Travis Cohen Acosta

Many Happy Returns

Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward.

                                                                         -Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition

By the time the fifth successive delay was announced for the flight, Stella Canto was confident she’d been cursed. Even if she didn’t hear the murmuring of incantations in between the apologetic words piped through the tinny intercom, there was no doubt in her mind that she had been damned.

In transit through the American Midwest and in transit through her mid-forties, she felt like she was in the middle of a war. Or rather, she thought, like she was at war with the middle. The war was slow going and the middle had come to feel very wide, so much so that the beginning and the end seemed impossibly far away, horizons without landscapes or skylines she could readily define. Sitting at her designated gate on the outskirts of Chicago, waiting to trade one skyline for another, listening to another announcement that seemed to make the middle just a little broader, she tried to reconcile movement and progress.

She had long since moved away from snow and badgers and small-town gossip to less snow and rats and big city obscurity. She had moved from no books bearing her name to four—five if she counted the one that was making her miserable, the one that was supposed to be happier, that so many had told her to do them a favor and write, like a crowd sourced prescription for anti-depressants. She had moved from having an agent to having none, from having a husband to having none, from having the vague idea of eventually wanting a child to having no real potential for kids in her life beyond the many nieces and nephews and alternating between having no desire and no hope. Moving, she’d gleaned, did not necessarily mean moving up. But she was not sure if it meant moving forward either, moving on, progressing.

How else could she account for this fresh squandering of time after wasting most of the week in an icy convention center surrounded by a staggering number of publishers who weren’t interested in an unfinished book that was cheerier than the ones she’d sold them in the past? How else could she square this new deferral of progress in the direction of where she wanted to be, a deferral from reaching home, from reaching her bed, from reaching yet another goal of where she was supposed to be? And how else could she explain the man gathering up his suitcase and his sport coat and ambling towards the seat next to her or the inevitability of his stride, so obviously intent on striking up a conversation with her?

“So,” he began, smirking in admiration of his own brazenness or his cleverness or both, “come here often?”

She remembered her Sartre and considered reminding the stranger that hell was other people. He had a nice jaw that held up a neat and tidy smile. He had a full head of hair that looked like he styled it just enough in the morning so that it fell in a manner that looked neither messy nor fussy. He had a friendly nose. But his eyes were too full of satisfaction and too absent anything akin to self-awareness. He wasn’t unattractive, but the look of being drunk on swagger made his whole face uglier.

Quoting Sartre was liable to engender curiosity or confusion, which could lead to more painfully inane lines. If he had mistaken her dazed staring at the pale emptiness in her computer as an invitation to chat, Stella knew there was a good chance he’d manage to misinterpret her vaguely disdainful existentialism for flirting. She thought it better to make her disdain overt.

“No,” she said curtly, making no effort to mask her disinterest before returning to the blue light of the page glowing in her lap.

“That’s a shame,” he replied, either undeterred by her rebuff or, more likely she imagined, completely oblivious of it. “Chicago’s a nice town. Airport can be a bit of a maze, but you never know who you’ll run into.”

“What are you doing right now?” Stella asked. She knew what he was doing. She’d had this conversation before, more times than she could count. Still, she could never believe that the people who chose to instigate an exchange with a line like ‘Come here often’ had any idea what they were doing or why they were doing it.

“What do you mean?” he asked, suddenly dumbfounded and shrinking into his shirt like a startled turtle taking shelter in its shell at the sound of a gator snapping at the waterline.

“What are you doing?” she repeated flatly.

“I’m just being friendly, getting to know you.”

“But I don’t want to know you. I want to work. I was working when you came over here, which you must have noticed and decided was less important than you were. And maybe you are more important to somebody, but not to me. So again—no, thank you.”

“And what is it you’re working on?” he asked. He tried to hide that he was uninterested, though not very hard. The only reason this bothered Stella was because it meant the conversation was still going for some reason.

“I’m writing,” she said. It came out automatically as she looked back down to the blank space in her lap where there should have been words.  She was not sure which she regretted more: that she had volunteered this information or that it was not exactly true.

“I’m trying to write,” she added. It was a curt correction, less for him than for herself.

“You should write about this,” he said, puffing himself up as if in preparation.

“About leaving a conference I didn’t want to be at, getting stuck at an airport I didn’t want to be in, and talking to someone I didn’t want to be talking to?”

“No,” he replied, an air of triumph flowing into his voice, “you should write about what a bitch you are.”

Stella looked up from her laptop to find him dripping with a self-congratulatory grin. She watched the smile dissipate as he registered that his barb had wounded her just as much as his pickup line had wooed her, which was to say, not at all. There was no need to remove her glasses so she could dab her eyes. Her lower lip was neither pouting nor trembling. Her face was set and steady and unmoved with the exception of her right eyebrow which she’d arched a hair higher than where it normally rested in response to this dull man and the dull dagger he’d drawn on her.

Stella had expected him to remove himself after that, but as he stared at her, unbelieving in what he saw and what she was making him endure, she realized that this had been wishful thinking. She also realized that Sartre was wrong—hell was not other people. Hell wasn’t men who liked women until they didn’t and then became men who hated women either. Hell wasn’t even people telling you what to write when they didn’t actually care unless what you wrote was about them, although in Stella’s experience, that did feel at least adjacent to hell. She decided that hell, much like insanity, was doing the same thing over and over, whether it was wading through the same tedious conversation or waiting for the same stream of delays to end.

Stella’s eyes darted toward the grey light filtering through the plate glass windows where the crew was making their sixth announcement. A clearly beleaguered flight attendant informed Stella and the rest of the passengers that this team had timed out and it could be another hour before a replacement crew arrived from Fort Lauderdale.

This was hell, she concluded, and decided to stow her computer and leave the gates in search of a drink. The nearest option that got her far enough away from the man and his scathing eyes that she could still practically feel feathering the hair on the back of her head, was the Admirals Club. Stella was not a member of the Admirals Club, or any other club, guild or society for that matter.

She’d had a boyfriend in college named Shawn who’d been obsessed with the secret rites of the Freemasons and had a penchant for telling her how much she didn’t know about “the world behind the world.” Shortly after they’d broken up, Stella wrote a short story about a man named Don, who bore a more than passing resemblance to Shawn. Don had the same powerful eyebrows hung over widely set eyes and the same perpetually wet look to his lips that had a way of turning her off slightly. He also shared Shawn’s propensity for reminding his own girlfriend how much he knew, or rather how much she didn’t. His insights, too, revolved around groups that he’d never been a member of or known a member of and his girlfriend, Persephone, would reliably absorb these diatribes with a quiet mix of forced patience and heartfelt indifference.

Until Don started talking about the Daughters of the Bull Iguana. According to him, this legion of mystic women kidnapped little boys and fed them to lizards, sacrificing them in an old-world fertility ritual that dated back to the pre-Columbian Taínos. Don didn’t know that iguanas preferred chewing on leaves and vines and had no appetite for boy meat. He also didn’t know that Persephone was one of the High Priestesses of the Daughters, nor that she was born of the line of women who could commune with Sargatti, goddess of lizards and brackish waters and wife to the great orange bull iguana who carried the world in his cheeks. Sacrifices were rare for the Daughters, though not unheard of. Don was a rare case. He still didn’t know what he didn’t know even as his girlfriend crushed his skull with a hunk of limestone that looked like a giant rotten tooth.

Stella hadn’t harmed Shawn, though she had derived a certain satisfaction from the elimination of his fictive effigy. The story had garnered her some attention after it was included in an anthology of feral woman tales published by a small imprint in Central Florida. It had also cemented her place in the pantheon of writers who wrote women that simply said, “No.”

Fourteen years, four books, and numerous effigies later, Shawn’s vague aftertaste still lingered and the notion of belonging to a club still felt a bit gross to Stella. It was why she’d never become a member of the Admiral’s Club, regardless of how often she found herself flying, be it for work or for the family she visited regularly if not entirely willingly.

Stella and her family weren’t quite estranged, but they weren’t exactly a Norman Rockwell painting either. She was inclined to describe them as distantly close. Stella loved her non-Rockwellian nuclear family of five, just as she loved her aunts and uncles and the battalion of cousins and nieces and nephews. She didn’t especially like that they all still called her Mary or how comfortable they were prescribing that she write this kind of story instead of that kind, instead of the kind she liked to write, the kind they didn’t bother to read except to see if it was about them. They loved her too, though they didn’t like that she invariably stole scenes from their dinner tables in Door County and took characters from their private conversations.

Stella preferred to think of this as borrowing or repurposing, though she could occasionally understand their disapproval. When she’d borrowed the virginity her sister, Suzie, had lost in the bed of a truck that belonged to no one in a dealership parking lot that was silent except for the hushed play of dead leaves and the cushioned sighing of the suspension, she understood why Suzie was upset to see her innocence rendered in a different town but in the back of the same pickup. She understood when Cousin Doug requested she be uninvited from that year’s scavenger hunt after she’d repurposed his childhood love for tumbled minerals and smooth, colorful rocks, for the gentle heft of them, for how they made him feel less lonely, and the nervous compulsion to steal from museum giftshops and roadside attractions that had been born of his love and his loneliness.

But she also understood something they did not: there was nothing embarrassing about the intimacy of a memory. Even when it was wrapped up in someone else’s lies and fabrications, it was the intimacy that made the lies feel true, that made everything around it feel real, that made a made-up thing beautiful.

There was, however, a cost to taking those private pieces of her sister or her cousin or herself and giving it away. It could not readily be bought back.

The lounge offered day passes, which were expensive, but so was a Caesar Salad or a stiff drink anywhere in the airport. And while she might spend less at a newsstand or a tiki bar with laminated palm fronds that looked deathless and felt wrong in Illinois, the lounge was the only place that sold a modicum of privacy, at any price.

As prepared as Stella was to fork over the $80 fee, she couldn’t help but feel taken aback by the bit of canned conversation the concierge offered her along with her debit card.

“Out of curiosity,” the buttoned-up woman wearing a tight bun and a poorly fitted navy suit with a winged badge that read Daphne began, “do you come here often?”

“What?” Stella asked. The single syllable popped with a reflexive kneejerk intensity that made it sound sharper than she’d intended.

“I’m sorry,” Daphne stammered, clearly caught off guard by the abrupt shift in Stella’s tone and posture, both of which had suddenly stiffened. “What I meant to say was do you frequent the Admiral’s Club…um, frequently? If you do, we have a special sign-up bonus for our Advantage credit card that gets you lounge access, along with other perks,”

Daphne paused then, fumbling in her head for the next thing she’d been trained to say.

“Treat yourself,” she announced, regaining her smile once she’d regained her footing in the script, “try something new.”

Stella softened her disposition, much to Daphne’s obvious relief, and set out in search of the bartender. Over her shoulder, she replied, once again:

“No, thank you.”
           
She made her way to the bar and ordered a Bloody Mary, which came out of a big batch bottle and arrived in a highball glass with a semi-withered stalk of celery. She returned the vegetable to the bartender and found a deep booth far enough from the entrance that she wouldn’t have to worry about making eye contact with Daphne until she left.

Stella felt bad about the awkward exchange and about rattling poor Daphne. But Stella was rattled, herself. It was off-putting enough having limpid pickup lines flung at her, but to hear the stranger’s line echoing back at her from the gate to the lounge, echoing out of another stranger’s mouth, had felt uncanny.

The more she turned the line over in her head, the more she kept coming back to the man’s suggestion to write about her situation, even if that hadn’t been his exact phrasing. She started drawing a sketch from memory. She deepened the dimples chiseled into his cheeks to show how hard he’d been smiling, try-hard dimples where the pride pooled on either side of his glimmering pearly teeth, which she opted to cap. It seemed fitting to dress him in the same silver sharkskin trousers he’d worn to highlight the distinctly sharky quality she remembered in his eyes. They weren’t the beady black marbles of shark eyes, they were bright and lively and almost inviting. But there had been a prowling hunter desire that exuded from those bright eyes and glimmered in the porcelain smoothness of his teeth.

Stella chose to call him Chaz and considered where she ought to put him, settling on the airport for now. Perhaps she’d move him to a train station or a doctor’s office or the DMV line later, but O’Hare was a sufficiently cursed place to start. Stella set him in motion, striding lithely from his seat at the gate toward her, or rather toward the version of her who often found her way onto the page.

Before Chaz could reach her, she reset him, moving him from the cold metal benches of the terminal to a wide leather loveseat in the lounge. Lounges, in Stella’s estimation, were spaces that served the sole purpose of letting time pass you by. Where better, she thought, to stage a scene where time refused to pass and an unwanted conversation refused to end?

As Stella waltzed Chaz over to her booth, she steeled her stand-in for another utterance of the words she’d grown tired of hearing again and again even before she put them on the page.

“You come here often.”

The period came as a surprise. The slimy twang of curiosity she’d anticipated—rightly so since his words were supposed to be her own making—was entirely absent. Instead, he’d dropped the pronouncement on the tabletop with a dull thud, laden down with the flat observational tone that might accompany an IRS audit. Neither she nor her character knew exactly how to respond.

“I said,” he began, answering the question she had not yet asked, “you come here often. Do you ever wonder why?”

Stella’s hands stopped moving and the cursor blinked rhythmically. She had written stories before that hadn’t gone according to plan and she’d written characters who’d taken different shapes than the ones she’d imagined them inhabiting. It was a feeling she welcomed, blood pulsing to parts of the page that she didn’t expect but could not deny. It wasn’t just her will to make the work in those moments, but the will of the work itself in tandem with her own. It was an easy surprise of honesty at her fingertips. But this was different. She didn’t know what it was her fingers were doing.

“What do you think we’re doing here?” Chaz asked once Stella went back to typing.

“You mean my fingers or you and me?” she asked on the next line as her story self.

“Does it make a difference? You are you, I am you, your fingers are you.”

“Actually, you’re a guy I met a little while ago, or at least a version of him.”

“Met seems like a strong way to put it,” Chaz replied. “And I’m not anyone. I’m a sketch drawn from memory, remember? Your memory. I didn’t come to this lounge to pester you–you brought me here. The same way you brought yourself here, same way you keep coming here over and over again.”

She stopped typing and he stopped talking. Then he just stood there and waited, unbothered by the silence. Stella, on the other hand, grew increasingly uneasy, squirming in her seat, raising and lowering her hands to and from the keyboard, uncertain of whether she wanted to follow the conversation further. Eventually, her wrists settled back on the tabletop.

“It’ll leave you alone when you leave it alone,” Chaz explained.

“What will?”

“The man in the terminal, the memories of burnt and singed bridges, the people and places you claim to want nothing to do with and yet do anything to hold onto—they’ll all leave you alone the minute you leave them alone. Except you keep coming here, coming back to them. Perhaps you don’t want to be left alone.”

Stella shut her laptop and stuffed it in her bag without saving the document. She knew the conversation would be there when she reopened her computer and she knew it had automatically saved what had been written. All the same, she didn’t want to be a participant in letting it linger any longer with the shortcuts and keystrokes that had become reflexive in safeguarding her work. It was an easy enough reflex to ignore—not only because the main reflex she was having was that of panic, but because she was not entirely sure these words were her work.

Stella felt conspicuous making her way out of the lounge and back into the terminal. Despite her steadfast avoidance of Daphne—or perhaps because of it—she got the distinct impression that the concierge was watching her like some sort of shifty sneakthief. She was a small thing caught in a strong current of paranoia. Hasty and afraid, she inadvertently turned from the direction of her gate and began floating away from the plane.

Airports—including O’Hare International—had never felt familiar to Stella. More than anything, she’d always found the lack of familiarity pervaded the people who surrounded her at the airport. Everyone was on their way to some place, to someone, to something beyond the airport. All that transpired inside the terminal felt like it happened in a space outside of the world or in a pocket that was sealed off from the rest of existence. Even airport employees struck Stella as being wholly detached from their surroundings, from their customers and coworkers, just waiting to go back to the world.

As she wandered further, hurrying nowhere, a woman waiting at the window of a chicken shop tossed a look over her shoulder and for a moment it landed on Stella. She saw an iteration of her mother in this anonymous face, even though her mother was a hundred and twenty miles away in Madison. There was no recognition in the woman’s eyes, but Stella thought she recognized the same weariness, the same low-grade fever of mild annoyance. She saw the lanky figure of a man who was and was not the man she’d once been certain she’d spend the rest of her life with. He wore a fluorescent vest and a high-visibility helmet and a different face than the one that belonged to her ex-husband. He entered a corridor with restricted access and did not look back. The man that had ended their life together told Stella she spent too much time looking back instead of forward. She had started writing a science fiction novella about a woman who gets addicted to her own memories after that, but she never got very far. She couldn’t decide what should happen to the woman, whether she would die from some sort of brain hemorrhage or just wither away and perish from malnourishment, so entranced by the past that she simply stopped caring about the present. All Stella knew for sure was that the woman would not find redemption. She wanted her to die, just like she’d wanted to die.

Surrounded by a rotating cavalcade of old characters drawn from old flames and old heartbreaks and even older disappointments, the sprawling arteries of terminal three had narrowed into a series of corners pressing in on her. But Stella had written her way into and out of corners in the past. She considered this and for a moment, the unfamiliar familiarity that had been stalking her all the way from the gate felt a little less disorienting, a little less pressing.

“Stella Canto,” her name pumped through the terminal, undercutting the foggy murmur of stray conversations and the low roar of air conditioning in a metallic voice that sounded like it was being piped through a soda can. “Stella Canto.” She thought she recognized that voice.

“Stella Canto,” the woman called to her in the distance, “please report to gate H3, final destination New York City, immediately. Your flight is boarding and will be departing as soon as cross check is complete.”

She had stopped looking at the faces she knew and didn’t know in the crowd and took in the signage. The blue boards had not been updated in as long as she could remember and despite all the convolutions of the concourse, the bland signs made it abundantly clear to Stella that she had made a wrong turn. She couldn’t say how many wrong turns had gotten her there or how many had actually been right or how much she regretted either. All she knew in that moment was that she needed to turn around and run the other way.

Stella was the last one on the plane and the first person she saw as she stepped off the jetway was her would-be suitor. He had paid for the extra legroom of first class, but he didn’t notice her until she began strafing down the aisle. When he looked up, he seemed unsurprised to see that she had been the woman holding up the flight, as if he knew Stella was the only one who could make his day even worse than she already had. There was ire in his glowering along with an obvious air of reproach, but what stood out to her the most was the boyish pouting that made his otherwise chiseled, masculine face look mushy and childish. Stella hadn’t noticed it before and even as she looked down the cabin and edged between the aisle seats, she couldn’t help but superimpose some of those dumb puppy details onto Chaz’s face. It was easier to picture him pouting. There was something comforting about it.

She would have preferred to stow her carry-on in the overhead compartment, where her computer and Chaz could be locked away, but she knew there would be no space left for that. Her bag would have to stay with her, resting atop her toes under the next seat for the duration of the flight. As she settled into 23C and clicked her seatbelt into place, the flight attendant who had called her to the plane began to make an announcement.

“Alright, ladies and gentlemen,” she began, the unmistakable flatness of resignation filling the plane, “we have now completed boarding and are ready to begin taxiing. Unfortunately, the tower has just informed us of a runway incursion, some sort of fuel spill on the tarmac that will have to be cleaned up before we can take off. Should only be a few more minutes, but we’re going to have to sit tight for a little while. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

A communal groan rumbled through the cabin as the captain switched off the seatbelt lights. Stella leaned forward and pulled her laptop from its sleeve, setting it on the tray table. She knew this airport was cursed and she thought a cursed airport you could never leave would be a good place for her conversation with Chaz. Just before her computer had a chance to wake up, the old woman sitting next to her in 23B sighed.

“You know,” she began wearily, “I flew out to visit my son and his new wife. Never been to Chicago before. If it’s always like this, I don’t know if I’ll be back again any time soon.”

The woman paused, looking down at her hands momentarily. She seemed caught off guard by her own admission, or maybe she just regretted saying it out loud. When she turned back to her seatmate, her face had brightened, though Stella thought it looked forced.

“Sorry for my manners, it’s been quite a day. I’m sure Chicago’s a perfectly lovely city.” The shift in her demeanor led Stella to believe the woman was worried she might have offended a local. Stella was happy to assuage that concern.

“Not especially,” she replied, with a warm smile.

“Oh,” the woman responded, grinning back at her, more genuinely this time, “I see. Do you come here often?”

Stella’s smile widened before she returned her attention to the computer in front of her.

“All the time,” she said.