No Service
~
When Lufthansa flight 1491 soared above the shore of New Jersey on its Trans-Atlantic journey, first to Munich and then to Kiev, Dave Sprangler suddenly had traveled further than ever before in his life. Peering out from his window seat he watched the setting September sun color the murky waters of the Atlantic with autumn hues. Once above the water Dave was sure that if the plane crashed he had little to no chance of survival and this thought propelled him back into his seat as a beautiful German stewardess sashayed down the aisle.
Dave never traveled. At least not in the style of those who considered themselves worldly. Sure, Dave took his family to the Outer Banks in North Carolina or, if he saved a little more money that year, to Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. Once he even managed to save enough money to take his family on a cruise in the Caribbean and he fondly remembered the weight he gained on that trip. But his fifty-two year old body hated gluttony now.
His current travel was taking him to Europe: the choice destination of America’s middle class. But not to France or to England where bourgeois North Americans spent their yearly salaries to keep a new wave of immigrants and refugees employed, he was going to Ukraine. His son, Michael, taught English in the capital. Dave knew nothing about Ukraine and hadn’t bothered to do much research on the country before his trip. He knew he was landing in Boryspil International Airport and that was enough. Michael would handle the rest.
He thought of Ukraine and pulled memories from dating back to the 1970s and 1980s; Chernobyl, the Soviet Union, Communism, and churches with domes. A country of eternal winter. A flat landscape that extended forever under a dull gray sky where, in the distance, artillery roared and men and women died in a place that the world did not know.
Dave reached into the pocket of his khakis and pulled out his BlackBerry. It was a work phone, but Regis in the IT Department said that he fixed it up so Dave could use it abroad. Dave turned it on again. He had turned it off when the plane first took off so as not to cause some technological irregularity that would break his phone or cause the aircraft to crash. The decade old phone booted up slowly, jingling some obscure tune of Mozart before reaching the main menu. Dave looked over the screen and waited for some minutes for the ‘no service’ symbol to go away.
It must be something to do with the plane, Dave thought. He hated phones. He would have liked to call his son to let him know that he was on his way or to call his wife, his second wife, that he was in the air. But he could do that in Kiev.
A stewardess approached, her young body voluptuous in the tight business suit costume, “Wine sir?”
“Oh, no, thank you.”
“It’s free.”
Dave smiled, “Oh, I guess it couldn’t hurt. Sure, how about a cabernet?”
“Of course, sir,” she said tending her refreshment cart.
“First time traveling?” said the man beside Dave. He was older, balding, wearing thin wire-rim glasses.
“Not my first time traveling,” Dave said receiving the wine from the stewardess, “Just the first time crossing the ocean.”
The man nodded and returned to the movie he was watching.
“Where are you heading?” Dave asked, thinking about the rumor that you meet some of the most interesting people when traveling.
“Munich. On business. You?”
“Oh, Ukraine, I’m going to visit my son. He works there as a teacher.”
“Ukraine, eh?” the man nodded, glancing over toward Dave to look out at the darkening window as night came, “Strange country. You married?”
“Yes, I am, just got married again last October.”
“Shame. You should have waited. The women there are notoriously beautiful. You’ll be craning your neck every other minute. But the men,” he laughed, “The men are notoriously violent. Is your son young?”
“He is, why?”
The man turned back to his movie, “I’m sure he’s enjoying himself.”
“Oh, yeah, maybe.” Dave reconsidered the rumor about meeting interesting people wherever you traveled.
He never bothered the man again, aside from having to go to the bathroom around two in the morning when the man cursed that Dave couldn’t relieve himself at a more appropriate time.
Dave didn’t sleep.
As someone not accustomed to traveling and not being able to spread out on his queen size bed with his golden Labrador, Frank, curled up at the foot of the bed, he just couldn’t get comfortable. Instead, he passed his time between trying to watch the different movies on the plane, but since neither were The Shawshank Redemption or Caddyshack they couldn’t hold his attention.
Beyond the window, the foaming Atlantic faded from view as the plane drifted high into the ocean of clouds and then into the azure deepness of the stratosphere. He thought that any minute the sun would erupt again and bathe the sky in light, but the darkness weighed heavy as white streaks of steam bubbled from the engines of the plane. A sense of peace overtook the aircraft and Dave felt at ease. He felt small and defenseless as only a thin piece of fuselage separated him from instant death high above the earth, yet everything felt so comfortable.
He sat back in his chair for a moment, ordered another glass of wine. The minutes turned to hours as the plane split the sky then the sun did erupt and scattered the sea of clouds. In a reversal of history, Dave was discovering the continent of his ancestors. Dave discovered Europe.
He once considered taking his family to Ireland to visit the city and home of his distant relations, but his daughters had been too young and his first wife had been too sick.
Maybe next year.
He pushed his eyes against the window like a diver seeing the surface world from his submarine for the first time in months and peered down at the cloud swept lands below. The green fields of Europe stretched on and on and little hamlets dotted the hills. Hedgerows and farms divided the land into different shades of green, yellow, and brown. He had no idea where they were flying. A range of mountains rose in the distance, which Dave thought to be the Alps, but even with the sun rising he couldn’t place if he was flying over Germany, Italy, Switzerland, or France. He also didn’t know if those mountains were the Alps.
The man beside him awoke, they said good morning to each other and nothing more then the plane touched down in Munich.
In the airport Dave sat down with his duffel bag at the gate and waited for his plane to Kiev. He checked his phone again. The battery had dropped three percent during the flight and the ‘no service’ symbol still blinked mockingly through the screen. Obviously, Regis had failed. Dave desperately wanted to call his son and tell him that he was only a few hours from Kiev. He tried to connect to the airport’s Wi-Fi, but after clicking ‘connect’ the loading circle went around…and around…and around…
Dave squeezed the phone in his hand. Patience was never his personal strength. He wanted to break it and throw it against the wall, but people were already gathering to board the flight to Kiev. The red anger in Dave’s face made him embarrassed and he sank low into his chair. His son would pick him up at the airport. After they found each other he wouldn’t need the phone until he arrived back in America.
On the flight from Munich to Kiev, Dave sweat anxiety because the phone refused to work. Life was supposed to be a systematic list of things that went according to a plan. His plan. Sure, things tended to work themselves out in the end, but these trivial changes in his plan became bothersome. He wanted to start this visit off on the right foot.
It didn’t help that the sandwiches served on the plane were pumpernickel bread with salami marinated in relish. The Germans are strange, he thought.
On this plane, no one spoke English or read newspapers in English. They were in German, French, or a strange alphabet that he presumed was Russian from old movies he saw about the Cold War. Dave had no idea what the difference was between Ukrainian, Russian, or any of the other languages in Eastern Europe. He tried to listen to the different conversations on the plane but it all sounded like gibberish. Dave folded his hands on his lap and tried to look out the window to his left. Two women sat between him and the window. They noticed his gaze, made eye-contact, and then went back to their conversation. Dave assumed they were speaking about him and he shrank back into his seat, feeling a strange, unconditional fear burbling in his stomach and heart.
There were men and women on the news at night who spoke three, four, or five languages and had been all around the world. Dave couldn’t even tell what language these women were speaking.
Dave was flying to Babel.
On a two hour flight to Kiev, he spent his time aggressively fiddling with his fingers and restarting his phone every other minute.
When the plane landed, Dave grabbed his duffel bag and shuffled out with the other passengers toward the customs line. He kept glancing at his phone as the line crawled forward waiting for a change in his service network. Ukrainian customs officers dressed in green military uniforms with several stars emblazoned on their epaulets called the travelers forward in Russian or broken English.
The stars confused him. Not every customs agent could hold the rank of Field Marshal.
Dave simply followed the line and had his passport clutched in his hand as though rigor mortis was setting into his body.
The customs agents shuffled the passengers through with dysfunctional efficiency.
After getting his passport stamped he jogged toward the wall of eyes and stone faces waiting for the disembarkation. The faces looked out toward the passengers, scanned for family members, then brightened. Unable to stop because of the relentless pushing of his fellow passengers, Dave was soon standing in the middle of the airport surrounded by people running with their luggage saran wrapped to protect their bags from the thieving airline attendants or maybe all those Field Marshals still patrolling the corridors of Boryspil.
Whether he looked left or right or spun his body around in circles, Dave could not find his son. His hand clenched tightly the strap of his duffel bag and he soon carried it with two arms, as the anxious sweat turned hot beaded and his stomach shriveled inside.
“Michael?” he called out to no one in particular, just hoping that his son would hear through the chaos of the travelers.
“America? America?” said a bull of a man breaking his way through the stampede of travelers to stand in front of Dave, sucking great gulps of air through his nose and mouth. “America?”
This answer was less than welcome.
“Excuse me?” said Dave. Dave was used to being in a position of authority, being somewhat tall and rotund. Now, he stood in the shadow of this bull.
“You America?”
“I’m American, yes,” Dave attempted to correct him.
“You go to Kyiv?” said the bull. “I take you there. Good rate.”
“I’m looking for my son, I’m sorry.”
“Your son live in Kyiv?”
“He does,” Dave pulled out the BlackBerry again, still the no service sign blinked at him. It blinked misery. The bull stared at the phone over Dave’s shoulder. “But I can’t get in contact with him.”
“What’s the number?” said the bull, taking out an ancient cell phone from the turn of the millennium.
“I’d rather not, really it’s not a problem,” Dave said, trying to walk away towards the waiting area, but the bull followed him.
“I can take you to Kyiv, America, you can find your son there. One hundred dollars. Good rate. He forget about you?”
Dave kept his eyes forward but he felt his existence being swallowed up by the bull’s shadow. The taxi driver loomed over him as he stumbled through the crowd toward the open seats. Every terror of travel became real. Every stereotypical remark that made Eastern Europe a place where people disappeared forever in dank dungeons and prisons filled his mind. He waited for the bull’s hands around his neck and for the eyes of the travelers to never look up at an instance they didn’t care about. Thankfully the next time Dave looked back the shadow was gone.
The bull had found another lost and desperate sap to prey on.
Dave sat down in a chair away from other waiting people, holding his duffel bag close to his body and shivering. All his fears that the trip would not go according to plan were happening. Sitting there alone the world lost focus as all the people in the airport blurred and their gibberish took on a tone of terrifying murmur. Similar to the women on the plane, they were all watching Dave, all commenting on how sad and horrified he looked.
In fact, none of them cared.
But to Dave now, he was a lonely old man in a lonely old world where he would pass eternities waiting for someone who would never come. Too proud to cry in fear so the tears only welled in his eyes and trickled down like scattered rain drops.
He took his phone out and glared at the screen. His hands tightened on the plastic as he wanted to take out all his anger on this dead piece of plastic, electricity, and zinc.
“Excuse me, sir, are you alright?” said a woman’s voice.
Dave lifted his head as a thin woman with long black hair looked at him. A shade of goldenrod brightened her face while the freckles that dotted her cheeks darkened her complexion like sunspots. She reminded Dave of a sunflower.
“Oh, yes, I’m alright, I’m just waiting for my son,” he paused trying to hold back the other sentences in his mouth, but the dam broke and Dave spewed forth weakness, “He was supposed to be here to pick me up, but he’s not here, and my phone doesn’t work.”
“Your son lives in Kyiv?” she said. The young woman had a clunky voice as if she was speaking with a mouthful of peanut butter. Every word thickly adorned with accent.
“Yes, though I don’t know the address.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a nicer, modern phone, compared to the one owned by the bull, and handed it to Dave. “Use mine,” she said smiling, “Call him.”
Dave looked at the woman and unshelled himself from the defense of his duffel bag. He reached up and took the phone, found his son’s number on his BlackBerry, then punched it in and waited as the dial tone droned on…and on…and on…
“Nothing,” said Dave with smile of cordiality and little else.
“I’m sorry,” said the woman. The wave of people who disembarked from Dave’s plane had dispersed, leaving few people left standing around the terminal, and even the bulls had disappeared to prey in greener pastures. “He may have been held up in traffic.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Dave, picking up his duffel bag again and holding it close to his chest.
“Would you like a ride into Kyiv?”
“Oh? What?” Dave looked at her. “I don’t know, he’s probably on his way.”
“Even if he is, it’s best that you don’t wait in the airport like this. Things can get weird. People will know you’re a foreigner and security won’t do much. My husband has our car in the parking lot, he won’t mind if we take you into town. It’s not right for you to wait here.”
Dave didn’t know what to do. This woman came from nowhere and was offering to drive him into the city. He thought about her taking advantage of him. Her husband waiting with a gun inside of the car to take his wallet, passport, and other valuables. But his options were limited. His son was nowhere to be found and Dave doubted he could ever navigate Kyiv. He doubted his ability to even leave the airport.
He had to take the chance. No one else might be so kind.
“Alright? Though I didn’t catch your name?” he said standing and extending his hand. “I’m Dave.”
“Bogdana,” said the sunflower and then helped Dave to his feet and guided him out of the airport to an older model of a Toyota Camry.
A man stood by the car, eying Dave with suspicion as he walked over with Bogdana.
“Хто це?” said the man, presumably Bogdana’s husband.
“Він американець. Він затоплений в аеропорту. Його син живе в Києві. Я сказав, що можемо дати йому їзду.”
They both spoke so fast that even if Dave knew a bit of Ukrainan he wouldn’t have been able to understand. Given that Dave understood no Ukrainian the hair stood on the back of his neck as the man looked him over. This was the moment where he would disappear forever.
“Де живе його син?”
“Не знаю. Йому потрібен Інтернет.”
“Добре. Ходімо.” Said the husband and entered the car.
Bogdana smiled at Dave and gestured to the back seat, “We can take you do an internet café or somewhere they have wi-fi and you should be able to figure out where your son is. Then we can take you to his house.” Her smile eased Dave’s fears, “I’m sure he just slept too long today.”
Dave sat in the back with his duffel back still pulled up to his chest as Bogdana’s husband, whose name Dave never heard, pulled out onto the highway.
The center of Kyiv stood about twenty minutes away from the airport town of Boryspil. A pothole marked highway stretched over flat land surrounded by tall, fence-post like trees where all the vegetation flowered at the top. Billboards emerging from the woods spoiled what little nature existed still around the capital as Ukrainian entrepreneurialism flared out, doing away with quaint traditionalism and magic. Advertisements for Chinese phones were coupled with pictures of naked women begging foreigners to marry them. The signs roared in Cyrillic, which fell deaf on Dave’s ears, but the gentle bending of the women’s fingers was enough for an illiterate man to understand. Take me.
Dave felt sick at the thought.
“Have you ever been to Ukraine, Dave?” said Bogdana.
“No, I’ve never been out of the country before.”
“Що він сказав?” said the husband.
“Це його перший час за кордоном.”
“І він приїхав на Україну? Він дивний,” the husband laughed. “Я б злякався.”
Dave clenched his mouth shut, now he knew that they were talking about him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t speak your language.”
“Just that we’re both surprised that you came to Ukraine for your first trip. But it’s to see your son. Really, I hope you enjoy it here. Ukraine is beautiful. People don’t know that.”
Perhaps all those people who were staring at him or who were talking before weren’t talking specifically about him and if they were, perhaps they were not speaking negatively about the terrified American clenching his duffel bag.
Dave looked out the window. The great Soviet-era high rises, now painted blue and yellow on the walls, welcomed him to Kyiv. He saw the great expanse of the Ukrainian steppe that rolled off forever into the east. Not a snowflake was to be seen. The past summer’s heat gave rise to the endless fields of golden wheat and then beyond the mighty Dnieper the city of Kyiv swallowed the American into its cosmopolitan alleyways.
Traffic slowed once they crossed the river. A car crash, probably a few hours old, clogged the flow of vehicles as Ukrainian drivers looked at the pulverized bus on the side of the road.
“Oh, how terrible,” Bogdana said, as they passed the wreckage and continued on to central Kyiv.
Dave looked to his left and right as the crumbling apartments of the outskirts transformed into modern apartments with glass windows that shimmered with the sun’s reflection. Gray skies moved in to prepare for an afternoon shower. Droplets pattered on the window and Dave felt a sense of grim calmness as he looked upon the blue and yellow banner fluttering frantically in the coming storm.
“We will take you to Podil, Dave,” said Bogdana, as they drove under the baroque balconies of Kyiv’s center city, “It’s an artsy area. A lot of young people and cafes. If I had to guess it’s where your son would be and they’ll definitely be able to help get your phone working.”
“You’ll be able to help me a bit more Bogdana?” Dave’s meek voice drifted from the back. “Until I get in contact with him.”
“Of course,” she smiled, “Ми збираємось переконатися, що він знаходить свого сина,” she said to her husband.
Her husband groaned.
Ten minutes later the Camry pulled up alongside a small café in the Podil district in Kyiv. Bogdana’s husband parked the car and she got out, then helped Dave from his seat. “Take your bag with you,” she said.
The husband, still in the car, blasted electronic music once the doors closed.
Dave held the duffel bag tight, his only form of comfort aside from the sunflower that walked beside him into the café. At the counter she ordered two cups of coffee then gestured for Dave to show the clerk his phone.
“Йому потрібно підключитися до Інтернету, і його телефон не працює, і йому потрібно контактувати з його сином. Ви можете допомогти?”
The clerk looked at Bogdana, then at Dave, then nodded, “Так.” He reached into his pocket and handed his smartphone to Bogdana before coming around the counter to make sure nothing weird would happen. Dave nearly remarked on the kindness, but instead frantically guided Bogdana to log onto Facebook and get in touch with his son.
“What is your email and password, Dave?” she said beginning to enter his information.
“Spangler63@yahoo.com and the password is golfer45 with a capital ‘G,’” he said and grimaced every time Bogdana made a mistake with her typing. He wanted to snatch the phone from her and enter it himself. The rain was knocking hard against the glass windows of the café. Not a storm, but a heavy, tiresome rain.
She finally entered the correct information and Dave watched as his Facebook’s homepage came into view. His eyes narrowed. For someone who only had a few friends he couldn’t understand why there were so many notifications and messages. He reached to snatch the phone out of Bogdana’s hand. When he did the ‘no service’ message finally disappeared as a score of green bars brought the BlackBerry to life. The phone vibrated angrily in Dave’s hand as if it wanted to escape his grasp and fall to the floor to smash itself. The phone’s revenge for Dave’s treatment during the trip.
Dave held on as missed calls and unopened text messages crashed against his trembling fingers. They were from his wife, his daughters, and some of his friends. They were time stamped at random times throughout the night before when he was flying. Then there was a call from his son about four hours ago and then another wave of timestamps stretching from two hours ago to only twenty minutes before reaching the café.
“I think something happened.” Dave whispered to no one and everyone.
“Excuse me?” said Bogdana, “Is everything alright?”
As Dave opened the latest message from his second wife, Angela, something familiar occurred. Starting at the edges of the café the color of the walls paled to a drab gray as the vibrant yellow drizzled in great globs onto the floor. Pictures on the wall faded to black and the people sitting at the tables near the walls froze to stone. The yellow color crept across the floor leaving the flooring planks looking like driftwood. Driftwood washed up on a barren shore trying to call the rough sand and cold sun home. The lake of yellow pooled around his feet before stretching up in a column to the sky. A thin yellow cyclone of paint spiraled up toward Dave’s BlackBerry. The phone sucked all color into the speaker. What it left was gray walls and stony people, blank pictures and stale cookies behind the café counter. Only Bogdana’s sunflower complexion brought color to the colorless, odorless, voiceless, feelingless world that Dave entered.
“Dave? What’s wrong?”
Yellow was Elizabeth’s favorite color. Yellow was the favorite color of Dave’s first wife.
Dave didn’t respond. This world wouldn’t allow him to respond. He walked to one of the driftwood-made chairs and set his phone on a gray table. He looked at the window at the rain drops falling with silent splashes on the avenue.
He clutched his duffel bag. The only item Dave had left that provided any comfort from his warm home back in Pennsylvania and he thought.
He thought about how two years ago he had been out of the house when Elizabeth died. Her yellow tinged skin sucked all the color out of the walls of Dave’s living room and when the hospice workers came to take her, they never gave back the color.
Now the phone in front of him lay vibrating. Angela called, his daughters called, and strange numbers he didn’t know called.
The color was inside the phone. The screen flashed yellow. It was the only color left in the café and the only color that Dave remembered of Michael. So he sat there in that gray café. Dave sat there and let his yellow phone vibrate forever.