A Mirror for the Stars Read online

  2

  Yeah, so Karen is the one who got away. Everyone’s got one. Don’t try to bullshit me. You’ve got one too. If you’ve never known someone who was so special that you’d instantly fly across the country on their account, I pity you. If you’re with that person right now, I envy you. Fuck yeah, I flew to Chicago for Karen. Shit, I’d have let someone tie me up and drag me to Florida behind a beat-up station wagon, doggy paddle across the Caribbean Sea, dive head first into a vat of mosquito attractant, walk through the Amazon jungle naked, and jump off the highest peak of the Andes.

  Anyway, If Karen planned on groping me half as eagerly as the overweight, slack-jawed TSA agent did, we'd have to get a room first.  That seemed unlikely under the circumstances, but hey, a guy can dream.

  I ran passed about a hundred televisions on the way to the gate. They seemed to be mounted on every flat surface. Tired, sallow-faced travelers were huddled around each one, watching a pretty blonde CNN anchor drone on about something. I paused to catch the story, but it was just a bunch of gobbledygook. I figured the men were just watching because the top three buttons on her blouse were undone. Ordinarily I would have stuck around to enjoy the view myself, but I was in a hurry.

  The stewardess was already making the last calls for boarders when I jogged up to the gate and handed her my boarding pass. As the plane taxied out onto the runway all the things Karen said bounced around in my head.  It was just a jumble of nonsense.  I couldn't parse anything useful out of it. It didn't help that the guy sitting next to me was coughing up both his lungs and at least one kidney.  He doubled up in his seat with his hands over his face and hacked.

  "Are you alright?" I asked

  "No," he said through his fingers.  "I think I'm coming down with bronchitis."

  "Make sure you keep everything on your side of the arm rest, ok?" I said.

  "Yeah, ok,"  He wheezed. “Asshole.”

  Somewhere down the aisle the stewardess was pushing drinks on everyone. I thought I heard her tell someone it was three bucks for a goddamn Coke.

  I stared out the window. Little pinpricks of white light twinkled above me, and down below. Countless thousands of lights shined in the darkness of the rust belt, as if Pittsburgh was a mirror for the stars. If stars shined in Pittsburgh, did borderline alcoholic unemployed steel workers drive ramshackle pickup trucks in space? I wondered what Karen would have thought of that idea. She had just the right kind of mind for bouncing stupid shit off of. It's hard to reconcile our hours of silly conversation with the three sentences she'd uttered that ended our relationship. "I'm sorry. I'm moving to Chicago and you can't come with me. This is goodbye."

  The stewardess passed and I pretended to sleep. When I looked back, there was a little glass of Coke in the drink holder of my arm rest. I figured I’d heard wrong earlier. It must be free, but for three bucks they’d put some booze in it or something. That seemed a little more reasonable.

  “Hey man,” said Coughing Dude. His tubes were clogged up pretty good. He sounded like Doctor Claw. “Are you going to drink that?”

  “All yours,” I murmured absently.

  I tried to focus on Karen, but Coughing Dude started living up to his nickname.

  “Maybe if you’re dying of consumption, you should just go to the fucking morgue,” I scolded. I had some more choice banter ready to go, but I stopped myself short.

  Coughing Dude’s face was bright red, and tears were running down his cheeks. The little plastic glass of Coke splashed on the floor at his feet. “Help,” he tried to scream, but it came out in an ugly, hoarse whisper. He frantically undid the buttons on his shirt and starting flailing at his bare chest.

  “Hey!” I stood up and shouted. “I think he’s having a heart attack!”

  A general murmur rose up amongst the other passengers, and the stewardesses came running. The pretty one who passed out the Cokes was first on the scene. Her name tag said “Charlotte.” She glanced down at the spilled glass on the floor, and then looked at me. Her eyelids narrowed to little slits and her lips thinned out, and she glared at me. Then in an instant her face morphed and she was showing nothing but excitement and detached, professional concern. “Get the Head Flight Attendant!” she said.

  A crone who I guess was supposed to be the Head Flight Attendant showed up with a stretcher and shoved an oxygen mask over Coughing Dude’s face. The stewardesses huddled over him as they tried to give him CPR, so I couldn’t see that well, but I watched his feet beat and kick. Slowly, horribly, the kicking died down and became twitching, and then his legs were completely still.

  “Um, we need some volunteers to help lift the gentlemen up onto the stretcher,” announced Head Flight Attendant Crone.

  “Is that guy dead?” asked a voice behind me.

  I nearly jumped out of my chair. It was a girl of maybe twelve or thirteen, dirty blond hair pulled back into two tight braids on either side of her head. Disgust folded the skin around her nose and pushed all her freckles together. Her eyes were alive with morbid curiosity. She was leaning up over the back of my seat, craning her neck to take in as much of the scene as she could.

  “Um, I don’t know kid,” I said.

  You see, I was less concerned with his actual death than I was his potential murder, if you follow me. Coughing Dude was not at the peak of health, but he seemed like he was holding it together more or less ok. Call me paranoid, but it did seem like Coughing Dude became Heart Attack Dude the minute he took a sip of the drink I didn’t ask for. I didn’t like the look I got from Charlotte, either.

  They might come after you. That’s what Karen said. Who were “they”?

  Paranoid delusional fantasies danced around in my head.

  Karen moved to Chicago to start a new job for a research firm that worked with the government. I was surprised by that, and not just because I thought we had more of the “death do us part” kind of relationship than the “I got a new job in a better city, see you in Hell” kind. You see, Karen was the type of person who would rant about the Military Industrial Complex given the opportunity and a little bit too much to drink. Her working for some faceless quasi-government corporation never quite jived for me, but then again I was biased against the whole thing.

  Crazy as it might seem, I figured I may as well keep an eye on Charlotte and avoid any other refreshments that turned up while I wasn’t looking.

  “This is your Captain speaking,” said a voice over the intercom. “Thank you for your patience and assistance with our ill passenger. I wanted to let you know that there will be medical personnel waiting for him as soon as we reach the tarmac, and we’ve been given emergency clearance to land as soon as possible to make sure we get him the help he needs. We will be touching down in Chicago in about forty-five minutes. It’s a pleasant evening in the Windy City with temperatures around fifty-four degrees. Thank you for flying with us today.”

  Did that mean Coughing Dude wasn’t really dead? I thought not. They probably wouldn’t announce something like that to everyone.

  The adrenaline was starting to wear off, and my eyelids were getting heavy. I decided to stay awake though. We’d be landing pretty soon, and it would be best to stay vigilant. There was a lot of cloud cover beneath us now, so I couldn’t watch the ground lights anymore. The blinking light on the plane’s wing winked on and off, casting a red haze over everything for an instant and then fading out. In and out. In. And out. It was relaxing, and the hum of the engines faded to a pleasant white noise that blotted out the unpleasant symphony of clearing throats, snores and clicking laptop keys from my fellow passengers.

  Then I was standing with Karen in an apple orchard.