Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

System Aircraft Maintenance : One oh one heavy, please repeat.

Captain John Macmanaman : Confirm engine number-two explosive failure. Number-two accessory drive system is blown. Secondary debris hit the horizontal stabiliser and severed number-one line and number-three line. These hydraulic systems are down. Copy?

SAM : Copy, one oh one heavy. You lost number two.

Macmanaman : No. We lost all three.

SAM : One oh one heavy. You lost number three?

Macmanaman : We lost all of them.

SAM : One oh one heavy. You still have number one, right?

Macmanaman : All three are gone. Repeat. All three are gone.

SAM : One oh one heavy. Copy, copy. You have emergency hydraulics.

Macmanaman : Affirmative. But the goddamned auto won’t disengage. It thinks one through three is fictitious. Extreme yaw. Extreme pitch.

Flight Engineer Hal Ward : Try it.

First Officer Nick Chopko : Yeah but …

Ward: Try it.

Chopko : … Auto disengaged!

Macmanaman : I feel it. I feel it. Auto disengaged. Hydraulic quantity returning. Now flying by direct law. Nose is coming up. Steadying. Steadying. Still yawing but no pitch. It won’t give us flaps.

SAM : One oh one heavy. I’ll clear frequency and give you Detroit.

Chopko : The backup hydraulics — where are they anyway?

Ward : Where they used to be, in the old days. Under the cabin floor.

Macmanaman : Come in!

Flight Attendant Robynne Davis : Is it over? Are we okay?

Macmanaman : We’re coming out of it, Robynne. What’s it like back there?

Davis : Like a vomitorium in ancient Rome. They can take a yaw but they hate a pitch.

Chopko : We got the pitch. We’ll get the yaw. Now what?

Flight Attendant Conchita Martinez : Lucy says the floor’s hot. The passengers are saying the cabin floor’s hot. Left side. Between the wings.

Chopko: Christ. Any smoke?

Martinez : How could they tell?

Macmanaman : You know what we need? What we need is an airport.

No, you couldn’t tell — about the smoke. A lavish bonfire of wet leaves would have made little difference to the pall. In Economy, 314 people had cigarettes in their mouths (they weren’t giving up now ), including the occupants of rows twenty-five to thirty, seats H and I and J, who, in addition, had their feet off the floor and tucked in underneath them.

There was smoke in the hold, too, under the port wing. But this was smoke of a different kind. With this kind of smoke (hot, thick, black), you wouldn’t be breathing it: you’d be eating it. And it would be eating you … Just discernible in the pallet facing the cargo door, Royce Traynor, mantled in ebony, stood upright, slowly steadying on his base as if to regather his strength. When the plane yawed to starboard, he sank back, waiting, against a column of stacked bags. Next, the port wing began its sharp drop, and Royce, after bristling for an instant like a wave before it breaks, dived forward to butt the diagonal handle of the cargo door … This door was not a plug door, opening inwards, and kept slammed shut by air-pressure. It opened outwards, to increase holdspace and revenue … He’s up again now, with the yaw to the right, and leaning back, in weary but determined contemplation. Then the tottering vertical and the piledrive into the handle of the cargo door, with all his weight. Which was the weight of what? Which was the weight of the past.

You could see why Royce had to do this. When the sprinklers came on, you could see why Royce had to do this. He couldn’t trust to fire. It was now his aim to go for the very throat of the aircraft. Decompression, explosive decompression, was what he wanted to bring about, and the collapse, the catastrophic strangulation, of the cabin floor, with all its tubes and veins and arteries. Most proximately, the blown door would mean his own escape (he would be the first to go), his martyrdom, after death.

With no blood in him any more, just wax and formaldehyde, Royce sways. The front teeth, perhaps, are bared: the teeth of a sunbelt golf pro. Royce sways, but not drunkenly. He rests, catching his breath, unappeasably preparing himself for fresh assault.

Xan Meo hit Fucktown at four p.m. on February 2, when the Fucktown Shuttle landed at Fucktown’s Felixio International Skyport … All the signs, of course, said Lovetown, as in Welcome to Lovetown. But people very often accidentally called Lovetown Fucktown. It was clearly something Lovetown had had to get used to.

First, at LAX, he was required to pick up his suitcase and clear it through Immigration. This wait at the luggage carousel, he realised, was an interlude of enforced, of mandated ennui. It wasn’t like standing at a bus-stop with nothing to read: the bus, when it came, would announce itself; and there were other things to look at. No, you had to go on watching, staring; you had to go on performing humble mental tasks involving the differentiation of shape; you had to go on dully imagining dull complication, dull delay. A lanky Englishman was talking fearfully to his mobile phone: ‘It’s going round … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s stopped going round … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s not on it … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s not on it …’ And, to Xan, this poem of boredom was like a douche of self-discovery. He couldn’t remember when he’d last been bored, and this was what it was like. It was like civilisation. Because you’re never bored , are you, when you’re always raring to fuck or fight.

A courtesy car transferred him to the second airfield. Here the little toytown terminal contained a busy, frisky, jittery throng: multicoloured lovebirds massing ecstatically for the long flight south. Xan felt further depersonalised by the open and unsmiling use, hereabouts, of the byname Fucktown — as in ‘LA — San Diego with a stopover in Fucktown’, ‘What takes you to Fucktown?’ and (from a man in uniform) ‘And is Fucktown your final destination?’ For an instant, as he stood beneath the blatting, clacking information-board, he saw, or thought he saw, the directive ‘14:05: FUCKTOWN 5D LAST CALL.’ The twirling cubes quickly corrected themselves, with a paparazzo flutter. Lovetown’s other cognomen seemed to be used only in reference to the Sextown Sniper …

In the plane his consciousness of anomaly, of regrettable innovation, persisted and ramified. It took him several minutes to identify an important absence — that of children. All planes have children on them. But not the shuttle to Lovetown: no babies, bassinets, no hefted bundles. Well Lovetown was a babyless place, he supposed. It was Adult. There were teenage passengers on board, male and female, who couldn’t possibly be destined for erotic employment; but Lovetown needed its hatcheck girls, its busboys and carboys, just like anywhere else. And some of the older people maintained a patina of childishness — the cartoon, the picture book. As he returned from the toilet he noticed that some men and women got younger, or older, fast, as you walked towards them: about five years for every row of seats.

Surrounded by tans of butterscotch and eggyolk, by sculpted puppyfat in tanktop T-shirts, with noses too small or hair too big or mouths too wide, too full, and engaged in ceaseless laughter, as if the passengers were the unified audience of a coruscating comedy … The stewardesses in their blue suits looked more normal, less stylised in mien and gesture, than the intransigent titterers they tended. The Captain put them down in Lovetown, and the tube of canned sex emptied itself in relays of tits and pits and zits.