Experimental
0 hours
[*silence*]
[*darkness*]
[*a stone bell vibrates, its echoes heavy, radiating circles of sound*]
[*silence*]
[*light*]
scene: an escalator in LAX. a man stands at the top, watching its descent.
[*a digital bell rings, signaling an impending flight announcement*]
UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT NO. 6__ IS NOW BOARDING
a woman stands on the escalator. her face is tilted upward toward the man, moonlike. at the bottom, she steps off, waves, starts to disappear from his view.
he watches her walk away, shadow lengthening, yearning against the white tile.
right before she completely disappears from view, he sees her hesitate. her feet stop, pivot, freeze—
—and then continue.
he stands there watching, long after her shadow has disappeared.
minus 82 hours
[*all background sound vanishes*]
during our regularly scheduled sunday facetime, a week before our third anniversary trip to L.A., angela tells me that she wants to break up.
grief pours from me in spurts, chunks, like the gulps of water sputtering from an overturned vase.
it will take months before i am fully empty, before i am ready to be filled again.
minus 48 hours
[*the low growling of airplane engines*]
i dreamed that i went to L.A. last night, except when i arrived at the airport, i found that my flight was to San Diego, and it wasn’t until after the plane began to untether itself from the ground that an authoritative voice boomed from my iPhone, warning me that i had flown without a REAL ID:
AMERICAN AIRSPACE is under FEDERAL JURISDICTION, so if you are on the aircraft when it reaches 10,000 FEET, I am LEGALLY OBLIGATED to inform you that you will be SUBJECT to IMMEDIATE DEPORTATION re: EXECUTIVE ORDER NO. 6__
the scene snaps to: Monty Python’s Flying Circus. hijackers have just taken control of an aircraft, forcing the pilot to change course from Dover to Cuba.
a solitary passenger—michael palin—jumps out of the emergency exit, landing in a hayfield in Luton. crawling to a nearby bus stop, he boards an oncoming bus. as the doors close, the sign on the bus clicks into legibility:
DEST: CUBA
144 hours
[*the quiet hum of cars passing on the road*]
i sprint the quarter mile to the bus stop only to find that the bus is seven minutes late. My earbuds die as soon as i lift them from the case.
michael palin yanks the red handle on the left side of the bus window with the foreboding sign next to it in small, thick, blood-red capital letters:
EMERGENCY EXIT
the handle is not metal but rather papier-mâché. it snaps off in his hand. the window is unaffected. between the first and second layers of glass that hold michael palin on a trajectory to Cuba, there is, impossibly:
a fly—
wings beating into a blur.
168 hours
[song: “everything in its right place” (radiohead)]
the bus is four minutes late this morning, but i have company:
everything in its right place
croons thom yorke as i gently apply pressure to the smooth plastic surface of my left earbud to reflect the sounds of the world from my eardrums. the irony of the lyrics is not lost on me, but i think that if i listen hard enough, i might believe my life really is in the right place—at least, until the song is over.
michael palin yanks on the yellow string to signal a stop on the bus, but instead, it releases the forty-tonne weight, crushing the
STOP REQUESTED
sign.
this isn’t happening
he mutters to himself.
i’m not here.
whispers thom yorke into his left ear.
190 hours
[song: “chest” (brian eno and fred again..)]
there is no bus driver. there are no other passengers. the thin, black rubber wheel spins around itself in lazy circles, but the bus continues in a straight line, a Cuban-Freudian death drive. outside the window, trees lengthen into green spires; atop them, parrots pine for the fjords.
i wear the same gray levi’s as yesterday, marveling at how our bodies constantly regenerate themselves skin cell by skin cell, outlived by the knotted-fiber cloths that we hang on ourselves.
my stomach involuntary tightens, as if to hold myself whole, gripping the folds of the small intestine
feeling it in my, in my gut,
warble brian eno and fred again.. through the bus’s PA system.
feeling it in my chest—
214 hours
[song: “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” (beyoncé)]
today all I feel in my chest is heartburn.
i sit in a new spot on the bus, in the middle of the triplet of seats that face out the right window.
i realize i have never looked down some of the side streets that i fly by every morning, and in that moment, a sweeping array of road opens itself to me, interlocking wires of street, a thickening of fields.
looka there,
implores beyoncé.
now is the time to let love in.
michael palin slumps back down onto the sun-softened bus seat and kicks his feet out. he closes his eyes. Cuba comes into view, a small haven, a dot of green growing like a sprig out of the warm blue of the Atlantic. the bus is caught in a swell, tilts upward; Cuba briefly vanishes and then returns.
238 hours
[song: “everything is romantic” (charli xcx and caroline polachek)]
today, the bus does not pick me up from the main road. instead, its trajectory swings nearer to me.
i wait to board while the elementary school children disembark, loudly, in clusters, oblivious to me, oblivious to the density of life surrounding them, buoyant in the way that only children can be. the bus driver, too, is oblivious to me; he is too busy waving the kids goodbye out the back door.
headphones on, I hit play.
charli xcx begins to intone circles of meaning:
fall
fall in
fall in love
fall in love again
fall in love again and again
fall in love again and again, fall in love again and again, fall in love again and again
fall in love again and a—
fall in love again
fall in love
fall in
fall
it is like a mantra, built like bricks word by word and imbued with repetition, a steady, heart-like beam that begins as a wisp, a cloud, but dips and deepens into a valley of sound.
outside, a parrot leaps from the crest of a pine tree, unfolding wings that hang on air, carry it to the fjords.
262 hours
[song: “39.28” (childish gambino)]
waves kiss the sides of our buses—mine and the one that carries michael palin to Cuba—in time:
for a moment, they rock back and forth, off-diagonal matrix elements growing, slipping into coherence.
for a moment, i melt into my seat and enjoy the gentle rocking.
i know this will not always be the case: all human states of joy are, by definition, temporary—only legible in comparison with mountains of weighted impedances.
normally, i am skeptical of moments beyond my control, have the tendency to devalue things that come and go.
bliss is a cheap emotion,
agrees childish gambino, crooning in my ear.
so i don’t know why i’m here
without you
today, i decide to let myself reach a hand out into the lightness—not to permanently exist there, but to step out of—
grief is a standing ocean
i never swam unless you did.
i know i will be back.
i cannot control nor predict how i will be returned; i cannot control nor predict whether I will ever see angela again.
i do not know what nor where this life will bring me.
i take a deep breath in through my nose, make myself buoyant with air, and,
feeling it in my chest,
fall—
without you
·
*
… the Bedford-to-Luton bus washes up onto the Havana beach.
it is midnight, and the stars radiate faintly through the tropical-island haze.
the front door creaks open, and michael palin hobbles out into ankle deep waves.
grief is a standing ocean
he takes stock of the land.
in the distance, grasses whisper over the water’s wave-whooshing. warm wind tickles his ears.
his feet, though wet, are warmed in the dormant heat of the sand.
so warm, in fact, that for a moment, he is lost in the sensation, floating, free
Nikhil Kiran Harle is a Ph.D. student in physics at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the University of Innsbruck and an opera singer. Recent poetry appears in The Winged Moon, Utriculi, and STILLS.