Come fly with me

He had told her he didn’t want to go alone and there was no one else. He wouldn’t say where, just that she wouldn’t hear from him again after. She had suspicions, but no idea, really. Maybe it was the curiosity that made her say yes. Their relationship had ended amicably, the most boring way, the easiest kind to break away from, to forget. So when he contacted her, it had been months since she had even thought of him, maybe years. It was hard to tell here.

They had taken a train. The first clue. She asked why not a door or a craft and he had told her that was impossible, while smiling at her like he wanted her to guess what he meant, like she would enjoy the answer. She didn’t get it, but it gave her a bad feeling, like a gesture of kindness with a hook inside. She was used to those, especially here.

The station had been at the end of a long maze of hallways, so disorienting she had expected to end up in a Dreamworld or a Hardworld, but the termination was archetypically Otherworld. A glowing train platform and awning stuck in the void, with strange stars shining that she had never seen from anywhere else in the Other. Spirits stood waiting with overflowing smiles and bouncing anticipation. The train itself appeared as a dot out in the black, and within a few seconds it was rushing in front of them with sounds that echoed in the airless void. A strange steam cloud rolled off of it, though it looked like an archetypical bullet train.

He had presented two tickets, polished metal pamphlets that radiated opalescence, to the masked station hand, who had returned a single sliver of metal to each of them. It wrapped itself around her wrist, and from then on felt like a small hand pulling her. The second clue.

The train ride had felt just as she had expected, but faster. Steam rolled across the windows until the black disappeared, and when the steam itself fell away, they were flying across a wide plain under a bright blue sky with clouds the same color as the steam. A downtown skyline glittered in the distance, wavering like it was struggling to exist.

The track had curved once, for no other reason than to let her see, she felt, the airport spread out in front of her, streaks of concrete and flashes of sunburst metal and glass, with the distinct feel of having been thought into being. It looked like a piece of the Otherworld laid across a flat section of the Real. Another clue.

They had been alone in their train car and were the only ones to step out onto the platform, and she knew with her dreamsense that all the other spirits that had stepped onboard were long gone and far away, Another clue.

They walked down an echoing empty hallway towards their departure gate, number seven. The light outside bloomed into a late morning glare. Smells of breakfasts foods and espresso and sugar came from somewhere unseen. The echoing hum rose gently as they approached the gate, a white noise murmuring full of excitement and emotion, a mass of people ready to go, to move on, speaking of the magic of an ultimate destination, though she couldn’t recall the exact moment they had blended into that flow of travelers, or even if she had seen a single face among the crowd.

She had looked over the railing at the dark empty level below. All shadows and shuttered restaurants and a lone mop bucket. The Arrivals section. Its dead darkness and closed doors had drawn her eye as if trying to tell her something, but his hand on her arm had pulled her further into the stream of light and energy flowing across Departures.

They stood waiting, time rolling over them and pushing everything before back into some other life, until there was only them, standing in front of the massive windows, sunlight in long bands at their feet like offerings, a stream of people flowing behind them, somewhere, unconnected to them now. It was a place, a moment, between places, between states of existence, between lives, or maybe between a life and something else that wasn’t a life, but could take roughly the same shape, occupy the same space. She couldn’t describe it, so she let him talk.

“This place must be made for me. Amazing.”

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

She had asked him why, as he expected her to, and he had told her of his childhood, of things he never would have mentioned when they were together. Things she had spent the entire time, in some way or another, trying to get him to talk about.

He had grown up in Colorado, in Broomfield, in the nineties, during the city’s tech boom. His father worked in the industry, and they were, as a family, propelled by that current in a way that may have made the marriage “break up in orbit”, as he put it.

After the divorce, his father had moved to Los Colinas, Texas, as if to spite his mother, who hated the heat and would get deeply depressed if the weather ever got up out of the sixties. He had laughed when he first came to Texas, and seen the land, its wide flatness so similar to his hometown, but without the mountains to box it in, as if the earth would just spill out forever. He came to believe it was this quality of apparent endlessness and boundarylessness that made the people there insane, resistant to even the most common sense of restrictions.

This Airport, he told her, was taken from his dreams. He had spent so many hours in the DFW and Denver airports, that he had often dreamed of them, and in his dreams the two merged into the mega-airport they now saw. Looking back as an adult, the dreams had blended with memory, adding another layer of refraction, and he found that when he visited either airport later in life, he didn’t recognize them.

There was a pause as he looked around, smiling, taking everything in as if he had just been handed the deed to it all, while she waited for him to let her back in, but at the end of the pause he said something that sickened her.

“I know that this place will take me back, it will fix everything.”

She was suddenly glad she had decided to not go with him, to brush off his hints at an invitation, and to not ask him to explain where he was going. Whatever kind of place his destination was, it was for him, and she would only be an accessory to it.

He had seen her face, and that old game had started up again, where she had realized something about him, unintentionally, (how the fuck could she help it anyway?) and he had become embarrassed like he always did, and tried to hide what she had seen.

“Isn’t that what this world is about? Healing ourselves? Getting to the root of the flaws in our Spirits? What’s deeper than childhood?”

She didn’t have an answer and he was only looking for some sign she didn’t think he was childish, so she watched the people walking down the hall, and noticed something.

They never got any closer. She would watch them walking towards her from far off, and then they would turn or stop or sit down, but never get close enough to see. When she was looking one direction, some would pass her from behind, but never turn their face to her. After some time watching them, she was convinced they didn’t have any faces. These were specters, fragments of memory, robots with nineties wardrobes and white noise voices.

A voice, a real voice, had come over the intercom and announced the boarding. Phantoms filed into the doorway and gave illusionary tickets to an agent who had the only other face in the world. Celeste watched her flash smiles and move and was convinced that she was a real Spirit, and something about her seemed completely in control, as if she could snap her fingers and turn the entire airport to rubble.

“I guess this is your last chance. To come with me.”

He said it without looking at her. Two questions crammed into statement shapes, broken by a sigh and said breathlessly. She was suddenly glad he was leaving. Everything about him made her sad for him.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for.” Such a fucking movie thing to say, said for lack of anything else coming to mind, but he ate it up. He nodded like it was full of meaning, looked into her eyes for once, and even kissed her. Like all his kisses, it felt like he wanted more than anything for her to be dazzled by it, and to tell him she was.

She patted him on the shoulder and mumbled goodbye and he was gone, walking down a tunnel that glowed with a focused humming beam of the mid-morning light bouncing off everything else, and fading into a blurry square at the end, where he turned and vanished.

Time rushed out like water over a convex surface, going any which way as long as it was fast, sometimes running over itself out of order, but this is what she remembered.

He had a window seat, and somehow she could see his face, clear as day. He waved to her, childlike, and soon the plane was taxiing out. She could see his face the whole time, as the plane turned, as it came down the runway, as it lifted off, as if her vision had detached itself from her body and followed him. The plane darkened and flew into the sun. It wavered and shrunk and suddenly the sun wasn’t the sun, but a pure ball of light with something to say, and full of memories of things said to it, and in the brief moment as it was flashing like an explosion, she knew something about it that she could never put into words.

Then it was gone, and he was gone, and the world around her had become exactly what she had expected since they stepped off the train.