Chapter 2
2
The next morning, I waited at the corner of Nineteenth and Taraval for the bus that would convey me to Acuity’s office in Daly City. It was a clear day, and I took stock of the sky, as I’d been in the habit of doing all my life. As a child, I was shy, prone to daydreaming, and my fantasies always involved the sky and a realm above it, a secular heaven populated by rabbits and horses with wings. My dad taught me the names of different clouds, enabling me to distinguish between the high, wispy cirrus, the patchy altocumulus, and the low-hanging stratocumulus. As my interests matured, I progressed from clouds to the harder stuff of contrails, which I learned to read like tea leaves, by a system of my own devising. An abundance of contrails was a sign my day would go well.
Presently, I fixated on the boldest line in the sky, a contrail still in the process of creation. By squinting I could make out the plane that expelled the vapor, a shining silver dot at the head of the trail. I consulted my flight-tracking app, which identified the plane as a 737-900 named N8770Q, en route from Seattle to San Jose. The sight of the distant 737 filled me with longing. It had been three weeks since I’d flown, and at times like these, I feared my connection to my loves was waning. I was eager to renew our bond after work with a visit to the Elephant Bar in Burlingame, my usual Friday night routine when I didn’t have a flight booked. I’d order a side of fries, the cheapest item on the menu, and spend a few hours watching planes land at SFO through the bay-facing windows before the host dislodged me, an amiable battle we waged each week.
I boarded the bus and stood in the front section, my body pressed against those of students bound for San Francisco State University, a cluster of brutalist buildings just past Stonestown Galleria, where Karina and I sometimes ventured after happy hour to browse tipsily at Forever 21 and Sephora. I rode to the end of the line, the Daly City BART station, where many commuters climbed the platform to board trains that would carry them north, to offices off the downtown San Francisco stops, or south, to the Millbrae station, where they could transfer to Caltrain, which would ferry them farther south to the tech campuses of Silicon Valley, including our parent company’s headquarters in Menlo Park. I wished I could take BART to SFO again, perhaps daring to enter the airport itself. I’d gaze longingly at the security checkpoint, beyond which lay my personal nirvana. Sadly, I could not permit such an indulgence. I had to earn money that would fund future flights, as well as rent and food. I waited dutifully at the stoplight to cross John Daly Boulevard.
Acuity occupied the third floor of a building lined with narrow tinted windows. I was a few minutes early, as a life devoted to air travel had molded me into neurotic punctuality. I stowed my phone in a locker at the edge of the moderation floor, in accordance with company policy; they didn’t want us taking photos of the content that crossed our queues. Our terminals were arranged on long tables, cardboard dividers set between the monitors to prevent what Christa, the stocky blonde who oversaw human relations at our site, termed “cross contamination.” As usual, I headed to the exterior row, nearest the windows.
The night-shift workers had departed at 6:00 a.m. , and I was nervous to discover the condition in which they’d left the terminals. The custodial crew made their rounds between night and day shifts, and again between day and night, but their work was often slapdash, and sure enough, today I found a clump of tissues tucked between my monitor and the cardboard divider. I scanned Karina’s terminal to ensure she wouldn’t find any similar remnants. One morning, I’d found a small heap of fingernail clippings tucked between her keyboard and monitor. I quietly removed the pile of keratin before Karina saw it, knowing she’d make a big deal of it. Karina was a germophobe, and she would view the nail shards as a provocation. And perhaps they were, as debris seemed likelier to wash up at Karina’s terminal than mine, though maybe the night-shift worker who used her terminal was simply filthier than my own nocturnal double.
I settled into my swivel chair, donned my headphones, and logged in with my credentials. On my portal, a backlog of posts had accumulated, awaiting my review. These were posts the moderation software had flagged, requiring a human intellect to weigh in. The software’s artificial intelligence was refined by each decision we input, though our own decisions were cross-checked with the software and our efficiency ratings climbed the more frequently we concurred. I was happy to be paid twenty dollars an hour to flatter a machine that would soon replace me.
First up were a few dozen comments on a CNN video of interviews with survivors of yesterday’s mass shooting at a church outside Dallas. OBVIOUS CIA PSY-OP, read one; classic false flag, read another. Wake up, sheeple! read a third comment, a common refrain, along with a few comments linking the event to billionaire George Soros. These were all fine, according to the terms of service. I clicked the green button for each post, which would allow the comments to remain visible. But the next comment— crisis actors should be executed! along with the names and addresses of several victims’ family members—was not allowed under the ToS. I clicked the red button, which flagged the post for removal and placed a temporary lock on the offending account.
Next, the queue fed me a string of flagged comments on a video of a teenage girl’s morning routine, calling her such names as slut, bitch, cum dumpster, ugly whore; but thanks to my expertise, I understood these comments were in good fun, playful ribbing among friends. One comment read, OMG I hate your perfect skin you cunt, which the video poster had “liked” and replied to with a kissing-face emoji. I was intimidated by the girl’s popularity. When I was her age, I’d been exempt from such camaraderie, but I couldn’t permit envy to impede my judgment. I applied the green button to the comments, allowing the girls to continue enjoying their youth.
Karina arrived, ten minutes late, on a cloud of gardenia perfume. She smiled at me sheepishly and went about sanitizing her space with disinfectant wipes. Today she wore a turquoise silk dress with a ruffled neckline, a white blazer, and red pumps. “Dress for the job you want” was one of her favorite sayings, though I wasn’t sure what profession corresponded to her outfits. Perhaps a cruise director or a local news anchor. Karina was three years younger than me, prettier than I’d been at any age, and better maintained, with smooth skin and a well-formed skeleton. She carried a Louis Vuitton tote, which Anthony had given her last year to compensate for forgetting her birthday. Her engagement ring sparkled as she wiped down her terminal.
Karina then draped an antimicrobial blanket over her chair, lowered its seat—her night-shift double must have been lanky—and sank into the chair with a sigh that conveyed her dread toward the eight hours that lay before us. The Violence vertical seemed ill-suited to Karina’s sensitive disposition. I was confused why she stayed, month after month, without at least requesting a transfer to H&H, Porn, or Spam. Karina’s credentials surely qualified her for better jobs. She held a bachelor’s degree, spoke Spanish and Portuguese, and was friendly and likable, unlike the rest of us. Why remain in this role, subjecting herself to videos of torture and gore? I’d asked Karina this in my first week at Acuity, and she’d replied simply that it was what she deserved. I was curious why she’d think she deserved punishment, but I refrained from further questioning. Karina would reveal her secrets to me in her own time, if she wished to.
I hoped to be the most efficient moderator in my vertical for the third consecutive month. At the end of each month, the top mod in each vertical received a one-hundred-dollar bonus. Our scores were written on a whiteboard by the door, updated daily by Christa, with our employee numbers standing in for our names. I glanced at the whiteboard now and was pleased to see that my number, 83944D, remained at the top of the H&H column. Karina, who’d told me her number was 28839C, had sunk to the very bottom of the Violence vertical. I was sorry to see her low ranking. I wished I could help my friend, but I reminded myself she was on her own path, guided by the universe’s all-knowing hand.
—
At 11:00 a.m. I retrieved my phone from the locker and adjourned to the wellness room for my mandatory nine-minute break. The room was a converted office, painted lavender. On one wall hung a painting I was fond of, which depicted the sun setting over the ocean. A narrow window provided a view of Interstate 280, though the blinds were drawn over it as usual. Pushed into a corner were felt boxes of toys and craft materials. The seating options were an overstuffed armchair and a yoga ball that needed inflating. On a side table sat a pyramid-shaped meditation timer set to nine minutes.
I activated the timer, sat on the ball, and fished in my jeans pocket for my shard of plane. I’d purchased it on eBay for forty dollars and carried it everywhere, as a talisman and a tool of sexual gratification. The piece was white and roughly rectangular, the size of a domino. According to the listing description, it was part of the hull of a decommissioned 737-800. I tucked the shard into my mouth while I perused photos of planes on my phone. First there was the A320, who possessed, in my opinion, the handsomest face of any commercial airliner. I proceeded to the 787 Dreamliner, whose beauty was augmented by his lovely name. Next up, a vintage magazine ad of the retired McDonnell Douglas DC-9, a plane that flaunted a certain “bad boy” appeal, having been involved in 276 aviation occurrences with a combined 3,697 fatalities in his forty-nine years of service, among the worst safety records in the industry.
Having enjoyed these appetizers, I moved on to the entrée: the 737. The 737 was my ideal plane, the sky’s narrow-bodied workhorse. His modest size made him more approachable than the wide-bodied fellows, such as the pompous 747 and the aloof A380. I scrolled through the dozens of 737 photos I’d saved, my eyes growing teary with affection.
As I admired these fine specimens, my thoughts drifted, as they often did, to my first love, a 737-800 named N92823, whom I met when I was thirteen. It was on board N92823 that I had my first taste of the destiny that awaited me. My family was flying to Chicago, where my dad had been invited to an actuarial convention. A rumbling commenced during the second beverage service. Then, the plane dropped. Around fifty feet, according to a report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board a year after the incident, though it felt like free fall. My body lifted, constrained only by the belt across my lap. All was calm for a moment, and then the plane pitched again, his nose dipping and rising erratically, so that it felt like we were in a boat on choppy seas.
The cabin filled with screams and prayers. All the while, a cord of energy crept up my spine. I was filled with a warm liquid sensation, a feeling of inevitability, along with wave upon wave of pleasure, what I would later understand had been my first orgasm. My mom gripped my forearm, but I hardly registered her touch. I was alone with N92823, who I believed had recognized me as his soulmate. I wanted the turbulence to go on and on, to build to a climax, the plane diving nose-first into the earth. A perfect death! I saw that my life had always been defined by this sublime end. It would have been ideal to die with both parents beside me, Al in the row ahead, our family preserved as we were in that moment—never to grow old and develop diseases, to shrivel and suffer, and to succumb to unremarkable deaths. For the first time, I understood my place in the world, and when N92823 leveled, I sobbed. My dad reached over to pat my thigh, mistaking my disappointment for relief. It was no big deal, he assured me, just a little turbulence. But he was wrong. It was a big deal indeed.
The NTSB report concluded that we’d encountered a patch of clear-air turbulence—though I had my own theories. N92823 had been in operation only two years at that point. We were both adolescents, and I hoped our flight had been as formative for him as it was for me. I became N92823’s biggest fan, following his moves on a flight-tracking website. I stalked the perimeter of John Wayne Airport when he was scheduled to fly through, taking distant, grainy photos of his handsome form with a digital camera. As he was often bound for Chicago, I asked my parents if we could fly there again, claiming to have become enamored of the stalwart Midwestern city. “Chicago? You kidding me?” my mom said. “You spent the whole trip in the bathroom. You had your chance at Chicago.”
When I turned eighteen, I got a job at the Subway in Terminal C at John Wayne, hoping to save my wages toward another date with N92823. But before I could reach this goal, my love was placed in storage after a mechanical issue on a flight from Newark to San Juan. I wondered if he’d grown impatient, awaiting our reunion. Perhaps his malfunction was an act of protest against the unjust world that kept us apart. As far as I knew, he remained imprisoned in a boneyard somewhere, his veins pumped with preservative oil, his windows covered with reflective shields to protect his interior from the sun’s rays. His body had likely been scavenged for parts on behalf of operational aircraft. I had forced myself to move on to available planes, but I’d always be grateful to N92823 for providing a standard against which I’d judge all subsequent lovers.
The timer’s chime snapped me back to reality. I tucked my shard of plane in my pocket and returned to the moderation floor.
—
In the break room, Karina assembled her lunch on the coffee-stained table: a Tupperware of raw kale and shredded chicken left over from last night’s dinner, and a Dannon Light + Fit vanilla yogurt, which she bought by the case. As usual, I’d brought nothing, preferring to feed upon the break room’s snack reserves to save money. Christa had made a Costco run last week, and I’d been extracting most of my daily calories from the replenished stash. I appreciated our employer’s largesse. They were not legally required to feed us, and yet they did, four times a year—boxes of frozen food and snack packs of trail mix, Nutri-Grain bars and fruit gummies, a pallet of Rockstar lemonade—all of which we ran through within a month, to await the next windfall.
“We could take a walk,” I said, as I scrounged the cabinets.
“What’s the point?” Karina said. “Leave the building so we can be impaled by a piece of sheet metal that fell off a truck? No thanks.” As this seemed like a random concern, I assumed she was referencing a scene she’d witnessed this morning in the Violence queue.
I heated two vegetarian egg rolls in the microwave. We were careful about what we said in the break room, as we all believed, without evidence, that the microwave was bugged with a listening device, so that Christa, or Scott, the regional manager, or perhaps even Scott’s supervisor at the parent company, could monitor for signs of discontent among their contracted employees.
“You need to eat better, Linda,” Karina said, glaring at my egg rolls, whose grease had burned a patch of translucence into the paper plate on which they rested.
“It’s free,” I said with a shrug.
One of the interior row dwellers—Adrian? Aiden?—entered the break room, cast a look of perfunctory lust at Karina, cracked a Rockstar lemonade, and left.
“What are you up to tonight?” Karina asked. I always dreaded this question. I couldn’t reveal my usual Friday plan of going to a bar to ogle planes, nor could I say I was doing nothing, which would draw attention to the barrenness of my social calendar. I feared Karina would realize she was my only friend, in which case she might wish to withdraw her friendship, sanitizing her life of me as she sanitized her terminal each morning.
Today, however, I had an excuse I knew would please her. “I need to work on my vision board,” I said coyly.
Karina’s eyes lit up. “So you’re coming?”
I nodded. “The garage sale was postponed.”
“Great!” she said. “I can’t wait to see what you put on your board.”
“What do the other women put on theirs?” I asked. I never missed a chance to learn what other people did.
“Everyone’s different,” Karina said, licking yogurt from her spoon. “Esme tends to focus on her career. Morgan’s more focused on family stuff.”
“What about romantic goals?”
“Those are fair game, too. The vision board is how I got Anthony to propose, after all.” Last October, Karina had showed me a photo of her Q4 vision board, which featured a diamond ring hovering above a couple kissing on a beach. Anthony had proposed over Christmas. I was glad Karina had gotten what she wanted, though I’d initially hoped she would manifest some other guy.
“You really think the board made him do it?” I’d been skeptical on this point, as it seemed to me that Karina’s devotion to Anthony was irrational and that he’d be wise to trap her in a marriage contract before she came to her senses.
“Totally. He needed a nudge.” She put down her spoon and eyed me. “Do you want to meet someone, Linda?”
“I’d like to find my soulmate,” I said, thinking of N92823. Whenever I flew, I imagined a repurposed piece of him was embedded within the plane I occupied, even if it was only a lowly bolt or screw.
“The vision board would be a great way to set an intention around dating,” Karina said.
I bit into an egg roll, scalding my tongue on the cabbage within. “I’m a little nervous to meet your friends,” I said quickly, before she could probe my dating history.
“Don’t stress,” Karina said. “They’ll love you.”
—
At last, I arrived at the Elephant Bar in Burlingame, an excursion I’d looked forward to all week. The restaurant was housed in a friendly building with zebra stripes painted on its sides. At the host stand, I greeted my adversary, Jose. He was thin and stylish, with a fade haircut and a single dangling cross earring. As usual, I claimed that while I appeared to be a party of one, I was in fact half of a party of two. This was a lie, but a necessary one, as a single patron had no hope of securing a booth with a view of SFO’s runways.
“I can seat you at the bar while you wait for your friend,” Jose said, which caught me off guard. This was the most resistance he’d offered yet. The bar was useless to me, as it was far from the windows and offered a view only of TV monitors playing sporting events.
“She’ll be here any minute,” I said. “Can I wait in a booth?”
The restaurant was mostly empty, as it was only five-thirty, and my request was reasonable on its face. Jose must have decided the fight wasn’t worth it, and he led me to a table along the window. I’d gotten away with it again, though I feared my days in the booth were numbered.
Through the window, I watched planes land on a runway jutting into the bay. It was dark, the winter sun having already set, and I tracked planes by their signal lights as they streamed in from the east, a steady procession guided by air traffic controllers stationed within the torch-shaped tower. A server arrived at my table, and I ordered a Diet Coke without breaking my gaze from the runway. A plane emblazoned with the Emirates logo touched down, his landing gear bouncing on the tarmac, and I flinched, my pulse quickening.
I was eager to discover what my vision board would set into motion. Perhaps it would result in my marriage to a pilot, which would in turn enable my marriage to a plane. I imagined my pilot, already fully assembled and going about his affairs in the days before our paths converged. He could be flying one of the planes I presently watched, his form tucked inside the plane’s noble head. It would be nice to have him here with me. He would add commentary to the scenes we saw through the window, making observations about physics or mechanics or something as the aircraft touched down. My dad had attempted a similar narration on our plane-spotting excursions, but his knowledge of aviation was limited, and I suspected he made things up sometimes. A pilot was better equipped to reveal the plane’s secrets. I knew that a pilot’s skills were put to the test during takeoff and landing, the most dangerous segments of any flight. While takeoff was uniquely orgasmic, and landing had its own erotic appeal, I preferred the intervening period of cruising, when the plane’s intelligence dominated, in the form of his autopilot software, along with, I believed, a spark of something akin to a soul.
The server returned for a third time and asked, with a note of impatience, whether I wanted anything else. I placed my usual order of fries, the cheapest item on the menu. I ate them slowly, stretching them until I’d had my fill.