an emptiness of sound
——
Joe put down the book and drank his whisky. A single ice-cube tinkled against the glass. The window shutters had gone down, and the plane was in darkness. Like the guy in the book, he had a window seat and no one beside him. Before and behind him, all throughout the plane, people were sleeping, like silkworm larvae in their soft cocoons. He could hear the sounds of their lives, the gentle snores and their bodies turning this way and that, and he wished he too could sleep. The books did not seem particularly conductive for airplane flights. They were full of exploding planes, exploding buildings, exploding trains, exploding people. They read like the lab reports of a morgue, full of facts and figures all concerned with death. He did not understand them. He thought about the words of the judge in the book. The judge said there was no war, or rather he said that the bomber, Reid, wasn’t a soldier: he was a criminal. But it seemed to Joe that, though he didn’t understand it, there was a war being fought in the book. He didn’t know why or what it was about, it was an ideological battle of which he had no conception, but not understanding it did not mean that it did not exist. Perhaps the judge, like himself, did not understand it, could not understand it, and therefore would not accept it for what it was. And yet, it only took one side to declare war.
He sighed and lit a cigarette, having booked a seat at the back of the plane, and when the ash grew long he tapped it into the arm-rest’s small, metallic ashtray. He wished he could look out of the window. It was dark on the plane, and quiet. He had headphones, but they carried only canned music through. Tomorrow he would be in Paris. He was traveling back through time on this flight, the hours falling backwards the further he went; it was like shedding old skin, emerging new again at the same point one started from. Today he would be in Paris. Yesterday, now.
On board the plane there was no time. Here, he existed in a bubble of stalled time, time halted, preserved, the hour of boarding contained within the self-enclosing metal all the while it was in the air. He shook his head. He was being fanciful. It was only the crossing of time zones that did this. Tomorrow he would readjust his watch, and it wouldn’t matter what the time was on the other side of the world. It seldom mattered what happened on the other side of the world.
He finished his cigarette, and his mouth tasted of ash. He finished the whisky, swirling it around his mouth with his tongue, running his tongue against his teeth, and swallowed, and his stomach felt hollow. He pressed the button that turned off the light and sat back, his head resting against the seat. The plane hummed all around him, and he let the sound close on him until he was completely alone, and the rest of on-board humanity had dwindled into a nothingness: an emptiness of sound.