Planes of Existence

(I wrote this one in the early spring of 2020, without realizing how much I would get to miss those uncomfortable flights. Though written in the third person, it clearly is a memoir piece, and the first (and so far only) one where I dared say anything about my aikido training. Learning aikido is a very slow journey toward the impossible, as Borges once said so beautifully, and the rough sketches included here are meant to suggest how malformed and unfinished one feels every step of the way, while oddly loving every second of it.)

Ding! The seat-belt sign switched on amid dinner service with that meek, muffled, blue sound. So deceptive, it was only loud enough to elicit a well-conditioned response from the passengers—here they were, awkwardly reaching under their folding trays, palpating the narrow spaces between cushions, clingy blankets, books, phones, tablets and their bloated, unhappy guts, to locate and snap together the two metal tips of the seat belt—but never loud enough to cause alarm, to suggest that anything could possibly go wrong as they hurtled through the clouds in a tin can, faster than five hundred miles per hour.

Another soft ding. For those still queuing in front of the lavatories, still helplessly shambling along the aisles with or without a wild-eyed, potentially explosive child in their arms. Everyone was now seated. So many earbuds that blended the sounds of the jam-packed aircraft into a booming hum; so many fingers absently tearing another bite from miniature, buttered buns; so many watery, itchy eyes reflecting the bright lights of stories told from the back of each seat, with the golden promise of killing another two hours in a ten-hour flight.

Soon after the second ding, a strong shudder crossed the entire length of the cabin, rattling the liquor bottles in the food carts, but now that the lights had been dimmed, most passengers concentrated on either not spilling their drinks, or sensing the all-new aches and pains that emerged from their bodies like deep-sea creatures drawn to the glittering, sunlit surface.

The bearded young man sitting next to Sabiha, judging by the way he clenched his fists on the sides of his tray, was one of the few exceptions. His thin face was expressionless, but Sabiha clearly saw the skin around his knuckles whitening at every quake, thump or buzz coming out of the hull. He was terrified of flying, the poor sucker, and he had to endure another seven hours of it.

For a moment, Sabiha considered an act of kindness. Normally, she was never one to seek human contact during an international flight which, she felt, attacked her whole being, creeping its way up her swollen ankles and losing no time in breaching her more immaterial gates as well; she was overwhelmed by the formlessness of the journey, seeing herself reduced to this thing that had to keep on moving, while the ones she loved, the living and now, increasingly, the dead, kept murmuring in her blood, tugging at her relentlessly between her old home and the new one she’d found. In plainer terms, she was an immigrant, and she didn’t enjoy fleeting conversation with strangers while traveling. Yet, here was material proof that some people got it much, much worse, having to deal with mortal terror along with identity issues and swollen ankles. She could chat with this man a bit, just to distract him, or even do something more extraordinary—and less energy-consuming—by simply smiling and offering her hand for him to hold during moments of severe turbulence. He would’ve understood the meaning of her innocent gesture … had this been a movie, which it was not.

With a grunt, Sabiha stepped away from the edge of utter foolery to which she had been once again about to succumb, just because she did, she always did, watch too many movies—like that time when she’d impulsively offered to share her umbrella with a guy who’d been getting completely drenched in a sudden fall shower, and never had her pride been more hurt than the moment she’d seen him puff up feather by distinct feather like a big, bright red cock, preparing to reject what he’d thought were her romantic advances triggered by his irresistible charm, when in truth his charm had been resistible in the extreme and she had only been trying to help out someone in distress. In any case, whatever her fellow passenger was experiencing, he showed no signs of asking for help, so they were destined to drown their sorrows separately—he, continuing to grip the edges of his folding tray as he stared into nothing, and she, watching a movie.

Ding! She couldn’t have picked a better one: it was about two brothers who, for different reasons and walking very different paths, ended up both becoming U.F.C. fighters. Considering the incurable restlessness in her legs, the growing tightness in her chest that admitted less and less air into her lungs, and the realization that she too had to endure the seven hours ahead, nothing other than the spectacle of troubled men addressing their life crises by pounding each other to death would’ve done the trick. Each powerful punch generated from the hips helped her breathe more freely, and her rib cage expanded after each body slam executed with flawless timing. Fine acting, superb combat choreography, muscles captured in their glistening, impersonal magnificence. She finally, most thankfully, was oblivious to the symphonic whining of her own body.

There was one fight scene toward the end when the trainer of one brother kept yelling at him to relax while the said brother was being battered into a bloody pulp. “Relax! Breathe! You’re alright!” Those were odd words under the circumstances, and the general viewer could simply attribute them to shoddy screenwriting, but for Sabiha, they formed the radiance of a new-born revelation. “So,” she thought to herself, “it’s not just him. It’s a thing.”

Ding! Her revelation was a very simple one, so she at least played a bit with the light and the costumes of its content. She made it so that the hour was close to sundown, and the dojo was bathing in the peach glow of the last rays coming through the large windows; she injected into that training room an atmosphere of serene joy; next, she inserted two people wearing hakamas—those long, pleated skirts of black or the loveliest, smudgy deep blue, that are worn over the regular karate-style uniforms and that open, ripple, and fold like fans in response to different aikido techniques. Since her daydream had made it so far, she even allowed one of those two aikido practitioners to be herself, her figure light and transparent as if an unseen hand had been painting her into the scene in real time, at the tip of a brush delivering a sinuous, unhesitating stroke.

And now that the vision was stretched too thin already, she had her partner without delay grab hold of her wrist for yonkajo, the fourth control: he was holding her forearm like the hilt of a sword, the pointy bone at the root of his index finger applying painful pressure on a nerve buried a little above her wrist, somewhere a talented second-degree black-belt like him would have no qualms locating. He raised her forearm just like a sword, ignoring the rest of the body that was attached to it, and applied a clean forward cut, laughing. One moment she was standing, pushed only a little out of her comfort, and in the next, a nearly electrical shock smashed her down on the mat, scattering away the silly fancy. No more brushwork on goldfish floating, no soft lights, only the plain memory and the screaming joy of training in a real dojo bustling with life.

Still laughing quietly, he ordered her to relax. As she got back on her feet, also laughing, she offered him her other arm for the same technique. After all, things had to be evened out on both sides. In a second, she was once again flattened against the mat by his blistering fourth control, blinded by the pain, but also astonished by the speed with which the pain left her body. He increased the intensity at each pass, so much so that she was now coming to a slapping halt against the mat while her intent was to reach something thirty inches underneath. He told her to relax again in that soothing voice, again and again, and though she laughed, she couldn’t understand, not until that moment on the plane …

She’d thought her friend had been merely playing at being a sadistic psycho, asking her to relax and breathe while trying repeatedly to kill her, but here was the movie portrait of a professional trainer for mixed martial arts, screaming the same directive at his guy in earnest. Of course, it was a thing. The heavier the attack, the more relaxed a real warrior had to be. It wasn’t a paradox or a mystery, but the simple correlation between tensing and injury—the same principle that allowed a baby to survive without a scratch a car crash that proved fatal to the adults involved. Fear of pain caused far greater damage than pain itself because it tensed up the body. Warriors trained themselves to stay in deep relaxation through breathing so that the pain could traverse the body unobstructed and exit without a permanent trace. Sabiha laughed at the clarity of the lesson, its jovial obviousness shining on her so generously, unexpectedly, as she remained wedged in her seat like a pathetic jumble of limb folded into blanket. She thought back to the morning when the head Sensei of their club had smiled them a poised, coppery-bright tiger’s smile, explaining how the samurai would work up their courage in times of need. “Relax,” they would apparently tell themselves, “You’re dead already. Dead because you were born. So, instead of fretting, just relax and see if you can do something before you cease to move.”

Ding! As soon as the seat-belt sign was switched off, all passengers—most of them, anyway—jumped up to retrieve their belongings from the overhead bins; they brushed and tugged at their clothing to ensure some semblance of order; they yawned, stretched and stirred in place like restless horses, barely resisting the urge for a stampede inside the cabin that was turned instantly too stuffy. In another ten minutes, Sabiha and her phobic fellow passenger would part forever, without exchanging any words. He would never know how much of her attention he’d drawn on the flight. She was glad he’d made it, and clearly, so was he.

The last impression she had of him was his palpable, titanic relief at being back on his two feet, firmly treading the thin crust of a tiny ball that contained a molten core and that hurtled through an infinite void without any up or down, faster than sixty-seven thousand miles per hour. ‘Maybe I ought to make him even whistle a tune, for good measure,’ she thought.

The virus arrived on the next plane home.

_____________________________