Jennifer’s hand was tense around me like a spring coil, her gait brisk and energized. I could sense she was anxious. Her pulse throbbed through her thumbpad, pressed into my chest, at times making me confuse her rapid heartbeat for my own. But mine was probably not going much slower.
I didn’t need to hand anything over at the baggage handling desk; my luggage was so small it fit in a single carry-on bag which would come aboard with me. After checking me in and getting my boarding pass, she took a seat in the corner of an airport café, offside the main walkways of public exposure, putting me down on the table. One of the things about being so small; people didn’t tend to see me unless they stopped and looked hard, plus Jen had the tendency of cupping her hand around me to forestall unwanted attention.
Now she rolled up my shirt hem and delicately ran her pinky finger over my stomach, probing in an exploratory way. Fuzz was starting to push up over my stomach since the Vet had shaved it off. The incision line running along my lower belly was red in areas and prickled a little at her touch, but the wound was closed and the stitches were gone. Still, I must have recoiled unconsciously at the physical contact, and she’d sensed it.
“DOES IT STILL HURT?” she enquired quietly.
“No,” I said, self-consciously pushing at her hand.
“NO AIRPORT PHARMACY,” she lamented, “BUT YOU STILL HAVE SOME REMAINING OXYCODONE,” – the Vet had prescribed me this after my surgery “—I GOT IT IN MY PURSE IF YOU WANT SOME BEFORE YOU GET ON THE PLANE.”
“I don’t need it. But why is it in your purse…?”
She scoffed, feigning indignation.
“DON’T WORRY, YOU. THE AMOUNT YOU WERE PRESCRIBED IS LIKE TABLE SALT TO ME.”
“It’s fine. It doesn’t hurt.” I rolled my shirt down.
“GOOD,” she tickled under my chin and gave me a quick wink: “AND ANYWAY, I’M MORE OF A VODKA GIRL.”
After we passed through the security gates, we went to a customer service reception, where an assistance officer would escort me onto the plane. She took a seat in a waiting bay, holding me on her thigh, her fingers curled behind me like the backrest of a chair. One of her fingers was tucked against my front, but roaming me as if to satisfy an anxious compulsion, and kept sliding under my top up to trace the scar on my belly with her nail, as if needing to check it again had all healed properly. I didn’t squirm, but just let her do it, enjoying her warm touch, which was calming my own nerves, while trying to ignore the prickling sensation of her nail against my slightly tender wound area.
Looking around she suddenly exclaimed, glibly:
"HOW CAN YOU BE SO SMALL AND YET SO BUSY AT THE SAME TIME? HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?”
“Well, I have a job now.”
“YOU ALREADY HAVE A JOB. YOUR JOB IS TO STAND AROUND AND LOOK ADORABLE.”
"This gives me an outlet. And a wage."
“YOU HAVE MONEY.”
“I’m getting paid for doing something other than just being some sad little tiny person.”
"I'M SUPPOSED TO BE THE BREADWINNER HERE!” she said, feigning annoyance, “I'M THE ONE WHO GOES TO WORK AND YOU’RE THE LUCKY LITTLE GUY WHO GETS TO MASSAGE MY FEET WHEN I GET HOME."
“You told me I should try it,” I pointed out.
“YEAH,” she said slowly. “I KNOW. I MEANT IT. THERE’S JUST A LOT GOING ON; I WANT YOU TO BE READY FOR IT ALL.”
“I will be.”
“CALL ME WHEN YOU LAND, LITTLE PILOT.”
“I promise.”
I reached my hand up towards her, making a grabbing motion. She could already read my mind, and brought me up against her lips for a relatively chaste kiss, a peck, although, due to the sheer size of her lips compared to my face, even a chaste kiss could be steamy and overpowering on my end.
“Love you, kitten,” I said after turning my head to the side.
Her eyes flew open and I was dropped from her face again. She didn’t like that one. A fingernail flew forward and uncurled rapidly in front of my face, giving my nose a small flick.
The assistance officer appeared, wheeling a cart with a booster seat in it. I was strapped into the booster seat.
"ALL SET…?" Jen said, observing me, “SURE YOU DON’T NEED ANYTHING?”
"I’m fine, really," I grunted. "I'm a grown man." Yet, it was painfully obvious I was strapped up in a tiny seat like a small child. And I was much, much smaller than a small child.
"YOU'RE A MAN," she said, giving my cheek a teasing poke, "BUT I NEED SOME CONVINCING ON THE OTHER PART."
"I can figure it out." She was acting like I was a little kid going off to my first day at school. Or, a baby going off to playschool.
Then the officer was wheeling me past the boarding gates, through the glass-walled jet bridge into the plane. At the plane’s entrance, the officer took me up in the booster seat, and carried it down the plane aisle to a seat at the back, just outside the galley, the area where the food was stored.
The officer attached the booster seat to the regular seat, and I was given a special little remote to control the TV, and an earphone which I draped around my neck.
After take-off, I soon drifted to sleep. During the flight, I was awoken as one of the flight attendants with a powdered complexion emerged from the galley bringing me tiny packeted meals and drinks.
She knelt by my chair and, with everyone around either sleeping or with headphones on, she said in a hushed voice:
“EXCUSE ME, ARE YOU JERRY MOUSSEAU?”
“Yes,” I replied, warily eyeing her suppressed smile at the sight of me.
“DON’T MEAN TO BOTHER YOU, BUT I SAW YOU ON TV AND JUST WANTED TO SAY HI. NEVER THOUGHT I’D SEE YOU HERE. YOU’RE AN ACTIVE LITTLE GUY. BUT IT’S REALLY NICE TO SEE.”
“Thank you.”
She stroked my arm with a finger and then stood and departed again.
Growing up, I used to be a bad traveller, the childish impatience of waiting. Now that I'd grown down, I loved it: the waiting was tinged with anticipation of something different, something more, something bigger. The flight was calm but I was too anxious to sleep, or even pay attention to an in-flight movie. With some music playing through my earphone the plane touched down at the big, lit up St Palma airport.
As most of the other passengers disembarked, one of the flight attendant’s detached my booster chair, and carried it – with me still strapped inside, plus my carry-on bag – off the plane, where I was transferred to another customer service officer, who wheeled me on a cart to the arrival gate.
The guy with sunglasses and gel-slicked hair who strode up to us wasn’t even carrying a sign that said my name, he rightly knew I’d be instantly recognizable. Farris had set me up with him; he was arranged to be my driver, or as Farris had put it ‘Gofer.’
“HEY THERE, CHIEF, SO…” he said somewhat awkwardly, sizing me up with his eyes. It made me wonder if he’d seen the TV special about me, or if this was the first time he’d seen someone my size.
"Hi," I said quickly, "Rafael Simon, right?"
"LET’S JUST GO WITH RAF. AND YOU'RE JERRY. COOL?"
"Cool," I nodded.
He extended the pad of his index finger upwards at my chest and I slipped my hand onto it to shake his ‘hand’. Then he hefted the booster seat up – me still inside – and took it out into the parking area, along with my carry-on.
“LIGHT,” he joked, “BARE ESSENTIALS ONLY.”
He put the booster seat into the shotgun position, but, unsatisfied, stacked it onto a duffel bag and strapping it in place to the headrest. The bag’s elevation enabled me to look out the window.
Although warm, light rain pattered against the roof of the white Chrysler while Raf turned the radio up, music from a station I’d never heard of before.
“YOU WANT ME TO TURN THIS JUNK OFF,” Raf indicated, “JUST LET ME KNOW. TOO HOT? COLD?” He indicated the air conditioner dial – vents currently fanning out mildly cool air – it had just occurred to him the controls were out of my reach.
“It doesn’t bother me,” I said.
The car rumbled down the streets to the Tiferno District, just outside the main St Palma metro area.
Car lights blurred and streaked past the windows. The sun was disappearing behind the skyline, gradually being replaced by the orange sodium street lights flicking on, and I was already feeling the first pangs of homesickness, plus a jolt of disbelief at myself that I’d agreed to make such a big move – if only during weekdays, or whatever my work schedule required. It was as if someone else had inhabited my brain and signed me up for it, and now – with the new cityscape scrolling past too fast to acclimatize to – the magnitude of it was in full swing.
Now that we were heading through a residential area of Tiferno in the foothills – my apartment was supposed to be around here – Raf began detouring to give me a general lay of the land.
“THAT’S THE BOWLING ALLEY,” he was saying, gesturing out the window at a passing building with a retro-styled glowing block-lettered sign, “BUT – ERR – ” he seemed to realize what he was saying, “MAYBE NOT YOUR STYLE.” He quickly gestured somewhere else. “OH, THAT’S THE GYM. MY EX WORKS THERE, SHE’S A PERSONAL TRAINER. YOU ALSO GOT A POOL, SPA, SAUNA...” he paused, as if trying to imagine how I would physically use any of those facilities.
I stopped him.
“Would your ex see me?”
“JUST GOTTA BOOK AND TALK TO HER. YOU GOT A PHONE? I’LL GIVE YOU HER NUMBER.”
I did have a phone now; a miniature phone, one of the tiniest on sale. It wasn’t a smart phone, but a flip phone, and the inside of the panel that flipped up made a functional touch screen. To me, it was as big as a tablet or laptop, but I could carry it around, if not in my pocket.
The car turned into a cul-de-sac and pulled up outside the small beige stucco apartment building; my lodgings while I was in town. It stood up on an incline overlooking residential streets that ran down the valley into the Tiferno commercial strips, and I fell in love with the elevation above ground level, looking down on all the inner city-dwellers. Plus, it had a weekly cleaning and laundry service – for me, absolutely necessary.
Before we went inside, Raf input his ex’s number into my phone, then took me inside my room. It was the smallest in the apartment, cramped by normal standards, a single room doubling as kitchen and dining space. He then helped me set up some string ladders packed in my carry-on; one for the bathroom sink, kitchen counter, bedside table (from which I could then leap onto the normal sized bed). He also installed some bathroom sink valves that turned with feather soft touch, so I would be able to easily run myself baths.
There was a slight complication with food prep: I couldn’t open the fridge. For now, Raf went downstairs to the street corner café right next door to the apartment and brought me up some food, enough to last me for the rest of the day, plus leftover. Before he left, he left a slit open in my bedroom window for a cool breeze.
That evening, after running a bath to check the sink valves were functioning properly, I lay on my bed with some food as the typical city smells wafted in through the gap in the window: gasoline fumes, petrichor on concrete from the previous rainfall, cigarette smoke from pedestrians passing by on the pavement below, burnt rubber of braking tires (accompanied by screeching sounds), and the sultry food aromas from the corner café’s vents.
I sat on my normal sized bed and settled into my bedroom, hunched over my phone, lying on the mattress before my crossed legs, and then dialed Jen’s mobile.
“Where’s my little man?” she said.
“I’m at the apartment. Raf picked me up at the airport. He’s my gofer – I mean, driver. What are you doing?”
“Just had dinner. Tell me about your pad.”
“The layout is a little cute and generic. Like a dollhouse but it's giant – I mean, from my point of view – which is weird."
Later that night, I took a warm bath to relax, and then searched for my superman costume, which I used as a pyjama onesie, but it wasn’t among my luggage; I must have forgotten to pack it.
Outside, the night had come to life, the air shimmered with urban noise: the traffic droned past the street below the window, and even once the sky got dark, when, if anything, it was louder; including the revvs and turbocharger pops, whirling emergency sirens. Even throughout the night I stirred to sounds, continually rediscovering myself – not back home – but alone, tucked into my swimming pool sized bed, the neon sign casting a wan artificial light patch, while jarringly animated 2 AM apartment deck conversations pattered outside, with occasional dogs barking and rattling chainlink fences.
Sometime after 2 AM sleep became more peaceful. Back home, Jen’s body heat was great to burrow into on cold mornings, but sharing the bed as we did also came with the risk of being accidentally squashed under a relocating arm, rolled around by mattress depressions, or blasted by a furnace of morning breath. It had been a long time since I’d slept on my own in a bed. With my eyes closed it was almost like being big again, the nostalgia was not completely unwelcome, and as it overcame and swept away the homesickness, I eased into sleep.