Читать книгу Planet Reese - Cordelia Strube - Страница 6

The magician unwraps a stick of Juicy Fruit and chews on it vigorously. “It’s for my ears,” he explains. “Otherwise, kaboom.” He balls the wrapper then palms it, revealing an empty hand to Reese. “I might be working with Buddy Greco in Vegas. It’s between me and Ernesto Ventura who’s, like, a total loser.”

Reese is beside the magician — and not with his wife and children — because, according to the flight attendant with the red eyes and orange lips, the flight has been oversold, the seats assigned. Sitting across from his wife and children was the German in the Tilley hat. Reese, pointing to the back of the plane, asked him to consider changing seats. The German stood, squinted briefly at the magician in the tux and spiky hair, and said, “Nein, danke.”

The magician is tearing apart his napkin, balling the fragments in his hands. “Need a napkin?”

“I’ve got one, thanks,” Reese says before realizing that his napkin is no longer on his tray.

The magician opens his hand, revealing the shredded napkin whole again. “I’m working on this nail routine, it’s kind of like Houdini’s Needle Trick. He’d swallow, like, dozens of needles then regurgitate them with all the needles threaded.”

Reese peers over the rows of heads in front to see his family. Before takeoff, he managed to hover near them. Roberta had little to say to him, but Clara waved the colouring book the pregnant flight attendant had given her. “Look, Daddy, dinosaurs!” Derek, twitching despite the Ritalin, was absorbed in his Game Boy.

“So my nail act,” the magician says, “is like the Needle Trick except that instead of needles I use nails, and instead of swallowing them, I hammer them up my nose.”

Clara was the first to spot him. “That’s the magician!” she shouted. “You are so lucky, Daddy! You get to sit beside the magician!”

On the ship, Reese had avoided him by remaining on the pool deck, but now, with their arms frequently touching on the arm-rest, interaction has become inevitable.

“I’m into the classic illusions,” the magician explains. “None of that laser crap Ernesto’s been doing. Magic’s gotten way too safe. You don’t see guys in straitjackets dangling from their ankles over major intersections anymore. You don’t see guys handcuffed, bagged, crated, and dumped into rivers. Nothing but wussies out there.”

Reese smiles politely and glances past the passenger in the window seat who, prior to takeoff, had been speaking heatedly into his cellphone in another language, guttural but unidentifiable. “H’what’s your problem?” the man demands. He has an abundance of nose hair.

“I was just trying to look out the window,” Reese explains.

“H’what, you never seen sky before?”

The pregnant flight attendant appears to collect their trays. The nose-haired man calls her “sweetcakes” and orders more rum and Coke.

Reese assures himself that it was a successful vacation. He and Roberta didn’t fight, and the children were occupied with the Kid’s Club, which freed their parents. He slouched on various deck chairs, focusing on his bird books to stop contemplating the effect twenty-five hundred passengers defecating into the ocean was having on the fish below.

Inside their cabin, Reese refrained from voicing his concerns regarding the lack of any windows and their dependency on a ventilation system and elevators. He had come on the cruise to show he could be positive — to prove Roberta wrong. He knew that this was his last chance. Even Greenpeace had called him negative. “You’ve changed,” they said, just before they fired him.

“I’m older,” he replied.

There had been complaints about his “leadership skills.” When people did stupid things, he told them so.

On the cruise, to his amazement, he was able to behave like a man on vacation, even attending a Fine Arts Auction where he was shown “some of the most beautiful artwork produced in the last century.” He put his name in a box and won, yes, actually won, a Chagall print said to be worth a thousand dollars.

“That’s a lithograph,” Roberta told him.

“They say it’s a limited edition. They say it’s worth a thousand dollars.”

“Puh-lease.”

Derek and Clara took the upper bunks, Reese and Roberta the lower. It was really quite jolly, Reese thought. The lower bunks came with a slide-together option, but Reese and Roberta hadn’t slept together since the separation. The cruise was for the children, particularly Clara, who’d longed for them to be “a family” again. They ate spring rolls and fruit kebabs from the buffet, played minigolf, swam, and watched first-run movies in the movie theatre. Movies overwrought with sentimentality, violence, and the promotion of material gain that, under normal circumstances, Reese would not permit his children to see. But mid-Atlantic, in a stadium-sized boat rigged with stabilizers to free passengers of any sensation of being ocean-borne, the movies seemed appropriate. He enjoyed the popcorn and being in close proximity with his children and even agreed to go dancing, performing the Tush-Push and the Achy-Breaky at the Country Western Party. Roberta, energized from Pilates classes, hot tubs, and foot massages, insisted on attending the Tropical Island Night deck party where she took first place in the limbo contest. Reese joined the Martini Club, which served exclusive designer martinis in ten-ounce martini glasses. He played mystery and trivia games with an oil rig industrial safety consultant and an MP from Alberta who wore a cowboy hat. Not once did Reese mention environmental degradation. Roberta cannot complain.

Although, he almost threw a banana peel into the ocean where surely a seagull or some sea creature would eat it. But no, he pushed the banana peel into the chrome trash bin by the elevators. Yes, he has behaved well. And what joy to sit with his family again, particularly last night in Le Bistro. Derek performed his eating eyeball trick, which he hadn’t done for months, and when Reese hugged him he didn’t recoil. Clara performed her raising-eyebrows-while-wiggling-ears stunt, and Reese, because his children demanded it, did his Porky-Pig-buzzed-on-Smarties impression. Roberta was laughing, actually laughing the way she’d laughed before the children were born, when Reese would take her for bike rides, standing on the pedals while she sat on the seat gripping his waist, her long legs stretched out for balance. Only once, in the rain, did they skid into some shrubbery, and even then Roberta laughed. So why hadn’t she laughed until their last night on the cruise? Was it because Reese refused to go to the Sock Hop where rumour had it “Elvis” was going to make an appearance? Would it have been different if Reese agreed to attend “Band on the Run,” a musical extravaganza featuring music from the sixties, seventies, and eighties? “You don’t even like rock,” Reese protested.

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“The point is we’re trying to break patterns, try something different.”

Is that what we’re doing?

He endured all of it, the Beatles, the Bee Gees, the Stones, the Eagles, Pink Floyd, Creedence Clearwater Revival. Yes, he has behaved well.

The nose-haired man nudges him and signals that he needs to get up. Reese and the magician stand in the aisle while the nose-haired man, off-gassing rum, stumbles towards the toilets. As he squeezes past the pregnant flight attendant collecting garbage, he cups his hands over her buttocks. “’xcuse me,” he says, “so sorry.” Reese expects the flight attendant to draw attention to this sexual harassment but she only reddens. Since takeoff Reese has felt some concern about her fetus, how it is coping with the changes in cabin pressure. Elevated body temperature due to sexual harassment can only add stress to the unborn. Fetuses, he believes, experience all. Nothing can be hidden from them. When they’re forced into Earth’s atmosphere, they have supreme knowledge and an awareness that is systematically blunted by human conditioning. They cry out when they are born because they know.

“The bottom line is,” the magician states, applying lip balm, “it’s one big schmooze fest. That guy Cooney, he’s, like, Copperfield’s bum boy. That’s how he got the three tours in the Middle East. Plus, get this, eight winter seasons as head of entertainment at Santa Claus’ Village in Lapland.”

At the very least, Reese thinks, Roberta will allow him to visit the house and garden again, now that he’s proved that he is capable of behaving like a contented family man of the twenty-first century. It pains him that she has let his garden go to seed and feeds their children pesticided, genetically modified, hormone- and antibiotic-saturated foods. “We can’t afford anything else,” she tells him. “Besides, there’s E. coli on organic produce. All that cow shit.” She has always been very capable, practical, fearless of plumbing. For this reason Reese was astonished when she told the mediator that she was afraid of him, that she perceived him as uncontrollable. Reese has always felt that he has surrendered to her with little protest. He has even agreed to all of her settlement demands.

The magician is twirling his spikes. “Have you had your PSA tested?” he asks. “Everybody should get tested. Get this. The first urologist said there was nothing wrong with me, didn’t even order a biopsy. In two years my PSA score doubled. Doc number two said, ‘We gotta get that tumour out.’ A bunch of quacks out there.”

The nose-haired man stumbles back and begins to dig around in the overhead compartment. Jackets and bags fall on the magician’s head as over the PA system the captain warns them of pending turbulence. The magician stands, stuffing the jackets and bags back into the compartment. The nose-haired man, weaving about, possibly with delirium from the altitude and alcohol, flails his arms, trying to fight off the magician.

“Easy now,” Reese says, wedging himself between them. “We have to sit down now, turbulence coming. Time to buckle up.” He guides the nose-haired man back into the window seat. Within seconds he passes out. Reese fastens his seatbelt as he should be fastening the seatbelts on his children.

“Every time I fly they do this turbulence number,” the magician complains. “Like, what’s the big deal?”

As the pregnant flight attendant checks their seatbelts, Reese resists an urge to stroke her swollen belly. He is in awe of pregnant women. They are miraculous, sacred, untouchable. Even Roberta was miraculous and sacred, although had she expressed desire to have sexual relations he would have obliged. Fortunately, she was never particularly interested in sex. Previously he’d been dating an Argentinian accountant who’d believed that multiple orgasms assisted her English Language studies.

The magician unwraps another stick of Juicy Fruit. “Cancer changed my life. Used to be if somebody offered me yogourt, I’d toss it. Now I’m a total low-fat yogourt junkie.”

The turbulence begins. Reese fears for his children, wishes he could be with them offering assurances about modern technology and jet planes. In their last stormy exchange prior to the cruise, Roberta had warned him that he’d better stop condemning modern technology because Clara and Derek were entering a modern technological world. “You scare them,” she’d said.

“They told you that?”

He’d had them the weekend before, had set up a tent in his basement apartment. They’d eaten Fruit-to-Gos and played Jurassic-period and then Cretaceous-era dinosaurs. They hadn’t seemed scared.

“Do you think it makes children happy,” Roberta had asked, rhetorically, “to hear about species extinction and loss of wilderness and ... and corporate takeovers?”

“Such is the reality.”

“The reality is I buy Nike because they’re good.”

“They make’em cheap and sell’em high.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

She always says, “I don’t want to talk about this,” as though her wants are the only ones worth discussing.

“They think the world’s ending,” she’d said.

“Yes, well?”

“You don’t know that.”

“A few thousand Earth scientists seem to think we’re at a unique point in a multibillion-year history, that we can proceed to environmental ruin and wide-scale suffering or try to turn it around.”

“You’re telling them that?”

“The point is our children still have a choice. They can take action. They deserve to know that.”

Without warning, the plane drops. Despite the seatbelts, Reese’s and the magician’s heads bang into the ceiling. Women scream, babies wail. The flight attendants, buckled to their seats, are nowhere in sight. The magician falls to his knees in the aisle and puts a blanket over his head.

“I don’t think you should do that,” Reese says.

“Bug off. I’m praying.”

The captain explains that they have dropped fifty feet but that they should be through the worst of it. The magician continues to pray. Reese removes his belt and staggers down the aisle towards his family. A crew-cutted man shouts, “Sit down, dickhead!” at him. Roberta is hunched forward with her arms around both children, who have their eyes squeezed shut. The German is moaning.

“We’re alright,” Roberta says with that look Reese has come to dread. The look that says, This doesn’t concern you, we don’t need you.

“Go back to your seat, Reese,” she says. “It’s safer.”

He staggers back to the magician.

“Can’t you read?” the crew-cutted man shouts. “The sign says ‘Fasten seatbelts’! Sit the fuck down!” He’s wearing a College Girls Gone Wild T-shirt.

Reese squeezes past the magician, who is still praying under the blanket. He decides that if the plane doesn’t crash, if they live to see another day, he will do whatever it takes to keep his family intact. No sacrifice — philosophical, psychological, or financial — will be too great. He may even renovate the bathroom. For years Roberta has complained about the chipped pink bathtub and Reese has argued that, though pink and chipped, the bathtub still works, why add it to landfill? He has told her that he has a vision of his children sitting on the pink and chipped bathtub on a massive pile of other discarded but perfectly serviceable bathtubs. “Reese,” Roberta said, quite loudly, “it’s like we live in a slum. That’s a slum bathroom.”

As the plane stabilizes, Reese vows to renovate the bathroom. Any bathtub she wants, she shall have. Although, he would like one of those water-saver toilets.

The magician crawls back into his seat, his spiked hair flattened by the blanket. The nose-haired man, having slept through the excitement, indicates that he needs to use the wash-room again. The magician and Reese stand to let him pass. Reese moves up the aisle to check on his beloved family. All three are blissfully asleep, cuddled. He wants to put his arms around them, cherish them, forever. They are the posts to which he is pegged. Without them he would collapse. He kisses all three of them lightly on their heads while the German stares.

The movie has engrossed the magician. Reese tries to signal that he wants to resume his seat, but the magician remains oblivious. Reese takes the opportunity to use the facilities. As he approaches the toilets he sees the nose-haired man speaking to the pregnant flight attendant. He appears to be looking for something on the floor. As the pregnant flight attendant bends over to help him search, the nose-haired man presses his groin into her buttocks and grabs her breasts. The flight attendant shrieks. Within seconds Reese has grabbed the nose-haired man and pulled him to the floor. He expects other passengers to assist him but they are all asleep or plugged into the movie, iPods, or laptops. In the seats immediately around Reese is a contingent of seniors. He wrestles the nose-haired man, pushes his knees into his ribs. The man vomits onto his hands. The flight attendant disappears, presumably to get help. Reese has no choice but to hang on, inhaling the stench of vomit. A senior nudges him with his white loafers. “What in heck d’you think you’re doing?” he demands.

The crew-cutted man in the College Girls Gone Wild T-shirt shouts, “It’s a fucking terrorist!! Everybody stay calm!!!”, tackling the nose-haired man’s twitching feet. “Way to go, man,” he yells at Reese, who is feeling the nose-haired man losing strength. A gnarled woman with brown teeth warns, “Check him for combustible fluids!” Suddenly everyone is panicked about combustible fluids and the terrorist. Reese’s only concern is that he keep the nose-haired man away from the pregnant flight attendant or any other unsuspecting females. Roberta, when she wakens, will applaud him for his heroic deed. She has always despised men who objectify women. The co-pilot pushes through the crowd, ordering everyone to return to their seats, then kneels beside Reese. “I think you can let him go,” he says. “He looks unconscious.”

“Are you sure?” Reese asks. He looks up into the eyes of the pregnant flight attendant.

“Thank you,” she says with a timid smile that banishes any doubts Reese has had about forcibly subduing a man.

“I can’t feel a pulse,” the co-pilot says, pushing Reese aside and beginning CPR on the nose-haired man.

“Really?” Reese asks. “There must be one. I mean ... he can’t be dead.” He looks up, seeking reassurance from the pregnant flight attendant, but it is Roberta who is staring down at him as though he has gone mad.

“What have you done?” she says.