Удушье (Choke)

neck, and she's just sitting inside with the bottom half of her clothes on the floor. Her blouse open with nothing inside but her hands cupped under each breast, her fin­gernails, her lips, her nipples all the same cross between brown and red. Her legs as smooth white as her neck, smooth as a car you could drive two hundred miles an hour, and her hair the same brunette all over, and she licks her lips.

You slam the door and say, 'Sorry.'

And from somewhere deep inside, she says, 'Don't be.'

And she still doesn't lock the door. The little sign still saying:

Vacant.

How this happens is I used to fly round-trip from the East Coast to Los Angeles when I was still in the medical program at USC. During breaks in the school year. Six times I opened the door on the same yoga redhead naked from the waist down with her skinny legs pulled up cross-legged on the toilet seat, filing her nails with the scratch pad of a matchbook, as if she's trying to catch herself on fire, wearing just a silky blouse knotted over her breasts, and six times she looks down at her freckled pink self with the road crew orange rug around it, then her eyes the same gray as tin metal look up at me, slow, and every time says, 'If you don't mind,' she says, 'I'm in here.'

Six times, I slam the door in her face.

All I can think to say is, 'Don't you speak English?'

Six times.

This all takes less than a minute. There isn't time to think.

But it happens more and more often.

Some other trip, maybe cruising altitude between Los Angeles and Seattle, you'll open the door on some surfer blond with both tanned hands wrapped around the big purple dog between his legs, and Mr. Kewl shakes the stringy hair off his eyes, points his dog, squeezed shiny wet inside a glossy rubber, he points this straight at you and says, 'Hey, man, make the time....'

It gets to be, every time you go to the bathroom, the little sign says vacant, but it's always somebody.

Another woman, two knuckles deep and disappearing into herself.

A different man, his four inches dancing between his thumb and forefinger, primed and ready to cough up the little white sol­diers.

You begin to wonder, just what do they mean by vacant.

Even in an empty bathroom, you find the smell of spermicidal foam. The paper towels are always used up. You'll see the print of a bare foot on the bathroom mirror, six feet up, near the top of the mirror, the little arched print of a woman's foot, the five round spots left by her toes, and you'd wonder, what hap­pened here?

Like with coded public announcements, 'The Blue Danube Waltz' or Nurse Flamingo, you wonder, what's going on?

You wonder, what aren't they telling us?

You'll see a smear of lipstick on the wall, down almost to the floor, and you can only imagine what was going on. There's the dried white stripes from the last pull-out moment when some­body's dog tossed his white soldiers against the plastic wall.

Some flights the walls will still be wet to the touch, the mirror fogged. The carpet sticky. The sink drain is sucked full, choked with every color of little curled hair. On the bathroom counter, next to the sink, is the perfect round outline in jelly, contracep­tive jelly and mucus, of where somebody set her diaphragm. Some flights, there's two or three different sizes of perfect round outlines.

These are the domestic leg of longer flights, transpacific or flights over the pole. Ten-to- sixteen-hour flights. Direct flights, Los Angeles to Paris. Or from anywhere to Sydney.

My Los Angeles trip number seven, the yoga redhead whips her skirt off the floor and hurries out after me. Still zipping her­self up in the back, she trails me all the way to my seat and sits next to me, saying, 'If your goal is to hurt my feelings, you could give lessons.'

She's got this shining soap opera kind of hairdo, only now her blouse is buttoned with a big floppy bow in the front and every­thing, pinned down with a big jewelry brooch.