Stage 1

Welcome to gate four. She’s sleeping on the carpeted floor of the terminal. I glance at the clock. Fifty minutes until six in the morning. Enough time for the album. I take the headphones and plug them into the laptop in front of me, and keep writing. About what, I’m not sure. About what I’m doing, right now. About this trip, or journey, or mistake, or adventure, or whatever you’d like to call it. Honestly I haven’t yet hit upon the right word. The execution of a whim is something that defines one’s character. I do know that. I think in this case it defines me as a romantic modernist. Or to put it another way, a masochist. But there’s an element of a normal person in me somewhere. I know this because that tiny little piece of me feels dirty and abused. I’ve fought that piece back a hundred times, one more won’t be difficult. It gets easier, in fact. Which makes that little piece feel even worse. The growth of insanity is exponential. You start out writing a short story or two, maybe running around in the woods singing to yourself, then pretty soon you’re booking flights hours before they occur and driving oversized vehicles to far away airports with an enigmatic human being (who is maybe even further down the path to insanity than you) sound asleep in the passenger’s seat.

So how did I get here? It all started with a truck, and a stick, and fragments of ice being chipped off the windshield by bare, shaking hands. No. It started with a phone call. No, not even that. It started with a graduate school audition. Further back. With a kiss. Further. With a fascination with children’s books. With jazz. With a birthday. With a kiss.

It’s no use tracing these things through labyrinths of decisions already made, just like it’s no use thinking through all the decisions that weren’t made. You’ll get hopelessly lost in either direction, I can promise you that. But one thing I can tell you is that it feels amazing having everything you need to survive in a backpack by your side. I often wonder how it would feel to have everything you own in that backpack. I hope to feel that someday, but I should be careful, wishing for something like that. But hell, wishing is the one place I don’t need to be careful, and I have no intention of doing so.

Then again, I did wish for this. Didn’t I?

My living has become as careless as my wishing. That must be the real danger.

Stage 2

In the first plane, I could see down to the ground. It was dark. The cities below were glitter scattered on a tabletop. It felt like I could reach down and brush it into the air with my fingertips.

The wing outside the window wobbles against turbulence. She’s looking out the window now. I’ve learned that she sleeps with her eyes open, a lot of the time. It must be tiring, seeing even while you sleep. As for me, I can’t sleep at all.

Everyone looks tired on a plane, and in an airport. Anyone you come across smiling broadly for over three seconds is immediately labeled as either a jackass or a stewardess. It’s strange how even in these lab-rat conditions no one can help judging the people around them, sizing them up as morons or business slaves or vacationers or staff or baseball fans or military or anything. I guess I fall in the first category.

Two small children just walked by. I had forgotten children existed. The air gains a certain freshness as they pass, but it fades quickly as their father leads them back to their seats.

No clouds to see. Just a light grey all around this roaring javelin of a machine. I wonder what it will be like, over there. I wonder what it was like, back there. I really can’t say anymore. Is this what I’ve been needing to jar me out of my sleepwalking existence? It seemed like it at first. But now I only feel deeper asleep than I ever was, slipping into a dream.

Waking up is just not in the cards. Not for a while now. So I’ll take what I’ve been given, and scour every inch of this preposterous rabbit hole.

Stage 3

I walked until my feet hurt. The library was a cathedral. I read The Communist Manifesto on the highest floor until I was falling asleep. I’m so tired now my vision expands with each inhalation and shrinks as I exhale. I haven’t slept in an amount of time that eludes me. I fail to understand where I am. I know no one in this town, not a single person. And I’ll be honest, I could get used to all of this. I’ve never felt so deep in a dream before, so far removed from my life.

I sat on that dock, listened to that album, watched all those cars across the bay flow over the bridge in a stream of white pinpoints. Then the album ended, and I listened to the lapping of the water against the wooden beams.

I’m hoping by the end of this, my mind, rather than throwing up its usual walls and mirrors to obstruct that which is true from reaching the other end of the wire, or even worse, reforging itself to be utterly desensitized to even something as absurd as this, will suffer some sort of implosion, and suddenly I will be in my life again instead of outside it. I can’t say that I need this to happen, because I’ve been living fine out here. But it’s about time I came home.

I’m not going home physically until I go home mentally.

That’s a lie, I’m going home Sunday no matter what. But I feel like something might actually happen, this time. I feel like what I’m reaching for, just this once, I may actually grasp before these days are done.

I’m not depressed right now. Just distant. Painfully distant from myself.

Merciful God.

Stage 4

The morning was kinder to me. I feel like myself today, whatever that means, even walking through such alien surroundings. Not entirely alien. Very human. I know these people, in a way. Their struggles are just as irrelevant, trivial, and self-afflicted as mine, and seem to them to be excruciatingly important. Just as mine seem to me.

I walked down from the campus’s towering hill and soon found myself on the lakeside. I spotted a trail of some kind and followed it. Freeways, built on concrete pillars thrusting out of the water, arched above me as I hiked through the wetlands on muddy pathways and floating platforms. The mountains were almost black against the sky, and were flecked with splotches of white. They loomed far out in the distance, and the clouds skimmed over them, children in the eyes of wise old men. I sunk into the amalgam of urban and natural and felt free and safe and even young.

After a while I found myself on the other side of the marsh that borders the lake, and in the midst of an arboretum. It was filled with colorful winter flowers and towering cedars. I sang a few songs as I walked in their shade. The sun was shining brightly through the clouds, and a light rain was falling. I was filled with a joyous melancholy. Sunlit rain is something I had forgotten could be.

Just like I have forgotten to be, for so long.

Or some such nonsense.

Stage 5

We fell asleep. I dreamed of ghosts congregating in our room, standing around the bed, watching us. They had no eyes. They were only fuzzy, three-dimensional shadows vaguely human in form, as if they could hardly remember what creatures they once resembled. One by one they waded into the bed, their legs moving effortlessly through the mattress and sheets. We lay there, clutching one another, and each time one of the ghosts passed through us, we shivered. They didn’t seem to mean us harm. I think they just wanted to feel alive again. And for the split second they passed through our dying bodies, perhaps they did feel alive, and the memories of life flooded their vaporous heads, while ours were filled with strange dreams of solemn visitors and green fields spotted with doors.

Stage 6

From the windows of the small prop plane the snow-drenched Blue Ridge looks like furry scoops of vanilla ice cream. I tell her this. She tells me I’m strange. I have no retort, comical or otherwise.

As it turned out, my Latin professor was on the same plane. She gives us a ride back. The three of us talk of language, then of music, then of government, then of the human purpose. I listen intently to the two of them, and try to listen to myself. The roads are clear, and the snow is clean and white. I’m home. And maybe more than just home. I feel quiet, strong. For a little while, maybe, I am the man that little boy wanted to be.

Backstage

That’s a pretty good script. But there’s still one question left. Should the movie be a comedy or a tragedy?

Ah, hell. A movie’s a movie. Sign the fucking contract.