Right of Thirst (28 page)

The next day, at the airport, I was determined not to make too much of it. Her flight to Bangkok was an hour before mine, but we went together anyway, and waited through the crowded check-in lines and security lines, through the quick, indifferent glances of the police, their hands stained with blue ink. The wide room, with its battered wooden stations and quivering fluorescent lights overhead, echoed with the muffled chunk of exit stamps, like hundreds of doors being opened, or closed. There were only a few other Westerners among us; for the most part, those waiting with us looked as if they were leaving rather than traveling. Meanwhile Elise stood in front of me, a perfect blond triangle of down at the nape of her neck.

By the gates, with some time left, we sat on rows of battered oval fiberglass chairs bolted together, and looked out at the runways.

She was dressed casually again, in her cargo pants and sandals. Her specimen case hung from one shoulder, and from the other, her solar shower, folded tight, the legs telescoped into themselves and their tips clipped together, like a photographer's tripod. The necklace I'd bought her was nowhere to be seen.

“Are you planning to take a shower on the plane?” I asked her. She smiled.

“I would like to,” she said. “But I think they only allow this in first class.”

“Why didn't you check it in?”

“Because then it will be broken,” she said. “They bent the leg when I came here.”

We were quiet for a while, looking out at the lights on the runway. Several times, in the distance, planes landed, but we only saw them in the gaps between hangars. It was getting dark, and all the lights on the field were on.

“Will you write to me from time to time?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said. “And now you must give me your address.”

“Remember,” I said, thinking again of her black case, “you have to tell me whether my mother should be turning over in her grave because some of her ancestors were African slaves.”

“I will not forget,” she said.

I took out my wallet, flipped through it, and found another of my cards. I handed it to her, and she studied it for a moment before tucking it away into her bag.

“Thank you, Professor,” she said.

“Where are you going in Thailand?” I asked.

“I think I am going to Phuket,” she said. “The beach, and also the rain forest. I would like to see them. And I want to ride on an elephant.”

I smiled.

She reached into her orange day pack and withdrew her journal and a pen. She opened the notebook carefully to the last full page, and wrote her name, address, telephone number, and e-mail in precise small letters. Then, to my surprise, she handed the book to me.

“This is for you,” she said, simply.

“For me?” I asked, puzzled, reflexively taking the book from her.

“Yes,” she said, looking at me steadily.

“But it's your journal.”

“I have made a copy at the hotel,” she said.

I looked down at the book in my hands, confused.

“I wanted to get you something,” she said. “And I am not sure what. So I am giving you this.”

“But I don't speak German,” I said.

“You can translate it if you wish. It is not so difficult now.”

I stared at the book for a while. I didn't know what to make of it.

“This is a very personal thing,” I said. “I don't know what to say.”

“I think,” she said, “that this is more important for you than for me. All that happened. And so I would like to give this to you.”

I looked down at the book.

“Aren't there things in here that you wouldn't want anyone to read?”

“Yes,” she said. “But not so many.”

“You can take those pages out, you know. I wouldn't mind.”

She shook her head.

“It is okay,” she said. “I think it is better to leave them in.” She hesitated, then continued.

“Not everything in this book is good,” she said. “I wrote some things about you that are not so nice. Maybe it will hurt your feelings a little bit. You should know this.”

“Like what?” I said.

She blushed.

“I said that you are always thinking too much, and many
times you are talking too much, and often it is about depressing things, and that sometimes you are boring. I also said that you like giving lectures and telling people what they should do, and that you take everything too seriously.”

I laughed.

“Well,” I said, “that's all true.”

“Some other things, also,” she said.

I didn't know how to reply.

“Thank you, Elise,” I said finally. “I appreciate it very much.”

“I think you gave money to everyone,” she said. “Not just Homa. To Sanjit also. More than just paying him. And to Ali's family. I am not sure. But I think so.”

“Did Rai say anything to you?”

“No,” she said. “And I did not ask him. But I think it is true. He was different when we left his house.” She looked at me again.

“I tried to help them,” I said finally. “That's all.”

“Why were you keeping this a secret?”

“It wasn't a secret. It was private. It's hard to explain.”

“How much did you give them?”

I didn't want to tell her. She would measure me with it, just as I measured myself. Their gratitude was cheap, after all. It could be bought with hardly anything.

“A lot for them,” I said. “Not so much for me.”

“You have done a good thing,” she said.

I didn't answer.

“I also want to give something to Ali's family,” she continued. “But I only have a little money. And I want to go to Thailand. And one or two hundred dollars is too small, it is nothing. So I gave nothing.”

She looked at me steadily.

“Don't be too hard on yourself,” I replied.

“I would like to give you some money for Homa and Ali. I would like to send this to you later.”

“Don't worry about it, Elise. Let me do it. I can afford it. You're not old enough to give your money away.”

“Maybe you are right,” she said. “But also you are wrong.”

“I won't take it, you know,” I said. “And I gave them much more than you ever could.”

We were quiet for a while.

“There is something else,” she said, finally, reaching into her bag, pulling out the box. It was the necklace, and she handed it to me.

“I got that for you because I wanted you to have it,” I said, my voice catching. “Don't make me take it back.”

“I know,” she said. “But I thought about this very much. I believe this is for someone else. Even if you do not know who it is.”

“I don't plan to get married again, Elise.”

“Maybe you will not get married,” she said. “But you can if you want. You are not too old. You are a good man, intelligent. You are still handsome. It is true. And so I think you should give this to her. It is better.”

My cheeks were burning, my eyes stung.

“Tell me,” I said, after a moment. “Is Scott Coles meeting you in Thailand?”

She flushed.

“Yes,” she said, simply, after a long pause. “For a few days only. Then he is coming here to see what he can do.”

“Did you call him?”

“Yes,” she said. “I called him from the hotel. After you said you would not come.”

“Well,” I said. “Please give him my best.”

“He is sorry, you know,” she said, awkwardly. “He feels very bad for what has happened. He wants to talk to you when you get home.”

We fell silent after that. It took me a few moments to compose myself, but I did so, because I am good at doing so. The seats around us had mostly filled up, and then, finally, they called her flight for boarding.

I stood, a bit too quickly. She followed, and offered me a quick, enigmatic look, and I walked with her to the gate. She had the boarding pass in her hand, and just before she handed it to the steward, she turned toward me.

“Good-bye, Elise,” I said. I hugged her tightly, then stepped back. I did it as calmly as I could.

“Good-bye, Charles,” she replied, with a smile, and then she turned and walked through the door.

A window, near the back. The seats were brown and orange, the cloth worn thin. I smelled the industrial cleaner from the bathroom a few feet behind me. I sat down, buckled the belt, and looked out the window at the ground below. The gray wing in front of me hung out in space. The plane was old, no doubt a worn-out castoff from the West.

Down the length of the cabin, over the seat backs, I could see the other passengers flowing in, peering at the seat numbers in the dim cabin lighting, opening the overhead bins. I saw no Western faces; a few families, with young children, and many men, both young and middle-aged, who seemed to be alone, some in suits, others in warm-up jackets and jeans and tennis shoes. Cabdrivers, I thought, or convenience store clerks, westward toward the dream of a better life.

There was a chorus of thuds as the doors closed. The steward came on the intercom. I could barely hear him. Would we please fasten our seat belts, and place our seat backs and tray tables in the upright position. The flight attendants, young women in blue suits, stood at the head of the sections with seat belts in their hands, and buckled them.

Then we were gliding backward, towed from the gangway, and
the wing out the window was sweeping across the hangars and trucks, and the engines were spooling up, and we began to roll out toward the runways. Somewhere up front, a very young child began to cry—the catlike call of infancy. We taxied in long, slow bounds, the weight of the plane everywhere, laden with all its cold tons of fuel.

Then the sudden turn, and I saw the runway for a moment through the window—a sea of red and blue lights, and the wide black center, stretching out into the dark. For the first time I heard the pilot's voice, in clipped accented English, asking the attendants to be seated.

We came to a quick, shuddering halt, with a low squeal of brakes, and as he pushed the throttles forward, and the thunder of the engines began, I felt my heart thudding and skipping in my chest.

The plane began to move, pressing me against the seat, and the blue lights went by one by one, faster, like a string of illuminated beads. The bins above me creaked and shook, the wing rose at the tip, and then, finally, the slow backward tilt, the thumps and bangs of the gear as it left the ground, and we were off, banking heavily, rightward in a climbing turn. The gear came up, and one of the rumbles left us. For a moment, before the clouds began to shoot by, I had a view of the city, gleaming with the lights of the poor.

Then we were rolling level, and the clouds were flowing heavily past, and the first shudders of turbulence began, the wide gray wing heaving and flexing, the single light at the tip blinking like a metronome. A sudden whine, a reeling in, from the center, and the flaps slid back. The airspeed was rising, we were climbing well, and soon the lights of the city beneath us vanished altogether.

There was a flash as we broke through the high layer of
clouds, but it was a moonless night, and the view I might have imagined—sheets of clouds below us, the stars in their millions—was nowhere to be seen. Instead it was only the dark, and my own reflection in the window, and a few tiny perfect crystals of ice between the layers of plastic and glass.

A few minutes later the lights dimmed, and video screens came on in each section of the cabin. The screens showed the same blue image of the world, with a icon of a plane moving across it like the minute hand of a clock. There were rows of numbers, changing constantly—our heading, our longitude and latitude, our altitude, our airspeed and ground speed, our estimated time to arrival. Forty-one thousand feet. Seventeen hours to go. Half the globe was lit, and half was in shadow, and after a while I realized that our night would be longer than any on earth, because we were moving in the same direction as the passage of darkness across the world.

I thought of Elise, high up in the dark, with her specimen case in the bin above her head. I wondered what she was thinking, and whether I would ever see her again, and I had no idea at all. Meanwhile, in my bag, the necklace gleamed on.

I unzipped my pack then, and took out her journal. I held it for a while in my lap, before turning on the overhead light and opening the book. Each entry was dated in the European fashion. Some lasted many pages, others only a paragraph or two. I saw my name many times, in her tiny, exact hand, and Rai's, and Homa's. Ali as well, toward the end. Other names, also, that I didn't know, scattered here and there. Apart from them, I understood nothing. It resisted me completely, yet never had I wanted to read something so much. It was the same story, of course, told through other eyes, and I was simply another character within it. I was one of many, no better, perhaps, than the rest.

But still she'd given it to me. And if I knew her at all, I must
come out all right in the end. It must be true, I thought, because she understood what she'd held in her hands, how raw I'd been, and she'd done it anyway.

 

I never unwrapped Eric's painting. I left that for him. But I'd hung mine in the guest room where I slept. It was a self-portrait, and I knew which photograph Rachel had used, because I had taken it.

She was in her early fifties, shortly before her illness. She was wearing jeans, and a spattered white T-shirt. She was sitting by her desk, with the studio windows behind her. There were threads of gray in her hair, which was long and tangled and undone. Her head was cocked, as if someone had just entered the room and asked her a question. A warm, attractive face, intelligent, with wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, but not beautiful, not glamorous or elegant—just Rachel as she was, the woman I had loved, looking up at me again.

 

The hours passed, the icon moved. Dinner was served, and I ate. I dozed, and woke, and dozed again. All through the long, eidetic night—the ridgelines against the sky, the sound of the river, the falling snow, Homa's face, Ali's arms in the water, the rasp of the saw in my hands—for hour after empty hour, the light on the wing blinked on, until Hamburg swam up in the dark like phosphorous. Hamburg, I thought vaguely, had been absolutely flattened. Sixty years earlier it was a pile of bricks and ash.

I sat and waited as they refueled the plane. I had no interest in the terminal, with its duty-free stores and harsh fluorescent lights. I was dulled to all of it by then. I was done with think
ing, and sick of remembering, and I just wanted to arrive. It was a familiar feeling, one I'd had over and over as a young man—a few more patients to see, a few more notes to write, another cup of coffee, and then I'd be gone, out to Lakeshore Drive, with all those whitecaps and gulls leading me the last few miles back home.

Two hours from New York, high above the Atlantic, the sun rose. The wings began to glow. At first it was barely perceptible, but soon I could read the letters stenciled on the flaps—DO NOT STAND. Streaks of grease, also, and scratches, the peppering of thirty years of slipstreams. I could feel it wake me up. And I wasn't alone; as the light began pouring in through the windows, the others around me began to shift, and move, and open their eyes.

I rubbed my face, wishing I had a razor. I could smell my breath. I wanted to look decent, on the chance that Eric would be there. I didn't want to shock him; I was thin, I knew, thinner than I'd been in years. I was stronger, also. But my face was haggard, sunburned from the valley, and I was going to look exhausted when I walked off the plane. But it couldn't be helped; I didn't have a razor.

Settle down, I told myself. He won't be there. I'd called him in the middle of the night, and he hadn't answered. Probably he was out of town, or staying with a girlfriend, or any of a hundred other things. It was only a little after six in the morning, and he had work to do. I'd given him no warning, and I was months early. His apartment was small, hardly more than a studio, he had no spare bed, he had only a couch, and what did I expect?

But still my palms were damp, my breathing quick, and I wished I'd brought a razor, and could brush my teeth, and could hold up my side of the bargain a little better.

All through the throttling back, the spinning of dials, the
cryptic voices in the radios, as I imagined them, a whole world of accents in the headings and altitudes and clearances to land, all through the long curve of our descent, I thought about him. I began to see the silver points of other aircraft, a thousand feet above, a thousand feet below. Some of them closed with impossible speed, and were gone, and some of them swelled beside us as our paths converged.

The flaps went down, and the sea grew nearer. Pleasure boats, some under sail, and the wing was starting its slow, pendulous heave, and then the gear was shuddering in the slipstream, and finally there it was, the skyline of New York City, sunlight glistening off the glass facades of the buildings, one by one, as if to say, this is the world we have made.

We were sailing over streets and apartment blocks, our shadow beneath us, a little sideways in the crosswind from the sea, the green grass flowing by, the skip and stutter of the first white stripes, and then the heavy drum-rolling cough of the wheels, on the ground at last, as the cabin shook and creaked once more, and the engines thundered in reverse. Braking, braking again, and they'd done it, they'd taken me all the way back.

Later, after baggage claim, after customs, after the scanned-in passports, after the police with their dogs, after the coffee stands, after all of that, I could not stop myself from shaking. I could not calm down. What's come over me, I wondered, why am I acting this way? And for the first time I realized how afraid I was, and how terrifying it would be to fly on alone, back to my house, and all that I faced there. We were filing out through the last of the barricades to arrivals, one after the other through the gap. I was near the end of the line, pushing my cart, and out in the morning I could see a cluster of drivers standing just beyond the red rope, holding up signs with names on them. The line grew shorter, the gap grew nearer. I was looking everywhere.

And then I saw him. He waited just past the exit, and the rope, near a pillar. He was watching the line; his eyes flicked across their faces. He hadn't seen me. He took a step forward. That was all—a solitary, expectant step.

I felt myself go calm for the first time. He was dressed in a dark suit, with a green tie, which was unlike him. He was searching for me like someone with news to tell, and in that moment he looked like everything I wanted him to be, young and handsome and full of life, with his dark hair, and his bright, alert eyes flowing over us, one by one, there at the end of the journey.

The line moved on through the gap, and then, finally, he saw me. His face lit up, and he came toward me exactly as his mother had done, when she was his age, and had opened her arms for me also.