A Ghost at the Edge of the Sea: Chapter One

Chapter One

The plane over the Pacific shuddered and dipped. Its wings flexed, and the metal groaned as the passengers groaned. From his position in seat 46B, Will couldn’t tell which sound was which. He clutched at his armrests, his seatbelt cutting into his stomach with every jolt. The flight attendants had been strapped into their seats for at least ten minutes now, or twenty; he couldn’t move to check the time, and outside, it was still dark. The woman next to him gasped and grabbed his hand as the screens showing the film flickered, then went dark, and Will held his breath, waiting for the oxygen masks to tumble into his lap.

“At least,” the woman said softly, without letting go of Will’s hand, “at least I know where I’m going.”

Will raised his eyebrows at this, and then turned to her and gave the best smile he could manage. “Shanghai still, I hope. Unless they’ve changed it to some small Pacific island.”

The woman giggled and shook her head. Her blond bangs brushed at her eyes with the movement. “No, that’s not what I meant,” she said, pressing down with her hand and driving his own into the cracking gray plastic. “I mean after that, if this plane gives up. What’s your name?”

“Will,” he replied, cautiously, unable to come up with another to give her.

“Pray with me, Will,” she said. “Pray that we reach whatever destination God has set out for us, whether it’s of this earth or not.”

For a second, Will thought she wanted him to pray something with words, words that he knew he wouldn’t know. But she simply sat in reverent silence, her eyes closed, her lips moving without sound. So he closed his own eyes too, to keep her company, and realized, right before his plastic cup tipped melting ice into his lap, that even now he still didn’t buy the idea of heaven. It was Shanghai or oblivion.

Will did not believe in an afterlife; he never had. He didn’t really wonder about it when he was a boy, not even when his cat and his grandfather died on the same day and adults reassured him awkwardly that they’d both gone to a better place. And when his father was diagnosed with cancer, he tried his best not to think about death at all.

It was only after his father actually died that he realized one night in his dark bedroom, alone save for the blinking lights of the router and power strip, that his father was gone, really gone. Death was final, decay inevitable, and his father’s life was wiped from existence as completely as an arrangement of driftwood in the face of a rising tide.

And after the turbulence finally subsided and the movie began again, after Will dried off his jeans in the cramped restroom as best he could, after the woman next to him stopped praying and offered him a valium, which he gratefully accepted, he thought of his father again as he slipped into sleep and wished that there really was a place to go, that death wasn’t as hopeless as he knew it to be.

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Why Are My Eyes Sad?

Not actually our tree, but still a Swedish Christmas tree.

So I bought a Christmas tree today from an Egyptian guy who had a bunch of them stuck out in the snow right by our house. It's a lovely tree, and it's currently in our apartment, upright, with two cats circling. (After all, not only is it a tree, but it came in with snow that they didn't have to go outside to experience.)

While he was wrapping it up in the tree-netting, though, after we'd discussed the relative merits of our home countries' political systems, he told me he wanted to ask me something.

Oh boy, I thought. Here we go. "Sure," I told him, preparing to turn down a date.

"Why do you have sad eyes?"

That one wasn't what I expected.

"Well, I don't know," I said finally. "I mean, I'm not actually sad."

"Ah, okay. Some people just have sad eyes. That must be it."

This wasn't the usual "Smile, gorgeous!" that creepy guys like to give women on the street now and then. And he didn't seem like a creepy guy. The conversation drifted to tree technicalities easily, and then I paid for the tree and dragged it home.

But this still begs the question: are my eyes actually sad? No one else has ever told me that. So either everyone has just been protecting me from the horrible truth, or maybe I really did look sad. The possibility that the young, lonely, cold guy who spoke no Swedish was trying to prolong the conversation and hit on me notwithstanding (my husband and my father, I know well, will pick this option), what could be causing sad-eyes?

1) Allergies. Definitely a contributing factor.

2) I'm deeply depressed but have no idea.

3) I was actually a little bummed about something just before I bought the tree and it showed on my face.

Yeah...it's number three (with a touch of number one). I didn't realize that it was going to be obvious, but as I walked from the mall to the tree place, I had just realized why I've been so reluctant to get to work this week. After a wonderfully productive retreat with the Stockholm Writers' Group, I now have a full draft. This will be (knock wood) one of the last full drafts of this book I ever write. In the new year, I'll send it off to my agent, and I hope with all sincerity that she'll then take it away to be sold.

In short, while the rest of you might get to enter this imagined world sooner rather than later, my own period of intimacy with it is almost done. For six years and change, I've been at it, off and on–but mostly on. I've spent so much time with these characters that they are as real to me as many famous real people out there I hear about but have never met. More real, even. And just now, just as I'm getting things to where I am really happy with what the book is and does, I have to send it away. Maybe it's kind of like sending a kid to preschool just after you get them toilet trained. And I do joke that I'll tell our kids (when they exist) that this book is their older sibling.

Jokes and comparision to kids aside, I know I can't be the first writer or artist to feel this way near the culmination of a large project. I'm actually pretty bad at finishing projects in general. I took a personality test once that gave you indices of how driven you supposedly are by all of these theoretically-motivating factors. And guess what I got for "Completing Things," or whatever it was called. Yes, that's right: 0. That was my lowest score, even lower than "Neatness." (Swear to god, Mom, it really was!) It's probably tied into why I write novels vs shorter pieces in the first place. This way, I get to sit with these characters and their world for years.

I wish for all possible success with this book, I really do. But it's still bittersweet to give it up.