The Journey Prize Stories 25 Read online

  Sometime this week would be ideal, says Sharon.

  Sharon has her day-planner out, making arrangements for the mattress to be delivered. Kathryn gazes blankly at the appointments and the half-familiar names. It’s mostly wedding stuff. Then she sees her own name:

  Sleep World

  (w/Kathryn!)

  Next to her name is drawn a small heart. The whole day is blocked off. Kathryn wonders if they will now have lunch and sit on some heated patio drinking bellinis and talking about big and small things, or if the unexpected efficiency of her purchase will inspire Sharon to see how many other tasks she can accomplish today.

  Kathryn doesn’t mind either way. She is ready to go home. She has something to say to Chris. It is starting to take up space in her mouth. She wants him to be happy. What is her worst-case scenario?

  ELIZA ROBERTSON

  MY SISTER SANG

  Seated and stowed.

  Thank you, all set.

  [Sound like cockpit door closing.]

  Oh, that fucking door again.

  What’s wrong?

  This.

  Oh.

  You have to slam it pretty hard.

  [Sound like cockpit door closing.]

  This one is: Plane Ditched in Columbia River after Multiple Bird Strikes. Three serious injuries. One fatality. Forty-three passengers treated for hypothermia. On my desk Monday morning: the stats, the snaps, the autopsy, the tapes. (The .FLAC files.) (We still say tapes.) Linguists identify speech – loss of thrust, loss of trust, one five zero knots, one five zero, not. I take the acoustics. Engine noise, aircraft chimes, whether the captain has reclined his seat.

  Flaps one, please.

  Flaps one.

  What a view of the Columbia today.

  Yeah.

  After takeoff checklist.

  After takeoff checklist complete.

  [Sound of chime.]

  Birds.

  Whoa.

  [Sound of thump.]

  Oh shit.

  Oh yeah.

  Uh oh.

  Sometimes you hear the pilots snap photos. Would you look at those Rockies. Or: photo of the FO clicking a photo of that fighter. Also, they swap jokes.

  Welcome to the George Herbert Walker Bush Intergalactical Airport.

  [Sound of laugh.]

  I can’t fly anymore. Free flights, if I wanted, but I can’t coax myself past security. I take trains.

  Mayday mayday mayday mayday.

  Caution, terrain terrain terrain.

  Too low. Terrain.

  Pull up. Terrain.

  We’re goin’ in the river.

  Say again, Jetblue?

  Pull up. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.

  The Oregonian featured the accident on the front page. I bought a copy at lunch. The girl’s on A3: Backup Singer Dies in Plane Crash. In the photo, she’s surrounded by honeycomb. Her hair’s the same colour. Yellow in the waxlight, how sun warms through a sheet of gold tack.

  Name: VERNON, Joy. Case #1734512, age: 19, race: white, sex: female.

  Cause of death: cerebral hypoxia

  due to: asphyxiation

  due to: aspiration of water into the air passages

  Manner of death: drowning

  In the autopsy photo, her eyes are open. Brown irises. Eyes like wood like warm like walnut. Report says sclerae clear. Report says ears pierced once each lobe and nose unremarkable.

  She sang back-up for Fiona Apple, says the newspaper. And LuAnne de Lesseps. She also released a single of her own, which you can purchase on iTunes for $1.29.

  My sister sang before she married. Christian pop, which her manager sold as gospel. We weren’t religious – our car wore a Darwin fish. But her manager said there was a market. He said, Praise radio will eat her up with double catsup and a side of fries.

  I never liked him. He wore T-shirts with milk stained down the front. Cheerios, he’d say. Sometimes it’s so hard to get them in the mouth.

  The new linguist started today. She’ll analyze the resonant frequencies of vocal tracts. F-values, she calls them. How we form words from the lips and the teeth and the tongue and the lungs. She combs her hair very smooth. I think she must use a bun-setter.

  I brought a coffee to her computer station to introduce myself. I said, “Well if it doesn’t work out here, I think the CIA is hiring.”

  She typed the rest of her sentence, then pointed to the small ceramic pig on her desk. It wore a Post-it. The Post-it said, Cunning linguist jokes: $1.

  She’s bright. But she knows she’s bright, which makes it less attractive. Still.

  We work in the basement where you don’t see the sun. You see: two computer monitors with equalizer waves; desks made from highly recyclable aluminum; ergonomic chairs, whirly. Our lab is fragrance-free and climate-controlled, volume-controlled, light-controlled. Plants cannot grow here. We keep a synthetic lemon tree by the vending machine.

  To isolate the voices on a CVR tape, you have to clear the extraneous noise in layers. The engine roar, the static. Like filing sand off a fossil, stratum by stratum. Blowing off the dust. Audio archaeology, let’s say. Let’s say Indiana Jones.

  I like to listen to routine take-offs and landings. The pilots sound like performance poets. I picture them crinkled over the control board in black berets, anemic fingers snapping, clasping espressos, eyes cast to the far corner, too cool for contact, for the stewardess with the pretzels and the can of V8.

  Flaps five.

  Flaps five.

  Flaps one.

  Flaps one.

  Flaps up.

  Say what?

  Flaps up.

  Flaps up.

  My sister toured once, ten years ago, after her junior year of high school. She hit the major towns on the Praise radio circuit. Lubbock, Texas, to Lynchburg, Virginia. Lynchburg, I had said when she showed me her itinerary. Lynchburg? She shrugged. They have the world’s largest evangelical university.

  The tour was eight weeks, to private Christian schools and rodeos. Her merch team sold chastity rings. She brought me home a mug that said TEAM JESUS and filled it with prayer jellybeans. Red for the blood you shed. Black for my sinful heart. Yellow for the Heaven above, and so on. I still have them. I think she meant it as a joke.

  She died in childbirth. A C-section that led to a blood clot that led to a stroke. We talked on the phone the night before. She told me they had painted the nursery yellow, which the decorator described as “String.” She said that yellow can be shrill; it’s hard to get yellow right. She said she got it right. She said, you know the colour of a wheel of lemon when you hold it to the sun? I said, perfect. Have you settled on a name? She said yes. Jaime. Because on paper it reads like j’aime.

  Jaime turned four last month. I talked to her on Skype. When she grins she thrusts her chin out like a goat. I can picture her in a garden this way, neck craned to the sun, as daylilies do, and sunflowers. Heliotropism, I think it’s called.

  After lunch, I found Joy Vernon’s single on YouTube. The song is called Delilah, the video shot at her father’s bee farm. She sings against a barn wall in a breezy shirtdress, and she picks her banjo. A low, pinging banjo, against that wall, and her voice is blue and dusky.

  Halfway through the video, I felt a brush at my elbow, and I turned to find April, the new linguist, behind me in her chair. She had wheeled it from her desk across the aisle. I shifted, and she rolled nearer.

  “She’s lovely, isn’t she?” she said when the video ended.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Could you play the song again?”

  I dragged back the play bar. We watched the video from the start. Bees in the wisteria. Joy’s hair in her eyes as she bows to see the strings.

  “Carrot slice?” said April. She had packed her lunch in a Japanese bento box. Everything compartmentalized. A slot for the chopsticks.

  “Thank you.” She passed a carrot into my palm. It looked carefully cut. On a diagonal, the edge serrated.
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  “I used to work in Homicide,” she said. “Voice ID from emergency phone calls, and so on.” We still faced the computer screen – Joy at the barn again, strumming the banjo between verses. “This one case, the vic was an opera singer.” She paused to snap her lunchbox. “I never liked opera. But after a week on the case, I ordered her recording of Evita online. I listened to the tracks over and over.”

  I nodded. The YouTube video had ended. April turned to me. Her cheeks looked worn somehow, smooth and unsunned, but as if the skin were pulled too tightly to her ears.

  She continued, “When you replay a voice in evidence for eight hours a day, you can almost know them. And when you catch a glimpse of their life before, you get immersed. I get immersed. In the knowing of them.”

  I stared at her.

  She looked down. “Unprofessional, I know.”

  When she raised her eyes, I was still staring. She held the eye contact. In that moment, I understood that she understood that I understood everything she said.

  I often see her at the vending machine. She never buys anything, but she slides her eyes over each item through the glass. I stopped once. When she noticed me, she turned toward the elevator. I said, “Too many choices?” and she smiled and waggled her lunch kit.

  You get into the habit of transcription: sound of Smarties dispensed from the machine, sound of Coke can, sound of leather soles on a vinyl floor. Sometimes you try to adjust the levels. At the crosswalk, when I race a yellow light. Sound of honk. At home, when the neighbours yell, and one of them unhooks the fire extinguisher. Sometimes my fingers stretch for the mouse.

  After work today, I returned to the newspaper stand and bought the last fifteen copies of The Oregonian. I don’t know why. But they were only one dollar each.

  For Jaime’s fourth birthday, I mailed an Easy-Bake Oven. She loved it. The cookie dough turns pink. She said to me on Skype, “This present is my number two favourite.” But I want to send a gift I didn’t find on this page of the Toys“R”Us flyer. Origami, maybe. Her mother loved origami. I have this Polaroid of her folding paper cranes – thirty of them, for her classmates on Valentine’s Day instead of cards or cinnamon hearts. Are four-year-olds into paper?

  My sister and I bought ants on television once. An entire colony, queen included. We converted our fish tank into a two-storey formicarium – poured plaster over a plastic wall, over the clay tunnels we had shaped with our palms. Plus leaves and sand. The leaves you call “forage,” plant material for grazing livestock, a term we adopted. Livestock. Can’t play soccer after school – have to check the herd.

  She sang for them. I played rhythm: chopsticks on an empty plastic jug. The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah. Work songs. You could watch them for hours, and sometimes we did. The entire colony shimmering through the chambers, a still black line, though every ant moved. Frames of celluloid projected on a screen, like a river, like blood cells. How motion can be static – it gets you thinking.

  When we spotted an ant too close to the cheesecloth, she would fetch petroleum jelly from the bathroom, and we fingered streaks of it around the lip of the aquarium. I told her they harvested vaseline from jellyfish. She said, Do not. I said, Do too, and smeared a daub of it into her bangs.

  We later experimented with radio and production speed. Which is to say, crawling. Which is to say, with speakers situated on either side of the formicarium. Do ants file faster to “The Imperial March” or ABBA? The study proved inconclusive.

  After a couple of months, the plaster moulded and ants found their way into the kitchen, into the paper sack of flour and the dried figs. My mother made me dump the tank in the park “at least two blocks from our house.” My sister started piano. She signed up for voice lessons twice a week with an Italian woman who sang off-Broadway. I took up coin collection. There was money in coins. Ha, ha.

  And they all go marching down.

  To the ground.

  To get out of the rain.

  A quick hello from your cockpit crew, this is Flight 166 with service to New York. We’ll be flying at 38,000 feet, mostly smooth, for four hours and fifteen minutes, takeoff to landing.

  I’ve heard the cabin safety announcement so often, I could probably be a flight attendant. In preparation for departure, please be certain your seat back is straightened and your tray table stowed. There are a total of eight exits on this aircraft: two door exits at the front of the aircraft, four window exits over the wings, and two door exits at the rear of the aircraft. To start the flow of oxygen, reach up and pull the mask toward you. Place the mask over your nose and mouth. Place the elastic band over your head. The plastic bag may not inflate.

  I have this shirt with a soundboard printed on the front. The caption says, I know what all these buttons do. I think a pilot could wear this shirt also.

  Today, April wears a wool sweater the colour of eggshells, the colour of string. She’s hennaed her hair very red. Poppy, I’d say. I’d say: hellzapoppin. I think she must attract hummingbirds.

  At break, I stopped behind her at the vending machine and watched her scan the items. I don’t even think she brought her wallet. I stood there for a full minute before I caught her staring at me through the glass. Then it was me who jumped.

  She turned. She said, “Go ahead, I’m not in line.”

  I said, “Me neither.”

  She shifted her eyes to the potted plant.

  “You know they’re scented?” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The lemons.”

  She drew her eyes up the tree to the yellow baubles of plastic fruit.

  “Real wood, too,” I continued. “We voted for it last year. They emailed options from a catalogue.”

  The elevator dinged open and one of the techs from Fifth Floor strolled out behind us. April stepped for the door. I stepped with her.

  “What were the other options?” she said.

  “Orange.” I walked inside the elevator and leaned against the far wall. “Banana. Bamboo.”

  “I would have voted bamboo.”

  The elevator opened at the main floor. I followed her through the lobby into the courtyard, an urban “greenspace” designed with white-slab cement, birch mulch, a stand of honey locusts, and a fountain.

  I said, “They described the lemon trees as evergreen.”

  She said, “Well. I don’t suppose they lose leaves.”

  We bought coffees from an espresso bar across the street and carried them back to the fountain – a rectangular pond like a wading pool, with a hunk of granite in the centre for the spout. In fact, I’d seen the fountain used as a wading pool a few times. And as a birdbath. And as a urinal. But such is public art.

  I offered her a piece of my croissant – one stuffed with chocolate, so what I said was, “Pain au chocolat?”

  She said, “No, thank you.”

  I sipped my coffee.

  She said, “I’m not supposed to have this, but you want to hear?” She outstretched her iPhone, the white wires of earbuds looped around her thumb.

  I nodded.

  “One of the survivors posted it on YouTube. I downloaded the video file before they took it down.”

  She offered me an earbud and plugged the second into her own ear. We bowed over the phone. I could feel the friction of the space between our foreheads. There’s a point where technology mimics the past. iPads like slates, like the Flintstones, like chisels. The iPhone felt divinatory – as though we should be bent over a bowl of water.

  She tapped the screen and opened the file. She pressed PLAY.

  Rain blew into the camera, diagonal sheets of it into the aluminum, into brown water. The camera jolted up and you could see people, their orange life vests, crowded onto the wing. The rear slides had extended. They floated uselessly, like boneless arms, or slapstick rubber chickens. What you could hear was shouting – passengers shouting to passengers in the water – Grab here – Grab my hand – passengers shouting to passengers to swim away �
�� Dive – Before – it goes – crew shouting to passengers to stop shouting. What you could hear was rain. Drumming into metal, into hard water, pinging off the life vests. And a continuous chime from the interior of the aircraft, ding ding ding, like your door’s open, like a friendly reminder before you leave the parking lot. And there, in the corner of the frame, you could see her treading water. She had floated the farthest from the wreck, her hair starfished out around her shoulders. She drifted farther from the plane with every paddle. Her mouth opened and closed, but not in communication, her eyes unfocused, or focused on a distance. She was singing. You could see she was singing.

  To fold a paper crane, your paper must be square. With sixteen newspapers and scissors from Reception, you can cut a lot of squares. I began with a lifestyles story on the 2002 Miss America. I pressed her face right in half. Then I folded the same line onto the reverse side, whitespace for an AT&T ad. I followed the dotted diagram from www.papercrane.org. I ignored the video how-tos and the photographs. For my sister, there was no such thing as Google.

  April found me at 8:30, after she cycled back to work for her phone. I had moved to the floor at this point, to the strips of paper I snipped from the squares. I stored the completed cranes in an emptied recycling box – fired them from where I sat, like paper planes. Paper cranes. Nose first into the box, or onto the surrounding carpet.

  When she saw me, she backed up, then stepped forward, then stood very still. “We used newspaper for my guinea pig,” she said. “You look like my guinea pig.”