The Middle Seat

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:09:10 -0700

You notice the old woman immediately. Perhaps it’s because her styled hair and the lavender-framed reading glasses whose frames perfectly match her sweater remind you of your favorite great-aunt Pearl, the one who always pinned a cloth lilac into her white curls, even in winter. Or perhaps it’s because, among the businesspeople and vacationers standing in the aisle and forcing their wheeled suitcases and large shopping bags into overhead bins, she carries only a small leather pocketbook, which she clutches tightly against her body. She waits.
You watch her pull her ticket envelope from the pocketbook, glance at the paper front, and peer at the posted seat numbers. Grasping the armrest and seatback, she lowers herself gently into 12D. Hers is the aisle seat opposite your row, where you are nestled alone into the window seat, re-braiding your long hair. Your possessions have already spread out around you, the hairbrush pulled out of your canvas bag and nestled in the folds of your tossed jacket. You feel confident claiming the middle seat because the boarding area was not crowded, which you take as a sign that the flight will also be sparsely populated.
You are grateful for the space. You’ve flown twice already on this trip, first to Boston, then from Philly to Atlanta, and both flights were packed, leaving you wishing you could take the gate agent up on her offer of a free ticket in exchange for your cramped middle seat. Both times you had a performance scheduled that night and couldn’t spare the requisite hours. This was disappointing, although you’re not quite so strapped for cash as you were before you put together this string of East Coast gigs, your first independent tour away from the Northwest.
Crashing on friends’ sofas in new cities has been somewhat of a role reversal for you. You’re used to being the one to take care of people, the one with stray dancers and musicians and teenagers on your extra futon, the one making big pots of spaghetti or black beans and welcoming people in. In just three weeks, you’ve pushed that life from the front of your mind, walked around each city as if it were home. You’ve treated acquaintances like old friends.
You’ve also tried push away the memory of breaking off your relationship with Bryan. You try not to let yourself think about blues dancing spontaneously with him in the park while it was drizzling, the t-shirt clad abdomen on which you loved to rest your head and smell his scent, or the things he’d surreptitiously draw with markers on your roll of toilet paper ––urea molecules, or once a dog peeing on a fire hydrant–– in lieu of leaving love notes, because he knew you’d like this better. You’ve found yourself dodging the lingering voice of your mother telling you that you’re too independent and picky for your own good, and that if you’re not careful, you’ll just end up alone and regretful. When your mother says this, you tell her she sounds like one of the old blues songs you play and sing, and you start making up lyrics about no-good women and lonely men until she gets the point and laughs with you. Inside, of course, you fear she’s right.
The aisle procession slows to a trickle. There is a woman in a striped suit, talking on her cell phone as she pulls a suitcase smoothly between the rows, deftly preventing it from catching on any seat edges or passengers’ knees. A frequent flyer, you decide. You watch the old woman across the aisle again. She puts away her reading glasses and moves her pocketbook to the seat next to her, then reconsiders and places the pocketbook back on her lap. She smoothes the creases of her khaki pants with her hands. You hope she gets to keep the seat next to her, even if it’s only a pocketbook she wants to keep there.
But a man and woman have stopped between your rows, looking first at your vacant seats and then at the old woman’s. The man is tall and wide and his wife is visibly pregnant. You look back and count at least a dozen empty rows, hoping the couple will decide to switch to seats other than their assigned ones. But, no, they’re motioning to the elderly woman that their tickets are for seats E and F. She gets up, holding onto the cushioned seatback once again, and they settle in.
After a few moments, the pregnant woman has to go to the bathroom and you watch as the elderly woman stands up. You unbuckle your seat belt and step towards the aisle. Touching her arm, you tell her in a low voice that there are so many empty rows, you’re sure she could sit wherever she wants if she’d rather not have to get up again.
She looks toward the back of the plane, and then at you. “Would you mind if I sit with you?” she asks. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
Of course you wouldn’t mind, you tell her, although you avoid pointing out that you might have to pee too. Maybe you can just hold it. Still, you ask, wouldn’t she prefer a whole row to herself? She could have one if she wants; there are so many.
She looks toward the back of the plane and clutches the seatback slightly, then looks hesitantly at you again. You slide back into your row and she sits down in the aisle seat, placing her pocketbook next to the belongings you’ve tossed into the middle seat.
The voice on the loudspeaker interrupts a faint instrumental rendition of a Beatles song. As you listen to announcements about closing the cabin doors, estimated flight times and expected turbulence, you notice the old woman smoothing her pants again. She pulls an embroidered handkerchief out of her pocketbook, unfolds it, looks at it, and refolds it. She clutches it tightly.
You glance at her face to see if she’s out of her comfort zone or merely a nervous person. Her expression of politely guarded fear carries none of the familiarity of someone accustomed to anxiety.
As the plane rolls backward, she breathes in and closes her eyes. Gently, you place a hand on her arm and say, “Excuse me, you don’t fly very much do you?”
She shakes her head. “I haven’t flown in thirty years.” She hesitates. “I didn’t suppose it would be obvious.”
You tell her that it isn’t obvious, that you just have a sense about people. You reassure her that you fly all the time, that this is your third flight this month, and that these days it’s actually safer to fly than drive. It’s a statistic your mother’s always cited and you’ve never wanted to question it, at least not while airborne. “Also,” you add, “everything he said about the turbulence and stuff is totally normal. They say that every flight..”
She thanks you. She explains that she wouldn’t have flown this time either, except that her son, who had moved out to Oregon and would otherwise come to visit her, is sick. “He has diabetes now,” she explains, pronouncing it diabet-iss, “and some other things besides. He’s having a rough spell so I’m coming to him.”
You think that maybe this is where you’re supposed to say something like, “Well, bless your heart,” except it would sound so unnatural coming out of your mouth. You smile.
She tells you more about her son, her eyes darting periodically to the window as the plane moves along the tarmac. The flight attendant stops by your seat and asks you to remove your things from the middle seat for take-off. You place your possessions and the woman’s pocketbook in the space under the seat in front of your row.
You think about your great-aunt Pearl, about the time she confided to you that she hated when anyone offered her assistance. You remember how embarrassed she was when she fell that time outside the supermarket, because strangers had stopped to help her and call an ambulance, then spoke to the paramedics as if she weren’t present and lucid. How she’d taken to pushing her red shopping cart around the city sometimes, because it helped her avoid using a walker. How highly she’d prized her independence, her carefully-chosen clothes, and her mind so sharp nobody in the family could beat her at the crossword puzzle.
Remembering this, you debate internally the right thing to do. Hoping this woman won’t think you sound patronizing, you carefully ask, “Would it help if maybe you… Would you like to hold my hand?”
She turns her pale blue eyes to meet yours fully. “Well, that’s a very sweet offer. I was only thinking how much I wanted to ask something like that but I…” she trails off. “I’m sorry, I haven’t asked your name.”
You tell her it’s Shuli. Hers is Margaret.
You hold your hand out along the middle seat. Margaret places her hand into it. You feel her rings, her bony fingers, and her soft, fragile skin. She holds tightly to your hand and you watch her shoulders relax.
As the plane speeds up for take-off, you begin telling her that everything is normal. You repeat this once you’re airborne, when the pilot dips the plane’s left wing sharply to turn.
She remarks that your fingers are so long but thin, like hers. Strong, too; musician’s fingers. She asks if you play music.
You’re impressed, and tell her that you do, that you’re just coming home from a tour of the East Coast where you performed vocal and piano jazz and blues with local musicians and bands at dance venues in eight cities. Margaret takes the top of your hand with her other hand and tells you, smiling, that she had a feeling you were a pianist. She plays piano too, mostly Chopin and Bach, and says that her piano is her favorite company on the days when her house feels too quiet.
She doesn’t care much for the blues, but adores all the “old songs” as she calls the jazz standards. You both love Gershwin: “Nice Work If You Can Get it,” “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” and “Someone To Watch Over Me,” which is her favorite, although you’ve never felt like it sounded right in your voice. And Cole Porter! She seems genuinely surprised that someone young loves this music so much. You think of the hundreds of friends and acquaintances you have along both coasts who dance to swing and blues, sometimes three or more nights a week. You invite her to the gig you have in Portland tomorrow night before you head home to Seattle, and you promise to put her on the guest list. She thanks you, but she’s leaving right from the airport to her son’s house in Eastern Oregon.
The captain announces that you’ve reached cruising altitude. You gently ask Margaret if you can have your hand back, as long as she’s feeling better now.
“Well okay,” she tells you, “but I might just have to borrow it again for the landing.”
You bring your belongings and her pocketbook up from the floor and place them on the middle seat. You root around in your bag to find the energy bar for which you paid too much in the airport. You wonder why its flavor combination of peanut butter and green tea extract sounded good to you this morning.
Margaret pulls two small packets wrapped in wax paper out of a plastic bag in her pocketbook. She glances at your energy bar and says, “Shuli, may I offer you a turkey sandwich? I packed myself a spare, just in case I got stuck in the airport like those people you see on the news from time to time. I’m glad to see that didn’t happen.”
You gratefully accept the sandwich and put the energy bar away. As you take small bites, you realize you’d forgotten about the delightful, slippery feel and comforting scent of waxed paper against sliced sandwich bread.
Margaret comments that your name is unusual, but very pretty. You explain that it’s short for Shulamit, a popular Israeli Jewish name, and that your father is Israeli. You’re used to curiosity about your name, although your mother’s voice inside you can’t help wondering if this older woman will suddenly reveal herself to be anti-Semitic, and regret holding your hand. But no, she’s telling you about the lovely Jewish family on her block.
She asks if you have a boyfriend and you tell her about Bryan, about deciding that, at twenty-six, you aren’t ready to get serious with him, even though your mother was thrilled that he was a biologist, and you were thrilled that he could dance. You admit your decision scares you.
Margaret touches your hand again for only a moment. “Shuli, believe me; you’ve got your head on straight.” She grins, conspiratorially. “I’ll tell you, my mother had fits because I waited until I was twenty-seven to marry Donald. Believe me, w hen we were young, that was something. But you know, if I’d married him when he first asked, as much as I’d have liked the security, I’d have felt like I was still a girl, just a married girl. Or maybe even a widowed girl, because he asked me just before he went to fight in the war and you never knew what would happen. I felt badly for him, going over there without my promise, of course, but he was very kind and he wanted what was right for me.” She takes a bite of her turkey sandwich and chews thoughtfully. You play with the waxed paper on yours.
“So, I went to school and I worked. I found that music and work could keep me company, and that I liked my own company. I was what people today call an independent woman, although believe you me, my mother had other names for me. But when Donald came home and we got reacquainted, well, I was finally becoming someone who, shall we say, knew who she was. Before that, I don’t think I could have told you what my favorite color was, let alone what I thought about anything.”
You’re guessing her favorite color is lavender, but you don’t ask. You miss your great-aunt Pearl. You miss Bryan.
The flight passes quickly. At one point, you hit turbulence and hold your hand out for Margaret, who grasps it, but the turbulence lasts only a moment. You smile at each other. She returns to her magazine, and you gaze back out the window at the patchwork of farms, the flat pioneer states you’ve never seen up close.
When the captain announces that he’ll begin the final descent into the Portland area, the clouds outside your window are too thick for you to see the landscape below, although you’ve gotten a nice peek at some of the Cascade Mountains poking out above the whiteness. You move your bag and coat and Margaret’s purse back to the floor under the seat.
Margaret says, “May I borrow that hand back again?” You rest your open palm on the middle seat, while using your other hand to rummage through your bag on the floor, searching for the scarf you’ll want once the plane lands.
You feel something on the hand Margaret is touching. You look over and realize Margaret is sliding a ring onto your finger. It is a thin gold band with a tiny diamond solitaire. You have no idea what to say.
“I can’t… Wait…”
“Now, don’t you worry, I’m not proposing to you,” she says, laughing. “But I want you to have this. You’ve been so sweet.”
“That’s a diamond ring,” you manage. “I can’t possibly take that.”
“Oh don’t be silly, Shuli. I have dozens of rings at home. Please take it. I don’t need it. Who else would I give it to? I have boys, no daughters, no granddaughters.”
You hold your hand closer to your face, looking at the ring. It’s the sort you once imagined Bryan giving you, simple and lovely. And here you are, on your flight of independence, wearing a ring with no expectations attached. It is lightweight. It feels like yours.
“Thank you,” you finally say.
“Well, I’ll be needing that hand back now, if it’s alright.” You give her your hand again.
The descent is smooth, although Margaret still catches her breath when the plane banks or loses altitude quickly. You remember hating the landing when you were a girl and flying was not yet familiar. It seemed so easy for the plane to hit the ground wrong.
You tell her what’s coming next. Circling the airport. Positioning for the final approach.
She laughs. “I feel so spoiled. Don’t you just wish you could always have someone narrate what’s about to happen, so you feel a bit more prepared?”
“Absolutely,” you agree. And how.
But you know, and you know she knows, that your hand is far more of a comfort than your words. Human touch, by assuring us that we are loved, paradoxically makes us comfortable with independence. You feel Margaret’s hand in yours, and your own diamond ring on your finger. And you know, whatever comes next, that you are prepared to land.

Lost Slippers

Mon, 6 Oct 2008 09:36:16 -0700

Although she knows she can’t afford it, Adele hails a cab. The B and C trains are delayed, and it would take so long to get home, especially with a moody child still unaccustomed to the subway. She follows Max onto the backseat, the vinyl sticking to her legs in the unforgiving heat. She reminds him to buckle his seatbelt, and tells the white-haired driver their address in Queens. He pulls out onto Central Park West as Max glances back at the apartment building with a doorman and an elevator. Their small building in Queens has neither.
Max has been quiet these first two weeks in New York. Their house in Oregon had three bedrooms, a huge living room, a yard. Max’s room in the sparsely-furnished apartment in East Elmhurst is slightly bigger than his twin bed. The air smells like plane fuel. At night he can hear the elevated train. He hates the elevated train.
Adele has been staying up late, drinking stale coffee and working on her résumé. Her references are three thousand miles away. She wonders if her experience from years of seeing Michael, Max’s father, through low-level depression counts as having professional expertise with mental illness.
Adele has promised Max pizza, explaining that New York is famous for its pizza. Max talks about his favorite toppings, but she knows he’s thinking of home. He liked to secret away pizza scraps to sneak across the fence to the neighbor’s yellow dog, who would spit out green peppers but eat everything else. Max misses the yellow dog, and he misses his father.
Adele had convinced Max to go to a birthday party today, the party of an acquaintance’s seven-year-old son. When she picked him up from the apartment, thirteen blocks from where she grew up, Max was sitting on a couch, watching other kids play a video game. A barely-touched plate of cake sat at his feet.
Now, as they sit in the cab at the light, a group of Orthodox young men cross the street. Irreligious a Jew as she is, Adele feels suddenly like she’s living where she belongs again, culturally speaking.
Max blurts out, “I liked the elevator buttons.”
“Did you like the elevator? Maybe we’ll have one someday.”
“They didn’t have a number 13. That’s dumb. If I had an elevator, I’d have a number 13.”
The cab moves forward. Adele lowers the window, enjoying the slight breeze. Max plays with his shoelace.
She tells him, “I know life here’s not perfect, but we’re going to have to be patient and I promise, we’ll get to have good things.”
“Like elevators.”
“Like elevators. And all the pizza we can eat. And a job for me.” She looks out the window.
Max picks up a paper shopping bag from the taxi floor. “What’s this?”
Adele shuts off her reflexive terrorism fears and examines the bag. She pulls out a shoebox and opens it. It contains red high heels, thin strapped-ones made of nice leather..
“It’s the ruby slippers!” Max has been into The Wizard of Oz for a few years now. They dressed him as the Tin Man last Halloween, daubing his grinning face with silver paint. Adele has carefully avoided unpacking the DVD, with its message that there’s no place like home.
“Hey, I think another passenger left a bag behind,” she tells the white-haired driver, sliding the box back into the shopping bag. He looks into the rear-view mirror.
“Hang on.” He stops at another light and turns his deeply-lined face toward them. He smiles and his eyes crinkle warmly. “Okay, show me.” He has a slight Eastern European accent, possibly Russian.
She lifts the bag so he can see it through the clear barrier. “Ah! That’s what I thought. It was the lady an hour ago in Midtown.” He looks at his watch. “Half an hour ago.”
The light changes. He navigates around cars and bicycles. After a block he says, “Listen, I’ll make you an offer. I don’t like someone to lose a belonging in my taxi. I know precisely where I dropped her. She was joining someone for a meeting over lunch. If you aren’t in a hurry, I’ll stop the meter and we’ll try to catch her there. Then, I’ll take you home, no charge. Acceptable?” Adele is in no hurry to get to the apartment, and no charge sounds appealing. She agrees.
She strokes Max’s hair. “We’re going to go bring the lady her lost shoes. A little less Wizard of Oz, a little more Cinderella.” Their Portland friends, eager to see Max freed from any constrictive gender norms, had bought the boy a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and a set of Disney DVDs. The Wizard of Oz DVD had been a gift from Michael’s mother.
“Like Cinderella’s slipper,” Max agrees. “Wait, Mom, except how will we find her if we have both of them? It has to match, remember?”
“This man knows what Cinderella looks like,” Adele reassures Max. “She’s been in his cab.”
Max is impressed. The driver chimes in that indeed, he knows the story of Cinderella very well. With a crinkled-eye smile in the rear-view mirror to Adele, he tells Max that Cinderella usually lives in a castle in Russia and is an extremely successful business woman.
Adele tells the driver that her grandfather was also from Russia. “No kidding,” he says.
He looks a bit like Adele’s grandfather as she remembers him, the bushy eyebrows and wide, pronounced wide cheekbones. She remember how intently her grandfather would listen whenever she told him that something was troubling her at school, which was often. She feels an ache she knows well.
Alexander says he’s retired. He was a historian. He isn’t driving cabs for the money, he doesn’t need that. But after his wife died, he missed having people to talk to. He wandered here and there, did a little writing. Then, after a few years, he became a cab driver on a whim, and got used to it. It’s the best way, he insists, to keep his mind active in retirement. “It’s not just the drivers, though boy do they keep you alert.” He gestures with his thumb to the next lane, as though implicating the black Mercedes passing him. “But, you want to talk to the most interesting people in the world? You drive New Yorkers around, I’m telling you.”
“And Cinderella.” Max is still listening.
“You bet,” Alexander agrees, “And Cinderella. You get to drive a lot of Cinderellas.”
They drive a few more blocks. As the cab approaches Columbus Circle, Max asks, “Why do they call them slippers in fairy tales when they’re shoes? Because slippers are soft, like Daddy’s bedroom slippers.”
Adele explains that slipper is also an old-fashioned word for a woman’s small, delicate shoe, although she knows that wasn’t the real question. Max used to put on his father’s size 13 fuzzy slippers and slide around the house, making his parents laugh.
Alexander maneuvers the cab to double-park outside a diner. “We’ll wait here a moment. You see how this red Mitsubishi’s parked? A parking job like that, they’ll be back any second.” Sure enough, a woman runs out to the Mitsubishi and vacates the space, into which Alexander deftly squeezes the taxi.
Max insists on meeting Cinderella, so they all head to the diner. There’s a large street fair nearby. “I think the Armenians have a booth at this one,” Alexander tells Adele. “A nice street fair. Decent. Don’t miss any street fair put on by a church’s old women. If there’s a saint in the name of the street fair, you won’t believe the good things to eat.”
They enter the diner. Alexander spots the well-dressed woman, who does a double-take when he waves. Alexander gestures for Max to deliver the shoes. Adele watches Max say something to the woman, who smiles and mouths, “Thank you!” to Alexander. Adele guesses Max asked if the woman is Cinderella.
After squeezing through the door past customers, Adele looks at the crowd outside. She squeezes Max’s hand. “Do you want to see the street fair?”
She offers to take the subway home, but Alexander shrugs and says his shift is almost over. If they don’t mind, he’ll accompany them. “You kept your end of the bargain; I keep mine. Besides, those Armenian ladies make lahmajoun that’s out of this world.”
Sweat-inducing heat radiates from the pavement, but the mood is upbeat. Like in their neighborhood in Queens, the passersby come from myriad cultures. Max looks around. She lets go of his hand and lets him walk alone, but close.
Alexander says quietly, “The boy doesn’t love New York yet.”
“No, he’s a deer in headlights. Subway headlights. I grew up here, but seeing it through his eyes is something else.” She thinks of her grandfather, arriving from Russia as a boy.
“If I may ask, where is his father?”
Adele sighs. “He’s in Oregon. We broke it off.”
“I see. My daughter, she also left her husband, a long time ago. He hurt her and the child terribly.”
“It wasn’t like that with Michael. He had depression though, and after a while I felt like his therapist, not his partner.” Alexander’s accent is so close to her grandfather’s.
Max watches some musicians play steel drums, and Adele and Alexander watch him. Alexander says, “He looks like my daughter’s child. My grandson.”
Adele looks at him. His tone has shifted slightly.
“They both were killed, unfortunately.” Adele murmurs her shock and condolences. She wonders silently whether the deaths were related to the violent husband.
Alexander reads this in her expression and quickly explains, “It was simply an automobile accident. Not even a drunk driver. Some idiot who didn’t know how to drive.” He shrugs. “I wish I could have protected her. I’d like to have driven her home that day.”
Amid the rhythmic clanging of the steel drums, Max looks up at Adele. She thinks, Michael would like this music. They’ll call Michael tonight.
Across from the musicians, Alexander is beckoning Adele and Max toward a food booth. His smiling expression is back, although Adele now sees something sad behind the crinkles next to his eyes.
They join Alexander. At this booth, with streamlined and quick movements, old women from the Armenian church are dishing out thin, tortilla-like breads baked with a fragrant, browned-meat topping. “Lahmajoun,” a women in a blue apron tells Adele, while squeezing lemon onto a steaming bread, rolling it up, and handing it to a customer. This, Adele thinks, they didn’t have in Oregon.
Adele is about to pay for three, but Alexander has her beat. “Your welcome to New York,” he says.
Max is looking skeptically at the lahmajoun. The woman in the blue apron smiles. “You ever had lahmajoun? This is my grandson’s favorite snack.”
“What is it?” Max asks, more to Adele than the woman.
The woman doesn’t miss a beat. “It’s a pizza,” she says, “A really super tasty meat pizza. From Armenia. You want yours cut like a pizza or rolled like a tube?” Max wants his cut like a pizza. The woman obliges, deftly slicing it into four triangles and stacking them on paper, while Adele silently thanks any listening Armenian saint for the wisdom of this woman’s choice of analogy.
It works. Max loves the lahmajoun, eating all four quarters.
While Alexander and Max look at knock-off t-shirts, Adele slips back to the lahmajoun booth. Keeping an eye on her son, she quickly gives the woman money for two large frozen packages of lahmajoun.
The ride home is quiet except for the radio, which Alexander keeps on 1010 WINS, listening for traffic updates and snippets of news. Adele thinks about her grandfather, and about Alexander’s lost family.
As they cross the Queensborough Bridge, Adele points out Roosevelt Island. Portland had bridges, but New York’s are larger, more dramatic. Max presses against the window, watching the Roosevelt Island tram above his head. She thinks of the tram in Portland, and wonder if he is remembering it too.
As they turn on Northern Boulevard, she tells Max, “I promise we’ll still have real pizza. New York pizza.”
“Can we eat it on the tram?”
“We’ll see.”
“Or on the train? Or a cab.”
“I thought you didn’t like trains.”
Max shrugs. I don’t know. Maybe with pizza I’d like them.”
They drive through her neighborhood, which Alexander navigates expertly. He pulls in front of her building and smiles. “Delivered safely,” he says.
He gets out the cab to say goodbye. Adele gives him the second package of lahmajoun and thanks him. His eyes crinkle into a smile, and he shakes her hand and touches the boy’s cheek before getting back into the cab.
As Adele and Max start to leave, Max turns and asks Alexander through the open window, “Wait, if Cinderella lives in a castle in Russia, how come she’s here?”
Alexander shrugs. “What can I tell you? She’s sick of Russia. She prefers New York. She likes the people. She likes the pizza.” With another shrug, he drives away.
The elevated train screeches a few blocks away. Adele unlocks the front door, and together she and Max climb the stairs home.

Remembrance

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:32:48 -0700

In eight decades of living, Rose had learned the interlinked arts of waiting and watching. In the last few years in particular, since her husband had passed away and her own health problems had increased, Rose’s hours alone in doctors’ offices afforded her added patience and observation skills, growing increasingly fine-tuned as she sat reading facial expressions and listening to how families communicate with unspoken thoughts between their words. At eighty, Rose knew that to watch is to remain in the present rather than get lost in the past, in better times or in regrets, as she felt so many people her age did. Rose had learned to strike a balance; she’d observe people’s actions, wonder about their lives, and connect them in her mind to experiences and characters from her past. When her children or grandchildren came to visit her in Los Angeles, she’d accompany them to a museum or beach, find a bench to sit on, and tell them, “Go and enjoy yourselves. I’ll have fun here.” She’d often carry in her handbag a section of The New York Times or a magazine, in whose words she’d get absorbed when the volume of passerby decreased.

Rose sat in her mechanic’s waiting room, wishing she’d thought to bring the copy of The New Yorker she’d been reading so she could have finished the article on the doctors in Sudan. Instead, she passed over the waiting room options – Time, Sports Illustrated and Highlights for Children. She politely refused the mechanic’s offer of a cup of water, and waited.

Looking to occupy the time until her car was ready, she gradually began watching the gentleman opposite her, not so directly as to feel like she was staring, but with interest. Elderly and poised, dressed in slacks and a neatly ironed polo shirt, he was seated very upright in his chair, tapping a forefinger to his lips as he read a book – a rather large one. It occurred to Rose that reading such a large book seemed increasingly rare, and she felt regretful. Rose belonged to a book club, and read both her assigned book and at least two other books every month. If she heard a book review on NPR that sounded particularly interesting, she wrote down the title and author. Sometimes she heard the information wrong, and called her adult granddaughter, who would use the Internet to identify the exact book. “I don’t want to bother your mother,” Rose would explain, “and you’re so good at finding things.” Rose also hoped her granddaughter would read some of these same books, and would not become part of this generation so lost in the Internet that they thought a newspaper was a computer screen image you clicked on, rather than something that you folded and refolded over your breakfast, as you methodically learned about the world.

The gentleman pulled a small pencil from his pocket and noted something in the margin of a page, before turning it.

Rose spoke. “Excuse me, but I happened to notice your book, and I’m curious what it is.”

The gentleman smiled and folded the book closed, showing Rose the cover. “It’s Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past,” he explained. “Have you read it?”

Rose was delighted. “You know, as it happens, I haven’t yet picked up Proust, although I’d like to. As a matter of fact, my daughter went to live in Paris when she was young and through with college, and she just adored his writing. What do you think of it, if I may ask?”

“So far, Mrs –-“

“You can just call me Rose.”

“Rose. Arthur.”

“A pleasure to meet you.”

“Rose, I’m not through with it, and it’s going to take me a long time. The whole work is actually seven volumes. But so far, I’m enjoying it very much. He really gets across both how childhood feels to a child and how it feels to reflect on childhood as an adult.”

“If I remember, is this the one about the croissant he dips in his tea, and then he happens to remember the past?” Rose pronounced the “r” in croissant, having long since accepted that the French her daughter learned to speak mellifluously is harder for her own tongue, bred in Brooklyn on the sounds of English and Yiddish.

“Yes, that’s it, although it was a madeleine that he bit into rather than a croissant. That’s the one your daughter enjoyed?”

“Yes. You know, I’m surprised at myself that I’ve never gotten around to reading Proust. Somewhere I even still have the letters my daughter wrote me from Paris, including one she wrote about reading that book. You know, I don’t save much; I’ll throw out something if I haven’t used it in a year, but I’ve saved every letter my children and grandchildren have ever written me. Nobody seems to write letters anymore, only emails.”

“Everything worthwhile finds its way back eventually. One of these days all the kids will discover letter writing and go around saying they invented it.”

“I hope so.” Rose was thrilled to hear someone agree with her and yet present an optimistic counterpoint. It had been a long time since she’d talked with someone new who seemed so intelligent and reflective.

“If your daughter read Remembrance when she was young, I wonder whether she could really appreciate it. At my age, it seems like I’m finally just starting to grasp the picture of what it means to remember.”

“Well, yes.” Rose sighed.

“It’s as though you have to build up some experience before you start really coming to an understanding of what it means to remember. You have to get a full picture to see where in the picture your memories fit. Of course at the same time, as luck would have it, you’re starting to forget things.” He relaxed back in his chair and shrugged.

“But, you know,” Rose pointed out, “you get a lot of practice remembering when you’re young. You don’t have as big a picture; I agree with you there. It’s a different, how shall I say, a different breed of memory. I remember when my grandchildren were young they loved to remember things aloud. They’d always say, ‘Grandma, remember the time we went to the beach and tried frozen yogurt?’ But you know, I remember everything I’ve ever read.”

“So you also like to read?” he asked, setting aside Remembrance.

“I’ve always loved to read. But, that’s how our generation was raised, of course. I happen to belong to a very interesting book club, and it’s not just old people, either. I like to be around people of all ages, and I always go away learning something. Although some of them,” she shrugged, “how shall I say – I think they miss the point of some of these books.” She thought about a book her book club had read, an autobiography of a childhood spent during Israel’s early years. She instinctively did not mention this example to Arthur; while she felt thrilled to pass the time talking with an intelligent stranger, she was cautious from having spent a lifetime witnessing and experiencing the complex fluctuations and permutations of anti-Semitism and sentiments over Israel. Still, she was so excited to be having such an interesting conversation about reading that she couldn’t help hoping her mechanic would take longer than usual.

“What do you enjoy reading?” Arthur asked.

“Oh, I enjoy everything. I read the New York Times every day. I’m interested in politics, literature, history, science; all sorts of things.” Rose thought about an article she’d read recently, about how people with damage to a particular part of the brain are incapable of feeling regret. She was trying to remember the name of the part of the brain; the something-or-other cortex, starting with an O, she thought, but didn’t want to broach the article with Arthur if she couldn’t remember the name. It had been such an interesting article too, and had left Rose imagining what it would be like to go through life without experiencing regret; it seemed strangely tantalizing. With a daughter who did research on brains, Rose tried to read every article related to neuroscience she could find. She decided to bring up an article she did remember, an interesting piece about the amygdala, the fear center of the brain. Rose was fascinated that there was a whole part of the brain reserved for fear, ready to take control at any moment.

The mechanic opened the door of the waiting area to tell Rose that her car was ready.

Rose stopped thinking about the amygdala, remembering instead that the last time the mechanic worked on her car, the mechanic had left a large piece of paper on the driver’s side floor, presumably to keep the floor carpets clean while he sat in the driver’s seat. She’d been nervous that she was going to slip on the paper while getting in or out of the car.

“Excuse me, do you mind double checking to make certain you’ve taken that piece of paper off the driver’s side floor? I only ask because it was left there the last time and…”

“Not a problem, ma’am. We’ll take a look.”

Arthur stood up. “It was very nice meeting you, Rose. Thank you for helping me pass the time so enjoyably.”

She turned. “Likewise. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the Proust.” She lingered a moment, then followed the mechanic out into the shop, paid for her oil change, and drove away in her paper-free car. She thought about what she needed to pick up from the supermarket on her way home, what she might make for dinner tonight, and what to bake for her book club next week. She did not think about meeting Arthur.

Only later that night, in the mid-evening quiet after dinner, after C-Span failed to hold her interest, and after finishing the last section of the newspaper and a cup of tea, did Rose think of the conversation. She looked around her quiet apartment. It had been a treat to have intelligent conversation with someone new. Perhaps she should have asked for his phone number or offered to invite him to her book club. It had been so many years since she had had someone to talk to regularly about literature and current events.

Even before her husband had died, in the years he’d spent falling further into dementia, Rose’s reflections and insights had moved from an external dialogue to more and more of an internal one. The times she’d comment to her husband on a piece in the newspaper became less frequent, until she noticed how uncommon they’d become and started doing it on purpose. Still, she feared she was doing it for the sake of past conversations, as though keeping a shadow of such experiences alive let her hold onto them. So she’d start conversations with him about politics and books, articles and conversations she’d had at the farmers’ market, sharing some anecdotes and reflections with him, before moving the dialogue to her own head. She continued keeping this routine of one-sided discussions until he was gone. The list of all the words they’d ever exchanged was now finite, a completed work, with some pages lost to memory. Numbered remembrances are bittersweet.

She stood up and put her teacup in the dishwasher, poured in the detergent, and pressed the start button. She hated leaving anything dirty in the dishwasher overnight, even if there were just a few things in there. Her grandchildren were fond of saying that she should conserve water, but she couldn’t bring herself to let anything dirty sit.

Leaving the kitchen, she paused and looked at the seder plate sitting on display in her cabinet of dishes, and thought about Passover, which would arrive in only a month. She thought about how small seders had become over the years, usually herself, her sister, and her brother-in-law. Each year as they said, “Let us remember and never forget,” Rose thought about how much they remembered, and how far away memories seemed sometimes. She missed the larger family seders back in New York, when her children lived close and her grandchildren were still so small, young enough to be excited about asking the Four Questions and searching for the hidden afikomen. Now everyone was scattered around the country, her grandchildren were adults, and Passover seders were small.

She looked at the time – only 8:40. Too late to call her daughter on the East Coast and ask what the name of that cortex was that houses feelings of regret, but early enough to call her granddaughter up in Seattle. Maybe her granddaughter would come for Passover.

Rose dialed her granddaughter.

Her granddaughter answered with a cheerful “Hi Grandma!” Rose could hear wind in the background; she still hadn’t gotten used to the idea of caller ID, nor the fact that her granddaughter, who owned only a cell phone, could answer the phone anywhere.

“You’re not driving, are you?”

“No. How are you doing?” 
“Oh, I’m fine.” Rose chatted with her granddaughter about whatever came to her mind, asked questions about her granddaughter’s boyfriend and job, and mentioned the latest book from her book club. “You haven’t read it, have you?” she asked.

“Nope. What’s the name? I’ll write it down.”

Rose retrieved her copy of the book and spelled out the author’s name and the title. “I think you’ll enjoy it,” she said. “You haven’t by any chance read that last one I sent you yet, have you?”

“Uh, not yet.”

“Well, pick it up and give it a few pages. You’d really enjoy it. You know, speaking of books, I was down at my mechanic today and there was this chap reading a book – a really enormous book. And I thought, you know, it’s just a shame you just never see people reading really large books anymore.”

“Except Harry Potter,” her granddaughter commented.

“Oh. Well I don’t know about Harry Potter, but in any event, I was waiting for my oil change to be done so I ended up talking to this chap about his book, which turned out to be Marcel Proust’s, oh what is the name, Remembering Things in the Past. Has your mother ever given it to you?”

“Nope. Isn’t that the one with the madeleine?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve always meant to read it. Most of what I’ve read in French was in high school, and we never got to that. Of course now my French is so bad I don’t think I could do it, but it would feel like cheating to read it in English.”

“Well, I didn’t ask this chap if he was reading it in English or in French, I suppose, but we had a very interesting conversation. And you know how the people in my book club are, well… It was just, how shall I say, a nice change to have someone to talk to who really had something to say. And I thought, ‘Dummy! Why didn’t you say something? You could have asked for his phone number. You could have said something.’ But I didn’t.”

“Was he hot?” her granddaughter was the only relative Rose let tease her.

Rose laughed. “That’s not what I was looking for. But it would just be nice to have someone to talk to. It gets quiet sometimes down here.”

“Well, maybe you’ll see him again, next time you’re there. How regularly do you get your oil changed? Maybe you’re on the same schedule.”

Rose sighed. “It’s not a big deal, I just got a little frustrated with myself.”

“Well, you know you can call me anytime. And I owe you a visit. But I know it’s not the same.”

Rose remembered why she called. “What are your plans for Passover this year?”

Her granddaughter paused. “My roommates and I have been planning a seder here. But I could be tempted to come down there. Maybe I could do a first night seder here and fly down for the second night? I’d have to check with work.”

“Well, think about it. Let’s see. It would be nice to have you here. We could go up to that frozen yogurt place we went to, up at the beach. Remember that time? When you played ski ball?”

“Is frozen yogurt even kosher for Passover? And do they even have frozen yogurt places anymore?”

“Oh, who knows. Well, I hope you can come. Your aunt and uncle would love to see you.”

They talked a few minutes more and then said goodnight. Perhaps her granddaughter would come, Rose thought. Perhaps they would remember together the seders from years ago, and they would cook together. Rose would make her special sponge cake, the one her husband had always loved to eat with strawberries. Rose would be able to watch her granddaughter, to see how her granddaughter is really doing, to understand the unspoken realities one can only tell from observation. Perhaps.

She sighed, shut off the dining room lights, and walked to the living room. The apartment was quiet and still. She lingered by her bookshelf and looked at the titles. Tucked slightly back in the P section was a copy of the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. Her daughter must have given it to her years ago, with the hopes that she’d read it.

Rose took the book from the shelf and held it. Marcel Proust. The old paper smelled of longing and memories, but it was clear the book had never been opened.

Slowly, Rose walked to her sofa, bent to turn on the lamp, sat down, and began to read.

Brillig

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:46:35 -0700

Every day at four o’clock, Ethan gets up from his desk, walks a block and a half to a coffee shop, considers the posted chalkboard of beverage options for a few moments, and orders a latte. A tall, double soy latte, although he is not vegan. If there are any small, ginger-almond cookies left in the jar, he buys a small, ginger-almond cookie. He leaves his change in the tip jar, and walks back to office for another hour and a half of work.
Ethan’s job title is Website Developer, but his job hasn’t involved any actual development in over a year. Policies and procedural bureaucracy prevent him from making any substantial or creative changes to the existing website, so his time is spent with tasks like making routine updates to the company calendar and employee contact information, monitoring the site’s traffic, and checking to make sure links aren’t dead. He used to hope for more to do, perhaps a chance to add a few new pages, or try out new designs. He’s been told his last proposal, from seven months ago, is still under consideration by a management committee. Now, daily, he makes necessary updates, tests links, attends mandatory meetings, and responds politely to hallway small talk. He sits in his undecorated cubicle, and, between tasks, he emails a few friends, makes evening plans, and checks news websites. Finding it easier than deciding each day when to get a latte, Ethan sets a recurring appointment on his calendar marked “latte.” In the final stretch of the day, at four o’clock, when his computer beeps and shows the word “latte,” he gets up from his desk in his windowless cubicle and goes outside.
Previously more attentive to traffic, Ethan has lately gotten into trouble a few times crossing the street to the coffee shop. He has gotten hit by a bicycle he somehow didn’t see, and had to jump back from an approaching car. The car only registered in his consciousness when its front bumper was inches from his legs. He jumped back. The car paused and then drove on. Its backside displayed a bumper sticker Ethan would love: “There are only 10 kinds of people: Those who understand binary and those who don't.” Ethan didn’t notice.
Today, a Wednesday, Ethan is surprised to discover that the weather is warmer and sunnier than he’d expected. Having finished most of his work for the day, he slows down, looking around at the steep block between First and Second Avenue. There is an alley next to a red brick building with a stone inscription reading 1904 at its base. As he walks, Ethan taps his hand on a iron railing running next to the building.
Looking down past the railing, he notices for the first time that this building contains a daylight basement office. The rows of cubicles are visible through a few windows just below street level. He wonders briefly whether a societal increase in cubicle-bound jobs is having any detrimental effect on the human ability to interact. He notices that the cubicles in these daylight basement offices are somewhat less tidy than those he is used to at work. There is a profusion of plants, and he remembers discovering that the all plants in his workplace are fake. The desk chair closest to the window is empty, left holding a small, carelessly-tossed white cardigan by an inhabitant who, he can’t help imagining, is in a meeting somewhere in an air conditioned conference room, wishing she had her sweater.
Remembering his latte mission, Ethan is about to turn away when he notices something else in the window by the unoccupied desk. There is a yellow sticky note posted in the window. He crouches down to get a better look. It bears a single word: brillig.
Brillig. Ethan can’t remember why that word sounds familiar and yet like nonsense. He wishes the woman were at her desk.
He contents himself with walking slowly the rest of the way to the coffee shop, breathing in the warm air. He watches a bike messenger zip by and wonders whether he’d prefer that job to his own. He waits for the light to change, crosses the street, walks half a block more to the coffee shop, holding the door for a woman whom he thinks looks sad. Today, the coffee shop is out of ginger-almond cookies, but instead of going away with only his latte, Ethan decides to try a pistachio-cherry biscotti. It is delicious.
By Thursday morning, Ethan has forgotten all about brillig. He had intended to Google it, but instead went back to his desk, polished a Powerpoint presentation for a meeting later in the week, and left early. Today, he is caught up in a whirlwind of routine activity; there is the meeting at which he must present on the website, to which no significant changes have been made. There is a new co-worker with whom he is to meet. There are six new events to add to the calendar, and a broken link to fix.
His four o’clock calendar reminder catches him by surprise, the word “latte” appearing on his screen with a beep and an image of an alarm bell. Feeling sluggish, he is eager for caffeine. The weather is cooler and cloudy, but he still feels good to be outside. On the way up the hill, he suddenly remembers the previous day’s experience and glances down at the basement window to see if the note is still there.
At first it appears to be, but as Ethan leans down he realizes it is a different note. This time, it simply says: and. Ethan is intrigued. Why on earth, he wonders, would someone write “and” on a sticky note and put it in the window? Today, there is still no one at the desk closest to the window and there is no sweater left behind.
Remembering that he has work to do, he rushes up the hill to the coffee shop, stares at the beverage menu while the woman ahead of him orders her chai, and requests his latte with one ginger-almond cookie, to go, please. Latte and cookie in hand, he rushes back down the hill, glancing down at the window only long enough to confirm that the note does say “and” and to notice that the desk chair is now occupied by a woman with short, blonde hair who faces away from the window toward her computer. He continues down the hill, wondering if perhaps her name is Brillig, which sounds like an Irish girl’s name, now that he thinks of it. Perhaps tomorrow, he imagines, the note will say Fred or whatever the name of her beloved might be. Perhaps the day after that it will say 4Ever, or something similarly cloying. He goes back to work.
Friday morning, Ethan realizes still has not Googled brillig. And so, rather than waiting until his latte break, Ethan takes a detour from his usual bus route and walks down the hill to work, pausing by the red brick building. Looking down into the window, he sees the woman at her desk and a new yellow note. It reads: the.
His theory about saccharine declarations of love is fairly well squelched, unless the blonde’s beloved goes by “the Beast” or some such fairy tale name. He looks at the back of her head for clues, but she is typing into spreadsheets and does not turn around. Not wanting to feel like a stalker, he moves on.
At his desk, before checking on any of his day’s work, he opens up Google and types in “brillig.” The first page that comes up displays the National Debt Clock, and he wonders whether her work has to do with economics or some sort of financial field. Still, the page barely uses the word “brillig” and so he clicks the back arrow. The next entry is for an Australian band; he wonders if she might be a fan, and whether the band is any good. He checks the third entry and feels a little foolish. Of course. “Jabberwocky.” Twas brillig and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe / All mimsy were the borogoves / And the mome raths outgabe. This is it: brillig… and… the… She is posting the words of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking Glass, daily, one by one, on yellow sticky notes, in a daylight basement window at which it is unlikely will ever look.
It is clear that this woman is nuts, or perhaps terrifically bored, but he can’t help liking the project anyway. It’s going to take her a long time. He wonders if she’ll give up.
A literature buff and math geek in high school, Ethan had even made his way through Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice, enjoying Gardner’s analytical perspective on Carroll’s children’s stories. And then, getting lost in a sea of other books, he’d forgotten most of what he’d read. He remembers now that the words of “Jabberwocky” are nonsense, but that Lewis Carroll had particular meanings for each of them.
A bit more online browsing reveals that “brillig” means “Four o’clock in the afternoon, or the time when you might begin broiling things for dinner.” He thinks about how four o’clock is the time that each day he takes his daily latte break. Smiling, he clicks on his Outlook calendar and selects the recurring event scheduled for 4:00 each day. He clicks on the option to modify all occurrences and changes the event from “latte” to “brillig.” He resolves to visit the window each day, as long as she can keep her project up. It would be wrong, he feels, for someone to go to such trouble and for nobody to stop and notice.
Ethan keeps his pledge. Each weekday, when his computer beeps and displays the reminder “brillig,” he leaves his desk. On his way for his latte, he stops at the iron railing and reads the sticky note invariably affixed to the window. He has figured out that the notes are only posted on weekdays: “slithy… toves… did… gyre… and…” (weekend) “gimble… in… the… wabes. All…” (weekend) “mimsy… were… the.. borogoves…” and so forth.
Even though Ethan knows what the notes will say, he continues his ritual of bearing witness. He has also begun looking around him whenever he remembers to do so, wondering what other little serendipities he might be missing. There is a rope swing on a sycamore tree in his neighborhood. Small, blue glass tiles embedded in concrete on a traffic island. Trees he’d never noticed planted on top of a building near his office. He looks at strangers and wonders where they’re going and if they work in cubicles. He notices an elderly man in a grey, tweed cap who also always seems to be out for a walk near the coffee shop each day at four o’clock. The man is always smiling.
Over four weeks have passed and the woman has never made eye contact with Ethan. She is often away from her desk at four o’clock. When she is there, she is facing her computer rather than the window. He wonders how it is possible that the same woman who, indirectly, has been teaching him to look around vigilantly, so as not to miss anything, could, herself, miss his daily pilgrimages to the window.
“And… the… mome… mome…” The same note appears two days in a row. She is not at her desk and her computer is off. The next day, she is back and there are two notes in the window: raths and outgabe. Ethan figures she was sick, but resists the idea of affixing a note to her window, saying, “Hope you’re feeling better.” It seems a bit too far to reach.
He calculates how long it will take her. Thirty-three weeks, give or take a bit when you factor in holidays. It is spring now and she won’t even finish until November. What will she do if she takes vacation time? Will her workplace get a temp? Will the temp replace the words?
Ethan starts carrying a camera. He now takes not only latte breaks at brillig but takes actual lunch breaks away from his desk, during which he walks and takes pictures of whatever he finds. A waterfall, tucked away in a tiny downtown park. A sandwich, left abandoned in a gutter. A little girl in red shoes, chasing seagulls by the ferry terminal. He never photographs the window with the notes.
Summertime weather comes early. The notes keep appearing. “So… rested… (weekend) he… by… the Tumtum… tree… (weekend) and…” He stands outside the window, on his brillig break, thinking. She is not at her desk. He feels this has gone on too long without any interaction, but interaction is not an option today. He turns and heads for the coffee shop.
At the door, he lets a sad-looking woman with blonde hair pass. He goes in to order his drink, when it dawns on him this woman’s hair was short like the brillig girl’s. He outside to check but she is already gone. He goes back inside and orders a chai, just to try something new.
“Stood… awhile… in…” He has not told any of his friends about the phenomenon. She is the only one with whom he can share this experience, yet his pursuit is not romantic in nature. He does not daydream of hearing her call out, “Come to my arms, my beamish boy!” But he has to talk to her about brillig, somehow.
In his dream that night, he is in a forest. He is trying to find his way to the coffee shop, but he’s lost. He wants to stop and notice all the forest’s details, but each time he tries to concentrate on a rock or a mossy tree, it fades out of his vision, ungraspable by sight. A voice booms out, “AND, HAST THOU SLAIN THE JABBERWOCK?” He wakes up, sweating.
The next morning, he heads to work nearly two hours early, arriving downtown at 7:15 am. He checks her window before heading to his office. The note still says in, the previous day’s word. He hurries down the block and around the corner, into his office building, upstairs and to his cubicle. He rips open a fresh pad of yellow sticky notes, pulls off one and, with a black permanent marker, writes THOUGHT. He writes it on the sticky side. He tosses the marker and notepad back onto his desk and runs back down the stairs and out the door, up the block to her window. Without hesitation, he leans as far as he can over the railing, and affixes the note to her window, so she will be able to read it from the inside. His heart is pounding as he hurries back down the hill to work.
He bounces between tasks and email all day, never focusing on any project for more than a few minutes. When his brillig alarm goes off he moves out the door slower then usual, feeling like a student about to find out a grade on a particularly grueling test. He walks up the hill. He passes the elderly man in the tweed cap, and crosses the alley to the building with the iron railing.
His note is still there, as is hers for the day, also thought. He looks down and sees that she has rearranged her cubicle. She now faces toward the wall below the window, and she has moved her computer. He crouches down on the edge of the pavement, leaning against a lower iron bar on the railing. He waits.
She is engaged in her work, but eventually seems to notice the time and start to get up. She looks up as she does so, and sits back in her chair, seeing the man crouching at the railing. Ethan takes a small step back, waves, points at the note he’s left and waves again. She takes this in, looks at the note, looks back at Ethan, and waves. She smiles and shrugs. She is the same woman from the coffee shop. She does not head out for her break.
Acknowledgement becomes part of the daily ritual. He comes by at four o’clock –– brillig –– and looks at the latest note. He waits until she looks up. He waves. She waves. He goes to the coffee shop. She does not go.
He has memorized the poem by now but is still on time each day for the next installment, as though it were a new episode of a favorite TV show. When the Jabberwock finally appears, “Jabberwock… with… (weekend) eyes… of… flame,… Came… ” he is thrilled. Soon the Jabberwock will be slain.
Ethan is still taking photographs. He makes a website of his favorite pictures, and calls it See Brillig. He sends the site to friends. Soon his friends and a few strangers are sending him their own pictures of whatever they notice serendipitously. He posts everything. A condo windowsill, piled high with stuffed armadillos, all looking outside. Tiny, bronze statues of dancing women, just above most people’s sightline. A stalk of corn growing in an abandoned lot. A sliver of moon. A contented, fat, grey-haired man with a contented fat, grey cat, sitting in a lawn chair at the edge of a rural airport, watching airplanes. A tattoo of tiny piano keys across the nape of a woman’s neck, framed by her dark green blouse and short, messy black hair. Ethan monitors his website traffic, and smiles.
“Burbled… as… it… came” Ethan buys a sketch pad with thick pages, some pencils, and a set of watercolors. He has not touched watercolors in years, not since he was a teenager and felt a gnawing fear that watercolors were not something a teenage boy wanted to be caught using. Now, he makes sketches and paintings of his favorite photographs. A spoon bearing Elvis Presley’s face. A bunch of blue and white delphiniums peeking out of a plastic, green garbage bin. A ceramic teacup left on the curb.
Late summer has arrived. The Jabberwock has been slain. It is the weekend, the last days before the triumphant stanza: “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? / Come to my arms, my beamish boy! / Oh frabjous day, Callooh Callay! / He chortled in his joy.” These words repeat in Ethan’s head. He envies the boy in the poem, whose accomplishment was witnessed and celebrated by someone else. Now that the poem has reached its peak, he wants to thank the girl.
He takes out his old copy of The Annotated Alice, finding the original illustration by John Tenniel. He is surprised that all this time he has not paused to look at the illustration. The boy bends backwards with the weight of the sword, ready to face the beast with his own vorpal blade. The beast itself is truly, endearingly hideous. The Jabberwock bears four enormous teeth in its oval mouth, and holds aloft claws bigger than its own head, nearly bigger than the boy. The Jabberwocky is staring ferociously not at the boy, but at the viewer of the illustration.
Ethan takes his watercolors, sketchpad and pencils to the park. He sits on a bench. There, after watching the water and the ducks, the kayakers and the twirling leaves, he paints her the Jabberwocky.
On Monday, Ethan is early to work. He races through his responsibilities, but makes himself wait until brillig. When the alarm beeps, he pushes away from his desk, holding the rolled-up illustration and a small tape dispenser. He races up the hill and, unwilling to stop himself, cries out the lines, “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy!” The elderly man notices Ethan, stops and grins broadly.
Ethan continues, galloping up the block, “Oh frabjous day, callooh…” and stops. He has reached her window and looked down, eager to see the celebratory “And.” There is nothing. Nothing is affixed to the window. Nothing is at her desk. Her cubicle is cleaned out. She is gone.
He stares. He sits down on the sidewalk, searching down at her desk for some sign of occupancy. He glances around to make sure he’s really on the right block. He notices the elderly man watching him. He is still holding onto his painting of the Jabberwocky. He unrolls it and looks at it. It’s really not bad. And yet.
Ethan looks back down toward the woman’s empty desk one more time. He rolls up the painting and slowly walks back down the hill. As he passes by the gentle eyes of the elderly man, Ethan thinks he hears the man murmuring faintly, "…callay! / He chortled in his joy. / ‘Twas brillig and…”
Ethan returns to his cubicle. He sits in his chair and takes a deep breath. She will never finish the poem, not in that window anyway. He will never again see the yellow sticky notes in her window. He has no idea what has happened to her, if she quit her job, if she was fired, if some terrible accident happened. Whatever the circumstance, the ritual is over.
Ethan unrolls the drawing he is still holding. He stands up and hangs his Jabberwock on the outside of his cubicle, neither remembering nor caring whether decorations on the outside of a cubicle violate any company policy. Looking around his desk, he notices the pad of sticky notes and the marker he had tossed to a corner of his desk so many verses ago. He picks up the pad, takes the marker, hesitates, and writes “’Twas” on the top note. He affixes this note to the cubicle wall next to the Jabberwock. He sits down in his desk chair, faces his computer and goes back to work.  

The Aurora Chasers

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:13:50 -0700

Experts agree on this much: A display of aurora borealis found in the nighttime skies of the lower forty-eight may be more beautiful than a proper pastrami sandwich found outside New York City, but it is nearly as elusive. This does not stop devotees of both auroras and pastrami sandwiches from restless and relentless pursuits of their respective beloved. Whether geomagnetic or carnivorous in nature, it is a truth –– yes, Miss Austen –– universally acknowledged that we are driven to pursue objects of desires that appear slightly beyond our reach.
This tendency, Anna has thought, may explain why human beings are so drawn to the sun and to the nighttime sky, full of celestial bodies that are the most remote occupants of our visual field. We gaze deliciously and safely on what we cannot have.
Anna, at present, is more of a pastrami-chaser than an aurora-chaser, though, if asked, she wouldn’t consider the likelihood high that she will experience either, now that life has brought her from her native Manhattan to the damp and void-of-good-deli world of Seattle. No matter. It’s better to crave something and not have it than to taste it for certain and realize it’s not really what you wanted. She tells herself this quietly, but not so quietly that the sun doesn’t hear. The sun laughs gently and strokes Anna’s hair.
Make no mistake: the sun, allegedly the source of all things regular and reliable, knows all about breaking out of patterns and developing irregularities. The sun may be a hub of attraction and stability but it has all sorts of flukes: sunspots, coronal holes, magnetic storms.
It doesn’t just send out sunlight. When some charged particles break free from its gravity, they frolic briskly outward into the universe as solar winds. These solar winds can be playful as they travel toward Earth, or wherever their final destination may be. They may swoop past our planet without causing even the socks on the atmospheric clothesline to quiver, or they might take over the sky with vibrant displays of aurora borealis (aurora australis in the southern hemisphere), causing human beings and tall trees to catch their collective breath. Transient tag signs of solar energy and awe, palpitations of irreverence, auroras remind us that the sun is not opposed to delighting in the unexpected, or creating it.
With auroras, the sun takes center stage, even at night.
It is a god of mixed messages and extraordinary phenomena. It revels in the devotion of sunbathers and aurora chasers, patiently feeds plants and plant-eaters, and keeps us moving in ellipses on our paths of familiarity, repetition, and growth. It gives us freckles. It gives us life. Let there be light.

The sun is not out. This is a shame, since it has labored to send light over 90 million miles only to have a good portion of that light rejected by Seattle’s fickle March clouds. From the sun’s perspective, it looks like the people are not out, having chosen to stay huddled under that greyish-white blanket again, which, Anna is starting to think, doesn’t actually sound like a bad idea. She is having doubts about whether being out in the drizzle, headed to a rally against the war, a rally that will be witnessed only by other coffee-drinking, anti-war Seattleites, and not the Bush administration, is really the best use of her Saturday morning. She’s starting to wish she were still curled under a warm, grey blanket on her bed, being witnessed only by a warm, yellow cat who has somewhat less political clout than a politician and is significantly less earnest than an activist. Anna doesn’t look up at the clouds and notice their artistic effort to replicate her blanket’s shades of grey, nor does she look for the sun. Like most Seattleites, she’s learned to ignore the idea of the sun when she can’t see it. The sun doesn’t mind, since Seattleites more than make up for this tendency by gushing over any sudden sliver of blue sky as a “sun break.”
Anna wonders whether she has remembered to feed the cat, and if she can justify this uncertainty as an excuse to turn around. (Worry not, dear reader; the cat has been fed. It is fast asleep on top of the blanket, blissfully far from rain or anti-war protests. It is pondering whether it’s true that, contrary to popular belief, Jane Austen actually never once used the term “dear reader” in her writing (it is) and whether she misses you, the reader (she does). Or perhaps it is thinking of mice.)
The anti-war protests were inspiring at first, drawing large crowds and giving Anna a boost of hope and momentum. She has grown increasingly apathetic. She suspects that she has acquired more detriment to her spirits from the ineffectiveness of the protests than she has gained buoyancy from what has now become a predictable experience of chants in the rain, speeches, and vigils with candles whose flames inevitably get rained out.
Anna reaches Westlake Center and watches. People mill about handing out colorful flyers, or stand holding lattes and signs. A grey-haired man wearing a skirt hands Anna a quarter-page red flyer about socialism. Anna receives it reflexively, too late to say “No, thank you.” An attractive woman in blue with dark, short hair and chai-colored skin smiles at Anna, causing Anna to glance away, blushing. The speaker from the Seattle City Council is distorted by a poor sound system, and each word becomes lost to Anna’s memory seconds after it is uttered.
“Somehow I don’t see the City Council ending the war in Iraq.”
Anna looks to see a man in his twenties with a bicycle. He is standing on her left and definitely addressing her. He is taller than she, and wearing a grey and black helmet. His rolled-up pants defy the cool weather and show the legs of someone whose bike is rarely resting in the garage. His eyes are dark and playful. Anna thinks she doesn’t notice these details. She is putting on her public facial expression.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re with us, but their stance seems irrelevant,” he adds.
“Yeah... it is a little depressing. Kind of a reminder that this is too small scale to matter.” She is relieved to say it out loud. She uses her right hand to de-tangle some ends of her heavy, dark-chocolate hair.
“Absolutely. Yeah, were looking kind of skeptical.” Anna wonders if he’s flirting, which usually makes her feel on guard, as if this is junior high school, and he’s another boy who has been dared to ask out the girl with big glasses and too much brown hair.
She looks at him.
He takes this as a request for an explanation. “Did you read Winnie the Pooh when you were a kid?”
“Um, yeah. Why?”
“Remember that part where Eeyore loses his tail and Rabbit finds it?”
“Ooh, careful what you say about Eeyore.” Eeyore is her favorite Milne character.
He holds up his hands, balancing his bike against his body, and insists, “Don’t worry; I hold him in the highest regard. But you kind of looked like you were channeling one of those illustrations of Eeyore dubiously checking out the spot where his tail should be.” His expression is serious but his eyes tease her.
Anna is not used to other adults talking about children’s literature, much less intuiting that she knows much about it. But she has noticed something in the sound of his “Don’t worry.” At the risk of admitting too much in common and getting tricked into a date, she changes the subject. “We’re both from New York, by the way.”  He grins. “How could you tell?”
“The way you said ‘don’t worry.’” The cadences gave you away.
“That’s awesome. People can’t usually tell. Okay, so where’d you go to high school?”
She tells him, and they play the name game awkwardly and unsuccessfully for a few minutes. They go through the motions of expatriate New Yorkers, comparing where in Seattle to find mediocre bagels, tolerable pizza, and the pastrami she occasionally lets slide by her more pescetarian tendencies. The game is less about locating the foods locally than it is about expressing dissatisfaction with diaspora imitations. She lets a lull happen, and looks the other direction, back across the crowds. The woman she’d admired is gone, and Anna feels the familiar comfort of regret.
“I’m Noah, by the way.”
She looks back. “Anna. Hi.”
He looks at her. She blinks. He says, “Do you have a pen?”
Anna has one in her jacket pocket and has handed it to him before she’s thought to lie. He takes it, gently dislodges the red flyer from the fingers of her left hand, where she has been crumpling its corner, and writes his name and email address. He hands the paper back to her. Noah Bernstein. She realizes he’s Jewish too. She doesn’t say anything about this other trait in common, doesn’t want to be someone’s Nice Jewish Girl.
He says, “Send me an email sometime, if you want to get, you know, lousy bagels.” She nods. He looks up and says, “Hey, look; a sun break!” before smiling and riding away. She raises her head and notices the faint strip of blue in the sky.
She doesn’t throw away the paper but has no intention of emailing him. She is certain he’s now down the street having the same conversation with a different woman. She has no idea that Noah Bernstein has never in his life had the guts to give a strange woman his email address.
Now, Miss Austen would like this to be a love story, but the reality is that Anna is probably not ready for love, whether with men, with women, with sunspots, or with anyone else. Jane smiles when she hears that, but then again Jane has yet to see what Anna did to the geranium she received from the woman she had a crush on a year ago. She was ecstatic to receive it, thrilled to have it live intimately in her house, leaves gorgeously releasing the regurgitated oxygen of her crush-recipient’s breath. She stole sidelong, self-indulgent glances at it resting on the kitchen windowsill among her sunlit blue glass bottles while she stood at the stove scrambling eggs. But plants, unlike cats, do not meow for their supper. Only every month or so did she notice, while gazing lovingly at the geranium and stirring the eggs, that the leaves were getting tiny, dry, and sparse, and remember that geraniums benefit from occasional drinks of water.
It had never even occurred to her to ask the woman out.

The sun can give us all the ingredients for aurora borealis, but Earth has to be receptive in order to close the deal. The sun may send the queen of all solar flares, but if the sky is clouded, the likelihood of eager human beings, tail-less donkeys or tall trees seeing the auroras is limited. The sun’s coronal holes may blow messages to us along a solar wind stream, but if our magnetic field is not receptive, the skies will remain quiet. Even if auroras appear, only the aurora chasers in time zones where it is dark and clear during the window of opportunity will get the pleasure of auroral company. Harmony and timing are essential catalysts.
The sun can be a tease too. Its sunspots may hurl aurora dust tantalizingly the wrong way, sending it off into the galaxy rather than aiming it directly at Earth, two-day priority mail.
Sometimes the skies clear. The magnetic field is tilted just so. The solar flare is sent on a direct flight to Earth, with no plan to change planes in the outskirts of the solar system. Sky watchers are awake and poised in dark, open spaces awaiting the sun like a lover. On those nights, the aurora chasers are captivated as the skies dance and dance.

It wasn’t Rabbit. It was Pooh. Anna wakes with a start in the middle of the night. Her moment of awareness is as intense as the suddenly clear night sky outside the window by her bed. Noah Bernstein was wrong. Rabbit does not find Eeyore’s lost tail. She fidgets under her blanket for a while, sending the cat scurrying to the floor. Eventually, she gets out of bed, turns on the light, retrieves her worn-out hardback of Winnie the Pooh and confirms the correction. The rest of her sleep is fitful, while faintly green light and shadows dance across her face.
In the morning, she has forgotten all this. Avoiding the clouds and rain that have returned, she is cleaning out the pockets of yesterday’s jeans and preparing to do laundry, when she finds the red paper with Noah Bernstein’s email address. The correction floods back. She perches on the edge of her desk, moving aside a stack of black poster board from a forgotten art project. She is certain that a respect for accuracy and a love of children’s literature is all that is occupying her thoughts. It wasn’t Rabbit. It wasn’t Rabbit. She knows this will stop bothering her only if she tells him. Ten minutes pass before she opens her laptop, and launches her email. It’s important to her not to sound too charming or interesting, lest he actually want to respond to her email. She edits her message six times before sending:
Noah –
This is Anna, a woman you met yesterday. I had brown hair and you said something to me about Eeyore. I’m writing because it occurred to me that it wasn’t Rabbit who found Eeyore’s tail. It was Pooh. He found it at Owl’s house, where Owl was unwittingly using it as a doorbell. Anyway, I wanted to email you while I still remembered because I figured you’d want to know. Not that it matters, I guess.
-Anna
She assembles and loads her laundry, notices and actually waters her geranium, and crawls back onto her bed with her laptop. She browses websites of The New York Times and Seattle Times, glad to have the distracting topic of children’s literature off her mind.
The news of the war is discouraging. Four GI’s were killed in a roadside bomb. An attack in a market left dozens of Iraqi civilians dead. Costs are soaring. American companies, profiteering. The president is optimistic. She feels herself sinking and clicks to another site.
An article in the Seattle Times catches her eye. It is about the aurora borealis, or northern lights. The article says that the aurora borealis was visible over Seattle last night during a break in the clouds.
Anna reads on. She has never understood what the northern lights were, exactly, but has always felt drawn to the idea of seeing them, intensified by a fear that, as with so many things, her life will pass by without the opportunity. She stares at the picture of bright green waves and spirals in the sky above the Space Needle and Elliott Bay. She Googles “aurora borealis” and is rewarded with over a million hits, some for sites displaying pictures of what looks like glowing, spilled paint feathering the nighttime sky.
On spaceweather.com, she reads that the previous night’s auroras were caused by an enormous solar flare, an X-class one, whatever that means. She learns that solar flares are what happen when sunspots – magnetic blemishes on the sun – erupt. A sunspot having an orgasm. She reads that auroras can occur not only when Earth basks in the protons of a solar flare but also when Earth’s sails catch the sun’s gustier winds or even when our planet’s own magnetic field hiccups in just the right way.
She scrolls through pictures from last night’s auroras witnessed all over the world: green, purple and red swirls above an array of nighttime landscapes. She’d always thought auroras were restricted pretty much to Alaska and the North Pole, but when she realizes the previous night’s geomagnetic storm caused the skies to light up as far south as Arizona and Texas, she knows she has to see auroras herself, and that she will make it happen.
His email back is titled, Good Morning. If it is a good morning. Which I doubt. She recognizes the Eeyore quotation and can’t help the feeling of a smile if not exactly the muscle movement of one. She reads:

Anna –
“Not that it matters, I guess” you say? Could there BE a sentiment more worthy of Eeyore? Excellent. And yes, after I’d ridden away, I realized my error and was mortified. Nice to meet someone else who still takes the anthropomorphized inhabitants of children’s classics seriously.
If you’re still online, will you come have bagels with me for lunch? If there’s anything more worthy of an Eeyore’s pessimism than the value of protests during this political time, it’s the quality of bagels during this epicurean time.
-Noah

Still thinking about the aurora borealis, and wanting to tell someone about it, she hits Reply without any premeditation and writes:

Okay, I guess I can do that. Do you want to meet at Noah’s on Broadway at noon? And have you ever seen the northern lights?

He replies quickly:

Yes, Noah’s for bagels sounds great. No, I’ve never seen the northern lights. But I’d like to do both. Oh and I assume you mean “Noah’s Bagels” rather than any place belonging to me. :-)”

She blushes. The lights fade out of her mind again. Auroras last only so long.

They are sitting at a small table with bagels and whitefish salad perched in plastic baskets. They are discussing the travesty of bagels that have been steamed rather than boiled. “The worst ones taste like marshmallows,” she laments.
They chew.
“So, you’ve never seen the aurora borealis?”
“Oh yeah, you’d asked about that. My sister saw it out the window of a plane once, so I always kind of look if I’m flying somewhere at night. How come?”
“So, I learned this morning on a website about auroras that you don’t have to go way far north or up in the sky to see them. If the timing is right, you can even see them down here or as far south as Arizona.”
“Arizona? Seriously?”
“There was a picture of these red swirls in the sky over Monument Valley in Arizona. Right there mixed with the stars in the night sky.”
“Holy shit. Is it just random or what?”
She thinks for a moment trying to remember the details. “Well, if I remember right from what I was reading, it’s because the sun gets sunspots that pop up for a while and then fade away. Sometimes one of them explodes, and if what explodes out of that sunspot hits Earth, and we’re lucky, we get auroras. This one website said last night’s auroras here were from a really huge explosion.”  “There were auroras here last night? Like, that you saw?”
She shakes her head. “I didn’t see them, but there was a picture in the Seattle Times.”
He is looking at her intently. “And you spent the morning learning this all online? That’s gorgeously dorky.”
She is quiet, taking in what she knows is a compliment.
“What?” he asks her, his eyes on her.
“Okay. You want dorkier online behavior from a former New Yorker? Here’s a confession for you: I peruse pictures of smoked fish on the Zabar’s website like some people look at porn.”  “Nice.”
“No, seriously. You should see the pictures they have on there – freshly sliced nova on bagels in soft lighting, hunks of whitefish… I can’t stop looking.” She blushes and sits back in her chair.  He laughs. “That’s beautiful. Sexy whitefish hunks.”   “You think I’m joking.” She nibbles a few onion flakes off her bagel.
“Oh good god, no. All I have to say is, do you realize how little decent pastrami porn there is on the Internet? One good picture on the site for Katz’s Delicatessen. Nothing to speak of on the Second Avenue Deli or the Carnegie websites. What does a guy have to do in this world for some shots of hot, juicy pastrami dripping with mustard and stacked on fresh rye?”
“Oh my god. You said ‘pastrami porn.’” She bites her cheeks.
A few sunbeams penetrate the window to have a look.

The appearance of sunshine in the greater Seattle area is not so rare as reputation would have it. There are sun breaks nearly every day, even if just a small fragment of blue and ray of sunshine appear over, say, Fremont or White Center. Seattleites revel in the sunshine, but allow themselves to do so only because they also profess pride in a preference for the comfort of grey, cooler clouds. They, like Jane Austen’s heroines, have a reputation to uphold.

Noah has brought his laptop over, and they are sitting on a rug in her living room as daylight fades away outside. They are eating almonds and raisins from plastic bags, while browsing aurora websites. Each has a grandmother whose favorite snack is almonds and raisins. They will never learn this fact in common.
They sprawl comfortably against pillows, comparing information they find. Noah notices, but does not comment on, Anna’s stacks of magazines and newspapers –– The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, Mother Jones and others –– which are strewn over the only couch and the coffee table. He can guess Anna’s habit of paralyzing herself by internalizing hopeless world news. He has seen the difference in Anna’s eyes when she talks about politics and when she talks about auroras. They stick to auroras.
It has not been spoken, but has silently been agreed, that Anna and Noah will see the aurora borealis together. They are slowly becoming fluent in the language of auroras. They learn that sunspots produce the most common and predictable northern lights, with solar winds flowing from occasional coronal holes representing the second best source. They have found websites that show the placement of the sun’s current spots, and which explain the complexity of each spot’s magnetic field. The more complex the magnetic field –– especially of a nice, large sunspot –– the greater the likelihood of that spot erupting in a large solar flare. If the spot happens to be smack-dab in the middle of the side of the sun facing Earth on the day it erupts, aurora chasers everywhere make plans to throw blankets in the car and head for the dark, north-facing spaces to await magic. More often than not, though, the sunspot rotates back over to the other side of the sun, decays, or taunts aurora chasers by remaining quiet.
Anna and Noah have been keeping an eye on one large sunspot, Sunspot 486, which measures seven times the size of Jupiter across and has a magnetic field ripe for big M-class or X-class solar flares.
“It says on spaceweather that October has been one of the busiest months in a long time for solar activity,” Noah tells her. Anna looks up and crawls over next to Noah to grab a few more raisins and peer at his screen.
“I saw that. Do they say why?”
“Hmm.” He keeps paging through the website’s text. “Have you heard of solar minimum and solar maximum yet?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So it looks like sun actually has an eleven-year cycle from solar maximum, when there are tons of sunspots, to solar minimum, where there’s a dry spell. But the thing I can’t figure out is that solar maximum already happened, back in 2000, which means it’s been three years, and the sun’s behaving like it’s solar maximum now all over again.”
She stirs the almonds in the bag. “That also means in a few years it’s going to be even harder to see them. I wish I had known about this stuff earlier. What if the other night was the last show for years, and we missed our chance?” Her eyes are open all the way as she looks at him closely. He glances at her eyes and back at the screen.
“That would suck,” he agrees, “but I don’t think it’s the case. Besides, think about all those people who randomly come across them and don’t even know when to look. We’re giving ourselves the best advantage we can.”
“I suppose if they were commonplace they wouldn’t have such an aura of mystique.”
“Or an aurora of mystique.”
She laughs, feels obligated to groan, and throws an almond at him, which he deftly catches in his mouth. He throws a raisin back at her, which she tries to grab with her mouth and misses. She scrambles across the rug and turns to pelt him again but sees at least two more raisins fly her way. She catches one in her mouth, and smiles.
“You’re ridiculously cute with raisins in your hair,” he says, trying to sound dry and looking back and forth between her and his computer. She pulls a raisin out of her hair.
“Are you making fun of me?” she asks, trying not to sound serious as she eats the raisin.
Noah moves his laptop off his legs to the floor by his side, leans his head back against the sofa and looks at her. He speaks slowly when he says, “No. No, actually I’m thinking about how much I want to kiss you. But I’m weighing that with the knowledge that if I do, you’ll think I’m an asshole who just feigns interest in sunspots to get all the pretty girls to notice him.” She looks at him, her hand gripping the rough edge of the painted coffee table.
He holds her gaze. “Between this and my weakness for pastrami porn, have I revealed too much to stand a chance?”
Anna does not look away. She slides slowly over the rug until she is next to Noah. She places one hand on the side of his face, and her lips on his mouth. Their kisses are small and quiet, sweetly present. The computer screens go into sleep mode as the room grows dark, too dark for Jane Austen to be scandalized by the behavior of two twenty-first century un-chaperoned aurora chasers.
Jane may not notice their movements in the darkness, even when Anna takes Noah’s hand and leads him out of the living room, but the moon watches knowingly through the windowpanes. The moon has seen this all before, and it never gets old. Full moonlight is an unrivaled aphrodisiac, provoking senseless sensibilities in chasers and chased alike.
On some clear nights, after all, aurora chasers travel to wide-open north-facing spaces and open themselves up in anticipation, only to find that the geomagnetic storm never comes. On such nights, when the moon is allowed to keep her rightful watch over her charges without solar upstaging, aurora chasers under moonlit blankets may find other ways to spend their anticipation, urgently searching for beauty or just trying to stay warm. Their excuses make no difference to the moon. She is on nighttime watch, and all is well.

It has happened. Sunspot 486 has unleashed two colossal solar flares, one after the other. They are X-17 and X-11 class, respectively. They punctuate the sun’s abundance of impressive displays this month, and are sizable enough to be extraordinary in the grand scale of solar activity. The X-17 class flare is among the top ten largest in recorded history. The aurora chasers begin their delicious wait.
It takes approximately one to three days for a sunspot’s coronal mass ejection (or sunspot ejaculation, Anna can’t help thinking) to reach and impregnate Earth’s atmosphere. Anna’s eyes are shining. At her temp job, she frequently refreshes the screen of a website that shows an ultraviolet image of the northern hemisphere’s auroral activity. When auroras hit, if they come, she knows the small green blob, signaling no activity, hovering above the polar region will transform into a large red circle extending further south, past her magnetic latitude, and will tempt her out into the darkness. Everywhere the red circle covers, there will be a possibility of auroras. With a flare this large, she is pretty sure it will reach Washington State, if not much further south.
So far, the weather is cooperating and providing mostly clear skies. The sun senses Anna wants more from it than daylight. She has that wild look in her eyes of a new aurora chaser, and the sun can tell.
She makes the call at 10:24 pm.
He answers, “Yes, my palindrome?”
“It’s here.”
“It’s here?” His voice changes from playful to serious.
“Yes. The blob of activity level is enormous and red. I didn’t know it could get this big. I think they’re getting auroras in Greece.”
“My car?”
“Yes. Bring your passport, just in case.”
He arrives in his old Volvo in less than twenty minutes. He has brought almonds and raisins, a sleeping bag, a flashlight, an atlas, his passport, and assorted garments made of fleece. She has assembled sandwiches, unearthed a water bottle, and pulled the grey blanket from her bed.
He kisses her and touches the blanket, teasing, “I don’t know, that blanket looks kind of like cloud cover. ”
“Don’t even joke about it. Avoiding the clouds is going to be tricky. A few fronts are coming in. According to the clear sky clock, our best bet is going to be to head up north toward Mount Vernon or Bellingham, and then out of the light pollution, or to hit Canada if there are still clouds. It’s supposed to be clearer over B.C.”
They check the websites one last time to make sure activity is still happening. There are dots on a map to indicate where aurora chasers across the country have already reported seeing storms. “Illinois,” she says. “And Nebraska. Let’s hit the road; it’s going to hit here soon.”
They steer a few blocks on Aurora Avenue North (no relation) and cut across 85th Street to I-5 where they can speed northward as far as they want. Anna feels breathtakingly free.
“How are the skies?” Noah asks quietly.
Anna peers up through the sunroof, the windshield, and her own window. “Cloudy with some clear spots.”
“Check out that glow. Do you think that’s anything?” he murmurs.
“Everett,” she sighs. “We’re still south of it, so that’s probably just the city’s lights.” A New Yorker at heart, she chokes a little at referring to Everett as a city.
They are quiet. They snack on almonds and raisins. He rests his hand on her leg and she lets herself play with his fingers.
North of Everett, he comments, “That glow’s still there. I think it’s something else.” The northern sky is lit with a fuzzy haze.
“I can’t tell.”
“I think it’s our lights.”
She looks up and around at the sky. There are clear spaces and cloudy spaces. Nothing unusual. Sharing a sandwich, they continue driving north.
By Mount Vernon, there are still too many clouds, so they don’t exit the freeway just yet. They wind through the hills approaching Bellingham. When the hillsides of trees open back up to reveal wider landscape, Noah murmurs, “Anna, the glow is still there. That’s definitely our glow.”
Anna looks forward and then up through the sunroof. She gasps, “Oh my God.”
“What’s up there?” His voice matches hers.
“There was a streak, but now it’s gone. I thought it was a cloud, but it pulsed in and out, just like the descriptions say. And there are more. Oh my God, Noah, we’re seeing auroras.”
Noah leans forward and looks up through the windshield. “Holy shit. You’re right.”
“Do you want me to drive for a little bit?”
“No, that’s okay – let’s get off at the next exit.”
They exit, but find themselves tangled in Bellingham, with too many street lights and no open views to the north. They are still seeing faint streaks in the sky, but they know this is not their destination. “Canada?” Noah asks her.
“Canada,” she replies.
They get back on the freeway. Holding hands, they head north.
“I’m so calling in sick tomorrow. There was a huge solar flare and unfortunately I had to flee the country.” He is grinning.
They slow down at the border and hand over their passports. At this point, the streaks shooting and fading above are growing bolder and more frequent, and there are faint pulses of white feathering and unfolding across the night sky.
“Where do you live?” the border guard accepts their passports and looks inside the Volvo at the two eager aurora chasers entering her country well after midnight.
“Seattle,” Noah replies.
“And what’s your business in Canada?” She looks at Anna.
“We’re chasing – we’re looking for a good view of the aurora borealis, the northern lights.”
“Ma’am, you have to go really far north for that, up around Prince George or Prince Rupert.” Anna can’t tell if the guard is amused or suspicious, but Anna has limited patience.
“One of the largest solar flares ever on record happened thirty-six hours ago, and the northern lights are visible down here tonight. You could see them right here, if not for the electric lighting. We’ll only be here a few hours, and then we’re coming home.”
The guard returns their passports and waves them through.
“Prince Rupert and Prince George, eh? I didn’t know we needed permission from royalty to see solar phenomena.”
Anna ignores the comment and gives Noah directions to Highway 1, which they hope is their best bet for ending up somewhere dark and clear. They drive a few miles out on the highway and select an exit. Noah takes a series of turns, each time driving as far away from the highway’s lights as he can. He turns into one road to find it is actually a bumpy, dirt lot at the entrance to a farm. He starts to turn around and then pauses, killing the engine and headlights.
“Sky check,” he says. They get out of the Volvo, look up, and shriek almost simultaneously. The dark sky is filled with feathers and pulses, streaks and waves, curtains and flashes, all glowing the color of jade.
Anna is ecstatic. “This is it! We’re not going anywhere.”
They dance around in a field of collard greens or cabbages, awed by the sight above. They hop onto a wooden fence and hold on to its logs, leaning back. When she can tear her eyes from the sky for even a moment, Anna runs to the car and pulls out the blanket, sleeping bag, and snacks. They bundle onto the ground, warm and squealing a little, holding each other and staring upward.
Anna and Noah grow quiet. A celestial rain-curtain of green light takes over the northeast quadrant of the heavens, pouring magnetic magic in glowing streams down to the horizon, the curtains moving and rippling. The sky directly above pulses and rolls in unpredictably fluctuating ocean waves of light, feeling close enough to fall on their heads. A swirl of pale emerald sends spirals east across the illuminated darkness. Stars play among the green streaks. The sky is alive. Human-made fireworks are put to shame. Anna and Noah lie among the cruciferous rows and bask in light unlike any they have ever experienced.
After an hour, the displays are growing quieter, and the lovers, colder. They lie close together. Noah feeds Anna raisins, one by one.
“And to think,” he says, “I would have been content with seeing some lights out the window of a plane.”
“Hmm.”
“Not the blinking ones on the wing, of course. Those don’t count.”
“Noah, I never would have been the kind of person to do this, even to think of it, like, three years ago. Not even a year ago. I’d have wanted it, but I wouldn’t have done it.”
“No?” He strokes her face.
“No. I mean I guess moving out of the city was a step.” She almost clarifies that “the city” means “Manhattan” until she remembers that he knows, that he too felt stifled by and left a city he will also always love more than any other. She continues, “But I have to fight a bad tendency to kind of watch life happen instead of making it happen, you know?”
“I know.” He does not share more.
“I don’t want to do that any more, Noah.”
“I know.” He takes her hand and snuggles in closer to her. They are quiet. The sky is still pulsing faintly, the afterglow panting sighs of a geomagnetic storm fogging up the windows of the atmosphere with the last small breaths of light.
The aurora chasers drive home, silent and full.

Anna calls in sick to work. She can’t get out from under her blanket. This is all too much, too fast, too open. So recently, she rekindled a dream of seeing the northern lights, and here she is, someone who has seen them, opened herself up to them, drowned in them. Now what?
She lies in bed and reads the news. How can she be thinking about the sun at a time like this? How can she consider herself an active participant in the world when there is nothing she can do about the war, or anything else that matters? Even as an aurora chaser, she is nothing more than a spectator. Everything is at once too big and too small. Her cat cuddles next to her, sniffs her, lies on her, ignores her.
Two days pass. So far, she has returned neither Noah’s phone call or email, nor those of other friends, wanting to chat, unaware of the turns Anna’s life has taken. She has crossed international borders to witness spectacular celestial phenomena and taken a nice Jewish boy from New York to bed. Things have shifted a little lately.
In the late afternoon, the phone rings again, and it is Noah. She breathes in and answers it.
“Hey.” He is surprised to hear her pick up.
“Hey.”
“So I found this tail, and I was wondering if it belonged to you.”
Anna is quiet.
“Okay, I just wanted to make sure you’re doing okay.”
“Mmm.”
“You haven’t gotten out of bed, have you.”
It’s not fair that someone she has known so briefly can tell this over the phone. She is quiet.
“There’s a sun break outside, and we’re close to sunset. Can I drag you outside to witness it? Or get your cat to, if you need some space from me?” He knows that this is about more than what has been going on between them.
“I don’t need a Mr. Darcy to come rescue me. I’m doing just fine. I’ll catch another one. Sun breaks happen nearly every day and sunsets definitely do.”
“So do auroras, this month, Miss Elizabeth. That doesn’t mean they’re worthy of missing.” She is thrown off for a moment, realizing he understood her reference to Pride and Prejudice.
“Well, I like the clouds.”
“I know. Okay.”
They pause.
“I still can’t believe we saw them,” she says quietly. “I’m still thinking about it.”
“Can I tell you something?” he asks.
“Sure.”
“You know I don’t mind the whole Eeyore pessimism thing. But underneath it I think you’re the most optimistic person I’ve ever met.”
“Hmm.”
“Optimists look for sun breaks. You said to hell with sun breaks; let’s look for auroras. You got me to chase those auroras into another country, and find them. I think you woke me up, and I guess, whatever happens, I appreciate that.”
Anna starts crying and doesn’t know why.
“You okay?”
“Thanks for calling me,” she chokes. “I need to sleep.” She hesitates. “Wait, Noah?” she murmurs.
“Mmm hmm?”
“Go look at the illustrations of Eeyore after he gets his tail back. He frisks around and stuff.”
“I know he does. I think it’s the only time he actually smiles. Sleep well.”
While Anna is sleeping, Jane Austen comes to sit on the edge of her bed. She strokes Anna’s loose hair, dries the tears on Anna’s cheek, pulls the blanket up to tuck her in. Jane is concerned, alarmed even, for this girl who is so far from any comfort of her own family and with no fortune of which to speak. Jane wishes with her whole heart that Anna had a sister, the solace-bringing presence to whom a young woman might turn when her woes are due to matters of the heart, to overwhelming change of fortune, or to extraordinary geomagnetic phenomena. Jane is unaware that a precocious Anna at age ten, having actually read Pride and Prejudice, began imagining Miss Elizabeth Bennet to be her own sister, talking to her at night when she felt alone in a city apartment, with the distant sounds of sirens and garbage trucks for company.
Miss Jane, however, is wise and patient, despite her alarm for Miss Anna’s health. And so, dear reader, she reassures you of Anna’s resilience and wellbeing. In place of a sister, in place of the Elizabeth Bennet Anna never really had, Jane Austen sits with Anna through the night, witnessing the fortitude Anna’s face shows when she sleeps. The skies outside are clouded and still.
In the morning, Anna gets up to feed the cat. It is the weekend. The daylight feels fresh and new. She stretches and walks through the kitchen. She is hungry, and slowly gets out everything she needs for eggs and toast. Jane Austen stage whispers, “Cup of tea!” loud enough for Anna to think of it, and Anna makes herself some earl grey with soy milk –– a remedy of which Jane approves, despite her puzzlement over soy milk. Anna takes her breakfast into the living room, begins to pick up a magazine, looks at it, and puts it aside. She eats on the edge of her couch, looking through the window at the last yellow leaves on a tree. Her mind is still.
When she opens the door to retrieve her mail and feel the fresh air she is craving, there is a brown paper shopping bag on her doorstep. Its handles are tied together with a piece of string, to which is attached an envelope marked:
Anna, a.k.a. Miss Elizabeth Bennet
She carries the bag inside and closes her door. She sits on the couch, looks at the bag again, and pulls off the envelope. Inside is a note that reads:

Dear Anna/Miss Elizabeth,
As Mr. Fitzpatrick Darcy is unavailable at present, having dashed off heroically to attend to some poor quality bagels in the Midwest somewhere, I have stepped in to scribe this epistle.
We wish to thank you for exposing us to a superiour display of aurora borealis. While we were so fortunate as to experience fair weather in our venture to the north country, Prince George, Mr. Darcy and I were quite concerned that your own grey quilt did resemble cloud cover to so great an extent as might impede your future luck in such undertakings (which, for the record, are quite scandalous for a young woman to be taking unescorted with a gentleman of no known connexions). Please, then, consider the enclosed gift as a token of gratitude and concern.
Yours, etc.
Prince Rupert
She peers in the bag and pulls out a blanket. It is shockingly soft, jet black and sprinkled with an abstract quilted patchwork of green and white. She wraps it around her shoulders, and then unwraps it and looks at it again. It is unmistakably their sky. She picks up the card and looks at it again. She holds the quilt and card close, sitting on the couch, and looking outside at the maple’s yellow leaves.
Reader, she called him.
Certainly, she tells herself, she is calling not only because it is polite to thank a friend for a gift, but because she needs to correct an egregious mistake.
“Hey, there.”
She pauses. “It’s Fitzwilliam Darcy, not Fitzpatrick Darcy. And thank you for the blanket, Noah. It’s amazing. I don’t know what to say.”
“Yeah, I know it’s Fitzwilliam. But I couldn’t be entirely sure you’d call me unless I made such a flagrant error.”
She finds herself blushing and then smiling. “How the hell did you produce a blanket with our auroras on it?.”
“It was crazy. I found myself walking alone down by Pike Place Market before I called you, and before that sun break happened. I went down to watch the ferries from Steinbrueck Park. I was also looking for a sun break and there just wasn’t one, and I felt kind of small. I mean, how arrogant is that to assume the sun’s going to show up just because I want it. And it wasn’t a good kind of feeling small. The other night when we were watching auroras, that was a good kind of feeling small. In the park, I just felt like a schmuck.”
“So I walked back through the market, and ended up passing this quilt shop. And that blanket was hanging in the window. It was incredible, not only because it looked just like our sky, but because this was yet another experience of walking along, expecting the mundane, and stumbling completely serendipitously upon the mind-bogglingly beautiful. So anyway, yeah, I bought you the quilt. You really like it? I can take it back if you don’t.”
“I love it, Noah.”
“I’m glad. You sound good, by the way.”
“Mmm. I feel good. Are you doing okay?”
“Ehh. Suffering from some vitamin deficiency brought on by lack of pastrami, but I’ll live.”
“I’ll dig up some pastrami porn for you. Just don’t open it at work.”
“You’re the best.”
They get off the phone. Anna opens all her windows and cleans up her breakfast dishes. She looks around her kitchen, takes the geranium off the windowsill, trims off its dead branches with her sharp kitchen scissors, and gives it a drenching. She returns to the living room, where she begins picking up the magazines strewn about. She carries them to her kitchen for recycling, noticing for the first time how many colors can be found in one glossy page. She places them on her kitchen counter, rearranging them, tearing out pages and covers. Sunlight streams through the window onto the pages, illuminating the vibrancy of their colors.
Anna retrieves from her bedroom a piece of the black poster board nearly forgotten on her desk, an old glue stick from a drawer, and her laptop. She finds her favorite aurora photo on spaceweather.com, one taken in northern Ontario during the recent storm. In it, the skies are red, yellow and green all at once, in a spiraled shape like the geomagnetic lovechild of a tornado and a waterfall. She spreads the magazines out on the floor in a pool of sunlight and begins cutting tiny shards and curls of color from their pages. For hours, deep in concentration, even after the sunlight shifts off her work, she cuts fragments of color and glues them in place on the poster board. When she is done, she has a mosaic aurora, matching the photograph on the website, with even tiny pinpoints of white paper to fill in as stars.
There are hundreds and hundreds of separate bits of paper in her swirling display. She looks at it for a long time.
As her artwork dries, she removes her now-drained geranium from the sink and replaces it on the windowsill. Looking at the plant, she thinks of Amber, the woman who gave her the geranium and whose phone number is buried in the scraps of paper that have accumulated by the kitchen phone. She digs up the right scrap and makes the call.
Anna does not mention her obsession with the geranium. Amber does not admit that she still wonders if Anna hates geraniums, and if this is why they did not stay in touch. Anna does tell Amber it’s great to talk to her. She shyly mentions her new interest in northern lights, and hears Amber’s story of once seeing the lights on a trip up the British Columbia Inside Passage. They talk about activism, about finding meaningful projects on a scale small enough to have an impact. Accepting that there are some phenomena beyond our control makes it paradoxically easier to work on them.
Anna thinks of auroras, of how captivated she is by something she can only observe, and how this feels so passive. She broaches this with Amber, who reminds her of quantum mechanics, of Schrodinger’s cat who is still both alive and dead until someone looks in the box and risks getting scratched. Perhaps aurora chasers too, by observing the sky, provide the necessary final ingredient of observation. Reality is ambiguous until it has been witnessed.

We make life decisions to impose a comforting sense of order, with certain chapters neatly opened and closed, sharply delineated as a sunset marking the close of a day’s solar brightness. But the universe is playful place, which frequently has other plans. Sometimes the sun returns in the middle of the night. Sometimes a once-in-a-lifetime solar flare is just a beginning. And so it is that Anna, just days later, takes a peek back at spaceweather.com, breathes in sharply, and quickly dials Noah Bernstein.
“Oh palindrome, my palindrome,” he answers, trying hard to sound nonchalant.
“X-28 class.”
“Excuse me?”
Her heart is pounding. “Sunspot 486 which we thought would be decaying by now? Yeah, it just unleashed an X-28 class flare.”
“Are you sure? I don’t think they come that big.”
“This is the biggest solar flare ever on record. They’re only guessing at the X-28. It overwhelmed the instruments they use to measure the flares, so it might end up being quite a lot larger. The astronomers are peeing their pants.”
“Holy shit. So does this mean we’ll…”
“I don’t know if we’ll get auroras. It wasn’t even Earth-directed; it might send craziness off into another part of the solar system. But it was big enough that we may get storms anyway.”
“Shall we try?”
“I think we have to.”
“Emergency aurora chasers meeting at Noah’s Bagels?”
“I think so. I’ll bring my laptop, because you absolutely have to see this solar flare, and I’ll also bring something I made for you.” She pauses. “I’ll also call the princes and Mr. Darcy, to see if they can join us.”
“Alas, I think they’re otherwise occupied. Something about rushing off to rescue a heroine from some rascal who was attempting to destroy the honor of literary accuracy.”
“Okay, we can have our meeting anyway. We’ll send them the minutes. And maybe we can take a walk if we get a sun break. I kind of want to stop missing beauty, you know?”
“I don’t know, that doesn’t sound like Eeyore, but I’ll take it. Though let’s be cautious: if you’re going for beauty and perfection and all that, we might not want to be eating bagels in this city. Is it worth the risk?”
“I suppose. Not that it matters, of course.”

Aurora chasers know the importance of living in the moment and of patience. In the fall and spring, the high months for auroras, and especially during the busy years of solar maximum, aurora chasers revel in an abundant harvest of lights, storing up memories for the long, dark nights of solar minimum ahead.
We learn to let go, but never to become inert. The sun is in control, yet every aurora chaser knows that even during solar minimum there may be nights of extraordinary lights, sent from one lone sunspot who couldn’t help but get up and dance. The aurora chasers are at peace with their solar cycle, awed by the months which knock over the charts with record-setting flares, and accepting of the quiet stretches of a more dormant sun. They never stop looking, just in case.
The sun may ignore them or caress them, these aurora chasers who are both tiny specks of irrelevance and quantum witnesses to beauty. Any illusion of finality, like the end of a month’s breathtaking auroras, is just a mark in the endless cycle of solar activity and human awe.
And so, dear reader, the story has no end.

Romeo and Juliet in India*

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:54:50 -0700

Romeo danced foxtrot; Juliet preferred tango. They met in a hotel in India, near the Ganges delta, where Romeo worked. That November, Juliet danced in the hotel, performing with Mike and with Charlie. She danced so beautifully that Romeo’s “Bravo!” could be heard as an echo throughout the hotel. Still in his uniform, Romeo pursued Juliet until he caught up with her. “I don’t dance tango,” he said, “but I do foxtrot.”

They danced and drank whiskey all November long. Juliet forgot about Mike. She forgot about Charlie. She thought about how Romeo looked in his uniform. Juliet loved Romeo; Romeo loved Juliet. They dreamed together; they’d travel to Lima and Quebec and the High Sierras. Romeo daydreamed about being a papa someday; they would all look like Juliet, so lovely, even when they weighed just a few kilos.

Ironically, clearly as an x-ray, Juliet and Romeo could see that they were doomed. Both papas were alphas, so it was hard to say whether Juliet’s papa hated Romeo’s more, or vice versa. Her papa, Oscar, relaxed in India, playing golf and drinking whiskey.   Oscar was a Yankee. Romeo’s papa, a Zulu named Victor, had once been insulted by a Yankee (who also played golf and drank whiskey) and never gotten over it. Oscar hated Victor. Victor hated Oscar.

Juliet’s papa confronted her; Romeo’s papa confronted him. Both papas said: “Whatever you are doing, ‘foxtrot’ or whatever you call it; it’s over. We’re leaving India.”

Romeo and Juliet despaired. Romeo snuck away when it was dark, looking for Juliet. He could not find her and, miserable, sat down to drink whiskey. Inebriated and weeping, he fell asleep.

Juliet too had snuck away. Soon she found her Romeo, but was horrified to see him collapsed; she thought he was dead, for he would not awaken. She smashed the whiskey and stabbed herself.

Romeo awoke and saw Juliet dead. He too stabbed himself.

Oscar and Victor were devastated. Oscar ceased hating Victor. Victor ceased hating Oscar. They were heartbroken.

Another November passed. By the following November, Victor and Oscar played golf together and drank whiskey, two alphas getting along. Bravo, you might say, but was it too late? For both Oscar and Victor were still miserable, remembering young Romeo and Juliet.  There are some echoes not even whiskey can silence.

*Note: This story is written using only nouns from the aviation alphabet (with the exception of pronouns, which I allowed. I also allowed plural forms.) The aviation alphabet is:
Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India
Juliet
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Whiskey
X-ray
Yankee
Zulu