I leave town later than I want, which is not so much of a problem as I have planned to arrive two hours early . . . meaning, I will be arriving three hours early. I do this partially as a stopgap against unforeseen problems on the road — traffic, car trouble, a flat tire. I plan ahead, I anticipate. I live in two worlds, moving forward and looking back . . . looking both ways on a one-way street.

I also do it because, when I am traveling alone, I enjoy the solitude that comes from being in a world of strangers. The solitude, the folding into one’s self, to ignore everyone else is a rare luxury and a selfish pleasure that I am glad to indulge in.

Today I realize that I am not looking for gods, as I usually do when I travel.

I do not know if this is because there are no gods traveling today — so, therefore, I do not take notice of them. Or perhaps there are no gods at all.

“If you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is…” I tell myself. But I know I am no god and that this is just a pretentious game, an indulgence like the solitude.

So be it.

I arrive early. I check in. A man named James takes my bags from me and helps me coax a boarding pass out of the willfully resistant computer. The damn thing just refuses to acknowledge my right to fly today. James convinces it otherwise. He is patient, like one deals with a small child who cannot be blamed for their actions.

I find a place to install myself. I buy a sandwich and a beer at the restaurant that appears to be least like a fast food restaurant.

The menu is a choose-your-own adventure of breads, cheeses, meats and toppings. I am lost without a template to rely on.

“What’s good?” I ask the enormous black woman behind the counter. She is, for some reason, wrapping fruit in cellophane.

She shrugs “S’all good, I guess.” She says without humor.

“What do you like?”

Another shrug, another hermetically sealed apple added to her pile. “I guess that chicken pannini is good.”

I tell her I’ll have one of those.

“Four minutes,” she tells me.

I stand and watch other travellers — a middle-aged couple who embody the quintessential tourist, right down to their black socks and sandals — puzzle over the intricacies of the menu, the uncertainty of no well-defined line for customers, the lack of an obvious cashier.

For some reason, uncharacteristically, their confusion irritates me. I sip my beer.

The sandwich arrives well after four minutes. It is wrapped in foil, cellophane, and paper. Opening it is like performing an autopsy.

Opening it is like performing an autopsy.

The sandwich is terrible. I finish only my beer.

I work through an old story — a novella, really, from over fifteen years ago. At the time, it was the longest thing I had ever written and it took up almost nine months of my life.

Only one other persona has ever read it, but it is one of my favorites. I think of it often, sometimes every day.

It is a good story despite the fact that it was written by someone just barely finding his voice.

For some reason, once I finished finished my latest book, I had the urge to come back to this earlier story, to scrape away whatever is worthless and excavate anything that might be worth salvaging.

I find the files on my laptop and drag them out of whatever antiquated format they’re in. I wrote the original version ion my old Mac Classic. It’s slumbering now, down in the basement back home. I expect that if I went and started it up again, I’d find the original files there on its hard drive, like insects in amber.

I don’t read it too closely as I bring the old words into the new program I use for writing these days. I watch enough to make sure that nothing has been lost in the conversion — vowels for instance, or punctuation. It’s boring work and I get sick of it quickly. I don’t have the patience for archeology right now. The delicate brushwork exposing the fragile bones of my old story.

I continue to hate my sandwich and drink my beer. Rather than sit and drink more beer until I like my sandwich, I decide to find my gate — two hours early — and occupy myself with something else.

Power outlets in airports are harder to find every time I travel. In Midway, many of them seem to be covered over with locked plates. Eventually, I find one behind a bank of mercifully empty chairs and sit down, the cord running surreptitiously behind my back. I have heard stories about people being told that they can use them, “for security reasons” so I have my dialogue rehearsed and ready, should a security guard show up.

I flip idly through the files on my laptop, looking for something to work on. — something short enough to not frustrate me when I have to set it aside, but something with potential so that the effort is a worthwhile one.

I find a story I wrote five or six years ago. It’s one that I like a lot.

It’s also a bit of an oddball piece in that it was inspired — practically transcribed word-for-word — from a dream I had one night. The dream was itself distinctive in that I was not myself in the dream,. Neither was I playing a role, conscious of myself. No, in the dream I was someone else completely.

It is also worth noting that, upon waking from the dream, I found myself clutching the hand of a ghost.

(But I digress…)

My wife and mother-in-law think that it is a true dream, that it is an episode from a past life.

I don’t know what I think of that idea, but I like the story regardless. In many ways, it does not feel like something I wrote. it is like reading something by another writer.

And, unfortunately, I find that it is not very good. The Shape of the story is there but the sentence-to-sentence structure is jagged and uneven, like warped floorboards in an old house.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t discourage me. I lean in and start ripping it apart. I work through every paragraph, writing them from scratch to find a new, cleaner way to express what they’re meant to be saying.

If there is no cleaner way, I cut the passage completely

It is a good way to work and I feel good doing it. So much so that I am disappointed when they call for boarding. I would have happily sat there for another two or three hours, finishing the story.

I’ve only made it through a handful of paragraphs, but it feels productive and I close my computer with satisfaction. I will, I tell myself confidently, finish this fucker on the plane.

The flight is open seating. The flight attendants wear green plastic bowler hats and green aprons festooned with shamrocks and I hate every single one of them for it, feeling very Irish as I do so.

Apart from a good forty minutes of rewrites, not much has happened on this trip. No drama, no gods, no stories. In defiance of this, I pick a seat in row thirteen. I’d say “Macbeth” too, if I thought it would do any good.

I try to read before takeoff but I cannot keep my eyes open. I close my book and my eyes.

When I open them again, we are in the air.

Outside the window, far below us, I can see only clouds. I realize, without alarm, that we are doing the impossible and that there are a variety of forces waiting to drag us out of the sky at any moment.

I take out my book, Paul Auster’s memoir about his father’s death, “The Invention of Solitude”. The writing is excellent and I can feel Auster’s voice in my head, I can hear him speaking to me and I wish, not for the first or last time, that I might one day have s strong a voice of my own, that people will read my stories on airplanes.

The woman sitting next to me sleeps. Every ten minutes or so, her head snaps down suddenly and with such force that I wince. Each time, she settles back into sleep without ever really waking up.

There is a magazine folded on her lap. I realize for the first time the irony inherent in its title — it is not about people at all, but their opposite.

I wonder if I am the first person to think of it. I expect that I am not.

I accept tonic water from the attendant. Usually I don’t mind having a drink or two when I am traveling alone. Another selfish luxury. But I have a long trip ahead of me and I don’t necessarily want to show up smelling like the wake has already started,.

I decide that I should be more productive. As much as I am enjoying reading Auster’s book, I want to get back to my story and finish it.

Much to my irritation, I find that I cannot open my laptop completely. The woman in front of me has put her seat back — why do people insist on indulging in that extra inch or two of inclination, which does nothing but impose on the people behind them? ‚— and it prevents me from seeing the screen on my laptop. No amount of twisting will allow me to see and type at the same time.

So I cannot work on my story.

I decide to type blind, dimming the light to save the battery. It’s not that hard really, I have a voice in my head and I know how to follow it.

The turbulence starts about an hour into the flight. The clouds clear and we are flying over mountains and patchwork fields and farms. It is all so uninspiring, so often described — even the word “patchwork” embarrasses me — that I close the window screen.

Eventually, I catch up with myself — that’s where I am now — and decide to go back to Auster.

Before I do, I slide open the window once more, only to find that we are flying over what can only be described as the surface of Mars.