Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
He Thought, Therefore He Was
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
I arrive at Heathrow airport during a soaking rain so wet and dark I can hardly see the tarmac. 6:23 am.
For morning flights out of London, the United lounge has the best bacon butties. Airport lounges, like pubs, are places where accidental conversations and free-hearted confessions with complete strangers can occur.
We first noticed each other at the snack bar, both of us examining the breakfast buffet. When coincidentally we ended up across from each other at a shiny white Formica tabletop, I offered a fellow bacon-butty-devotee a we-are-stuck-here-together “hello.”
The corners of his mouth tightened into a feeble smile. I’ve seen happier smiles on death masks.
Compared to my forty-six-year-old body, he is athletic, trim, fit. In his late 20s and wearing a dark navy hoodie, tan slacks and flip flops, I take him for a college student. I’m half right.
He has just dropped out of Princeton, he says. A leave of absence, he says. To get over a broken heart, he says.
When his girlfriend, now ex-girlfriend, beheaded their relationship, he decided to escape or, in the modern idiom, move on. A brain remains conscious after being decapitated.
The awful moment he was guillotined occurred at a party. As he tells me, he overheard his girlfriend—the smartest, sexiest, most wonderful student on campus—announce to her friends, “My boyfriend is taking theater arts classes. He’s a crap actor. I can’t stand going to his performances.”
“She knew, had to know, I was within earshot,” he says. I say nothing but decide his former girlfriend must also be the most insensitive student on campus. In an instant of solidarity, I hate her.
“At first, I tried to ignore what I had heard. My most successful acting role,” he adds with a half-laugh, half-grimace. He cast himself as the anti-hero in a play with no exits, no lines, no curtain calls.
Humiliated, he dropped out of school. He fled to England, a country filled with the fumes of failed Shakespearean actors.
One day out for a London walkabout, he stopped curbside. He considered looking the wrong way before stepping out in front of an on-rushing double-decker bus. A suicidal death at a time and place of his choosing, he says. A final attempt at re-empowering himself.
Like a jumbo jet revving for takeoff, his words come faster, louder. If it’s possible to scream in a monotone whisper, he is screaming like a Munch painting. His words sting me like a pelting hailstorm.
His flight is announced. His lament interrupted. To Istanbul, he says.
As he reaches for his backpack, he says travel is a distraction, a displacement. I say nothing, but I know well the traveler’s trick of running towards something while running away from something.
Cheaper than a therapist, he adds. A tear forms in the corner of his eye.
Something in my eye, he says. A speck of flour, he says. From the bacon butty roll, he says.
