“I’m going to Florida in four days,” she said through her tears. “I’m afraid to fly. I hate all the little noises and the way the coffee smells and the way all the seats and the bins feel so cheap and everything rattles when you take off. I want you to write me a prescription for something to make it easier.”

Without blinking, Berman reached one of his hands into a pocket of his chair and pulled out a prescription pad. “I’m qualified to do that,” he said, and began to write.

She needed help and he was going to give it to her, and all she had to do was ask for it. She was so relieved and grateful, and so embarrassed by her own ignorance of this simple arrangement, she wept even harder.

Twenty

Welcome to Florida

1.

The gray smoke of clouds floated past the window at a leisurely pace. There was nothing quite as soothing as flying, nothing that provided such a sharp, comforting contrast between illusion and reality. On the inside, the calm hum of air filtration systems and the predictable routine of flight attendants and the bland monotone of the pilots; on the outside, the violence of metal and jet fuel ripping the sky apart, cutting up the delicate chemicals of the atmosphere in an effort to hurry people to places they usually didn’t want to go. Desmond loved being lifted out of his life, plucked up into the chilly ether where everything was clean and carefully controlled and simultaneously safe and dangerous, where you could travel at extraordinary speeds through subzero temperatures without effort or discomfort, without even having to press your foot on a pedal. And if ever there was a moment when he longed to be rescued from the foundering boat of his life and strapped into a comfortable chair, it was now. How many mistakes could he make thirty thousand feet above his whole world?

Two female flight attendants were standing in the aisle one row in front of them, loudly discussing the injustice of the airline’s scheduling policies. It was true that all the glamour had been drained from air travel, but that only made it as dull, in a reassuring way, as a trip to the Grand Union.

“I’m sick of it,” one of them said. “I’m sick of being pushed around.”

“No kidding,” the scrawnier of the two drawled. “And yesterday they drug-tested me again. That’s twice this month.”

“Oh shit.” The untested woman reached a pale, braceleted arm into the overhead bin and tossed a pillow, doll-sized and stiff, to the passenger seated below.

“The whole thing was so humiliating I went out and had a complete blowout last night.”

Jane shoved a magazine into the seat back in front of her. “Aren’t they supposed to be discussing something important right now?”

“Your lunch?”