Chapter 2. Late September

Ch 2. Late September

Why I'm on a plane heading for Istanbul
They fired me on September 15, almost one week ago to the day. They called it downsizing and gave me some money and a year's free hospitalization. I woke up the next morning, put on jeans and a t-shirt, smiled at my surprised doorman who looked at his watch (it was 9 a.m. and I was late to work) and walked to the open doors of the entrance to the building. And just stood there.
I had nowhere to go.

The sky was a lovely pale blue between the tall buildings across the street. A few seagulls floated against the cloudless blue and slowly moved behind the building on the right. I gazed as they disappeared, thinking once again how much more I enjoy seeing the sky in vertical squares contained between the buildings of my neighborhood than wide open in the country, everywhere, shapeless, without a frame. Pointless. This way made sense. The city made sense. There was always some little thing to pick up, the cleaning or the Sunday paper.

The doorman's footsteps coming from behind signaled that I should start moving or he’d ask questions, so I headed out into the sunlight and walked around the corner to the deli.

Eight years. Where did they go? As I had every morning for eight years, usually a little earlier in the day, I bought a small container of black coffee and a poppy seed bagel with cream cheese. This time instead of grabbing the bus outside the deli door and heading to work, I walked to Central Park as if it were the weekend. I sat myself down on a bench in the shade of the splendid old chestnut tree just inside the entrance and pulled the bagel out of the small paper bag, pulled back the slot on the container of coffee and took a sip.

It was an absolutely gorgeous fall day. I thought, Hey, this isn't so bad. I could have been locked inside the dirty sealed-windows of the huge and ugly vault in midtown Manhattan where I had been employed since my life caved in, hearing the dampened horns and sirens from the streets below, looking at pieces of paper about import tariffs and train schedules in some third-world place I couldn't find on the map, worrying about whether the bitch in the next office was going to find a way to make me want to commit murder that day.

And I would have missed this lovely morning in the park.

A fine-looking black dog ran by, one of those silky, thickly furred ones that look like wolves. I watched it fly past the slow-moving strollers and disappear over the green hill and thought about what a nice life dogs have. Then in my head a sentence spoke itself: "Lucky dog. You always know what to do next," and I had to admit I was scared. It was pretty clear the beautiful fall weather and the nice tree and the nice dog weren't going to see me through.

There I sat, a woman further along in midlife than I was willing to tell anyone, with no husband and no interest in acquiring one, and just enough money to barely pay my rent for one year if I didn't use the phone or go to the movies. No retirement fund. No family. No financial prospects of any kind. And not a remote possibility that I would be able to interview for a job, or even take one if it fell out of a window and hit me in the head.
I couldn't. I don't know why but I knew that was simply a fact.

That's when it occurred to me that I should travel.

"Travel! Ginger, without a job you don't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out," my office friend Adele said on the phone a few hours later that day. "Your money will be gone in three months! Then what will you do?"

"The same thing I'd have to do in twelve months. Hang myself, I guess."

"That's not funny," she said.

But Adele was wrong. It was very funny, funny enough that for the whole week, after I bought the ticket, sub-let the apartment, threw some stuff into a suitcase and boarded the plane for Istanbul, I was still amused.

Looking out the window of the plane at a cheery, endless bright sky above and a floor of snowy cotton clouds below, I realized I had hit 'now or never' time, that time when you finally do the thing you were always afraid to do like burn your bridges, and the thing you always wanted to do like travel around the world. I was in this plane because I chose "Now" but I had a very big problem. Although I was doing the thing I'd always been afraid to do, which was set off into the unknown without a plan or a source of money, I didn't have the slightest idea of what I wanted to do. I had turned my back on the cowardice of Never but I didn't have anything to do Now. That made the prospect of jumping off a cliff or hanging oneself seem almost comforting. And that was amusing.

The good people I'd left behind, the employees at the Hateful Exploitation Corporation, thought I was a great adventurer.

"You will find a beautiful man and he will make you laugh," said a tiny Peruvian woman name Rosa.
"You are a fool," said Roberto, her brother. "Ginger is a profesora, an educated woman. An intellectual."
"A Brainiac," said beautiful, black Angela. "She don't need no man."
"Good thing," I nodded.

How odd, the way they saw me. You'd have to be from the working class to think I was an intellectual. There's an old joke my family used to tell and retell: A middle-aged Jewish man has bought his first boat and is trying on a captain's hat in front of his wife. "Look Becky," he crows, "I'm a captain!"
"To you you're a captain," she answers. "To me you're a captain. But to a captain, you're no captain."

And to an intellectual, I was no intellectual. I wasn't even sure what an intellectual was. At any rate, I had reached the point when it’s more dangerous to stay where you are than to do anything else you can think of. I didn’t expect much would come of my choice but for the moment it was pleasant, finally, after all this tedious time, to have chosen 'now.'

I knew my good mood wouldn’t last. Unlike a 20 year-old striking out into the unknown expecting adventure, longing for excitement, I've been on this earth long enough to know that when you leave someplace with no destination the future can cover your life like an fog that won't let you find your way. I'd been on planes before. Sooner or later I'd arrive and my comfortable sense of movement would come to a halt. But I was safe for at least nine hours.

And I even knew someone, a neighbor who had become an expat in Turkey, a chronically unemployed opera singer, pretty, chubby and blond who had just settled in with what she claimed was "an adorable Turk" in a small town in central Turkey , Cappadocia, wherever the hell that was. My entire knowledge of Turkey, like most Americans', comes from the chilling movie "Midnight Express," about the nightmare of life in a Turkish prison. But I didn't smuggle marijuana, so I figured I was safe.

And my neighbor Pamela said it was wonderful.

"I live in a cave, a real cave! And I have a carpet and pillows and I have my computer plugged into an electrical outlet! It's gorgeous! You have to come and stay with me. Saladin's place is huge!" I imagined standing on an open plain, looking up at a cliff full of open caves, each one full of furniture and electrical appliances plugged into the walls, with Pamela waving to me from the top. And then I imagined myself inside the cave sitting on a beautiful oriental rug looking out onto that great open plain, feeling the comfort of being quiet and far away. It was a nice plan.

I snuggled into the seat and pulled the magazine out of the pocket in front of me, so I could look at the fold-out map of the world tucked in the back pages. Tiny Europe on the left, huge Asia everywhere else, landlocked seas and names from an exotic version of the wild west: Kazak, Uzbek, Tajik, Kirghizistans, huge and blank and flat with only a few of the curved lines that showed the routes of the airline I was flying.

Nobody went to Central Asia.

Toward the bottom of the page was the triangle of India rising up in the north to become the Himalayas, leveling out into the high Tibetan plateau and falling away into a deep desert with a name I’d never heard of. One could fly to all those places from Istanbul. If one had any reason to do so.

The bell dinged and the seatbelt sign went off. Across the narrow aisle a large man moved out of his seat and up above me with an ease that caught my attention. I didn't look up but I could tell he was of a size where he noticed the cramped seating space, and though I could tell without looking that he was neither young nor slim, he moved as smoothly as an athlete as he turned and disappeared down the aisle behind me.