fresh lemon zing of poisson in Paris. The burn of tajine in Morocco. Are these places all gone now? Silent streets, cafes full of dusty skeletons?
Julie and I stand in the centre aisle, looking at each other. I point to a window seat and raise my eyebrows. Keeping her eyes solidly on me, she backs into the row and sits down. Her hands grip the armrests like the plane is in a flaming death dive.
I sit in the aisle seat and release an involuntary wheeze, looking straight ahead at my stacks of memorabilia. Every time I go into the city, I bring back one thing that catches my eye. A puzzle. A shot glass. A Barbie. A dildo. Flowers. Magazines. Books. I bring them here to my home, strew them around the seats and aisles, and stare at them for hours. The piles reach to the ceiling now. M keeps asking me why I do this. I have no answer.
'Not . . . eat,' I groan at Julie, looking her in the eyes. 'I . . . won't eat.'
She stares at me. Her lips are tight and pale.
I point at her. I open my mouth and point at my crooked, bloodstained teeth. I shake my head. She presses herself against the window. A terrified whimper rises in her throat. This is not working.
'Safe,' I tell her, letting out a sigh. 'Keep . . . you safe.'
I stand up and go to my record player. I dig through my LP collection in the overhead compartments and pull out an album. I take the headphones back to my seat and place them on Julie's ears. She is still frozen, wide-eyed.
The record plays. It's Frank Sinatra. I can hear it faintly through the phones, like a distant eulogy drifting on autumn air.
Last night . . . when we were young . . .
I close my eyes and hunch forward. My head sways vaguely in time with the music as verses float through the jet cabin, blending together in my ears.
Life was so new . . . so real, so right . . .
'Safe,' I mumble. 'Keep you . . . safe.'
. . . ages ago . . . last night . . .
When my eyes finally open, Julie's face has changed. The terror has faded, and she regards me with disbelief.
'What are you?' she whispers.
I turn my face away. I stand and duck out of the plane. Her bewildered gaze follows me down the tunnel.
In the airport parking garage, there is a classic Mercedes convertible that I've been playing with for several months. After weeks of staring at it, I figured out how to fill its tank from a barrel of stabilised gasoline I found in the service rooms. Then I remembered how to turn the key and start it, after pushing its owner's dry corpse to the pavement. But I have no idea how to drive. The best I've been able to do is back out of the parking spot and ram into a nearby Hummer. Sometimes I just sit there with the engine purring, my hands resting limply on the wheel, willing a true memory to pop into my head. Not another hazy impression or vague awareness cribbed from the collective subconscious. Something specific, bright and vivid. Something unmistakably mine. I strain myself, trying to wrench it out of the blackness.
I meet M later that evening at his home in the women's bathroom. He is sitting in front of a TV plugged into a long extension cord, gaping at a late-night soft-core movie he found in some dead man's luggage. I don't know why he does this. Erotica is meaningless for us now. The blood doesn't pump, the passion doesn't surge. I've walked in on M with his 'girlfriends' before, and they're just standing there naked, staring at each other, sometimes rubbing their bodies together but looking tired and lost. Maybe it's a kind of death throe. A distant echo of that great motivator that once started wars and inspired symphonies, that drove human history out of the caves and into space. M may be holding on, but those days are over now. Sex, once a law as undisputed as gravity, has been disproved. The equation is erased, the blackboard broken.
Sometimes it's a relief. I remember the need, the insatiable hunger that ruled my life and the lives of everyone around me. Sometimes I'm glad to be free of it. There's less trouble now. But our loss of this, the most