Fear of Flying

I had thought that Mitski's “Last Words of a Shooting Star” was a calming song to listen to while waiting at the gate, half-asleep, with its pretty guitar line, its quivering vocals, until I listened to the lyrics: “All of this turbulence was not forecasted, apologies from the intercom, and I am relieved that I left my room tidy, they'll think of me kindly when they come for my things, they'll never know how I'd stared at the dark in that room with no thoughts like a blood-sniffing shark, and while my dreams made music in the night, carefully, I was going to live.”

It's been a quick series of events lately. Time zones flash by. I see the world from above, when I'm lucky. Traces of snow over the Canadian prairies. Endless parched flatlands in Turkmenistan. A labyrinth of impossibly deep canyons somewhere in the Afghan desert which, if it was anywhere less remote, would be world-famous.

For various and complex reasons, I've been flying a lot. A total of 15 flights over the past three months, including three trans-Pacifics, one trans-Eurasian, and one trans-Atlantic – I'm counting that one because while Reykjavik is something of a halfway point, with its winter vibes and little bottles of brennivin at duty-free, my final destination was Chicago, so it was basically a trans-Atlantic.

Bangkok to Oslo, Oslo to Paris, Amsterdam to Reykjavik, Reykjavik to Chicago, Des Moines to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Seattle, Seattle to Taipei, Taipei to Bangkok, Bangkok to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Dallas, Dallas to Kansas City, Des Moines to Denver, Denver to Seattle, Seattle to Tokyo, Tokyo to Bangkok.

That's not to count the numerous trains, buses, courtesy shuttles, and long drives in private, taxi, and rental cars as part of the process, nor does it count the numerous taxi and subway rides that take up my life, given my choice of a city-center existence, which many would consider absurd given the fact that I'm rapidly approaching middle age.

I am flying by air not just because I love travel – which I do – but because of various personal reversals, and above all else, the fact that for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be somewhere else, whether that “somewhere else” is my adult self wondering where I'll move next, or my kindergarten self wishing he was digging up treasure and gunning down Nazis alongside Indiana Jones.

Probably the best-known movie about the fundamentally evasive nature of a life defined by travel, Up in the Air, wasn't an especially good movie – serviceable, but not especially good – but one thing it got consistently right was the dread feeling of transitory space, of departure lounges, airport bars, tinny music in Marriott Courtyards and Doubletrees, stodgy smoked salmon on stodgy bagels, of being simultaneously sleepless and tired as well as overcaffeinated and twitchy.

What I couldn't sympathize with though – although I realize it's regrettably a real thing – was the George Clooney character's obsession with the tangential benefits of travel, the accumulations of frequent flyer miles and platinum cards, the rights to use express lanes and VIP rental cars, all the little titles granted to little men with business cards.

For someone who loves travel, I hate flying, always have. This is not an original idea – most people do, I think. The uncomfortable seats, the security lines, the constant reminders that I am a valued customer even as I'm treated like a veal calf. And the perks and add-ons, even when I get them, fail to comfort me. From the moment I enter the queue at check-in, I feel as if I am entering the vortex.

I come out hours later. Generally, if I'm flying clockwise I'm fine, but counterclockwise, I'm likely to be in trouble. I carry that weird, jittery energy out with me, and small things seem ready to set me off. Maybe it's the falling concrete that forms the “wall” of the metro station at Barbès-Rochechouart in Paris. Maybe it's the ersatz localism at Chiang-Kai Shek Airport in Taipei. Or maybe it's the Dad humor scrawled next to the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny drop at a store on the drive in from the Kansas City Airport after a 24-hour series of flights -- “Take a penny, that's fine. Take two, get a job!!!” – while the local constabulary busied itself harassing a random black man in the parking lot.

After flying, all seems to be a disgusting, farcical facsimile.

I thought I was fine, after my time in the vortex ended. I thought I had, more or less, beaten jet lag. I thought I had balanced the appropriate quanta of alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, THC, CBD, alprazolam, and melatonin that would ensure a graceful dismount, a return to everyday life. A swim, a little bowl of noodles for breakfast, a bottle of vodka to infuse with guavas, mastic resin, and cedar tips.

When I arrive in Bangkok, I find a city trapped under a thick blanket of smog as the cooling winds from the Sea of Japan failed to blow in, a high-pressure zone preventing the normal particulates – organic molecules from vehicle exhaust, heavy metals, and the like – from rising and dispersing, with talks of cloud-seeding operations to relieve the Beijing levels of industrial hydrocarbons in the atmosphere.

And on Saturday night, when I went to bed, I quickly lost myself in an 18 hour passout, not waking up until after sunset the following day.

I tried and failed to fall asleep the following night. “Well, another long dark night of the soul,” I told myself, my own bed-gnawing misery probably bearing little in common with what Saint John of the Cross had in mind when he'd coined the term la noche oscura del alma.

But when the sun rose, and I was still whole, if sweaty and on edge, before my apartment building was shaken by the sudden roar of helicopters.

Lying there, I thought of the climax scene of Through a Glass Darkly, the spider crawling through the wall, the helicopter flying past, the door opening with no one behind it. Karin, our heroine in the midst of her stands up calmly before running into the corner, screaming.

I was frightened. The door opened. But the god that came out was a spider. He came towards me and I saw his face. It was a terrible, stony face.

Was the door open, more now than the night before? And was that a spider on the far wall, descending between the curtain and the first shaft of morning light?