Choking Story

“I am surely choking,” he thought. This could have been nervousness, or just the last button on his shirt creeping up and rubbing against his Adam’s apple. Several times amid the AirFrance jumbo full of backpackers on walkabouts, the jet-set, the American tourists, he felt a trickle of sweat run down his face onto the broadcloth of his expensive shirt, darkening the blue pinstripe fabric.

Nobody asked questions. Nobody asked him to open his luggage.

Perhaps the security people were busy with a baby stroller. An old lady in a wheelchair. Perhaps he talked his way into something, out of something. He was worried that they wouldn’t let him on the plane with such a large, heavy carry-on bag. He was mostly worried about the X-ray at the security gate. He removed his shoes when he got on the plane. He relaxed. He started to feel confident, which was a good thing.

There were a few more drips of sweat. First, when the flight attendant asked him to return his seat to an upright position upon initial approach into the Charles de Gaulle Airport; and second, when the taxi driver commented on the heaviness of the luggage and he couldn’t think of what to say next. He hadn’t planned that far. He even said so. “I don’t know why,” he said. “I haven’t thought ahead that far.”

He made it to the bateaux mouche; it had been planned. Besides, he didn’t know anywhere else in the city. And he floated past antique bridges and one-of-a-kind street lamps. And the water was probably colder than he imagined, (Paris in March?) but it wasn’t like canoe trips back home when he was a kid, now was it? It wasn’t like he could just reach down and stick his god-damned fingers in the god-damned Seine, now was it?