Coming to America | 001 | Thirty Thousand Feet

Sebastian had been to New York once before. Twenty-two years old, a tryout for something he wasn’t ready for, though he hadn’t understood that was the reason at the time. He had prepared meticulously, the way he prepared for everything, and he had walked into the room and performed well and come home with nothing. He had sat on the train from Heathrow at half eleven at night watching his own reflection in the dark glass, this younger version of himself with something slightly dented, and thought: not yet. Not like this.

He understands now.

That is the difference. Not the suits, though the suits are right. Not the years, though the years were necessary. The difference is that Sebastian Cross is no longer a man performing readiness. He is a man who has arrived at it, quietly and without announcement, the way certain things arrive when you have stopped looking for them and simply done the work until the work became the answer.

He sits at the kitchen table in the four o’clock dark with an ice cold tea and thinks about this.

The flat is mostly packed. What remains is what belongs here, the furniture, the walls, the particular quality of silence that a place accumulates over years of being lived in carefully. He has not been careless in this flat. He has not been careless anywhere. There are men who shed their environments like skin, who leave rooms looking like they were never occupied, and Sebastian has always been one of them. This wasa out of a respect for the distinction between the temporary and the permanent that he has held as long as he can remember. He knows which one he is in most rooms.

He finishes the tea. Rinses the cup. Leaves it on the draining board. He stops and looks at the cup. Who is he leaving it for?

Outside, London is doing what London does at four in the morning, which is mostly just persisting. The orange glow of it against the low cloud. A cab somewhere. The city has no particular feelings about his departure and he has none about its indifference, which is perhaps the most London relationship a person can have.

He puts on his jacket.

Picks up the cases.

Closes the door.

He would soon be an Englishman in New York.

⁂

Stellan Cross has been in the gym since five and the bar has not beaten him yet.

This is not bravado. It is simply what has happened in this room every morning for the better part of fifteen years: the bar loaded to a weight that would end most conversations, and Stellan moving it with the unhurried precision of a man who stopped being surprised by his own body a long time ago. Breathe in through the nose. Out through the nose. The rhythm so established it no longer requires attention, which means his attention is elsewhere, which is the point.

He thinks about very little when he trains. This took years to achieve. There was a time when the gym was where the noise lived, the childhood things, everything he couldn’t carry surfacing the moment he was alone with the bar. He pushed through it rather than sat with it. At some point the noise stopped. He liked it that way.

Stellan couldn’t locate when exactly. No morning he walked in and found the quiet waiting. More gradual than that, the slow removal of everything that wasn’t load-bearing until what remained was the structure itself.

He racks the bar. Sits up. The gym is empty at this hour, which is how he prefers it. Other people bring their noise and the morning requires none.

He showers cold. Dresses. Picks up his bag. This would be the last time he sets foot in this sanctuary for quite some time.

At the door he stops and looks back at the room, not with sentiment, he is not a sentimental man, but with the specific attention of someone taking stock of a place they are leaving. The bar now unloaded. The chalk on the floor. The particular quality of silence that belongs to spaces where serious things happen without many people to witness them.

He turns off the light.

He leaves.

⁂

Solomon Cross is on the floor of his bedroom at half four in the morning and he is doing what he always does when something important is ending, which is sit very still and let it be ending.

The objects are arranged around him without plan. A ticket stub from a night that began well and ended differently. An old photograph, the three of them when he was nineteen, standing outside a gym in Bermondsey with the specific expression of young men who suspect they are going to be something but have not yet accumulated the evidence. A pair of Nikes, white, worn at the heel, carrying the residue of a story he has told in fragments to various people over the years, never the whole of it, never in order. They are the record of a version of himself that was real and is now complete, the way a book is complete when you close it, not gone but finished.

He is not sad about this. He is rarely sad about anything. Life was there to be lived and Solomon Cross had lived some life.

And yet, that is what surprises him the most. The woman from Annabel’s was sleeping behind him. He had expected something more when this moment came, some version of grief or resistance or the particular ache of things ending. Instead there is just the objects and the floor and the clear clean feeling of a man who has looked honestly at what he is carrying and decided what to put down. He often wondered whether he was innately this way or whether this was a byproduct of a Cross upbringing.

She had known his face before she knew his name. There is a version of Solomon Cross that is known, the face and the grin and the room-filling ease of him, and it is not false, it is genuinely him, but it is not the whole of him, and the whole of him is something he has never handed to anyone at a bar on the basis of being recognised.

He looks at her for four seconds.

There is affection in it and not much more, the particular warmth of a man who likes people and understands that liking is not the same as keeping. He found the game both exciting and dull at the same time. Being naturally brilliant had its quieter moments of reflection.

He picks up his case.

The door makes no sound.

⁂

Stellan is already at the car.

He is leaning against it with his arms folded when Sebastian comes down. They load the boot in the efficient silence of people who have done versions of this before, then stand on the wet pavement in the coral glow of the morning and wait for Solomon.

Solomon is four minutes late, which for Solomon is essentially punctual.

He comes out of his building with the easy unhurried stride of a man who has closed something behind him and is not looking back, a bag over one shoulder, new sunglasses that Sebastian notes and does not comment on.

“Morning,” Solomon says, to both of them… to neither of them.

Stellan gets in the car.

⁂

The motorway is wet and mostly empty. Stellan drives at a consistent speed in the outside lane. Sebastian sits with his eyes forward. Solomon watches London disassemble itself through the window, the city thinning, the gaps between things growing, and he thinks about the photograph on the floor of his bedroom, the three of them outside that gym, how none of them knew yet and all of them suspected, and how the distance between suspecting and knowing is the whole of what the last sixteen years have been.

Nobody speaks.

London goes.

The signs for the airport appear.

⁂

Heathrow Terminal 5 is built for a different kind of person. Moving walkways. Paperbacks in colour-coded rows. Coffee at seven pounds fifty that nobody finishes. The fluorescent light that renders everyone a slightly worse version of themselves, washed out and shuffling toward departures with the glassy compliance of people who have ceded the morning to the process. It is a machine for managing the fact of leaving, and it is very good at what it does, and it has no category for what has just walked through its doors.

Stellan puts his bag down and sits.

He has a coffee he ordered because the queue was there and he was standing in it. It goes cold beside him. Across the concourse a child, four years old at most, has fixed him with the total unguarded stare that belongs only to the very young and the very afraid. Stellan’s hands rest open on his knees. He breathes at the rate he has breathed for two hours in the gym this morning. The child, after a long moment, finds something else to look at.

Solomon is at the Harrods concession.

Sebastian walks.

Not aimlessly. He has never done anything aimlessly. He walks the length of the terminal and takes note of things most people do not think to inventory. The family near gate fourteen managing three children and too much luggage. The young woman sleeping across two seats with her coat pulled up, entirely at peace in the way only the very young or the very exhausted can be in an airport.

He thinks about the roster.

Good wrestlers. Some of them genuinely good. Men who have worked hard and know their craft at a level that would be exceptional in most contexts. He is not contemptuous of this. He respects work done honestly.

What they have not had is this.

He catches his reflection and stops at the window. Outside the tarmac is wet and the planes move in the grey morning with the slow purposeful logic of very large things. He watches them and thinks about New York at twenty-two, not with regret but with the clean analytical clarity of a man thinking about a calculation he eventually got right. A sense of inevitability about it.

He had been ready in every way except the one that mattered. He had assembled every piece and not understood that the pieces were not the point.

He turns away from the window. This would not be like before.

⁂

Solomon is back, wearing the new sunglasses, sitting beside Stellan with the composed satisfaction of a man who considers a transaction complete.

“You bought more sunglasses,” Sebastian says.

“Those ones had the wrong energy for America,” Solomon says.

“Sunglasses have energy.”

“Everything has energy. You know this.”

Sebastian sits. The three of them take their usual geometry, Sebastian at one end, Stellan at the other, Solomon in the middle, and it occurs to Sebastian, not for the first time, that this arrangement is not accidental.

A boy appears at his elbow.

Eight years old. Maybe nine. Manchester United shirt, wrong name on the back, player sold eighteen months ago. His father stands twenty feet away with a phone raised and the particular hope of a man who has done this calculation and decided the odds are good.

The boy holds out his phone.

Sebastian looks at it. Then at the boy.

“No,” he says.

Quiet. Considered. The word lands the way a door lands when closed by someone who is not angry, who has simply decided the room has nothing more for them inside. The boy had not prepared for no. Sebastian watches him process the space where yes was supposed to be and offers nothing. The boy walks back to his father. The father lowers the phone.

Solomon, from behind the new sunglasses, has watched all of it. He turns back to the concession and says nothing.

Stellan picks up his coffee. Puts it down without drinking it.

⁂

They board without event.

Nobody pushes past Stellan. Something in the way he occupies space communicates prior claim, a signal most people receive without knowing they have received it, and the seats nearby stay empty.

Solomon takes the aisle. He always takes the aisle. Within two exchanges he knows the name of the woman who brings the drinks trolley, and she is smiling in a way she was not smiling before.

Sebastian takes the window. He has a book open before they finish taxiing.

“What are you reading?” Solomon asks across Stellan, who has already closed his eyes.

Sebastian shows him the cover without looking up.

“Is it good?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You’ve read it before.”

“I know.”

The plane lifts. Below them London folds into grey geometry and disappears into cloud. Solomon watches it go with the expression of a man filing something away rather than leaving something behind.

Stellan does not watch anything. His arms are folded, his eyes are closed, and the seat does not seem to contain him so much as he permits it to exist around him. Somewhere over West London his breathing settles into the long even rhythm of a man who is completely, genuinely asleep.

“Are you actually asleep?” Solomon says.

Nothing.

“Stellan.”

“Yes,” Stellan says, without opening his eyes.

“You said yes.”

“Yes, I’m asleep.”

Solomon turns back to his window. England is gone.

⁂

The man in 14C is named Dave.

Insurance. Regional director. Daughter starting college in September, something about his face suggesting he is still adjusting to the velocity of it, time having moved faster than the version of events he was given to expect. He has the open unguarded face of a man who extended trust early in life and found the policy adequate. Solomon reads all of this in thirty seconds and tells him the version of his life that has a garden in it, Sundays with a shape to them, things mostly fine, which is not entirely untrue.

Dave asks what Solomon does. Solomon tells him. The re-evaluation moves across Dave’s face like the weather.

“You don’t look like a wrestler,” Dave says.

“No,” Solomon says. “I don’t.”

He turns to the window and stays there.

Stellan leans across later, without preamble. “Stop telling him things.”

“He’s interesting.”

Stellan looks at Dave, who is reading a Sky Mall catalogue with the focused attention of a man who has not yet located the correct level of irony for the situation. He looks back at Solomon. Solomon shrugs. Stellan returns to his window.

“My colleague thinks I talk too much,” Solomon tells Dave.

Dave doesn’t look up. “Does he.”

“He’s usually right.”

Dave considers this. “So do you?”

Solomon gives him the real smile, then he turns back to the dark outside the window and stays there.

Dave talks.

Solomon lets him.

⁂

Three rows back Sebastian has read the same page four times.

He is not troubled by this. He is thinking about the version of himself at twenty-two in that train carriage with something slightly dented, certain about all the wrong things. He has spent years correcting that version. Not from doubt, never from doubt. From the honesty of someone who wants the thing they are building to be exactly right before they put it in front of the world.

He thinks it is. The titles suggest it is.

Solomon appears in the aisle. Looks at the book. Looks at Sebastian.

“You haven’t moved in four hours.”

“I’m reading.”

“You’re looking at a page.”

Sebastian says nothing.

“Are you alright?”

“Yes.”

“You can say if …”

“I’m alright, Solomon.” Not hard. Final.

Solomon holds the look for a moment, not pressing, filing, and then nods once and goes back to his seat. Sebastian hears him say something to Stellan in a low voice. Hears nothing back.

He closes the book.

Stellan is still. Arms folded, head slightly forward. Sebastian cannot locate the moment when the effort of that stillness became stillness itself. At some point they became the same thing. He cannot find the seam. Stellan is built that way.

Outside the window the sky is beginning to change. Not light yet, something before light, the dark that has already started the quiet work of becoming something else. He watches it for a long time.

The page stays unread.

⁂

JFK arrivals are louder than Solomon remembers and he has never been here before, which is the thing about America, the way it confirms expectations you did not know you had brought with you. The strip lighting. The luggage carts. The family at the barrier making a sound that is not quite language. A man by the exit holding a sign with someone else’s name on it, and the patient specific blankness of a man doing the job of waiting.

Customs is a queue. The officer takes Stellan’s passport, studies it, looks up at him with the careful expression of a man recalibrating his understanding of what a person can be. The officer stamps the passport and says nothing, and Stellan moves on without acknowledging any of it, which Solomon finds funnier than he has any reason to and keeps entirely to himself.

Outside the air is different. Warmer and denser and carrying something in it that is neither good nor bad, just different, the atmosphere of a city that has no interest in your feelings about it. Solomon stands on the kerb with his bag and breathes it in and thinks about Bermondsey. A Thursday in November, seventeen years old, standing outside the gym with Sebastian after a session that had run two hours over because neither of them would be the first to say stop. He had said: this is where life goes, isn’t it. Not a question. Sebastian had looked at him for a long moment and said eventually, and gone back inside. Solomon had stood there in the dark understanding that eventually was the most serious thing Sebastian had ever said to him.

He had been right to take it seriously.

“You’re just standing there,” Sebastian says, appearing beside him.

“I’m having a moment.”

“Have it in the car.”

“You’re not even slightly moved by this? We’re in America, Sebastian.”

“We’ve been in America for forty minutes. It’s an airport.”

Solomon picks up his bag. “You are genuinely remarkable,” he says. “In the clinical sense.”

Stellan is already at the car.

The expressway. The skyline in the last of the evening light, the glass towers doing something complicated with the vermilion sky. The driver has understood from some signal nobody gave that this is a car that does not require conversation. Solomon watches the city through the window. Sebastian is on his phone, reading something with the quality of attention that means he has already drawn his conclusions and is simply confirming the arithmetic.

“The Intruders,” he says, eventually, not looking up.

Stellan says nothing. He has the expression he always has, which is to say he has no expression. After fifteen years, Solomon understands is itself a form of expression.

“I watched the footage,” Sebastian says.

“Was there much to watch?”

“No.”

Solomon looks at him. “How old was it?”

“Old enough that it shouldn’t have been the most recent thing available.”

“Right.” Solomon turns back to the window. The expressway is widening, the city pressing in from both sides.

“So we’ve come all this way, first booking, and they’ve given us two large men who’ve confused being large with having a plan.”

Sebastian says nothing, which is its own answer.

“I’m not even insulted,” Solomon says. “That’s the thing. I want to be insulted, and I can’t quite get there because you’d have to care about something for it to be an insult and I don’t know that I…” He stops. “Stellan. Are you insulted?”

Stellan considers this with the seriousness he applies to everything. “I want to know if it’s going to be worth lacing my boots.”

“It won’t be,” Sebastian says.

“Then why are we…”

“Because we’re here and they’re there.” He says it without irritation, the flat settled logic of a man who has already processed the indignity and filed it under necessary. “We did the due diligence. We always do the due diligence. In this case the due diligence took eleven minutes and eight of those were finding the footage.”

Solomon laughs. Just once, short, genuine. “Eleven minutes.”

“I was being thorough.”

“You were being you.”

Sebastian looks at him for a moment, something in it that is not quite a smile but is in the same postcode. “After Saturday,” he says, “I want a different conversation. A different room. Someone worth the preparation.”

“Someone who gets us out of bed,” Solomon says.

“Someone who makes it necessary.” He looks back at the skyline. “I have a name. Someone who knows this country. Knows the rooms worth being in, the people worth the work.”

“Who?” Solomon says.

“I’ll tell you when I’ve confirmed it.”