Lockheed
by Stephen Orr
She knows the temperature varies. She knows that often, at night, it gets to minus thirty, and during the day it gets to fifty, more. She knows this because she’s been sitting in the plane for thirty years. Perhaps thirty-two, or -three, she can’t be sure. She started, in the early days, writing the date in a small notebook in the pocket of her apron, but this became full, so she wrote on a pre-take-off checklist she found in the cockpit, a warranty, a list of songs Elvis wrote on the way to Las Vegas for a concert, lots of places, but then her pen ran out and she tried to keep track of the date in her head (all during the hot days, the freezing nights), but eventually she gave up all together. It may be 2021 or 2022, but she may be years off. Maybe it’s only 2017, or maybe it’s 2027, either way, the time passes, she sits in the red velvet-covered chair watching, planning, thinking, remembering, it just keeps going, day-night, cold-hot, light-dark, with the music of her head, the facts, the dates, all of it … She thinks her name may be Veronica, but she can’t be sure about this either. She never wrote it down, and now, she stares at the floor of the 1962 Lockheed 1329 JetStar and guesses she should clean the carpet again, although there’s no power for her vacuum, hasn’t been for at least twenty years, so she’ll have to sweep it out, but this is hard because it’s a rich, burgundy shag pile. Either way, she hasn’t managed any cleaning for at least fifteen years, so what does it matter? She thinks, There must be an inch of dust, I could start there and work my way towards the front and maybe I could get most of it. And there, the seat, the mounts, the metal, I could wipe them over, I could polish them (although she ran out of polish years ago – one of ten bottles of empty cleaners sitting in a bucket). She could wait till it rains, go into the desert, dampen her rags, return and try to clean the chair mounts or the chairs themselves or the dials and leather in the cockpit, all of this, she could try all of this, but she hasn’t for years. Just sits, imagines how it might be done, how it might look better, after it’s done. This thought, recurring, and she wonders what … Tracey (is it Tracey, is her ten year old daughter named Tracey?) is doing now, has been doing this year, last year, the last decade, the last decades, what’s she doing? Tracey, perhaps? Ten, was she ten, so now she might be forty-seven or -eight, it’s hard to tell. She just sits and waits. All day every day and all night every night she sits and waits to be told what to do, when to go home, she dare not move from the interior of the plane she’s been sent to clean. Interestingly enough, the plane belongs to the singer Elvis Presley. He bought it new in 1962. He and his wife use it (along with another two planes) to fly to concerts all over America. This is her job: to clean the plane when the Presleys aren’t using it. Drive to Memphis airport, fetch her things from the office, wheel them out, load them in, vacuum, polish, empty the bins, like this. She suspects something has happened since she started work on 3 December 1971. Elvis and Priscilla and the pilots don’t come to the plane anymore, don’t seem to use it. Strange. There was a time she’d have to rush to get it clean, but not now, now she just waits. Someone will come soon, make clear what she’s meant to be doing, update her on her husband and daughter, say, Well, it’s time, Veronica (or whatever, her employer’s sure to know) for you to get some sleep, so go home, come back. Something like this. Then she’ll know. But it’s important, for now, she waits, she looks at the cobwebs on the interior of the plane, the way the panels are falling off, the lights dropping from their sockets, and knows soon, soon she’ll have to get back to work, but why, when, how, there’s so much to do, and this causes her anxiety, and this anxiety (she guesses) is the real cause of her … waiting. I wonder, she thinks, if [daughter] has finished school? I wonder if she kept up with the mathematics, or tried Latin, Greek? That’d be good to know, and the ceiling, too, needs lifting, and the windows have been sand-blasted by the desert, and what about … Trevor, was it Trevor [her husband], what would he make of it, and Elvis (she’s been told) won’t tolerate dirt or filth, so she has to get the plane looking clean. But something happened, sometime in the eighties (she’d stopped tracking dates by then) when the plane moved and clunked and bolts were removed and she was lifted into the air, swinging, and then she was on the back of a truck, driving, and two days later she was in the desert, lowered, without wheels, without engines, without wings, into a parking spot between a 707 and a row of DC-3s. Something, which might explain why Elvis never comes anymore, or Priscilla, or her boss, with the cleaning things. [Daughter] could be married, with children and … Jesus, I wonder what they thought when I didn’t come home, when they found my car at the airport … I wonder, married, with children, all boys, perhaps, with their father’s brown eyes and brown hair and his long nose, although maybe [daughter’s] blonde hair and stubby nose, and there they are, Christmas, Christ, what a time to miss, all the teak, too, to be polished, around the windows, the drinks cabinet (she’d drunk it dry by 1977), the audio-visual station, the roller doors that no longer rolled, the record player and cassette player on which she listened to Elvis’s rehearsals, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, till the power stopped. And the television and Betamax on which she’s watched the Presleys’ home movies, The Great Escape (hundreds, maybe thousands of times) before, again, the power ran out. Each of these machines, she observes now as she sits in the King’s chair, covered in dust she imagines cleaning every day (but doesn’t), cobwebs she imagines removing (but doesn’t), the knobs and sliding controls and things (she doesn’t understand the dials, EQ, reverberation) that no longer function. Just sits, waiting, checking her watch which she winds twice a day, and she knows the time, exactly, but what good’s the time without the day, week, month, year? Sometimes she thinks she might stop winding the watch, but it’s a distraction twice a day, a job, a purpose, something to replace the cleaning she longs to do, but can’t. Anyway, a tape got caught in the Betamax in 1974 and she couldn’t use it after that, sat worrying what Mr [boss] would say when her saw it, or Mr Presley, what would he say? But she can’t do much about it now. She can’t fix it. She spent days staring it, feeling bad, imagining how she might pull it out and rethread it, but of course, this might’ve made it worse. Stand, she thinks, move to the front, open the door again, stare out at the New Mexico desert (she overheard someone calling to someone else in 1988: ‘Hottest day on record in New Mexico’). Sometimes she sees workmen removing wings and tails and salvaging parts of planes, and wonders why no one ever comes to her Lockheed. They can’t see in, of course. That’s another thing they did, the day after they brought her here, they covered the windows with some sort of wrap, and all she’s been able to see since is diffuse light, and dark. A featureless world. Nothing. But she could, she imagines, open the door again, peer out, maybe even call: ‘Hello, is anybody there?’ She could. But what good would it do? There are thousands of planes, and only two or three men, a few machines, a crane, so who’d hear her, who’d know, so she remains in her seat which is Elvis’s seat, beside Priscilla’s seat, and sometimes they brought their bubba, Lisa Marie. She was a nice little one. She reminded her of her daughter [Tracey?]. Made her weepy, so she got on with her job, overused the window cleaner and general purpose cleaner, so they ran out too soon, and here she sits, now, waiting for more, wondering, and [daughter] will be happy to see her (goodness me, she will!). There’ll be a reunion and they’ll hug and [husband] will tell her how much he, they, everyone has missed her and worried where she was: ‘Where were you, [Veronica]?’ What a day that will be! But eventually. There’s no rush, no putting the cart before the horse, there’s a job to be done and she’ll have to do it properly. The thought of waking, breathing, being hungry, though she hasn’t eaten for decades, though that too can wait. She’s overcome her hunger. The thought of needing a toilet, but she can hold. She’s held for decades, she can hold a bit longer. The thought of being hot and sweaty and needing a shower, but the shower, too, can wait. The thought that she’s bleeding, sometimes from her front, sometimes from her back, and a rash that started in 1990 has spread across her face and down her side. It’s itchy, she can’t stop scratching it, but that too can wait. The thought that she wants fun, and now she’s read the Presleys’ magazines dozens of times, played their board games (Monopoly, especially), listened to their music, remembered everything Elvis and Priscilla have said to her, [boss], [husband], [daughter], [best friend], so what’s left? Of course, nothing’s left. This list of thoughts. A hundred thoughts (she’s calculated) equals five or six minutes, so she has to have tens of thousands of thoughts every day, and of course she’s had these thoughts millions of times over, and it’s so hard, no, impossible, to have new thoughts if all you do is sit waiting in the Lockheed. But she tries to have new thoughts. She looks at the carpet and imagines removing a few threads and inventing some machine to analyse them – colour, dyes, fibres – then imagines writing a PhD about her shag and eventually winning the Nobel Prize. These sort of thoughts. Silly, facile things, but new things to add to the old thoughts she has to keep churning. Of course, there’s no point to all this. None at all. So maybe she should kill herself, but how on earth could she do this with no power or knives or weapons? Point being, nothing is simple. She could, perhaps, wrap a few old cleaning cloths around her head, shove them down her throat, but they’ve all come apart. It’s like, no matter how hard she tries to apply the logic that explains her life, her job, her future, nothing works. What if [daughter] has died, or killed herself, so overcome with her missing mother? Goodness. What if? What if she never finished school or went to university but … shh, shh, there he is now, listen:
‘Strange to think …’
‘What?’
‘Elvis?’
‘He didn’t like the Lockheed, shocking fuel efficiency, just stopped using it …’
The voices fade. She must be careful, though, because there’s a big, mechanical pincer they use to destroy planes. In, down, hold, crush, a pile of twisted metal and interiors. Maybe some means of suicide but … so she must be careful, listen for clues:
‘… when he comes to pick it up. Put it in a mall somewhere, charge people a dollar and half to see it.’
Returns to her thoughts. Number 12,376. She’s certainly got her degree, at least, I wonder which, Humanities, I hope, Philosophy, perhaps, the conversations we had about Rosseau and Goethe [listing the philosophers she remembers from an unfinished degree]. Maybe a thesis, a book, something I could read … 12, 377. Wander back, of course, I could but (imagines standing, walking into cockpit, sitting in the pilot’s chair, cleaning around the throttles, playing with the altimeter and imagining the sky in front of her, the clouds and mountains in the distance) what would that achieve? Now, just the grey wrap. The transponder and the flaps, she always plays with the flaps, and the radio and … I could but. 12,378. Come on, old girl, don’t get gloomy, you know how that ends. Stay focussed. Plenty of thoughts, so many you couldn’t possibly fill a life with them, check time, what time, three-seventeen and thirty-six seconds, [daughter] in her bath, fat legs, are they too fat, and her pretty face, so pretty, and the sun above, what’s it in here, 42 degrees, perhaps a few more or less, how to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit (see, she recalls, thinking is such hard work). Like this. Her old dress sweat-, shit- and piss- stained, still the style, the company logo (Bert Roy & Sons), a picture of a plane taking off, contrails, and: ‘We Clean The Best Of Them!’ We? Who? Clean what? She can’t … so hard to create new thoughts to replace old ones, but she must or she’ll run out of thoughts, become forgetful, dementia, something … new thoughts, come on, try, try, try harder! But she can hardly make them anymore. Was a time it was easy, thousands a day, but now five or six, if she’s lucky, and meanwhile she loses a hundred, so where will that end, her, here, minus any thoughts or feelings? Better to be dead. But how to be dead? 12,379. So many thoughts. Where do they all sit inside such a small lump of meat? Somewhere. Red velvet, all this velvet, so hard to clean, especially after Lisa Marie vomited on it, couldn’t get it out, the plane stunk, Mr Presley complained, but in a sense it was his fault for having so much velvet. I can vacuum it once the power comes on (and imagines this, how proud she’ll feel for having stuck at the job). Hair-pins, Wittgenstein and his small hut and indecipherable ravings and if you try, if you pick up the bottle of lemon-scented carpet shampoo, you can still smell lemons. Ah, praise the Lord, lemons, [daughter] climbing the tree in the backyard to pick them for Mr [neighbour]. And Combat! and Bewitched and the burnt potatoes in the bin, at the bottom where [husband] didn’t notice and try, try make the memories real, and hair spray, what was the brand, what was the name, 12,380, the way the bassinet never rocked properly and [husband] said he’d fix it but he never did, and the sound of rats in the wall at three am, and [daughter’s] reflux and 12, 381 and … and being here is nothing more than the sum of all the thoughts required to be here.
1. Being here is nothing more than the sum of all the thoughts required to be here
1.1.1 Being here is nothing more …
1.1.2 Being here is nothing more …
1.21.1 Being here is …
1.21.2 Being here …
1.221 Being …
The rest is a song, a birthday card, It’s a Wonderful Life! (praise, I remember the title!) and what you thought a word was about. Voice 1 and 2 returning, and there they are, at the door, has Mr [boss] sent them with the Pine-o-Cleen, and Voice 1 fights with the door and eventually manages to open it, looks inside, a big brute, a big beard, and behind him, the sweet, sawdust smell of the desert! Praise. And he looks in and says, ‘Who are you?’ So confused. But it’s simple, really, and she asks if there are any instructions, if Mr and Mrs Presley will be needing their jet soon …
Stephen Orr is an Adelaide-based writer of novels, short stories and essays. His work explores the dynamics of families in particularly Australian landscapes. His latest novel, Shining Like the Sun, concerns one man's efforts to hold a dying mallee town together.