....At the point when he double-hovers - between the dream and the reality, between the sky and the earth - he gets scared.
....He falls asleep on a plane.
....The rational trust disappears, transparent at first, then more so, then replaced by a simple, sound and wrong estimate: I am 30,000 feet above the firm ground in a steel container, and it has a beginning and end.
....The fear is both simple and plain.
....So, here, in the leather seats of first class, half-asleep (this "half" is very important), he very tangibly faces his fear.
....Of death, not of flying. Of nothingness, non-being.
....The avalanche is so simple that he's surprised he can stop it in reality: happy he is not, smiling even less, and only the worst half of his life is left, the one he will crown with soiled underwear, red eyes, hairy ears, helplessness (desperate helplessness, because there's no tomorrow), people running away from him, from his smell and from the mistress he carries on his shoulders because they don't want to watch her swinging as she rides on top of him.
....Amid the avalanche, he remembers he doesn't have the stomach nor the time for children, and there's some vague sadness in that.
....Vague, since he never wanted to have children.
....Then he remembers his older colleague with a bald head. They are standing in the parking lot in front of the hotel, 3-4 in the morning, and he feels free or intimate enough to ask about children. (Strange, he always asks older colleagues whether one should have children. And when.) Or, perhaps, the slightly hunchbacked colleague offered himself, said it on his own. He said he was sorry he didn't provide that pleasure to his wife. Now, he already likes behaving like an old man, he walks like an old man, talks like an old man, likes being an old man - as a mutual co-worker once said.
....The next day he is awake and on the ground. Because of the jet-lag, he's got a bit of dream in his reality, but pleasant, like a cloud in the eye.
....And then he remembers that he'll fuck with women most beautiful, that he'll tenderly touch their faces with the tips of his fingers and with his lips, that he'll tell them from the depth of his heart they are beautiful, that he won't believe his luck he is with such most beautiful, slim, dark beauties - a deer in their walk, that as he feels their long, endless legs on his ribs, hips, thighs and shoulders, as he turns around to see whether they have straightened, or hold their feet at a 90-degree angle, as he rubs their torsos with his, leaving seven curly little hairs on their white tits, as they laugh with gusto and as he feels their insides on the tip of his dick - he is touching the sky.