May 8, 2003

Barbeque In the Clouds

By George K. George

The thrust was immense. The recline was sickening. And the time it lasted, unnerving.

Seat seven-B shook out a few pills a friend had given him before he left. They were round with a “V” inscribed. “Pills is pills,” he sighed to himself before dry-swallowing several. The plane shook violently from side to side as though it was a marble tossed carelessly into a funnel. He assured himself that this was normal and ordered two tiny wines from the stewardess.

Moving back from first class into coach, seat fourteen-C was trying to fight his prejudice in regards to the dark man sitting across the aisle and two seats fore. The faint scent of the twenty-something businesswoman in fourteen-B was no more than an atom over the margin of not being technically a pheromone, an intermittent distraction from concern.

Seat twenty-six-F was leafing through a booklet of compact discs trying to match her selection to her dynamic mood, on her way to stand in her ex-boyfriend’s wedding. Beside her, a twenty-something man was settling in to warm himself by the phrases in his mind that a just-friend he was paying a just-friendly visit to had said to him on the phone before getting on the plane to visit the girl. Seat twenty-six-F was wondering why he hadn’t so much as glanced in her direction. She cued up track two, and reclined the seat.

But in the seats most aft and port, a mother sat with her daughter. The child peered from the double Plexiglas window at the sodium glow of the grid becoming more and more intricate below. Her mother held the page in her novel with a thumb and waved down a steward for two blankets and two pillows.

The cabin was filled with the sound of rushing air, drowning out any conversations fore or starboard. The girl tucked the blanket around herself and stared up at the light, fan and call button console out of her reach. They were departing from a visit to the girl’s grandmother. It occurred to the girl that she had but three grandparents. She put three and one together, had the thought, and asked her mother.

“Where do we go when we die?”

Her mother tightened her lips, and looked straight ahead while marking her page. Funny, she thought, that this epiphany comes prior to the still unasked question of how babies originate. Certainly in adult minds the causation crosses the mind more frequently. Though learning not to be stunned by her child’s intellectual development, she relaxed her eyes and fought a smile. A true test of her agnostic profession, she realized.

“Well, what do you think happens?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked you,” she rolled her eyes.

Her mother knew she was stuck. She’d half-hoped her daughter would shed some light on the subject for her. Climbing into an airplane was comfort at its least. Envisioning sandwiched cars flaming in the sun on an interstate, or a helicopter’s view of a train wreck all strewn around the tracks like sausage links on a butcher’s floor made the statistics for safety eight miles high only slightly more convincing.

“Well, you know. Some people say that we go to a big barbeque in the clouds. Everyone is there, and there’s a heck of a band,” the mother nudged her daughter and chuckled softly.

The child gazed out the window at the moonlit cumulous landscape.

“No. I don’t think so. What else?”

“Do you remember we got lost while camping? When we walked down the gravel road until it turned into a dark scary forest. Remember what we did?

“We held hands?”

“Yes. And we turned around and went back the way we came.”

“Living backwards? That’s weird, Mom.”

“Maybe we wouldn’t notice the difference,” said her mother, and counted the times she suspected not knowing whether she had perished. She had been in her share of traffic incidences, each time lucky to walk. Her daughter often reminded her that she was not a ghost, and was thankful to have her company.

The stewardess came back with packages of honey-roasted peanuts, a club soda and orange juice. She smiled brightly at the girl, too deep in thought to acknowledge, and wheeled the cart toward the nose of the plane, first with a shot of her lipstick-framed teeth at the mother.

The girl sipped the juice. Her mother sipped the soda and began fighting with the foil around the peanuts.

The girl set her glass down and admired the deep orange of the liquid. For a second, she let slip the still posed question, which reminded her of it once again, “Come on mom, what happens to us?”

“No one knows dear, but there are many stories. Some think you just start right over again as somebody else. Or something else.”

She felt, at the age of six, that she hadn’t been somebody else for very long and let her mind wander over all the things taught in Social Studies that her recently visited grandmother had seen in her days on Earth. She wasn’t yet aware enough of the human condition to shudder. Instead, it intrigued.

Her mother was in a thought cloud of her own. Wondering if it would be better to die and be forgotten than to live out the rest of her days in observance of her actions while losing conscious control of them. Back to six-year-old mode, she came.

“Have some peanuts.”

The girl crunched, squinting, pondering.

Her mother yawned and draped a blanket over her lap.

The girl’s mother was able to pin down why the sky is blue, where milk comes from, and where the garbage goes. This abstract conversation had gone on too long for the girl’s attention span.

“Where do you think we go, Mom?”

“I’d like to think we take our favorite vehicle into a sunset of our favorite color. And when we get there, we will know the answer to every question we ever had. Maybe there will be a town of little houses all colored like the favorite color of the people who live inside. But sometimes, I think we just fall into a restful sleep, dear.”

This outpouring silenced the girl. She drank the rest of her juice, and quietly asked her mother to recline her seat. They yawned in succession.

The girl shut her eyes. The sound of rushing air became the sound of wind blowing by the girls ears, on a tandem bicycle with her mother, riding into a half-sphere of deepest orange. Before nodding off, she thought she saw a rainbow of little houses.

When the cabin finished tearing into pieces, and frigid water filled the remains, the mother and daughter reached their destination in the sun. They slept restfully, all knowing.