Diary,
If memory serves me right (and it does on this occasion), there was a time I flew from Chicago to Nairobi. One of the flight stewards was a beautiful Swedish woman called Klara.
Long story short, Klara and I sparked a fire 30,000 feet above sea level. It culminated in her inviting me to join the mile-high club. Well, if like me back then you don’t know what that is, it is a glorious situation where two consenting adults indulge in awkward lovemaking inside a cramped airplane toilet.
Needless to say, I thought the mile-high club meant an unnecessary upgrade and more charges I didn’t need. So, I declined. Of course, I wanted to kick my ass when I landed and realised what I had missed. Now that I’m flying to India for a study on perpetual bachelors, I’m more than determined to make things right this time.
Luckily, my next-seat partner is a young woman who appears to be in her twenties, and judging by the death grip on her armrest as we taxi to the runway, she must be deathly afraid of flying. That’s my “in”. Next stop, mile-high club.
“Are you a virgin?” I ask, flashing a beatific smile.
She momentarily forgets about dying in a fiery crash and pierces me with a set of brilliant-brown eyes that would be beautiful if not so full of sudden rage. “I beg your pardon?”
“A virgin to flying, is what I meant. Is this your first time?”
“What is it with you men and sex? Must everything be measured against copulation?”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Oh, you know what the hell I mean. To accommodate for puny sexual organs, you buy the largest and longest vehicles on the road. You compete to build the tallest rockets and sky scrapers all shaped—”
“Like penises?” I interpose. “That’s so basic. What other shapes are there to choose from — horizontal ground scrapers?”
She smiles nervously and shakes her head. “Even your language is hyper-sexualised. Climbers ‘conquering’ mountains, businessmen ‘penetrating’ a market to ‘dominate’ competition.”
“You mean like ‘mastering’ a system?”
Now she laughs openly. “You’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”
“Think about it, though. Isn’t life all about sex? What’s the number one prerogative of any species? Self-propagation. To multiply and fill the earth. Basically, everything that’s alive, plant of animal, lives to have sex.”
“Yeah? What about the whiptail lizards?”
“What about them?”
“It’s an all-female species that reproduce through parthenogenesis.”
Now I’m properly impressed. The young woman might display an irrational fear for the safest form of transportation, but she’s remarkably smart.
“Parthenogenesis. You mean where an embryo develops from an unfertilised egg, allowing an organism to reproduce without a mate?”
“I could mention several other species if you like.”
Several other species… This rubs me all kinds of wrong ways. Is she serious or is there a screw loose somewhere inside her pretty head? Normal human beings don’t possess such particular information just to rebuff sex.
“You don’t happen to be a whiptail lizard, do you?” I ask.
“You’re such a crude man, you know that?”
“But even crude men have a purpose, you know. There. Look out of the window.”
She does so unwillingly but then she smiles gloriously. “Oh my God! We’re in the air!”
“And you never even noticed it, did you?”
She makes a dubious face. “C’mon. You want to say you were being deliberately rude to distract me?”
“It worked, didn’t it?” I extend my hand. “Name’s Tom, on my way to Agra for a singles convention.”
She shakes my hand. “Nice to meet you, Tom. Name’s Wacu, on my way to Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, to become a nun.”
Talk about hitting a dead end.
