crop of the air

I got up in the middle of the night and went over to the window. It wasn’t the middle of the night, it was half-past five in the afternoon, I had slept from nine til five because right now sleep is my job. You can’t tell because it’s dark already, but not quite. It never gets quite dark, there is always as I noticed in England years before this the glow on the horizon of the next town; the lights infect the dark and it feels like it’s mutual, in wintertime it never gets quite fully light, really, either.

Half-awake I scrabbled at the curtains a bit. He said: What are you doing? I fell back. I said: I thought I should get up and close these curtains properly, I thought, in the morning a bright shaft of light is going to come through that gap and wake me up. But I realised I was wrong. Mm, he said, it won’t get light til late, maybe 8 o’clock. And, I said, it’s not going to get bright at all. No, he said ruefully, and we went back down into the chambers of sleep, the lost city of all those who are dead to the world.

A lit sign at Abu Dhabi airport said, Last Chance to Buy. To me this had a kind of ectopian ring, if ectopia can be the reverse of utopian. Beside the sign were many golden products ranked in serried rows. Bottles of perfume, bottles of booze. Last year when I was there they had an aqua-coloured lightbox showing the wistful face of a child gazing out of her window and the text said, At any one moment there are 450,000 people in the air. That image of the city of souls who have left the earth yet plan to return, and the image jetlag plants in me of half the world sleeping in their bed-tombs under the water, as the sun splashes its giant curves up and down the round walls of Earth and drags them on, made me think again about how air travel feels like being away at sea. I guess it doesn’t last as long. But the feeling of being returned safely to dry ground is just as dull and amazing, just as blessed. The dangers are the same: you could fall overboard and be eaten, you are out of your element, you could drown. I suppose you really wouldn’t get eaten in midair but you could drown in the air, gasping for ground like a fish drawn against its fire of will onto the deck, you would fall and keep falling and take many miles to die.