Gray - By Pete Wentz Page 0,57

losing it,” they say, but I know I am, so technically speaking, I’m pretty sure I’m “giving it away,” not “losing it.” I decide before we take off that I need to hear Her voice, not because I miss Her but because I feel the need to get my life in order just in case the plane goes down. I call Her up and the phone just rings and rings, so I hang up and call again. This time she answers, but she’s not in the mood to nurture my fears, to massage my neurosis, or to agree that God won’t let this plane go down because there are kids on it. I don’t really blame Her.

“You’re losing it,” she sighs.

“Whose side are you on?” I whine.

“There aren’t sides. This isn’t high school.”

“There is me, and then there’s everyone else,” I shout into the phone. “Now pick!”

Sometimes when I am leaving, arguing with someone takes the place of saying a formal good-bye. Everyone on the plane is staring at me now. Kids have turned all the way around in their seats to look at the crazy man screaming into his cell phone. Their parents grab them and spin them forward again, as if I might infect them or something. The flight attendants are giving me concerned glances. I don’t let any of that stop me. My life has veered off course. Has crashed into the mountain. I have become one of those people you see on daytime TV, the ones who shout obscenities at their exes and throw chairs around the studio. The ones who have Maury Povich do paternity tests for them. I am at the bottom. But still, I can go lower. I call Her a bitch and tell Her she has ruined me. I don’t mention my incident from the other night, or the EMTs, but she gets the drift. The silence on the other end of the phone tells me she is searching for something to say to me. Something punishing. Something unforgivable.

“I hope your plane crashes,” she spits.

Somewhere deep down, so do I, but I’m not lucky enough to be struck by lightning or to win the lottery. I’m not nine-in-twenty-one-million lucky. I hang up on Her just as the flight attendant tells me to turn off my phone, and after a perfunctory safety demonstration (as if any of it is going to help), we are roaring down the runway, picking up speed, rattling and straining and leaving the earth behind us. I am suddenly not afraid of dying anymore. I think it’d be a relief. And besides, no one would miss me if I were gone. I’ve burned all the bridges, collapsed all the walls.

Every time the plane bumps, I think of Her.

21

It’s later. New York City on a February morning, in a winter that just won’t quit. A hotel near Times Square, a wind that tears through the city streets, a cold that grips you and won’t let go. Businessmen in trench coats, collars turned up, hustling to work. Neon signs just waking up. Or just going to sleep. Steam billowing up from somewhere down below, rank and heavy, the way you see in old movies. Coffee from a cart, in a paper cup, sugar congealed on the bottom. Me in a dream, taking it all in, skin blue, smoke pouring from my lips, hands dug in my pockets. My coat is somewhere in Chicago. My apartment, long vacant, probably burned to the ground. My life just as empty, and quite possibly as charred, the smoldering remnants put out on the street. Alone. Low. Months since I’ve shared a bed with another warm body, since I’ve put my hand on soft skin. An ad on a bus for laundry detergent, a smiling woman in a white robe, an angel here to rescue me. She disappears around a corner in a cloud of exhaust. Typical.

• • •

The guys are meeting the shareholders without me. They are playing them the record they made in spite of me. It’s probably better that way. I am barely in the equation; I am a remainder at best. Maybe a decimal point. I have nothing to do, no place to be, and I can’t bear to sit in my hotel room any longer, so I’m just wandering around the city, up and down the streets, with no coat on. It’s almost as if I were on vacation, except I don’t want to be here. I walk down to the