"just a human being"

economy class across the Pacific, circa 2004

The man is seated a bit further up in the coach section. He's wearing a bright red silk button-down shirt, his head is shaved like a monk’s, and dark sunglasses cover his eyes, even inside the airplane. Beads jangle: they're draped over his neck, around his wrists and they jiggle as his hands shake and twitch. He trembles as he places his bag into the overhead bin.

A little while later, after the flight has begun, he gets up and paces around economy class with a purple airplane blanket draped over his shoulders. Like some perverse anti-superhero in his makeshift cape. As he passes my row, I notice he's holding a strand of beads in his hands behind him, counting. Murmuring to himself, he does laps around the cabin. And the thought shamefully crosses my mind that he could be a terrorist just waiting for the right moment…

Several hours later in Tokyo we all get off for the security cabin scrub. Wandering through the perpetually sterile terminal, I notice him in the smoking lounge. He's puffing away, one cigarette directly following the next. I spot his transit card: so he’s on the next leg of the flight with me as well. Just my luck.

He manages to board without his sunglasses this time, although he's held onto the purple blanket and his beads. He changes seats once, then again, until he’s only a couple of rows ahead of me. He gets up to go to the bathroom and notices that we are speaking English, my fellow travelers and I.

“So is this the American section?” he asks me and the new friends I've just made in the row behind. His tone is awkward.

"I just came from Tibet," he says, unpromted. "It's so nice to hear English. There, it's only Tibetan and Hindi. It’s been a long time."

We nod, and he stares at us for a while. Then he moves to the bathroom.

When he returns from the bathroom, he stops and leans over my seat. "I've been there 33 years. Tibet, I mean."

I nod but don't say anything.

"Ever since I was a kid."

"Really, why'd you go?"

“I found myself there." He shakes his head and shrugs. “They thought I was someone. But I’m not. I’m not."

He tells me his a US citizen, born and raised until he was "taken" out of the country so long ago.
Now he teaches English in a monastery to monks who are planning to travel to the US and England. He’s planning on spending the next year in India, he tells me, then before I can respond he sticks out his hand for me to shake. “Hi,” he says, “my name’s Kevin. I’m just a human being. Nothing more.”

He walks off down the aisle and the petite young Chinese woman next to me turns to me and starts speaking very good English.

"The monk," she says, "he seem nice. You know this is my first trip to America." The woman smiles. She smiles broadly as she starts to tell me about the friends she's planning to visit.

Kevin's still wearing his purple blanket cape when he returns and interrupts my neighbor's story. He talks to me, urgently, in a monologue of swirling thoughts: about happiness, about how so many Americans don’t have it, can’t find it, can’t buy it. "And don't get me started on our foriegn policy," he says: Vietnam, bombing Laos and Cambodia in the 70s. "More bombs were dropped there than in all of World War II."

"I think you're blocking," I say and point to the beverage carts stacking up in the aisle behind him.

Kevin keeps talking, and the stewardesses struggle to squeeze the carts by. He bashes George Bush for a while while more people try to climb over and by him. He's not particularly wrong, in my opinion, just an obstacle. Finally, when the chaos seems slightly more settled, he turns and walks away.

“That’s what I love about Americans,” my Chinese neighbor says after he's gone, “you’re all so friendly to each other all the time."

She offers me some spicy beef jerky and I thank her, not bothering to correct her impression. She'll be jaded soon enough. Or maybe not.