BRANCHES OF THE SERVICE
Photograph by Ryan Ancill.
The attaché looked out the window and knew that something was wrong about the wing. He absolutely knew. But he couldn’t say what he knew other than he knew and that he couldn’t say what he knew.
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His driver to the airport, Samson, hadn’t said a word. Samson had opened the back hatch from his seat and let the attaché load his bags himself. Same for unload.
At Security, the attaché showed his passport to the officer, loaded his bags into plastic trays, trays on the belt, bags in the trays.
After he’d passed through the scanner, another officer asked him to remove his glasses so that the officer could examine the earpieces of the glasses.
Just as he arrived at the gate a notification popped up on his phone and was echoed, a moment later, by an announcement from the airline employee behind the counter that his flight was on time and would be boarding shortly.
He walked around a corner to the Lost and Found.
The Lost and Found consisted of a forlorn counter in a dead-end hallway separated from Security by a mesh fence, with a Lost and Found employee behind the counter buried in their phone, and a single shelf, devoid of any items found, on the wall behind the employee.
Opposite the counter, against the wall, stood a row of flags. Poles that were taller than the attaché by half were capped by golden braided tassels dangling to the base of each furled flag.
Defense force flags. What were they doing in the dead end? He’d never seen them there. And who was watching them? Not the Lost and Found employee. The attaché, for his own amusement, stood as near to Coast Guard as would be necessary to reach the top of the pole. He extended his arm to the top of the pole and touched, brushed with his fingers, the golden braid. The Lost and Found employee neither called out Hei! nor darted out from the counter. He remained buried in his phone, texting.
The attaché walked back around the corner back to the gate, scanned his boarding pass, joined the line in the boarding bridge, found his seat, stuffed his belongings in the overhead compartment, squeezed past the passenger in the aisle seat, settled into his seat, opened his notebook to the page marked by a tassel, and went to work.
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His finger reaching for the call button, the call button sounded, not after he’d pressed the button, but before, and he “called back” his finger as he realized that another call button had been pressed, somewhere in a row behind him. The aircraft began its slow roll forward as if the button had been its cue. The attaché was watching out the window now with attention. From the passenger address system at the front of the cabin a flight attendant announced in a neutral tone that the flight attendants would be happy to answer calls once the aircraft was aloft and to please be patient until the aircraft safely was aloft.
Whoever had pressed the call button waited exactly until the end of the announcement and then pushed the call button again, and this time the attaché, alerted by the first call, without turning his attention from the wing, caught out of the corner of his eye the arm of the passenger in the aisle seat in the row immediately behind him as the arm descended from the button.
We can not answer calls while the aircraft is taking off, please be patient, said the passenger address system, this time somewhat testily.
The button sounded once more. The aircraft now had progressed beyond the sluggish early phase of its acceleration, and the wing with its engine and flaps and slats was jouncing like a child’s toy model of an aircraft designed with affordability in mind. The passenger address system began an answer in a tone of firm rebuke but was interrupted by the button which kept sounding over and over in an insistent tone of not taking no for an answer.
Down the aisle came a flight attendant, not disguising his annoyance as he sized up the cabin and observed that no one was out of their seat or doubled over in pain or making a scene of some kind. The passenger who’d summoned the attendant was in the aisle seat in the row behind the attaché. He was twenty or thirty years older than the attaché and had salt-and-pepper hair in a nondescript cut and a cleanshaven weathered face with deep circles beneath the eyes. In a loud whisper partly drowned out by the engines he was explaining to the flight attendant, in Finnish, with urgency, something about the wing. His urgency cut through the turbofan’s roar. By now the aircraft had left the ground. The attaché made out the English word “slats.” The man seemed upset that the flight attendant wasn’t reacting but only continuing to listen. He stretched his arm and pointed out the window at the wing, jabbing his finger across the chest of the passenger behind the attaché. Both the attaché and the passenger in the aisle seat in his row had turned in their seats and were watching the heated one-sided exchange, as were other passengers up and down the aisle, as the aircraft continued its climb.
The flight attendant crouched in the aisle and peered out the window.
A quiet but unsettled murmur spread through the cabin. The flight attendant rose from his crouch without a word and walked uphill toward the front of the aircraft. The cockpit door opened and admitted him. The wing sliced through shapeless wisps of clouds in the mostly blue sky. The other two flight attendants still were buckled into their seats. Upward soared the aircraft in a climb that seemed no different to the attaché than innumerable other climbs except that normally he would be drafting notes and footnotes in his notebook. Now he listened for the voice of the passenger who’d pressed the button, wondering whether the passenger, who urgently had something he wanted to convey, speech inside him that wanted out, would engage his neighbors and whether, then, a group conversation would coalesce around the passenger, a tense conversation, or whether instead the passengers murmuring around him were eyeing him with the communal distrust of a supposed member of the community who steps out of line and would icily decline to engage the passenger.
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Out of the cockpit and down the aisle came the flight attendant who’d knelt down earlier. He stopped, not at the button-pusher’s row, but at the row ahead, the attaché’s row.
The flight attendant, friendly but not smiling, asked the passenger in the aisle seat and the attaché to kindly unbuckle and step into the aisle. The attaché shut his notebook and complied. The passenger who’d pressed the button stood and joined the two displaced passengers in the aisle. The flight attendant asked him to return to his seat. The button-pusher complied. The flight attendant slid across the row with a kind of good-natured awkwardness. He hunched down, supporting himself with one hand against the arm of the attaché’s seat, his face close up against the window. He gave the wing a quick look.
The flight attendant turned his head and looked at the attaché.
Uh-oh, thought the attaché, this is it. He’s about to ask me a question about the wing which will brand me forever as an inattentive passenger. He will inquire about the wing, and I will have to answer that I do not normally pay attention to the wing. Here ends my vow of silence.
The flight attendant asked the attaché if he could borrow the attaché’s notebook.
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Flipping through the notebook to the first blank page, the attaché handed over the meticulously crafted notes almost all of which had been exercises in overpreparation. Out of an abundance of relief he handed over his fine-point marker as well. The flight attendant went back to peering out the window. As he peered, he sketched. He looked back and forth from the page to the wing. He drew and peered. The aircraft ascended through endless wispy clouds. Piece by piece, a wing, with turbofan and slats and flaps, assembled itself crudely, cutting across the faint blue lines that ruled the page.
When the sketch was done, the flight attendant thanked the attaché and brought the notebook up the aisle to the cockpit door, which again opened to admit him.
The subdued murmuring resumed in the cabin—subdued in part by the roar of the engines. The attaché, before he slid back into his seat, glanced at the button-pusher, who wasn’t murmuring, but sat grimly with his arms folded and his weathered face flushed. He looked like a man who has been complaining to his municipal council for the past decade about the corrosion of structural elements in a renovated bridge and is now waiting on the phone to speak to a low-level administrative staffperson while sitting in his car observing a crack in the bridge from the shoulder of a road along the river.
The aircraft ascended smoothly, at a shallow angle now, so shallow that only the wispy gray clouds, of all shapes and sizes, not fully-formed clouds but fragmentary cloudlets that perhaps would soon dissolve into nothingness in the heat of the new day’s sun or perhaps were permanent decorative features of this stratum of the sky, invisible from the ground, wispy and elongated and with soft convoluted blurry edges, all in various pleasing shades of gray so light as to be in places translucent…only these shapes, falling not only behind the wing as it grazed or pierced them, but falling below as well, vividly established that the aircraft was still in the ascent phase of its flight…
…a phase in which normally the attaché would be thankful for the smooth ride as he drafted and redrafted in the notebook on his knees. Normally he would be thinking in meeting-sized thoughts, attaché-level thoughts. He examined his knees (black wool) and pictured the empty page there, pre-wing, the ruled lines, the black tassel; he imagined the familiar and comfortable fit of the fine-point marker in his grip—the marker that he kept clipped to the notebook at the juncture of the front and back covers—and he visualized his fingers gripping the marker and the marker moving across the page, but the thoughts that formed, without the notebook present to guide and center them, went in all kinds of unhelpful and unfocused directions just as quite possibly the meeting in Stockholm would, unless he arrived with the notes, whose solemn purpose was, among other meeting-oriented purposes, to bring a meeting back on track.
Feeling helpless, the attaché pressed his cheek against the window and began thinking slat-sized and flap-sized and turbofan-sized thoughts. Flapslat, slatflap: nonsense words that resonated pleasantly within his head, unspoken. Fanflap, fanslat. Airbreather. The turbofan was connected to the wing by a component whose name he couldn’t call to mind, not a strut, not a pylon. The turbofan breathed in air and breathed out air. It was LOUD, never more so than when your seat sat over the wing. Humans too are airbreathers, the attaché said to himself. We breathe in air and breathe out speech. No air, no speech. Air in, speech out. The air that the turbofan breathes in undergoes some chemical reaction involving heat and fuel hidden within the turbofan’s aluminium exterior. The air that humans breathe in undergoes some chemical reaction involving heat and fuel hidden within skin. The reaction happens inside the turbofan and what comes out is air. The reaction happens inside skin and what comes out is speech. Air.
The attaché made a mental note that wasn’t meeting-sized and pertained not at all to any of the meetings he sat in on, but which pertained to air and breathing and which he felt obliged to make for accuracy’s sake, even though he wasn’t all too sure about the accuracy as it floated up from some random eco briefing and—
The note in the process of being written inside the attaché’s head was interrupted by a voice.
The captain was making an announcement via the passenger address system. In accented English, he identified himself as captain. The announcement was brief. The flight crew, he said, was aware of a minor issue with the wing. They had contacted Operations about the issue. They had just heard back from Operations, who’d informed them that it was safe to continue on to their destination.
The attaché, no stranger to announcements from the cockpit, made a mental note about the announcement’s tone. Not only did it lack the usual chipper veneer of such announcements, the voice struck the attaché as the voice of someone who was not a happy camper. Not only not a happy camper but not happy in a way that the attaché would have sworn he recognized. The captain had been told off. Upbraided.
At the end of the announcement the attaché found that he’d turned his head and was looking at the passenger in the aisle seat in his row. All up and down the cabin passengers were turning their heads and looking at other passengers. The passenger in the aisle seat looked back at the attaché and rolled his eyes. He wore a black blazer and a white dress shirt without a tie and gray slacks and his skin was hazelnut-hued. After rolling his eyes, he half-smiled at the attaché. On his left wrist he wore a bracelet made from hematite in a style that was popular in Helsinki that summer. The attaché half-smiled back, two half smiles adding up to a kind of speaking handshake. Hello! I fly this route nearly every week, too. Can you believe the sort of folderol that comes out of the passenger address system! Last month the flight crew introduced themselves by singing “Hi! I’m Elli!” and “Hi! I’m Eino!” And on that very same trip when I was returning to Helsinki, I watched a member of the cabin crew put the microphone to his mouth and announce that we would shortly be landing in Stockholm! All around the cabin other pairs of passengers were exchanging just such handshakes and rolling their eyes or shaking their heads.
The attaché went back to gazing out the window, thinking turbofan-sized thoughts about how a turbofan breathed in air and breathed out air on a leg from Helsinki to Stockholm, breathed in and breathed out on a next leg from Stockholm to Gothenburg, more of the same on a next leg to Oslo, leg after leg, breathing in air and breathing out air until the aircraft was put to bed for the night, and the next day it began all over again, airbreathers boarding the aircraft on a leg from Tallinn to Riga, Riga to Stockholm, Stockholm to Tampere-Pirkkala, and on and on. The air the turbofan breathed in was exactly the same air as the airbreathers in the cabin breathed in, the very same transparent air that the attaché wasn’t seeing as he gazed out the window and breathed in air and didn’t breathe out speech.
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Gazing out the window, pursuing this line of thought—have they opened the new lounge at Tampere-Pirkkala?—the attaché felt eyes upon him. He had the unmistakable and almost never erroneous sensation that he was being watched.
He turned away from the window. The passenger in the aisle seat in his row was looking at him with friendly curiosity.
“Was that Arabic?” the passenger said.
The attaché broke out his phone. He thumbed in letters and held the phone up to the passenger in the aisle seat. The message read: No that was entirely in English? Announcements are always in English? followed by a puzzlement emoji. He held the message up long enough to be read by someone whose first language wasn’t English. Without waiting for the passenger to answer, he switched to another screen on the phone and held up the phone again. The message started with a serious-face buttoned-lips emoji and read: Most sincere apologies for communicating via text, not speech! For personal reasons I have taken a temporary vow of silence. I do hope you’ll understand!! and concluded with a smiley-face buttoned-lips emoji.
After the attaché put down the phone, the passenger in the aisle seat intensified his look of friendliness and curiosity, then waved his hand in front of his mouth, as people do to affably dismiss. “Oh, I understand, I completely understand. No worries at all,” he said. “Nothing of importance, really. Sorry to intrude. Vow of silence, good for you.” He buckled his seat belt and added “Carry on as you were,” in a tone of exaggerated camaraderie.
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The attaché made a stab at drafting a list of notes which he then would flesh out once he had a marker in his hand again, but the device he did have in his hand was so alien to the conjuring of meeting-sized thoughts that he didn’t get past thumbing in the optimistic title “Inspired kernels of notes that anticipate all possible meeting contingencies.” At that moment he again felt eyes on him. He looked over at the passenger in the aisle seat and discovered the flight attendant from before standing in the aisle.
“Your notebook is now in my possession again,” said the flight attendant. “The captain wishes me to extend his thanks for your willingness to let us borrow it. Moreover, the captain would like me to apologize on his behalf for tearing out a page. Moreover, he has a request. Operations has asked us to retain the page. They would like to examine the sketch. They would very much like to acquire the page for the purposes of documentation. There is a chance they will not be able to return the page, they have said. Not return the page, I repeat, is a distinct possibility. To keep the page, however, they must have your permission. I am now asking for your permission to return the notebook to you without the page and to keep the page and deliver it to Operations.”
“Why don’t you just take a photo of the page?” asked the passenger in the aisle seat in the attaché’s row.
“I’m not Operations, I don’t make those decisions,” said the flight attendant.
Thumbing again, the attaché composed a notebook-sized note and held his phone up to the flight attendant. The note read: Yes I grant you, and Operations, and any and all employees and departments of the national carrier and its affiliates, and their representatives, and any and all parties not connected with the national carrier and its affiliates but with a legitimate claim of interest in the sketch, and in turn their representatives, and persons associated with their representatives who have a direct or indirect claim, here and now and forever into perpetuity, without condition and irrevocably, my permission to retain the page!! followed by the national carrier’s smiling aircraft emoji. The attaché changed the screen and held up the message about his vow of silence.
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The attaché put away his phone and placed the notebook on his knees. He opened it to the gap marked by the tassel, the page gap. The gap marked a confrontation between a thoughtful high-ranking employee of the national carrier who had been intent on tidily tearing out the page, and a notebook not designed for the removal of individual pages. The attaché unclipped the marker from the cover and set to work to bridge the gap, to override the break between pages, by filling the new blank next page, the page formerly waiting its turn and now thrust into premature immediacy, filling the page and by so doing assuring himself of continuity.
But his thoughts wandered to the missing page, which he envisioned framed and mounted in a hallway deep in Operations, alongside other airline curiosities.
He imagined a colleague, a fellow attaché, stopping by his office one afternoon, knocking on his door, announcing without preliminaries, in a jesting tone that hints at privileged knowledge about to be revealed, that only the other day he’d had a chance to view and admire a sample of the attaché’s artwork. He would reveal the privileged knowledge in the same way that a classmate of the attaché had revealed privileged knowledge two decades earlier when the attaché was a young student on the outskirts of Espoo. The classmate, a distant acquaintance of the attaché, had approached the attaché, and in the hinting privileged-knowledge jesting tone described how he’d accompanied his father to a professional gathering of dentists in Stockholm and had viewed a plaster model of the young attaché’s teeth at an exhibit at the conference. The classmate’s father was the attaché’s dentist, and the attaché’s braces were a new kind of—but here the attaché’s wandering thoughts were interrupted once more by a tingling intuition that eyes were trained upon him. Again, he looked over at the passenger in the aisle seat in his row.
The passenger was looking not at him, but at the notebook, and his face beamed with an expression that combined vindication, longing, fellow-feeling, surprised happiness, and a pressing urge to speak. He was gazing blatantly at the notes on the wide-open pages as no passenger ever does without violating a venerable social contract. He seemed unable to tear his eyes away from the page filled with notes and the post-gap page, which as yet held just the first few scribblings of a new note.
“It is Arabic!” the passenger said at last, after the attaché had been staring him in the face for at least five or six seconds.
The attaché sputtered: sound, not speech. He composed himself and thumbed another message into his phone and turned so that the passenger in the aisle seat could read the message, which was preceded by a loose-knot emoji, a fine-point marker emoji, and two big hazelnut-hued smiley face emojis, and read: I get that all the time!! No, I write my notes in English. My cursive is a loopy scrawl. The attaché gave the passenger time to read the message. He took away the phone and held up the open notebook exactly where the phone had been, open pages facing outward. He gave the passenger a good long close-up of his loopy scrawl.
The passenger’s face fell.
The attaché quickly plunged back into the page, but his thoughts were now Espoo-sized thoughts, wandering self-consciously toward an explanation. The origin of his loopy scrawl was an enigma that begged to be narrated in conversation. In his childhood, his school on the outskirts of Espoo had been nothing special. Yet within that nothing-special were pockets of incongruously deep scholarship. Many and various were the challenging assignments written with pen and paper in the classroom. Sonnets and half-sonnets, for example, in his English class. An old man / boasted / that for him / philosophy / was only / so much / wind. His manner of gripping the pen was idiosyncratic and had never been corrected. Why never corrected? Therein lay the enigma. Mister Malmivaara sat at his desk in the corner of the classroom so near to the attaché that the attaché could make out the peculiar white eyelash that grew not from Mister Malmivaara’s eyelid but from the skin at the corner of his eye. He watched the attaché clawing the pen clumsily and never said a word. No teacher did. It was as if he were writing with an invisible marker, a grip cloaked in invisibility. As the attaché progressed toward a career in public service, and grew into his grip, he cultivated the ballooning loops of letters, the exaggerated slanting ascenders and descenders, simple letters given short shrift, letters entangled with their neighbors—it all added up, over time, to his signature illegibility. In crowded coffee shops, hotel shuttles, reading rooms in research libraries, in seats aloft, his notes were as opaque as code.
That he could only with difficulty restrain himself from turning to the passenger in the aisle seat and telling him about Espoo and Mister Malmivaara and the white eyelash and the invisible penmanship was a reason in itself for swearing a vow of silence.
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He gave up on his notes and gazed out the window until the clouds dropped away far below and the aircraft leveled off. The cabin crew began to busy themselves in the little galley at the front of the cabin. He realized he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since his afternoon flight on the day before. He watched the galley. The flight attendant who’d returned his notebook emerged from the galley without a cart or a tray. He came down the aisle and stopped at the attaché’s row and beckoned for the attaché to follow him as he swiveled and moved back up the aisle toward the front. Every passenger in the cabin stopped what they were doing and scrutinized the attaché as he made his way up the aisle.
In the little galley, out of sight of the passengers in the cabin, two other flight attendants were brushing lint from their midnight-blue blazers with a lint brush. They bestowed friendly smiles upon the attaché as he turned the corner with the assistance of the flight attendant who’d returned his notebook and who gently guided the attaché out of sight of the passengers in the cabin with his hand on the attaché’s elbow. An aroma of yeast and meat teased the attaché’s appetite. The two other flight attendants smoothed out the fronts of their blazers. They leaned back against the curved hull of the cabin. One of them, with a high dome of a forehead and bristly close-cropped auburn hair, resembled Hans Välimäki, the television personality.
“Captain would like us to initiate you,” said the flight attendant who’d returned his notebook.
“Initiation ceremony,” said the flight attendant who resembled Hans Välimäki. “A rare privilege. Granted only to the deserving few. In my many years of working for the airline, I have only participated in a handful of such ceremonies.”
“This will be my first,” said the third flight attendant. “Rarely does a passenger make such an outstanding contribution to safety, comfort, and convenience.”
No, the attaché thumbed into his phone. Thank you but the credit should go to the passenger in the aisle seat in the row behind my row. He added a Finnish flag emoji and a Finnish coat of arms emoji, a Maiden of Finland emoji, and a Whooper Swan emoji. He held the phone up to the flight attendant who’d drawn with the attaché’s marker on the attaché’s page, the other flight attendants stepping forward to read the screen.
“Oh,” said the flight attendant who resembled Hans Välimäki, “don’t you worry about him. We have a special initiation reserved for just such passengers.”
“Yes indeed. I’ve participated in many such initiations. Each a little better than the last. The work that goes into improving them is a highlight of my aspiration to improve myself.”
“Striving always for a proper balance of safety, comfort, and convenience.” The three flight attendants laughed heartily.
“Turning back and landing in Helsinki, you have no idea how that would have wreaked havoc with our schedules,” said the flight attendant who’d returned the notebook.
The flight attendant opened a drawer in a cabinet alongside a sink. Inside the drawer were odds and ends: safety pins, shirt buttons, a wristwatch, a pair of eyeglasses with pink frames, a plastic envelope containing what looked like an assortment of very small forks. He rooted around until he laid hold of a smaller plastic envelope which he drew out from the drawer and held up for the attaché to examine.
Inside the envelope was a circular medallion embossed with the symbol of the national carrier, the letter “F” with a whimsical tail of enormously disproportionate length. Flanking the medallion were long silver wings, tipped with rounded, overlapping embossed feathers. “Our land, our land, our Fatherland!” the flight attendant who’d returned the notebook sang softly. Still singing, he pinned the medallion to the attaché’s black wool lapel.
We love our rippling brooks, so bright, our gushing streams, so strong, the whisper of dark woods at night, our starry skies, our summer light, all, all that we, in sight and song, have felt and lived among.
Fortunato Salazar's fiction and other writing is at Ploughshares, Conjunctions, The Atlantic, Electric Literature, and widely elsewhere. He lives in Berlin, Germany, and West Hollywood, CA.