are two human beings, it meant, and we have interests in common. I am trusting that you will understand me.
I didn’t know what I had done to make it seem as though I deserved that kind of trust.
She had moved to New Jersey three years ago, she told me, from Ljubljana, Slovenia. She had come with her sister and her sister’s husband. Her sister was a geologist—“a little bit famous,” my neighbor said—and had taken a faculty position at Rutgers.
I told her I understood why the husband would have had to move, but why then had she herself left her home and moved across half a continent and an ocean in the middle of her life? Surely not only to follow her sister. At this point she had already told me how beautiful her city had been, how much she missed it.
“I have not always been the best at organizing my life,” she said. “I had lost another job, broken up with another boyfriend. Our mother had died the year before, two years behind our father. I thought, ‘Why not try a new place, a new language?’ It seemed the right time.”
The plane shuddered slightly, then settled back into the calm of its sleep.
“And also yes,” my neighbor said, “she is my sister. I have never been apart from her.”
It wasn’t that she had been jealous of her sister. She herself had never wished to be married, and in Ljubljana she had not even liked her sister’s husband.
“I thought him boring,” she said. “He was too nice.”
But in Newark my neighbor’s sister was often away from home, and my neighbor and the husband spent a lot of time alone together, looking for work, speaking only in English in order to master the language.
“We knew English already, of course,” my neighbor said. “When there are only two million people in the world who speak your native language, you learn English. But we wanted really to speak it well.”
She blamed the change in language for the change in her feelings. “He was someone else when he spoke in English,” she said. “Someone I loved. I was someone else, someone who loved him.”
My neighbor had told me that she was fleeing New Jersey. What did it mean about me that I had imagined her fleeing the memory of violence, the nearness of death, when in fact what she was fleeing was an excess of life, a love that had simply been allowed to grow in the wrong place?
To her sister, though, it had meant death, or something like it.
“She tried to kill herself,” my neighbor said. “She swallowed Drano. She had to have surgery to repair the damage to her small intestine.”
My neighbor realized that she could not continue the affair, but also that she could not see her sister’s husband again, that her presence would be enough to destroy their marriage.
“At the time when it was happening,” she said, “I thought, ‘What does a marriage matter?’ Do you know what the word husband means? What it used to mean? In Old English it meant a manager, a steward. It comes from the combination of the word hūs, which meant a house or household, with the word bōndi, which meant one who cultivates or tills the soil. These dead words, these dead ways of being hanging around like ghosts, poisoning our lives. ‘Why should she have a husband?’ I thought. ‘Why should anyone?’ Let our desires be wild plants instead of tame ones.”
Now, having seen the damage her desire had done, she was fleeing. “I have committed a transgression I cannot undo. It is just the sort of thing for which, in very ancient times, one might have been put to death, or banished from one’s home forever.”
She wanted to escape the earth, but she didn’t want to die, so she was going to San Francisco, to sit beside an ocean she had never seen before, and to be far from those she loved.
In San Francisco you have to take off your sweater and put it on again twenty times a day. What else is there to say about it? Something about the fog? It’s crawling with assholes. It would be a beautiful place to live if you had a time machine.
I am trying to date again. It’s been a while, and the modes of courtship have changed. My phone shows me the faces of women who are physically near me, and I decide whether I like these faces. The owners of the faces decide whether they like my face. If we like each other’s faces, we type messages to each other. I try to think of things to say to the owners of these beautiful faces that will be different from the things everyone else is saying. I tell them that I grew up in New Jersey, that I’ve seen the Jersey Devil in the Pine Barrens. It was late at night, and I was eating a hamburger with a friend at a diner, on this long stretch of empty road where there was nothing else around but the dark woods growing out of the sandy soil. I looked up from my hamburger and saw him through the window, but he was pretty far away. He was naked, covered in short, stiff hair like the hair of a dog, but shaped otherwise more or less like a man. He was standing at the edge of a beam of light from a streetlamp, at the border between the woods and the parking lot, just staring in at us. I could tell by the way he held his tail in his hands that he’d been alone a long time.