Unnamed Storms

A hurricane is turning Florida’s peninsula into an exclamation mark. Thousands of miles away, Derek and the rest of the flight crew are left in a not uncommon limbo. Luggage slumps on decoupled wagons beside the empty plane while the waiting passengers spill their discontent to neighboring gates and eye the flight crew in the semi-open lounge.

Derek is thumbing through Sonja’s selfies with company pilots, flight attendants, and ground crews, as well as her shots of the sinuous glaciers of Greenland, of night skies shimmering with auroras. Sonja has the most followers of all the airline’s employees, not counting Captain Williams. Williams is perched at the bar with other pilots, his hands gamboling with a story, his upper body slightly too wide and slightly too short, like all pilots. Williams’s time-lapse flight-deck storm videos have racked up millions of views, the lightning apocalyptic, the clouds enraptured with ionic war. Williams makes a claustrophobic trans-Atlantic hop seem like the thrill of a lifetime.

If Williams is Mars, then Sonja is Venus. Before Sonja began working Derek’s routes, each flight felt like a journey through a long windowed tube arcing over the sea. Sonja’s presence has made the hours bearable, bleakly reassuring him that it’s tubes for everyone, even the exquisitely beautiful. He is also thankful for her imperfections: her freckled nape when her cravat is loose, the span of her bare arms humanized by a pair of moles, and those touches of perspiration whenever she leans across the middle aisle to receive a bottle of wine from his generous, outstretched hand.

A baby grand piano sits in the lounge where Derek waits with his colleagues Sonja, Brigitte, and Pierre. Derek takes a seat at the piano and plays “Summertime,” then “My Favorite Things,” then “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out,” sharing a sampling of his repertoire, though it’s really all he can play competently. He hopes Sonja will recognize the opportunity and sit beside him on the bench to capture a selfie. He imagines her next post: Flight crew member Derek entertains passengers about to depart (maybe) to Florida! Isn’t he something?! She’ll plant a performative smooch on his cheek as the passengers applaud. All her followers will see that he is more than just flop sweat, clogging airplane aisles. It takes all kinds to run an airline.

Williams and the first officer stride past wheeling their high-end carry-ons. “Flight’s on. And stormy,” Williams says to Derek, like it’s the best news in the world.

No one applauds after Derek’s final piano flourish, though they applaud Captain Williams after he pumps up the crowd with a “Who’s ready to fly to Florida!”

The trans-Atlantic flight is as Williams describes it—stormy. Theirs is one of the last to come in before all flights are grounded. It’s after midnight when he, Sonja, Brigitte, and Pierre climb from the airport shuttle. The pilots continue on with other plans. Debris floats down the gutter in front of their hotel. The wind tries to steal their carry-on luggage. GET LOST DEREK! is spray-painted along several plywood sheets protecting the hotel’s ground-floor windows. Sonja makes him pose for a photo while the others laugh. It’s just his luck to share a name with a hurricane.

“Get lost, Derek,” Pierre says, playing bouncer at the hotel door until Brigitte tells Pierre to fuck off and let them all in.

The kitchen is closed, and since it’s too windy and wet to go out for food, they scrounge together a meal from snack bars, chocolates, and bags of nuts from the minifridge in Pierre’s room. From his carry-on, Pierre pulls out a bag of potato chips which promises to contain at least one chip infused with Pepper X, three million on the Scoville scale—which means nothing to Derek. He and the others take turns plucking out a chip at a time as they watch the hurricane on TV, the storm no longer the point in an exclamation mark but a white swirl of erasure.

Sonja bites into a chip and is unharmed, filling Derek with relief. Every time the bag comes past him he chooses the most sinister-looking chip, hoping to keep Sonja safe from Pierre’s game of Russian roulette. Sonja’s on her phone looking at Williams’s feed when she snaps upright, eyes gleaming, hands fanning her face. She’s laughing, then not. Then not at all. She’s choking on what might be Swedish curse words. Brigitte rushes her a glass of water, but drinking it only increases Sonja’s agony.

“Milk!” Pierre says.

Derek hurries downstairs to the bar, but it’s closed. He heads out into the storm without a second thought, searching. He returns to the hotel soaked but nestling small cartons of chocolate milk from a liquor store blocks away. His colleagues are gone.

Pierre replies to Derek’s text. Hospital.

Hospital! Derek has the front desk call him a taxi. He doesn’t know whether to bring the chocolate milks or to toss them, not until he sees Pierre roll his eyes as Derek enters the hospital waiting room.

“How is she?”

“You know as much as I do,” Pierre says, gesturing for one of Derek’s chocolate milks. “Briggy is with her.” Pierre shakes the carton, then downs the contents in one go.

The waiting room fills with injuries: abrasions, broken bones, cuts from flying debris, heavy bleeding. Derek hears the storm through the hospital’s air conditioning: mediated sighs and moans and a clanging that sounds like something being lifted and dropped over and over. He browses Sonja’s photo stream while waiting for word on her condition. Her last post was twelve hours ago from their departure gate. He appears in the background of a selfie. The unintentional forced perspective makes him appear to be standing on Sonja’s shoulder. He could be happy at that size, whispering compliments into her ear. Not an angel or devil on her shoulder, but Derek the Admirer.

Pierre grabs another chocolate milk, then the last carton. He looks down at Derek’s phone. “She’s paid extra to do that, you know. It’s a recruitment tool. Same with Captain Thunder.”

Derek doesn’t believe Pierre. He’s seen Sonja gaze out the galley windows without her phone, the light bouncing off the cloud tops and gracing her with that otherworldly glow found only at rarified altitudes. She genuinely wants to share her vision of the world.

“Most of her followers are bought,” Pierre says.

Derek only intends to take back Pierre’s last chocolate milk, but he ends up squeezing the cartoon with such force that the contents gush across Pierre’s throat and shirt.

“They think it’s mostly a panic attack,” Brigitte says, appearing before them. They quit their shoving match immediately. Brigitte holds out Sonja’s room card. “She wants her makeup bag.”

Back at the hotel, Pierre heads to his own room to change. In Sonja’s room, Derek opens her tidy suitcase and finds the clear bag of makeup and, beneath it, an identical bag with prescriptions. Should he bring those as well? He sees a spare second uniform, workout clothes, tan underwear, a bra with one cup spooned into the other—clothing he does not touch or disturb, though an untamed part of him wants to. He compromises with a graze across the curve of one cup with his knuckle. Emboldened, he unzips the makeup bag and removes a pencil and holds it under the light. Printed along the side it reads: Lancôme Le Crayone Khol 03 Gris Bleau 1.8g .06 oz. It’s another language. The dark gray barrel has a tapered gold cap. The nib has a greasy feel to it, slipping surprisingly quickly across a page of hotel stationary.

Derek collects his jacket from Pierre’s room.

“You shouldn’t treat her like a Madonna,” Pierre says, wearing nothing but a blue thong as he walks back to his bed with a drink in his hands. The rain on the window sounds like someone is hurling gravel. “I could tell you stories,” he says, but Derek is already out the door, down the hall, fast-tapping the elevator call button, Sonja’s makeup bag nestled in his free hand, then tucked in his jacket once he’s outside.

The hospital releases Sonja in the night’s final hours. Despite the storm, all three of them fall asleep in the taxi and have to be jostled awake by the driver when they arrive at their hotel.

Curtains drawn, eye mask ready, Derek climbs into his own bed. He hears a tapping at his door. He wishes it were Sonja, asking for a glass of milk, but he assumes it’s Brigitte. He’s slept with Brigitte a handful of times, once at this very hotel. She’s a dynamo. He enjoys watching her little unintentional dance at work as she reprimands her uniform’s climb up over her hips with frequent tugs in the opposite direction. But Brigitte has a husband and three teen boys, and he doesn’t like the fact that her family is not enough for her, or that messing around is the only way someone will sleep with him. That last time, Brigitte role-played that he was Captain Williams and she was Sonja. She even swiped a captain’s hat for him to wear and dolled herself up past the point of parody as Sonja. The whole thing made him feel ill. To the best of his knowledge, Sonja and Captain Williams have never slept together, but maybe that’s one of those stories Pierre could tell.

Derek ignores the taps and tries to fall into dreams in which he and Sonja have imaginary conversations about how difficult it can be to get through a day, about whether she, too, deep down, also believes that they’re passing through metaphorical tubes in the sky, never really traveling, knowing, or experiencing the vast world below. Does he want her to admit she’s falling apart? Of course not, but a little.

He knows she would never allow him into her life, but he dreams of her tripping into his: reveling in sloth on her days off, doing nothing but eating, napping, surfing the web, masturbating to porn, binging TV—the rewards for making it through another week’s shifts. To agree with him that renouncing willpower and hope is an act of philosophical acceptance of the human condition.

But the knocking at his door could also be Sonja, asking for a glass of milk.

The hallway is empty. He hears the noise again, but from behind him. He pulls aside a curtain and cups his hands against the warm glass. A tall palm sways, the end of one shredded frond grazing the hotel’s façade several floors below. Tap tap tap.

He wakes a couple of hours later to find that Williams has posted a fresh storm video from their approach into Florida yesterday, as well as one captured from a high-rise last night. While he’s scrolling, Sonja posts a new photo. It’s him, Derek, standing in front of the boarded ground-floor windows the night before. She’s cropped the photo so the only word next to him is DEREK! No one has commented or liked the photo yet. It’s fresh and his alone, his added heart feeling as loud as a shout.

He finds the others downstairs finishing breakfast. The light in the restaurant brightens by degrees as workers remove the plywood panels covering the windows. Sonja, sitting as far from Pierre as the table will allow, suddenly glows. She’s back to perfection, though Derek can still see her in tears, gasping, beauty broken. When he first saw her on Brigitte’s arm in the hospital waiting room, he didn’t recognize her at first. Swollen lips, reddened eyes, and makeup that Brigitte must have inexpertly applied. He had looked away from the disfigurement then, but now wonders where it went in the night.

Derek fixes himself a breakfast plate and sits down. No one mentions the night before. The TV is on with a survey of the damage which is now the main subject; hurricane Derek has been downgraded to a tropical storm.

Late that afternoon, after the runway has been cleared and they’ve left Florida on the same plane they arrived on, Sonja thanks him for his help the night before.

“Of course,” Derek says, heating meals in the plane’s galley.

Because he finds it painful to look at Sonja in such a confined space, he gazes out the window. Only rain clouds remain of what was once a hurricane. When he turns back, Brigitte has joined them. She tugs down her uniform and prepares the coffee and tea. Pierre is checking the vegan, kosher, and children’s meals. Not until Derek unlocks his loaded cart and pushes it clear to the first row of coach, does he lose the sensation of Sonja’s hand on his shoulder that moment ago when she thanked him, a moment already miles and miles away in an empty tube in an empty sky above an unnamed storm.

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