The Pilot

The pilot and I stayed at a cheap, extended-stay lodge by the small-craft airport during the first six months we were together. I was really young. Twenty-two. About to turn twenty-three, but I was just twenty-two.

I had already been cheated on by a couple boyfriends, so I thought I knew what bad news was. I had adopted an air of precocious wisdom. I was certain most men would disappoint me, yet I remained secretly shocked at the various, creative ways they found to do it.

That night, we were at the lodge bar being served by the bartender who also worked the front desk overnight, who was really, truly just a kid. He couldn’t have been older than eighteen. Alaska liquor laws were strict: You weren’t allowed to serve or touch alcohol until you were twenty-one and there were plenty of cops who cruised through, thumbs on belts, hips forward, like they had nothing better to do. They had nothing better to do because in town things were boring until they were dire, so they spent the majority of the boring part lapping town in their cruisers or wandering into random businesses to “check things out” or pull you over for imagined traffic violations in the hopes you’d be driving drunk. But this kid had bought some kind of clemency. He’d line up shots for the cops—I assumed they were off duty but couldn’t be sure, their radios still hissed and spat. I realized there must be a deeper agreement than free whiskey but my imagination, though weary, wasn’t yet corrupt enough to picture the details.

The kid had dark hair that was so thick it made his face look smaller than it was. The owners of the lodge lived mostly in the Lower 48 and left him and a smattering of young, transient workers from Ukraine and elsewhere to run the place.

He had adolescent acne, which made me feel ashamed for him, but also relieved that I had kicked my first bout with acne the summer before.

When I finally made it to the dermatologist, she scraped at the lesions on my cheek with a tongue depressor, and when I recoiled asked if I had been on birth control. Yes, on and off, I told her. I had been prescribed the pill easily and without ceremony the moment I turned eighteen.

The dermatologist told me how my cavalier usage had permanently altered my face and my hormones; I would have crater scars forever and an increased likelihood of developing fibroids in my uterus. So I wasn’t on birth control when I met the pilot. The pilot didn’t so much refuse to wear a condom as create the circumstances under which it was very difficult, almost impossible, to ask him to wear one. I would have to think hard to remember how he managed this. It couldn’t be as simple as saying no, but I fear it was. Although I knew better, had been cheated on, had lived a whole life of disappointment already, it felt easier to capitulate to his desires than not.

The pilot was thirteen years older than me. The first night we met, when he came over to chat me up at the bar, I swear he told me he was only thirty. After I saw his driver’s license and real age, he would tell me I had been making assumptions; he hadn’t said a word about being any age at all.

That night—the one I’m telling you about, at the lodge with the young bartender kid—that night, the bartender kid was chatting with us and I was in the mood to drink, so I was being extra nice to see if he might spare a shot or two. And of course he did. He lined them up and took one for himself, tapping the bottom of the shot glass to the bar top before tipping it back, a real industry move.

The pilot was being extra friendly with the bartender too, looking him in the eye for long spells and talking close. The pilot didn’t blink much and had alarmingly blue eyes. He had this way of speaking to people that bordered on disconcerting but made them feel special. People weren’t used to being stared at so intensely. He was handsome in a confusing way, like if you saw a photo you’d think, fine, okay. But seeing how he worked his eyes and his shoulders, really worked his looks and the uneven corners of his mouth, you couldn’t help but be attracted.

The kid was obviously attracted. I was feeling jealous, even though the pilot said he only fucked women, so I was in the mood to drink. Sometimes I took comfort in the knowledge that the pilot was so egalitarian with his attention, meaning none of his attention was that significant, equally weighted, but not tonight. At this time I believed the adage that alcohol brought out your true nature, so I thought I was an angry person at my core. I was becoming furious every time I drank. I had smashed three flip phones over the course of a couple months. I couldn’t afford it but I would have two, three, four vodka sodas and find myself throwing my phone at the wall, the sidewalk, parked cars.

The problem was mostly Facebook. Before coming to the bar to meet the pilot after his flights to the villages—at that point, he was flying a Cessna back and forth between my hometown and the smaller villages across the bay, ferrying passengers and mail and groceries and telling dumb jokes, importing his stupid humor to the villages—I had checked his Facebook page, like I did about thirteen times a day, like a drug, hoping to see no change in his tagged photos. Of course the sick thing I had been hoping not to see—but looking for, thoroughly, so it’s almost like I did want it, maybe—had happened.

Maybe I should take a moment to say what I did. I was a waitress at a popular café in town. I made a lot of coffee and I cleared a lot of tables and I was a bit austere to the guests but also beloved, I hoped. I was a really good waitress. I was skilled at pulling espresso shots while taking orders for tomato soup and Reuben sandwiches, extra kraut, and I moved in a deliberate, graceful way that would go noticed. Once, a boy called the café to ask for my number because he’d watched the way I walked from table to table and back to the counter; he’d been too shy to do it in person because I was that good. I wouldn’t give him my number because he was just a boy, and I couldn’t navigate that amount of insecurity.

I was desired, but I wasn’t a pilot. The levers and buttons I pushed didn’t have life or death consequences and I wasn’t a man who bored right into people’s brains with my weird blue eyes, so I wasn’t granted the level of extreme sexual currency he possessed. He said it was a curse he couldn’t escape, his openness and allure.

Facebook was the record of his curse. Earlier that night I found tagged photos of him with some blonde woman in Anchorage, from his last trip through the airport there. They were laughing together at Chilkoot Charlie’s, and he had his arm around her shoulder, and she was clasping his hand above her right breast. Her name was Miranda Teller and we had no mutual friends, outside of him.

Underneath the photo, someone with the same last name—Teller—had commented “awwww cuties” with the heart-eye emoji.

Now, I could see how the bartender was becoming drunk on him, too, and I was fighting the anger, despite the pilot’s hand on the upper part of my butt as we sat on the barstools. I wasn’t able to confront him. He would shake me off and say they were all friends, always friends, that he was here on this planet, had arrived on this planet from some other realm, to enjoy people and to love life and if I couldn’t get on board, that was my own failing, my own lack of imagination and stunted ability to love. Sometimes he would introduce me to one of the Facebook women—they were always just passing through town—and he would be right, they were friends from this or that part of life—he was older than me and had more of those—so I had to be smart about my accusations, or moreover pretend to be cool: an internal process of churning, digesting the jealousy, of tamping down the panic.

If I drank right, I might become like him. I might do whatever I wanted, because what anyone wanted was to become this boundless thing, to let go of belonging and restriction and possession and predictability.

The bar was starting to fill up a little, which was rare this time of winter, where the town looked in on itself, myopic. In the summer this place would be full of tourists, the trash kind who didn’t have the money to rent something nicer or even a giant, gas-guzzling beast of an RV; for now it housed a few locals and transient workers.

In the lounge area, inexplicable crystal chandeliers shattered light all over the red, rich, almost Russian-tzar-blood-opulent carpet. Despite this, the bar was shitty and smelled shitty, like mildew and the cleaning fluids that couldn’t mask the mildew. The barstools were backless and overstuffed, the lights turned up too high, so the whole place shivered, exposed.

The bartender was nervous; he was wiping the bar top near the pilot over and over, and I wanted to tell him that no amount of wiping was going to make that bar clean and no amount of lingering was going to make him truly special to the pilot. The bar was filling up, and he should care for the guests who were coming in, who were leaning against the rail politely, asking with their eyes. I was in hospitality, of course, and I was embarrassed for the kid, the way he ignored their expectant looks in favor of whatever dumb, cowboy shit the pilot was saying, something about flying over Augustine and letting the volcanic thermal drafts push his plane around for fun, yeehaw.

I made myself available for conversation. I didn’t recognize some folks, which surprised me. Beside me was a medium-handsome guy whose Carhartts were stained with primer; he looked nearly artistic even though he had likely been painting a boat or house. His blond hair was thick except where it thinned on the crown of his head and he had the kind of hyperextended fingers that ticked up at the ends, which I found elegant and sexy.

I asked him what a guy’s gotta do to get a drink around here and he made a little half-smirk. When I said maybe he should show a little cleavage, bending over the bar to illustrate, he full-on laughed.

The pilot had his back to me and there was no indication he cared I was talking to this dude. I took another long drink of my pinot grigio and could feel the fuck it, I’m getting drunk on purpose taking over, when you stop sipping and open your throat. It’s that wild feeling, letting the alcohol transform you into the glassy-eyed, brilliant, angry creature you are, and I was going to direct all that cunning, animal intellect at this painter guy. If I could do it right, I could keep the rage at a level that made me amplified without being destructive, so he’d find me alluring; luminous, even.

I mean, it wasn’t hard to do around here. There weren’t that many people, so you had to pay attention to anyone who was at all sexually interesting. Everyone’s stock was higher than it would have been in any city over five thousand people.

The painter was indeed working in the boatyard. I could tell he wasn’t particularly smart, and had a kindness about him that felt ill-informed about the world, a fundamental lack of defenses. He seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. I would have bet this guy rarely made it past Anchorage and if he did, it was to some place like North Dakota to visit his cousins and hunt deer.

The bartender finally managed to pour the painter a beer while remaining locked in on the pilot, who was talking about energy photons from space now and their power over our thoughts. Often, a large part of my anger was because of how wantonly stupid he was allowed to be about science and the way energy and matter worked. Because he was a pilot, taking people’s lives into his hands, they trusted his brain, his imagination. Also this bartender was young young, so he’d fall for it, and I kind of hated how, because I was also young, though preternaturally, internally old, this said something about me and the kind of person I was, that I was sitting here with the pilot, somehow belonging to him even while he ignored me, even while the Facebook girls were smiling, drawing his hand toward their breast, forever and ever, amen.

The alcohol was really working. I was burning quite bright and had entered a realm where my memories would become slippery and malleable. In this place, consequences were more or less imaginary. If everyone was drunk, and we all woke up questioning our memory, transgressions could go excused, overlooked, so only the imprints of thumbs on our forearms or weird words on our minds might linger.

This was a place I longed to be more and more. I felt free here. I was transcendent of jealousy and boring ideas about faithfulness and loyalty. I could get on board with what the night offered, for a while—a frictionless, slippery being. If I drank right, I might become like him. I might do whatever I wanted, because what anyone wanted was to become this boundless thing, to let go of belonging and restriction and possession and predictability.

And it felt like movement, this drunk place. It felt like I was stretching my imagination. It was easy to be held here, by the town. It was the literal end of the road, where the highway system stopped. I was born here and my parents lived ten miles up the road, on the hill you crested as you drove into town, as the bay and the mountains splayed out before you. They were tucked away in the woods, right now in a trailer that was cozy and warm.

I hadn’t seen my parents lately. My dad didn’t like any of my previous boyfriends, but he liked that the pilot was mechanical and capable and friendly, you know, really friendly, so I didn’t bring the pilot around too much for fear my father would start to catch on to the stranger parts of him.

The pilot was drinking more than usual. He didn’t have wheels up at any time tomorrow. Tomorrow was his day off. I guess he felt a little responsibility to his job, enough to keep it.

The night progressed. I mean, the night took on a quality of self-possession, as if there was nothing outside this night, just this malevolent red carpet, just this shivering light. People moved toward me and I clapped their shoulders and we talked, we got deep, I talked about how I wanted to be a dancer, a doctor. We talked story. We talked about the usuals—my job, where I used to party in high school, where the painter and the pilot used to party in high school (they were older, they had different spots). We started to exchange our closest near-death stories like playing cards; we spoke them in the most bland, everyday tone, as if they were nothing to us. We one-upped each other. The painter got his glove stuck in a winch on a gillnetter. I had nearly drowned as a child when I fell from the dock, hypothermic. Outside it was dark, it had been dark since 3 p.m.

The pilot didn’t have nine lives, he had infinite lives. He had flipped his car and survived. He had crashed while skiing, on boats, and he cheated death over and over to the point where he was facile, loose-shouldered in its presence.

At one point the painter put his hand on my thigh and I let him rest it there; I liked the way his fingers looked on the weave of my jeans. At that, I saw a shadow in the pilot’s eyes. This moment remains clear.

The bartender came out to the other side of the bar and sat between me and the pilot. I told him he was a cutie. The pilot turned so the two of them were facing each other, and their knees touched. I remember this too: a little fear, a little anger.

Two weeks into dating, the pilot told me he loved me. I think this had a mechanical value to him. This was massaging the throttle, allowing the plane to disengage from the runway. This enabled him to maneuver me, though I knew better. I told him there was no way he could love me yet, we barely knew each other. I was preternaturally old, remember. I was in charge. I had my head on my shoulders. He told me we had been lovers in a past life, we were transcendent of time and of our bodies, that we could manipulate the world and the conditions of our mortality if we only believed and lived in the power we already had. I said he was crazy, but two weeks later I told him I loved him back. If words had different meanings when I was with him, I, too, could be a person who said love without loving. But I was beginning to love him, a little, as if he had incanted the feelings into existence.

You have to understand there weren’t a lot of choices in this town. I was young and I wanted to be with somebody, and the pilot wasn’t boring. I mean, what was I supposed to do? Plus I could handle it. I was handling it. He was a challenge; he was challenging me.

The pilot flew in and out of the town every day. He boomeranged between my town and the smaller villages across the bay. He let me fly to the villages with him. He called it take-baby-to-work day and I’d sit in the copilot’s seat in the little Cessna and feel both important—my proximity to the throttle, the steering, the instruments—and infantile, a child ferried back and forth, an errand kid.

I was also afraid of heights and of flying in small aircraft, where every draft buffeted the plane and I could feel the wind leaking through the imperfectly sealed door. When we took off, I’d hold on to the seat bottom, as if trying to keep myself from flying out the windshield.

The flats would spider out into the bay below us, the chop texturing the water like hammered tin. It was a short flight, about twenty minutes, to the villages. The pilot was chivalrous and solicitous on those flights. He held the hand and lower back of pregnant women as they boarded, he made jokes. He always got everyone and their gear in and out safely. He tenderly loaded jugs of milk, firearms, coolers full of groceries, mail. As a pilot, he was talented in all aspects. The landing and takeoff in the village was difficult; the runway was a narrow beach lane with a mountain on one end. He’d watched his friends flip their planes into the water when they took off wrong. Occasionally, someone died. The locals would tell him how much they preferred when he was flying, some people would even time their trips to town around his schedule.

When we were flying back empty, sometimes he’d idle and drop the plane down just to scare me. I would cry and start to hyperventilate as we fell and the mountains got closer and closer, before he pulled up. I’d beg him not to do it, but my terror seemed to please him.

I continued to be afraid every time I went up with him, which was often, maybe once or twice a week, but I still went. It seemed important to appear adventurous and impervious to danger like he was. Sometimes he would tell me to take the yoke in the copilot’s seat, and show me how to turn, how to trim, how to press the rudder pedals. I was so nervous during these lessons my hands became slippery on the controls.

Anyway, we were at the bar and night was looking in on itself and expanding at once. Time was over. There was no time; the night would not end. I remember resting my face on the painter’s shoulder. He smelled good, like Old Spice. He smelled my neck, like he wanted to kiss it. I wasn’t sure where the boundaries were. I looked to the pilot for some clue on the rules, but he had gone to the bathroom when I wasn’t paying attention.

I told the painter about how I thought my parents never loved me and he said all young people think like that, but that I was very beautiful and was that guy my boyfriend?

I told him the truth—yeah, I guess he was my boyfriend—and the painter looked sad and said this was getting weird, all of this. He gathered his coat, and after he left I felt an emptiness where he had been, as if his decent spirit had created a vacuum, like the window for redemption was over.

The night continued. The guests dried up, until it was just me, the bartender, and the pilot. Then the pilot was ushering us out to the airport: It was close and we could simply walk across the street. The bartender kid didn’t even close up. We left bottles on the bar top and pools of alcohol.

The pilot said we’d been invited to a party in the village—he’d received a message from a friend in the village, and he held up his phone as if to prove it. He had keys to the flight-service office. The small planes were tied down on the tarmac overnight, not even left in a hangar. The company wouldn’t care if he borrowed one. In fact, they’d never know. A little fuel wouldn’t be missed. He was in charge of the fueling schedule anyway.

We poured into the cold. The kid left the lights on in the bar. The inside of the flight office was shadowy and too quiet and official-looking. The papers on the desk and the blank computer monitors were unsettling; I almost thought to reverse the course of the night, head us back toward bed, but the pilot walked through the space and out the service door with authority, and the kid followed, and so did I.

Outside, the planes were crouched like startled birds, wings high and ready, and the night overhead was deep and bracing. I could see stars on stars and I did wonder what aliens or gods or photons might be looking down on our foolish pilgrimage, thinking yes, yes, you are limitless, do it. Or, more likely: what idiots.

The Cessna was tied down, an orange stripe painted around the fuselage that looked dull brown in the darkness. The pilot offered his hand to help the bartender into the back seat. I climbed into the right side of the cockpit. The bartender tittered and giggled from the back seat. He really was just a kid, hands folded over the belt expectantly, eyes glittering in the dark. The bartender kid, I’ll name him, I knew his name, I still do. The bartender kid was named Andy. He smelled faintly of cigarettes.

My fear and the cold were sobering me up. The cold always sucked the fun right out of my buzz. I never understood people who got drunk and froze to death in snowbanks when they laid down for a rest.

We had never flown in the dark together, but the moon was brazen and the runway was lit up paper white and glowing.

The bartender had brought a fifth of tequila from the bar and began passing it around the cabin. I took it next and opened my throat, fortifying myself. I wanted to throw up, but I willed down the bile.

The pilot jumped into the front seat and handed me my headset, handed Andy his, then put on his own.

He opened the throttle a little. Flipped a red switch. Flipped another red switch. Fuel flooded the engine. He flipped the ignition switch. His hands skimmed and ticked and tacked assuredly. The engines rattled to life, though they were muffled by the headset, which divorced me from the noise and the delicate shift of the plane beneath me as it warmed up.

Normally he would rattle call signs into the mouthpiece in the particular voice of all pilots, low and nonchalant, alerting the tower to his departure, getting cleared for takeoff. But the airport was shut down and what we were doing was illegal, so he remained silent. The fifth had come back my way and I took another drink. Andy was a good drinker; at least he was pretending to be a good drinker, he was holding himself with extra attention, extra grace, every movement and enunciation deliberate, fighting the tequila. I think he wanted to impress the pilot.

“My uncle used to fly planes,” he said, as if this was old hat to him. His words were the closest thing in our ears; the headset isolated our voices and shut out the rest. “He died in a crash. He was spotting moose and flew too low or something.”

The pilot began to taxi us to the runway. He began to accelerate and the plane jigged and jagged a little on the ice but we picked up speed easily and then the ground dropped out.

I always found the initial ascent the most comforting part of flying. It felt the steadiest, the acceleration and pitch pressing my chest back into the seat, for a moment held.

I felt a little bad for the kid. If he was afraid of flying, he wasn’t showing it, but his knuckles were white on the throat of the bottle. We were out over the bay now, which glistened—cold. I had to keep myself from looking back at him too much. I wanted him to think I didn’t care that he was up here with us, either, that I didn’t give two shits that he’d been talking with the pilot all night long and was in the back of the plane, entrusted with this mission, entrusted with a kind of intimacy I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The pilot only fucked women, that’s what he told me.

We were really out over the middle of the bay, the mountains surrounding us like a ragged jawbone, like we were flying over a giant mouth that might clamp down at any moment. It was beautiful.

The night was calm and smooth but the plane still jerked a little this way and that, as if expressing nervous tics. I was letting it all happen. I was feeling the magnetism between the pilot and the kid and I was feeling how unimportant I was to the whole scene, how played out and accessorized and pathetic, or free, or something.

The pilot began the usuals, I knew he would. He flew high, then banked the plane sharply, pressing its nose down, taking us into a dive. I was almost too drunk to care. I only whimpered softly. The mountains wheeled, impervious.

“More fun this way, whoop!” he said. He cackled. I could feel the kid press his feet into the back of my seat, his breath hot and fast in the headset. The pilot pulled us out and rose again. For a moment, I was lifted and pressed, safe. Then he did it again, pulled up again. It would have been boring if it wasn’t so terrifying.

The kid began to cry softly, but it was amplified in our headphones. He must have been asking himself what he was doing up there with the two of us, in the same kind of plane that killed his uncle, with a drunk pilot and a drunk girl who did god knows what; who worked at a coffee shop where she controlled an exact output of coffee and sandwiches but little else. Just a girlfriend, a tagalong girlfriend passenger, and I hated him for being so pathetic and so sad, and for whatever predatory impulse he was inspiring in the pilot, whatever thing wrapped up as protection, or mentorship, or—

The pilot unbuckled his safety belt and began to climb into the rear of the aircraft with the kid, “Don’t cry,” said the pilot. “Take the wheel,” he said to me in his flat way, to take the yoke.

I shook my head. He told me again.

He told me to hold her steady, that I’ve got this, that it’s so easy a child could do it; to continue flying across where I knew to go, I’d gone so many times to the villages it should be nothing to me to stay on course. He put one leg between the seats, then the other. The plane shifted, angry at the redistribution of weight. I was suddenly alone up front, nose light.

He put one arm around the kid and removed his headset, then his own, and began speaking into the kid’s ear, his lips so close to the lobe I couldn’t imagine they weren’t brushing. I could feel the tingle in my own ear, traveling down to my navel. I had only taken the controls a few times, here and there. Only on calm days where the pilot would tell me little tips, here is the throttle, this is how you turn. This dial controls the pitch, if you’re ever caught in a spiral dive, reduce to idle, try to balance the wings, pull back so slowly, too slowly, without the urgency you think you need as the ground, the water rushes up toward you, as death rushes toward you.

The sudden shift of weight sent the nose of the plane skittering a little. I had the yoke in my hands, feeling it buck against my fingers; there was a little intuition there that lived in my arms and my hands. I wasn’t completely incapable.

Please, please, please. I was asking again and again. Please come back, I think there were tears running into my mouth. I was so afraid I stopped being able to look back at the two of them. In my mind, the pilot had run his hand down the length of the kid’s thigh.

I was shaking, I was crying, but the pilot didn’t breach the seats again, he didn’t come back my way and I wouldn’t take my hands from the steering, so I began to settle. The plane didn’t feel like it was going fast from this height. The spot of the village on the ground was barely getting closer, and the yoke had steadied in my hand. I imagine the pilot was telling the kid something about how special he was, how he understood death, too, how all his friends were dead in a similar fashion, just like the kid’s uncle; that the universe was expanding as we flew, that nothing mattered, that everything mattered, weren’t we all-powerful, dry your tears, let me take you in my hand, maybe my mouth, and really what did it matter?

Love was mutable, it could take any form. It might become Facebook photos and heart-eye emojis, it might look like sharing a metal bubble in the sky, what a miracle. I didn’t own love and if the pilot was in love with the kid and me and anyone who crossed his path, then what was wrong with that? Wasn’t love the most egalitarian thing we had, the only thing we had? I was in love with them both and I was in love with the way the giant mouth was prepared to eat us and I was crying and I wasn’t drunk, I was lucid. I was aware. I glanced back and saw the kid’s earlobe in the pilot’s mouth and I was flying; we were all flying together.

We could all go on living—I could shepherd us across the bay—or we could do anything else. I experimented with the yoke a little. I turned the plane so we were facing a few degrees off from where we needed to be. I turned us this way and that, gently, becoming comfortable with my faculties. The plane responded well. Nobody was stopping me, there was relative silence from the back seat; I no longer had access to what the pilot and the kid were saying; I didn’t look back to see what they were doing. I was powerful. I was beautiful; I wasn’t even angry anymore, wasn’t even afraid. I was full of a kind of love that felt very close to hatred: It welled up the same way, from the same reservoir. I tilted the prongs of the yoke forward, a little, and the plane’s nose dipped. Then I pressed the yoke down in earnest, and I watched and felt the bay tip toward us and felt the pilot hit the seat back full on, heavy and scrabbling, asking me what the fuck I was doing.

He was laughing a little, I think. He still had his headset off so I couldn’t really hear, but he must have been laughing. He could see the humor in it. Besides, he couldn’t die; he had mastered death. But he was usually in control of the plane, the car, the night. Maybe I wanted him to feel what his love was like. Maybe that was all I could do, give him one ounce of what it was like when he dropped the plane out from under me on take-baby-to-work days, when we were skimming back from the drop-off all alone and I cried and begged. Maybe I wanted him to feel a little like I did when I prowled his Facebook page three, four, five times a day, waiting for evidence of his infidelity, which he’d explain as a figment of my own lack of imagination—my own narrow mind. Maybe I wanted him to be proud of how well I’d learned, because hadn’t he been conditioning me for this moment, to transcend death and fear and possession?

I plunged us down and the pilot was trying to scramble over the seat without punching his feet into the controls. And the bay was getting closer in a way that felt impossible to correct. Pull up, now, please. And man, the bay was coming up fast, and I’m telling this story and I’m not a specter, I’m not a ghost or a photon of light from space, come back to tell this story. Had we been spinning, we would have crashed. But it was a direct, precise descent. I was steady and straight, I was in control. And I pulled up, and the pilot climbed back over and took the left-side yoke and got us back on track to the party, and I was giggling and giggling the whole way, and snot was running into my mouth, and the cabin smelled of tequila and cigarette and urine.

When we landed on the little strip of beach in the village I was a husk, all hollowed out and still in the air, somehow. The kid had peed his pants and fell down sobbing on the gravel. I don’t remember a whole lot of the rest of the night, besides being ushered into a one-story house which was warm and full of bodies. Someone pressed a beer into my hand and I was immediately drunk again, and charming. I charmed everybody and eventually threw up all my charm off the back porch, where a dog tried to eat it.

After, because I had emptied a little of the tequila from my head, I tried to sidle up to the kid, who the pilot had deposited on a couch in the corner. The monitor stove was blazing and everyone was too hot, the light was orange and the couch weave was rough plaid, like we were in a photograph from the ’70s. I had stripped to my tank top and had my armpits clenched to my side to keep the sweat from rolling down to my waist. The host, a short man with a big smile and lots of moose roast to share, had given the kid a pair of sweats to wear that hiked up to mid-calf. The kid was tall. When I sat beside him, he recoiled like a cockroach had crawled out from the cushions. I was still drunk and high from near-death, so I touched him. His shoulder. He pulled away so quickly, my hand dropped. I remember noticing how far away from each other his eyebrows were, creating a large, flat space above his nose that was as perfect and unmarred as a snow field.

I didn’t say sorry, per se. I tried to talk and joke; I tried to spark some look of like, you’re not a bad person, or trust, or culpability, like maybe we were both in on it, we had both created the atmosphere in the cabin of the airplane and maybe what I did was understandable and even warranted, at worst, at best some kind of gift, an indoctrination into the ways—a night, or even a life—of freedom. I used my best charm and I even tried to brush my lips close to his neck under the pretense of smelling a cologne, which he wasn’t wearing, but he bobbed away and asked me to please, please leave him alone. He still had the fifth of tequila and was taking steady, determined pulls, as if intent on erasing me and the cabin and the party and the pilot. I left him and orbited. When I found the pilot, finally, he was behind the house sharing a cigarette with a girl who couldn’t have been any older than me, probably much younger.

When we were flying back empty, sometimes he’d idle and drop the plane down just to scare me. I would cry and start to hyperventilate as we fell and the mountains got closer and closer, before he pulled up. I’d beg him not to do it, but my terror seemed to please him.

As usual, there were no material consequences for the pilot. Nobody noticed he took the plane. We landed back at the airport before dawn, right before the office admin arrived for work. Nobody knew. The kid came back with us. He drank himself into such oblivion that we had to load him into the plane like cargo, though he rocked back and forth and murmured the whole flight. I gave him a plastic bag in which to puke, and he availed himself as we were landing; a perfect landing, so smooth you could barely feel the moment we went from airborne to land-bound, the snow and sky turning purple as the sun brewed behind the mountains, the stink of puke mitigated by the cold.

We hauled the kid out of the plane and sort of half-dragged him between us across the tarmac, through the flight office. It was the longest journey of my life. I thought I saw a shadow of a person in the office but all was still and watching. We saw one car on the short stretch of road back to the lodge, a silver Camry that blended with the dawn, but it didn’t slow or seem to care, though it’s hard to read the thoughts of a car. The pilot was calm as usual. He made a few light jokes about how our poor lil buddy got overserved.

We got him back to the lodge and set him in a chair in the corner of the lounge. I kept rearranging him, trying to make his limbs look natural, but his head lolled back and I was worried his airway would be cut off. I finally found a small pillow to wedge behind his head, then crossed his arms over his abdomen in an approximation of peace. You’d think someone might have seen us, but that’s the life of freedom. Even if they did, we didn’t force the kid to drink. He did that all by himself, and we were the good Samaritans—friends even—who got him home safe.

We went back to our room and lay on the bed, not bothering to get under the covers. The pilot rolled over and began to kiss me. Our kisses, in general, lacked passion, our lips mashed together so I could feel the bones, the hard parts, the teeth and skull beneath. For someone who was so desired, the pilot was very utilitarian about sex, and forceful. I often wondered why I was with someone who lacked passion, and I’m not sure I can answer that to this day. I’m not sure why I would rebuke, then accept, his advances. He told me he really did love me, and that I was crazy, the way I flew today. He seemed proud. I’m not sure why his words could supplant feelings of actual tenderness. We had sex, and he came, then fell asleep. I stayed awake and watched the sun rise, splashing over me, grotesque, too golden to be deserved.

I kept dating the pilot for a while. We stayed in the lodge, still, for a while. The kid didn’t work there anymore. He was blind drunk, sleeping on the shift, and fired after being picked up by the cops, his clemency run out. I found him serving tables at the Mexican restaurant six months later, and we pretended not to know each other, a kind of theater, my body shaking as I drank my margarita, his silence, his forced erasure of our history the deepest indictment I’d ever known.

I eventually got out. The pilot gave me an STI, final bodily proof of his cheating. The nurse practitioner said not to worry, it was very treatable, though I would never be able to reconcile the evidence of other bodies inside mine, so many bodies and friends and love; love as a kind of sharing, a mandate that I ultimately failed to accept. I had remained faithful to the pilot, almost contrary to his teachings. But this isn’t a story about that. That story makes me the victim and I am not the victim, though I needed an excuse to get out, to leave the specter of Andy and all the future bad things I’d do if I stayed. And leaving the town, the state, and the pilot did cleanse me some, restoring a modicum of weight and heft to my soul.

After I left the pilot, he would hear through the grapevine that I was coming home and track me down in the Anchorage airport just to say hi, he said. He’d check the flight manifests of partner airlines to find me and I’d feel afraid and special all at once. He eventually stopped finding me, stopped calling me at odd hours, at odd intervals, to make me say I loved him after a year or two. I thought about resisting, telling him I didn’t love him anymore, but that seemed unnecessarily cruel. Who was I hurting, saying I loved him? But he did stop. Eventually, he faded from the forefront of my anxieties. I was, indeed, just fine without regular access to the sky, without the utilitarian, almost frightening sex, without the pilot in my life at all, though I would continue to question any love that came my way, holding it for examination like a many-sided totem, asking what pound of flesh it might ask for in return: love, after all, a possessive thing.

I don't know why I was so shocked when I saw the pilot’s obituary one morning. I was on Facebook, and a friend of a friend had shared it. The comments had been piling up. I want to say I am beyond the age the pilot would have found sexually alluring, but that is likely not true. He wasn’t really in it for sex, I suppose.

I’m still afraid of death, so when someone I know dies, which happens more often than I like these days, I panic a little at the finality. I’ve not gotten used to death, so I wonder how he felt when it happened; he who was so bored by it, superior, who didn’t crash or burn or slit his throat (he would never) or fall from a great height. He died in his sleep, an aneurysm, quick and inevitable, precise.

He had a wife. I knew this. I’d heard he’d gotten married, I might have even seen a picture or two. I remember her steep jaw and cleft chin. I can’t believe he got married but I guess he thought everything was available to him, the whole world laid out like a feast. I wonder if, finding him gone the next day, his wife woke up free. I wonder if she’s free like I’m free. And still, I feel a small sadness at his passing. I feel a small jealousy that she knew him in later years, could clock the passage of his skin downward, and the deepening of his wrinkles, the shadow of his mortality. I wonder if he’s moved on, through the lesser strata of the atmosphere, into the vacuum of space and places beyond, or if he’s been truly blotted out, that voracious appetite, the voracious emptiness of him sated: Congratulations. You did it; you finally did it. You died.