“Not more than three days shall I remain under one roof.”
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
William scanned the carousel for a small red suitcase; or at least one that was reddish and smallish. He stood, as always, near the tail of the luggage snake, where bags were fed back into the airport’s entrails. His essentials were all in his backpack: passport, little pink pills, cigarettes, lighter, two changes of clothes and an e-book reader which Birgit had loaded up last year with the complete translated works of Goethe (‘everyone,’ she’d proclaimed, ‘should read him once before they die.’). In recent months, he’d unearthed a few treasures from similar-looking suitcases, including the sky-blue shirt he was wearing, which almost fitted, and an expensive Moleskin notebook. Sometimes, as he approached the green ‘nothing to declare’ sign, someone would tap his shoulder and tell him he had the wrong suitcase. William would apologise repeatedly; he’d reached an age where people usually felt obliged to be polite. He only ever took one suitcase from the carousel, so someone else could experience what he did every few weeks, the invigorating surprise of starting afresh with new possessions. Once, he’d extracted a mysterious plastic rod, which started buzzing when he pushed the on button, but put it back again when a suited pilot began to stare.
Disappointingly, the first dull red suitcase to clunk towards him was his own. With the assistance of an Australian-surfer-type, he lifted it off. He was tired of his current clothes, but thus were the rules of the game.
William thanked the Australian. He had momentarily forgotten which country this was, but it seemed embarrassing to ask. He shuffled through customs and took a lift straight up to Departures, hurrying past the luminous ‘kiss and fly’ sign. He kept his eyes down in case anyone clutching a bunch of flowers at the rail had Birgit’s long, silver hair or pointed nose. He disliked these moments, but somehow, they only got worse the further he went from the airport. This way, he was always between somewhere and somewhere else, even if he never really arrived at the latter.
Rule 1: One suitcase only
In the six months since Birgit’s death, and William’s subsequent retirement from the heartbreakingly dull insurance job he’d stuck with for the pension, he’d been following the rules of his game. Selling their house meant he could afford an economy flight every day or two. Where possible, he booked in row 13. Superstitious flyers made those seats cheaper, if they weren’t removed from the plane altogether. A Chinese businessman told him some airlines skipped 14 too; the number sounded like the Cantonese for ‘will die’. On his last flight, a nervous Polish woman had dug her nails into the skin of his arm during takeoff, apologised profusely and retreated, eyes fixed forwards. This pattern repeated itself through a patch of turbulence, until she drew blood. William dabbed his arm with a napkin, put down the armrest and switched on his e-reader. He liked turbulence; it reminded him they were still moving.
He slept in airport hotels or on long-haul flights, ate at pleasingly predictable chain restaurants, showered in bathrooms cleaned multiple times a day, and bought toiletries in 100ml bottles. Occasionally he sent a postcard of a place where he wasn’t – Sydney Opera House from Athens, the Burj Khalifa from Nairobi – to his former address, under different pseudonyms. He and Birgit had had no children, though not for want of trying, and no one from the insurance company merited a postcard. William’s remaining family thought him eccentric: what was the point of all the travelling, if you couldn’t experience the culture? William explained, patiently, that he hated culture, his own especially. Never again would he try a new dish, visit a significant place of worship or let himself be photographed on some idiotic bridge. Birgit had insisted on holidaying by train after she’d seen some online videos about carbon footprints and sustainability. But life, William thought, wasn’t sustainable. Especially at his age. Birgit had separated waste into three different bins, too, and cycled to work; but whatever else it had sustained, it hadn’t sustained her.
Rule 2: No further than one mile from the airport building
William stepped onto a long travelator, a perpetual motion machine that further proved the superiority of airports over the outside world. It carried him past flocks of beer-sipping Brits, indifferent to the time of day, an Italian family loudly rummaging through suitcases, and underslept cleaners pushing trolleys against the flow of traffic. He poked his nose into a multi-faith prayer room and watched people prostrating or crossing themselves, or bowing, murmuring, eyes closed. He’d given up on his childhood Catholicism, barring a vague sense of the holiness of clouds he felt every time he lifted the plastic shutter and looked out on rolling seas of sparkling, fluffy infinity. God, if he or she existed, was a pilot.
At security, he smiled benevolently at the amateurs who’d failed to separate liquids or extract computers. He hoped, nevertheless, he might be selected for random frisking. It wasn’t a sexual thing: these days, unless he was assigned a middle seat on a full flight, this was his only physical touch.
He liked the stories from his seat neighbours, and collated good ones in the Moleskine notebook, below his five rules. After changing a detail or two, he retold the stories to other travellers as his own, bartering them for new ones. The only passengers he couldn’t bear were those who talked politics. He pretended to fall asleep and sometimes allowed himself to dribble on their shoulders. He didn’t want new ideas; he wanted new lives. The most human desire, William had learned in his seventy-two years, was the desire to be many.
The security scanner failed to beep. A young woman waved him through.
His flight wasn’t boarding for a few more hours. He joined the longest passport queue, flicking through the additional pages for which he’d paid extra, filled with Cyrillic, Arabic and Japanese lettering, ink-smears of airplanes, and visas-on-arrival. He had started noticing how people who looked like him were waved through as if they were paying for groceries, while those who didn’t were more often interrogated or despatched to private rooms. As if to challenge this thought, the border guard stared at him for longer than usual. Though the photograph was only a couple of years old, his face was slipping away from its likeness, straggles of white hair disappearing, pigment fading from already pale skin, oddly coloured spots sprouting on his sagging neck, like an actor increasingly struggling to play his own self.
The stamp came down. After being waved through, William had to pause for breath, doubled over. A man with the Australian surfer’s luxurious eyebrows came over to him. If you fly often enough, you see all facial characteristics and body types.
‘Are you OK?’
William forced a smile. ‘Nothing to declare.’
Rule 3: No more than three days in one airport
The muted lounge TV was reporting on the effects of climate change in the Amazon basin. Birgit would have called him a selfish old git, creating all those emissions without even seeing anything. It seemed to him people should be angry about things like unequal passport queues, rather than monkeys in the rainforest. Après moi, le déluge, he told a fellow passenger who’d questioned his lifestyle. The passenger told him, actually, flooding was very much part of the problem, and pulled on an eyemask. But wasn’t it his prerogative to travel however he liked?
And there was plenty to see in airports. Singapore had a butterfly garden, Athens a mini-museum. William cherished, too, the shower droplets hanging mid-air against white curtains like the flecks of static on the first TV he’d ever bought, the clacking of the old-fashioned departure board in Frankfurt gradually turning Dar es Salaam into Kathmandu. Airports had food, drink, massage chairs, postal services, stationers and banks; practically a whole high street, except perhaps for a doctor’s surgery. People on planes were always asking: Is there a doctor on board? That was the one thing he never pretended to be. In fact, where possible, he avoided even saying the d-word.
Rule 4: The next flight shall be the cheapest to a new airport
William’s hand trembled as he flicked the heavy-duty lighter: once, twice, takeoff. On arrival in a new airport, he always sought out the smoking area, in case his rules ever brought him back. They were mostly hidden away, poorly signposted halls of shame for furtive addicts and oldies who hadn’t moved with the times. Goethe once said: “Smoking stupefies a man, and makes him incapable of thinking or writing.” William had taken it up again after Birgit’s death, in search of stupefaction, and become equally proud of these clouds of emissions.
When he first visited her at St. Thomas’, he was struck by how small her world had become, how little movement it entailed beyond a handful of doors on the Identikit corridor. At that point, she could still make it downstairs to the ruler-straight row of poplars outside, but regardless of what he said to reassure her, they both knew she wasn’t leaving. Even though they could afford a private room, her kindly prison made him claustrophobic after a few hours. Soon she couldn’t even manage her German novels, their last shared hobby. She was on a one-way ticket to a dignified death, “an impossibility,” as Goethe put it, “which suddenly becomes a reality”. What was missing in hospitals was anger. Everyone was too calm, or at best, melancholy. He believed dignity should apply to life, not death.
A muffled announcement came over the tannoy: Flight 146 to … now ready for … your way to gate number…
He tapped the Marlboro and ground the stub into nothingness.
Rule 5: Travel alone
The next travelator bore William’s body towards his gate. He didn’t have the energy to walk today; the suitcase felt heavier than usual. The cut on his arm from the manicured Polish nails was throbbing. In American airspace, he probably could have sued her. At another gate, a couple were loudly berating an airline employee. Rage, rage, he murmured out loud, at the cancellation of the flight. Planes were angry places, too: he’d seen fights over the wrong seat, food spillages, over-sized luggage, and how many Bloody Marys were too many. ‘Air rage’, it was called, or, for William, ‘street theatre’.
…The moving walkway is ending. Please watch your step. The moving…
William watched his step. This lifestyle wasn’t sustainable; but he never intended it to be. In a few weeks or a few months, before his current passport was full or his supply of pink pills had run out, impossibility would become reality. At St. Thomas’, they’d offered him more time, less distance. He’d chosen the opposite. He’d shake hands with his pilot on his own terms.
He hoped when it happened, it would happen in row 13 or 14, sometime between the distribution of snacks and the instruction to fasten seatbelts for landing, not at a departure gate – even if that would add a certain irony. He didn’t want it to be messy or drawn-out, but did hope someone would see. Who, these days, looks death in the face, even if that face is framed by an inflatable travel pillow? It would be a formative experience for some young person. Maybe they’d make an online video about it.
Something rose in William’s chest and emerged in a choking fit of full-body coughing that forced him down onto an anti-sleeping bench. More sympathy and water were proffered. When a concerned passerby outed herself as a d-word, he shook his head firmly and forced himself to his feet. He had to keep moving. The other d-word wasn’t a destination on the revolving board; it was simply the next travelator. William stepped onto it, one hand gripping the handrail, watching familiar faces, variations on past passengers, being carried in the other direction, while the other hand grasped the handle of his own, or someone else’s, small, red suitcase.
