Eighteen-Second Passenger

This is another altered auto (altered autobiographical)piece. I have been told by those who know that there are too many places and names in the story and it takes too long to get going. That is probably true. I have another version that is shorter.

Eighteen-Second Passenger
1
It was a year and a half before Karl Peter died. Of course, he didn’t know when Karl Peter would die. With AIDS, you never knew. When he lived in New York, Carlos, who went by the name Chuck--a guy who could always get you theater tickets--came down with pneumonia, got better, went to Fire Island, got sick there and two weeks later was dead. That was in 1984. Chaguito, who got sick about the same time, dragged on for years.
In the main train terminal in Copenhagen, Paul made mental lists. It made him feel in control. List one, types of transportation on the trip so far. List two, the places he and Karl Peter had been together. List three, Karl Peter’s friends whom he had met. List four, his friends whom Karl Peter met. :
When the train pulled into the ferry at Korsør, he got out and climbed the stairs to the top deck to look at the pilings for the bridge that would connect Funen and Sealand. The small island Sprogø that lay between them, once with only a white-washed farm house, a few stone and mortar buildings, and a herd of black and white dairy cattle, was now the path of a four lane highway. A low bridge connected the highway with Funen. The other end of the highway ended with a double chain of the huge soaring pylons for the bridge over the Great Belt.
Out on the deck the wind whipped his brown hair into his eyes. He turned straight into the wind, focused for a few bleary-eyed seconds on the pylons, and tried to make out land across the belt. He felt a secure removal from the world when he entered the enclosed deck. A line stood outside the small kiosk and a longer one was forming in front of the cafeteria. He found a seat next to a window facing west towards Funen. There was a newspaper on the seat which he placed on the table. The engines strained as the ship pulled away from the dock and then settled into guttural rumbling. The people in the lines and those seated at the tables in the cafeteria were somber and static. He was exhausted by the trip, and his mind latched onto thoughts and repeated them. “Motionless in motion.” He smiled at the thought, as if it applied to the other passengers whom he took in as he gazed around the cafeteria, but not to himself.
A woman who had been in the line at the kiosk lugged a shopping bag and a blue and white striped bag up to the table. She dropped her things and he turned to look at her.
“This seat free?”
She dug into the cloth bag for a thermos and some wrapped sandwiches, placed them on the table and seemed to fall into the chair. She wore white support hose up to her knees and a light plaid pleated skirt that hung squarely from her hips..
“Is that you newspaper?” she said pointing to the Politiken that was piled on the table with the sports section on top.
“Yes, but you can look at it.”
She took the front page section without acknowledging his answer and lifted it up like a wall between them.
The same year Karl Peter=s ex-lover Bjørn died, Paul had moved to Puerto Rico with Neftalí. Bjørn had moved to Bergen with a new lover and hadn't told anyone he was sick. He refused treatment and after two bouts of pneumonia he was gone. At the time Paul thought of an essay he had read about how animals go off to hide when they die. Neftalí's friend Miriam died the same year. She had a boyfriend who was a heroin addict. Her new age friends had gone to the hospital with crystals and set them on her chest but a week later she was dead. There was a big obituary in the paper that said that she had died from el mal del siglo, the scourge of the century.@ Paul had not mentioned Chuck, Chaguito or Miriam to Karl Peter. There was no consolation in numbers.
He looked at the design for the new bridge on the back of the newspaper which the woman was reading and tried to compare it with the unconnected pylons he could see to his right. The drawing was the skeleton of the bridge. A bridge looked like a skeleton. Of what? he thought. Of the ocean? Of the air? Of the small encapsulated pieces of flesh that would shoot across it? Of motion? Motionless in motion. He smiled the vacuity of the phrase.
The woman lowered the paper to turn the page and glared at him as if he were spying on her.
In 1991 Karl Peter=s mother died. A year later he moved from Copenhagen back to the farm on which he grew up. Paul was surprised. Karl Peter had worked in the same welfare office, lived in the same apartment in the Vestebro section of Copenhagen for twenty years. He had lost his Funen accent. Each winter he took his package trip to Austria and each summer his package trip to a Greek island, Patmos or Rhodes.
His friends joked about the move back to north Funen with its flat ocean-like fields of sugar beets and its soft peculiar accent, but he didn't find it funny. Werner, with whom Karl Peter had talked of setting up an antique store, was furious and said that Karl Peter was going home to cry over his dead mother and try to crawl up her snatch by sleeping in the same bed that he was born in. They never spoke together again. Werner's vulgarity was often breathtaking.
Paul asked him if he was going to sell "black pigs", since the year they had been lovers they had joked about Karl Peter's mother selling pigs illegally to a local butcher. Karl Peter had merely written back that he would have neither white nor black pigs. The farm and his family were not to be joked about. In 1993 he told Paul he was sick.
Twenty minutes into the crossing, the voices sank into the muffle of the engine=s grind. There were still no cellular phones on the ferry and would only be few for the last year it sailed.
Three of his friends, one in San Francisco, his college roommate, and someone he waited tables with in a Greek diner on Broadway and Sixty-third, died the year that Karl Peter told him he was infected. He had pneumonia once in 1992. He started AZT in 1993, but it almost killed him. Four of Neftalí's friends died that year.
From the window he could make out the church steeple in Nyborg and the tops of the trees in the forest north of the city. The woman lowered the paper again. Jet lag made it difficult for him to concentrate on anything and he stared vaguely past her. She turned the page, then vigorously flapped it open. When Paul looked at her, she lifted the paper before her face.
He brought three old New Yorkers from a pile in his office for the trip. From San Juan to New York, he read a short novel by García Marquez, La crónica de una muerte anunciada. Between New York and Gothenburg, he had read the New Yorkers. One article was about the crash of the US Air Flight 423 outside of Pittsburgh on September 7, 1994. He hadn't finished it. He reached the paragraph where it said, “Of those twenty-six seconds, only about eight seconds are crucial to the understanding of what occurred. After those first eight seconds, the pilots had become passengers,” and put it down. For him, the article with its inventory of the thousands of hours involved in the investigation, the parts, both human and machine, examples of other unsolved air crashes, the detailed last minutes of flight, had suddenly become about something else.
People began to gather their things. The ferry passed into the harbor, the motors groaned in reverse as the ship slowed down, and then came the soft thud as it touched the dock.
Everything had gone fine. He reached the bus five minutes before it left. He sat in the front and told the bus driver where he wanted to get off. Karl Peter was waiting for him next to the bus sign, thin as always, his beard bushier, a few teeth missing. They talked about the trip, about what was growing in his garden, about the riding school horses that left their hoof prints in the gravel edge next to his hedge that he raked twice a day.
2
Most newcomers to the area were surprised that the house was built as late as 1912. The barn was bindingsværk, a crude wooden frame with stone and mortar between the beams. The house, stables and work shed connected to form a square with an opening large enough for a wagon or truck to pass into the inner courtyard. Though the design was handy for chores, if you had a fire you lost everything. Modern farms were built like the big estates with the farm buildings far from the house.
There were three doors going outside, one down to the cellar, another out to the barn which was connected to the house, two into the dining room, three from the kitchen, one from the hallway into the sitting room, one from the kitchen hallway up to the attic with its two finished bedrooms both with doors. The downstairs bedroom had a doorway up three steps to the bathroom, an addition added at the same time as the cellar under it. Sometimes he counted twelve doors and other times thirteen.
Paul opened the door of the attic bedroom and walked down the cold path through the piles of plates, dolls, and furniture. He tiptoed down the steep attic stairs holding onto the rope that hung from the ceiling to steady himself. He edged the door open so its creak broke into small separate notes. He didn't bother with the light here since he wasn't sure where it was, found the door to the small hallway that held a shower stall, a freezer, old boots and clogs. He opened the door to the barn, then the one to the back garden and hurried out. His piss thudded into the raked gravel and steam rose from the puddle that formed and then coursed towards him. He shuddered in relief.
He looked up at the sky. Silence.
In bed he counted the doors again. When he was warm, he undressed under the covers and threw the clothes onto the floor. Beyond the hedge on the other side of the road, the neighbor=s cows shone in the moonlight. At night the fear came to him that the stillness of the house meant that Karl Peter had stopped breathing. He would listen until he heard the neighbor=s son come home on his motor scooter, or the wind in the long entangled boughs of the red beech tree. Even when the dim glow from headlights of cars on the farther road came in through the window and fluttered against the faded wallpaper on the slanted dormer walls, he felt as if there was life and relaxed into sleep.
It was June. Until eleven in the evening northern Funen hummed with half-light, a dull indistinct presence that like light fog cut vision to a few hundred feet. They sat in the garden until it became cold and drank the last glasses of wine and the coffee inside. There was little difference between the light in the room from the four candles on the high table before the sofa and liquid mixture of light and darkness outside that seemed to swell and wane with their breathing.
They didn't talk about dying, but it seemed to Paul to be the topic of the long pauses in their conversation.
“Jeppe called.” Karl Peter broke the silence.
“Was he sober?
“No. He never is anymore. He lost his job, or they forced him to retire. They kept him on for years.”
“I remember when he showed up at the apartment. Woke up in the middle of the divider in the expressway. That was fifteen years ago. Covered with mud. No keys.”
The conversation drifted back into silence. It seemed they would sit there for the rest of the evening without a word.
“It got worse. He gets stupider.”
“What did he say when he called?”
“He told me not to feel bad since we are all going to die. That was his consolation. I hung up. He called back. Thought we got cut off.”


The second morning after his arrival Paul sat at the long narrow kitchen table next to the downstairs bedroom. He had looked for the newspaper but it wasnt in the mailbox and came back in.
Another fifteen minutes and he tiptoed into the living room which had been divided into a dining room and a small sitting room. The television was by the kitchen door so when they watched television at night--this was two years before commercial television came to Denmark and there were still only the two public channels which didn't start adult programming until seven p.m.--they had to sit at the table in the stiff dining room chairs.
Paul tried to read the room. Porcelain dogs, hundreds of them, covered the end tables and corner tables and sideboards and windowsills. He lifted a few up that he thought might be Bing and Grøndahl or Royal Copenhagen or Lladró, but most of them were cheap mass-produced sentimentality, as opposed to the finer versions. On one table the dogs encircled adoringly a porcelain Marie Antoinette with a crepe ruffled skirt. A little electric cord ran from the back of skirt so the dress could be lit up. On another table, dogs, whose faces lifted to an adored master, faced a print of Saint Margaret ascending into heaven in a cloud of cherubs.
He raised a piece of Bornholm pottery from the coffee table and turned it over to look at the signature. The art nouveau deep oranges and dark reds left the different impression from the packs of dogs: autumnal peace, expensive good taste sinking back into the earth like leaf mold.
He entered the real dining room. Karl-Peter bought the huge impractical carved oak set with a part of the inheritance from his mother. The two meter long bureau with carved scenes of dancing peasants was filled with antique china and silver. Before a trip they took to Copenhagen later that summer, the first trip Karl Peter had made to the capital since he moved to the farm, they opened all the doors and Paul took pictures, just in case there was a robbery and Karl Peter had to make a claim to the insurance company. Paul still had those pictures under the rag rug place mats in a junk drawer in the house in Puerto Rico.
Official photographs of members of the royal family hung on the walls. A crude painting of King Frederik the Ninth=s, his hands stretched below his knees and his one eye uncomfortably crunched into his cheek stood on an easel by the French doors. On the wall behind the easel was a painting of King Christian the Tenth by the same artist. His forehead stretched up like he was in a convex mirror and the shoulders were as square as a box.
Karl Peter’s collection of Danish royal memorabilia began fifteen years earlier. When Paul’s visa ran out, he left Karl Peter and moved back to New York. Paul had jokingly mocked the royal family. Each week Karl Peter sent him a postcard of Queen Margarethe or Prince Henrik or of the young princes or of Queen Inga, the queen mother. On the back of one of them, Karl Peter had written, “I have been alone since you abandoned me.” The word he had used was “forladt,” deserted, forsaken. To Paul he was merely following the laws of the universe. When your visa expires, you leave. The expiration date was printed on his passport. And he had never registered with the police. In that word "forladt", there were all the implications of responsibility.
He returned to the kitchen. There was still no sound from behind the door. He got up and stood before it. The white paint was worn from the handle down to an earlier light green color that matched a scratch on the door frame. He concentrated to bring whatever was beyond the door to life. He sat down.
Karl Peter came in through the hall door with a cardboard box full of strawberries.
“I thought you were still asleep. I was trying not to wake you.”
“I've been out picking strawberries. Come look.”
Paul picked up a gritty strawberry and took it to the sink to wash it off.
“I have to go to the hospital today. You can come if you want.”
Paul bit into the strawberry.
Karl Peter rolled up his sleeve and held the underside of his forearm up for inspection. He pointed to a dark plum-colored spot.
“The dermatologist in Odense, she burns them off with dry ice. Suzanne the sadist, we call her. You can stay here. You must still be tired from your trip.”
The unexplained “we” made Paul feel excluded.
“Yeah, I am tired.”
They sat silently over coffee for several minutes.
“You know I read an article on the plane. I don=t know why I read it. It should have had a notice warning you not to read it on a plane. It was about a plane crash. The plane started falling and the second passed when they couldn=t do anything about it. There was a line in that article, “After the first eighteen seconds, the pilots had become passengers.” I keep thinking about that.”
Karl Peter looked at him for a few seconds, as if waiting for Paul to explain, then took a sip of coffee and walked into the bedroom to change.
When Karl Peter returned from the hospital, they drove to Odense Fjord which was three kilometers away through the flat fields of sugar beets. Paul brought the camera, but Karl Peter was not interested in posing, so Paul took several pictures of the fjord and of Karl Peter from the back as he walked down the path through the wild roses and snake grass.
“I've started to talk to the minister,” Karl Peter said in an off-hand way that showed his embarrassment.
“I thought you took yourself out of the state church.”
“Everybody did when I was in my twenties. I want to be buried next to my mother. I joined the church again. It makes it easier to be buried in the churchyard. I guess part of me always believed. It was always work not to.”
“Really?”
“Well, maybe not. I had no reason to think about it.” Karl Peter stopped to shake the sand out of his shoes.
‘Those paintings in the bedroom. The copy of The Last Supper with the Judas with a nose bigger than Hans Christian Andersen=s and all the other disciples with the same face. And that Jesus over the bed with the crown of thorns that look like a knife set. Those are yours?”
Paul stopped for an answer and Karl Peter walked away from him.
“Or those were some your mother had?”
“Mine. I bought them at the Salvation Army in Odense. I like that they are only an attempt at art. More religious. Less art.”
“Less art is right.”
There was not even a smile from Karl Peter and they came to the end of the trail and walked back to the car without talking.
“I feel that most of my life I have been the passenger, like the pilots in those last eighteen seconds.”
Paul waited for a reaction. Karl Peter stood next to the car and looked out over the fjord. The towers of the power plant in Odense were visible on the horizon.
“Do you ever think that we are hurling through space at incredible speed and at the same time spinning around 25,000 miles every day? And we don=t feel it. We are numb to movement. If you were on a dirigible in a wind and you lit a match, it wouldn=t go out. It would be moving with the wind and would not feel it.”
“I feel it.” Karl Peter raised the collar of his jacket around his neck. “Let's go back.”
3
Paul cranked the slatted aluminum windows open and looked out on the fog that moved down between the green mountains like a white river. Neftalí had moved into the city soon after Paul returned from visiting Karl Peter and their relationship of twelve years ended.
There was a message on the machine from a friend from Denmark. The person said only that he had something to tell him and would call back later. Paul assumed that Karl Peter was dead. He meant to call, Gurli, a neighbor who was a trained nurse who had visited Karl Peter every day since he had been sent home from the hospital. Karl Peter had battled the county social services until they installed a hospital bed and he could move home from the hospital. He realized he had dialed the wrong number when Karl Peter’s aunt answered.
“Paul. Hello. Yes, he died yesterday. Very peaceful. It=s better. It was so bad towards the end, but it was a beautiful death.”
He looked again at the address book and tried again.
“Paul. I couldn't talk to you the other day when he gave me the phone. He was in so much pain. The nurse would come and he would hide it, act like he was fine. He thought that if they gave him morphine he would die. As soon as she left he screamed and swore, making up for all the time she was there. At the end he was so bad that they sent him back to the hospital and gave him morphine. He died the next morning.”
The last months Paul called him every week. Commuting to work he took coastal Highway 188 from Loíza to San Juan to spare himself the annoyance of the strings of traffic lights on the 65th Infantry Highway through Carolina. Mornings he paid little attention to the ocean, coconut palm groves, tall wispy Australian pines. And there was always the worry that the ocean had taken a chunk of the highway and he might have to turn back and enter the snarl of traffic from Carolina to San Juan, arriving late and exhausted. But after work with the expectation of the cool dark mountain evening, he stared out at the zigzagging coast of the isthmus of Piñones and felt that the water somehow connected him to Karl Peter, that it passed across the Atlantic to the North Sea and to Odense Fjord. He never told Karl Peter this. When he got to the bridge over the Río Grande of Loíza, the view of the river with a perfectly spaced line of coconut palms in the distance, mountains and clouds farther off, gave him a vision of an imagined childhood paradise.
There was a storm the week Karl Peter died. It stuck to the island and dumped ten to fifteen inches of rain. For two days it poured without letting up. From the back door of the house, he could see no further than the gate. He fell asleep and woke up to the rain pounding on the tin roof. Electricity went out for three days. The neighbor told him that part of the road was washed out and large boulders were blocking both roads down the mountain. When electricity came back, on the television they showed hills of sand along the road in Piñones. Several places the asphalt had caved in and the chunks that were left hung three feet above the missing road.
When he finally could go back to work, he took the 65th Infantry Highway to Carolina and then Baldorioty de Castro to San Juan--Traffic lights, merging traffic, cars passing on the emergency lane, the emergency lane converting to a regular lane and bottle-necking at each overpass. His mind was fettered to the present by the constant need to react and brake, accelerate, brake, accelerate. He sat in lines of traffic jams wondering whether it was an accident or road construction that detained him as if it were the answer to the universe. He thought of the Cortazar story about the traffic jam on the way to Paris where no one ever knows the cause and people get married and die as they wait for the cars to move again. Perhaps that=s the fear of every traffic jam, that it will never move.
That day he left work early and decided to try 188. He bought the New York Times near work and made it to Piñones by four. He stopped at a bar overlooking the ocean and tried to read, but the wind off the ocean flapped the newspaper like sheets on a line. He set the half-full beer can down and the wind blew it over.
He took off for home again. By Combate Beach, two surfers ran down a sand dune into the road. Paul braked suddenly. The anger rose up to his throat and he felt his chest tighten. He hissed a few words in Spanish that would have made him blush in English. One of the surfers lifted his board like a club at the car. Paul gunned his car as a threat and the surfer held his ground. The other one gave him the finger and leered. A Jeep Cherokee came around the corner and slammed on its brakes behind him. It honked and the surfers crossed to their rusted Datsun parked off the edge of the road.
He tried to leave the Jeep as far behind him as he could. A car pulled up to the road from a shaded parking place on the beach and stopped to look before turning into the road and Paul blasted it with the horn. The Jeep was now visible in his rear view mirror only at the end of the long straight stretches of road.
A hundred feet ahead the speed zone for the grade school began. He slowed down, though the school was so isolated that no children ever walked home. The car behind him passed impatiently. In the mornings when he slowed down for the school zone with a long line of anxious commuters behind him, he imagined himself leading them in a religious ceremony. The figures of the children on the sign were symbols that inspired the commuters' worship; human hope and community. That brown and beige cement building on the long empty stretch of beach and palm housed the children no driver could see, but everyone in the long line of cars behind him must be reminded of. He looked in his rear view mirror. The Jeep was right behind him, passed in a flash of impatience, and a minute later the road was empty.
It came on him suddenly. As he brought the car around the bend, the road seemed almost to be at the level of the water. The sea grape trees thinned and he could see the Atlantic, blue to the horizon. He began to cry. He pulled over, did not leave the car or roll the window down. Soon the ocean blurred behind the tears and almost as quickly they stopped.
When he reached the bridge, he pulled over. The November weather was comfortable, but walking up the bridge, he began to sweat and his light brown shirt stuck to his skin. He stood exactly in the middle, looked out to the ocean that was mixed as far as he could see with the muddy water of the river. In the other direction the brown prairie of water disappeared into trees. In his mind he saw pieces of rivers; the creek next to his house, the waterfall on the Quebrada Reyes, the rain falling on his roof that all fed into the Río Grande of Loíza, but in his mind it was a broken network. It was not a physical entity, but a chain of places that existed simultaneously in his memory.
He took the map from the glove compartment, opened it onto the steering wheel and found the bridge. A long line of cars, that had been following a semi, passed him, each with a whoosh and gentle rocking. He looked out the windshield as if he could recognize what was on the map, then back at the ocean that ran to the edges of the paper in all directions and the blue tangle of rivers threading through the brown and green mountains.