Decline and Fall of Alternative Civilization Read online

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  The flight was full. Like a low note on a cathedral organ, timelessly growling through misplacings of faith, the plane lifted heavily up and through the cloud cover to rise above a vast mattress of melting ice cream. Sunlight angled toward a red shift, a little girl about five years old in the adjacent seat extended an arm to June's window, her finger bending on the plastic.

  "There's another airplane," she cried.

  "Huh?" June swallowed hard to clear her ears.

  "There's another airplane. See it?"

  "Where?" She looked and looked but didn't see anything.

  "Right there!" The finger still bent to the window. "It's a little black spot. Don't you see it?"

  "Uh?" All she saw was clouds, sky, hazy orange shadow. The little girl wore glasses as she did. Probably nearsighted as well. "Gosh. I guess I don't see it."

  "Oh, it's gone now."

  June wondered if the girl was playing games. As the plane had taxied, the tyke pulled down the tray in front of her, set her yarn-haired doll upon it, made motions of grooming and applying makeup. Before she could puzzle over it too hard-

  "There's another airplane!" The little arm once again bent the finger to the window. "It's right there. See it?"

  June scanned the air one more time, didn't see anything, thought about what W.C. Fields would do in this situation-

  "Don't you see it?"

  -then she saw it. "Yeah, I see it!"

  "It's a little white spot this time."

  Like a halved cigarette, it floated above the vanilla clouds miles away pushing in the opposite direction of theirs. Beyond it a confusion of deepening shadows edged the sharp blue yonder.

  The girl's mother in the aisle seat next to the child was amazed. An older sister in the seat directly behind the young one was equally stunned. She leaned forward and remarked, "You always see the planes! How are you so good at spotting them?"

  The little girl shrugged directly at June, said, "I don't know. I just look out the window."

  Huh. She just looked out the window.

  June plucked notes in a midnight takeoff, climbing for altitude, staring out the windows of thoughts that were unwilling to leave her alone. Truth was a voice singing over a major scale: "By their very nature, airplanes want to stay in the air. They do not want to go down."

  It was the mantra of the man who piloted the plane and kindly brought her on board, the last person among the many who had trusted her. Once, at a cocktail party during an argument about air safety and probabilities, she made a snappy comment that provoked laughs. He gravely silenced her with that statement. Their exchange burned with a truth not unlike Kitty Hawk itself. A human can walk through life neither confident nor trusting and, possessing intelligence, she can trust in that which she doesn't understand and live by emotions she doesn't trust. He understood his work as she understood hers, but his work was infused with a responsibility she had failed to comprehend until that moment. The pilot had to believe not only in himself, but in his own trust in that belief, and, by laying his hands on the controls, endow the aircraft with that trust-that faith-which the craft must then entrust back to him. It was on the puny wings of men like this that she must do her job.

  She still had a husband who gave enough reasons to be unfaithful herself, so why not end it? Take the hike, pitch the tent, shit in the woods. Why was she so damned stupid as to play ball yet expect him to make the first bunt? June didn't follow baseball anymore; it followed her. She occasionally picked up the sports section to peruse the league standings. An ill-advised quest, but?so how were the Cubs doing these days?

  Yeah, thought so.

  There's always next year.

  Funny.

  No, it wasn't.

  Love is never funny.

  Heartbreak isn't even that funny.

  Pain is the only thing that holds a sense of humor intact.

  At least there were the Cubs.

  And there would always be next year.

  Maybe she'd fly a green kite over Brooklyn or go back to working with cooks who did the dance of unruly card tricks. You can't account for every glance, for every time you look away from another's glance, or for every fleeting apology that is never voiced because it is overrun by another fleeting glance. The eyes confuse the mind for emotion, desire for denial, and never know if they're looking at the past or the future. They worry and glance into the present, always the present, and set up grievous mea culpas that join Real and Unreal like frail ladders between floors, spiders' strands dropping from leaf to grass.

  In the ever-widening baseball diamond the possibilities go on forever past the infield plays, beyond the outfield running, over the wall, and far past what the fans or bleacher bums think during the seventh-inning stretch. And feminist baseball, with its lofty pronouncements and latte-fueled anger, was subject to both the rules and whims of the game, much to the chagrin of the feminists. There had to be a Jacqueline Robinson to break the new barrier, whether or not there'd be a Ruth Barber to look on and report. Then the feminist leagues could get on to more important things like the rivalries, the rookies, the veterans, the balls, the strikes, the averages, the playoffs?the SERIES! This is what the feminists wanted, wasn't it? Or were they politically grandstanding like the men and the advertisers?

  June wanted to get up off the bench, walk out to the plate, hoist the bat above her shoulder, eye the pitcher, and play the game, dammit. She might strike out but she'd never get a piece of wood unless she started swinging. Eye of the needle questions that poked at a fabric with no time left for a stitch-not one in nine of an existence that was not worth the darning.

  All rise for the national anthem!

  "here's the windup and the pitch?swung on, strike one."

  This woman achieved a season record for starting pinch hitters last year and it looks like she's on her way to another one this year.

  "ball one, one and one the count."

  In addition to that pinch-hitting record she's earning a respectable record in the walk files.

  "low and inside. two and one."

  A few short years ago she was considered a sacrifice batter, just let her swing out or else walk her, but time is proving otherwise.

  "fast ball! three and one the count."

  It's interesting what goes through a batter's mind when she knows that a pitcher prefers to throw her slop, hoping to walk her or else ground her out.

  "fast ball. and it's a line drive to right field sending the second base runner to third and?holy moly! she's safe at first! with two outs in the bottom of the fifth and a chance for the home team to achieve a victory."

  There's times when the perennial pinch hitters almost get hailed as gladiatrixes. Baseball and common sense be damned. The spouse had crossed the foul line. He was playing for some other team, a scab player not worthy of a relief position, barely worth an easy strikeout.

  "so we saw the fifth inning draw to a close with two women on and a chance to take the lead from the visitors. a promising hit to shallow center but an easy out at first, turning that golden opportunity into the elusive opportunity. the score remains tied with no hits, no walks in a thus far quiet sixth as the side is retired."

  Now there were lights at Wrigley Field, the Mariners were being sold to a foreign country, and damned if there wasn't gonna be a strike soon. The players and the owners were making a bundle-they could afford to strike. A bundle. Enough for one rookie's salary to make 1919's payoff roll out like peanut butter. So let 'em strike. They still play the blues in Chicago, and Shoeless Joe Jackson probably had a wife who was equally unshod and just as unlucky.

  And it just goes ta show ya.

  "like the top of the sixth, we slept through the bottom of the inning. the top of the seventh saw a base hit, three routine pop-ups, and three routine outs. listen closely and you can probably hear the ivy growing."

  By the seventh-inning stretch love was no longer a requirement for marr
iage (something modern bleacher bums already knew), nor was this an unheard-of theory. Best-seller lists from Open Marriage onward bore testimony to it. She had read some of this psychological flotsam and emotional jetsam because it seemed a good way to grok what her humanities instructors were talking about but, ultimately, these pseudo-ruminations fell flat, and it didn't take long for her to lose interest in feminist dogma and wymyn who run with the wolfma.

  "thank god for charlene the peanut woman. at the close of the seventh inning it's good to have something other than the sound of beer cups being squashed in the aisles. we saw one more routine fly and two almost anticlimactic walks that gave up a perfect double play. maybe the words of the song should be changed:

  take me out to the ballgame

  where the ivy still grows with

  peanuts, bums, and crackerjacks,

  drunk beneath a sky of pale black."

  One day the waitress found a copy of Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb in a back booth after a lunch rush. The customer ate alone-a small salad, dry toast, glass of orange juice-left enough money to cover the bill and decent tip. She also left a sweater. The slim woman could have been a dancer but none would ever know. She never returned to claim the sweater or the book.

  There was another day when the rookie flight attendant printed a copy of her Nietzsche /Kant thesis (changing the title to Finnegans Flyer-by Joyce J. Jameson) and stuck it into the pocket facing seat 17F. It stayed there. Someone ripped a couple of pages out and it acquired a coffee stain that matched the bottom contour of a food tray. There was more interest in crappy in-flight movies and most of her friends had acquiesced to varying degrees of Oprah Inflammation-the American sickness that took getting ill before realizing there was an affliction. The popular media was insidious and the popular psyche was every bit its equal in vulnerability.

  There was a sucker born every minute; a con woman born twice as often.

  Ah, Pessimism.

  At best, an illusion aspired to be a dream, as the Statue of Liberty must have appeared to boatloads of broken immigrants. Standing in the ancient harbor, she seemed to be saluting them. That was the legend. The reality was that Lady Liberty had a speech impediment that did her dream to not be understood? Did her dream to not be debased into mere illusion? Could in not be the slave traders that in going about their business as usual were heard to speak many times "Trust me!" or does that accompany Se?or Columbus on the beach? Or were such trustings grumbled to the first night watchman by the snakes to precede the light of sticks burning? ?No o comprendemos?

  In Brooklyn, June and her husband lived within blocks of the site where, in the early 1960s, two airliners collided in midair and one of them plunged into the brownstones below.

  New York was poetic as it was ridiculous.

  The day:

  Belched up in the human spew from the irritated bowels of Manhattan, above was the roof of Grand Central Station's mouth.

  Ridiculous.

  She walked outside breathing up to the ridiculous gargoyles on the Chrysler Building. It was ridiculous for staring and she didn't stop staring and after a lot of staring, she was ridiculously walking Park Avenue all the way to Bowery and stopping halfway between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Staten Island Ferry.

  Ridiculous.

  It was no time to stop and no time to be so ridiculously, invisibly invisible.

  Trudging to Whitehall Terminal, to the next boat, climbing to the bridge deck, barely noticing planks and floorboards or the weight of updrifting menace. Spiraling inward to an abyss, growing to ridiculous heights. Who would want to tear down an old building?

  Marriage wasn't an old building.

  She wasn't King Kong scaling the Empire State or World Trade Center.

  Growing, vertigo, ridiculous.

  The ferry swept her past the statue and past again.

  The day:

  The boat swung back and again across the river, a pendulum marking infinitesimal fractions of eternity. The statue backfaded green toward gunmetal while nothing could be more invisible. She was tall as the statue, bigger than Kong.

  There in the day:

  In the falling certainty of everything they faced off, jealousy, rage, in the bottom of the ninth, she asked a question. The statue answered with a smirk, raised an indelicate finger from an upraised hand, the quake erupted into fire. All that was invisible and ridiculous exploded into gravity. A flash of cranky entropy and June was solid, June was small, and June was screaming across the greyness: "I can't understand a word you fucking say!"

  When the boat docked on the Manhattan side she walked back to Grand Central Station but didn't stare at anything.

  On the train ride back to Brooklyn, fluorescent lights cast shadowless illumination on things she couldn't help but see. An underground surgicenter where things lived and died between the bumpings of stops and starts, hidden from view. In the dark tunnels was a dull fortitude that scraped along spasms of steel nerves, carrying her weary, unimportant being onward like a misfired impulse shooting beneath the callused skin of a city that couldn't wait to open another sore; knife open another gaping wound. Pain was a luxury. If only she cared enough to throw herself upon the tracks-the ultimate deli slicer.

  Into extra innings. All tied up. It ain't over til it's over. Gotta go the distance. She was ready to throw the last pitch, shag the last fly, swing the final out. No chance the game would be called on account of darkness. Already, fate was lifting itself to the unrequited past. Like the adage about old pilots-old longings never die either. Unlike pilots, old longings do not have the grace to jettison away; they climb to a higher altitude where hope thins to bittersweet resignation. The ring slid off and was tossed away, there was no reason to look, to see where it landed. She remembered Wrigley Field from the Sheffield rooftop-a heroic emotion giving birth to the moonlight of a perfect Summer-and this green diamond would forever be her best friend.

  "you can probably see the ivy growing

  under a blue chicago moon."