Air American

Mr. Diaz traveled from Andalusia in a silver airplane with a picture of an eagle on the side. His carry-on bag was slim, made of leather with buckles to keep his bilingual dictionary, notebook, and cellular phone from falling out by accident. Mr. Diaz had done a lot of planning.
His English was good, he knew. He had been brushing up for months now, watching the BBC news while he dressed in the morning, reciting common phrases to himself.
"I am fine, thank you."
"I would like a coffee and dry toast."
"You have a lovely family."
After takeoff, he attempted to complete the English language crossword puzzle, doing a reasonable amount before folding the magazine neatly and tucking into his bag, ready for a nap. Mr. Diaz enjoyed naps. He had the most interesting dreams when sleeping shallowly. In the dimly lit cabin, white airplane noise draped on all sides, he found it exceptionally easy to slip into wispy visions of flight attendants, sunny mornings in bed, and a woman named Brenda.
He knew her only from photographs: Brenda on a trip to California, wearing sun lenses. Brenda when she graduated high school, her chestnut hair teased and falling around her face like a Christmas wreath. Mr. Diaz ached with the desire to touch her, to smell of her. He had known the electricity of amorous contact so few times in his life.
Three weeks of vacation, saved up over years of regular exercise, systematically washed hands, and other simple rituals that had let him avoid the thousands of common illnesses so wont to strike his colleagues. The bank manager hadn’t been exactly sure of what to do when Mr. Diaz decided to use all of this time at once. There were no regulations against this sort of thing. It just never happened. “Bueno,” said the manager after Mr. Diaz had revealed his plans for a mysterious and uncharacteristic American vacation “que vaya con Diós.”
The in-flight movie was an American one, apparently a comedy. A blond-haired young man attempted several times to woo the attractive new girl next door, not knowing that her father was a actually a don in the Mafia. Mr. Diaz awoke after the picture had already begun, but managed to gain a loose understanding of what was happening, picking apart the English sentences as if they were objects for dissection. First, one had to separate the string of accented sounds into individual words. A general understanding would follow. Any words not immediately understood could be guessed at from context. At times, he laughed lightly at remarks he suspected were jokes, but did not fully comprehend.
After the movie, the stewardesses served a light dinner. Mr. Diaz picked at it lightly for several minutes, but ended up throwing most of it away. He considered striking up a conversation with the youngish man sitting next to him, who had removed his headphones for the first time during the flight.
“You live in New York?”
“Pardon?” the young man asked, his eyes wide, kind-looking in a manufactured way.
“I ask if you are from New York. You went to Spain for vacation or no?”
“Yes. Well sort of. I am a student in America. I studied in Spain for a few months.”
“Sort of?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said ‘sort of’.” Mr. Diaz sighed, wanted to punch himself. “I am sorry, I am Spanish-speaking.”
“Ah?” said the young man, “¿De qué parte?” The young man’s accent was flawless. They talked in Spanish for nearly an hour in, until his shame of failing to converse in English had nearly disappeared.
“You travel alone?” asked the student. He spoke so perfectly.
“I have a friend waiting,” said Mr. Diaz. “Tomorrow is her birthday and I am going to surprise her.”
“¡Qué lindo! And she will pick you up at the airport?”
“No,” replied Mr. Diaz. In a fit of courage, he attempted to speak in English once again. “I plant to sup in her home with her family. I hope to go there by taxi.”
“Pardon?” the young man’s eyes widened again, like this would somehow make Mr. Diaz’s accent more intelligible.
“Nada.”
Mr. Diaz decided to work on the crossword a little more.

He found John F. Kennedy International Airport to be more comforting than expected. The signs were printed in bold, friendly letters, and as he walked from BAGGAGE CLAIM to GROUND TRANSPORTATION, Mr. Diaz took pleasure in feeling like only one of millions of strangers. The city, too, soothed him; its blinking lights and cold, tall buildings reminding him of his own home country, somehow slicker. When the taxi dropped him off on Brenda’s block, he decided to take a short walk and gather his thoughts. It was almost 9 PM Eastern time now, and he didn’t expect Brenda and her family to start supper for another hour or so.
Mr. Diaz placed his small rolling suitcase and carry-on bag beside him on a bench and gazed upward, toward the top of a particularly pretty building, made of red brick. The air of November was cold, crisp. Made him feel lost and thus truly alive. Brenda had told him that the city air in the fall was what made her stay. It had been one of the first things she wrote about her home.
They met one Sunday evening in an online chat room called “Book Lovers, Anonymous”. Mr. Diaz had joined to practice his English. Brenda had been logging on for months. She loved books so much, she said, that she was thinking of going back to school for a degree in English. Mr. Diaz had a degree in economics and mathematics. She had been impressed that he—a finance agent—took the time to read in a foreign language.
I didn’t think that businessmen had hearts she wrote.
Poetry gives me a heart he replied, smiling to himself.
As months passed, he adjusted his sleep cycles so that he could be up late when it was evening in New York. She liked to talk to him while she prepared dinner for her family.
I would like to see what your children look like.
She told him she didn’t believe in that, that she wanted to protect them, but that he could see her if he liked. A few days later, he decided that he would. The pictures she sent him made his insides move in a way he hadn’t felt since a handful of rose-scented evenings with a young woman at university. One night, he found the courage to tell her
In reality, I am very lonely.
She hadn’t known what to say, had tried to comfort him with a variety of typed, transcontinental pleasantries, but had failed to do the impossible, to reach him. He regretted having told her this, for burdening her with the desperation of his empty, repulsive life. He was an imbecile.
Then the words had come rocketing through the deep, inky distance that separated them, zapping Mr. Diaz, thrusting every cell of his body into a frenzy.
In a way, Federico, I love you differently than I love anyone else.
He nearly wept, didn’t sleep. He opened his journal to write, to try to somehow express his agonizing joy, and wrote a single sentence:
“Tonight I am not the same.” Three days later, without telling Brenda, he bought his airline ticket.
He couldn’t put his finger on what he found so different here, aside from the temperature. Perhaps it was that here, he lived only for a dream, a risk unlike any he had ever taken before. This American air he had never breathed before.

Mr. Diaz wondered if the speaker over the building’s buzzer had fallen into disrepair. No one answered for several seconds. Then, a crackle, a woman’s voice. His heart throbbed painfully. He couldn’t swallow.
“Hello?”
How could he do this? How could he say
“Hello. My name is Federico. I find this address in phonebook.” Then, with a note of enthusiasm “This is Brenda?”
No response. The city generated a type of white noise, a rush of symphonic erasure not all too different from an airplane. Mr. Diaz thought of nothing for ten entire seconds.
“Federico,” the woman’s voice seemed tired, faint, “I…I…”
“I came for your birthday. It is tomorrow, isn’t it?”
She mumbled something. It might have been the word “sorry”, but the damned speaker was so bad in the first place. Mr. Diaz clenched his fists.
“Hi,” a man’s voice this time. Not angry or threatening. Only curious. “May I ask who’s speaking?” He spoke fast. Mr. Diaz tried to think, tried to plan something quickly. He backed away from the building’s doorway, then stepped forward.
“I am sorry.” He said into the speaker.
“Pardon?” asked the man. Mr. Diaz’s English escaped him like a frightened bird.
“I said I am fucking sorry!” He hissed in Spanish.
“I’m sorry?” Not understood. No one understood.
He would not cry. Mr. Diaz closed his eyes, touched the apartment building’s rose-colored brick, let his ears fill with the white noise, the noise that was sure to swallow him. Above, he was sure he heard a passing silver jet, full of people who were not speaking to one another, people trapped in a metal cabin shooting through an empty sky who had only crosswords and the sound of rushing air to keep them from feeling empty.
He remembered a bookstore he had seen a few blocks down during his walk and began drifting in that direction, away from the brass speaker plate. Away from the pair of voices that belonged to people he never knew, never ever knew. The first flakes of an early, wet snow alighted on his face. Mr. Diaz wished he knew what this feeling was called in English.