Free And Then You Die by Michael Dibdin Page A

his mouth wide open as if snoring. The cabin attendant in the other aisle bent over him and said something and then, not getting any response, buckled up the man’s safety belt.
    The scene outside the window looked like nothing on earth, a rough first draft of creation fresh from the drawing board: deep ocean rollers going about their restless immemorial business, then breaking up in spectacular confusion on the ragged coastline , and beyond that an uneven wasteland torn to shreds by outcrops and crags of raw rock breaking the surface in random profusion. There were no buildings, no fields, no farms, no roads, no people. Nothing.
    This was not how Zen had imagined America, but as the wheels touched down and they rolled to a roaring halt, he saw a row of large camouflaged military jets, each with the United States flag painted on the tail. They continued to taxi for some time, then drew to a halt. The sound of the engines died away and everyone stood up.
    Zen manoeuvred his way politely through the throng towards the row of seats opposite, where his hand baggage was in the overhead locker. The man who had taken his seat was still lying there, mouth agape. He had had several rounds of cocktails and liqueurs before and after the lunch which Zen himself had refused after one glance, and was no doubt still sleeping them off.
    Gradually the line of standing passengers started moving slowly forward, carrying Zen with it. The crew members at the door nodded, smiled, apologized, and assured everyone that the delay would be a brief one. It seemed to Zen that one of the male attendants, a slim young man with piercing eyes, gave him a particularly meaningful look, but that was neither here nor there. Everyone knew that i steward were all gay. Outside, the light seemed diminished, uncertain of itself. The air was harder than he was used to, almost fibrous in texture, and smelt strongly of seaweed. Zen wrapped his coat about him and stepped down the gangway to the waiting bus.
    A short drive brought them to a low line of concrete buildings, where they were unloaded into what looked to Zen like the dance hall of a ‘youth club’ to which the church was trying to attract the disaffected teenagers of some no-hope town in Calabria. The unsmiling uniformed blonde men and women who had accompanied them on the bus now escorted them inside, then closed and locked the doors and drove away in the bus.
    One of the side effects of Zen’s brush with death had turned out to be that his lifelong fear of flying had been dispelled. This may have been due to the greater fears to which he had been exposed, or simply a case of familiarity breeding contempt; aeroplanes had been the preferred means of transport of the authorities in whose hands he had been ever since the ‘incident’. At all events, he had now come to realize that flying was not at all frightening, just massively boring. And the most boring parts were not the flight itself, but the bits before it started and after it stopped. Entering the United States was evidently not going to be an exception. There was no sign of any passport officers, no sign of the luggage, no purposeful activity at all. Everyone just stood around.
    Five minutes later, a second busload of passengers returned from the plane to swell the waiting throng, and some time afterthat a third, bearing a final contingent of stragglers. Meanwhile a tanker truck had approached the aircraft, and men in orange jumpsuits were hooking up a coil of large plastic piping to its underbelly. Zen turned to a young man standing next to him who had just finished a long mobile-phone call in Italian.
    ‘Looks like they’re filling her up,’ he remarked, as a token conversational opening.
    The man looked him blankly.
    ‘Emptying her out, you mean. Christ knows when we’ll get to LA at this rate. My people are going ballistic.’
    He punched more buttons and turned away.
    ‘At first I thought it was a joke!’ said a voice to Zen’s left.