Амброз Бирс - Flight or Fright - 17 Turbulent Tales

The audience clapped, at least, after Ilvi’s introduction, an idle plagiarism of the curriculum vitae John had sent her. He made his way to the podium, leaned toward the mic, glanced at the screen behind him, leaned toward the mic, and glanced again at the screen behind him. Leaning toward the mic a final time, and making sure his already soft voice was as mild as a child’s aspirin, he said he was not sure which speech should begin first. A few scattered chuckles, then actual laughter. John turned to the screen one last time to see that his talk’s first block of translated text had obligingly appeared. Okay, he thought. Good.

He flattened out the first page of his talk, which he had given several times, and looked out on the facial pointillism of his audience. Three hundred people? Their expressions were more curious than hostile, he thought. Something then popped into his mind as suddenly as the words had appeared on the screen behind him: This was too far to have come. He was a tenured professor of law at a major American university. He wondered, once again, why he was so determined to defend himself. Was the solace of knowing he could that important?

At the beginning of September 2001, John was 34 years old and reviewing a treaty whose most legally substantive issue involved polar bears.

Before returning to his seat John tried a couple of things. He hit the cockpit door with the steel air compressor approximately four dozen times. He then returned aft, held down the PA button of the attendant’s control panel, and screamed. Becoming hysterical solved nothing. Calmer now, and sitting, he tried to formulate a reasonable explanation for what was happening. He did not think he had been drugged. He had eaten nothing that day and drunk only a can of Diet Coke shortly after boarding. The attendant had given the can to John and he himself had opened it.

He replayed various short-term-memory fragments. The morning flight from Tallinn. Forty-five minutes in Helsinki. The bovine ordeal of boarding. He recalled as many fellow passengers as he could. Chatty Janika, the Estonian on her way to the United States. The neckless, bullfrogish man John had sat beside at the gate. The amply eyebrowed young woman in the Oxford sweatshirt who smiled at John as she passed his seat on her way to coach. (No Asian man forgets a white girl who smiles at him, unibrow or no.) A young man he recalled only because he was black. A studious, string-haired girl in a loose white blouse. A kid in his early twenties in a YOU SUCK tee shirt. The female flight attendants in their powder-blue pantsuits. John had been conscious of his Asianness on this Finnair flight, in this northern clime, and recalled, now, anticipating his relief at returning to California, his university town, its sidewalks of multiracial buffet, its music stores and eateries, the varieties of its cannabis enfleurage.

But there was the matter of his iPhone. Someone had clearly taken it. He had looked for it under his and every other seat in business class. What would he do? What could he do? The air compressor had done real damage to the door, denting its hardened shell and knocking off the handle. The handle was now in John’s pocket, in case he needed to fix it later, though he had no idea how he might do that. He found some tools in an aft storage cabinet, which were now on the seat beside him. The door itself had not budged.

In sudden need of the transporting thereness of an outside item, he pulled a magazine from the mesh basket on the side of his seat, its heavily laminated cover as cold and slippery as glass. Finnair’s in-flight shopping magazine. Even under his present circumstances, the appeal of shopping while aboard a plane remained mysterious. He nonetheless slapped at the crisp, thick pages. Fifty-euro pearl necklaces. Twenty-euro sticks of Dolce & Gabbana deodorant. Thirty-euro Glam Bronze Sunset & Glam Shine foundation by L’Oréal. Pages of European chocolates and confections. He came to the last pages, electronics, and stopped at a 245-euro solar-powered BlackBerry Curve 8310 Smartphone. Almost certainly, dozens of passengers aboard this plane had been carrying phones, any number of which might still be in their carry-ons. While getting reception was unlikely, he might find a device that allowed the sending of a stored email or text once the plane reached a lower altitude.

As he rose, the plane shook as though withstanding atmospheric reentry. He sat and buckled his seatbelt. His fear, having almost come under the control of his hope, felt newly feral. He breathed. He was not sure what time it was, or how long he had been on this plane, but his window shade, like every other window in business class, was now open, and once again he stared into the freezing darkness of the troposphere. He thought of his wife, his students, their concern for him, and, yet again, rose.

John felt strangely better once he had all the business class carry-ons gathered around his seat. Remaining close to his appointed seat seemed important, though he could not explain why. He worked his way through the bags, most of which were small. People who paid business class fares did not hesitate to check their luggage. They had no cab line to beat; they landed to find Jordanian men holding small white signs bearing their last names. Unzipping luggage, John slipped his hand into one opening after another and felt and squeezed and searched. He did not want to unnecessarily disturb anyone’s items. Anything that felt at all promising he pulled out through its zippered caul. By the end of his search he sat among shaving kits, digital cameras, iPods, duty-free bottles of vodka with Cyrillic lettering, several Montblanc pens, and a smooth pink plastic torpedo he had realized only incrementally was a sex toy. Also accounted for were half a dozen computer cases, every one of them empty.

He moved on to coach, but before he had managed to empty a single overhead container, his stomach sent another dose of fiery waste toward its point of egress. He staggered to the bathroom, unbuckling his pants, and sprayed before he could get himself atop the metal-basined toilet’s plastic ring. The smell had no equivalent he could name. It was, somehow, an orange smell. His intestinal spigot opened again; waste escaped him in avid bursts. He was sick now, and dizzy, his brain an invalid whom no one had thought to visit in months. When he was finished he washed his hands.

Decorousness no longer concerned him. He walked down the first aisle opening overheads and savagely throwing their contents to the floor. Soon enough it was knee-deep with baggage. Would he really go through all of it? No. His anger was too overriding now, and he had to allow himself to regenerate the care and attentiveness searching the bags would require. He moved to the second aisle, pushing overhead release buttons as he traversed it. After a satisfying pop the doors slowly lifted open. So much of this plane was kept in place by plastic hinges. He was within a metal tube, sailing just beneath the fringe of outer space, while huge engines fifty feet from him spewed invisible 1,000-degree fire. Was this any less remarkable than the reality that he was now trapped inside?

He found Janika in the aisle’s third-to-last overhead—though given that the overheads were triply connected, she occupied all of them, however unhappily she fit. Her bruised, cross-eyed face and masking-taped mouth sent John to the floor as resoundingly as a blow. When he finally looked back up at her he saw that one of her arms had slipped from its containment. Her hand vibrated lightly in turbulence he could no longer feel. He carefully removed her from the overhead. When the last of her body pulled free she seemed to gain one hundred spontaneous pounds. John fell back, Janika on top of him, onto a bed of carry-ons and their jutting contents.