Midnight Call And Other Stories by Jonathan Thomas

Author:Jonathan Thomas [Thomas, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2017-10-23T22:00:00+00:00

The Road to Schwärmerei

By boarding time it was mostly they who filled the seats in the waiting area, and who stood gabbing merrily, oblivious to anyone trying to get around them. When Syd felt a nudge at the forearm he’d been resting on the back of his seat, he withdrew, even though the name-badged matron whose arm now rested there was, after all, invading his space. And worse, her queenly look prompted him to mumble, “Excuse me.” With peripheral squint he sometimes noticed heads cocked his way, as if cold crow eyes were sizing up a bright trinket. But when he stared back, their looks turned presumed-upon, smoldery. Syd couldn’t quite make out what kind of cutesy mascot adorned all the badges.

Once airborne and at cruising altitude, the mass loosing of seatbelts was alarming, like cardboard in bicycle spokes. Syd glumly saw at last how deep he was in apparent company picnic. Out of two hundred-plus on this Boeing 767, at least two-thirds were up and socializing, saying nothing he could pick out over jet drone, but shrill enough to make him dread these seven transatlantic hours.

At the end of Syd’s row, a corn-fed patriarch, with Ahab beard and bald pate, had planted himself. He stood hobnobbing with the aisle passenger, and Syd detected an archetype of sorts in pencil holder and glasses case jammed into sport shirt pocket, and lip of trusslike moneybelt jutting over waistband, in the shadow of potbelly. The name-badge mascot was still out of focus, maybe with Viking horns or rabbit ears, maybe with hockey stick or T-square, maybe with none of the above.

The giddiness in eyes and chatter bespoke more than getaway anticipation. Syd knew from his own ancient history where these symptoms pointed, though for this crowd full of mutual reinforcement, cure seemed unlikely. And they, no doubt, felt at their happiest and best in the throes of their enthusiasm, whether for Jesus or Star Trek or Hummel figurines. Of the nature of these converts he had no inkling, but make no mistake, true fulfillment flowed solely from whatever they had in common, for that was always a condition of Schwärmerei. And who to say it better, mused Syd with unregenerate political incorrectness, than the Germans, with 1,500 years of going overboard between sack of Rome and Third Reich?

Syd sighed relief as Ahab beard finally sauntered off to block some other row. Bathroom had become top priority, and though red lights ahead signaled “Fwd Lavs Occupied,” intrepid Syd zigzagged like a pinball past the laughing gaggles, braced for waiting in line. Oddly, the little sliding panel on one bathroom door read “Vacant,” though the overhead light still insisted otherwise. Syd nudged the door, heard no protest from within, and entered shrugging.

Brrr. Kinda cold in there, but then again, didn’t these toilets empty into subzero sky? More bothersome was the latched panel, broad as a doormat, above the toilet. He blinked, clueless as to what lay behind. Circuitry, emergency kits, spare parts? The prolonged

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