We Are Pirates: A Novel (10 page)

“Are you traveling alone, Phil?” Jane asked.

“No,” Phil Needle said. “She’s with me.” The cart went by and both of them could see he’d gestured to Alma Levine, who was carefully pouring the tiny bottle of vodka into her cup and saying something to the puppet guy.

“I’m alone,” the woman said, startlingly not asking who Alma Levine was. “I won’t be alone when I get there, though. I’m meeting somebody.”

Leonard Steed said that whenever he sat next to someone on an airplane, he viewed them as an average American and tried to pitch ideas for programming to see what an average American would like. Leonard Steed had his own plane, of course, but still Phil Needle tried to steer the talk that way. “Do you listen to the radio?” he asked.

Jane shook her head, although it wasn’t clear she was actually saying no. “Don’t you want to know who I’m meeting?”

You don’t care
that I’m with a much younger woman who’s drinking at ten in the morning, but “Sure.”

“Guess.”

“Boyfriend.”

“That’s right,” she said, chuckling and sipping ginger ale. “Wow, first guess. Now guess what he looks like.”

“Tall,” Phil Needle said. Bubbles in his drink popped on the surface. “I bet he likes to listen to the radio.”

“I’m surprising him,” Jane said, and took another sip, a little too big. “Cancer.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“No, no, I mean it’s almost his birthday. I believe in astrology, very strongly. Do you believe in astrology?”

American Astrology
, he thought idly.

“What’s your birthday?”

The coincidence was discovered, with some squealing. Levine raised her eyebrows at him and finished her drink, and on cue the airplane shifted stiffly downward like a flipped switch. Out the window, the bluey mosaic of swimming pools hadn’t started up; they weren’t near Los Angeles yet. He looked down at the paper: “Possible Titles,” “American,” the last words he would ever write?

“Do you think there’s a problem?” Jane asked him.

“No, I think we just hit air,” Phil Needle said. “So tell me, what kind of music do you like?”

The plane dipped again, right in everyone’s stomachs. Jane named an idiot.

“You like him?” I’m going to die next to you?

“You’re not going to die,” said the crackle on the loudspeaker. Not a word was audible, but the message was clear.

“Did you catch all that?” Levine asked him. Her hand, the one not clutching the cup, reached across the aisle and rested on his shoulder. “Did you catch any of it?”

“No,” Phil Needle said, one shrug for his assistant and the other for Jane.

“I really hate flying,” Levine said. “I’m scared of it.”

Phil Needle watched her suckle spiked ice with new understanding. The flight attendant said something to the business class passengers, too far from poor Phil Needle to be audible, and then walked halfway down the plane to repeat herself.

“As I’m sure you heard from the announcement,” she said, “our plane is experiencing electrical problems. They are not dangerous, but as a safety precaution we are landing ahead of schedule. Please put away all your carry-on items, including purses and cell phones.”

“We’re landing early?” Levine asked.

“I’m sorry,” the flight attendant said. “Purses and purses. You may keep your cell phones. I’m sorry, computers.”

“But we’re not in Los Angeles?” said another passenger two rows up. He looked like a monkey, with a monkey face.

“We’re landing early,” the flight attendant said, “at San Jose International Airport.”

“San Jose?”

“Your luggage will be made available to you if you wish to arrange for alternate transportation,” the flight attendant said. “We won’t have an accurate assessment of how long repairs will take until we’re on the ground.”

“You mean it’s going to be a long time and we should find another flight to L.A.?” said the angry monkey.

“We won’t have an accurate assessment of how long repairs will take until we’re on the ground,” the flight attendant said, as if she hadn’t before.

“What is she saying?” said some poor fool even further back. The flight attendant didn’t answer but began dumping everyone’s cups into a bag. San Jose veered into the window, an ugly and successful city with several affiliates airing radio shows Phil Needle had produced. Still, no one recognized him as the plane bumped into town. The brakes were loud and rough, and Phil Needle had the feeling the other planes were laughing scornfully at Winter Air as they taxied into a paltry gate. Disembarking Phil Needle realized the page of titles was still crumpled in his mad hand.

“I need to give you this,” he told the flight attendant, but she frowned as he pressed it into her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t accept this. Winter Air does not allow its crew to accept gratuities.”

“It’s not money,” Phil Needle said, and uncrumpled the paper in front of her. Behind him, passengers wondered what was going on. “I wouldn’t tip you, not for this shitty morning. Talk about not meeting my needs!”

He didn’t say any of this last half, of course, not out loud, though he reworked several drafts of it as he stalked beside Levine. The airport was skimpy, just a couple of hallways, and everyone in it looked unhappy.

“What shall we do?”

Phil Needle saw that Levine wasn’t going to solve this, either. “Get a rental car,” he said. “We can throw our suitcases in the back and floor it down there. It should be quicker than waiting for Winter Air.”

“Yeah, Winter Air blows,” Levine said. “Okay, a car. Down here, I think.”

“I have to get my suitcase first,” Phil Needle said.

“Right, I forgot you checked things,” Levine said. “I’ll find the car.”

But she had found this terrible airline. “No, stay with me,” Phil Needle said. “I might need you for something.”

Levine narrowed her eyes but followed him as he followed the arrows. In this day and age, people’s baggage was found on something called a carousel, even though it was nowhere near as elegant or circusy as the term implied. WELCOME TO SAN JOSE, MANY BAGS LOOK ALIKE
.
The machine whirred into life and, surprisingly, the bags began to appear, just as Winter Air had said they would. Phil Needle watched for his suitcase among the tossed and tumbling bags, but the closest he could find was another suitcase, similar in color, that went unclaimed for lap after lap around the carousel while Phil Needle and Levine stood in silence. He thought he could smell the vodka on her breath, but it was possible he was making that up. He turned on his phone and looked at the names of the people he knew.

It’s difficult to make Phil and Marina Needle the heroes of their love story. They had smiled vaguely at each other for a couple of years in New York, whenever Marina came in to do voice work. Through a seedy boyfriend she’d started out dubbing Italian horror movies—you can hear her to this day, badly synchronized with the scarlet lips of vampire victims—and then moved into radio ads, cooing suggestively over nightclubs or with prim anxiety about who to call if you have been in an accident. It was a good voice—you could almost picture the injured husband, wincing behind a shattered windshield. Phil Needle paid no real attention to her, as it was the long story of Eleanor at the time, screaming and lying, and anyway Marina was dating a guy, another seedy boyfriend named Rafael Bligh, who was all wired up with his idea of having Marina record descriptive narration of classic films for the blind. She’d hole up with Rafael in an unused booth for the afternoon, and Phil Needle would walk by and catch a glimpse of her saying “The old man drops the snow globe” or “She slowly picks up the black statuette” while Ray stood behind her offering advice and, Marina told him later, cupping her ass. She’d dated another guy too, who worked there before. Too many boyfriends and you look like a bitch.

The party was on a hot, crappy night in a Brooklyn brownstone with crackly staircases and long, leaning hallways, and inside were people loud and laughing. The hosts were friends Phil Needle had since lost track of, and the room was full of strangers. Reggae loped out of speakers someplace. The ceiling was strung up with too many lights. An inked sign taped to a ceramic bowl read TONIGHT
I’M AN ASHTRAY,
and there was a tall, skinny boy of no more than twelve sulking in front of the refrigerator where the beer probably was. The drugs had worn off on the subway and Phil Needle’s arm still hurt where Eleanor had scratched him. He stepped back out the door and climbed a metal ladder to the roof, where it was cooler and seven or eight stars could be seen. He stood up there for a moment, beneath the stars, and then, without Phil Needle having said a word to anyone, the brittle floor collapsed beneath him, right where he was standing. He fell halfway and then stopped, his legs kicking air beneath him and his hands clawing on the sandpapery surface of the roof. Strangers reached out to him and tried to drag him out; strangers ran up the ladder and pulled at his legs. Tipsily the two strategies were debated, but nobody, Phil Needle noticed, talked to Phil Needle much. At last he was down, and, wiping his plastery pants, he decided to leave. He ran into the twelve-year-old boy on the stairs. It was Marina, with a new haircut. A year later they were married, not at the sort of wedding where all the guests are flush with happiness, believing the couple to be a symbol of all that is right with the world, though neither was it the kind with everyone thinking it wouldn’t last. It was just a wedding, memorable to guests only because the rabbi asked for the rings when he already had them himself. They were still married, and it was not a loveless marriage—Phil Needle certainly did not think that, scrolling down the list of names in his cell phone’s memory—though something had downshifted. Marina had changed, becoming the sort of woman who bought a bottle of iced tea and stuck a straw in it and walked around all day, sucking, sucking, sucking. More and more, Marina stayed in the room where she did her paintings. Lord knew why she wanted to paint. She couldn’t take photographs—many of their vacations, to anyone glancing at the pictures, had been spent in the looming shadows of giant thumbs. There was a shadow over Phil Needle, too. Marina had not erased the girl, Eleanor, who didn’t want him anymore, and for these reasons and more Phil Needle didn’t want to phone his wife, who had left too many messages, it looked like. He erased them, almost by accident, unheard, and then on impulse he scrolled ahead of Marina’s name alphabetically and called his father for the first time in months.

“Hello.”

“Hi, Dad.”

“Who is this?”

“Your son.”

“My son is dead,” like always.

“
Dad.
”

“He died of drugs.”

“This is your
other
son, Dad. Phil.”

“You’re dead to me too.”

“No,” Phil Needle said. “No, I’m not.”

“You both did drugs.”

“Dad,
please.
”

Alma Levine blinked out of a reverie and frowned at him. Most everybody had their bags, except for whatever schlump hadn’t claimed the suitcase similar to Phil Needle’s. From the tinny, tiny speaker on the phone came the laughter Phil Needle had never liked.

“How’s what’s-her-name?”

“Marina’s fine, Dad. How are you?”

“Fit as a fiddle. And Gwen?”

Phil Needle knew this conversation like the back of his hand, and looked at it now. The ink was still there. Behind it, the similar suitcase made another lap, and it occurred to Phil Needle that someone had taken his suitcase by mistake and left him with this. “She’s fine, too. I’m just calling, Dad, to check up on you, I guess.”

“Well, it’s the world that’s all gone wrong.”

That was it, of course. It had come to this. Some passenger—the monkey guy, it came to him—had taken his suitcase and Phil Needle was now alone, standing with Alma Levine in a strange place like Adam and Eve while this voice talked to him, his father, from nowhere. He had nothing to wear, he had nothing for a title, and he stood alone with his head filled with schemes for his own deliverance. And then on the umpteenth lap he saw that it was his baggage after all.

“I tell you,” said his father, “black people—”

“Don’t start,” Phil Needle said.

The magazine wanted to know if Gwen knew what all girls had in common. There was a girl on the cover, and the address label for the magazine, DR
. DAVID DONNER, DDS
,
was pasted on the girl’s denim thigh, with another sticker on the other leg, DO NOT REMOVE, as if she were prepped for surgery. Gwen picked up the girl. No, she could not imagine what they had in common.

Parental jazz hummed around the waiting room, empty except for another girl, Gwen’s age probably, dressed better, with a long chainy necklace, spreading out the magazines like she was tiling a floor and angry about it. The office woman behind the open, sliding window kept frowning behind her headset, deciding whether or not to say anything.

“This is the
worst ever
,” the girl said. She was not looking at Gwen. “The
worst ever
selection of magazines I’ve seen
ever.
”