Odyssean

The tap on Tristan's shoulder jolted him awake. There were only two people on the plane. Two passengers. He didn't count the pilots or the two flight attendants, one apiece for each esteemed guest.

"Would you like a meal?" the attendant asked, towering over him. Tristan squinted to keep his eyes open. She held a plastic tray with a foil-wrapped meal box in one hand, and in the other gripped both a small bottle of water and a can of root beer gleaming with condensation. He understood why she hadn't wheeled out the food cart in all its regalia, but root beer struck him as an odd choice.

Sunlight reflected off the aluminum wrap but offered no clue about the box's contents. A full meal cart might have brought with it an olfactory hint, the salted wake-up-now aroma but the single tray smelled of nothing.

"Is it vegetarian?"

"Sausage and eggs, so you can have the eggs", she replied. "Is that okay?"

"That's fine." He accepted the tray and fiddled with the tray table's handle till it came loose. The attendant flipped open the tray table in the seat adjacent to his and wordlessly placed the drinks on them. Tristan thanked her. She turned and walked down the aisle in a hurry.

The foil crinkled loudly despite his efforts to open the box delicately. He did this with the curiosity of a fish considering a ped-icure, for he did not eat eggs. The last time anyone in his family had touched an egg was in the final years of his grandmother's life. Osteoporosis and a scolding from the doctor made her give in and eat a daily solitary boiled egg. It was brought to her in a small metal cup and cleaned with a separate sponge so the smell would not infect the other dishes. She complained that the eggs were making her hallucinate her husband, who had been dead for fifteen years. A sausage would have killed her.

Tristan decided against breaking his lifelong abstinence for the pungent selection in front of him, which had the appearance of yellow- and brown-dyed rubber. Suddenly weary, he unbuckled his seatbelt and stepped into the aisle. He chided himself for leaving his backpack in the overhead bin on an empty flight.

This was the first time his thirteen-hour flight home was free of its usual irritants: cramped spaces, snorers, bathroom lines. His six-foot-three frame was not confined to a middle seat flanked by two large men whose elbows shamelessly violated seat sovereignty agreements. Elbows and knees inevitably closed in on him the farther his neighbors journeyed into sleep, as did the swampy layer of recycled sweat and air that settles in on every long-haul flight. Tristan elbowed and nudged neighboring limbs back over the border only when his assailants were asleep; they always returned as the sleepers' bodies tensed and slackened.

He told his parents that the dread of each cross-continent journey was what held him back from visiting home. They seemed to have believed it for the first few years. A half-truth assuaged his guilt and gave his parents a tenuous but acceptable reply to uncles and aunties who inquired at every family gathering. Over time, he hoped, it would fade into an unexamined truth. It was on the drive home from Salika's parents' house that she had steered the conversation in her delicate, roundabout way to the topic she knew was a sore spot. I'll come with you, she had said.

He shot down the idea immediately but agreed to book his ticket that weekend. So far, empty rows and clear skies mocked his filial neglect.

He opened the bin, reached for his bag, and pulled out his sleeping mask from the front pocket. It was flimsy red and blue, a holdover from last year's flight to Sydney with Salika. He zipped up the bag, shoved it back into the bin and pushed till he heard the latch click.

Tristan stood in the right aisle, his seat in the rightmost seating section. He saw her from his vantage point seven or eight rows ahead. She was sitting in the aisle seat of the left section, across the expanse of the middle columns. Neither of them had chosen the four-seat-wide middle section where it would have been easier to stretch out and sleep.

The woman had close-cropped hair that reminded him of a black-haired Jean Seberg. She was wearing an oversized lime-green sweater and must have tucked her arms into its torso; the sleeves lay limp at her sides. She sat motionless. Tristan could not tell if she was awake, but her meal tray sat unopened. She was a vegetarian, or she just wanted to avoid visions of dead husbands.

He returned to his seat and put on the sleeping mask. The cheap elastic band was too loose for the mask to stay on, so he tied a knot in it and snapped it back on. A brief consideration of walking to the galley and asking the flight attendant, Zeynep maybe, for a bottle of water and more importantly, to let him sleep. He decided against it and closed his eyes.

In the eighth hour, the plane shook violently. Tristan was no man for turbulence despite his degree in applied mathematics; the slightest tremors catapulted him awake. The cabin lights were off. He instinctively pulled his seatbelt strap tighter till he felt the belt bite at his waist. He continued his longstanding turbulence procedure, reminding himself of the concept of lift and Newton's third law and the power of modern science and planes are built to withstand ten times the worst turbulence and it won't fall out of the sky. He tried to fill his thoughts with the air safety stats he used to cite to his mother each time she panicked during turbulence and planes are much safer than cars. What he'd said was "we're more likely to die during this car ride than once we're flying." He used to laugh at her for praying. More than once while flying alone, she'd asked someone sitting next to her to hold her hand. They always did.

The plane stabilized for a few moments. Suddenly, it dropped sharply and began to shake again. His hand was sweaty and cramped from gripping the seatbelt strap. He switched to his left hand and pulled the belt even tighter till he could not take more than shallow breaths. Today there were no sleeping or screen-watching faces he could find solace in through his peripheral vision. The overhead compartments rattled and Tristan felt a wave of heat emanate through his shirt.

He'd never before been able to sleep after bouts of severe tur-bulence. Through newly arrived age, jadedness, or some luck he found himself drifting off. The insides of his eyelids stung beneath the mask.

Loud thumping. He woke up and he had told Salika that he loved her, had he told his parents and when was the last time he felt brave enough to say that to a friend, would telling the limp sweater woman I love you as they fell to their death make up for it? But the plane was cruising smoothly. The metronomic thumping continued. The lights were off, as was the seatbelt sign.

Tristan unbuckled his seatbelt and poked his head over the seat in front of him. It was too dark to confirm the lime-green but unmistakably, it was her. His co-passenger stood still in the left aisle. Then her shrouded figure shifted forward and again Tristan felt a slight perturbation on the cabin floor. Heard the thud. She turned and faced the opposite direction.

Silently, Tristan crept into the middle section and sat down in the seat closest to her aisle. He tried to peer through the gap in the seats but could not see her clearly. Protected by the darkened cabin he craned his neck to see over the seats again.

She was jumping, jumping from one foot to the other, back and forth from one side to the other.

The woman paused for a moment. The strobe lights from the airplane's wing flickered over her as she leaned sideways, parallel to the window, a viewfinder briefly catching its flighty sub-ject. She took off her sweater and tossed it onto her seat. Then, without warning, she took off at a full sprint towards the back of the plane.

The footsteps grew quieter and he counted nine, ten, eleven seconds later they returned, the streak of her flew past his row, back to her seat, unaware of the presence of an observer. Tristan gripped the sides of the seats in front of him and shuttled himself sideways through the middle section, closer to his original seat and away from the runway.

His hands trembled as he reached for the two ends of the seatbelt but decided against it. The click of the buckle would be dampened but not muffled by the thumping that had started again. Tristan noticed that the flight attendant had cleared his uneaten tray and placed a new one on the tray table. He removed the covering foil, balled it up with both hands, and stood in the aisle. Leaning back on one leg, he wound up his arm and with full force hurled the foil ball into the depths of first class. Maybe the flight attendants were taking a smoke break.

Soham Mall