Steve Himmer
I knew you were a talker when you rose from your aisle seat on the runway in Amsterdam and ushered me to the window like a guest in your home. The armrest between us had not yet been lowered so I brought it down while you narrated settling in. Good idea, you said, referring to me putting my backpack in the overhead bin. You’d move your own up there to get yourself more legroom like I had. Where was your seatbelt? Aha, you were sitting on it! And the other end? You were on that, too. I slipped the zipper pouch with my in-flight essentials down the seatback: USB cable, ereader, headphones I could plug into the airplane’s own screen and also my earbuds in their sleek plastic capsule. I could have boarded with them already in, a preemptive barrier whether or not I had music playing, but it was too late to do so without being rude because we—you—were already talking.
Did I live in Boston, you asked, our destination that afternoon, or was I stopping over? I told you I did and you replied that you lived on Cape Cod but had grown up between the Cape and the city. I said so had I. You named your hometown; it was also mine. Stirred by coincidence we compared years of high school graduation, yours a decade earlier than my own.
We could play the name game, you said, but with such a gap who would we know in common? If we’d talked about people how quickly we might have realized we moved in different crowds at a long ago age when that mattered. I might have confessed how little I liked the town then, and how alien I felt living there, despite how little any of that would mean now after neither of us had lived there for a very long time, the greater balance of each of our lives spent away. Our remaining friends and family had all moved away. So we talked about places instead. The beaches, the schools, the restaurants in the business district of the harbor where we’d both worked serving summer visitors in the weeks during which their empty houses were briefly unboarded—you at the yacht club, me the Mill Wharf, working from interchangeable menus of burgers and lobsters and fish and chips. Sneaking underage beers from the bar after hours. How few of those houses take winters off now, we marveled, how different the town is in the off-season now that there is no such thing. Each of us on a rare visit in recent years had gotten lost in new neighborhoods, on new streets we thought would be woods and in the part of town where I’d lived an old army proving ground with left behind buildings perfect to creep around and get up to no good in was an identikit luxury home development now. We had the abandoned reform school in common, empty long enough before being torn down and turned into McMansions that we’d each spent afternoons sneaking around its crumbling classrooms and dormitories with friends. We’d each fallen off skateboards trying to coast on the warped, rippled floor of its gym and there too had enjoyed underage beers, a toast between us across time.
The flight attendants moved through the aisle closing overhead bins and shifting bags as your phone rang. Christopher, the screen read. The text on your screen was enlarged, despite the reading glasses you pulled from a pocket, something my own eye doctor had recently told me I should expect soon. You spoke softly though not quite a whisper, loudly enough that I overheard just by being there as you discussed some hard decision related to medical care, about not knowing how much more could be done and if it would help. You were told to stow your phone and you did, no complaints, no resistance or disrespect despite the high stakes of keeping in touch but the weight of the conversation hung on your face.
Your mother, you said, was in hospice in Spain. You’d been there but had to get home. She’d been declining for a while but after a stretch of improvement had decided to visit your brother, the one who had called. The whole family—your brother, his wife, and their kids—caught some bug, nothing major, but your mother caught it too and that minor illness cascaded into respiratory failure and unconsciousness and hospice care while the rest of them quickly recovered. So you’d flown in from Boston and your sister from California; your other brother had an easier trip from Germany. You told me all that as the plane gathered speed and took off then we stopped talking, pressed back in our seats and breathless. None of your siblings nor either of mine remained in the town that all seven of us had in common along with aging parents who had all moved away from that town as it became so much harder to afford over time, and now so much harder to find.
When we’d flattened out you asked if I remembered the bowling alley, the one above the downtown hardware store where the ceiling rumbled, and you told me about your best game of Asteroids ever that ended with your mom charging into the bowling alley’s arcade to drag you out by the ear for some transgression you could not recall. Something a friend had ratted you out to his own mom about, whether you’d done it or not. I told you about two idiots a year ahead of me in high school who broke into the bowling alley one night and cracked open the arcade machines to steal quarters, then asked in the morning at the bank right next door for a suspicious supply of coin wrappers. It was the kind of small town lore that could be from anywhere but it wasn’t, it was from a town and a time we both knew and that we both knew was gone and we laughed as a flight attendant offered us drinks.
You ordered white wine and said you’d spilled Coke on yourself on the flight to Amsterdam, where you’d only passed through without even the right adaptor to charge your phone and stay in touch with the situation unfolding in Spain so you’d had to buy one at Schiphol in case something happened. In case things changed quickly with you caught in between. White wine at least wouldn’t stain and we toasted to that among other things.
The tabletop Galaga game at Gannett Grill, you asked, do you remember? I knew it wasn’t the game itself you were asking about, the machine, but the way you could fiddle its buttons for infinite games and to play as long as you liked without fear of loss until your order was called. The restaurant hadn’t been Gannett Grill for a long time and the building that once bore the name burned down years ago then was rebuilt. So many things there were called by names that outlived businesses. Not a single convenience store was known by what its sign said and you could date a person’s presence in town by whether they called a particular shop near the beach Bishop’s, Sam’s, or Dad’s Place.
How’d we get onto the train tracks? One way or another we did though there weren’t any through town in our day. The embankment was there, a high sandy path without rails or ties, running through the woods behind my house, but train service had ended a long time before. You could ride on that abandoned railbed from the harbor all the way to the northern edge of town and keep going with only a few roads to cross and no adults to know what you were doing. There was nothing like it, nothing at all, we agreed: to get on your bike alone or with friends and to stare down that long, perfect stretch and to know it went anywhere. Everywhere, if you rode long enough. If you kept pedaling. Germany. Spain. Amsterdam. Middle age. All the way to Bergson’s ice cream in the next town over, also gone but the train was restored at some point, new tracks laid, and it’s no longer possible to bike on that trail. There are too many fences and barriered crossings and cameras keeping an eye.
In flight WiFi was on now and your phone buzzed. The text on your screen was enlarged to show only a few words at a time but you still put on reading glasses to catch up with your brother and the situation in Spain; I remembered my eye doctor telling me at my last visit that I should expect to require some soon. You were older than me in that moment though we wore the same outfit of quick drying travel pants with zippered phone pockets, comfortable sneakers, and light fleece tops not too warm nor too cool. You texted back and forth a few times then set your phone down with something more than a sigh, something that welled up from deeper and that I felt through the joins where our seats connected. You ordered more wine and drank it quickly then ordered another and sat with eyes closed and an unacknowledged tear making its best effort to fall without either one of us saying so. We didn’t have the right place in common to talk about that.
You hadn’t slept for a few days, you said, not good sleep, and a few minutes later you were snoring with one hand atop your phone on the tray. If it buzzed, if there was news, you’d wake up. I watched two forgettable movies to pass the time and when the flight attendant asked you to prepare for landing nothing in Spain or in our old town had changed. We’d both grown a little bit older and so had everyone else.
After touchdown you texted your wife as I texted mine. She was on her way in the car, you said, picking you up so you wouldn’t have to take the long commuter bus to Cape Cod, and I could hear that neither you nor she wanted you riding alone. Mine was at work a short drive from the airport, in theory, but to pick me up at that time in the afternoon would have extended her day by a lot so I’d take a cab home—work would pay—sparing her the rush hour traffic. I could ask the taxi driver to keep going south an extra hour or so, likely much longer in traffic, until I reached the town we’d been talking about, but what for? It wouldn’t be the town I once knew and had returned to more easily in flight than I could in person. I would find nothing there to attach my memories to.
We made our way into the aisle to deplane and up the gangway and you were gone. I didn’t see you at the baggage carousel a few minutes later and we’d never gotten so far as exchanging names but it didn’t matter. We’d reached the edge of our map.
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Steve Himmer is the author of three novels, as well as stories and essays in a number of journals and anthologies. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in EPOCH, Barrelhouse, and Abundant Number. He edits Necessary Fiction, and teaches at Emerson College in Boston.