It was none of these.
I stared at that last line for a long time.
23
On board flight 865 to Cabo San Lucas, I closed my eyes. I had worked straight through Christmas, marking the season with a roast-beef sandwich—homemade, no less—and a call to my niece, Susanna, during which she thanked me for the Chronicles of Narnia set that I had ordered and sent straight from Amazon. Afterward, I talked to my sister for a few rare minutes.
Despite my productivity in those quiet days alone on the second floor of my building—Mrs. Russo had gone to her daughter’s house in Haverhill—I wasn’t going on this so-called vacation without my laptop and the handwritten transcriptions of every meeting since that first night. I would have felt less compelled to carry so much with me—I brought along two manuscripts as well—had the majority of my work over the holiday been for my actual job. But I had been preoccupied with the memoir on my laptop hard drive, currently seventy-eight thousand words and growing.
I looked out the window from seat 21A onto a heavenly floor of clouds worthy of a fabric softener commercial, disappointed that I could not see the earth. On my trip to China in college, I had lifted my window shade midflight. And there, as the rest of the dimly lit plane slept, watched a movie, or worked by seat lights, I gazed down onto what I calculated to be Siberia. Chalky rivers snaked through stunted mountains like veins in marble, pasty snow- spackled crevices in the landscape like filling in the pores of travertine. I must have stared for half an hour at that fawn gray and virgin desolation, my breath fogging the glass as I wondered if, like Isak Dinesen, I was seeing “a glimpse of the world through God’s eye.” Did I look down on any spot of land previously untouched by any eye but God’s?
It was the closest I had ever come to a religious experience, and though I had requested window seats and looked down on the earth from cruising altitude on nearly every flight since, I never saw anything like it again.
The man next to me—a short Asian with black, feathery brows and a hairline that had receded to the crown— leaned across the armrest between us to peer out as well.
“‘And I thought, yes, I see, this is the way it was intended,’” he said, quoting Dinesen.
We were bound by the story, needing one another in our own ways, but in that moment I realized I hated him, too. Again I wondered what would happen when we both got what we wanted from this arrangement and what would become of us, of this contemptuous codependency.
The demon removed his shoes and tucked them beneath the seat in front of him. He was wearing GoldToe socks.
“What made you leave the co-op? What’s been distracting you?” I asked without preamble.
He tilted his seat back and stretched his short legs. “I told you there were those who would not look well upon our time together.”
I remembered. I also recalled that he had sidestepped the question, saying it did not serve his purpose.
“Who? The Host?”
He sucked at his teeth. His smooth skin belied his age, the few age spots on his face the only clue that he was, I guessed, close to sixty years old. “Yes,” he said finally.
“Did you see them?”
“Let it be, Clay. You don’t know what you’re delving into.”
“What does this have to do with Mrs. Russo?”
His expression sharpened into a glower. “Stay away from her.”
“Why?”
“If you don’t want to jeopardize the time we have left, do as I say.”
I thought of the two men in the mall, the ladies at the bar in the Bristol Lounge. “What was it at Vittorio’s?” I said. “I didn’t see anyone.”
“You wouldn’t have.”
“But—”
“We don’t have time for me to explain this to you. I’ve answered your questions. With the committee meeting in your absence, I would think you’d be more focused on getting to the end of your book.”
