It wasn’t the kind that covered the entire face. He had until recently only seen those on
television, but after spending the last few days in what he could only describe
as a smattering of oversized shopping malls and indulgent luxury hotels hastily
scattered across unending desert, he was surprisingly no longer taken aback at,
if still bemused by, those hanging cloaks of draperied observance, which somehow
provided only as much anonymity as conspicuity, and from which light could
neither enter nor escape except for merciful slits enabling if not requiring the eyes
to peer out ominously, watchfully, giving them an inevitably beady quality, he thought
but felt bad about thinking. That wasn’t
what she was wearing, though. This was
merely a scarf that delicately, purposefully wrapped around her head like a portrait’s
border, cradling her hair tightly so not even the remote possibility of a
single strand dreaming of escaping existed, and framing her strong-featured, rounded
face, as if not only not obstructing the arguably divinely placed structures
within but actually accentuating the soft, russet skin, full, flush lips,
jet-black, wide eyes, and perfectly manicured eyebrows whose shape and form had
obviously been labored over. It was not
exactly clear if the scarf seamlessly blended into her body’s similarly
textured and colored covering, or if they were one and the same.
He could barely hear her soft whispering to the hyper-friendly
and -attentive stewardess with the motherly disposition, a disposition he believed
was in no small part absolutely genuine but which was also, he had to assume, a
dutifully if not strictly enforced job requirement.[1] Something about some sort of seat change that would promptly be looked into, but what really struck him was not
the genteelness of the seemingly unnecessary request – with separate little
pods constituting the business class seats, each fitted with foot rest, shoe
cubby, private entertainment viewing system, seat that reclined all the way
back, as in to a 180-degrees position as in parallel to the plane’s floor, and a
kind of encapsulating barrier around the non-aisle adjacent area that created a
sort of basic perimeter for the pod, not to mention her seemingly travelling by
herself, he couldn’t understand how any of the seats/pods were in any way
distinguishable from another, though since he had never before travelled with this
level of excess he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t missing some important detail
– but the exquisiteness of how she spoke English, lightly touched with a vaguely
stirring combination of Arabic and British accents, the type of vocalization
and articulation likely obtained in the finest of international private schools
where the daughters of oil-fueled sheiks and less-than-democratically-instituted
heads of state mix freely with the correspondingly privileged children of
European archdukes and lords to variously, if not vicariously, cement and subvert their families’ statuses. Her such status was particularly confirmed by an array of extremely pricey and
equally fashionable accessories: black
leather stilettos with over-sized, golden bow, black leather hand-bag of
unidentifiable, to him at least, but obviously expensive, designer brand, large,
incongruously unhip pearl earrings, flashy gold watch on one wrist, and on the
other a beautifully understated, thin bracelet featuring a simple design of
what appeared to be a dolphin jumping through a wave. There were no rings on any of her fingers.
His growing mesmerization by the girl at whom he curiously
stared left him fully unaware that the plane had by this point left the
ground. The subtly increasing force with
which his body was pushed into the seat did ultimately alert him to the ascent,
which he noted was accompanied by familiar passenger adjustments, readjustments,
and general, personal and possessory retrofitting in anticipation of the barrel
of the long ride they all stared down.
He was not particularly interested in them all, however. She stretched her legs out into the space across
from her seat and onto the foot-rest doubling as the top of the shoe cubby,
which remained unused, not only exposing her blue jeans, which though he had no
independent basis to confirm he could only assume were an expensive, designer
brand, but even surprisingly, as if in an impossibly abstruse act of coquetry, exposing
a few precious inches of ankle, which he thought appeared thin but not
otherwise especially remarkable.[2] She next took to the task of wrapping the
airline-provided yet nevertheless outrageously soft blanket around her legs and
waist, making sure to tightly tuck the corners in between her hips and the
seat’s arm rests so as to affix herself in this makeshift bower while retaining
sufficient upper body mobility. These
preparations aimed at maximizing relaxation and squeezing whatever relative pleasures
could be had in such an inherently unpleasurable environment no matter how many
relative frills could be provided took on an air of businesslike stolidity. The methodical placement of her large, decidedly
unhip pearl earrings inside her black leather hand-bag of unknown but surely designer
origin was succeeded by an equally prim, proper, and effective tactile verification
that her head-scarf, or -covering or -what-have-you, never revealed more than just
a suggestion of her neck as she carefully placed the specialized in-flight headphones
in her ears. She eased the seat back to
an angle upright enough to look straight ahead while reclined enough to
simulate comfort, and with a no-nonsense fluff of the pillow and its reflexive
placement in the small of her back, she plunged into the clunky morass of
divertissements that is the Etihad Airways in-flight entertainment viewing
system.
Having had a few if not carefree then at least unobsessed
moments to himself before she entered the frame, he was already familiar with
the bloated, spoiling cornucopia of multimedia audio-visual hydrogenation harbored
by the small screen across his seat, providing the kind of ocular gorging and auditory filling useful if not necessary to completely shutt oneself
off from one’s surroundings, allowing the time to destination to pass less than unbearably painfully, from classical Carnatic kritis to the Euro Club dance mix; broad
and terrible American television comedies to hyper and bizarre (and probably
terrible) Chinese serials; whimsical and sentimental British films to lavishly
stereotypical Bollywood musicals; a documentary on Moscow’s choking traffic
disaster to an infomercial on the different services offered in the Etihad airport lounges, etc. It was a world of blinking lights and pulsing
diodes existing largely to remove us from the crushing burdens of absolute boredom. Also available was an audio recording of
prayers from the Quran. As she scrolled
through these various options and many, many more, he knew he couldn't even
begin to guess where her roulette wheel of distraction-as-amusement would stop
but felt her selection would reveal something telling about her, a mostly shrouded enigma
he couldn't yet hope to crack, something important, perhaps even something epic. His bated breath fluttered tentatively as she
clicked past movie after movie with a metronomic rhythm that finally began to
slow and ultimately stopped entirely. Time
inside flight EY055 stood still for a brief, conversely unending moment as she
pressed the “SELECT” button and a title screen slowly came into focus to his
spying, bleary eyes: The Twilight
Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1.
As the timeless story of vampire love began to play, he
wondered if he was really going watch her watch this whole movie while continuing
to read into every single twitch and tic for larger meaning or mere justification for further study, to find new ways to avoid dealing with the personal
questions that had hounded him since long before the desert: why was he here, where was he going, what the hell happened back there, and whatever
other existential folderol he didn’t want to bother with yet couldn’t seem to
shake. Why can't I seem to figure out what to do, and when is it too late? Suddenly, she abruptly paused the
film, removed the in-flight headphones from her ears, and turned around. She looked directly at him and appeared to say something. He was stunned. He could not make out the words she seemed to
only be mouthing.
“Excuse me, what’s that?”
“I said, do you mind not speaking so loudly?”
[1] The friendliness and
attentiveness themselves being, without any doubt and requiring no beliefs nor
assumptions nor anything else that could be considered as less than total
certainty, jointly and severally genuine as well as professionally enforced.
[2] But absent some kind of horrific swelling or, even more impossibly surreal, a tattoo of a butterfly or something, how could they be,
he thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment