I sat near the nose of the aeroplane.  It was a British Airways flight to Bangkok. A night flight. I was flying alone. I didn't know anyone in Bangkok. I still don't.  

We had all been seated, and the hustle and bustle had died away, the bags crammed and re-crammed in the overhead lockers, men being vaguely chivalrous, offering to help women they didn't know with bags that weren't heavy. I wanted to help a woman, had looked around keenly for one, but they had all been helped. I was too late.

I checked the messages on my phone. Only one. From my mother, telling me to stay safe. This wasn't what I was seeking. She was biologically obligated to love me. I wanted love created where before there was nothing, immaculate, a miracle. I put my phone on airplane mode. The act brought a surge of relief. The iPhone is the modern conduit of salvation, your inbox gaping, open, prone for anyone capable of stimulating radio waves. Which is everyone. Like a person with an ear for God, you are infinitely accessible to salvation. When nothing ever arrives, you are reminded moment by moment that are you not saved.  I closed the conduit; 11 hours and 35 minutes of respite. 

The lights were dimmed, people shifting in their seats, once, twice, before falling into the soft anticipatory silence that befits a departure into the sky. Because I knew no one, I sat in a double silence. Everyone seemed cocooned, sequestering themselves in blankets, ill at ease, wary of the strangers who huddled around them in the darkness. A girl in the row next to me pulled a hoodie up over her head, rested it softly onto her boyfriend's shoulder, her face angled slightly upwards, as if turning to God.

We jolted into motion. The plane hummed. Something clicked, loud and disconcerting, a bolt dislodged somewhere in the belly of the beast. The plane shivered like the skin of a horse.

Because I was in the front row, I was facing two members of the cabin crew. They sat with their backs to the cockpit. One was a woman, the other a man. Their crisp, cheap little uniforms made them seem childlike, unserious. The woman was Asian, perhaps Filipino, short and heavy, a remarkable softness in her eyes. The man looked to me like a Spaniard. He was worn, his carefully gelled hair combed to disguise its aggressive recession up his forehead, the roots greying, his stomach hanging slightly over his belt like a little sack of grain.

With the plane in silence, they began to speak. They had taken off too many times to be discomforted into silence, their voices quiet but clear.

"I'm Javier. It's a pleasure to meet you," he said. "I cannot believe we haven't flown together before. How long have you worked for British Airways? Ten years!? For me, is fifteen. I can't believe it. Fifteen. Please forgive me for my openness - there is something about flying, the sky and the clouds, the strangeness of being in a metal box 30,000 feet in the air, it breeds intimacy - so please forgive my openness, but this is the best fucking job in the world. My language, I know, but I feel it deeply. I love this job. You know? You see the world with this job. The whole world. And the sex… you're in a different city every night! You understand. Forgive me for my openness."

The woman laughed timidly, rocked a little in her seat, shook her head softly to indicate that she was hard to shock. She had heard it all.

"Yes, you're right, it's a good job. You see the world."

"Have you done Chicago?" he asked.

"Yes. Twice."

"You know many times I've done it?"

"How many?"

"Fifty." He let the number settle in, let it slide into the darkness of the cabin like some reptile moving soundlessly into a river, barely perturbing the skin of the night water.

"No!?"

"It's true. Fifty."

"Which hotel is it?"

"In Chicago?"

"Yes, Chicago."

"You've done it twice! You don't remember?"

"You know how it is… cities, hotels."

He savoured the secret for a moment. The darkness made it greater, more cloistered. "I remember. I remember. It's the Regal." He said it like someone remembering a mythical city, a place buried deep in a jungle, a place adventurers might die trying to get to. "The Regal. Next to the airport."

"Right by the airport?"

"Just a short shuttle ride away."

"Oh," she replied, no trace of recollection. "I think I remember. It's nice?"

"Nice!? It's the Regal! There's a bar downstairs. Someone plays jazz piano. It's famous for its jazz, Chicago. We sit down there, listen to the sweet melody of the jazz, talk all night."

"You and pianist?"

"The pianist!? No, no, he's on the piano. Just the crew. Not the pianist. He just plays and he leaves."

"And all the crew stay up? That's a good team. That makes a difference."

"Well you know how it is. Those that sleep, those that don't.  You get a couple who slip off early. The pilot, he normally leaves early. He has to fly. He's important. Or so he thinks. But most of us stay and have a drink. Some slip off. Most start to go around midnight, I suppose. But not me. I don't sleep. I like so sit there. Even after everyone leaves, and it's just the bartender, cutting limes, laying down napkins like a bull-fighter. You should see how he does it. I like the way the chairs feel. So soft.  I can hardly climb out of them by the end of the night."

He blinked in the darkness. I found his eyes hard to interpret, the creases spidering from the corners of them.

"I like the way a hotel lobby feels, when there's almost no one in it. You see people coming in in the dead of night, into the lobby, all dressed up, and you wonder where they've been. Who they are. What lives they're living. And the women they bring in! The women! I'm telling you, some of the most beautiful women you've ever seen, traipsing into the lobby on the arm of some man, laughing, tripping, almost too drunk to stand, jewels around their necks. Who are the men who meet women like that…?" he began to trail off.

"What's the city like? What's Chicago like?"

"Chicago?" The man seemed nonplussed for a second. "I don't know. I've not been into it. It's famous for its jazz. But the Regal is nice. The staff at the hotel know us, of course they do, always ready with a wink and a smile. They know me by name, it's always Mr. Fernando, how are you? Mr. Fernando, welcome back. Always the red carpet for Mr. Fernando. There was a receptionist. Blonde." 

The woman nodded.  Breathed deeply. Seemed to retract into her seat. She glanced out of the window, the tarmac now speeding by as we accelerated.

I ached with loneliness. I didn't want them to know I was eavesdropping. The conversation would be killed stone-dead by the intrusion of a third party. It would become performance, not confession. There was something voyeuristic, naked about the three of us. I looked at my shoes.

The plane rattled, shook with energy, with aerial ambition.

The Spanish man sat back and looked at the ceiling, remembering something, the sacredness of everything beatified by the passage of time. We are trapped in the moment, looking backwards at our lives as they are transformed into art, each moment given a beauty it did not possess when we lived it. That is the tragedy of it all.

"You see the world with his job," the man said, and smiled softly at his companion.

I felt the wheels separate from the earth, hesitantly, as if at last doubting the safety of the endeavor. Then suddenly the ground dropped away out the window, rapidly, too late to turn back. It was done.

"That receptionist… at the Regal," the man began again, unprompted. "She always had a smile for me. She had a smile for everyone, but for me I knew it was different. One night, when she got off her shift, I bought her a drink. Made her laugh. I must confess, I told her I was a pilot. It was just a joke you see, just a joke. Harmless. The other crew played along, for a laugh, calling me Captain. Buying me drinks. What's the harm? Anyone can fly a plane these days. It flies itself."

The woman chuckled. "Where was the real pilot?"

"He was asleep by then. Always slipping off early that one. Always wanting to be home again. He saw nothing of the world."

"Home," the woman said, wistfully.

"Later, I watched her sleeping head on the pillow. For a long time. Heard the traffic crunching the snow outside, the city panting in the night, her breathing gently. She was young. I think. Had her whole life ahead of her. She saw my uniform in the morning. I walked out of the shower and she was holding it up, pinching it between two fingers like it was a bag of dog shit. She called me pathetic and left."

The man chuckled softly. "Mr. Fernando, pathetic!? I think not." He looked at his hands in the gloom, cupped them like a beggar. There were a few miscellaneous beads of light in the cabin casting a loveless, gentle glow. 

"Are you married?" the woman asked, a little nervously, trying not to sound judgmental.

The man started, as if stung. He looked at the woman, seeing if she knew more than she said. If she carried secrets. We all carry secrets.

"Married!? In this job. I would be crazy. You can have a girl in every city in this job. We are like sailors from the ancient times, tossed by the seas. Heroes. Heroes," he said.

I looked out the window. We were much higher than I expected. Below me were the deep, hot lights of the city in the night, then the softer, sadder lights of the suburbs, receding out into nothingness.  I had grown up in a suburb like that, run from a suburb like that. I thought of someone washing a dish, toweling it dry in front of a window, a thin gauzy little curtain protecting her home from the eyes of the world. I thought of a man in a car, returned from work in the darkness, sat behind the steering-wheel on his driveway, his chest rising and falling, his teeth chewing, girding himself for the sadness of the dinner table. I thought of a child breathing upwards into the frosted night sky, his breath misting in front of his eyes, seeing our plane, the sight of it prodding some ancestral explorer deep in his heart, driving him to be someone, to escape somewhere. I thought of a million solipsisms under the stars.

"I was married," the man said suddenly. "Once. A wife and two children. But she left me. Two years ago now. It was the travelling. She said. That I was always away. I think she was jealous to tell you the truth, me off seeing the world, her stuck at home. Two little children. Sometimes, when they were very small, I used to tell them I was a pilot! It was harmless really. Just to make them proud. They asked their mother. She laughed so loudly I heard it on the other side of the house. Imagine."

The man slid one foot forward across the carpet, serpentine in the gloom, the movement wrapped in a reverence.

"Oh," the woman said, worried she had unearthed something miserable. "I'm sorry about that. The breakup must have been hard."

"No," Mr. Fernando said thoughtfully. "Not the break up… not that. The break-up is pain. It's a howling pain. But pain lets you know you love something. That something's real. If you didn't love it, there wouldn't be pain. Am I wrong? And even if she doesn't live in your house, she lives in your heart. And what is more important, a house or a heart? The hard part comes later. Day after day goes by, week after week, month after month. The arguments become softer. Less bitter. Less frequent. You pretend to fight, but you both know you don't care anymore. Then one day, you wake up and you realise there's nothing left at all. The last fight has been fought. The last battle. The bond you built inside, it has all been washed away. And maybe you never built anything else in your life. You are not an architect after all. You push a drinks trolley for a living. Demonstrate how to put on a little yellow oxygen mask. You built one great thing, a monument of love. And now it's washed away. No pain anymore. That is the real loss. Sorry. Forgive me… There is something about flying," he finished softly.

The woman retracted into her seat. I listened with all my might, my mouth a little open. For a moment, I wondered if she might be an angel; perhaps that was why they had never met.  And she was going to say something redemptive, to gift absolution in that trembling cathedral of the sky. I needed it too. Please.

But nothing. I wasn't in the presence of an angel. Just a person. She shifted her weight, cleared her throat, said awkwardly: "We'll be in Bangkok soon."

Silence. Then: "Ahh, Bangkok!" Mr. Fernando replied cheerfully, his voice rallying, going out to battle. "Bangkok. Thailand. The land of smiles! I have been there many times, stayed in the Shangri-La. Wonderful hotel. Shangri-La. The name says it all. There is a singer in the lounge downstairs, a voice to die for, eyes like gems. The seats and the carpets, a bartender chopping mint, the chandelier in the lobby! You see the world with this job."

We had left suburbia. There was just the black of the countryside below us, an occasional glowing farmhouse, the soil, the oldest of all, moist, aching in the darkness. We had begun the long journey into the night.