David Flusfeder - The Pagan House

‘It’s okay,’ she said, hoping to reassure him and therefore herself.

‘I know,’ he said.

He knew too that she wanted him to hold on to her hand, to give her the power to protect him, and usually he would allow her this, but not this time, even if it caused him a pang of pity and self-reproach: he was not above punishing her for her transgressions.

The cabin lights flickered off and weakly on and off and on again, and each movement from light to dark to light was accompanied by a collective cabin-gasp of all the passengers, ahhh! and O! , and Mon gripped the armrest tighter and merciful Edgar relented: he held on to her hand and settled into the contact as she pulled his fingers tight. Her eyes were closed and her head was back and a vein pulsed in her eyelid and blue lines stood out in her throat, and the plane dipped and lurched and Edgar was enjoying himself. People all around them made rearrangements with blankets and headrests, and the stewardess reminded them again that the captain had requested that all seats should be in the upright position and infants strapped to a parent or caregiver, and now there was rising the sound of babies crying, nothing too startling, just the discontent of children baffled at being woken from sleep and fussed over, and the burly man from across the way loudly shouted, ‘ Miss? Miss?! What IS going on?! ’ and it took a while for Edgar to realize that the high keening note in the theological student’s voice behind him signified anguish, and that the ache in his ears meant that the plane was no longer bouncing but had been losing height, perhaps drastically, and that was why everything was tilted, and glasses and miniature bottles of wine were rolling down the slope towards business class; the mood in the cabin was changed and something very bad seemed to be happening.

‘ Miss! Miss!!!! MISS!!! ’

The stewardess was sitting below them braced in her chair, talking into a mouthpiece, her hands stroking each other.

‘Would everyone please return to their seats.’

Edgar straining heard her pleasant voice. Mon hadn’t moved or opened her eyes. Her hand gripped his more tightly. He tried to pull his hand away because it was hurting, but she had it and was not letting go. He tugged harder and all he achieved was a tiny choking moan from his mother. The ache in his ears was hardening into pain. The lights were lost again, and in the dark Edgar heard incompetently stowed tables clatter open, the thuds of surprised flesh, petulance now in the sobbing group-noise around him.

The lights came on just as an overhead locker opened, spewing out ribbons of clothes, bottles of duty-free liquor in corrugated-cardboard jackets that clattered off seat-backs and rolled clumsily down the aisle. The divinity student started to pray but lost the thread of his words until all he was saying was, ‘ Oh oh oh oh, oh God, oh God, God, oh God, oh oh oh, oh God, oh God, oh …’

Edgar viciously pushed his chair back against the student’s knees but the litany continued unaffected. ‘ Oh God oh God oh God oh God, oh oh …’

‘Oh my God,’ Mon said. ‘The plane’s going down.’

It was as if she had just realized it, and maybe she had. Edgar had been imagining the moment of impact: would the airplane bisect the water?—cutting through to the depths, past startled schools of fish, coral reefs, sunken galleons, mermaids’ treasure, dead men’s bones, down into darkness, bumping blind to a final stop on the ocean bed, the portholes bend with the enormous pressure and then burst, an insane hydraulic gush, the divinity student’s dull features washed away with the power of the water that somehow, miraculously, a benevolent corkscrew, picks up Edgar and twirls him up, pops him out into the air, the climax of a fountain —or would the plane somehow glide to the surface, bob along there on the waves—why else would they have been talking about life-jackets and life-boats and whistles and take your shoes off before you get on the slide? Was there an allowable moment of escape before the 747’s weight took it slurping beneath the water, the frightened pilot saluting behind the glass because, nobly, he has stayed at his controls till the last …?

Mon’s eyes were open. She stared at the awfulness of her end and his, their end, he supposed; he had heard her say it often enough, that a mother mayn’t think of herself any more as a free agent separate from her son, and the fat-legged stewardess was fixed to her seat and to her smile, despite the pleading of an Arab woman who was inexplicably showing the stewardess the naked chest of her infant; and several generations of orthodox Jews had taken a place up high at the rear of the cabin where the seat-backs held them in position, angled swaying with eyes closed, chanting through their beards, and Edgar wondered whether they were pleading with God to intercede here or just smoothing their own paths to Paradise; and the burly man across the way was busy removing his clothes—his business suit was off now and his shirt and his underpants, and he sat there in his tie as if he needed to meet his end almost as naked as when he had experienced his beginning; and others were making their own accommodations and most of these involved screaming or tears, but Edgar, entirely calm, knew exactly what he had to do and what he now might be able to do but he couldn’t do it with his mother beside him.

‘I need to go to the toilet,’ he said.

Mon nodded, plaintively hopeful eyes—this will save us, yes? This toilet, this going-to-the-toilet of yours? But she clearly didn’t understand what the words meant: she was waiting for his or anyone’s magic trick of slipping the future back into their lives.

‘I have to go to the toilet,’ he said.

He clambered over his mother, clasped her shoulder as he went past, and climbed up the slope to the toilet.

Oxygen masks swung in the air. Supper trays slid past, slapping chicken and beef curry against the sides of seats. The burly man was reading the in-flight magazine, resting it on the hairy rise of his belly. The couple who had kept banging into Edgar at the duty-free shop, pushing bulky hand luggage into his shins, swinging plastic baskets against his ribs, were kissing, breathing heavily, her legs folded beneath her; Edgar could trace the blue lines of veins below her khaki shorts, the red blood-holes left behind by shaving. The ginger-haired man who had kept going to the galley for more cans of beer was sobbing. An elderly couple demurely held hands. The game-playing boy from the departures lounge was watching a horror film on his screen. Edgar briefly watched beside him—wolfman transformations, cracks of lightning, high-breasted girls running up and down stairs—until the boy, annoyed at his privacy being invaded or maybe his technology being shared, curtly leaned in front of the screen, blocking Edgar’s view.

These were the last moments and it was surprising to Edgar that so many chose to spend them weeping. It surprised him too, as he continued to labour up towards the toilet—if anything, the angle had got steeper, each step harder to make—that he was so bent on privacy. He did not want to intrude on anyone else’s end, but neither should an unnecessary, outmoded now, sense of propriety keep him from what he needed to do. The rise of panic all around him transferred somehow to a feeling of well-being close to exhilaration and the minutes left to him were few and he did not want to spend the rest of his life climbing.

Edgar ducked into a bank of seats that was tenanted only by a woman sleeping, untouched by the clamour, her knees drawn up under a blanket, her mouth lightly open, her eyes hidden beneath a sleeping mask.

‘ Purr -fect,’ Edgar said, in his best whispery movie-villain voice, just as a trolley broke free of its moorings and lurched rattling past down the aisle. He heard a thud, a cry, and that would have been him, but he’d made it, he unzipped his trousers and settled down to his task.