In the fall I flew out to visit an old friend in Chicago. Back then, I still worked in tech sales, my heart problems lingered untreated and divorce approached like a thunderhead. I was nervous to fly in that condition, so early in the morning, powered by so much caffeine and so little sleep.
What you need to know is that I was afraid of what the approaching end of my marriage meant. The fission of our shared language. Chicago was a place, a welcome couch, a cold beer on a back porch, an end before the end, a few more desperate days.
Outside the terminal, I claimed a corner of the smoking area and collected a few spare anxious gulps of oxygen. Rideshares scampered through the dropoff zone. I knew the drivers were as frightened about the future as I was. Then I surrendered to the manufactured chill of the terminal, its x-ray blasts, its measures of my compliance. I bought coffee and regretted each foul swig.
I feel I should explain myself some more. Belief in a higher power or significance doesn’t come so easily. As I queued in line and looked out the wide glass window, I did not expect to feel a great updraft of dread at the looming sky, nether-carved storm cannons prepared to destroy the tarmac and the meek Boston skyline beyond. But I did, as the wind and rain tested the window’s defenses, and in me reawakened a small self, a boy, pew-knelt, his first funeral, afraid and dumbfounded about why my grandmother was silent.
This preflight ritual took a while. The soft ping of the scanner cut through the rustle of the terminal. The man ahead of me in line fingered a bag of chips. Children tugged at their mothers and brandished dead-screened tablet computers. I feared for their futures. Finally, I entered the gangway. Raindrops muttered against the metal roof. I cleared my throat and tried to compel a burp. Not because my stomach was upset but because I was desperate to process air, to prove the stress wasn’t about to kill me.
My seat was in the first row of coach. Knees tight against the wall. In my mind, I negotiated with my friend. Played out the conversation about why I abandoned the trip at the last possible moment. Okay, I thought. Okay. I wandered my mind in search of prayer, something formal, easy. Found nothing. I asked this looming fear, this new and surely sudden end, for mercy. For it to forgive, to protect my parents, too.
As I braced, a voice beside me asked for help. She was small, a nun, no younger than seventy, frocked. Clutched a black-cased travel bag. This woman of prayer broke my prayer. I stood and hoisted the bag into the compartment above us. As I shoved it against the other luggage inside the nun took the seat beside me, in the center of the row.
Thank you, the nun said.
Sure, I said.
We didn’t speak much for the duration of the flight. She minded her rosary. Fingered the beads in sacramental sequence as the plane inched closer to the sky. I tried not to stare but I found myself with an armful of questions. I settled on whether she wanted the aisle seat. The nun smiled and declined.
I decided then that neither our flight nor I would suffer. Unlike every time I’d flown or ever since I did not grip the armguards as we climbed. The wind did not beat against us. My ears, my stomach, and my heart, all stayed serene. I didn’t even feel thirsty. The cloud cover broke and through the window, there was Boston, gold-white diadem, strung on her chain of stop-light highways. She would live through the night, and so would I.
I won’t call it a religious experience. That feels false. I can’t say I felt the touch of God, such as He Is or may Be. But I did peer inside the numinous door. I tasted the air in the room. My friend in Chicago told me a story once. How they’d wandered an abandoned hospital once, years before. Brought cameras to make a movie but spent the night scaring themselves. Until they’d reached a stairwell to the attic. As they climbed, he told me, they felt as though others were passing them by. Descending. Feeling their way back home. Then my friend heard a moan, like the song of a loon, and they fled, even though it might have been someone shacked up in the hospital to stay out of the cold. Maybe that was the point. They didn’t know, but they didn’t need to know. The closeness to an untouchable truth was enough.
We arrived in Chicago a half-hour early. The pilot couldn’t believe it. He said it twice on the intercom like he wanted one of us to call out the error. We flew across the great lake as the first sketch of dawnlight stroked the water. The runway caught us, and the plane glided to the terminal at O’Hare on a stem of holy rain.
Without prompting I fetched the nun’s bag and carried it up the gangway. It felt owed.
Thank you, she said.
I watched her fade into the bustle of the airport. Nearby, passengers edged forward, phones and tickets to their chests, waiting to receive their turn in the sky.
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Michael McSweeney is a Massachusetts writer who lives online at @mpmcsweeney.
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image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 