The Closing Days

Chapter 1

When our plane banked right, pulling the city and the Bay into view, everything that had happened in the past few months felt escapable. Everyone that knew me was down there, and everyone at my destination was a stranger. I had a long flight in front of me, and I wanted to hold on to this sense of possibility and use the hours well. Maybe I could start a conversation with the woman beside me and practice my German. Maybe I could finish reading my book and plan my first days in Vienna. Five hours later, as we passed over the ragged edge of Greenland, none of those things had happened.

Instead, I just stared forward, fidgeting with the beige plastic clasp of my tray table while I listened in on my rowmates’ conversation. The man sitting by the window pointed his finger up and whispered in German, “I have visited two crematoriums in my life. Inside the concentration camp at Dachau during a school field trip, and in Santa Cruz this past week to collect my uncle’s remains. He’s stowed in my hand luggage.”

The man was wearing a heather-grey U.C. Santa Cruz Banana Slugs sweatshirt. The woman beside him gazed upward and replied, “I’m very sorry,” which in German is said literally, “It does me great suffering.” He, a middle-aged father of two from outside of Hamburg, and she, an unattached thirtysomething Austrian, had connected during the seatmate ingratiation window that exists between the clicking of seatbelts and liftoff. Now, twenty-eight thousand feet up on an arc between San Francisco and Vienna, they revealed themselves to each other, their conversation softly moving between death and triviality. Past and present. It appeared that I would spend the the flight in silence. Not that I had much to add. I’ve never been to a crematorium, Nazi-run or otherwise. If given the opportunity to speak, I would probably find a way to grasp and redirect their conversation into a soliloquy about getting expelled from Stanford and the way my girlfriend, Janet, had dumped me via a crisply folded letter slipped beneath my door about a month before. She’d spelled my last name wrong on the envelope. We’d dated for almost a year.

As the man by the window detailed the various illegalities present in the unregistered, international transference of the ashes that were once his Uncle Karl, a flight attendant stepped down the aisle with a bottle of red wine wrapped in a white cloth napkin. Her cheekbones held an Eastern European lift, her black hair pulled back into a ponytail. When she reached my row, I lifted my glass and our eyes met. She poured the wine and held my gaze for longer than necessary.

“Sir.”

“Yes?”

She leaned in close. I felt her warm breath on my neck. “Sir, I believe your mouth is bleeding.”

I reached to the corner of my mouth and then pulled my hand away. A bead of crimson shone back from the tip of my index finger.

“Here you are, sir.” She handed me a stack of thin cocktail napkins.

“Um- thanks,” I said, as I fumbled out of my seat and walked towards the rear-plane bathroom. Halfway there, an arrhythmic rock of turbulence sent my shoulder into the meaty arm of a sleeping bald man. His eyes flashed open, two white orbs sitting in the middle of his tanned head.

“What the fuck?” he said, in English. He looked like one of the golfers who would yell angry shit at my friends and me if we took too long to finish a hole at the Par Three course in Golden Gate Park.

“Sorry, man,” I replied, steadying myself on his headrest. I gave his shoulder a friendly pat and kept walking. A few seats farther, I turned back. He was leaning out into the aisle and staring at me. A chunky, silver Rolex glimmered from the thick wrist of his hairy arm. Definitely a golfer. I considered returning to apologize further, or to murder him, but elected to trudge on.

Humming fluorescents and the scent of urine greeted me inside the restroom. I tossed the soiled napkins towards the toilet, thin and speckled red, they fluttered like dismembered butterfly wings down onto the seat. Leaning close to the mirror, I examined my face. There is a tender, worn spot in the left corner of my mouth that never fully heals. It first tore about a decade ago. My body tries to scab it over and stitch it up, but each time I yawn or eat, it ruptures, producing a jab of pain and a dot of blood. I’ve grown something that resembles a beard, so it isn’t too noticeable from a foot or so away. I try like hell not to touch it, lick it, or draw attention to it. I washed my face with water scooped from the aluminum sink and blotted myself dry with pungent, brown paper towels.

When I returned to my seat, my rowmates were still talking. As I sat down, the man was saying to the woman, “Yes, flying on a plane is an act of surrender.” They spoke to each other like actors, emotions accentuated for an unseen third party; although, I suppose I was their third party. Their conversation slowed into a fallow period following a long diatribe on the ideal season for potty training, and after a few minutes of shared silence, I closed my eyes and began to drift between consciousness and sleep.

An hour or two later, as most around me slept with mouths agape, I became very awake. I massaged my knees and stretched into the aisle, tapping my white and navy Nike Air Pennys onto the floor in a hollow thud. The closer I examined any area of the plane—the seams in the fuselage, the pale lights running down the aisle—the more the complete shabbiness of our flying bus emerged. Every surface was scuffed or threadbare. If our aircraft sheared open right there over the Atlantic, releasing us and our belongings into the saltwater, nothing would ever be found. At my mom’s insistence, my suitcase included a photocopy of my passport sealed within a Ziploc bag. She took great comfort in this preparation. I am assured it is watertight, as she chose the model with yellow and blue sides that press together into green. The bag might float to the surface, informing birds and turtles of my age and birthplace. Family and friends waiting at our arrival gate would be unsettled when our flight switched from On Time to Delayed to—I’m not sure what exactly. For those who dropped passengers off at the airport, the shock would come easier. They saw loved ones leave, and they were prepared for an absence. Only the date of return would be modified.

I closed my eyes and imagined shooting three-pointers during an NBA Finals game. I’d stand in the corner, toes tucked behind the line, and receive a pass. With one motion I would rise, flick my wrist, and propel the ball towards the basket. This image calmed me. I approached the precipice of sleep, but I struggled when my mind shifted to the contours of my mom’s face. I have no ability to recall faces in my mind. If I can’t see someone in front of me, I begin to lose my memory of them and they begin to feel like a ghost. If I dwell on the sensation, I begin to feel like a ghost as well.

I took a deep breath and held it. Metallic cabin air stung my sinuses. I released the breath and tried a Hail Mary, an Our Father, and a Glory Be—a slightly different sequence of prayer than normal. It didn’t help. The more I shifted and stretched, the more my calves tightened, so I stepped out into the aisle and walked to the rear of the plane where a yellow light illuminated the flight attendant from earlier. As I passed the row of the once-again-sleeping bald man, I considered flipping his tray table and showering him with his half-empty cup of tomato juice. His black Greg Norman polo confirmed he was a golfer. It’s unclear why all golfers wish to always appear as golfers, even on flights to Europe in fall, but this man was no exception.

By the galley, the flight attendant sat in a jumpseat, happily chatting to one of her colleagues, who was standing next to her. Alongside them was a tray with glasses of apple juice and Halloween-sized Toblerone. Their conversation continued as I entered beneath the light. I rehearsed in my mind the best way to interrupt them in German, but at the last moment I grew nervous and spoke English.

“Mind if I?” I asked, reaching for the tray. The liquid in each glass shifted in unison, holding level while the plane made otherwise imperceptible movements. The sitting attendant nodded. I drank an apple juice in one long swig. Just seeing anyone awake, even strangers, reassured me. Little silver nametags dangled from their shirts—Sandra and Melanie—and they spoke about shifts not lining up with what had been promised. Midway through an exchange about the bangs-dominated haircut of their boss’s boss, they paused and looked over at me.

“Yes?” the one standing, Sandra, asked me, not unkindly.

I shrugged. “Nothing really. I can’t sleep, and I’m just happy someone else is awake.”

She smiled. “Care for some brandy?”

“You know, I think I already had too much wine.”

She placed her hand on the plastic counter beside her. “I could give you a new in-flight magazine?”

“Sure, thanks.”

She took out a plastic-wrapped stack of magazines from a cabinet, peeled it open, and extended the top one towards me. On the cover, a man wearing scuba gear over a business suit waved back at me. It looked like the scuba gear was added in post-production.

“How much longer do you think this flight will be?” I asked.

“About four hours.”

“Ok. Do you have any coffee?”

“Of course.” She reached above her and pulled a blue rectangular plastic coffee pot from a shelf and poured me a cup. I took a sip and pretended to enjoy it. Glassware matters. It matters deeply, and the waxy paper cup did this acrid liquid no favors. We had reached the point where I should return to my seat and let them continue their conversation. I lingered. I struggled to think of anything to say that would allow me to pass some of the remaining four hours in their company. Maybe Sandra would fall in love with me, and we’d get married and fight over her career flying around talking to lonely men late at night. The thought of our future arguments was starting to piss me off when the sitting flight attendant, Melanie, broke in.

“Sir. We do kindly ask that passengers remain in their seats, for safety, during the flight.”

I’m only twenty-three. Before this flight I’d never been called “Sir” in my life, and when she said it, it felt like code for, “You poor American bastard.”

“Yes, of course,” I replied, and slunk back to my seat, coffee, magazine, and Toblerone in hand. I unwrapped the chocolate from its foil, broke off a triangle, and let it melt in my mouth. It went well with the coffee, and I savored it and slipped into a haze as I flipped through page after page of advertisements for United Airlines-emblazoned travel gear. The fleeces weren’t terrible.

Four months before my flight, it was almost the end of spring quarter and I was supposed to be writing a paper about Tito, the former Yugoslav dictator. But no matter how early I woke up to write, or how bad I made myself feel for procrastinating, I couldn’t make much progress. I loved the course, Central Europe Since 1945, but my time was eaten up by a lab class about how to use sensors to measure heat transfer phenomena. My major was Mechanical Engineering, which I hated, but I was too far along to change. I had chosen during it my first week at Stanford based on five minutes flipping through a brochure at the student center. I liked cars I guess, and I knew Dad wouldn’t have been happy with a liberal arts degree.

Instead of my paper or my lab work, I mainly focused on the NBA. The Bulls had won a record seventy-two regular season games and the playoffs were on. Night after night I watched Jordan—a little thicker after his baseball sabbatical—back down his man on the block and then spring into the air, twisting, fading away from the basket and launching a shot just clear of his defender’s fingertips. It was a new move, and though at first it wasn’t as thrilling as when he sprang towards the basket in his wiry youth, its inevitability was intoxicating.

The Bulls won the championship on Father’s Day. In the locker room after the game, Jordan writhed on the floor and cried uncontrollably. His father, James, had been murdered three years before on the shoulder of the highway in Lumberton, North Carolina, and this was Michael’s first championship without him. They clinched at home in their stark white uniforms with broad and vivid red letters. That’s an image I can clearly resurrect in my mind. I’m not a Bulls fan. I like the Warriors, and we are terrible. But I’m drawn to Michael. I started the Finals pulling for Seattle—Shawn Kemp is my guy in NBA Jam—but after the Bulls dropped two straight, I started cheering for Chicago. At the close of Game 6, I felt relief. The series had to end that way. My paper was due the next morning, so I took a dissertation about Tito written in German, translated an entertaining portion, and turned it in.

Exactly three months after the Finals, my professor called me into his office. Unfortunately, he loved the paper and wanted to put me up for an award. When re-reading it to bask in my wordplay, he realized my use of endless paragraphs and excessive commas suggested that the original text might be German. He called a few former colleagues in Bonn and they located the paper that inspired me. If I left the University of my own accord, he wouldn’t report the fraud. I could stay and fight and maybe get probation, but he thought it best for me to exit without the stain. I was unquestionably at fault. I don’t believe in plagiarization. I just couldn’t seem to write, and I had been certain I would get away with it. The following morning, I went into the registrar’s office when they opened at 8 a.m. and withdrew from school. Then, I went to a travel agent at the Town and Country strip mall on El Camino and bought a one-way ticket to Vienna.

I chose Vienna because my Grandpa Charlie had spent nine months there immediately following the war and mentioned, without much detail, that it had been a formative period for him. I thumbed through his snapshots of the period on many a Sunday afternoon after church, intrigued by the stone buildings, the unsmiling faces, and the rubble. His grandfather had emigrated alone from Passau, a town near the border between Germany and Austria, in 1893. My grandpa’s only illumination on the intersection of his lineage and the war came from a comment one afternoon while I looked at a photo of a river lined with oak trees.

“That one’s of a forest near where my grandfather was born. Wish I could have visited under different circumstances.”

Though I was only fourteen at the time, the comment lingered. The photos weren’t the only thing he brought back. In a trunk in his attic I found a silver German sword, an officer’s saber. Across its handle was a Reichsadler perched on top of a swastika. Seeing those familiar crooked lines outside of a television screen raised the hairs on my arm. Grandpa Charlie became my personal Indiana Jones. I went downstairs to ask him about it, but I had no courage at all, so instead I asked if I could have something from his attic. He told me I could have absolutely anything I wanted, so I found a box big enough to hide the saber and covered it with random books and old yellow National Geographics. Grandpa could never throw away an issue. We ended up selling a few at an estate sale the year after he died of prostate cancer. The rest are in a dump now, somewhere around Colma. The saber is still under my bed in my room at my parent’s place. When I opened it that first night, a dark, tangy-smelling residue covered the bottom of the blade. I now realize this was grease, spread to ease friction with the scabbard. At the time, I assumed it was blood.

My interest in our family’s history inspired me to learn German, which I hoped to improve in Austria. Our last name is Vogel and my dad was impressed to have a son who could teach him to pronounce it correctly. I explained my plans for going abroad to my parents in our kitchen in the Outer Sunset of San Francisco at 2:17 a.m., three days before the flight. I wanted to tell them at a better time, but my mom is a doctor and is never at home and awake. The kitchen was dark other than a dim bulb glowing beneath our microwave. The window behind the sink was cracked open. It had been painted over so many times it never really shut all the way, and the smell of fog and wet eucalyptus filled the room. I phrased things the best I could.

“I’m not ‘expelled’ exactly, but my professor asked me to leave so he wouldn’t have to expel me.”

“So, they kicked you out,” stated my dad, rubbing his forehead. He sat across the table from me. My mom stood a few feet behind him, arms crossed, leaning against the doorway to the living room. Dad owns a small hardware store on Divis and has never been to college. He always ran down private schools until the day I got into Stanford. Then, without a word, he started wearing a Stanford ballcap to work. He must have picked it up from a gas station, though, because the typeface of the S was all wrong. The curves were too smooth.

“Basically, yes. But I can transfer somewhere else, and it will be like it never happened.”

“But it did happen,” answered my dad.

“Yeah. But I’ll transfer to Cal next fall, and I won’t ever do something like this again.”

“We didn’t raise you to cheat.”

“I know.”

He stood up. “You do realize that you are in an incredible amount of debt, right? Paying for three years of Stanford to graduate from Cal is an absolute fucking disaster.”

“I know. I’ll figure it out. I called the loan people and they have a grace period, so I only have to come up with the money for a couple payments as long as I get back in school next year. It’s in my name so it won’t affect you.”

“It won’t affect us, huh?”

“I mean financially, I guess.”

From the doorway, my mom asked, “What was the paper about?”

“We had to write about a patriotic tradition in Europe, so I chose this stupid relay that they ran through Yugoslavia on Tito’s birthday every year. It started in his hometown, wound through the whole country, and ended in Belgrade.”

“I thought you liked history?” she asked in a sad voice.

“I do, I just, I couldn’t—I don’t know. I actually wrote some of it—just not enough.”

My dad sat back down, placed his hands on the table and said, “You should stay, work at the store, and save money. You do not deserve a vacation to Europe.”

I bit my lower lip and picked at the fragile corner of my mouth. I hadn’t slept much since withdrawing.

“I know. I feel terrible, but I need to change something right now. I can’t stay home for a year. I have enough savings to get to Vienna, and I’ll find a job there. It’s going to work out.”

My mom walked over and pulled my hand away from my face. Then, she sat down next to Dad and put her arm around him. She’s a pediatric surgeon at UCSF, where she got her doctorate. Her view of academia is transactional and rooted in experience. Dad’s conceptions are from television. I wasn’t sure who this news hurt more. She looked over at me, her eyes bright, and in an artificially kind voice asked, “Alex, you didn’t cheat a lot, did you?”

“No, it was just this one time.”

“It’s better to fail than to cheat, ok?”

“Ok. Please. Let’s—ok.”

I didn’t speak much to either of them in the days before I left. The longest exchange was with mom about how much Pepto-Bismol to take on my trip. I took three bottles.

After finishing my in-flight magazine, I flipped through Rick Steve’s Europe Through the Back Door, dog-earing pages of interest and marking up a map affixed into the back cover of the book. When we began our descent into Vienna, the Austrian woman beside me placed her hand onto my wrist. On the other side of her, our rowmate was asleep.

“Excuse me?” she said in German. Her face looked colorless, her posture rigid. She rubbed at her eyes, which sent a tear sliding down one cheek, leaving a solemn track.

“Yes? What’s wrong?”

She laughed. “I’m just really afraid of landing. Very afraid.”

I nodded and put my hand atop hers. She twisted towards me, laid her head on my shoulder, and closed her eyes tightly. She smelled of peppermint and unbrushed teeth.

“I’m so sorry. This is so embarrassing,” she said.

“It’s fine, don’t worry—I’m studying to become a therapist, actually.”

“Really?”

“No.”

She laughed.

“I’m Alex,” I said.

“I’m Stefanie. I’m sorry. I hate flying. I ... I can leave you alone.”

“No, no. I’m happy to help. Let’s talk about something light to distract you—maybe that guy’s uncle above us?”

She laughed again. “Were you listening to our conversation?”

“Only all of it.”

“Oh, I don’t know why I talk so much on planes. I guess because I’m nervous.”

We stayed in that position, whispering small talk to one another as the plane descended. It was my first time speaking German in a non-contrived situation, and it was my first exposure to Austrian phrasing and rhythm. When most Americans talk about the German language, they focus on how it sounds to non-speakers and suggest that the strong, throaty vocalizations are emblematic of the German character. What they misunderstand is that once you are within the language, its sound melts away. Her shoulders stiffened when our plane touched down and the pilot hit the brakes, sending screeches and vibrations throughout the cabin. Once the braking eased and our plane began to taxi to our gate, she released me, and we instantly became strangers once again. I tried to keep the conversation going, but she went back to speaking with her now awake, ashes-smuggling friend. We nodded goodbye to one another at the baggage carousel.

Though in a haze, I managed to find the train from the airport into the city. I spent the ride pulling lost strands of her long blonde hair from my black Nike sweatshirt. I got off at a stop in the 5th District and worked my way through the biting, late October air to my hostel. Inside, I took an empty bunk in a room filled with Australian guys who were very tall and unseasonably tanned.

Leaving my bag in a flimsy plywood locker, I stepped out to explore with my passport and my entire life savings thrust down into my right front pocket: six hundred dollars in twice-folded American Express Travelers Cheques and five one-hundred schilling bills. I headed in the direction of the city center down a long, twisting street lined with shops. My pulse buzzed, and my steps were effortless, almost manic. I had made it to Europe, alone, and I had a new country to explore.

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About the Author:

Isaac Kovach lives in Manhattan with his wife and children. This is his debut novel and is based partly on his time living in Vienna. You can reach him here.