Changing Planes

CONFUSIONS OF UÑI

I’VE HEARS OF PLANES where no one should go, planes no one should visit even briefly. Sometimes in the dreary bustle of airport bars men at the next table talk in low voices, saying things like, “I told him what the Gnegn did to MacDowell,” or, “He thought he could handle it on Vavizzua.” Then a harsh, shrill, enormously amplified voice blats out, “Flight onteen to Hhuhh is now boarding at gate throighty-six,” or, “Shimbleglood Rrggrrggrr to a white courtesy phone please,” drowning out all other voices and driving sleep and hope from the poor souls who droop across blue plastic seats with steel legs bolted to the floor trying to catch a little rest between planes; and the words of the men at the next table are lost. Of course the men may merely be boasting to increase the glamor of their lives; surely if the Gnegn or Vavizzua were truly dangerous, the Interplanary Agency would warn people to stay away—as they warn them to stay off Zuehe.

It’s well known that the Zuehe plane is unusually tenuous. Visitors of ordinary mass and solidity are in danger of breaking through the delicate meshes of Zuehan reality, damaging a whole neighborhood in the process and ruining the happiness of their hosts. The affectionate, intimate relationships so important to the Zuehe may be permanently strained and even torn apart by the destructive weight of an ignorant and uncaring intruder. Meantime, the intruder suffers no more from such an accident than an abrupt return to his own plane, sometimes in a peculiar position or upside down, which is embarrassing, but after all at an airport one is among strangers and so shame has little power.

We’d all like to see the moonstone towers of Nezihoa, as pictured in Roman’s Planary Guide, the endless steppes of mist, the dim forests of the Sezu, the beautiful men and women of the Zuehe, with their slightly translucent clothes and bodies, their pale grey eyes, their hair the color of tarnished silver, so fine the hand does not know when it touches it. It is sad that so lovely a plane must not be visited, fortunate that those who have glimpsed it have been able to describe it for us. Still, some people go there. Ordinarily selfish people justify their invasion of Zuehe by the familiar expedient of considering themselves as not like all those other people who go to Zuehe and spoil it. Extremely selfish people go to Zuehe to boast about it, precisely because it is fragile, destructible, therefore a trophy.

The Zuehe themselves are far too gentle, reticent, and vague to forbid anybody entry. Verbs in their cloudy language do not even have an indicative mode, let alone an imperative.

They use only the conditional. They have a thousand ways of saying maybe, perhaps, lest, although, if… but not yes, not no. So at the usual entry point the Interplanary Agency has set up, instead of a hotel, a net, a large, strong, nylon net. In it anybody arriving on Zuehe, even unintentionally, is caught, sprayed with sheep-dip, given a pamphlet containing a straightforward warning in 442 languages, and sent straight back to their own, more durable though less enticing plane, where the Agency makes sure that they arrive upside down.

I have only been to one plane I really wouldn’t recommend to anybody and to which I shall certainly never return. I’m not sure it is exactly dangerous. I am no judge of danger. Only the brave can be that. Thrills and chills which to some people are the spice of life take the flavor right out of mine. When I’m frightened, food is sawdust—sex, with its vulnerability of body and soul, is the last thing I want—words are meaningless, thought incoherent, love paralysed. Cowardice of this degree is, I know, uncommon. Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder. And they’d find the terror exhilarating and take up skydiving as soon as their broken pelvis mended. Whereas I descend slowly from the stepladder, clutching at the porch rail, and swear I’ll never go above six inches again.

So I don’t fly any more than I absolutely have to, and when I do get trapped in airports I don’t go looking for the dangerous planes, but for the peaceful ones, the dull, ordinary, complicated ones, where I can be not frightened out of my wits but just ordinarily frightened, the way cowards are most of the time.

Waiting out a missed connection in the Denver airport, I fell into conversation with a friendly couple who’d been to Uñi. They told me it was “a nice place.” As they were elderly, he laden with an expensive camcorder and other electronic impediments, she wearing pantyhose and deeply unadventurous white wedgie sandals, I thought they wouldn’t have said that about anywhere dangerous. That was stupid of me. I should have been warned by the fact that they weren’t good at description. “Lot going on there,” the man said. “But all pretty much like here. Not one of those foreign places.” The wife added, “It’s a storybook country! Just like things you see on TV.”

Even that didn’t alert me.

“The weather’s very nice,” the wife said. The husband amended, “Changeable.”

That was OK. I had a light raincoat with me. My flight to Memphis wasn’t for an hour and half yet. I went to Uñi.

I checked into the Interplanary Inn. WELCOME TO OUR FRIENDS FROM THE ASTRAL PLANE! said a sign on the desk. A pale, heavyset, redheaded woman behind the desk gave me a translatomat and a self-guiding map of the town, but also pointed out to me the large placard: EXPERIENCE OUR VIRTUAL REALITY TOUR OF BEAUTIFUL UÑI EVERY TWENTY IZНMIT.

“You must do,” she said.

In general I evade “virtual” “experiences,” which were always recorded in better weather than it is today and which take the novelty out of everything you’re about to see without giving any real information. But two pale, heavyset clerks ushered me in such a determinedly friendly fashion to the VR cubicle that I had not the courage to protest. They helped me insert my head into the helmet, wrap the bodywrap around my body, and slip my legs and arms into the long stocking-gloves. And then I sat there quite alone for what felt like at least a quarter of an hour, waiting for the show to start, resisting claustrophobia, watching the colors inside my eyes, and wondering how long an izhmit was. Or was the singular izhm? Or was plural number shown by a prefix, so that the singular would be zhmit? Nothing whatever happened, speculative grammar palled, and I said the hell with it. I slipped out of the VR swaddle, walked past the clerks with guilty nonchalance, and got outside among the potted shrubs. The potted shrubs in front of hotels are the same on every plane.

I looked at my self-guiding map and set out to visit the Art Museum, which had three stars. The day was cool and sunny. The town, built mostly of grey stone with red tile roofs, looked old, settled, prosperous. People went about their business paying no attention to me. The Uñiats seemed mostly to be heavy-set, white-skinned, and red-haired. All of them wore coats, long skirts, and thick boots.

I found the Art Museum in its little park and went in. The paintings were mostly of heavyset, white-skinned, red-haired women with no clothes on, though some wore boots. They were well painted, but they didn’t do much for me. I was on my way out when I got drawn into a discussion. Two people, both men I thought, though it was hard to say given the coats, skirts, and boots, stood arguing in front of a painting of a plump red-haired female wearing nothing but boots on a flowered couch.

As I passed, one of them turned to me and said, or so my translatomat rendered what he said, “If the figure’s a central design element in the counterplay of blocks and masses, you can’t reduce the painting to a study of indirect light on surfaces, can you?”

He, or she, asked the question so simply, directly, and urgently that I could not merely say, “Excuse me?” or shake my head and pretend to be uncomprehending. I looked again at the painting and after a moment said, “Well, not usefully, perhaps.”

“But listen to the woodwinds,” said the other man, and I realised that the ambient music was an orchestral piece of some kind, dominated at the moment by plangent wind instruments, oboes perhaps, or bassoons in a high register. “The change of key is definitive,” the man said, a little too loudly. The person sitting behind us leaned forward and hissed, “Shh!” while a person in the row in front of us turned around and glared. Embarrassed, I sat very still throughout the rest of the piece, which was quite pretty, though the changes of key, or something of that kind—the only way I can recognise a change of key is when I cry without knowing why I am crying—gave it a certain incoherence. I was surprised when a tenor, or possibly a contralto, whom I had not previously noticed, stood up and began to sing the main theme in a powerful voice, ending on a long high note to wild applause from the audience in the big auditorium. They shouted and clapped and demanded an encore. But a gust of wind blowing in from the high hills to the west across the village square made all the trees shiver and bow, and looking up at the clouds streaming overhead I realised a storm was imminent. The clouds darkened from moment to moment, another great blast of wind struck, whirling up dust and leaves and litter, and I thought I’d better put on my raincoat. But I had checked it at the cloakroom in the Art Museum. My translatomat was clipped to my jacket lapel, but the self-guiding map had been in my raincoat pocket. I went to the desk in the tiny station building and asked when the next train left, and the one-eyed man behind the narrow iron grating said, “We do not have trains now.”

I turned to see the empty tracks stretching away under the vast arched roof of the station, track after track, each with its number and its gate. Here and there was a luggage cart, and a single distant passenger straying idly down a long platform, but no trains. “I need my raincoat,” I said, in a kind of panic.

“Try Lost and Found,” the one-eyed clerk said, and busied himself with forms and schedules. I walked across the great hollow space of the station towards the entrance. Beyond a restaurant and a coffee bar I found the Lost and Found. I went into it and said, “I checked my raincoat at the Art Museum, but I have lost the Art Museum.”

The statuesque red-haired woman at the counter said, “Wait a minute” in a bored voice, rummaged a bit, and shoved a map across the counter. “There,” she said, pointing at a square with a white, plump, red-nailed finger. “That’s the Art Museum.”

“But I don’t know where I am. Where this is. This village.”

“Here,” she said, pointing out another square on the map. It seemed to be ten or twelve streets from the Art Museum. “Better go while the conformation lasts. Stormy today.”

“Can I take the map?” I asked pitifully. She nodded.

I went out into the city streets, so mistrustful that I walked with short steps, as if the pavement might turn into an abyss before my feet, or a cliff face rise up before me, or the street crossing turn into the deck of a ship at sea. Nothing happened. The wide, level streets of the city crossed each other at regular intervals, treeless, quiet. The electric buses and taxis made little noise, and there were no private cars. I walked on. The map took me right back to the Art Museum, which I thought had had green-and-white marble steps instead of black slate ones, but other things about it were as I remembered. In general, I have a poor memory. I went in and asked at the cloakroom for my raincoat. While the black-haired, silver-eyed girl with thin black lips was looking for it, I wondered why I had asked, at the train station, when the next train left. Where had I thought I was going? All I had wanted was my coat at the Art Museum. If there had been a train, would I have taken it? Where would I have got off?

As soon as I had my coat, I hurried back through the steep, cobbled streets lined with charming balconied houses and crowded with the slender, almost skeletal, black-lipped people of Uñi, towards the Interplanary Hotel to demand an explanation. It was probably something in the air, I thought, as the fog thickened, hiding the mountains above the town and the peaked roofs of the houses on the hills. Maybe people on Uñi smoked something hallucinatory, or there was some pollen or something in the air or in the fog that affected the mind, confused the senses, or—a nasty thought—deleted stretches of memory, so that things seemed to happen without sequence and you couldn’t remember how you’d got where you were or what had happened in between. And having a poor memory, I might not be sure whether I had lost parts of it or not. It was like dreaming in some respects, but I was certainly not dreaming, only confused and increasingly alarmed, so that despite the damp cold I didn’t stop to put on my raincoat, but hurried shivering onward through the forest.

I smelled wood smoke, sweet and sharp in the wet air, and presently saw a gleam of light through the twilight mist that gathered almost palpable among the trees. A woodcutter’s hut stood just off the path, a shadowy bit of kitchen garden beside it, the red-gold glow of firelight in the low, small-paned window, smoke drifting up from the chimney, a lonesome, homely sight. I knocked. After a minute an old man opened the door. He was bald, and had an enormous wen or wart on his nose and a frying pan in his hand, in which sausages were sizzling cheerily. “You can have three wishes,” he said.

“I wish to find the Interplanary Hotel,” I said.

“That is the wish you cannot have,” the old man said. “Don’t you want to wish that the sausages were growing out of the end of my nose?”

After a brief pause for thought, I said, “No.”

“So, what do you wish for, besides the way to the Interplanary Hotel?”

I thought again. I said, “When I was twelve or thirteen, I used to plan what I’d wish for if they gave me three wishes. I thought I’d wish, I wish that having lived well to the age of eighty-five and having written some very good books, I may die quietly, knowing that all the people I love are happy and in good health, I knew that this was a stupid, disgusting wish. Pragmatic. Selfish. A coward’s wish. I knew it wasn’t fair. They would never allow it to be one of my three wishes. Besides, having wished it, what would I do with the other two wishes? So then I’d think, with the other two I could wish that everybody in the world was happier, or that they’d stop fighting wars, or that they’d wake up tomorrow morning feeling really good and be kind to everybody else all day, no, all year, no, forever, but then I’d realise I didn’t really believe in any of these wishes as anything but wishes. So long as they were wishes they were fine, even useful, but they couldn’t go any further than being wishes. By nothing I do can I attain a goal beyond my reach, as King Yudhişţhira said when he found heaven wasn’t all he’d hoped for. There are gates the bravest horse can’t jump. If wishes were horses, I’d have a whole herd of them, roan and buckskin, lovely wild horses, never bridled, never broken, galloping over the plains past red mesas and blue mountains. But cowards ride rocking horses made of wood with painted eyes, and back and forth they go, back and forth in one place on the playroom floor, back and forth, and all the plains and mesas and mountains are only in the rider’s eyes. So never mind about the wishes. Give me a sausage, please.”

We ate together, the old man and I. The sausages were excellent, so were the mashed potatoes and fried onions. I could not have wished for a better supper. After it we sat in companionable silence for a bit, looking at the fire, and then I thanked him for his hospitality and asked him for directions to the Interplanary Hotel.

“It’s a wild night,” he said, rocking in his rocking chair.

“I have to be in Memphis tomorrow morning,” I said.

“Memphis,” he said thoughtfully, or perhaps he said “Memfish.” He rocked a bit and said, “Ah, well, then. Better go east.”

And as at that moment a whole group of people erupted from an inner room I had not previously noticed, bluish-skinned silver-haired people dressed in tuxedos, off-the-shoulder ball gowns, and tiny pointy shoes, arguing shrilly, laughing loudly, making exaggerated gestures, batting their eyes, each holding a cocktail glass containing an oily liquid and one embalmed green olive, I did not feel like staying any longer, but plunged out into the night, which evidently was going to be wild only in the old man’s cottage, because out here on the seashore it was quite still, a half moon shining over the placid black water that sighed and rustled softly on the broad, curving beach.

Having no idea which direction east was, I began walking to the right, as east generally feels like the right to me and west feels like the left, which must mean that I face north a good deal. The water was inviting; I took off my shoes and stockings and waded in the cool come-and-go of shallow waves on the sand. It was so peaceful that I was not at all prepared for the burst of loud noise, fiercely bright light, and hot tomato soup that surged briefly around me, knocking me off my feet and half stifling me, as I staggered up onto the deck of a ship plunging through sheets of rain over a choppy, grey sea full of whitecaps or the heads of porpoises, I could not tell which. An enormous voice from the bridge bellowed incomprehensible orders and the even more enormous voice of the ship’s siren lamented vastly through the rain and mist, warning off the icebergs. “I wish I was at the Interplanary Hotel!” I shouted, but my puny cry was annihilated by the clamor and din all about me, and I had never believed in three wishes anyway. My clothes were soaked with tomato soup and rain and I was most uncomfortable, until a lightning bolt—green lightning, I had read of it but never seen it—zapped with a sizzle as of huge frying sausages down through the grey commotion not five yards from me and with a tremendous crash split the deck right down the middle. Fortunately we had just that moment struck an iceberg, which wedged itself into the cloven ship. I climbed the rail and stepped off the terrifying pitch of the deck onto the ice. From the iceberg I watched the two halves of the ship slant farther and farther apart as they slowly sank. All the people who had rushed up on deck wore blue bathing suits, trunks for the men, Olympic style for the women. Some of the suits had gold stripes, the officers’ suits evidently, for the people with gold-striped blue suits shouted orders which the ones in plain blue suits promptly obeyed, letting down six lifeboats, three to a side, and climbing into them in an orderly fashion. The last one in was a man with so many gold stripes on his bathing trunks that you could hardly see they were blue. As he stepped into the lifeboat, both halves of the ship sank quietly. The lifeboats fell into line and began to row away among the white-nosed porpoises.

“Wait,” I called, “wait! What about me?”

They did not look back. The boats disappeared quickly in the roiling gloom over the icy, porpoiseful water. There was nothing for it but to climb my iceberg and see what I could see. As I clambered over the humps and pinnacles of ice, I thought of Peter Pan on his rock, saying, “To die will be a great adventure,” or that’s how I remembered what he said. I had always thought that that was very brave of Peter Pan, definitely a constructive way to look at dying, and perhaps even true. But I didn’t particularly want to find out whether it was true or not, just now. Just now, I wanted to get back to the Interplanary Hotel. But alas, when I reached the summit of the iceberg, no hotel was visible. I saw nothing but grey sea, porpoises, grey mists and clouds, and darkness slowly thickening.

Everything else, everywhere else, had changed quickly into somewhere else. Why didn’t this? Why didn’t the iceberg become a wheat field, or an oil refinery, or a pissoir? Why was I stuck on it? Wasn’t there something I could do? Click my heels and say, “I want to be in Kansas”? What was wrong with this plane, anyhow? A storybook world, indeed! My feet were very cold by now, and only the lingering warmth of the tomato soup kept my clothes from freezing in the bitter wind that whined over the surface of the ice. I had to move. I had to do something. I started trying to dig a hole in the ice with my hands and heels, breaking off projections, kicking till big flakes came loose and I could pry them up and toss them away. As they flew out over the sea they looked like gulls or white butterflies. A big help that was. I was by now very angry, so angry that the iceberg began to melt around me, steaming and fizzing faintly, and I sank into it like a hot poker, red-hot with fury, and yelled at the two pale people who were hastily stripping the long stocking-gloves off my legs and arms, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

They were terribly embarrassed and worried. They were afraid I had gone mad, afraid I was going to sue their Interplanary Inn, afraid I would say bad things about Uñi on other planes. They did not know what had gone wrong with the Virtual Reality Experience of Beautiful Uñi, although clearly something had. They had called for their programmer.

When he came—wearing nothing but blue swim trunks and horn-rimmed glasses—he barely examined the machine. He declared it was in perfect order. He asserted that my “confusion” had been due to an unfortunate semi-overlap of frequencies, a kind of mental moire effect, caused by something unusual in my brainwaves interacting with their program. An anomaly, he said. The effect of a resistance, he said. His tone was accusatory. I got angry all over again and told him and the clerks that if their damned machine malfunctioned, they shouldn’t blame me but either fix it or shut it down and let tourists experience beautiful Uñi in their own solid, anomalous, resistant flesh.

The manager now arrived, a heavyset, white-skinned, redheaded woman with no clothes on at all, only boots. The clerks wore minidresses and boots. The person vacuuming the lobby was a veritable mass of skirts, trousers, jackets, scarves, and veils. It appeared that the higher a Uñiat’s rank, the less they wore. But I had no interest now in their folkways. I glared at the manager. She smarmed halfheartedly and made the kind of threatening apology-bargain such people make, which means take what we offer if you know what’s good for you. There would be no charge for my stay at the inn or at any hotel on Uñi, I would have free rail passage to picturesque Jima, complimentary tickets to the museums, the circus, the sausage factory, all sorts of stuff, which she reeled off mechanically till I broke in. No thanks, I’d had quite enough of Uñi and was leaving right now. I had to catch my flight to Memfish.

“How?” she said, with an unpleasant smile.

At that simple question a flood of terror washed through me like meltwater from the iceberg, paralysing my body, stopping breath and thought.

I knew how I’d got here, how I’d gone to other planes—by waiting at the airport, of course.

But the airport was on my plane, not this plane. I did not know how to get back to the airport.

I stood frozen, as they say.

Fortunately the manager was only too eager to be rid of me. What the translatomat had translated as “How?” had been a conventional phrase on the order of “How regrettable,” which the manager’s fleshy but tight lips had truncated. My cowardice, leaping at the false signal, had stopped my brain, chopped off my memory, just as the mere fear of forgetting the name ensures that I will forget the name of anyone I have to introduce to anyone else.

“The waiting room is this way,” the manager said, and escorted me back across the lobby, her bare haunches moving with a heavy, malevolent waggle.

Of course all Interplanary inns and hotels have a waiting room exactly like an airport, with rows of plastic chairs bolted to the floor, and a horrible diner with no seats which is closed but reeks of stale beef fat, and a flabby man with a nose cold overflowing from the chair next to you, and a display of expected flight arrivals and departures which flickers by so fast you never can be quite sure you’ve found your connecting plane among the thousands of listings, although when you do catch its number they seem to have changed the gate, which means that you need to be in a different concourse, so that your anxiety soon rises to an effective level—and there you are back in the Denver airport sitting on a plastic chair bolted to the floor next to a fat, phlegmy man reading a magazine called Successful Usury amid the smell of stale beef fat, the wails of a miserable two-year-old, and the hugely amplified voice of a woman whom I visualise as a heavyset, white-skinned, naked redhead in boots announcing that flight four-enty to Memfish has been canceled.

I was grateful to be back on my plane. I did not want to go east now. I wanted to go west. I found a flight to beautiful, peaceful, sane Los Engeles and went there. In the hotel there I had a long, very hot bath. I know people die of heart attacks in very hot baths, but I took the risk.