Flight or Fright Read online

  The audience clapped, at least, after Ilvi’s introduction, an idle plagiarism of the curriculum vitae John had sent her. He made his way to the podium, leaned toward the mic, glanced at the screen behind him, leaned toward the mic, and glanced again at the screen behind him. Leaning toward the mic a final time, and making sure his already soft voice was as mild as a child’s aspirin, he said he was not sure which speech should begin first. A few scattered chuckles, then actual laughter. John turned to the screen one last time to see that his talk’s first block of translated text had obligingly appeared. Okay, he thought. Good.

  He flattened out the first page of his talk, which he had given several times, and looked out on the facial pointillism of his audience. Three hundred people? Their expressions were more curious than hostile, he thought. Something then popped into his mind as suddenly as the words had appeared on the screen behind him: This was too far to have come. He was a tenured professor of law at a major American university. He wondered, once again, why he was so determined to defend himself. Was the solace of knowing he could that important?

  At the beginning of September 2001, John was 34 years old and reviewing a treaty whose most legally substantive issue involved polar bears.

  Before returning to his seat John tried a couple of things. He hit the cockpit door with the steel air compressor approximately four dozen times. He then returned aft, held down the PA button of the attendant’s control panel, and screamed. Becoming hysterical solved nothing. Calmer now, and sitting, he tried to formulate a reasonable explanation for what was happening. He did not think he had been drugged. He had eaten nothing that day and drunk only a can of Diet Coke shortly after boarding. The attendant had given the can to John and he himself had opened it.

  He replayed various short-term-memory fragments. The morning flight from Tallinn. Forty-five minutes in Helsinki. The bovine ordeal of boarding. He recalled as many fellow passengers as he could. Chatty Janika, the Estonian on her way to the United States. The neckless, bullfrogish man John had sat beside at the gate. The amply eyebrowed young woman in the Oxford sweatshirt who smiled at John as she passed his seat on her way to coach. (No Asian man forgets a white girl who smiles at him, unibrow or no.) A young man he recalled only because he was black. A studious, string-haired girl in a loose white blouse. A kid in his early twenties in a YOU SUCK tee shirt. The female flight attendants in their powder-blue pantsuits. John had been conscious of his Asianness on this Finnair flight, in this northern clime, and recalled, now, anticipating his relief at returning to California, his university town, its sidewalks of multiracial buffet, its music stores and eateries, the varieties of its cannabis enfleurage.

  But there was the matter of his iPhone. Someone had clearly taken it. He had looked for it under his and every other seat in business class. What would he do? What could he do? The air compressor had done real damage to the door, denting its hardened shell and knocking off the handle. The handle was now in John’s pocket, in case he needed to fix it later, though he had no idea how he might do that. He found some tools in an aft storage cabinet, which were now on the seat beside him. The door itself had not budged.

  In sudden need of the transporting thereness of an outside item, he pulled a magazine from the mesh basket on the side of his seat, its heavily laminated cover as cold and slippery as glass. Finnair’s in-flight shopping magazine. Even under his present circumstances, the appeal of shopping while aboard a plane remained mysterious. He nonetheless slapped at the crisp, thick pages. Fifty-euro pearl necklaces. Twenty-euro sticks of Dolce & Gabbana deodorant. Thirty-euro Glam Bronze Sunset & Glam Shine foundation by L’Oréal. Pages of European chocolates and confections. He came to the last pages, electronics, and stopped at a 245-euro solar-powered BlackBerry Curve 8310 Smartphone. Almost certainly, dozens of passengers aboard this plane had been carrying phones, any number of which might still be in their carry-ons. While getting reception was unlikely, he might find a device that allowed the sending of a stored email or text once the plane reached a lower altitude.

  As he rose, the plane shook as though withstanding atmospheric reentry. He sat and buckled his seatbelt. His fear, having almost come under the control of his hope, felt newly feral. He breathed. He was not sure what time it was, or how long he had been on this plane, but his window shade, like every other window in business class, was now open, and once again he stared into the freezing darkness of the troposphere. He thought of his wife, his students, their concern for him, and, yet again, rose.

  John felt strangely better once he had all the business class carry-ons gathered around his seat. Remaining close to his appointed seat seemed important, though he could not explain why. He worked his way through the bags, most of which were small. People who paid business class fares did not hesitate to check their luggage. They had no cab line to beat; they landed to find Jordanian men holding small white signs bearing their last names. Unzipping luggage, John slipped his hand into one opening after another and felt and squeezed and searched. He did not want to unnecessarily disturb anyone’s items. Anything that felt at all promising he pulled out through its zippered caul. By the end of his search he sat among shaving kits, digital cameras, iPods, duty-free bottles of vodka with Cyrillic lettering, several Montblanc pens, and a smooth pink plastic torpedo he had realized only incrementally was a sex toy. Also accounted for were half a dozen computer cases, every one of them empty.

  He moved on to coach, but before he had managed to empty a single overhead container, his stomach sent another dose of fiery waste toward its point of egress. He staggered to the bathroom, unbuckling his pants, and sprayed before he could get himself atop the metal-basined toilet’s plastic ring. The smell had no equivalent he could name. It was, somehow, an orange smell. His intestinal spigot opened again; waste escaped him in avid bursts. He was sick now, and dizzy, his brain an invalid whom no one had thought to visit in months. When he was finished he washed his hands.

  Decorousness no longer concerned him. He walked down the first aisle opening overheads and savagely throwing their contents to the floor. Soon enough it was knee-deep with baggage. Would he really go through all of it? No. His anger was too overriding now, and he had to allow himself to regenerate the care and attentiveness searching the bags would require. He moved to the second aisle, pushing overhead release buttons as he traversed it. After a satisfying pop the doors slowly lifted open. So much of this plane was kept in place by plastic hinges. He was within a metal tube, sailing just beneath the fringe of outer space, while huge engines fifty feet from him spewed invisible 1,000-degree fire. Was this any less remarkable than the reality that he was now trapped inside?

  He found Janika in the aisle’s third-to-last overhead—though given that the overheads were triply connected, she occupied all of them, however unhappily she fit. Her bruised, cross-eyed face and masking-taped mouth sent John to the floor as resoundingly as a blow. When he finally looked back up at her he saw that one of her arms had slipped from its containment. Her hand vibrated lightly in turbulence he could no longer feel. He carefully removed her from the overhead. When the last of her body pulled free she seemed to gain one hundred spontaneous pounds. John fell back, Janika on top of him, onto a bed of carry-ons and their jutting contents.

  Janika’s crossed eyes, so close to John’s own but unable to meet them, seemed troubled by some final, unwanted knowledge. Dried red crumbles of blood filled her nostrils. Her cheeks were spider-webbed with broken capillaries, the veins of her forehead and temples subcutaneously livid. John pushed her away and made long loud primate sounds. He tried pulling the masking tape from Janika’s mouth, but the sound of dead skin tugging against musculature was so nightmarishly sloppy he stopped and ran screaming back toward business class.

  He decided to once again beat the cockpit door with the air compressor. This time, however, he would not stop. He entered business class to find that the screen upon which the pre-flight PSA had been broadcast was lowering. The lights went soundless
ly out. Panic spun him around. Two steps into his flight he stumbled and fell. Unable to see and crawling back toward coach on an uneven reef of luggage, his thoughts turned Neanderthal. Back, back to shelter. But there was no shelter. What he had been feeling until now was not fear. Fear was liquid; it traveled the bloodstream; it sought the reservoir of the brain. Real fear, he now knew, took its power not from what could happen but what you realize will happen. Above him was a sound of small, whirring industry. He recognized it for what it was: throughout coach smaller screens were lowering into place. John looked at the closest one. It was on but blank. The screen glowed like vinyl: darker, somehow, than actual darkness.

  Then, an image of crisp digital-video quality, though its bottom edge vaguely flickered with waveform. John was too far away to make sense of it. He stood. What he saw when close enough was a small plywood room filmed from the impersonal high-corner angle unique to surveillance. In this room were two figures. In a chair, behind a small table: a woman. Circling her: a man in boots, loose black pants, black tank top, black ski mask. The audio was tinny, faraway, obviously unmic’d. In the blizzardy imperfection of poorly lit digital video, John did not immediately recognize Janika. She appeared to be tied to her chair and was crying in a steady and quietly hopeless way. The man looked at the camera, walked toward it, and finally reached up and grabbed it. The camera was not fixed in some surveillance perch at all; it was a hand-held. The image went whirlwind but quickly stabilized, save for a few hand-held jiggles.

  A second man, identically dressed, entered the room through a hitherto unnoticed door. Looking directly into the camera, he pulled the door shut with a strange gentleness. The first, camera-wielding man must have gone into zoom as the second approached: his ski-masked face less filled the screen than violently annexed it. John stared at this man staring back at him. This too was time travel. Now that she was blocked from sight, Janika’s soft, wet sobs were sharper, more keening. Or perhaps she was simply reacting to the second man’s entrance.

  The man himself said nothing. His eyes were animate in no remarkable way. When, at last, he turned away, he busied himself at the table. The man was writing something, John realized, and once he had finished he again faced the camera. He held out a piece of thin white cardboard filled with letters of nearly perfect contiguousness. John did not expect the sign to say what it did. He nonetheless felt grateful, for now he understood what was happening, and why. The man placed the sign on the table before fixing his attention upon Janika, who now screamed. As for the sign, John could still see it: CATEGORY 1.

  AFTER his speech, Ilvi asked John if he would like to join her and some others, including the speaker who preceded him, for drinks in the Old Town. Was this woman truly that stupid? John extricated himself from the offer with an obsequious bow, a claim of exhaustion, and multiple thank-yous. He was beginning to feel both ghostly and loathed here, less a man than an unpleasant idea. As he made his way toward the exit, people scattered from his path as though he were lobbing lit firecrackers. How much longer, he wondered, would this be his life?

  A few of the questions he had taken were indeed hostile, the most pointed posed by an older woman in the front row with a face as tight-skinned as a kayak. She had huffily asked what John would do in the event of a formal accusation of war crimes by the International Criminal Court. John told her he did not anticipate that happening and then lied: “I’m not that worried about it, to be perfectly honest.”

  John had another day scheduled in Tallinn. At the first thought of this, he stepped into a men’s room off the hallway outside of the conference room and stabbed at his iPhone until he was online. The conference had paid for John’s flight but, at his request, left the return ticket open. Within a couple of minutes his ticket was changed. Magic. Less magical was the fact that he was now $1,500 poorer. It was hard to regard this as anything but a bargain.

  John exited the men’s room to find a gleamingly clean-shaven man waiting for him. His outfit was a Halloween version of a tech-industry executive: navy blue sport coat, no tie, jeans, cross-trainers. He was obviously American. His face filled with an expression of unilateral recognition John had still not grown used to, probably because it was an expression that always failed to acknowledge itself as unilateral. He knew who John was; therefore John would be happy to meet him. Everyone was the star of his own story.

  He said John’s name and extended his hand. A business card emblazoned with the embassy seal materialized. RUSSELL GALLAGHER, CULTURAL LIAISON OFFICER. In John’s limited experience, words such as “cultural” and “officer” tended to serve as camouflage for intelligence work.

  John tried to give the card back but Gallagher insisted John keep it. John put it in his pocket and asked, “Are you my envoy?”

  Gallagher had a boyish, I’m-being-tickled laugh, though age was beginning its work around his eyes and had begun pushing back his hairline. “I’m not, unfortunately. You’re not too popular at the embassy. You probably know this already but they tried to get you uninvited to this thing.”

  John was aware that, among the remaining loyalist vestiges of the Administration, he could expect no grata shown his persona. But that an embassy would attempt to block his appearance at an international conference seemed astonishing. Did these people not have anything better to do? “As a matter of fact,” he told Gallagher, “I did not know that.”

  This indiscretion was cause for yet more Gallagher laughter. He was trying too hard, John thought.

  “It turns out your friend, Professor Armastus, doesn’t like to be pushed around. She also has friends. The harder the embassy lobbied the more determined they were to get you here. Great speech, by the way.”

  “Tonight is the first time I met her. But thank you.”

  “Look,” Gallagher said, aware that whatever he wanted to talk about was now thunking along the berm, “I’m here, under my own volition, to tell you that a lot of us are grateful to you and what you did.”

  “Thank you again.”

  He looked at John, his face sweetly bold. “My father was a Vietnam vet, seventy-one to seventy-two. One of the things he was involved with was the Phoenix Program. He always said the reason it got such a bad name was because it was created by geniuses and carried out by idiots. But even then it was the most effective thing we ever threw against the Viet Cong. The Communists admitted as much after the war. My dad was in Saigon, and he told me that by 1972 the average life expectancy of a Communist cell leader in the city was about four months. And nothing you argued for was worse than what my dad was proud to have done with Phoenix. Just wanted you to know there are a lot of us who admire you.”

  While drafting his memos John had actually looked into the Phoenix Program. He learned the CIA had made internal promises that Phoenix would be “operated under the normal laws of war.” He also learned that several American officers involved with Phoenix asked to be relieved of their duties because they thought what they were doing was immoral. John stood there looking at Gallagher. His posting in the target-poor environment of Estonia spoke for itself. His father hunted down Communists. The hottest action the son could scare up for himself was defying his embassy in order to tell John to keep his chin up. The conservatism of which Gallagher was doubtless a disciple was not a proper philosophy. It was a bad mood. Neither of them said anything for several seconds.

  “You want a drink?” Gallagher asked. “You look like you could use one.”

  John did not want a drink. He could, however, use one. They walked out of the Viru together and into the enduring 10:00 p.m. sunlight of a Tallinn summer evening. John asked Gallagher how long he had been posted here. “I was in Greece before this. Ten years in. Before that, the Marines. Made captain in 1998. Got out too early for any of the fun stuff.”

  They walked toward the center of the Old Town. In the weakening light the buildings seemed as bright as animation cells. People were drinking in the cafés along the sidewalk, drinking while they walked, drinking while they w
aited for ATM slots to stick out their tongues of currency. John noted the packs of young Russian men with hard eyes and unsteady gaits, the singing arm-entwined Scotsmen, the wobbling smokers standing outside every pub. He also noticed the tiny old begging women dressed in tatterdemalion, seasonally inappropriate clothing, every one looking as though she had suffered some unbreakable gypsy curse. John asked Gallagher, “With what sort of culture do you typically liaise around here?”

  Gallagher looked at him. “You might be surprised. But it’s a fun place to live, even if Estonians are sort of inscrutable. A buddy of mine plays bass, and he told me that wherever he’s lived in the world he’s always been able to show up at open mics. Everyone needs a bass player. When he got to Tallinn he’d show up at an open mic and there’d be five Estonian guys standing there with their basses, looking for a lead guitarist. This is a nation of bass players.”

  John’s eyes snagged on two high-heeled Freyas in dermally tight jeans walking toward him. These two carried themselves with the steel-spined air of women secretly covetous of constant low-grade harassment, which they were getting. In their wake they left all manner of shouted Russian entreaties.

  Gallagher noticed the women, too. “And, of course, there’s that. In Tallinn even the ugly girls are kind of pretty. This is offset by the fact that even the intelligent ones are kind of stupid.”

  Gallagher went on as they walked. Talk of women became talk of Finland, which became talk of the Soviet Special Forces, which became a condensed narrative history of the 1990s. Segues were nonexistent. Soon the soliloquy returned to his father. John was no longer listening. Instead he considered Gallagher. His hair was thin, limp, the color of rye, and Gallagher was often petting it forward—a naughty schoolboy tic reactivated in middle age to conceal his retreating hairline. Discussing his father left Gallagher wallowing in unspecified grievances, though he still insisted on laughing every third or fourth sentence. “And that’s what my dad always said,” Gallagher closed.