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part 2: the mid-atlantic to paris, in which our narrator is too overtired to see any good in the world

somewhere over ireland the cabin lights are turned back on, after having been off for not quite three hours, so the crew can give us our breakfast. i think it's about 1:30 am eastern standard time, so i'm not all that happy, and i'm definitely not hungry. this is a good thing, as i'm not willing to eat any of the food i'm handed. my left eyelid is fluttering like an angel-dusted moth at a candlelight vigil, but i've scored two brand-new tiny spoons, so while i feel i would be justified in complaining, i bite my tongue. i accept my 3 oz. of minute maid orange juice and shot glass of dingy coffee with a smile. toadie discards her shrink-wrapped, ice-cold danish with a slightly different expression. i point to her spoons; she softens.

outside the plane there's nothing but cobalt fog. i notice a small ice cube has formed between the inner and outer panes of my window. i lean toward it and look out again at the wing, which appears to be moving so slowly through the mist that i could out-stroll it. i look down for a more honest representation. the air below us looks like a radiograph of a diseased lung—a dark grey field blotted over with fibrous white blooms of pneumonic infiltrates or metastatic lesions. i hate myself. the sky progressively lightens as i watch, and the mets change to a dense patch of snow-frosted broccoli, and then to clots of slush stranded in a puddle on the side of a road. we/the earth turn(s) enough for the sun to tint the clouds, the same shades of gold and blue that the boston lights were beaming in a few hours before, are still lit up in however many time zones behind us. even colored, the clouds evoke nothing but water, in a way that they never manage to do from the ground, ice and mist and snapping, stinging purity so simple i can smell it. for a while when i was young, between the ages of nine and fourteen, i went skiing every week in the winter, and sometimes i would find myself completely alone on a trail. when that happened i always had to stop and disappear into all of the things that didn't exist at the bottom of the slope, like the hush of the motion of distant, speechless bodies being absorbed by powder drifts and pine needles, or the the way i could feel the air moving along the linings of my lungs as i inhaled. the best thing about an empty winter mountain, though, is the smell of the snow, which is the most perfect encapsulation of whole, tranquil nothingness in all the world. the smell of the air inside the plane is nondescript, not really worth describing, the same as all air that has been breathed and rebreathed by a crowd that is anonymous to itself. i try to remember the last time i smelled nothing but snow, and can't. i wonder if someday no one will know. all the way back in to ground i imagine hurling myself off into those cold, clean, absolving drifts, the layers of my smog-deadened skin peeling, disintegrating, dissolving into vapor over the course of my reentry.

the land, once it becomes visible, is nothing like land. it's pink and blue and cantaloupe-colored and partitioned off into tight geometric segments, all of the borders straight, all of the corners sharp. here and there the colors are broken by clumps of uniform houses in tidy rows. we descend a bit. as the wing tilts 45º against the now familiarly sky-colored horizon i hope, just for a second, not even a second, that we'll roll and barrel down into one of those perfect pastel squares. toadie pinches my elbow and points at an expanse off to our left, tells me it looks just like a skirt her mother made for her when she was a kid. she says she wouldn't wear it then, because it was so uncool, but she'd give anything for it now. i start mentally stabbing myself in the eye for wishing any harm on a plane she was in, even if it was for not quite a second.

this is the knot i find eternally the most impossible to untie.

every individual has a story that deserves to be told. every person on the planet can say something to you that will make you hope that he or she lives forever. when i think of them as individuals, i want to save them all. but i know that the earth won't be saved by preserving the people on it; i can have one or the other, a planet in good holistic health or all of those individuals, who collectively are smothering that planet. i can't decide.

i can't decide. i let the pressure build up in my head until my eyes water. one of the babies is crying again. when we drop onto the tarmac i look across the ashy expanse of pavement and see a second array of smokestacks, the twin to that i saw as we were taking off, belching dispassionately. i lose count of the planes on the ground before i think to count the ones leaving it. this is one airport in one city.

in this moment, given the chance to choose, i'd forget everyone's face.