Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗

I booked a flight to Vienna leaving early the next morning. The flight departed later than Comstock’s flight, but arrived earlier. In his rush to get “the first flight out,” he overlooked the possibility that a later flight with no connections or layovers would get there sooner.

I tried to not let the enormity of the fact that I was going to Austria seep into my mind. I’d never been out of the country before; in fact, the only reason I already had a passport is because a few years ago the family planned a trip to Italy during my summer break. I was stoked about the vacation, had everything planned and had applied for my passport, but at the last minute the trip was called off — my dad couldn’t take the time off work.

If Amy had a passport, I’d have gotten her a flight too. I thought for a moment I could be like one of those guys who flies to Europe just to go to a restaurant he likes, but this airfare would eat my money away in no time. I’d always wanted to fly someplace in first class, and I’d looked into it for my flight the next morning, but it was $10,000 more than the coach seat. That seemed a bit much.

$10,000 for an eight hour flight, that’s $1,250 per hour just for a wider seat and hot towels. And better food. And unlimited drinks. And larger blankets. And video screens. And stewardesses who call you by your name. No, not worth it, I convinced myself again, even though I could totally afford it.

The working theory was that Comstock was taking all of his money to Vienna (which is illegal if you don’t claim the money at customs, the internet taught me) to put it away in an untraceable Austrian bank account. Why would someone do that? Surely interest rates would be better in the US; he must be doing it to hide the money, but why? The only reason I could think of was the same reason I’d considered moving my money to a Swiss bank account a few days earlier, when I thought people wanted to kill me for it.

Was Comstock afraid of something now? Amy said he acted nervous in school earlier today; that he asked about me and then suddenly clammed up. I thought back to when this whole thing was started, when I had overheard a phone call and thought that he was talking to somebody about me. “It might be expensive,” he said, right after saying he wasn’t sure if he could “make it float” and right before doling out no punishment for putting a few kids in the hospital and nearly punching a police officer. Whoever he was talking to on the phone, he was talking about me. Could they now be angry with him?

And who was he talking to? Was he talking to the John Doe with the pepper spray? Were they arranging some plot to get to my money? Have they been doing this for years, finding students or parents with lots of money and stealing it? Could he now be nervous because I ran a car into his partner-in-crime? Or could they just be pawns, working for someone else; someone from whom Comstock slyly asked for more money by saying “it might be expensive”? If that were the case, maybe that little act of rebellion made them unhappy. Maybe they wanted to know why I was now crashing cars into their guys and making scenes in grocery stores. Maybe Nathan Comstock is afraid for his life, so he’s getting himself and his money out of the country.

This is why everybody around here says Don’t Ask Questions.

It was late, and Amy left for home so I could pack and get some sleep before I had to be in D.C. by 6 AM. I told her I’d write when I got there, if they had the internet yet in Austria.

I would only be there for two nights, until Friday, so I didn’t need many clothes, but I had to pack a lot to make the knife in the suitcase stand out less.

Once I had everything set to go, I had a hard time sleeping. After an hour of rolling around my bed, I gave up and decided I’d sleep on the plane instead, which would help pass the time and might prevent the jet lag associated with an eight hour flight into a time zone six hours ahead of mine. I spent the night in bed, with the laptop positioned awkwardly across my stomach, reading anything I could about Austria or international travel tips. Nothing interesting.

And then it was time. The sun wasn’t even up, but I was out the door. I wore the most comfortable clothes I owned, had a small suitcase in one hand and my backpack (with laptop inside) in my other.

Dulles Airport was an hour’s drive, which seems like much longer when you’re pathetically tired and the sky is a dreary dark blue. I kept running all of my possessions through my mind, trying to think of whether I needed it and, if I did, did I bring it. It was a short trip. I could have made it with the clothes on my back and just bought the things I happened to need while over there, but I still wanted to be prepared.

The roads were dead, but when I got to the airport there was a flurry of activity. I parked my car in an $8-per-day lot and was bussed to the terminal. I retrieved my ticket and checked my luggage at the counter without any problems. After a half-hour in the security checkpoint line, I was through. Somehow, it seemed like I should have been faced with more obstacles. It was rather fortunate that I wasn’t, because I was so tired that my brain was working on backup power and it felt like I was wading through a thick soup with every step.

There was an hour before I had to be on the plane, so I wandered around the terminal for a while. I got some overpriced breakfast from the food court; a little wrapped-up egg thing that I knew would probably throw a pretty rowdy party in my stomach. I browsed through a condensed Borders bookstore and got a small textbook on foreign banking, and after much deliberation settled on a novel that looked interesting enough. On my way to the gate, I found an ATM that seemed to have no withdrawal limit so I took out a thousand dollars in cash from my savings account and walked it over to a currency exchange and turned it into euros. A few years ago, advice would say to stick with American dollars overseas, but the euro seemed to have changed that from what I’d read.

I’m just a dude with €700 in his pocket. Nothing unusual about that.

But there was something unusual, I knew. I was flying to Austria on a whim to try and find out what sordid business my school principal was conducting. I had a knife and seedy plans for how to get him to talk. This wasn’t normal. I began to wonder if this was my life now, if everything would be following shaky leads, snooping into bank and e-mail accounts, buying cars and crashing them into hitmen. God, the fact that I’d driven my car into a person had still not seeped through my skull into the reality center of my brain. Here I was again, moving without thinking, going from impulse to impulse, and reacting on-the-fly. This had to stop, I knew, and I hoped it would stop in Austria.

After the tedious process of gate-waiting and boarding, I sat in an uncomfortable seat somewhere in the middle of an Austrian Air jet plane. My tiredness was useful to keep me from freaking out about how cool-yet-unusual this all was. The flight crew ran through the safety demonstration in English, then German, but it all sounded muffled and distant to me. I closed my eyes and tried to let myself sink into slumber.

I woke up to the feel of G-forces tugging on my skin, hoped we were landing, but knew we were only taking off.

If you ever have the opportunity to sit in the same place for eight hours straight, I suggest you decline. I tried to tell myself it was just like school, but at school I at least could walk from class to class and utilize some motor function. Just sitting there, reading or trying to watch a DVD on the laptop, it felt like some kind of reasonably humane torture.

I started with the international banking book for research, but my immune system seemed to reject it as foreign, so I switched to the novel, which was pretty good; it was about a professional bodyguard and, if novels can be cited as sources, my suspicion a million years ago that bodyguards charge about a thousand bucks per day was confirmed.

Flight attendants came around once in a while, bringing drinks and pitiful sandwiches. I went to the bathroom twice, just to feel my legs work.

When the gods of time passage saw fit to declare that my