Mann first noticed the woman while boarding their flight in Omaha. Dressed in a simple black dress and now sitting three rows behind him, she had light blue expressive eyes, a friendly, approachable face, and a petite athletic body, a combination he found highly desirable. Her hair, which was the color of a Kansas wheatfield, was pulled back in a tight chignon, revealing a high forehead that suggested a keen intelligence.
Adjusting his window seat slightly, it occurred to Mann that he hadn’t flown in a while. Thinking about it another moment, he realized he hadn’t flown in two years, probably because he hated it, especially the long lines in security, the white-knuckle takeoffs, and the remote yet real possibility of immediate death. To calm himself, he lifted his shade halfway, peered down at the ground, then consulted his watch.
Based on their flying time since Omaha, where he’d been attending a company training seminar, he calculated they were somewhere near Des Moines, the ‘Hartford of the West.’
Mann was an employee of e Consolidated Coffee Company, a small privately-owned firm that supplied other companies with coffee and related cafeteria items, 1 MARC BERLIN where he compiled and edited the company newsletter, e Monthly Grind. It wasn’t a particularly interesting job, but it paid reasonably well and offered an array of benefits, including a high-deductible health plan, dental insurance, and two weeks of paid vacation every year.
Still looking downward, Mann contented himself with the knowledge that he had reached a moderately satisfying, if uneventful, point in life where he had to do any actual work one or two hours a day, which allowed him to read the entire New York Times at his desk every morning, and take two-hour lunch breaks, either in the company cafeteria or at any one of six nearby restaurants.
At thirty-nine, Mann was still single and hardly saw his girlfriend Holly anymore, who’d moved to Maine where she probably had a new boyfriend by now anyway.
Feeling more confident the jet he was on wasn’t going to split in half and then nosedive into the ground at five hundred miles an hour, but now having to relieve himself due to the two ginger ales and three orange juices he’d drunk in the previous fifty minutes, Mann rose from his seat, edged his way to the aisle, then began moving toward the rear lavatories. The blonde woman he’d noticed while boarding looked up at him as he was passing, smiled briefly, then began reading a sheaf of papers she’d removed from a brown zippered portfolio. E
Entering one of the washrooms, Mann used the toilet, then the mirror to examine a barely detectable mole on the inner side of his lower lip. The mole, if that’s what it was, had been there for a while, but appeared to have gotten discernably larger in the last month or so.
Because everyone in his family was a big worrier, especially Ellen, his 78-year-old mother, and his father, who had succumbed to a massive hemorrhagic stroke following quintuple heart bypass surgery four years earlier, Mann assumed the mole was malignant.
Still examining his lip, Mann remembered the text message he’d received while waiting for his flight in the departure lounge. It had been from Turner Whitlock, an old high school friend who he hadn’t seen or talked to in f ive years. For some unknown reason, Whitlock had an urgent need to speak to him, preferably “as soon as possible.”
As he was returning to his seat, Mann’s plane encountered a patch of turbulence that caused it to bounce suddenly, first up, then down, then up again. In his youth, Mann had been a passable athlete, with respectable coordination and balance, but with fallen arches that prevented him from playing games that, like soccer or tennis, required a significant amount of lateral movement.
Still, the plane’s bounce made him stumble, three rows backward and a seat length to the left, so that he soon found himself sprawled across the laps of the two octogenarians sitting to the immediate right of the blonde woman, and who like himself had been visiting Omaha where they’d probably taken in the same tourist traps Mann had carefully avoided, such as Pioneer Courage Park and the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge.
Quickly untangling himself from the elderly couple, Mann noticed that the blonde woman, who looked younger than he had thought earlier (closer to thirty than thirty-five), was smiling at him again. Based on her silent yet open flirtatiousness, and the lack of a ring to announce she was married, he also guessed she was single.
Back in his seat, Mann consulted his watch again; then, because he’d already read the paper over breakfast, reluctantly switched on his TV. Mann used to enjoy watching TV or a good movie. Now in his late thirties, the unrelenting flow of vacuous imagery had caused him to permanently flee to a newspaper, cable news, or the daily crossword, for information and amusement.
On his screen now was a report about the President of the United States, Ambrose Fogarty. Fogarty was requesting that Congress increase America’s defense budget by eight percent, while the Pentagon itself was suggesting a four percent decrease. Right afterward, a press aide read a prepared statement from a Democratic congressperson from Connecticut who, citing the need to improve the nation’s crumbling rail and highway systems, wanted to see significant decreases in everything not related to infrastructure or health care.
Following the aide was a press conference with the Republican senior senator from Oklahoma, Tex Bullard. Speaking to a gaggle of reporters on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, Bullard said that considering all the enemies America has, including the Iranians, the Syrians, the Russians, the Chinese, and the evil North Koreans led by that supreme nutcase Kim Jong Un, it was his opinion that the defense budget should be doubled. “In closed session last month, the defense chiefs informed us we don’t need two additional aircraft carriers and sixty more F-43 jet fighters,” Bullard declared in an authoritative yet amicable drawl that reminded Mann of every other southern politician he’d ever heard. “Well, folks, they may be right about that. Still, there’s no way in hell I’m going to deny our troops the tools they need to defend our great nation, despite what the Joint Chiefs say.”
Mann turned his TV off, took a deep breath, then thought about what he’d just seen on the news. Now, in addition to being anxious about flying home without crashing, he felt confused and a bit nauseous. Suddenly, and not for the first time, he suspected he was slowly going insane.
Newly dispirited, as well as weary from a long flight, Mann ordered another orange juice, his fourth, from a passing flight attendant. Sipping it slowly (so he wouldn’t have to use the bathroom again prior to landing), he thought about how he would have to get up the next morning at six-thirty, then drive the forty-five miles to his office so he could plan and begin compiling Consolidated’s monthly internal newsletter, which, when completed, would be distributed to its four regional headquarters, where it would be presumably read, first, by Consolidated’s CEO, CFO, COO along with the board of directors, then by all its regional executives and employees, which seemed silly because as far as he knew and based on discussions with several lower-level associates including one in the southwest office, no one other than himself ever bothered to read it.
Flying over a dark Boston Harbor three hours later, Mann’s plane was buffeted again: a strong crosswind made Mann feel like he was on a small boat in a large storm, and not aboard a commercial airliner. To distract himself, he wondered how senior corporate executives, like those he worked under at Consolidated’s northeast regional office, became senior corporate executives, who were always making lengthy presentations at the tedious monthly meetings he was expected to attend. He also wondered if the blonde woman in the black dress would approach him somewhere after their flight, perhaps at the baggage carousel, or just outside the terminal at the arrivals entrance where he was scheduled
