Frequent Flyer

Adam Bignell, 2020

I am the western world’s top scholar of Mecha Media, and in 2022 alone, I gave over 57 lectures in over 15 different countries with such alluring titles as Communing with Computers: The Mech-Body Problem, Particle Acceleration at Scale, MechaLove at Home and, my opus, In Defense of Railguns. I have participated in symposiums on each and every continent except Antarctica, which hardly counts. I fill lecture halls. I am the holder of a Guinness World Record for my sheer volume of collectible Gunpla. I am a moderator on not one, not two, but three separate forums dedicated to the discussion of all things Mech. I am the author of 2 textbooks taught at the 200 and 800 levels — Intro to Super Robots; Advanced Lectures on Laser Armaments— as well as one light novel series featuring a trio of moody high schoolers with favourable bone structures who, through the power of sheer will, friendship, and the occasional trip to the beach, must defend a futuristic Tokyo from an onslaught of frightful attackers. My speech is completely unaccented; I use Japanese honorifics deftly.

All of this can be pulled out from under you in an instant, as KLM flight 1797 made goose-pimplingly clear to me. Turbulence? Turbulence is the least of my airborne problems. In the 21st century, we should each and every one of us be thankful for such trite and surmountable problems as turbulence, warm soda, cardboardish, microwaved meals, and long periods of time without a cigarette. I long for the days when crying infants were the very worst of it.

I have a routine, a ritual. I book early, shell out a little extra for the window seat. I arrive way ahead of the crowd, briefcase in hand. I stand patiently at the gate, sometimes over an hour in advance so I can board at the earliest opportunity.

I step onto the plane, and am polite to each and every steward-person. I compliment the cheerful and beautiful KLM staff on the charming blue of their uniforms, eliciting smiles and the customary ‘Thank You for flying Royal Dutch Airlines’ in a tone that is charged with sincere human meaning.

At my seat, I flip through the offerings of the in-flight magazines. It’s always the same, and this brings me the comfort of knowing that the world is, in my middle age, mostly predictable. Mostly.

The high gloss mags offer me quote unbeatable deals on flights to Fiji, or somewhere equally tropical with a favourable exchange rate from the currency printed by my home nation. The magazine also preempts the steward-people, who halfway through the flight will offer me the chance to buy laughably small servings of whisky and wine, though will only accept payment via Visa and Mastercard. I have both.

After the mags, I check out the safety cards, on permanently bent and recently sanitized laminate that shows happy and well-adjusted people jumping onto a big, fun-looking inflatable slide that whisks them to the safety of a raft, totally unconcerned with the smoke pluming from their recently crashed transport. My peace deepens when I see their unconcerned, multi-ethnic clip-art grins, and I spend a few minutes gazing out at the tarmac, watching the security-vested workers driving unconventional and street-illegal vehicles that were made for airport-specific purposes. I ponder my station in life as a respected academic with subtle, discerning taste, and then I open my briefcase.

I am the proud owner of an Ultra-High DPI Wacom drawing tablet with patented PapyroGlide Tactile Response, along with a Hand-Adaptive Guaranteed No-Slip Bamboo-Inspired Smart Stylus. I never leave home without both, and at great expense purchased a custom briefcase that fits each in an individualized component snugly and safely.

KLM’s retractable plastic trays are the largest among the reliable name-brand airlines I have flown with, and I will occasionally incur long layovers and inconvenient flight times for the luxury of using them. As I did on flight 1797.

Out of my briefcase, I retrieve the aforementioned drawing technology. On KLM’s large tray-space, I can comfortably place the 13 inch Wacom miracle of technological invention and still have room for a tiny bottle of overpriced whisky. My ideal set-up for long flights. On worse, low-budget and knock-off brand airlines — whose staff I am virtually positive shake the complementary soda before giving it to you — I am occasionally forced to lay the Wacom tablet in my lap, limiting my stylus dexterity which results in shaky line-work. But not so on KLM.

I keep my anime organized obsessively across 4 different cloud storage services. My folder structure, from top-level root node to leaf, is this: All Anime, Decade, Year, Franchise, Series, Season, Episode. One memorial day long weekend, while my spouse and offspring were away, I also created an indexed database searchable by Subgenre, Art Style, B-plots, Aggregate Critical Score, and even Primary Weaponry. I have watched each and every episode in my legally-acquired collection, amounting to over 17,000 collective hours. For my standalone prints, I will often choose a set of episodes in advance. For these I get away with raw domain knowledge, but on commissions, the index is invaluable.

On 1797, I will be working on a commission, for which I have already been paid half of my typical artist’s fee of 499 United States Dollars. The critical requests were these: Lots of capes, orthodox Catholic imagery, a commander with colours in the 400 nm to 500 nm range, force-accelerated melee weaponry, and all of this rendered in an ‘80s art style. Some later emails had requested subtler details —  weathering should be ‘plausible’, the overall effect should be ‘hopeful’, and at least one human resembling my client’s daughter should be visible etc. These vague subjective ornamentations can occasionally be tricky, but the core requests will be a slam dunk.

I queue up the episodes I have short-listed for the flight: Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn RE:0096 Episode 4: Full Frontal's Pursuit, The ArXimedes Affair Season 3, Episode 21: Heaven Rising, The Vision of Escaflowne Episode 18: False Vows, Magic Knight Rayearth Episode 2: Presea, the Master Smith in the Forest of Silence, as well as the movie Macross FB7: Listen to My Song!. I can usually get a commission 80% done on my first intuitive selections, while the remaining 20% requires a bit of hunting for more obscure “inspiration”. Hence the index.

Next, I open up the drawing app Window Writer Premium, an app created by a tiny German development team with which, as their most impassioned and indebted user, I communicate frequently and with verve. The big and critical edge WWP has over all competing draw apps is something called ‘Alpha Mode’, which turns the by default opaque application background into a transparent ‘window’ (hence) allowing one to, for instance, pause one’s media player at an optimal scene, overlay the drawing application, and...

If you haven’t figured it out by now I might as well come out and say it. I am a fraud. I might be a legitimate scholar but I am an illegitimate artist. I profit off a gambit, a scam, a scheme. I own a 2020 Mercedes-Benz Gt 63 S 4MATIC+ — used, but still —  purchased with cash I tricked out of the wallets of well-meaning mech enthusiasts with misleading adjective phrases such as ‘hand drawn’ and ‘original’ and even ‘artisanal’. I’m a con-man, and a bad one at that: the audacity to commit my sins out in the open, in an airborne vehicle shared with over 100 other strangers proves it. What I mentally tout as ingenious efficiency, engaging in an in-flight side hustle that often produces works whose profits cover the flight itself, is in actual fact unalloyed, brazen idiocy. Don’t tempt fate folks.

We are cruising at 35k feet, and I’m almost done the line work on the mech commander. Ironically I’m just finishing up the details pulled from the wings of a duo called the Increased Luck Warriors in Escaflowne when my focus is broken by a beep overhead indicating that I can, if I wish, rise out of my seat and use the facilities. Peripherally, I see something that startles me.

My neighbour in the center seat is staring dead at my beloved Wacom tablet. How long was he watching? I turn to meet his eye and he sustains eye contact. A fearless man.

“Can I help you?”

“Ciao.”

“Have you been watching me?”

“The name’s Anton.”

I feel my pulse rising and I’m suddenly aware of the collar of my shirt sitting uncomfortably against my Adam's apple, bobbing as I compulsively swallow, just one of my nervous ticks. The space between my shoulder blades begins to sweat.

“If you don’t mind I’d appreciate it if you kept your eyes to yourself.”

“What are you working on there, friend?”

“Are you listening to what I’m saying?”

“Well I’m sitting in this here center seat, not much for me to look at straight ahead. Nothing interesting in the aisle. I was just looking at the window at what’s making out to be a beautiful night, and I notice that you’re working away pretty passionately, oblivious to the piercing silver of the full moon over the cloudscape just to your left.”

I turn out the window for a moment but I can’t focus on the endless wispy plains of clouds. I turn back, and the man is looking at my tablet again.

“Looks like you’re tracing one of those foreign cartoons. Got any kids? I’ve got a baby girl waiting at home. Here let me...” Anton is rummaging around in his jacket pocket, hard to find past the tangle of overlapping seatbelts, affording me precious moments in which to retrieve my conspicuously large and flat-response studio headphones from the front pouch of my special custom birefcase. My heart is pounding.

“Isn’t she just a pumpkin?” Anton forces me to gaze upon his average-looking child on the screen of his outdated iPhone.

“I have adult children, now if you’ll please leave me…”

“Hey now don’t be a —”

But enough is enough. I put on my headphones, give Anton a weak shrug, and play the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s arrangement of Cruel Angel’s Thesis to try and calm down. It doesn’t work.

I must have bumped the tablet when I was fishing around in my briefcase, as the Wacom tablet has unpaused and is playing the Escaflowne episode — mercifully on silent; I have learned this lesson the hard way — when I turn back to it. I have to fatfinger the little progress indicator in the media player to find the exact moment I paused, and at 30 fps this is no easy task. All the while my fraudulent line work is conspicuously overlaid against the artisanal Escaflowne team’s artwork of yore. Finally, I find the frame that fills in all my line work, and I try to play it cool. I’m aware that putting away my Wacom tablet now would be even more suspicious than continuing on, and so I continue on.

But I can feel Anton’s gaze. He’s watching. I can tell, peripherally, by the angle of his face. The doomsday scenarios are flying through my head, and the quality of my linework drops starkly. What if Anton is GenoDad, the very client who already paid 50% of my rate up front for an original, hand drawn and implicitly non-composite and non-traced mecha design by an esteemed scholar of mecha media? What if Anton is on the international council of artistry ethics, and is at this very moment considering the ways to mount an adept legal assault not only against my airborne side-hustle but against the very content of my personal and otherwise honest character? In the best case scenario, Anton probably thinks I’m a sad, weird hobbyist with a weird infantilizing obsession with vintage robots. I mentally pray to god that the latter is the case.

And it probably is... right? I mean what are the chances? But then again… I am flying from EuroSakura, Northern Europe’s premier anime convention. There must be some attendees afoot. For sure the duo a few seats up, in candy-coloured wigs, at the very least…

But Anton doesn’t seem like the type. Then again, neither do I.

An hour passes before I’ve finished the line work, and it’s not my best. I am just getting started on the base layer of shading when he taps my shoulder. I’m forced by my weak social composure to remove my headphones. I’ve been too deep in rumination hell to even notice I’ve been listening to the Chicago Symphony on loop this whole time.

“Is that Gundam?”

Shit. He knows Gundam. But everyone does... right? And if he was a hardcore otaku, surely he’d recognize...

“Escaflowne, actually, it’s a bit obsc —”

“How could I forget! Ah, my mom’s old favourite, she can’t get enough of those weird elongated ‘80s drawings. Those were the days, weren’t they? Anyways, I’ll leave you to it. Great colour-layering by the way.”

Images of a total fuselage annihilation soothe me. 

Anton doesn’t bother me for a few more hours. I try to be productive but all I can think of are high security, easy-on-the-human-rights correctional facilities. For the first time in its multi-year lifespan my Guaranteed No-Slip Stylus slips: Wacom must have not expected their users’s fingers to sweat as much as mine are. My hands leave smudges of oil across the beautiful scratch-proof glass of the Wacom screen. My shirt is sticking to my back and I can feel the redness of my ears throbbing inside my noise-cancelling headphones.

The steward-person gives me a questioning look when I answer ‘both’ to ‘wine or whisky?’. I deplete the whisky quickly, but it just makes the Cell Block X of my mind’s eye more ruthless: My imagined cellmate berates me daily for having mispronounced Code Geass for over a decade, a factoid he could only have garnished from close correspondence with my sworn enemies among my now ex-university’s faculty, a very real factoid that rains shame down on my psyche to this day.

The commissioned piece is going to need serious work. In my paranoid and drunken stupor, I have sloppily allowed certain shades that are undoubtedly supra 500 nm to sully the force-core of the commander’s Mark V central chassis. That’s green alright. Am I an amateur? What’s happening to me?

Once more Anton taps me on the shoulder.

“You know I think I might recognize you. You didn’t speak at a convention this past week did you?” Has he been leading me on this whole time? Playing dumb to get me to talk? I have to stop myself from telling Anton to save it for my attorney.

“Oh me? No way, just a —”

“Ah don’t be coy Doc. You’re a bit of a hot shot in the community. Hell, I read your textbook in college.” I feel my lower half clench. Deplaning cannot come quickly enough. I need out. Do I have the right to remain silent with Anton?

“Forgive me, I don’t remember your first name but it’s… Dr. Flores, right?” He’s right. Lord help me. I try desperately to be casual but my voice comes out in a waver. Anton is a big man.

“Heh! Uh oh! I’m caught!” I clap my hands to my cheeks in a vaudeville melodrama, and immediately feel absurd. A passing steward-person visibly winces when she sees me.

But suddenly I have an out: the seatbelt light flickers off again — When was it turned back on? — and I use my legitimate need to go to the restroom as an excuse to pack up my drawing gear. My hands are shaky, and I drop the stylus. It bounces off of Anton’s expensive-looking leather loafers. He makes a sound like Ope! and politely retrieves the stylus for me. As he hands it to me, he makes eye contact and can tell something is up.

“Alright there champ?” 

“Just need to use the…” I point vaguely up the plane. Anton looks pained in concerned air-traveller empathy as he and the recently awoken pregnant woman, a woman whose distended abdomen I haven’t even mentally registered until now, shuffle out into the aisle.

I emit a nervous, dry laugh, and scurry down the plane to the undersized toilet.

Pregnant women are somewhat mech-like, aren’t they? Could make for a conference paper... The thought comes to me like a portent of total mental collapse.

I’m white-knuckling it, gripping the edges of the tiny plastic sink, staring at my sunken eyes in the mirror. My breath keeps fogging and unfogging my reflection. Get a hold of yourself! You’re a doctor christ’s sake. Your name has suffixes. Anton’s nobody, a complete stranger. Might as well be a ghost, a passing face that’ll be forgotten by next week. I try splashing water on my face but even this is challenging in the limited space. Plus, the faucet requires one hand to be actively pressing a small glyphed lever before it will emit water, so I am afforded only one palmful at a time. I go for three, back to back. I splash the last across my brow and reach for the — You can’t be serious. The paper towel is depleted, and I know better to use toilet paper — another lesson I learned the hard way, when one of my students pointed out that I had been lecturing for over forty five minutes with a face covered in little white TP remnants.

I try to let my face drip-dry, but I realize that I’m moist with sweat as much as with water. I take another handful of water and re-rinse my face, then untuck my shirt — it’s already wet — and dry off my brow as best I can.

To my horror someone knocks on the door and asks if I’m alright. How long have I been in here, staring at my reflection in the mirror, pondering if I’ll have to beat someone up on my first day in high-security gang-affiliated prison to assert myself on the better end of a hierarchy?

“Just a minute.” I compose myself. I tuck in my shirt. The flight’s got to be close to over.

“Sir the seat belt sign has just been turned on, you’ll need to be finishing up.”

First the alcohol and now this. I can feel my good will with the Olympian KLM staff attenuating by the second.

Finally I leave the restroom, and am subjected to a dirty look by both a father and his young son, who looks aggrieved at the wait I have imposed on them. I keep my head low and make it back to my seat, where Anton and the pregnant aisle-seat lady shuffle out of their seats to allow me passage.

“You okay buddy? We were starting to get worried.” The woman nodded. We? Another witness. I can picture the woman, newborn in her arms, testifying against me on the stand, by way of a direct and unambiguously extended index finger. “That’s the monster who’s been defrauding innocent Japanese-media enthusiasts.” Tomatoes are thrown.

Moments after I sit down, the landing announcement is played in Dutch and English. Thank god. The nightmare is ending. I sit way back in my chair with my eyes closed, feeling sticky and worn out.

On our descent, Anton breaks the silence — isn’t this an unspoken rule? That we stay positively silent during the momentous and dramatic landing?

“Let me get a picture Doc. The kid’s going to love it.” He’s rooting around in his pockets again. When will the torment cease?

“Guess they were sold out of first class, hey? What’s a big shot like you doing with the unwashed masses?” His extended arm forces the pregnant woman to adjust her sitting posture, and she seems oddly unbothered.

“I’d really rather —” Too late. His arm’s around me before I can protest, and I’m held in place as he snaps a selfie at arm’s length.

“Now that’s a keeper.” Anton turns his phone towards me, and it is not. I look as though I have just undergone waterboarding, and my teeth are exposed in what can only be called a grimace.

“Oh! Here we go.” The descent can now be felt. Finally Anton sits with his hands folded in his lap, and I put my head back once more and close my eyes. I have heard that by far the landing is the most probable time that a plane is going to explode in a tragic morning news fireball, and I’m doing the mental calculus if this would be a better outcome than Cell Block X when the landing gear finally bumps against concrete.

We’re almost done. The plane pulls across the tarmac, and a familiar bing sounds, followed by the near pavlovian releasing of over a hundred seat belts, and people begin standing, Anton included. Eventually it is our turn to enter the aisle, and Anton presumptuously grabs what he correctly assumes is my carry-on from the overhead bin.

As he hands it to me, he leans way, uncomfortably in and whispers nightmare fuel directly into my ear.

“Oh, and FlorianFifty...”

My blood runs cold. It can’t be. My DeviantArt username. Only the most diehard follower would have been able to put the pieces together. I’m through. Finitio. A dead man walking. A future class-action lawsuit defendant. An orange jumpsuited penitent. A Cell Block X resident. The bottom feeder of the jailyards. The jig is up. I’m finished. Prepare for the wake. Tell my wife I love her. Tell my daughters to be better. I gambled big and lost hard. Sometimes you — 

“...Your secret’s safe with me.” He claps me on the back and is off.

Sometimes you make it out alive.