Jonah Cavallo wasn’t supposed to be a writer. He was destined to be a multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter. And after growing up performing around the world with his musician parents, he relocated from Toronto to London to pursue just that. It was going so well… until he fell in love with literature and, well, the heart wants what the heart wants. The extract below is from the novel he is writing, And So On And So Forth.
Foraging for chocolate. Like an antidote or some kind of emotional silver bullet. Chocolate emergency. Though biscuits would do.
Are people crossing to the other side of the walkway from me? I would. I’m giving off crazy person energy. I can feel it. I’m aware of my breathing – you’re not supposed to notice yourself breathing. This would make good fancy dress: 43 Year Old Crazy Man At An Airport. But you’d have to explain it.
’What are you?’
’I’m a crazy man at an airport.’
‘Oh.’
The joke wouldn’t land. People would retreat to the comfort of their fellow Draculas and pirates. ’Wouldn’t land’ – my brain is overrunning. But actually, I seem invisible. This static charge is in my head only. That’s good.
Margo said despite what people say sugar actually calms you down. I’ve always doubted that thing about sugar making children hyper. Giving them any food will make them hyper. You want your child to be tired, don’t feed it. I can’t remember the science she quoted at me – she was very convincing, Margo always is – but I am ready to lunge at a placebo life raft. Let sugar do the work sedatives failed to do.
Leave the peanut butter cups, they might not be sugary enough. Three KitKats. Pack of chocolate chip – they look disgusting. Not that I can imagine eating anything. But I’ve got them should I need them. As if inhaling a KitKat would stop hyperventilation in its tracks. Or hydration somehow regulate my limbic system. Small bottle of water – airport small, twice the size of normal small and three times the price. The magazine rack recalling a former life when a music glossy promised enough enthralment to have me excited for take off and getting stuck in. The girl ahead of me at the till looks about six years old. How far did her parents send her for a pack of wet wipes? She can’t be travelling alone. Guy at the till could not be more unconcerned. Doesn’t watch to see if an adult is with her, doesn’t meet my eyes, talks to the scanner – ‘£9.30’. Fucking immoral.
When did airports become full-on shopping centres? The words ‘Duty Free’ induced such excitement when I was a kid – almost an obligation to buy something. But now you have to travel this small scale replica of Oxford Street to get to the departure lounge. And not just the shops, the floor to ceiling ads for perfumes or designer shoes – images and taglines suggesting an attitude and a tax bracket. Random formations of couples, families, solo travellers wandering this passageway like pigeons by a dumpster, anaesthetised by familiar brand names and their corresponding aesthetics. It’s comforting. On the other side of the world from home the Prada logo can act as a cultural Rosetta Stone. But who sees these pictures of models scowling like they wouldn’t waste their Evian on you if you combusted and are impelled to spend insane amounts of money on a scarf? If I get these glasses frames can I too look at random people like they’ve crawled up from the sewers? Aspirational.
Memory of the afternoon Margo proposed sipping water as a way to stop anxiety rising into a tornado. The attacks were rare by that point. What would she have made of me just a year before, that eighteen year old vacillating between elation and terror, always a bottle of Ativan in one pocket, paper bag in the other. Soho cappuccinos, record shop worship, delighting in culture shock exploring my new city and my new freedom. But always fear of the moment – never more than a few hours away – tightening of the chest, contraction of stomach, hands numb, pulse vaulting to implausible speed, London cycloning under my feet. The physical manifestations terrified me, always life and death. But they were distraction, decoy. The real monster was panic. I knew this abstractly at the time, it took years to believe. Only now, decades on, I understand it. Because anxiety scams you, plays you into fearing your body – heart, breath, balance – when it is really your seething brain charging the attack, having waited for the most unassuming moment – at the movies, on your sofa, Sunday lunch – to shoot you through with adrenalin and rabid, violent horror. A quiver – small at first, the sense of solidity falling away, a noxious swim in your head and you know what’s coming. It feels like something happening to you, invading you, not something occurring in you. The only rational response is panic. But how do you identify and discern this visceral panic from the invisible, stealth one that set this all in motion? And how to fathom that you are both conscious victim and unconscious executioner? It whittles away the certainty of any given moment, corrodes your self-assurance until you find you’ve become absurdist comedy. I remember heaving at Margo down the phone, ‘My heart’s beating, Margo, my heart’s beating!’ And her calm, patient, ’That’s good.’
What to call this throwback? Jeopardy Nostalgia. It must be seventeen, eighteen years now since I graduated from anxious wreck to functioning mess. Far enough back now to have been swallowed in the muddy collapse of specifics, ‘the past’. No more pills, water bottles, no touching the paper bag inside my pocket like a talisman. Yet somewhere in this familiar tension is the smallest breath of melancholy. Maybe it’s like former alcoholics – no matter how long without a drink they will always be alcoholics. Is an emergency flight to save my mother all it’s going to take to relapse?
My brain shuts down looking at the check-in displays – too much information relayed in too small a space. I marvel at the idea of people daydreaming or reading on planes. Marvel and chew myself up. Barely a hesitation to walk on stage to perform but sitting there – always an aisle seat in the middle by the wing – is cold sweat and catastrophising. But why turn on myself ? This is an entirely rational irrational fear. Flying may have been my favourite form of travel when I was a child but growing up means looking at the world around you and actually seeing it. That friend of Margo’s saying ‘What’s the problem, you just sit there and relax. It’s like you’re in your living room.’ Such a lack of imagination must be diagnosable. Lack of imagination might actually help me get on this plane. And stay on it. But here I am with my new charm, sugar. Water, paper bag, sugar – Mr Anxiety stands no chance.
That time with the hypnotist, in her treatment room, three candles staving off darkness, besieged by essential oils as I lay on her treatment table. The flickering yellow ceiling, her reassuring, soft French accent, ‘Visualise yourself relaxed and happy on the plane’. When I woke she assured me the treatment would be effective even if I’d fallen asleep. She switched the light on, I sat up. An atmosphere of post-séance. She said I was holding on to strategies from the past, outdated fear that belonged to another time and I was dragging it into the present. Yes. That’s, like, my whole thing – I must tell my therapist, she’ll be shocked. I left thinking I’d paid through the patchouli-violated nose for a nap. Then a week later as the plane took off I was in a trance, practically asleep. But that was more than a decade ago. Not this time. The GP suggested I try meditating. During the flight! This fills me with the same horror as those fully-reclining beds on luxury airlines. Who could want to sleep 30,000 feet in the air. I’ll be sat up clutching my paper bag, sweating and terrified like God intended, thank you.
Think about the flight attendants. Just another day at work for them, just a shift. They don’t care – merely tedious. I long to see them floating through the airport halls, wheeling their suitcases, on their way to one plane or another, like a parade of non-fear.
And now the sit. The usual impersonality of the departure lounge. No, you couldn’t call this a lounge – vertiginous ceilings, walls of white-grey concrete slabs, line after line of minimalist black and chrome seats stuck together in rows. I think they’ve tried for a kind of modern gallery chic but if it weren’t for the whole side of the building being glass it would feel like an oversized GP waiting room. Why do they do this? The windows dwarf everything and demand to be looked at. You cannot escape seeing the planes waiting on the tarmac and the cloying expanse of nothing. Who the fuck wants to see that?
Fight the urge to pace. Maybe that’s what the open plan design is for. This instinct to calm yourself down by doing something that will actually work you up even more is the essence of the human condition – taking stimulants like nicotine or alcohol to relax. Coffee chain across the way has its own cordoned off area – shelter from the monstrous sky view. I navigate the army formation of seats and enter. The waiter behind the counter nods me towards the table area.
‘An orange juice?’
Another nod.
Faux 50’s style triangular tables and chairs. Likely faux wood too. Furniture you could only ever find in a communal area. Interior-design Diazepam. I want the banality of the furniture to infect and spread through me. I’ve always had this tendency. Those doctor appointments, riveting my attention to the fissured white of the generic office ceilings and lights while the paediatrician, stethoscope to my chest, ‘Breathe in – hold it – breathe out – and again’. Anything anonymous, anything innocuous was succour. My mind would reach out to the wastepaper basket, desktop clock, plastic blinds for refuge. I wanted the safety of the mundane to reach back and fill me with insipid calm. What I need now is a monk-like ability to clear my mind of all thoughts. But if that superpower exists it’s the result of incredible feats of discipline and self control and I only went to three of the dozen yoga classes I paid for, so it’s unlikely.
A jolt. The waiter, suddenly next to me, announces ‘An orange juice’ solemnly, as if naming a conceptual art piece, as he puts it down in front of me. An awkward pause, as if we are both admiring it, until I realise he’s waiting for me to tap my payment into the card reader. I do, the beep releases us and he’s off.
No thinking. About her. About the flight, about everything waiting on the other side of it. Clear your mind of all thoughts. But you can’t clench it into being, denial is pre-conscious. The idea of willed, controlled denial is a paradox. But actually no – this superpower exists! They walk amongst us. They call it ‘compartmentalising’. What would the street value of that be if they could bottle it?
I’ve spent my life trying to not think about her. It’s been a kind of career – no, a vocation. Another failed calling. It was inevitable I’d end up having to run to her. But this? Not like this. I must sound like her right now, the way she would declare ‘I never imagined it would come to this’ every time entirely predictable disaster struck. So it’s my turn to say it now? Like a ritual I’m taking over, an incantation passed down from mother to son.
Boarding announcement. I am breathing – I can steady myself by focusing on that. I can walk and breathe at the same time. Yes I can.
People passing by the flight attendants checking passports, going forward into the long white ramp tunnel thing. Unbearably slow. Flash image – the tunnel is a meat grinder. These people will come out the other side human mince.
I am feeling my age. No, I am feeling a difference in age. No! I have an awareness of age difference, not a feeling. Jesus. This is the mental equivalent of walking with your shoelaces tied together. I see myself flying to London – literally see myself, not sure how I acquired this view that has me in shot – standing by a window at the back of the plane. A woman in her maybe mid thirties, also smoking – you could smoke on planes then, seems insane now – keen, talking to me about things I could do to meet people – did she run some kind of youth group? Or am I confusing her with the guy who stopped me in a Camden street sometime that first year to hand me a leaflet about some culty religious youth group? And I asked him – just to make a point, I wasn’t actually interested – ‘How do you feel about gay people attending?’ and I saw his face light up as he said ‘Oh, we are very welcoming!’ and I thought get me the fuck out of there. But that flight – how simple it was, racing me towards my life. It would be my life now. I wasn’t deflecting, it wasn’t surreal. I was present, engaged. Scared yes but more thrilled. Good scared. Is this ability to be in the moment, to look right now directly in the eyes, something we have to inevitably lose? Medicating ourselves with one flavour or another of disassociation as we age. That’s being an adult.
Phone buzzing in pocket. Shift shoulder bag to other arm to grab it.
‘Hey. How is it, sugar?’
‘Oh, you know. The inquisition.’
’Where are you now?’
‘I’m queueing at the boarding gate.’
‘Oh, fabulous!’
‘Yes, just wonderful.’
‘I’ll be thinking of you.’
’You can think of me up in the sky projectile vomiting my way to Romania.’
‘Well, thankfully, you can’t projectile vomit for the whole three hours.’
‘I know a challenge when I hear one, Margo.’
‘You’re going to see that you can do this. And you will feel great.’
‘Yeah but what if – worst case scenario – I survive the flight and have to see my mother?’
‘You’ll survive that too. And probably so will she. Text me when you land, OK?’
‘Maybe.’
‘OK, honey. Love you.’
‘Thank you, Margo. Thank you.’
’Thank you.’
‘Really. Thank you.’
‘Go.’
I am not far from the mouth of the tunnel now. The momentum of the crowd pushing me little by little towards the check-in desk in front of it. My feet appear to be acting without my command or explicit willing. They are taking my body to the airplane, they are taking me to Romania and my mother.
Here’s my passport, yes that’s me – smile – off I go. Thank you with a second smile. My manners are never forgotten. They are as stealthy as my panic. And now down the corridor. A few steps and I will no longer be in the airport. The moment my feet hit the hollow, slightly bouncy floor of the accordion tube leading to the plane, I feel the assurance of earth fall away. Walking fast now, bouncing more as I am speeding towards the plane. I imagine this tunnel going all the way – three hours marching and I will come out the other end in Bucharest. Worse than a meat grinder. I can hear the fans circulating the air inside the plane from meters away. That sound excited me as a child, there was something abstractly comforting about it. Now it’s like my tinnitus has been made corporeal. Slow down as I reach the door. Three people go through the greeting ritual ahead of me. Two stewardesses – is that sexist now – should I refer to them as crew? – stand in front of the door to the cockpit, smiling their welcome. I know their demeanour is part of the job, I know those smiles are paid for, but I fall for it. I want to. It’s important. It works. My turn next. Left foot inside, then right. Gone from earth. I’m on ground that will soon be miles away. Don’t think about that. How to not think about that? Clear your mind of all thoughts.
‘Good morning. Welcome aboard!’
Oh, I’ve got a big good morning for them. I smile back, I stop myself bowing slightly. What is this deference I always find myself wanting to communicate? I try to make my physicality as unimposing as possible. I want to meet their eyes, catch and be recorded by them. I am not a problem passenger – I am not one of those. I am not drunk or high or crazy. I am man with smile. I am nice so you be nice. Remember me. And be nice. Idiocy.
I linger just a second or two longer than instinctive. I hope not creepy. I turn, now facing down the plane. The usual quiet opera – bags and coats being stowed above, people searching for seating numbers, people rifling through rucksacks for their in-flight comforts and distractions. There is no turning away from this now. I look – and the thought that always – even back when I loved flying – always went through my mind at this point presents itself once more: Do these look like people that will die in a plane crash?