Free Cost of Life by Joshua Corin

has begun its descent.”

Chapter 11
    The man in Seat 18A was on his way to Cozumel to meet the love of his life. His name was Frank Brown. Her name was Catalina-Luisa Hierra Perez. If ever he had doubted in the magic of words, his faith restored itself each time he whispered her name and felt his heart double in size.
    He had met her in an online chat room, but so what? For men like him, teetotalers, introverts, there were not many other alternatives, and he hadn’t signed into that chat room on a frost-cold December night expecting to meet the love of his life. But if ever he had doubted in fate…
    The screen name Frank Brown used was Ag(NH3)2NO3. That tended to keep away the perverts and, in theory, attracted like-minded, intelligent loners like himself who also possessed more than a passing knowledge of chemistry. The compound he alluded to was known as Tollens’ reagent and what made it extraordinary was…but no, the specifics didn’t matter. It was a test, pure and simple, to seek out the embrace of smart conversation on a lonely night.
    And on that night, on the eleventh of December, his silver lure found gold. For starters, she had signed in under the screen name Half-a-Cat.
    Hesitant but hopeful, he’d messaged her:
Does your owner Erwin treat you well?
    Her reply arrived almost instantaneously:
He’s always waving.
    Frank Brown had nearly chirped in excitement. She’d picked up on his Schrödinger reference and had added to it with a joke about his theory of wave particles! Oh! They continued to banter all through the night, lobbing scientific puns back and forth for hours. He learned that she was a graduate student in marine biology at the University of Quintana Roo on the tropical island of Cozumel. She told him her name. She mentioned that her friends called her “Cat.” But even then, Frank couldn’t think of her as anything less than Catalina-Luisa Hierra Perez.
    After a week of online chatting, they exchanged phone numbers.
    After a month, on one dark evening in January, they exchanged pictures.
    By February, they were discussing when they could meet in person. The bank Frank worked for was going through a merger and the earliest he could get off for vacation time was July. So be it. The day his boss approved his request, Frank bought his plane ticket to Cozumel. That afternoon, he went to the post office to get a passport. He was forty-two years old. He had never even left the state of Georgia before. Now he was on his way to Mexico.
    Magic. Fate.
    Next to him, a mother breast-fed her newborn. Were newborns even allowed to fly? The baby had spent most of the flight so far producing from its tiny lungs a series of screams that far exceeded anything Frank’s own lungs could ever have produced. He had to be grateful at least that its mouth was currently stopped up.
    Catalina-Luisa Hierra Perez wasn’t fond of kids either. She was fond of
pozole,
football, bad jokes, and coral reefs. And Frank. She was fond of Frank.
    He smiled. He was fond of her too.
    Not even one hour into the flight, and already he was antsy. He wanted to chat with his love right now via text messaging, but he couldn’t afford the airline’s insane WiFi rates. Other people around him didn’t seem to have the same concern. Across the aisle, the mother’s husband was clacking away at his tablet’s keyboard. Beside him, their pigtailed daughter was clacking away at
her
tablet’s keyboard.
    Via eavesdropping, Frank had learned that their names were Travis and Zelda. The mother’s name was Nell. The baby’s name was variously Amy, Amy-Poo, and My Darling Cabbage.
    He shut his eyes and reclined his seat. Maybe he could relax away the butterflies flitting about his belly. He had a Learn Spanish book in his carry-on, but that would hardly get his mind off his lovely Catalina-Luisa Hierra Perez. He breathed in, he breathed out, and he let the cushions behind his head and behind his back do the rest.
    Then he heard the snoring.