Nothing

Carl Stellweg

Once I was in the middle of nowhere. There was darkness all around me, impeccable darkness, but above me there were stars, sparkling with unreal splendor – never before had I seen so many.

This was the night sky above the Pacific everyone raved about, and now I could see why. At last I had found my place under it. I had reached a destination I had never sought.

And right in front of me was this very large aeroplane. Or maybe it only seemed that large because this was the middle of nowhere.

The aeroplane reminded me of a whale marooned on a beach, although it was not lying on its belly, choking to death under its own weight like whales are prone to do, but resting perkily on its undercarriage, which made it look all the more foolish and forlorn, and as if it were dying.

And I was standing there smoking and talking to a colleague of the Los Angeles Times, an amiable man I had met earlier that day in Tahiti.

Tahiti, with its gargantuan thunderclouds, its fickle winds, its fog-wreathed volcanic peaks, and its dark sepulchral beaches. Even Tahiti was behind me now.

I've forgotten the name of this colleague, but not his habit of ending a sentence with: ‘That's interesting’, or: ‘Isn't that interesting?’

Still an inquisitive little boy, this obese man in his fifties who year after year had been dragging his clumsy, panting body around the globe, with unflinching curiosity no doubt, in the service of the illustrious Los Angeles Times.

And while we shared our brief, exclusive in-the-middle-of-nowhere experience, he must have said something to me in the way of: ‘This is an international airport. Isn't that interesting?'

I must have nodded.  It was.

The international airport consisted of a two-storey-tall control tower, and a shed with a turf roof, which was the passenger terminal. We'd walked through it after having surrendered our passports to a short, dark, frizzy-haired man in a simple uniform who waved us on.

Pitch dark, dead quiet countryside awaited us. A small stretch of carelessly asphalted road. The silhouette of a palm tree. No sound. No shuffling and creaking of night creatures. No creatures. Nothing.

I felt very much at peace, and in the enveloping darkness I believed I saw the rotund face of my companion radiating peacefulness as well. And even confused happiness.

We collected our passports, smoked another cigarette, then it was time to board again.

With a deep roar of relief the plane regained its raison d’être. We were the only passengers left. Earlier on, we had seen an old couple leave: short, dark, frizzy-haired, carrying large plastic bags.

They had dissolved in the pitch dark, dead quiet countryside in which they belonged. They were the only reason the plane had landed at this international airport in the middle of nowhere.

A stewardess offered us a glass of champagne. She sat on the edge of a chair and poured herself a glass as well. A second stewardess joined us. Turned out they were French.

We toasted. Chatted. Laughed. Barriers were broken as roles faded. We poured some more champagne, exclaimed that this was très agréable, started to play tric-trac and yahtzee, rummikub and dice poker, taught each other folk dances from our childhoods, exchanged recipes, fearlessly speculated about the First Cause, freely discussed the Hopi Indians' cyclic concept of time , brazenly ridiculed John Maynard Keynes’ countercyclical fiscal policies, put on each other's clothes the wrong way around, sang Scottish shanty songs, played a handball tournament with a life jacket, and uncorked some more champagne.

All of this and more in our supersonic secret attic above the Pacific, under the stars.

Of course the stewardesses were trained to act as 'one of the boys'; to participate, if required, in the international casual camaraderie of traveling men. Because such men can be  lonely. And stewardesses presumably too, although that is not relevant to their training.

No offense. Just trying to recount the way it was before everything changed. Before the P-word and all that it entailed invaded our lives. And before the floods came, of course.

At one point, my Los Angeles Times colleague told us we would fly over the date line and it would be 24 hours later.

That didn't matter one bit, and yet again it was god almighty interesting.

And when the boyish captain announced this in a tone that even for him was playful because he too had drunk too much, we crowded at the same window, whooping childishly, wide-eyed, cheek to cheek, our arms nonchalantly resting on each other's backs, and pointed out where the date line according to each one of us ran, miles beneath us across that dark Pacific ocean.

Then  I realized how incredible it was that I had been fifteen thousand kilometers away from here less than a week before, and hadn’t known that I was about to travel, let alone so far. It happened because of one phone call. But I was still young at the time, my suitcase was quickly packed. Young people nowadays do not have much use for suitcases - as if I didn’t know.

Suddenly the plane started to shake, as if gripped by violent abdominal spasms. Pieces of hand luggage tumbled down from their compartments, champagne glasses fell to the ground, as we did too, but thankfully they were plastic glasses and we were drunk and limp, so we landed softly.

This was another famous characteristic of the skies above the Pacific, besides all these pretty twinkling stars: the boundless fury they could unleash.

I clung to one of the stewardesses as I clung to my older sister many years ago, at the fair, when we were in a dark, enclosed jalopy called the 'caterpillar' that shuddered wildly at great speed on erratic rails for at least five tortuous minutes.

'J'ai peur,' I whispered. 'Moi aussi j'ai peur,' she whispered back, and surely that answer wasn't relevant to her training. Nor was her smile, which suggested she could picture worse ways of dying than with a traveling man against her breast and in her arms, high above the ocean.

Guess what, we didn’t die. We landed safely on New Caledonia, another island under French control, and our final destination. We said goodbye casually, knowing we would never see each other again and would never completely forget each other either.

The only thing I had to do on New Caledonia was spend the night. I had to catch a plane to Australia the next day. What I remember of New Caledonia is exactly nothing.

But here's what I've been trying to say all along. And what keeps me going. Listen up.

I’ve got this hunch that we of the global human family could overcome the loss of Miami, New York, Shanghai, three quarters of the Netherlands, half of Bangladesh and other ‘critical coastal areas’; that no string of Pandemics will entirely wipe us out; but that the Middle of Nowhere must be preserved at all costs.

I tell myself that once the water has almost literally reached my chin, I will decide that enough is enough, I will pack my suitcase one last time and muster the courage to defy all the guidelines and return: by bicycle, train, trolley, truck, flatbed, tuk-tuk, rickshaw, camel, ferry, canoe, kontiki raft, and tree trunk.

I will need to stay out of the hands of the robotized testing brigades which will start to chase me the moment I discard my biometric bracelet, and of course I must  avoid the spitting and licking gangs.

Impelled by a a new kind of fever or virus, I will try to join my comrades of yore - who too must have felt that enough was enough, and must have set out for a journey to the place few know about.

They may have a hard time recognizing me. That may be mutual. They will look different, the French stewardesses, the obese reporter, the boyish captain. Not only because of old age. They will have lost all their loved ones and possessions, as I will have.

Still, everything will be as it had to be, as it was bound to become one day. We'll still be there, we'll be alive, and all we will ask for, a little wistfully but unanimously, is nothing.