3.521 kg
Bradley Loewen
Damian stepped forward. “Hi,” he said, smiling, trying to be the gregarious traveler he always wanted to be. The ticket agent was gorgeous. You see the most beautiful people right when you’re leaving. As if it was a concerted campaign to keep him to stay. Sorry…
The Air France ticket agent returned the greeting with the practiced cordiality of a million repetitions. “Where are you flying today, sir?”
Away. They recited their lines and all too quickly arrived at that final, loaded request.
“Alright, sir, please place your bag on the belt.”
The moment of truth. He should have made more small talk, been more affable, won the agent’s lenience. Damian had no idea how much his big maroon suitcase weighed, only that it was heavy. He hadn’t had a scale. He hauled it onto the belt.
The numbers raced. Stop, stop, Damian pleaded. They didn’t. Two, three, four kilos over. No ticket agent was that lenient. Although he could have been four kilos heavier in body weight and no one would’ve complained. No, no. Think of the luggage handlers’ backs.
So indeed, the repacking of shame. He heaved his suitcase off of the belt, stepped out of line avoiding eye contact with anyone, and threw it open near the wall. Books… books could go in his backpack. His backpack was so heavy already. No matter. They never weighed that.
How much was four kilos? That much? Maybe that was enough. What else could he move? He stepped back in line. Thank goodness that even after all the flying his life had entailed he was still paranoid enough about missing his flight to always arrive plenty early.
“Sir, you’re still three kilos overweight,” the ticket agent said with impatience beginning to tinge her voice. No, no, no… He stepped out of line again.
What to do? He was flying alone. No companion to share the load, in check-in or in carry-on. His backpack was so heavy. And looking like it could rip apart at any moment.
He made a snap decision. Fine. Fine, he thought. He had a small blue duffel bag folded up inside his suitcase.
Damian unfolded the duffel and practically dumped the contents of his backpack into it. All the books. Peripheral gadgetry for phone, camera, and laptop. As much as would fit—it wasn’t big enough to ever go over. Now that’d he’d made the decision to check two bags, everything was so much easier. A huge weight off of his back. Literally, he thought to himself in a welcome moment of levity.
You know, you can’t put a price on peace of mind, Damian thought as he strode away from the check-in counter with nothing but his passport, boarding pass, and a backpack of air. He’d worried about the weight the entire train ride to the airport. He really should start spending more money on things.
He forgot to take his belt off before the metal detector but he hardly cared—any chance of a perfect run this time was long gone. Two more redundant security checks later, he finally sank into his window seat. Nothing else could happen, at least not for the next eleven hours. He was home free. Well, free.
To improve matters, the lithe blonde he’d been so close to striking up conversation with in one of the security check lines came down his aisle soon after he was settled. The seat next to him was still open and he hoped, he hoped, but of course not. Two rows forward. However, only the overhead compartment above him still had space, and she was struggling with a dark pink suitcase that had to be bigger than allowed. He plucked up his courage once again and asked, “Need a hand?”
“I think I’m alright, but thanks,” she replied cheerfully in a lovely un-nasally voice with a touch of plush Southern drawl.
Damian immediately felt like a fool. He’d offered because she was attractive. Not too far away there was a mother traveling alone with a child, surely struggling just as much if not more, to whom he hadn’t offered his help. Shameful. He pulled his big headphones out of his backpack, one of the few items remaining in it, and was reclining into his dubstep when an extremely heavyset man in a suit squeezed in next to him. Damian had put his armrest down straightaway when he’d sat down, of course, but the other’s mass was still uncomfortably close to him. Damian wondered how heavy the man’s check-in had been. And felt ashamed again. Judging someone based on their appearance. Just because he’d never struggled with weight. It wasn’t just physical, after all—he’d read somewhere that losing weight required letting go of the security one derived from it.
Takeoff was always the best part. The rush of the engines roaring that there was no better time in history to be alive, the thrill of being pressed back against your seat by the speed, and then the glorious moment of liftoff and actually feeling more like you were flying than merely sitting in a chair in a metal tube. And everything became so small so quickly, a toy world where nothing really mattered. Not anymore.
Alright. Time to get into the movies. No time to waste.
He stared out of the window of the train as it hurtled through the night. In the distance Damian could see the lights of a town. He knew its name, but it wouldn’t have needed to be that one. In the darkness it could be any town. Any city, for that matter, reduced to pointillistic light on black. I am anywhere, he thought. Now that sounded like the first line of a poem. He would write that poem when he got home. His home for two months.
How many times had he stared out of a moving window into the night of some country at the lights of some city while ensconced in his music? The familiarity of the situation was comforting and sorrowful and comforting in its sorrowfulness. He observed, and passed through.
Damian took a sip of his apple juice. He never had written that poem.
“I hope things work out with your… friend,” the quiet brown-haired girl in the seat next to him said as he stood and joined the long shuffle toward the exit.
“I hope so too,” Damian replied. “Take care.”
He exited the plane, the corridor, the baggage claim. So this was where his heart had run off to, he thought, looking around. There she was. He hurried toward her. Despite having played this moment over in his head a hundred times, he had no idea how to begin after all this time. Hug? Handshake? High five? Awkward wave? Bises? Bisous?
She embraced him. Held him. Home at last—
Damian shook his head. That was stupid. None of that had ever happened. He knew better than that.
“If I were you—and not that you have to listen to my advice, but—I’d get into real estate. Now’s the time, man. Get a house. Doesn’t matter if you live in it or not. Get on the ladder. Now’s the time. There’s money to be made.”
Damian made an unintelligible but agreeable sounding grunt. There was no off switch with this guy. But it was too short of a flight for any credible excuse to get out of the conversation. A quickie, the guy had called it after asking the formidable head British Airways flight attendant how long the flight was. “I like quickies,” he’d proceeded to announce to her with a sly grin. Damian had prayed that no one nearby thought he and the Canadian were together. To the flight attendant’s credit she’d taken it in stride. You got used to things as a flight attendant, Damian supposed.
And now he was trying to get him to get on the real estate ladder. Damian knew that actually wasn’t terrible advice. It was smart to invest in assets that generally appreciated. But he couldn’t imagine himself making that big of a commitment. His biggest belonging was his laptop. His biggest belonging was portable. His biggest belonging was not belonging.
Perhaps this guy felt differently about commitment. Before real estate he’d been explaining how he was on his way to meet up with his wife and her family and how much he wasn’t looking forward to it. Damian watched as he stopped talking long enough to raise his beer to his lips, eyeing the flight attendant once more as he gulped.
Perhaps not.
Damian looked up from his movie. He much preferred long-haul to short-haul. Short-haulers were such… tourists. There were tourists on long-haul flights too, but the flight was long enough for that to fade for a time. For them to all be from the same place and headed for the same place and it wasn’t so complicated.
He was standing just outside of the southeast exit of Shinjuku Station. People swarmed around him. Humidity and sound washed over him—the constant machine sounds of a nearby game center, ads playing on several large screens overhead, various conversations around him, shady-looking guys handing out tissues very selectively, the electric guitarist that was always there in the same spot. Thirty-eight million pieces of blackened gum on the street.
He was standing on a dusty dirt road with a soybean field on one side and a pasture on the other, both stretching as far as the eye could see. There was no one around him, no one for half a mile in any direction. Half a mile. You could live your entire life within half a mile in Tokyo and see new faces every day. It was too open here. The sky was too big. It was unnerving. Was there an opposite to claustrophobia? It was like sprinting through a jungle and suddenly emerging from the trees to find yourself on the edge of a precipice—sky above, around, even below. Too much space.
Ostensibly there had been a plane ride somewhere in there, but he could hardly remember it. He felt like he’d been plucked out of Shinjuku and deposited in Indiana by an invisible hand or arcade crane. At least, his eyes and body had been. His soul was racing to make up the ground. Humans could now travel faster than the speed of sound, but what about the speed of the soul? And what if he was carried away again before it could arrive to anchor him? Would his soul eventually catch up to his eyes, the specter to the spectator, or would he be stuck forever in this sleepy twilight?
Screaming. A baby. He’d been lucky the last few times flying, but clearly not this time.
Damian watched the jumbo jet makes its way across the pastel sky.
“Hey, Damian, you want another burger?” His friend called from the other side of the field, barely audible over the music blasting from the stage (‘Like a land-worthy sailor / I am a falter and failure’).
He glanced back up at the sky and caught a last glimpse of the plane before it disappeared behind a cloud. Not yet, he found himself thinking. Not yet.
Still screaming. It wouldn’t go away. He felt sorry for the parent. A vocally discontent child and the eyes and ire of all surrounding travelers. He tightened his headphones. The top of his head hurt from the constant weight, but not bad enough to stop pouring content into his eyes and ears from which he would remember only disjointed images and feelings in a few hours.
He walked along the sidewalk. Pavement, they called it. Get your head back in the game, Damian. The summer’s almost over. The summer is over.
He floated down the street in a jet-lagged reverie lit by crime-orange streetlights. His baggage had gotten lost and wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow. Nothing to do tonight but eat ice cream and peanut butter and watch something to try to stay awake and avoid having to talk to anyone. But he didn’t have ice cream and peanut butter which necessitated a brief public appearance at Sainsbury’s before he could be nowhere.
ETA thirty minutes. That was quick. Well, was it? The second half had been quick. As always. Frankly he could go for another movie. He had no idea if he was ready for this, only that it’d always worked out before. So he’d upped the stakes.
The doors slid open and Damian walked out of the baggage claim into the world. He scanned the waiting faces, wishing his name was on one of the glove-held cards. Someday. To have a place to go, and in an air-conditioned limousine no less.
But that was silly. He did have a place to go. He didn’t think anyone was waiting for him, but no matter, he was prepared for this and knew what to do.
Oh wait, there they were. They had sent someone. It had to be them. No one would wear clothes like that unless they were part of some welcoming team. He made his way over, passing a couple embracing.
The white-clad welcomers saw him. “Hi, are you Damian? Welcome. Is that all you have? You travel light.”
Bright sunlight hit them as they exited the concourse and headed for the parking lot. He loved arriving in the morning. A whole new day.
Back through sliding doors, inside the baggage claim on carousel 3, a big maroon suitcase and smaller blue duffel bag continued their trek around and around, losing companions one by one until they were the only two left, just before melding into the jumble of the next flight.
~
Bradley Loewen (@ich1yenthoughts) was born in Japan to American parents and raised in Yokohama, Tokyo, and Kansas. He graduated from the University of Bradford in the U.K., with years abroad in Philadelphia and Toulouse, France, and is now working as a translator back in Tokyo.
Emma Grigoryan is Armenian. She has won over fifteen international awards in fashion, fine art, portrait, advertising and wedding photography, and her photos have been exhibited at Le Louvre. She started shooting when she was seventeen and hasn’t stopped since: happy, confident people inspire her work, and she loves being able to create whatever sparkles in her mind.
