Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

The plane took its numbered position in an orderly conga of incoming aircraft. Panorama Airlines Flight 503, as indicated on the strip placed directly underneath the oscillating screen of approach radar, the relevant details written on a piece of paper denoting the airline, flight number, type of equipment (a 727-200 with nearly four thousand hours of service), seventy-seven passengers and six crew, scheduled for arrival at 2:18 p.m. Central Standard Time, all in the heavily abbreviated jargon of flight control. Flight 503 was about to be shepherded from regional traffic control to the tower, and the controller offered the sort of unscripted good-bye that was against regulations: “This is TRACON passing you over to DFW tower control. Godspeed, 503, and happy New Year.”

The pilot responded with a snippet of song— “Should auld acquaintance be forgot” —in a clear and steady tenor, surprising even himself; the tower controller and copilot joined in, everyone’s headsets on that particular frequency filling with song.

Nearly one-fourth of the commercial-service airliners in the skies over Texas that afternoon were variations on the 727, but the one that wavered on approach to DFW seemed to the eyes of its captain a venerable lady, a dance-hall matron, filled with the kind of erotic flaws that could be appreciated only by old men wistful for lost chances. She might have been past her prime—the assembly line that built her was now devoted to making her unsightly and bulkier successors—but this old lady was a once-famous chanteuse known in nightclubs from Paris to Saigon, a celebrity slowly going to seed.

Dallas control signaled final approach, and Panorama 503 circled, two hundred miles out, beginning its final descent from flight level two-six-zero, twenty-six thousand feet.

Visual landing indicated.

The passenger in 3B was deadheading, a second-seat pilot returning to DFW to work an evening flight to Washington National. She slept soundly.

3E and 3F were colleagues of convenience, a developer and a moneyman intertwined in an elaborate plan to convert midrange apartments in the North Dallas exurbs into condominiums; they had spent the nearly two hours since boarding going over ad copy that promised a luxury lifestyle, the banner that hung from an overpass on the Thornton Freeway and swore, If you lived here, you’d be home by now.

4E, remembering his most minor assignation from the night before, a kiss with a stranger. He thought languorous thoughts—why had he never acted on his feelings for men before last night? The mere prospect of touching another man’s skin left a taste like metal high in his throat.

5B, an accountant from a Big Six firm, admired the shapely legs of the woman across the aisle in 5E, who had removed her shoes and was stretching, pointing her stockinged toes in a variety of directions. Through the sheer hose, he could see that her toenails had been recently painted a brownish-red reminiscent of dried blood, a color 5B associated with the lips of a specific type of pale, raven-haired women. He was dreaming of what it might be like to sleep next to a woman with immaculately kept feet, all the calluses and corns soaked and shaved away with an array of potions and small tools. Then he waited for the shame, the self-admonishment that came whenever these mildly lewd thoughts entered his mind. This wasn’t a middle-class longing. Even to his therapist, he could not admit the depths of his desire; he thought he might like to try being a submissive, and here in the aisle beside him was a pair of feet that practically demanded his worship. His wife, home in Plano, had tremendously ugly feet, like she’d spent twenty years as a cop walking a beat. Her toenails had gone yellow-gray with a persistent fungus.

In the window seat of the first row of coach, 6A felt the peculiar discomfort of travel, that pressing sensation in his bowels that meant, after three days of red wine and red meat, he desperately needed a good shit.

6C slept the dreamless sleep of a Xanax zombie.

7D turned to observe his children, a row behind (8A–C), and wondered how they could have possibly gotten so fat. 8D was the beleaguered mother enduring the withering glances of 8F, the unspoken signifiers that clearly spelled out his desire for the children to shut the hell up.

9A and C looked silently over the same in-flight magazine, promising themselves a dinner at one of America’s top-ten steakhouses.

9D waved for one last drink; 9E hissed at 9D, “Do you really need another?” before slumping across the empty seat to her right and staring out the window at the Texas flatlands.

The in-flight entertainments pumped out popular music. Six people on board (10A and B, 13C, 17A, 20D, and 28F) chose a meditative program of classical favorites, but it was 17A who began to daydream once he recognized a familiar theme from Debussy’s Doctor Gradus; it wasn’t so much a specific memory as an image of his sister, the way months of experience get condensed into one picture: she’s at the piano bench, her long, straight hair parted in the middle (she would have been about eighteen, and this would have been the midseventies). She tried her best to teach him Debussy’s wandering left-hand movements, the rollicking song for children, but he’d been impatient. An image of himself then, age seven, at the top of the stairs, listening to his sister practicing her scales on their modest upright piano. His own music room, in a five-bedroom house in the north Dallas suburb of Addison, had been designed around a seven-foot baby grand, but its keys had never felt more than the insistent banging of his unschooled children, the occasional riffing of “Chopsticks.”

13F stared out the window and contemplated the mail he knew would be waiting for him, the latest settlement proposal in a series of divorce negotiations that had now lasted longer than the actual marriage; he scribbled figures on a yellow pad, added and subtracted various columns, and was resigning himself to giving his estranged wife everything she asked for, no matter her rationale. Arms-control agreements had taken less time. 13F was tired of arguing, tired of revisiting decisions he’d made two or four or even eight months ago, all for the purpose of deciding who owed what, who would be held responsible. He’d always been the one responsible for this relationship, responsible for its ill-considered beginning, responsible for the whimsical decision to get married, responsible for sitting his estranged wife down at the dinner table to tell her he wanted out. He was guilty of laughing a bit too hard at jokes about overbearing wives, nagging mothers-in-law. Now it was going to cost him, and he could use this legal pad to put together an actual dollar-cost estimate. The result of his analysis: he wanted out at any price.

14D dreamed of another trip, something that had nothing to do with the persistent movement required of him as a soldier of middle management, a week of repose poolside, dangling his feet into the edge of an ocean of warm, greenish water.

Row 16 was filled with four consultants in seats A, C, D, and F, each irritated that their frequent-flyer miles and platinum status had not gained them entrée to first class.

In 23A, a businessman pressed the buttons of his control panel indiscriminately, flipping through each channel until he settled on channel 14 to eavesdrop on the cockpit chatter, Flight 503, cleared for final approach to DFW.

Three people on the plane, moments apart, stared into the expanse of blue at flight level two-four-zero, each thinking that the color of the sky was the same azure tint that haloed Mrs. Kennedy as she descended the steps of Air Force One and waved to the assembled Love Field crowd on that sunny November day.