Ambrose D. Smart
As the flight attendant's obligatory safety announcement blares, Frances Neruda tries to strap herself in for her first ever business trip—a tech conference in Chicago—but she accidentally grabs the belt of the man next to her—a man with stringy, sandy hair and a nose ring and a face that looks worn beyond what she presumes are his years (probably early-to-mid thirties)—so she apologizes, but he just gives her a wide grin, revealing a missing front tooth. She kicks her backpack under the seat in front of her, willing it to fit. The overhead compartments are full, and she doesn't want to check an additional bag.
Frances enjoys giving people who are simply background characters in her own life (one of her NYU writing professors used the term “nondescript figurants” for such background characters, but she likes to think that there's no such thing as a nondescript figurant) stories of their own, and an airplane—a tiny flying capsule full of recycled air and a bunch of complete strangers—is the ideal setting for this sort of targeted daydreaming. The plane hasn't even moved yet, and she's already observing the people in her direct vicinity.
Across the aisle, in seats 17C and 17D, there's a couple, presumably married (it's impossible to know for certain, but Frances has noticed that married couples often have a gentler, more laidback air between them than couples who are simply dating). The wife has wide-set features and a short bob resembling that of Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka (but her hair is red instead of black) and wears a fashionable silk scarf, and the husband has dark, greased back, business-like hair and a freshly-shaven face and wears a bowtie. He seems like the type of person to consider even something as mundane as flying on a plane a big, fashionable ordeal.
Frances wants to come up with a story for the man on her right with the missing tooth—maybe he's a method actor who is traveling to Hollywood to play a toothless role—but as the plane accelerates on the runway and she feels the familiar lift of takeoff, he is already telling her everything she wants to know about him and more. She doesn't ask him, but he tells her anyway. He says that he's an Iraq War veteran. He says that he got a Purple Heart for his service. He says that the whole war was really quite pointless and imperialistic, and she half-heartedly agrees, wondering why he's still talking to her. He leans in uncomfortably close as he tells her all this, as if he's relaying a top-secret message (a military habit, she supposes), and his breath stinks of garlic. She wonders what he had for lunch. She wonders whether the missing tooth affects his ability to eat lasagna or garlic bread or roast chicken or whatever—whether it creates this imbalance that leaves a weird jagged pattern in whatever he's biting.
The man and wife across from Frances give off strong suburban vibes. They seem like the type of couple to own a moderate-sized house in a little gated community and live there with their ten-year-old son Gavin and a cocker spaniel named Buster. They probably own an annual indoor pool membership. The wife likely pays $100 for her Willy Wonka haircuts and has convinced herself that because they're so expensive, they must be beautiful. The husband probably invests in real estate and detests the oxymoron “business casual.”
The man on her right is talking about getting shot in the leg when the seatbelt sign turns off. He asks Frances where she's headed, and she lies and says college (at this point, she is certain that there's something very “off” about the missing-toothed man and is determined not to give him a single piece of accurate information). She pulls her one surviving AirPod (she lost the other on a flight just like this one) out of her backpack and begins blasting Bob Dylan's “Ballad of a Thin Man” in her left ear, hoping the man will take a hint, but he plows ahead as if nothing has changed. He asks whether she wants to see what his leg looked like after being bust open by a bullet, and she respectfully declines, but by this point he's holding his phone in front of her face, and she's looking at something bloody and swollen and yellow with a texture that reminds her of a gremlin's skin. [1]
Frances returns her attention to the couple in 17C-D. The woman has gotten out one of those velvet neck pillows sold at airport kiosks and appears to be asleep. The man is watching Star Trek (a show only available in the paid entertainment category, Frances can't help noting), his bulky Audio-Technica headphones plugged into his armrest. Frances can picture the woman owning a small business that sells jewelry and good luck charms and fashionable scarves and knitted sweaters and barely makes enough gross profit to break even, but it's her passion project, and she loves it. The man probably works in some sort of actuarial job, selling his soul every day to pull in 250 grand per year, but being perfectly happy to sell his soul because his home life is so fulfilling. Their son most likely attends a nice private school with vague Christian leanings, and on the wife's days off, she likely invites a bunch of the other upper-middle class moms over for “lunch”—an assorted plate of fancy cheeses and crackers and salami slices organized in an aesthetically pleasing pattern—where they talk about their children's charming antics and play bridge.
The unsavory man in the seat next to Frances wants to know how old she is. She lies again and says seventeen, because at this point, she is ninety percent sure he's hitting on her and hopes her apparent minor status will get him off her back. He asks why a seventeen-year-old is in college, and she realizes with horror that he's been taking in every word she's said to him. She tells him she was a child genius. He picks at his lone front tooth with a dirt-encrusted fingernail. The tooth appears to be on the verge of recoiling in disgust. [2]
The sleeping woman is leaning over onto her husband's shoulder now, and he's still watching Star Trek, seemingly nonplussed. He adjusts his bowtie. Frances continues to mold their collective life into a story, imagining all the ways the narrative could proceed from here, but she can't conceptualize any threads that don't lead to a happy ending. [3] She figures he's a moderate liberal who reluctantly votes Republican for the tax cuts, while his wife is a registered Democrat who erects “No Human Is Illegal” and “Love Is Love” signs in their front yard, and this discrepancy used to cause the occasional Election Day spat, until they agreed to just not discuss their differences. She probably attends one of those hippie-dippy progressive churches with a six-piece rock band and concert-quality speakers and a giant screen behind the altar that lights up with song lyrics and Bible verses in big, bold letters, and he (an apathetic agnostic, Frances assumes) agrees to come with her most weekends because he likes to discuss baseball with the pastor after the service ends.
The stewardess is already traversing the plane's narrow hallway offering snacks and beverages to first-class passengers, but it will be a while before she gets to row 17 in the economy section. Frances wonders whether she should press the flight attendant call button on the ceiling and ask to change seats. Her mom always told her, whenever she flew on planes as a child, that that button was for emergencies only. She recognizes now that the sentiment was most likely bullshit—that her mother was simply exercising whatever power she had to stop her children from being annoying and disruptive (as children on planes tend to be). Frances imagines a dream sequence where every passenger presses his or her flight attendant call button at the same time, overwhelming the plane's entire electrical system and causing it to drop out of the sky and into Lake Huron. [4]
“Do you want to see a picture of her?”
Frances realizes she's been tuning out the toothless man for quite some time now. The monitor on the seat in front of her flickers between the flight stats and the map of their progress. It's negative thirty degrees Fahrenheit outside, and the plane looms over Middle-of-Nowhere, Canada.
“Who?” Frances asks blankly.
“My girlfriend. The one I've been telling you about. Wanna see a cute picture of us?” It sounds more like a demand than a question.
Frances raises an eyebrow skeptically. “Uh, yeah. Sure.”
The man holds his phone in front of her face like he did when he showed her his shot-up leg, but the image is not of a loving couple holding hands—it's a picture of male genitalia. She averts her eyes immediately.
“Oh, sorry,” the man says sheepishly, putting his phone back into the pocket of his leather coat. “Wrong picture.”
“You think?”
“I meant to send that to my girlfriend.”
But at this point Frances doubts he even has a girlfriend. Maybe he wasn't even in the war. Maybe he shot his own leg while doing target practice in his backyard or simply searched “leg, bullet wound” on Google images and downloaded the goriest picture he could find. What she's doing to the couple across the aisle—inventing entire lives and personas for them that might not be (and probably aren't, if she's being honest) accurate—is what this man is doing to himself.
The stewardess offers the couple across from Frances their choice of snack and beverage. Alcohol is not included, but they dish out some of their own money for a couple cans of beer. When it's Frances's turn to order, she asks the stewardess whether it would be possible for her to move to a different seat. If the man next to her takes note of this request, he shows no reaction, running his hand absentmindedly through his sandy hair while staring blankly at his tray table.
“Sorry,” the stewardess replies with a fake, polite smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes. She's tan and heavily made-up and likely in her early forties. She's good-looking in a reserved way and seems like the type to have a servile husband back home, but cheat on him while abroad with twenty-one-year-old European underwear models. Her husband probably knows, but he's taught himself to not care. “We're fully booked. There are no empty seats.”
Frances should tell the stewardess about the toothless war vet and his creepy antics. Surely, as a woman herself, she'd understand the impulse to get away from such a hideous and unpleasant person. Or, if it really comes down to the wire, she could fake a heart attack or an epileptic seizure or an anaphylactic reaction to the Delta-brand peanuts she's just been given.
She remembers when she was in sixth grade and her brother had just gotten his driver's license and began driving her to school. Every day, at the Fifth Avenue intersection in downtown Manhattan, Andrew would accelerate for a split second before slamming on the brakes. He always made a point to do it when another car was coming. He never caused any accidents (though a chorus of angry horns usually ensued), but every time he hit the brakes, sending Frances flying forward in the passenger seat, the seatbelt friction-burning her scrawny neck, he glanced over at her and grinned smugly, as if to say, I didn't kill you this time, but I could if I wanted to. Therefore, Frances desperately tried to get out of riding with him by any means possible, usually by faking an illness. When her mother didn't buy it, she would offer to take the bus, but her mom would tell her that's silly—that there was no reason to sit on a bus with a bunch of smelly kids (Frances's mother did not perceive her own kids as smelly, but often used the descriptor to refer to kids she thought of as less civilized/proper than her own) when her older brother was perfectly capable of driving her. Frances doesn't quite know why she never told her mother about her fear or about Andrew's antics—maybe she supposed the news of her tattling would get back to her brother, and he'd experience the satisfaction of having cracked her. She really should have told somebody.
Now, as this crucial moment just sort of hangs there like a thick, gaseous cloud, an odd sense of déjà-vu overcomes her. This is her chance to find recompense for the torment of her youth—to become a person of action rather than a helpless victim.
“That's okay,” she tells the stewardess after a short eternity. “Not a big deal.”
The couple across from Frances is conversing rapidly about their trip to New York City. They can't decide whether they enjoyed Wicked or The Phantom of the Opera more. At some point during their trip, they visited the M&M store in Times Square. On their last day, they took a tour of 30 Rock and shopped at FAO Schwarz. They seem perfectly happy—content—and all at once, Frances is hit by the overwhelming realization that she is different from them in every possible way, and it hurts more than it should. It hurts the way reading something terrible about someone you admire or love hurts—that stabbing pain in the pit of your stomach caused not by the information itself, but the knowledge that you'll never look at the person the same way again. But this time, “the person” is herself.
The past few days in New York were rainy, but the rain always came on slow. First, it would start sprinkling, a spattering so light and infrequent it could just be Frances's imagination, but then it would progress into a torrential downpour, and the transition would be so smooth and gradual it could catch you off guard. One moment, the occasional droplet is striking your hair, but before you know it, buckets are falling, and your clothes are soaked and sticking to your skin, and your steps are making the water on the sidewalks splash up and hit your shins and soak through your shoes and into your socks—that terrible discomfort where you can feel the water squelching around in there with every step. Frances pictures the couple in 17C and 17D huddled together in Central Park when the rain starts really coming down. The wife pulls an umbrella out of her purse and hands it to the husband. The husband opens it and holds it above both of their heads while she leans in close to rest her head on his shoulder. Her damp, glistening red hair bounces with every step she takes, holding its shape. Frances wonders what she has to do each morning to get it to stay in such an unnatural position.
As Frances waits desperately for the plane to land, trying to make the couple across from her into anything but a set of nondescript figurants, she feels herself—as in Frances, the real, bona fide, flesh-and-blood woman who exists not because of, but in spite of her own imagination and experiences pain and sorrow and joy, who cried when her older brother pushed her off her bicycle at age eight and caused her to skin her knee, who can still trace the faint outline of that scar even now, fourteen years later, and who maybe even fell in love once, who is not some imaginary character inspired by a suburban couple on a plane, but an actual person who, once upon a time, had actual hopes and dreams and aspirations—becoming a nondescript figurant herself. What would her story be? Who would want to read about her nine-to-five job answering call after call, but never getting her foot through the door, about a childhood tainted by cheesy 80s horror-comedies that ended the same way every time, about her repeated nightmares of being trapped and how she is trapped—not in a room with ringing phones and absurd requests, but in a life that she never asked for and never wanted? When strangers watch her from the sidelines, what do they see? Is there even enough of her present for them to see anything but a blank slate—a thin, wispy narrative thread that trails off into the same nothingness regardless of how it begins?
1. Frances was terrified of the movie Gremlins growing up. Though she wasn't aware of it at the time, hindsight has informed her that her older brother Andrew used the film to traumatize her. After the initial viewing—the one that resulted in hours of crying and months of nightmares (she was only five at the time, after all), her brother somehow coerced her into watching the film several more times. He said that the only scary part of the whole movie was the otherworldly appearance of the post-transformation gremlins, and he promised to instruct Frances on the appropriate times to close or open her eyes so that she could avoid having to look at the gremlins' distorted, demonic faces, but he (on purpose, she now realizes) told her to open her eyes at all the wrong moments. By the third viewing, she was afraid to look at the screen at any point of the movie's duration, but even when her eyes were closed tight, her hands pressing against her eyelids so that they could not open even if she wanted them to, the gremlins' bat-like, elven outlines appeared in the stars formed by her retinas, and even when she plugged her ears or lay alone in silence at night, she heard them cackling, screeching, their high-pitched voices following her wherever she went.
2. When asked, years later, by a therapist, to describe the most terrifying thing about the gremlins, Frances was at a loss. It was not their teeth that haunted her most, as her therapist erroneously assumed. At the time, she simply said that their entire demeanor was off-putting to her in a strange, creepy way that she couldn't describe or even put her finger on, really—it wasn't until several years after that session that she recognized her fear for what it really was: a fear of losing control. The gremlins were innocuous enough on their own, but the environment that allowed the cute, innocent mogwais to undergo such a sinister transformation in the first place was what set Frances off, and the feeling that she was powerless to stop something that was utterly preventable only intensified with subsequent viewings (or listenings) of the film. She remembers the way her five-year-old self screamed at the TV, begging Billy (the film's protagonist) to simply not feed the lovable mogwais after midnight and how each time, without fail, Billy ignored her pleas.
3. When Frances was accepted into NYU nearly five years ago—so naive and full of hope, but still ultimately stunted, she felt, in more ways than one, she wanted to be a fiction writer. She even told Donny Brown she was going to be a fiction writer, and he found the idea (she thought at the time) charming and endearing and quaint and maybe even sexually attractive, but he disappeared from her life without a reason or a trace and took with him all her idealistic dreams about writing—about creating narratives she could control, even as she felt like she was rapidly losing control of her own narrative.
She remembers giving him her stories to read and how he said that they were brilliant, but lacked diversity of character—that every character was Frances, in a sense. He said that was okay as long as they represented different parts of herself, but she wasn't sure they did. She wasn't sure which parts of herself she'd want to represent, if she could. She remembers reading his stories, hanging onto every word, and even now, she still recalls some of his most vibrant characters in vivid detail because they all contained within them such blatant, but such human contradictions—the jester who was also a hit man, the grief counselor who killed herself, the skydiver with a fear of heights. She remembers the last time she talked to him, on the walk back to her dorm after their composition class, and how she didn't know it would be the last time. She remembers calling him late that same night and how he didn't pick up and how she lay awake in bed, not because anything particularly out of the ordinary had happened, but because some basic animal instinct told her it was all wrong.
So after her freshman year and the whole ordeal with Donny, she changed her major to computer science, because she'd always excelled in math, and apparently women in STEM were the new hot thing and made big money, and that was all she really cared about now—making money—not doing what she loved, because she was rapidly figuring out that she didn't love anything.
4. In the weeks after graduating from college, soon after starting work at her new tech support job, Frances began having a recurring nightmare—one that, not coincidentally, involves being "on call." The dream essentially proceeded the same way each time: she stands in a pristine, velvet-carpeted room surrounded by telephones—the old kinds from the early 2000s with the cords—and for some reason, as established by the dream logic, she can only leave the room once she finishes answering them. Also, for another inexplicable dream-logic reason, she really, really wants to get out of the room. One by one, the telephones begin to ring, and one by one, she answers them. The contents of her phone conversations are usually not a focus of the dream, and she can rarely recall them upon waking (except for the particularly gruesome or anxiety-inducing ones—one time, a lady called to say that her dog had been hit by a car and was in critical condition and that she needed Frances on the scene ASAP if the dog was going to be saved, and Frances kept trying to explain the situation to her—how she couldn't leave—and the lady was sobbing and asking her whether she really even cared if the dog lived or died, and Frances said that yes, she did, but she had to attend to all these other phone calls (by this point, at least three additional phones were ringing incessantly in the background), but the majority of the calls revolve around mundane, forgettable favors that for some reason the dream logic dictates Frances alone is capable of doing—things like changing a tire, cleaning a bathroom, telling some woman's husband she wants a divorce, etc.). The crux of the nightmare's terror, so to speak, is the fact that all her attempts to escape the room ultimately prove futile. Every time there's a single moment of cathartic silence, she heads for the door, but then the ringing starts again. She is unable to make anything resembling an independent decision—unable to exert any kind of control over the situation. A few months back, when the dreams were at their most intense, her therapist brought up the theory that her subconscious was manifesting her own personal conception of hell.