Red Eye to Keflavík

Chapter 1 of Search For a Dancer, a serial memoir about a week I spent in Iceland. Mondays on Flippism is the Key

The egalitarian boarding procedures of Icelandair are commendable. People who need extra time first, then First Class, everyone else next. No myriad class divisions. To actually sit in First Class, however, will cost you plenty.

I was taking a flight (that might well be my last Icelandic hurrah) in a use-it-or-lose-it situation, the ticket I had was a replacement for a Covid-cancelled flight in 2020. I’d done this trip to Iceland many other times over the last twenty-two years each one was: rejuvenating; a celebration; an obsession; a search; an escape. Party for one, row 10, window seat A. Over the wing, but it really didn’t matter much as it will be dark the whole way. I was in a new jet—a 737 MAX—but I didn’t dwell on those crashes, they’d worked out all the bugs, amiright? The thrum of the engines are a lullaby for this jaded traveler, a prelude to takeoff. The ground crews on the tarmac are few on Sunday nights at MSP Terminal 2, I think this is the last flight east for the night.

An advantage of doing several repeat trips to the same destination is that planning is a breeze. You’ve done the drill, you know your options, you can plan for some free time i.e., in the hot-pots at the neighborhood swimming pool. Being in Reykjavík always offers you more opportunities for things that than you could ever experience at home, especially when there is a music festival going on at the same time as the height of the theatre season. And then there are the women. The sprakkar. More about them in due course.

The announcement that the cabin is sealed is a good omen—no one else had come to sit in my row. Any red-eye flight is a struggle with comfort, but being able to snuggle into the wall with my legs extended over the other two seats a least offers an opportunity for some fitful sleep. As soon as we took off I was into hibernation mode…

“… old gigs experienced in Iceland, superimposed upon expectations of the upcoming shows, dreaming of the future, are these premonitions any less real that those past memories of when I was in a band and those wild nights from my youth, almost every one a hallucination… desire commingled with elation… ‘Halcyon days’ is what my old friend Jim called those times; an idyll that came to an abrupt end with murder at a gig on Washington Avenue—typical Northside shenanigans—we’d been circling blithely around this dance of death for years… music, dancing, liquor, grass and other mind-altering substances the group’s performances were, in reality, a strange facilitation of communal foreplay… breaking down the inhibitions of socially retarded young people… love and death in a pas de deux… these trips to Ultima Thule an attempt to erase those sordid escapades from my youth… Iceland, on its surface, was clean and welcoming in that first visit twenty-two years ago… subsequent trips opened up my eyes… getting to know some of the people there revealed the darker sides of the island but the darkness an order of magnitude less than dismal cesspool of my youthful nightlife… that was my life… it’s no good life… ”

The seat-belt chime. Turbulence over Thunder Bay, an isolated front, an anomaly, climbing over it, ignoring it as sleep returns…

… A café in a Scandinavian capital…
-We meet again. Good to see you.
-Have some tea with me?
-I'd better not.
-You aren't so surprised to see me now.
-I'll admit it, the first few times were a bit unsettling but it is rather nice when you show up in my dream every once in a while.
-Enjoying your visit to our fair city?
-Of course, whether awake or asleep, it is always a kick to be here.
-I can't stay long, I've got a party tonight…
-Of course, good bye…
… the dream shifts to a street scene… Laugavegur… twilight… walking down the hill towards Bankastræti… three young wanna-be toughs eyeing me a a potential mark…I put on my wild-eyed stare and they turn away to look for an easier target… the sound of breaking glass… a son of privilege is smashing the bottles in a sack toted by an old man… a scrounger for recyclables, people ignore the sad tableaux… I turn on to Ingólfstræti just in time to see a woman in despair over the vandalism to her car’s side-mirror, its broken shards glitter like diamonds beneath it on the street, perhaps the perp was the same hooligan… in Kolaportið, the flea market by the harbour, there is a woman selling books, with bruises on her face…

Awake again, the flight progress map showed us situated over Greenland, a little more than halfway. Were any sleepless Inuits below aware of this aluminum tube soaring over their frigid homeland? I reset my watch to GMT. I was probably not going to be able to get back to my dream-state, but I closed my eyes anyway, these night flights are relatively quiet as far as activity, the low roar of the jet engines mask any conversations, even the steady parade of bladders on their way to be emptied has come to a halt. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again the plane was in glide mode, it wouldn’t be long until we landed and my adventure began for real.

The captain’s voice saying “Velkominn heim… ” came over the cabin P.A.


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