Some Things About Flying

by Joan Barfoot

  Does she know that? Does she believe it?

  “Bullshit. And I wasn’t leaving my fucking seat, so don’t tell me to stay in it. We’re in this crate, we deserve some decent information, and I want an answer to my fucking question.” The man does seem to be capturing a mood; angry voices sound around him in grumbling support.

  Sheila’s eyes and lips narrow briefly, as if she would very much like to slap him. Then she looks as if she could cry, but mustn’t do that, either. She looks, actually, like a kid with a part in a school play that’s gone off the rails, out of control, into some spiralling, impromptu ad lib. Even her make-up looks stagey and garish against skin gone white.

  “Sir, you’re causing a disturbance, upsetting other passengers.” She takes a deep breath, glances around. Gauging support or hostility? “Even if you’re afraid, it’s no reason to try to scare others. Particularly when there’s nothing to be frightened of.”

  Oh, inspired, Lila thinks. The man is left voiceless, bruised where it hurts worst, in his pride. Others briefly roused by his fury now try to look as if they never were.

  On the other hand. On the other hand, if Lila were the one demanding better information, she would not care to be treated with contempt. She would hope to phrase her concerns more politely, with more compassion for Sheila and for her fellow passengers, but equally she would hope not to hear drivel like, “There’s nothing to be frightened of.” She narrows her eyes as Sheila advances more confidently, pursuing the lowering of blinds. Which, astonishingly, do obediently descend.

  Are these people crazy? How can they agree to shut themselves in, blocking out brightness for what may be their last moments? Shouldn’t they need to bathe in light, feel awed and grateful that there still is such a thing as light?

  Perhaps they’re exhausted from seeing. From fear. The entire space is dimming, and Lila is having trouble catching her breath. Tom nudges her. “The blind? Can you reach it?”

  Is he crazy, too? “Tom, it’s too—eerie.” That’s the only word she can think of that isn’t quite panicky. “Surely you don’t want to watch the movie, do you?”

  “I don’t suppose so.” He looks dubious, though; tempted. “But other people might. Especially the kids, it’ll divert them.” He nods towards Susie, but her eyes are closed, so she’s not a good example. “And you know it won’t be dark. There’s always light.”

  Not the right kind, there won’t be. Not real, true light.

  How long would it take, starting now, for the plane to spin down to the sea? And what would the view be? What shifting, changing forms might light take during the descent?

  “The blind please, ma’am.” Sheila is beside Tom, looking at her, but Lila can’t move, any more than she would be able to move a razor against her own wrist. Sheila reaches behind and pulls it down herself. “Thank you,” says Tom. And, “Sorry.”

  Lila’s hands curl into fists, fingernails digging into the flesh of her palms. She closes her eyes, tries to conjure up light, and almost succeeds.

  She hears Tom sigh, feels him fiddling with his headset.

  In her mind’s eye, she must be able to hold all the shades of brightness: the blue and gold and green of sky, sunshine, grass, all that. The bright, comforting red is velvet, best dress from childhood, worn on special occasions, such as birthday parties. She can feel it too, under fingers, brushing thighs, a lost sensation.

  Here’s the lawn, a pricklier softness, that her father cultivated to a very particular colour and height, reluctantly and regularly mowed by Don. How rigorously their father judged and cared for that lawn, its uniform colour, its absence of weeds—he was meticulous about it, pacing it in the evenings, bending to run a palm over it, plucking offending presences from it. His extensive concern for something so inessential made him seem foolish.

  What could that passion have really been for? Surely not truly for the perfection of grass.

  Lila has made assumptions about her father and her mother, not all of which are necessarily borne out in these details. She has bestowed the word “seething” on her mother, and allowed her various passions, but has left her father sitting, quiet and kind, in a corner.

  That’s not where he was. He was out scrutinizing his lawn, or driving Don to hockey practice, or building the swing, or hammering and sawing away in the basement. Passing Lila, he might hug her shoulders, wordlessly. In his work, handing out and denying bank loans and mortgages, he must have been powerful.

  He obviously had a part in whatever caused her mother to seethe; and her mother may have had a part in his solitary silences.

  Lila’s mother gave her, in a little blue cardboard box, her first pair of earrings: silver drops. Her father said, “Looks like you’re getting all grown up.” He sounded sad, and if Lila hadn’t been fifteen and aimed towards her own deeply desired, undefined future, she might have spared him a moment of pity. If she tilted her head in a certain way, under the white-globed front hallway light, the earrings’ silveriness glowed back at her from the long mirror by the door.

  What was different then, wearing those earrings? Blind, dumb, ruthless hope, she supposes. Being young.

  Now there are some questions she wouldn’t mind asking her parents. But she missed any moment there might have been, and there is no point, and no time, to regret. She needs to keep her eye on the light.

  Setting off on a cross-country road trip with her first lover, she drove through miles and miles of golden grain, light rippling over it, stirred by the wind. She can see the shiftings and colours more clearly than the lover, Jason, whose affections did not survive the rigours of their days together in the car, who grew hunched and morose, who was not much of a lover anyway, and who is unattached in her mind’s eye to light.

  After the prairies they wound through mountains, where brilliance glared off snow at the peaks, and lit lower rocks, and finally faded into hazy darkness below.

  At the end of that journey, Lila was diverted from farewells, hers and Jason’s, by sunlight like shatterings of glass skipping over the sea, far into the distance. She was awed by this first view in her life of the sea, couldn’t imagine its depth and immensity.

  Don’t think of oceans.

  All right then, cosy events. Fireside embraces, seductive, soft words.

  Don’t think of flames. Lila’s eyes fly open.

  On the screen, someone is riding a horse down a mountain. It looks like a dimmed, dulled version of her bright younger vision.

  Some people actually appear to be staring at the screen, watching this. Surely, though, what they see are not horses and men, but scenes and films from their own lives.

  What gorgeous duster coats the men in the movie are wearing. Look how they hang, how they move with those lanky bodies, how seductively they flare at the hips. She should get one—would she look properly dramatic, or just ridiculous?

  Oh, how stupid—she won’t be shopping for a duster coat, or anything else; another of those foolish, startled griefs.

  Glancing at Tom, she is astonished to see that while he is watching the screen, headset clamped around his dishevelled, greying and receding hair, tears are simply flowing from his eyes, pouring unchecked down his face and off his chin. She has never seen him weep before. He is doing it without sound or movement, and it looks remarkable.

  It’s also private; as intrusive, and even embarrassing, to watch as it would be to walk into a room expecting to find it empty, and discovering instead a friend making love, catching in the eyes that remote and ardent look of orgasm.

  One would back out, awkward and apologizing if seen, silent if not.

  When Lila cries, which isn’t often, her face contorts, her nose reddens, her hands fly up to catch and blot the tears. How can he weep without moving?

  And what is he weeping for? Perhaps his own private version of prairies, or silver drop earrings.

  She is struck t
o the heart that she has no idea, actually feels her heart quiver and lurch. Tears come to her own eyes. He has been the dearest person in her life, and at the end, she doesn’t know what pictures form the contents of his grief, and he has no way of knowing hers. This sorrow is explosive; she could burst open, splashing loneliness over everything.

  Well. Almost everyone must be deep inside their own soul when they die.

  She closes her eyes, this time to be clear about what really may happen: smoke and spinning and blackness and burning light, limbs and voices flying and crying—all this can happen at any instant, and they would each be alone. It’s going to hurt so much. Her poor skin, poor bones, all crumpled and crushed, and her beloved little home, and Don and Anne and the kids, the remnants of family, and all her beautiful books and ideas and words, and rows of young faces watching her, more or less eagerly, taking apart all those books and ideas with the hope and intention of being able to put them back together, and voices and laughter of gossiping colleagues and dear Patsy and Nell, in cafeterias and restaurants, in kitchens and living rooms and in voices on telephones. And mysterious, unknown Tom. Skin, voice, flesh over bones, fingers and palms on her flesh and his. Laughter and opposing ideas and desires, magical intersectings of ideas and desires, and solemn eyes, delicious lips. Her own secrets and dreams: whatever they are, her true final companions.

  Opening her eyes, she finds Tom regarding her, now dry-eyed and dry-cheeked, with yet another queer and unfamiliar expression. “What?” she asks. In the end, it’s not only words that have no life-saving uses. Love doesn’t, either.

  The end may be a matter of passionate, grieving silence when all else fails.

  The cabin seems to sway and shift. She can’t tell if it’s the plane or herself.

  Now he is stroking that thinnest layer of skin on the back of her hand; his thumb moving gently between her wrist and her fingers, and his fingers resting in her palm, connect her to her own skin, in this seat, in this cabin, in this instant.

  Something will happen very soon, for very good or very ill. “It’ll be all right,” he says. “We’ll be fine.”

  As if he knows. As if it’s up to him. In their other lives, he knew and it was up to him, but there’s no room here for the tininess of that plot, those small bumpings and grindings of emotion and event. She smiles at him anyway.

  “I know we’ve had troubles,” he says, “but I’ve never not loved you. You made my life more than I could have hoped.”

  She notices, although he may not, the past tense. “Thank you. You, too.” Because it’s perfectly true, he has made her life larger, no lie. There are pictures and ideas and touches and combinations of words she might never in her life have encountered, if he hadn’t invited her for a drink.

  The plane judders and something that feels large and vital grinds. Lila’s skin is suddenly boiling, and Tom also breaks out in a sweat: exactly that, beads and drops popping out on his forehead, his neck, his hands.

  The juddering slows, the grinding eases. This isn’t it, then, not quite yet?

  The cabin is oddly, briefly quiet. People must be shocked into silence, petrified into immobility. Everyone must be staring at something inside their own heads, behind their own eyes, beyond denial.

  If all these people do vanish at once from their own lives, many stories will be changed. For generations, for the rest of life on earth for that matter, connections will be altered or lost, some unanticipated children will be born from unexpected unions, and some others will not. Some people may fall into poverty, and others will thrive. The hearts of thousands will be affected, and even some aspects of Tom’s long view, history itself, will be altered. Lost lives, lost genes, lost prospects and possibilities—all that. A peace accord signed here, an unnecessary battle erupting there. Perhaps also a serial killer or two fewer in the future as well, who knows? Or one or two more.

  Another shudder, another jolt, a fragile levelling.

  When Lila was little, she performed a small daily ritual. First thing each morning, she said, just to herself, “Let something good happen. Let the first thing that happens be lucky.” A small lucky event could expand to a whole lucky day; and the reverse.

  It wasn’t, she supposes, more ridiculous than other rituals of hope. Even heading for this flight, she was considering small events in a similar light, little moments of good fortune signifying much larger, far-flung fortunes. And look how that is turning out.

  When she was little, she hunted four-leaf clovers, extremely rare and lucky to find in her father’s immaculate lawn. She had no idea then what real good luck was, or real bad luck.

  Real bad luck would have been to enter the world in a more brutal, unjust time or place. To unkind parents, or in a bleak location lacking shelter or food, or to a culture which required her feet to be bound, or her body mutilated, or one in which she would cook but never read, and certainly never teach the beauty of words, or anything else. What good luck, to have been able to eat, say, wear, do, possess, think, and love, more or less, within reason, what she desired. There can’t be much more to ask of fortune; although she would now extend her hopes to not dying this way.

  “My god,” Tom says, “this is torture.”

  The level of movement and noise is rising again. Like him, people are regaining their voices, and what comes out once again is fear. Or maybe not, maybe she’s wrong and it’s regret, or despair. It’s vigorous, at any rate, and feels volatile. “Sit down,” Sheila commands, patrolling the aisle. “Take your seats. Nothing is happening, so just take your seats.” She is no longer, Lila notes, saying “please,” and is even touching some people rather roughly to force them back, or down.

  How can they believe someone who says nothing is happening? How are they supposed to have faith in someone who has to push for obedience?

  Whatever will happen, it’s taking too long. Tom’s right, it’s excruciating, waiting and counting the notches carved into her life. “I wish,” she says, trying to sound jaunty and brave, “we’d had our two weeks. If we were on our way back, I might not have minded so much.” In fact, she might have been seeing other pictures entirely.

  He fails to look charmed. “Can you feel that?” he asks urgently, clutching her hand.

  Putting words into the air is not always wise. Unformed, unprepared ideas too easily vanish in speech; or the reverse: spoken aloud, they become too real, and unavoidable. Tom’s anxiety, spoken aloud, makes Lila shiver.

  What if she fell apart, broke into fragments of fear—how willing would he be to comfort and try to put her back together?

  A terrible question to ask at this stage.

  Everything is slippery and unfinished. Nothing she thought she had a grip on is firm. That should be appalling.

  It almost feels hopeful.

  Everyone, even those still flailing in their seats, or weeping, must be learning so much so fast—what a better teacher Lila would have been, if she could have stimulated this kind of desperate urgency in the classroom. “Learn or die,” she could have commanded. “Understand, or you won’t get out of this room alive.” That would have sharpened them up, all right.

  Oops. “Lila!” The plane lurches again to the right, cries and screams rise higher and Tom whispers, “Sweet Jesus.” Lila didn’t know he had this streak of fundamentalism—next he’ll be speaking in tongues.

  But she, too, is again saying prayer-like words to herself: “Oh no, please no.” If civility is thin, so, apparently, is much else.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” they hear. This time there’s no warning of the voice. The movie continues its westward way on the screen, but abruptly without sound. “Ladies and gentlemen this is your co-pilot, Frank McLean, again. We regret if any of you have been alarmed by our most recent manoeuvres.” The awful grinding hardly sounded like a manoeuvre to Lila; it sounded more like metal on the very edge of falling apart.

  Christ,
she’s boiling in this sweater—to think she wore it so her skin would be able to breathe. She plucks at it, to unstick it from her skin. Tom has a little dip at the base of his throat where sweat is starting to pool. What a moist man he has been at times today.

  “We want you to know that we remain on our course and are making good progress. Within the next few minutes, we expect to reach the coast of England and be very near our destination.”

  “Nearer My God To Thee”—that’s what they sang on the Titanic, isn’t it? Or is that only a fable of courage?

  “In order to maximize our position, we are advising you of an action we have undertaken which will cause some inconvenience when we arrive. To lighten the aircraft and facilitate our landing, we are releasing cargo while we are still over water. We have almost completed this process. When we arrive, therefore, passengers will find themselves—yourselves—without luggage. Obviously we regret the loss of any items of value, and the inconvenience. However, the airline accepts responsibility, and claim forms and some emergency supplies will be available for you at our destination.”

  Oh, isn’t that heartening—they’ll know they’re safe when they start filling out forms.

  Lila wonders what she would miss, which items sea creatures would enjoy, or be puzzled by, as they hurtle into that dark world. Lace and cotton, even one new dress of extravagant silk—she packed, she remembers, with an eye to the creation of appealing memories.

  Let the sea have them; if only it doesn’t get her skin and bones.

  She is astounded to hear some grumbling, people cranky about their possessions counting and mourning their losses. “I am sure,” the voice goes on smoothly, “that you will all consider this a small sacrifice in comparison to the increased safety it provides.”

  On the movie screen, two men face each other down: a long, dark look exchanged. One of them, presumably, will shortly die. The film plays like white sound, a frivolous alternative vision.

  “As to your carry-on luggage, you will not be able to exit the plane with it, but airport crews will retrieve it for you as soon as possible after we’ve landed.”