Futures

I am pausing at the edge of it, staring at the empty tables as though I had left something on one of them or missed some espionage rendezvous. And yet the thing is no more than what it is, a food court in an airport terminal. Seattle. Marlou and I sat at one of those tables as we embarked for Italy last summer.

The whole thing could not have been easier. My sister-in-law drove us here for our midday flight. The Air France lounge was half-empty, and there was plenty of time for a snack. We wandered to the nearest eatery, a Japanese place with sushi and noodle offerings. We ordered soup, and Marlou carried the plastic bowls to the plastic table. The weak broth and sodden noodles had just enough green onion shavings to be credible. We kept an eye on the departure gate.

And now just over one year later, the truth about that moment comes at me as I roll my wheelchair off a flight from California. The underlying sadness and denial and fear. We were headed for Tuscany, after all, and what could be more romantic and buoy a couple's spirits higher? But there was nothing buoyant about this departure. We had our soup and carried on pleasantly enough, but we were not really taking off and up but out and down.

I can see it now, stopping en route to the baggage claim where my sister-in-law and nephews are waiting. It accomplishes nothing to sit and stare. There are no bona fide mysteries here. And people are waiting. And Marlou and I were waiting. And now I am waiting. For what? The other shoe to drop. My bag at carousel 5. Godot.

Could this have all played out better, if I had fully given voice to the dread? Could I have helped Marlou prepare better? Prepared myself better? Let's say someone had quietly presented the likely scenario. In about 10 months you will find yourself propped up in a bed, face paralyzed so that one eye will droop open while the other closes, while you either cannot hear or cannot respond, no one can say which, while you gasp away your final afternoon and onlookers gaze horrified and helpless. Check it out, 10 months. What do you say? And what do you do? Just let the horrid mechanism of life grind away? Grinding you away? Apparently. Apparently you get on your flight, get off it, get on another, then worry about the turnoff to Val d'Elsa. While the fear keeps seeping upward like water through a badly sealed floor.

And it's still seeping. Sometimes oozing fear, sometimes sadness. And beyond that an emptiness. A bunch of vacant tables, a plastic fork on one, a napkin on the other. Everyone has moved on, thousands of times, to their seats in row 12 and their uncle in Dubai or their girlfriend in Duluth. And here there's nothing.

It's a borderline cool evening in Seattle, my brother and family having gotten acclimated to the July heat. I vote for eating outside. Which is easy for me to say, having arrived in a London pullover. Why am I attired for the cool evening? Not by design. I cannot plan anything effectively these days. Eyeing my e-mail on my brother's computer, there is a message from an attorney. Marlou's estate, things need to be done. I do not know what he's talking about and make an appointment.

That evening is even marginally warm, not rainy and quite still, is a sort of July miracle in Seattle. There are beautiful things in my brother's garden. There are black-stemmed hydrangeas, a peony, a lush lawn, ambitious tomatoes and a resident garter snake with a green stripe. The latter has even molted, leaving its husk of skin under the shrubs. The folding electric wheelchair I brought on this trip for this very purpose, a portable moment outside, another portable moment elsewhere, has worked out. I click myself back and forth on the terrace, eating summer corn and northwest sausages.

Later, my brother having helped me undress, I sit on the edge of the bed and stare into the insomnia darkness. The bedside table is too low. And I am too old and too tired and too full of gin and tonic to do anything about it. My brother has already piled two telephone books to achieve sufficient height. I need to reach for plastic urinals in the night. I am still reaching for Marlou, that is the other thing. And tonight all I find is the past. The time before I visited Seattle with her, when I was single, and not happily so. My brother's house was a refuge. It was a place I visited for renewal. I didn't have a life, it seemed, but there was one here. And I am here again. I can't make the table any higher or myself any lower.

Let alone, any younger. Although recently I have been invited by no less than Virgin America, the burgeoning youth-oriented airline. I crutched my way aboard the Airbus, headed down the aisle and into a sort of cave. All the aircraft's window shades were down. Blue mood lighting seeped about the edges of the molded interior. An entertainment screen before my seat was presenting options. Television. Films. Just swipe your credit card at the bottom of the screen. Same for ordering food or cocktails. And we were airborne and the adolescent girl next to me was deep into a film, so the shade stayed down as California drifted on invisibly below us. I read. I wished I could have my iPod on and blaring while I talked to the passenger next to me while eyeing the screen of the woman next to him. Instead, I stole a glance at what the guy beside me was reading. Futures trades, a big printout of the transactions. God, but it's gratifying to see a secdurities trader sitting in coach. Trader, I wanted to tell him, why don't you try Trader Joe's?. Instead, I returned to my book. I didn't want to trade any futures. My future, however short and possibly bleak, would do.