Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

The last drink of water was doled out four hours ago. He has a roll of peppermint LifeSavers: he always takes them on trips, in case of bumpy rides. He gave one to the middle-aged woman in oversized glasses and a plaid pant suit who was sitting beside him. He is somewhat relieved she’s gone: her voiceless, colorless weeping, snuffly and monotonous, was beginning to get to him. The women and the children have all been allowed off, but he is not a woman or a child. Everyone left on the plane is a man. They have been spaced, two by two, with an empty seat between each pair. Their passports have been collected. Those who have done the collecting are standing at intervals in the aisles of the plane, six of them, three with small machine guns, three with visible grenades. They are all wearing airplane pillowcases over their heads, with holes cut for the eyes and for the mouths, which show in the dim light as white glints, pink glistenings. Below these pillowcases, which are red, their clothes are ordinary: a leisure outfit, a pair of gray flannel slacks with a white shirt tucked in, the bottom of a conservative navy-blue suit.

Naturally they came on board in the guise of passengers; though how they got the weapons past Security is anyone’s guess. They must have had help, someone at the airport, so that they could jump up, the way they did, somewhere over the English Channel, and start shouting orders and waving around the firearms. Either that or the things were already on the plane, in pre-arranged hiding places, Because nothing metal gets through the X-rays these days.

There are two or possibly three other men up in the cockpit, negotiating with the control tower over the radio. They haven’t yet told the passengers who they are or what they want; all they’ve said, in heavily accented but understandable English, is that everyone on the plane will live together or else die together. The rest has been monosyllables and pointing: You, here. It’s hard to tell how many of them there are altogether, because of the identical pillowcases. They’re like those characters in old comic books, the ones with two identities. These men have been caught halfway through their transformation: ordinary bodies but with powerful, supernatural heads, deformed in the direction of heroism, or villainy. I don’t know whether or not this is what my brother thought. But it’s what I think for him, now. Unlike the open-mouthed man beside him, my brother can’t sleep. So he occupies himself with theoretical stratagems: what would he do if he were in their place, the place of the men with pillowcase heads? It’s their tension, their hair-trigger excitement and blocked adrenaline that fills the plane, despite the lax bodies of the passengers, their fatigue and resignation.

If he were them, he would of course be ready to die. Without that as a given, such an operation would be pointless and unthinkable. But die for what? There’s probably a religious motif, though in the foreground something more immediate: money, the release of others jailed in some sinkhole for doing more or less the same thing these men are doing. Blowing something up, or threatening to. Or shooting someone. In a way this is all familiar. It’s as if he’s lived through it before, a long time ago; and despite the unpleasantness, the irritation of it, the combination of boredom and fear, he has a certain fellow feeling. He hopes these men can keep their heads and carry it off, whatever it is. He hopes there will be no sniveling and pants wetting among the passengers, that no one will go berserk and start screaming, and trigger a jittery massacre. A cool hand and a steady eye is what he wishes for them. A man has entered from the front of the plane and is talking with two of the others. It seems to be an argument: there are gestures of the hands, a raised word. The other standing men tense, their square red heads scanning the passengers like odd radars. My brother knows he should avoid eye contact, keep his head down. He looks at the nylon webbing pocket in front of him, furtively peels off a LifeSaver. The new man starts to walk down the aisle of the plane, his oblong, three-holed head turning from side to side. A second man walks behind him. Eerily, the taped music comes on over the intercom, saccharine, soporific. The man pauses; his oversized head moves ponderously left, like the head of some shortsighted, dull-witted monster. He extends an arm, gestures with the hand: Up. It’s my brother he points to.

Here I stop inventing. I’ve spoken with the witnesses, the survivors, so I know that my brother stands up, eases himself past the man in the aisle seat, saying, “Excuse me.” The expression on his face is one of bemused curiosity: these people are unfathomable, but then so are most. Perhaps they have mistaken him for someone else. Or they may want him to help negotiate, because they’re walking toward the front of the plane, where another pillowhead stands waiting.

It’s this one who swings open the door for him, like a polite hotel doorman, letting in the full glare of day. After the semidarkness it’s ferociously bright, and my brother stands blinking as the image clears to sand and sea, a happy vacation postcard. Then he is falling, faster than the speed of light. This is how my brother enters the past.

I was on planes and in airports for fifteen hours, getting there. I saw the buildings after that, the sea, the stretch of runway; the plane itself was gone. All they got in the end was safe conduct. I didn’t want to identify the body, or see it at all. If you don’t see the body, it’s easier to believe nobody’s dead. But I did want to know whether they shot him before throwing him out, or after. I wanted it to be after, so he could have had that brief moment of escape, of sunlight, of pretended flight. I did not stay up at night, on that trip. I did not want to look at the stars. The body has its own defenses, its way of blocking things out. The government people said I was wonderful, by which they meant not a nuisance. I didn’t collapse or make a spectacle of myself; I spoke with reporters, signed the forms, made the decisions. There was a great deal I didn’t see or think about until much later.

What I thought about then was the space twin, the one who went on an interplanetary journey and returned in a week to find his brother ten years older.

Now I will get older, I thought. And he will not.

Chapter 69

M y parents never understood Stephen’s death, because it had no reason; or no reason that had anything to do with him. Nor did they get over it. Before it, they were active, alert, vigorous; after it they faded.

“It doesn’t matter how old they are,” my mother said. “They’re always your children.” She tells me this as something I will need to know, later on.

My father became shorter and thinner, visibly shriveled; he sat for long periods, without doing anything. Unlike himself. This is what my mother told me, over the telephone, long distance. Sons should not die before their fathers. It’s not natural, it’s the wrong order. Because who will carry on?

My parents themselves died in the usual way, of the things elderly people die of, that I myself will die of sooner than I think: my father instantly, my mother a year later, of a slower and more painful disease. “It’s a good thing your father went the way he did,” she said. “He would have hated this.” She didn’t say anything about hating it herself.

The girls came for a week, early on, at the end of summer, when my mother was still in her house in the Soo and we could all pretend this was just another visit. I stayed on after them, digging weeds out of the garden, helping with the dishes because my mother had never got a dishwasher, doing the laundry downstairs in the automatic washer but hanging it out on the line because she thought driers used up too much electricity. Greasing the muffin tins. Impersonating a child.