They’re number four, he tells them, and it won’t be long now. He speaks with a slight southern accent, and his voice is reassuring. The reason that so many pilots are southern is that so many southerners go into the military, and so many pilots are ex–Vietnam War veterans. This comforts Ella—these men are seasoned by dangerous exploits, which they have come through unscathed. Their experience is like a bright shield over their passengers. They have always made the right decisions.
The plane taxies slowly to the end of the runway, turns ponderously, revs its engines, and then begins to rumble down the long concrete strip. As the plane gains speed, the engine noise mounts and mounts, and when the cabin falls silent with the universal respect given to takeoff, Ella is gripped briefly by nerves. She reaches for Nat’s hand, and he clasps hers firmly and reassuringly, without looking at her. He is not a nervous flier; he flies too often.
The rumbling, hurtling plane nears the end of the runway, racing toward the moment of breathless suspension, the moment in which the arcs of speed and lift and burden all intersect, precisely and miraculously, and the wheels leave the ground, and they suddenly rise up, without pause, smoothly and astonishingly into the clear blue air. The landing gear folds noisily into the belly and the plane banks hard, tipping over the rows of dark buildings of Newark, now so tidy and precise. They have done it; they have made the transition from earthbound to airborne, and there is something great and self-congratulatory about this moment. They have all succeeeded in this death-defying venture.
When the stewardess reappears with the lunch menu, Ella is no longer holding Nat’s hand. She used to be a very anxious flier, but that has changed, too. She feels remoter, now, from the danger of flying. Once, without Nat, she flew through a thunderstorm, lightning bolts sizzling off the wings, the fuselage jolting horridly with each shock. Her heart had thudded in her throat, but she had suddenly thought to herself, though she is not religious, “You are in the hand of God.” At that her panic ceased.
Since then she no longer becomes so frightened during flight. Fatalism, or some sort of calm, has entered her. She is in her fifties, and she has certainly lived over half her life. She feels less responsible now for the care of the world. If she vanishes, the world will rumble along without her.
Right now she is absorbed in her book, and they are climbing smoothly toward thirty thousand feet, heading slightly northwest, toward San Francisco. The stewardess smiles professionally and offers her a menu. Ella takes it, smiling back. She wonders how long the stewardess will go on working. It’s a brutal life, they say, especially if you have a family. You’re away so much, and you get bloat, and your cycle is disturbed. Plus you’re on your feet all the time: Ella thinks of her knee, which will at some point, her doctor says, need replacement, though she’s putting it off. She wouldn’t be able do this job, but these women must like it well enough.
Ella’s reading Anthony Trollope, Nat a book about Alexander Hamilton. She likes the symmetry they create, likes feeling that, together, they are responsibly covering the field of letters: she, fiction, nineteenth-century, English; he, politics, eighteenth-century, American. What more can you expect of a marriage? She sinks peacefully into her book.
At first she hardly notices the disturbance, since the noise level on airplanes is already so high—the loud drone of the engines, the staccato voices of video earphones, the conversations around them. But finally it becomes intrusive, and she looks up to see a dark-skinned young man in a pale T-shirt, with a red bandanna tied around his head, coming down the aisle from first class. He has something in his raised hand, and he is shouting at them angrily. It’s the anger that is most apparent, and confusing. It’s directed at them, the passengers, for some reason. What is he shouting? Behind him there seems to be a cloud of black smoke: is something on fire? Is the plane on fire? He is shouting at all of them, though the words are too big, right now, to understand, it’s hard to sort through the information—the smoke, the rage, the T-shirt and bandanna, who is he?—but his anger is very clear, and his insistence. He is motioning at them urgently, gesturing at the back of the plane. He’s angry at them all, he’s beside himself with rage. His rage, the chaotic energy of it, is confusing and frightening. The front of the plane is where the pilots are, and where the stewardesses busy themselves. The front of the plane is the seat of authority, but no one in uniform appears—where is the captain, with his reassuring southern voice, his heroic war record? It seems that this dark-skinned man now represents authority. That’s where he’s coming from, the cockpit, and the black smoke is billowing behind him. He’s shouting.
“Get in the back!”
Some people stand, bewildered. “What’s going on?” People are asking him questions, but the man is not answering; instead, the questions turn his face darker, thunderous. He has large liquid black eyes, brilliant.
“Get in the back,” he says ferociously. “There’s been an accident.”
“What kind of accident?” More people stand, alarmed, wanting to know, wanting to help.
Behind the man their stewardess suddenly appears, the stocky black-haired one. Her pockmarked face is contorted with purpose. “Help!” she shouts. Her voice is high-pitched, frantic. “Hijackers!”
The man swivels instantly; his arm shoots out and he seizes her by the throat, his arm snaking around her neck. They are directly in front of Ella, and Ella can see the woman’s hand shaking, held helplessly across her chest. The hijacker’s elbow is raised high in the air, and he holds her chin up. “Don’t move,” he hisses. The stewardess wears a navy cardigan over a white long-sleeved shirt. There is a gold bangle on her wrist, and her hand is shaking. Ella can hear her breathing: slow and strained.
The hijacker looks around. He looks to be in his thirties, with high cheekbones and a broad, slightly crooked nose. His teeth are very white, and his shiny black hair falls over his forehead. No one moves. Behind him, the first-class cabin is full of smoke. The stewardess swallows convulsively. Her chin is still pulled high by the hijacker’s arm. Ella can see the shifting of her throat muscles beneath the skin. The hijacker tightens his grip, and her eyes roll upward, then close. She swallows again, with difficulty, and her hand goes up, reflexively, to his arm. Ella remembers the smooth ritual gestures she made during the safety video. The hijacker hisses at her again, then pulls her chin up, further exposing her throat.
What he has in his other hand is a small straight blade, Ella sees its brightness, and he sweeps the blade across her throat. The pale skin parts easily. The smell of blood is very strong, and the rush of it overwhelming, disorienting. It floods out, dark, and in pulses, down her white blouse, which is now crimson, each wave of fresh blood darkening the blouse, the sweater. The stewardess is trying to scream, though her voice no longer works; she makes shuddering noises, sounds of breath and moist tissue. Her arms are all right, and her legs. She grabs at him, and kicks, but her movements are perfunctory, jerky and spasmodic, and she is not really, now, kicking at the hijacker. She is kicking the way the body prepares itself for death, the way it jerks itself loose of its earthly connections. She kicks and struggles fitfully, and the hijacker, with each jerk, holds her more closely, clasping her to himself like a demon lover, the blood pumping out of the terrible dark place on her neck. He holds her closer and closer to his own breast, which is now covered with streams of her dark blood. The blood is on their arms, it is on the carpet, it is everywhere, and the air reeks. The hijacker’s eyes are black and brilliant, and he stares at the passengers without blinking. The stewardess is still plucking with her hands and struggling, and her throat makes terrible attempts at speech. Shudders of air move through places where air was not meant to go. There are moist sounds of tissue smacking and flapping, heaves and gasps, a kind of sob.
“Get in the back,” the hijacker says. His eyes are hypnotic with intensity.
It seems that they have no will, now. It seems there is nothing for their weakened bodies to do, now, but stand and move heavil
y, without a will, down the aisle and back into the tourist section. There they can see rows of faces looking up at them, confused, alarmed. Alarm is spreading, deepening, across the faces. There are cries and questions, some screams. The hijacker is behind them, still holding his dreadful burden, the heavy body of the stewardess. The smell of the blood—thick and ferrous—makes Ella feel faint. It’s a smell she did not know she knew, but she does. She knows it. The body knows it.
Nat is ahead of her, and she reaches down low, for his hand. There is nothing now but fear. Just behind them, in first class, there is smoke and chaos. Beyond that, up in the cockpit, is beyond contemplation. The mind dares not go there. It is too dangerous to call it into being.
“Nobody move,” the hijacker shouts at them. He is beside himself. “Nobody to move.”
The rows of faces stare up, stunned.
The plane is doing something, it seems to be descending. They are nearing another city, rows of buildings are reappearing. The engines seem louder now—are they going faster?
Ella and Nat are standing helplessly in the aisle—there is nowhere for them to go. Behind them is the hijacker, with his mad eyes. Ella is right ahead of him, facing the rear of the plane, and she presses forward, against Nat. She doesn’t want to touch the hijacker, or the body of the stewardess, whom he holds in front of himself like a shield. The stewardess seems to have stopped moving. The smell of the blood is rich and sickening. Ella moves her feet to one side; she doesn’t want the blood on her shoes.
They can all feel the plane shifting now. The smoke in first class is drifting into this cabin, acrid, dense, alarming. Ella’s eyes sting, and she closes them. She leans against Nat’s back, pressing herself against his spine. She knows his back intimately, and now she pictures its beautiful slope. She knows where the scar is, on the left side, where he fell in a baseball game as a teenager, long before she knew him. The bluish mark, where a BB went in. She knows exactly the texture of the skin, beneath his gray suit, his blue shirt. She puts her nose against his suit and breathes in: she knows exactly the smell of his skin, rich and comforting. She sets her cheek against his shoulder blade, leaning on her good knee.
The plane is definitely descending now, and they’re over another urban landscape, streets and buildings in a bewildering pattern. Don’t hijackers want to go somewhere else? Don’t they want to be taken to Cuba? Palestine? It’s New York, she can see the Triborough Bridge. Why are they headed here? Ella feels her body tighten, she is panting, and her stomach is clenched. The roar of the engines seems deafening—is it really louder, or is it fear that makes it seem so? She thinks of the plastic card, the orderly evacuation down the spotless chute. Behind her, the hijacker is still holding the slack body of the stewardess, and when he moves, Ella can feel something—his elbow, or her lifeless wrist—against her back, and she cringes, trying to move away.
Now the hijacker is shouting again, but not in English. It’s in another language, guttural, unknown, and there’s another hijacker, she now sees, across the aisle, with a red bandanna around his head, shouting too. What they say is incomprehensible, but it’s the force of it, the loudness and intensity of what they say, that cows the passengers, defeats them. They are wild-eyed, they are in some kind of insane, triumphal trance, the hijackers, and one of them holds the dead bleeding body of the stewardess, the woman who was supposed to care for them, to minister to their needs. She has been murdered, and the hijackers are screaming at all of them, and the tourist cabin, too, is now filling up with smoke.
The plane is going insanely fast—they can feel it, dizzying, hurtling low, just above the city buildings. Ella cannot see where they are but it is somewhere in New York, no longer a tidy cityscape seen dreamily from above but a nightmare landscape seen too close and too fast, and her whole body is going too fast, her heart, her lungs, her pulse, are going as fast as the plane. Nat, in front of her, begins to turn.
It’s over, Nat can see that. Everything is over. It’s strange how, as the plane speeds up, his mind slows down. It’s oddly calming. Everything is over, everything falls away, now, all the intentions and crises of life, the small things, his report for the meeting, the conversation with Beth, getting the car inspected, all of these don’t matter, and the large things—what were the large things? None of them matter, now. It’s all moving faster and faster, and here they are, all of them, trapped together, their doomed faces staring ahead, stunned, caught in this thundering, rumbling, accelerating plane, and he thinks, his mind slow and calm, that this is, really, what they all faced every day, hurtling through space together on the spinning planet, rushing, unaware, toward their final moments. And the spinning planet has been spinning like this, as it is now, for all time, sweeping through the endless black of space on its long elegant loop. It will go on, though for him, for them, it’s all over, whatever happens. There is time now to do only one thing, the last thing; he’s grateful that there’s time and he’s conscious. Gratitude floods him for this.
Nat shifts carefully, keeping his head low, avoiding the wrathful gaze of the hijacker, who is shouting something over and over at the top of his lungs, some sort of fanatical chant, and now the other hijacker is shouting it too. They seem, mystifyingly, to be flying through the buildings of Manhattan, and the engines are whining unbearably, their pitch is rising higher and higher toward some unthinkable climax, but before this, and just before the plane opens the black maw of its own tunnel, Nat turns and takes Ella in his arms.
Mary Gordon
Florence Melnick went to the library every day. Well, not every day: the library was closed on Sundays and legal holidays. Christmas was considered a legal holiday although in her opinion there was nothing legal about it, it was religious, and Florence was Jewish and Christmas was nothing but another day to her. So she resented it that everything was closed up on that day. She thought it violated the principle of separation of church and state, which had been so important to the Founding Fathers.
The branch of the New York Public Library that was, unfortunately in her opinion, closest to where she lived was called the Epiphany Branch. It was on Twenty-third Street between Third and Lexington Avenue, or, as everyone who didn’t have something wrong with them said, Third and Lex. That was one thing she took comfort from when she moved there from Brooklyn: it seemed friendly that she’d be living on a street that had a nickname.
But she’d never been happy in the neighborhood, never. She’d never felt that she belonged. In the old days in Flatbush, she’d known everybody, but everybody had moved out when they had the chance. Including her, when her nephew Howard had presented her with the opportunity. Her sister Ethel had had a stroke. Ethel was a widow and Florence never married. Why exactly she never knew. She would have been willing with the right kind of man. But not a fool, not someone with nothing in his head except what was between his legs, not someone with no ideals who only thought about food and money. Florence loved to read, she always hoped to meet someone who loved to read, but it hadn’t happened. None of the men she’d met in the forty-five years she’d worked as a saleswoman at Lerner Shops on King’s Highway. Of course, you could say, in her line of work, retail clothing for women, it wasn’t that likely that you’d meet so many men. Salesmen you’d meet, but rarely of the right type.
So she’d retired after forty-five years. They gave her a lovely party and a silver tray with her name engraved. Everyone said, “Keep in touch, Florence,” but when she tried to think who she really wanted to keep in touch with, no one came to mind. Her parents had died; Ethel was in Manhattan, but she had a life of her own, they didn’t share too many interests. But when she had the stroke and Howard made the suggestion—tactfully trying to point out that Flatbush wasn’t what it had been, and that his mother had a two-bedroom apartment that he was paying the maintenance on, not chicken feed but nothing compared to what a nursing home would be, to say nothing that his mother would rather die first—well, it all seemed to make a great deal of sense.
; And really there was nothing she really missed about Brooklyn except the main library at Grand Army Plaza. That was a library: marble and carpets and big ceilings and mahogany. They knew how to use materials in those days. They spared no expense. The library was right on Prospect Park, and the other side was a square with a statue of a soldier. When she walked into the door, the word cavernous came to her mind: empty space, dark air; even the air was scholarly. You could take a book off the stacks, walk up the stairs, and read it in the reading room. Real wood paneling. The Epiphany Branch was one big room, materials skimped everywhere. But what could she do? It was where she lived, she was seventy-eight, she wasn’t up to much traveling. Not in Manhattan.
Ethel only lived two months after Florence moved in. And there she was, in the middle of Manhattan, but no, not in the middle, it wasn’t really midtown. It was the middle in the worst sense. It was in the middle of a lot of things, downtown from the theater district and the museums, uptown from the village, which she’d always wanted to explore. She had come too old to Manhattan; the streets overwhelmed her and she never ventured uptown to the Forty-second Street library or to the Metropolitan Museum, which she’d thought she’d visit quite often when she’d imagined herself a Manhattanite. She didn’t move far beyond a five-block radius. Even so, she didn’t really know anybody in the neighborhood. Nobody seemed to speak English, or at least no English she understood.
Once she went into one of those coffee places, she thought maybe she’d meet people there. But they were very young and asking for things she’d never heard of—skim lattes, macchiatos. And they charged what she considered an arm and a leg. And the conversations were ridiculous, people talking about horoscopes: “Are you a Capricorn, that means you’re a warrior, but there must be something rising, because I not only see aggressiveness, I feel gentleness as well. You’re a person in conflict. Like, I see that you’re really a people person but sometimes you need to be alone.” “I can’t believe you see that,” the girl said. The man in his fifties with a ponytail and the girl no more than twenty-five, a lovely blond girl. Scandinavian-looking, though she didn’t have an accent. She sounded well educated, although Florence didn’t understand how a well-educated person could believe in something like astrology. “I see it completely,” the guy said. Well, girlie, I hope you see he’s not interested in horoscopes, just hanky-panky, Florence wanted to say. She left the place disgusted. She would never go back.
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