Abfahrt

Saturday afternoon finds our protagonist nauseous and gassy. For at least an hour, the plane has been lurching up and down above the Atlantic like it’s having an epileptic seizure. The protagonist is not familiar with the airline’s slogan, but he guesses it’s something like “Air Europa: Where Europe Comes To Vomit” or Air Ew-ropa for short.

A late lunch arrives in an aluminum container: crusty macaroni, petrified around the edges and soggy in the middle, three dehydrated chunks of chicken on top. Our protagonist makes a valiant effort, but it’s no use. His stomach screams rejection and he is forced to stash away a piece of bread and a chocolate snack for potential later use. He closes his eyes and waits for the middle-aged geneticist in the seat next to his to finish her meal so he can clamber out to the aisle and fish inside his backpack for the two Dramamine tablets he placed there in the morning.

The wrinkly geneticist with the crocodile neck has been a pain in the ass even before the plane took off. She is one of those irrepressibly chatty people who, when faced with a sullen, unresponsive travel mate like our protagonist, will change strategies and simply start making comments out loud, hoping someone in the vicinity of row 25 will bite.

For example: When she settled into her seat, she found the crinkly transparent bag containing a pillow and blanket and immediately turned to our protagonist.

“What is this?” she asked, pointing at the package.

“A blanket and pillow,” he answered dryly.

She proceeded to comment on the takeoff delay. She then badgered our protagonist with a volley of questions. How does the TV screen work? Do you need earphones? Where do you get them? Do we get food? When do we get food? What will the food be?

The protagonist nodded politely, not wanting to set the precedent that he was open to conversation, forced his lips into a smile, replied as quickly as possible and thought to himself that there better be some major karmic pay down the road.

And karma did come through, at the brink of regurgitation. Dinner is over, our protagonist rifles desperately through his backpack and, much to his dismay, finds nothing even remotely Dramamine-shaped.

“Is something wrong?” asks the geneticist.

“Just a queasy stomach,” says the protagonist. “I can’t find my Dramamine.”

“Oh, sit back down. I think I can help you.”

She pulls out a Ziploc bag brimming with pills of every shape and color, the kind of thing that would get you imprisoned at the first customs checkpoint, but she must be allowed to possess because she’s a kindly geneticist.

She breaks off a round green pill and hands it to the protagonist. His expression must have denoted skepticism, because she adds, “don’t worry, I’m a doctor.”

Here goes nothing, the protagonist thinks. He swallows the unknown medicament, then leans back into his seat. He figures that his current situation couldn’t get much worse, unless he has just consumed one of the Weasley brothers’ infamous Puking Pastilles.

Two hours later, the protagonist is passed out, forehead squarely on his retractable tray. He has drooled into his nostrils, something he previously thought impossibly, not that had given the matter much thought before, really. He wakes up with a start when, upon shifting his head, a waterfall of saliva flows from his nose and, instinctively, he assumes he’s dealing with a nosebleed.

“Are you OK?” asks the geneticist, who apparently has opted not to sleep, instead choosing to stare at the unconscious protagonist for the duration of the flight.

“Feeling much better,” he says.

“Thank god,” she says. “When I saw you with your head on your tray, I thought you were a goner.”

Now fully roused, the protagonist decides to, as a sign of gratitude, indulge the geneticist’s desire for conversation. During this time he 1. finds out her occupation, 2. tries to temper her fervent anti-Americanism, which apparently stems from the U.S.’s moneymaking perversions of the genetics field, 3. receives a lengthy stream of advice regarding his knee pain, which, according to the geneticist, can be alleviated with acupuncture.

Near the end of the conversation the geneticist says she is jealous of our protagonist and his unlimited potential. This makes him uncomfortable. His current life mission involves lowering the expectations bar, and where does she get off coming to that conclusion after a brief conversation? He not-so-subtly slides on his noise-canceling headphones and gets back to his music.

He listens to some Wilco and then to the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds”, because he read recently that this is the mother of all pop albums, but he can’t figure out what makes it so special. And then he turns to Taylor Swift and is not ashamed to reveal this tidbit, because, see here: just because she sings about being 15 and about boys on the football team doesn’t mean she should be discarded with the rest of the Mouseketeer generation. Every artists derives inspiration from their own narrow frame of reference, and it’s perfectly valid for a teenage female songwriter to focus on high school, and not just valid but also honest and admirable, as long as she’s doing her own writing. Which she is.

The on-board movies are a hodgepodge of Hollywood pap, and the movies’ greatest entertainment value lies in how hilariously they are translated into Spanish by the airline. “Sideways”, for some reason, has become “In Between Glasses”. “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is now “Ultimatum to Earth”. “About Schmidt” is subtly modified to “Regarding Schmidt” while “Marley and Me” is turned into the nonsensical “A Couple Of Three”. But the prize has to go to “He’s Just Not That Into You” which now is known as “What Is Wrong With Men?”. Genius.

As the sun rises outside the airplane window, our protagonist discards the chalky breakfast muffin and soon enough he’s walking down a stair car (which, regrettably, is not driven by Michael Bluth) into Madrid. It smells like summer dawn, heady and saturated with optimism. If our protagonist could bottle this scent he’d spend the rest of his days flying first class on Air Spew-ropa.

The Madrid airport is unremarkable, aside from some vending machines stocked with Activia, just in case you can’t wait till you get home to reactivate your bowels.

Now is probably a good time as any to introduce our protagonist, Futbol. He is 25 years old, 26 in two days. His hair is brown and cut short, formerly of mullet length but now shorn as a manifestation of his responsible and sober demeanor, clearly. He has a Roman profile which has been called regal by people trying to flatter him and jewy by just about everyone else. He sports some sweet braces, recently acquired as part of a binge of self-improvement stemming from a quarter life crisis. He quit his job as a newspaper reporter in the U.S. nine months ago and is living in exile in Buenos Aires.

While this break from employment has been good for his stress levels, it has, after a few months, made him antsy. Which is why he’s on this flight.

He lands in Barcelona, where our story begins, on May 31, 2009.