Grief Discount
by Diana Kole
The train emerged in Long Island City, tracking along an overpass by the Pulaski Bridge. I turned in my seat, toward the aisle; through the windows behind me diagonally, I could see the dark-glass towers of the Financial District, coming in and out of sight among the brighter glass of the new condos that had risen in this part of Queens in the past decade, maybe only in the past few years. I liked to walk across the Pulaski on windless days and look down at the geese that bobbed by the disused houseboats, but by the time I reached the other side, I never felt like venturing further: the other mouth of the bridge on the Long Island City side was tangled in so many onramps and offramps and wide avenues that I felt, at once, lost, and just wanted to be back in Greenpoint, a low-lying neighborhood with which I was familiar, of which I’d grown fond. Seeing the highways with their square patches of darker asphalt now didn’t make me feel that I’d missed anything. I lifted my shitty Amtrak coffee to my mouth and drank.
A child in the row in front of mine, a little boy in a chambray shirt, stood on his seat and turned to face me. Enough, the boy said. Enough!
I nodded.
The boy fixed me with a look. He seemed to be disappointed.
Enough, he said again. The kid was probably three years old. There were red blotches on his cheeks and neck. He was very cute, in a way I’d been prepared for by Western art of putti through the centuries. Blond curls.
The man beside the kid, who had a laptop open on his knees and was typing values into a nearly empty spreadsheet with two fingers, turned to look at me; I caught his eye before he looked back down. I didn’t know what he wanted to communicate. I could see that he wasn’t doing any work.
Then the man said, sharply: Liam. Sit down.
So this was his son. I could see that the man’s hair, over his left ear, curled in the same way, though it was darker. He had seemed so perfectly attuned to the rectangle of light coming from his laptop, so focused on that space above his knees. And all that time, his son was in front of him, sitting—until now—peacefully, having his own thoughts. The boy turned and slumped down; the back of his seat vibrated briefly and then was still. How strange, I thought, that a father can do that, stay enclosed in his own attention, living with his own sense of directionality, while his child is nearby, experiencing needs. There must have been another parent beside the boy—I could see a patch of black hair and a bare arm, reaching into his tiny lap. A mother.
I hated the spreadsheet man now, with a fervor I was almost shocked to feel. All you do, you fathers, I thought, is push your children back with a word when they intrude upon your little sphere of silence. Your son was trying to speak to you, I thought, and he has to have learned by now not to expect anything. Sit down. That’s all he could get out of you.
But I knew I was being unfair; I was using these strangers to throw me back into myself. Maybe Liam wasn’t this man’s son. Maybe they had a more complicated family than I understood. Maybe it wasn’t a family at all.
As I slid the bathroom door closed behind me and pulled down the little latch to lock it, I felt a flash of correspondence: I was, at once, ten years younger, intensely aware of my body as I had been at age twenty-one, feeling the click in my breathing that I’d been convinced then was the germ of an early death. The train was rocking in the present day and ten years earlier; I stood, for an instant that disintegrated as soon as I tried to name it, outside of time. Then the train gave a firm shudder, I threw my hand out to the little mirror to steady myself, and time was composed again of a sequence of almost-instants, stripped of the purity of what I had felt and had been unable to name.
I stepped toward the mirror, placed a hand flat on the glass, and leaned my forehead against it; I could feel the bones in my knuckles. I heard myself make a sound that wasn’t quite a gasp; I was crying, I knew, as though I were observing myself from above, as though my consciousness hovered over the train and sped along with it at a slight delay.
These instants outside of time were supposed to suffuse one with a taste of the infinite, were supposed to afford the prodrome of a joy that existed on a higher plane than the pleasures of love or the satisfactions of the intellect. I just felt collapsed. My lungs couldn’t bring enough air into my body. Maybe I had experienced timelessness wrong. Maybe I’d failed to use it, though for what, I couldn’t have said: all I knew was that for that instant, my mother wasn’t dead, and I wasn’t on my way to bury her. My nose was running and my face was wet. I reached for the paper towels and was startled at the sight of myself, so close in the smudged mirror; the whites of my eyes were visible below the irises.
I pressed at my face with a wet paper towel, uselessly. There was a knock on the door.
Sorry, I said, I’m sorry. One minute.
I wet another paper towel and wiped off my upper lip; I took a dry one and pressed it to my nose. With my hand on the latch, I closed my eyes. Thank you for this zone of privacy, I said silently to the walls, and then I opened the door. It was Liam and his mother, a radiantly beautiful woman wearing an expression of contempt. I stepped aside to let them in.
Back in my seat, I leaned, just slightly, into the aisle: the mute, huddled forms in the rows ahead of me had their heads bowed as if in prayer. Some were sleeping and had nodded onto their chests; some were on their phones. Who else, I thought, is experiencing psychic pain? Is in grief? On the few plane flights I took as a performatively morbid teenager, I’d always ask myself: Which of the other passengers is on their way to bury a parent? a child? a distant relative they actually despised?
Every major airline offered a grief discount; it had a different name in the language of official policy, something to do with bereavement, but grief discount was so much funnier. The single sharp syllable of grief, its archness, and then the utterly prosaic, commercial trochee of discount. To get the discount, you couldn’t just tick a box when you bought your plane ticket online; you had to speak with a representative on the phone and probably sound sufficiently mournful. I’d looked for the option, on the Delta website or whatever, and had been disappointed not to find it; I wanted to see how it might have been phrased. What is the purpose of your travel? Business; pleasure; death. Amtrak didn’t offer a grief discount. To bury my mother, I had paid full price.
Diana Kole is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Maisonneuve, and elsewhere. She holds an MS in narrative medicine from Columbia and is the recipient of a Tory Dent Fellowship in Creative Writing from NYU. She is at work on a novel.
