Four

Terminal

In the steamy airport building it felt like an old kitchen that had been used all morning. The smells, the moisture, the tastes of wood and breathe and herbs hanging in the air, suspended on labyrinths of silky cobwebs, invisible but nevertheless choking everything.
He felt very tired. He felt sleepy, but it soothed him, this sleep deprived oblivion. It provided him with a reprieve from his cynicism. And it allowed him a small window of life to move through time, unscathed by his sensitivity to painful disappointments.
He bought muffins, felt their strange reptilian surface for a moment, before pressing first lips, then teeth, then tongue against the warm sponge. He also ordered a steaming coffee, to help him have the computational ability to remember things like gates, seat numbers and departure times. Suddenly an impulse flashed in his mind to run, to spring. Was the flight due to leave at 10 to nine (now), or was it 10 to eight (an hour ago). He'd put it in the back of his mind to confirm this, had meant to do so in the taxi but had enjoyed his conversation with the driver too much. Feeling suddenly too tired to eat, he began to search for the ticket.
Need to go now.
He noticed a Filipino sitting by himself on a chair, a blanket over his shoulder, and a little girl sitting on his bag. He placed the tray in front of the old man, noticed his nose and the long lids of his eyes, but not the liquid balls, and then walked away. Only once he reached the light blue door to the terminal did he turn around. The little girl was sitting on his lap, eating the half eaten muffin. They didn't look at him. He stepped into the terminal corridor and as he did he heard his name.
'Van Lewen…'
For some reason the woman's voice, an Indian sounding voice, with very accurate enunciation, reminded him of something out of the movie Aliens.
He was hot, snakes of sweat spreading over his body, he had a sudden desperate urge to gnaw at damp, irritated skin under his wet underwear. He swallowed hard, felt cramp in his stomach, pushed against the throngs, knocked over a child but caught the little girl by the arm before she hit the ground. He held the arm aloft…it was not a girl but a cherub, a small boy with impossible red cheeks, and golden locks, a doll of a boy…and an elegant white hand moved to take the little hand in hers, and pull the whole body up to a vivid red dress and the burnish of brown hair. When he made contact with her eyes he felt a sting inside him that made him feel sick. Drunk, or drugged, or simply overwrought and overtired, he stepped out of this emotional web, and managed to throw his feet into a small free space beyond the mall of legs. He ran faster, but struggled against the harder bodies of a basketball team, and once he'd pressed through them there was another team.
'Last call…van Lewen…'
"I'm Van Lewen," he said, but his words fell into the web and hung there, the letters suspended like washing, while his lips moved, and others swam with and against him in this churning dream that was the airport building.
The blades, the fins, the tubes of missile shaped aeroplanes - jets - drifted beyond the windows like sharks, or mere buses of the sky, that roared and shook the the grasses under their metal stomachs.
Finally through the vast flocks of perspiring people. The strain of getting through all the checks, the X-Ray, the security, the ticketing, the personal body search, and finally the umbilical to the blue Boeing yielded to a sense of inner bouyancy. But when he looked inside the cylinder he saw it too was full of people, some of them holding open newspapers, others handling small dark objects that were either cameras or headphones or communication tools. He walked down the aisle, noticed a young filippino girl with a bald white man. She was smiling and feminine, and his land was on her leg.

Hugh strapped in his seatbelt, and right then the doors to the airframe were sealed. Hugh blinked as a voice and the aircraft began to vibrate against his head. His eyes were closed. The seat represented sleep.
A hand on his shoulder. A white hand. He followed the long feminine arm to the air hostess, who was offering him a small white towel. It took him a moment to register he was perspiring profusely. And another to notice that every seat around him was taken, even though they were flying to remote Puerto Princesa.
Hugh thought to himself: today every faroff place is easily reached by just about everyone.

He closed his eyes and when he opened them again they were starting the slow arc of a downwards spiral towards Palawan; the big Boeing was being buffeted by powerful cumulonimbus. He leaned over, a chemical dream still tinting his consciousness slightly, and he could see the wings shaking. He had never seen Boeing wings shake this much, and wondered how much they had been engineered to stand, surely not much more. White sheets of tropical rain pelted the windows, then the sun flashed the rain-silvered wings at him, and under them he saw huge brown scars, chocolaty smears raked into the green and yellow jungle of the island under them.

The lagoon was milky blue and filled with sailboats. They descended even further, his ears popping, so that he could see the buildings were all made of wood, all single storied. Then they dropped all the way out of the sky, bouncing softly at the nexus of a long narrow island chain. They were not far from Sabah in Malaysia, and even Indonesia was nearby now. Their craft stood on a strip overlooking the Sulu Sea, and when he emerged from the cylinder into the sun, his arms, neck and nose burned painfully in the tropical heat.

Reflections

A swimming pool is a fishbowl for the soul. It is a place to be
buoyant, a place for the sun to sprinkle itself into rectangular blue.
It is a place where wet dreams spin down a towel-dried spine.

Maybe some of the magic and charm of toiling in a pool comes from primal memories when I spun in amniotic fluid, dark and warm, with outside sounds muffled and crushed. Maybe a swimming pool is a place where the inklings of life blink back at us, through the stars, the silver stairs of light, where bodies are suspended, and I suspend my own, in a rectangular bubble bursting with light.

A swimming pool, in its most basic sense, is merely a rectangle of water for people to put themselves in.

There is ecstacy in that, and also, despite all this delight,loneliness. The loneliness of the long distance swimmer comes from isolation, from being in a sterile white world for long periods of time. It comes from being alone with oneself, in water. But this is not without warmth, or the glittering light of reflection. Sometimes the images shiver, dripping icy from their source. More often they spring buoyant and bright from the dancing rainbows that flow and radiate their chlorine dreams across the bleached chessboard backdrop that is the swimming
pool.

I saw my own reflections in the dark black bar running the polar white length of our lanes. I saw myself drifting in the night, I descended down, until the water pressed tightly against my ears, and saw my dark eyes shining in the dark, the tips of my hair catching the light and drawing it towards the dark black bar. I'd watch these silhouettes of light play off the the small waves that snaked around my body as I
crawled powerfully from one end of the pool to the other.

Sometimes I'd swim underwater and turn upside down and see the surface turn into a mirror, so that I was flying and below myself.
Reflections set off introspection. And a curosity in the swimmers stroking the water beside me.

The Holiday

One
Manila

Hugh closed the lid of light, and as he did the peppermint blue was extinguished. The passenger beside him opened an eye as the notebook clicked, then closed it to the airplane’s hollow sounding darkness.
A child could have drawn the deep gashes in Hugh’s forehead. His clenched hands pushed down on the computer’s ceiling. His eyes were closed, but not in an attitude of sleep, such as the Asian man beside him. They were pinched shut. Hugh’s thoughts, had focused his face into its present consternation. And his thoughts were the clanging symbols of futility. He had, you see, on a whim decided to open a document he’d been polishing for several years, and after a few final flourishes and finishing touches, he had fiddled and fussed, and somehow lost it all. Now, with the edge of the Philippine’s dark archipelago crawling under the airlerons of the Asiana Airlines Boeing, and his two weeks holiday about to start, his entire being ached with pain and futility. The consequence of confirming to overwrite the file had meant he had lost the original. And with that loss, all the sacrifices, backaches, arguments – the entire restrospective – now amounted to nothing.

Already he began to search for meaning in the loss. Already he attempted to find the silver lining. As he did so he realized the full extent of the loss. Daggers penetrated his chest. Images swam through his mind. The breath knocked out of him by the storm of emotional chaos that flushed through him now, in floods, torrents, and monsoons.
And all the while the aircraft continued to descend to the islands. The randomness, now, of his life, begin to scratch at him. An unpleasant emptiness swelled inside him, like a virus.
If your life fails to work out, it must be because you did something wrong? Trouble is your fault.
He opened his eyes. The crude digital aeroplane on the LCD moved a fraction over a map of the islands. It reminded him of the graphics on Atari games he played as a child.
He glared at the screen. He was now moving rapidly towards a place he no longer wished to visit. With all his work stolen from him, there was no work to celebrate. He would have to turn back and start again. Start over! Repeat what had already been done, repeat what had been accomplished! How could he convey it all as well once more? And to suffer those sacrifices twice? To venture through those troublesome memories, to spend the time negotiating the complex narratives again…
Heartbreak was in the eyes that now blinked in the direction of the notebook.
The aircraft landed, hangars and buildings flashed by the windows in rapid-fire. When Hugh stood up, his body felt twice as heavy. He contemplated leaving the notebook – a burden now – on the seat. He contemplated smashing it on the tarmac under the volcanic nose cone of the plane. He bumped against a passenger and, out of character, did not apologize. He was determined to be miserable. His wretchedness was encouraged by the fact that of the two queues, the one he chose moved half as fast.
He finally emerged in the terminal, utterly defeated, and unwilling to continue his journey.
He decided to sleep on a bench at the airport, and fly back to Seoul the following day. Perhaps he could get a few chapters done in the first week. If he worked quickly, it would save him time and effort, for he’d be able to draw on short term memory.
But he couldn’t sleep. The mosquitoes feasted on him. After two hours he was sitting in the dimness, other bodies snoring around him. Whilst searching for chewing gum (chewing loosened the sulking mouth) he’s fingers found a Lonely Planet. He tugged it out, the rough soles of his shoes causing the cover to tear in half.
He started with pictures, then jumped around, and finally his reading became more focussed, more interested. Fatigue had anaesthetized the memory of the lost file. Now sleep was the priority. And second to sleep, passing the night.
Inexplicably the almost motionless shadow, which every few minutes turned a page, and made almost no sound to disturb those Philippinos sleeping around him, stood up and almost without effort, walked quickly out of the building. A waiting taxi immediately drove him away from the airport, and into Manila.

Two
The Prostitute

Having been told where to go, and noticing his unusual Westerner’s accent, the driver began to ask questions. “Where are you from? What do you do?” and so forth.
Despite the lateness of the hour, government troops, their automatic weapons gleaming in the polished night, were gathered at intersections throughout the city.
“Is something going on?” Hugh asked, turning to look at a checkpoint in the rearview mirror.
“Bah,” the driver said dismissively. “Tonight is not special. Many nights like this.”
The driver saw that his passenger was still looking over his shoulder at the receding unit.
“So what job you do?”
Silence, then Hugh turned and sat back. He glanced up, then out the window: “I’m a writer.”
“A writer! Bah.”
He glanced back at the driver, made eye contact through the rearview mirror, then lowered his gaze through the windscreen wipers.
Manila, a dark city, with some tall building looming high like old bones, crept nearer. He didn’t want to go beyond this outer framework of the city.
The taxi driver seemed to have lost interest in talking.
“Is it nearby?”
“Yes, yes, very near,” the driver answered, irritably.
Almost interrupting himself, and in a more hopeful tone, the driver asked: “You will need a lift back to the airport?”
“Yes, first thing in the morning.”
“What time?”
“Early.”
“You call me okay.”
“Okay.” A moment passed. “So you are writer. Where does this word come from?”
“Which word?”
“Okay.”
“Where does the word ‘Okay’ come from? It comes from a war, a long time ago.”
The taxi turned a corner and pulled alongside the curb.
“It means ‘0 Killed’. O.K.”
The driver nodded.
Hugh handed over dollars. The driver looked pleased. He jabbed his index finger at the card he’d put in Hugh’s hand. “I will pick you up. Tell the lady, then I will find the hotel. Okay?”
Hugh managed a smile: “Okay.” And closed the door.
The air smelt salty.

Another door opened, and inside, wood and women gleamed in the low candlelight.
He sat down and eyes traveled to him, met him, and waited. A waiting game of hope, futility, shame, anticipation and desire – but this last one – a desire for what?
It was while of them, an older woman, pushed and plucked against him that a thought emerged out of a cocoon of memory.

Hugh’s mother had killed herself, he realized, not because of her life, but because of all the hope and promise it once had. She had been a head girl in high school. And a beauty queen at university. And then it all ended when she fell pregnant. It had started as another promising chapter, but all good things game to an end, and the flames that once were, were eclipsed, and then dusted by the too-early humdrum of marriage. Her suicide was merely the confirmation of a much earlier ending of her fairy tale. And her standards, like Virginia Woolf’s, could not permit a life so far below the par she had set herself.

The prostitute bumped against him once more. He asked her, dully: “Are you a mother?”
This caught her off guard.
She continued to babble and slur and make suggestive remarks, but he interjected once more: “Tell me about your children.”

The other prostitutes glanced at them, somewhat surprised that she had managed so many rounds already without being brushed off by this young, western buck.
But then he did brush her off. The brewery that was her mouth, the fumes that shot bullets of spit onto his cheeks, finally made him wince. With a small hand gesture and a small shake of his head, she tasted again the bitterness of defeat.
He glanced over his shoulder at a beautiful woman – no, not a woman – a girl, of perhaps 17 or 18. He patted the chair next to him. The chair was filled by this girl’s companion, almost as attractive. He asked her about procedures and processes, and then costs. Finally he asked for the girl’s name, who was still sitting behind them, watching her friend and him discreetly. He paid the amount written on the serviette, underlined the name, and handed cash and the paper towel to the girl serving drinks.

Hugh stood up, turned, and called out her name. She glanced to two faces, who nodded, one waved scrunched up papers, before feeding them into a till.

And as arranged, a taxi was waiting at the door. Doors opened and closed.

In the lateness, deep in the gloom, he discerned a soldier holding the muzzle of a machine gun to a beggar’s head. The taxi drifted by, like a ghost. Hugh said softly, with eyes closed: ‘If you murder you may come, as Pilate did, to murder the man who is God. Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
She heard the murmured name.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said, hesitating, then reaching, shaking his hand.
“No, my name is Hugh. Van Lewen.”
“Van Lewen,” she repeated.
Again she whispered, to the window: “Van Lewen.”
A fist of mist spread in front of her lips, then the silver slipped back into darkness.