Ask the Passengers (3 page)

I MADE THIS PICNIC TABLE
with Dad the summer before junior year. I was sick of making birdhouses. Seriously. How many birdhouses can two people make before they run out of things to say? Before they run out of space to put them? Our backyard was an ode to nesting and flight—part bird zoo and part art exhibit.

They’d say:
It’s very unique.

Dad had the whole summer off on account of his temporary unemployment, and Mom was staying with friends back in New York City to do some well-paid consulting for a month. Ellis was at summer sports camp for a week, and it was just Dad and me. Dad hadn’t discovered pot yet. He was a late bloomer, I guess.

So we built the table and moved it to the back patio, and even though Mom hates eating outside, she lets us do it about twice a summer just to be normal small-town people, the way she wants us to be.

The rest of the time, the table just sits here with nothing to do. So I lie on it and I look at the sky. I see shapes in the clouds by day and shooting stars by night. And I send love to the passengers inside the airplanes. It makes me happy. Anyone looking on might think I was smoking Dad’s pot, I bet. Lying here, grinning.

But it feels good to love a thing and not expect anything back. It feels good to not get an argument or any pushiness or any rumors or any bullshit. It’s love without strings. It’s ideal.

Tonight I spot a small jet and I concentrate on it and I stare at it and smile. Its very existence proves Zeno of Elea wrong. If motion was impossible, there would be no such things as airplanes. Or departure times. Or arrival times. I send my love up in a stream of steady light and in my head I think:
I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

PASSENGER #4657

HEIDI KLEIN, SEAT 17A FLIGHT #879

NASHVILLE TO PHILADELPHIA

HUMANITIES CLASS IS
a little like a shield I can put on every morning that will protect me from people like Aimee Hall and her pack of gossiping, tennis racquet–hugging compulsive hair-straighteners.

The room is filled with kids who either own Albert Camus T-shirts or read Kafka for fun on weekends. Okay—there are a few people here who just do it because it looks good on their college applications. But no matter what group you fit into, in humanities class you can speak your mind and Ms. Steck will listen. At the moment, we’re debating how I can’t accept that Zeno got away with questioning motion.

Every time we’ve talked about his “motion is impossible”
theory, I do the same thing. I stand up. I swing my arms around. I say, “Motion is possible. Check it out!” Today is no different.

“Back it up with an argument,” Ms. Steck says.

I swing my arms more wildly and pretend to tap-dance in place. “Motion is totally possible! Hello!”

“That’s not an argument,” she says.

“I think it is. Imagine the argument was
Astrid has two arms
, but I had only one, and my right arm was a stump, and I could show it to you right here in your face. Wouldn’t that be proof enough to move on to the next argument? Wouldn’t the stump be argument enough to prove that Astrid had only one arm?” I ask. “So me standing here moving is proof that Zeno was wrong and silly and just wasting our time. Motion is possible, and everyone in this room knows it.”

Ms. Steck just looks at me.

I add, “Maybe saying
motion is impossible
was his way of getting out of doing chores. Maybe it got him laid or something. But it’s totally ridiculous. Look!” I swing my arms even more wildly.

Two kids—Zeno lovers—in the back row keep trying to explain to me. “That’s the point!” one says. The other nods. “To argue things out to the most absurd!”

Ms. Steck reminds me of the arrow—one of Zeno’s arguments. The idea is that an arrow shot at a target has to move through time, but since time is made of tiny moments, the arrow, in each tiny moment, is at rest and not moving.

“That’s like saying that if I take a picture of Clay”—I
point to Clay, who is wearing his Kurt Vonnegut asterisk T-shirt today—“while he’s running hurdles and I freeze that moment in time… that he never really moved during the race.”

Ms. Steck says, “Yes. That’s a little like what Zeno was trying to say.”

“Which brings me back to: This is a waste of time! We all know Clay runs hurdles and wins medals. And he must have moved to get here today, right? Although, if I can use this as an excuse to get out of going to trig next, then I might just shut up.”

The class laughs, and I tell Ms. Steck that I am happy to move on from Zeno and his dumb theory. “I understand what he was doing, but I still think it’s stupid,” I say.

During free time at the end of class, while most people are writing their short paper on Zeno or finishing their homework for other classes, I hit the Internet, and I find someone who has something more important than “motion is impossible” to offer from around the fifth century
BC
.

Hippocrates. Father of Western medicine. He said this: “There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.” Now tell me
motion is impossible
seems remotely important next to that shit.

After I make it to fourth-period trig (because I moved my legs to walk there, and motion is totally possible), I realize this is
what trig sounds like to me: “Hgdj gehuoidah zdkgj szhdgouij fhhhf ldldfuhd. Ujfrekuhjd fhdy. Ksdihfh. 54 46 34 23. Iuhfg.”

I realize I only took trig because everyone else takes trig. I realize that I took trig because Mom said, “Well, of course you’re taking trig. You’re going to college, right?”

I tune out everything that Mr. Trig is explaining, and I walk through my options. I can change this. I have a choice. I decide to see the guidance counselor after lunch to set myself free. I decide to schedule something cooler for fourth period. Maybe I can still get into a yoga gym class, or maybe there’s still a spot in ceramics. Worst comes to worst, I can always take a study hall.

The bell rings. I don’t take down the nightly reading or homework assignment from the board. I leave my textbook and graph paper on Mr. Trig’s desk. I have mentally just quit trig. This makes me so happy, I smile through the rest of the day.

Eighth-period European history. I am still so happy about just dropping trig, it is impossible to stop smiling. But we are watching a documentary about the Holocaust. There are dead bodies piled up everywhere. Starving people in concentration camps. Gas chambers. This isn’t right, me smiling like this.

They’ll say:
Did you see Astrid Jones in EH today? Smiling at those Holocaust films?

The film footage stops, and a youngish guy with an English accent appears on the screen. He seems to be sitting in a room of Holocaust artifacts. Skulls, hair, teeth. He’s telling us how the Nazis killed more than just Jews. Yes, six million Jews were exterminated, but five million other civilians were, too. He says we often overlook these five million. I think he’s right. I’d never heard of them before right now.

He lists them. The Poles, the Ukrainians, the Yugoslavians, and the Russians. The blacks, the Gypsies, anyone of mixed race, the mentally or physically disabled and the homosexuals.

“At least the Nazis had that right,” Kevin Herman says from the back row.

The rest of the back row laughs. The film goes on. Mr. Williams either didn’t hear Kevin or has become really good at ignoring him.

The man explains the imprisonment and murder of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and how they were forced to wear purple armbands. The footage is black and white, but I can see armbands. I imagine they are purple. He explains that while we might know that Jews were forced to wear yellow stars, we may not know that homosexuals were forced to wear triangles. Pink triangles.

It occurs to me here that though I am no longer interested in triangles, I am interested in pink ones. I’m just still not so sure how interested I am.

“The gas chamber was too good for them,” Kevin says.

The back row sniggers again.