Some Things About Flying (6 page)

“Say he murdered his wife last night.”

Tom's eyes flare open again. “What?”

“Really. Beat her to death, broke all her bones, or stabbed her, or shot her, or put poison in her soup or her after-dinner drink. Then he threw a few things together and bolted, and now he's trying to escape, like Susie and her mother, except for different reasons. He's hoping nobody's found the body yet, and he has a few hours of lead time before anybody starts hunting him.”

“Why would he do that?”

Why indeed? Lila can hardly suggest he was having an affair and decided to cut loose (imagine Tom slaughtering Dorothy for such a reason—oh, not funny). “Maybe, let's see, she told him their children aren't really his? Or that he's getting too fat, or drinks too much, or that she hates how he dresses, or the sounds he makes chewing? Maybe she told him she couldn't stand a single thing about him any more.”

“And he killed her to put her out of her misery?”

“Something like that.”

Those things happen, too.

“He's big,” Tom says, regarding the man, “but he doesn't look dangerous. What made you suspicious? Or is this just your day for bad, vicious men? How about if the poor guy is only off to sell, I don't know, shady investments or swampland to unsuspecting Brits?”

“Heavens, no, that's far too dull. Of course he doesn't look dangerous, but that's the point. You know, nine out of ten people who look perfectly ordinary are hiding something dreadful. I believe there are studies to show that.”

“No doubt.” Tom laughs. He hates how many studies there are proving this, proving that, proving whatever is desired.

“Also, look where he's sitting. Maybe he figures if he slumps in a window seat, he won't be noticeable if anyone's on the lookout for him, but actually he sticks out, he's obviously inexperienced. A man his size used to flying would never choose an inside seat.”

“Good point, Sherlock.”

“Ms. Marple, please. Anyway, keep your eyes open at Heathrow. Scotland Yard is bound to be on tap for one thing or another.”

That also happens. The difficulty is finding stories that do not happen. New, unlikely, unreasonable stories.

“Shouldn't the movie be starting?”

“You'd think so. Going to watch it?”

It stars a man whose talents they both admire. From reviews, they gather it has little resemblance to old-fashioned Westerns, with their white hats and black hats, the clear good and bad which, Lila assumes, must have appealed to some people sometime. Modern moral ambiguity, she and Tom agree, is more compelling and far more realistic.

Well, naturally they agree on that. Of course they must. Moral ambiguity is practically their motto. They could wear matching sweatshirts with those words stitched front and back.

Most good stories are considerably more ambiguous than the ones Lila's been telling Tom. Everyone has their own perspectives, their own tales, their own points of view, and the question is only whether they're told or not, taken into account or not. If Lila's stories were true, Susie's father would surely have something to say for himself, and so would the man in the window seat. Not to mention his wife. Lila and Tom run into this themselves: an event she sees one way, he views quite another. They may agree both ways are reasonable, but that doesn't mean the differences aren't irreconcilable, and still sometimes startling.

Just a few weeks ago she discovered, for instance, that what she has regarded as lively discussions, he has sometimes viewed as arguments. Imagine how easily one could go years, decades, lives, without knowing that sort of thing—the prospects for misunderstanding are enormous.

What were they talking about? Massacres, that's it, because they were on her sofa having an after-work drink, as they do, and watching the news on television, as they do, and there was some hideous, bloody, senseless outbreak of slashing ill will by one indistinguishable group against another indistinguishable group, sending many limbs flying, much blood spurting, many corpses lying about in dusty roads and ditches. No one on the TV news pinpointed what, exactly, had launched this, but several people sounded certain it would lead to much more and much worse.

Wasn't it astonishing that these people who were now slaughtering each other had, for a fairly long time, been living peaceably as neighbours, as communities, sometimes even as families? Lila thought it was. She wondered what stories, frequently terrible but not always, must lie behind all this.

Surely Tom, the former politician and current historian, would have an enlightening perspective. History as he describes it is mainly a narrative of conflict; rather like news, although he doesn't like the comparison, having been burned on occasion and feeling as he does that news is fleeting and uninformed, and very likely to turn out to have been inaccurate, and certainly lacking in the long view. Whereas history is precisely the long view.

“How do you think a thing like that happens?” she asked. “Can you imagine doing those things? Hacking your neighbours to pieces? And little children? Well, look at that, little children on both sides, hacking and being hacked. Whatever will happen to them? How could their hearts ever recover? Would we be capable as well? I bet we could. I bet it's right beneath everyone's surface. What do you think brings it out?”

He frowned slightly and began to speak of arbitrary imperialism, colonialism, rough boundaries that failed to take inhabitants into account. “It happened everywhere. Africa, Europe, especially Eastern Europe, here and there in South America, even in North America, to a degree. There are always ancient tensions and rivalries, and we probably can't begin to understand them now.” He shrugged. “Probably those people can't either, any more. Now it's perpetual revenge, back and forth. In the bones. Or the blood. I don't know.”

This was puzzling. What was the point of pursuing politics or history if he could only shrug and regard some matters as hopeless? Anyway, it wasn't quite what she'd been asking.

“I realize,” she said carefully, “all that. But what I was wondering, is there something in everyone's bones and blood? Whatever the history, is there something vicious inside humans, and it only takes a scratch on the skin of civility for it to splash out?” Because for all her own relatively peaceful, unviolent life, this is Lila's suspicion.

“Oh, Lila.” He sighed. “I don't know. It's been a tough day. Let's not argue about it. You ready for another drink?”

What a surprise.

Mightn't it be interesting to track back their words together and compare how they each meant and heard them? Tom would call that pathological; not in the mad sense (although maybe that, too) but in the morgue-laboratory way of close, intent analysis and scrutiny.

In her work, dissecting texts and stories, Lila's intention is not to ruin, not to be left staring hopelessly at a heap of unreplaceable parts. It's to see the whole more clearly, with an eye to its complexity. To see how even entirely unfamiliar emotions can be felt, and unlikely circumstances experienced.

To have many more lives than her own, and make them, however briefly, imaginable and touchable.

Naturally she and Tom have some different opinions and perspectives, but shouldn't differences be opportunities? Shouldn't they make the two of them bigger, at least prevent them from shrinking? One of the hazards of a safe middle age is the lure of getting little. Lila imagines it gets easier and easier to curl up like old lettuce, turn brown at the edges and wilt into decrepitude. She does not care for that idea at all.

She glances towards him, and sees that he has evidently lost interest and now, for heaven's sake, has fallen asleep—does she have to go on making up stories to keep him awake? And how can he be tired when their journey has barely begun? Some exhaustion from his other life, perhaps, that Lila has no way of knowing about. She has very little idea how his private hours away from her are spent. Perhaps he's had large, unspeakable events on his calendar.

It's rather nice, though, and trusting, the way his head tilts towards her.

Usually when Lila goes to Europe, it's on a flight leaving at night, heading into the sunrise. This is different, flying into the dark. People lulled by a plane's sturdy, tedious sound and the immobility of waiting may fall asleep, like Tom; but won't they be disoriented when they get where they're going?

It's possible he's dozing for no other reason than to store energy for their time together. When he told her once that busy people should be able to grab quick naps whenever they can, she was reminded of something she'd read about the queen: “Her Majesty never passes up a discreet opportunity to use facilities”; which must account for why she is never caught going knock-kneed about her public chores. “You sleep,” Lila told Tom, “the way the queen pees.”

“No doubt I'd agree, if I knew what it meant. A regal sort of compliment, is it?”

Tom met the queen on one of his overseas political jaunts. “Well, not to say met her exactly, not the way I met you, for instance.”

“I should hope not.”

“More that I was actually present with a thousand or two other suitably impressed people on palace grounds when she drifted very close by. It's possible she might not recall the occasion.”

“Oh, I'm sure she does. Who could forget you?”

“Could you?”

“No, not ever.” Which of course, however their story goes, must be true (unless she comes down with one of those forgetting diseases). What isn't exactly clear is just what would be remembered, and how.

I want
, she thinks. “Want” is a verb that requires an object, but she can't find the word.

Well, she wants Tom, whose head is nodding closer and closer to her shoulder.

This, she thinks, is how it feels being with him: as if roots have shifted and nudged deeper and deeper, coiling and pushing until they have tendrils in every limb, organ and vein. Important parts of her have come to feel held together by these roots; like shallow land at risk of losing its topsoil if it isn't protected by growth.

Oh dear, another image gone over the top—she keeps, in her enthusiasm, going too far. She shakes her head.

Coming awake with her movement, Tom shakes his head, also. “My ears feel strange. Think there's something funny about the pressure?”

She shrugs. “It never quite suits me on a plane. That and the air. I always get some awful combination of dried out and puffed up, if a flight's any length at all.”

He laughs. “Sounds attractive. You must be a treat by the end.” He looks at his watch. “Sorry for tuning out. It wasn't you, it's just that after a while planes always send me unconscious.” She didn't know that about him; a good thing to find out, that his doze wasn't personal. And what will he learn about her in these two weeks? Not everything, for either of them, will be pleasing or virtuous, and thank goodness for that.

Now a couple of kids from heaven knows what part of the plane are running up and down the aisle. Susie is watching them, looking shy but willing. Lila hopes shy overcomes willing, because two youngsters playing some antagonistic game this close are already too many.

Adults are also stirring, cramped muscles kicking up trouble. Some people stand and stretch, creating a cabin-wide rustling of cloth that sounds, over the rhythm of engines, like a great flurry of moths' wings.

Somewhere towards the front, a baby is starting to howl.

Tom raises his eyebrows. “Still no movie?”

Lila shrugs again. “Not yet.”

“I could use another drink. How about you?”

“Sure. Whenever. She should be around again soon.”

He twists to peer down the aisle, turns back, frowning. “There's a bunch of them in the galley, just talking, it looks like. Four of them.”

Kind, tender-hearted Tom, and this surprised Lila in their early days, balks at casual service in restaurants and stores. He has been known to toss items he intended to buy on a counter and stalk out if he hasn't been able to get help fast enough, and he can be snappish in restaurants if he thinks the service is not properly attentive. By and large, when they're together he saves Lila the trouble of saying similar crisp words, or making similar crisp gestures herself.

And by and large, that's something to be careful about. She can't afford to start assuming, or depending; falling into roles, like husbands, like wives: men who automatically drive, women who automatically don't drive. That kind of thing. It can get too easy; like letting him order her drink for her.

“Listen,” he says more urgently. “Hear that?”

His face has the strangest expression. Unfamiliar, almost scary. What the hell is it?

He is looking beyond her, over her shoulder. His eyes are huge, his mouth hangs open.

“Oh, Jesus,” he says softly, with something like awe. “Oh, sweet Jesus Christ.”

four

Oh Jesus, indeed, oh sweet Jesus Christ.

Lila doesn't believe it. Then she almost laughs out loud—imagine even for an instant that her belief or disbelief makes any difference. Imagine a giggle bubbling up at a moment like this.

She is staring, gape-mouthed, at Tom, who is still staring past her, past the empty seat, out the window. How can he?

She has already turned and looked, and turned back to him, just as fast as she could.

That's fire out there. Fire and space; something terribly present and equally terribly empty.

No.

No, these things happen, but not really. On the news, yes, or in movies, but not to Lila. It's only—what?—a scene. She thinks, No wonder they don't show airplane disaster movies on airplanes, and another giggle bubbles up. They probably don't sell airplane disaster books in airport bookstores, either.

Tom's gaze remains locked on the flame-licked wing. He must have a different way of disbelieving than she does. Although fire dances in front of her anyway, between her face and his. She is watching his eyes through a flaring red curtain.

Lila prays for a suspension of event, right now. For anything but the heart-clamping terror against which she is instantly constructing this false, unsteady barricade. She is surprised to find herself praying. Or pleading, actually, the extent of her eloquence reduced to, “Oh please,” not even addressed anywhere in particular. Like a scared child: too few words, and too small ones, for very large events.

But it was just a little bit of fire, wasn't it? More hinting than real?

Airplanes must be built with this sort of possibility in mind, there must be mechanisms and manoeuvres. Well, what? Do the people flying this thing, who understand its mechanisms and manoeuvres, even know they have a problem yet?

She and Tom haven't said a word except for his exclamation, although maybe he gasped at first sight, Lila doesn't recall, but knowledge is spreading around them, rippling from seat to seat, row to row, until there's a rising, rumbling tone of horror. Some shouting. Shrieks here and there.

Some kinds of knowledge are explosive, too big to contain. That may be why hands fly up to faces, covering ears, covering eyes: trying to prevent minds from collapsing in on themselves with this new understanding.

Shared terror is far too real, multiplying itself automatically and uncontrollably in some wild formula maybe Tom's younger, clever mathematical daughter could explain.

Lila's grandmother, telling June of some upheaval, had words for this feeling: “I'm all turned inside out,” she'd say, hands fluttering in distress like butterflies.

Tenderly, tentatively, Lila reaches a hand to the side of Tom's jaw, feeling bone. Gristle under the skin.

She can't quite feel her own skin, though. An awful, high scream rises from somewhere behind them, and Lila admires how alert that woman must be, absorbing the impact of disaster so swiftly she can scream like that.

People are starting to move, some trying to run. Some, scattering possessions and wits, are even climbing over seats—where do they think they are going? What do they suppose they are doing? “Be still,” she wants to shout. “Everybody, shut up, please, till I can understand this.” She can't say just what “this” is. If she could say, would that fix it, or cause it to vanish? Is her faith in words so great she believes the right one could repair?

She hopes the members of the crew are not so foolish. Of course they're not; naturally their faith will be in machinery, not words.

Lila's touch has finally reached Tom, so that his gaze shifts, it seems reluctantly, to her. “Lila?” She can't hear him, but sees his mouth forming her name. “Lila?”

“I don't know.” She can't tell if he can hear her. “I don't know,” which is no answer, but then, it wasn't truly a question.

There isn't time to say everything twice like that. There isn't time, for that matter, to say everything once.

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe everyone's wrong. She only glanced for a second. On planes, sometimes things look wrong, or reflect in the air strangely, when nothing's really the matter at all. On night flights, sparks in the darkness have startled her on occasion. Maybe these are only sparks in the light.

She turns to look again. Those are not sparks. Those are flickers of flame at the edge of the wing.

Where is fuel stored on an airplane? How could there possibly be fire out there, where the air, as she tried to tell Susie, is so intensely cold? Why isn't someone
doing
something? There must be things to be done. She hopes the crew hasn't been stricken immobile by a disbelief similar to her own.

She turns back urgently to Tom. “This isn't happening, is it?” Surely he could alter reality. He has altered aspects of her reality for as long as she has known him, why not now?

“Oh Christ,” he says. “We're going to die.”

What?

She could shake and shake him. She's had such hopes, and he's not even trying. If he cultivated a disbelief like hers, could they not, with their combined wills, make this not be happening? Instead, such despair is in his face, along with terror.

She reaches out again to touch his skin. At the moment, she loves and pities him to death, and it does not feel like an odd combination.

Wait. Just wait. She is a rational person, and it's important to know things. With facts, a person can figure out how to feel, but they are flying at the moment without critical information. Not fair.

The running children have disappeared from the aisles. Susie is wrapped in her mother's arms, weeping. Does she understand, or is she just upset by an explosion of adult hysteria? Nobody understands; how could Susie? Why doesn't somebody tell them what's wrong? There might be hope, and no great problem, and nobody's telling them that, either. She starts to stand, to look around, to demand something from someone. She feels Tom's hand on her arm and looks down. “Lila,” he says. “Lila, please.”

Those words. She is so very weary of hearing them on important occasions. There was a time, early on, when she wanted her and Tom to be together, but “Lila, please,” he said.

She said, “Other people do it all the time.”

“Lila, please, we can't talk about this. I know they're almost grown, but the girls would be devastated. They're close to their mother, and I don't want to lose them. Maybe it'll be different once they're out on their own.”

Which they now are, but even then, Lila doubted it. She foresaw family events rolling into the future—graduations, weddings, births of grandchildren—in a festive parallel universe, followed by various crises, disintegrations, disasters and deaths. All the this and that, forbidding a move. And she was right.

Now this. She has an impulse to say, “I hope you're happy now.”

She still can't hear small sounds, like his voice, very well, although shouting and screaming from elsewhere feel as if they're drilling holes in her head.

Prayers used to be promises, bargains: “If I get a doll for Christmas, I promise I'll always be good.” Or “If I get a good mark on this test,” or “If I get asked to that party”—and always, in return, the promise she'd be good. She guesses she never kept it very well; but she would now. “I'll give up anything, I'll do anything. I'll be so good in my life, if I can only, please, have my life.”

Tom is her only really outstanding sin—old-fashioned, unfamiliar word that even at this terrible, bargaining moment doesn't feel like the right one. Without him, she would be lonely and sad, but alive. And she is not young any more, and at least she would remember love, and there must be other pleasures: wisdom, meekness, generosity, all those virtues she seems to have put off acquiring. She isn't stupid; she could probably get the hang of goodness.

“Lila!” His voice now is sharp, and she can hear him quite sharply. “Settle down, Lila. Come on, now, sit down.” She realizes she is still standing and that Tom, looking up at her, seems worried. Or disappointed. Or irritable. She can't always tell the difference. Sometimes there isn't much difference. Disappointments and worries irritate him, as a rule; cause and effect blurring together.

“Yes,” she says, “okay,” and obediently sits.

He keeps a grip, not tight, on her arm. “Keep calm. We need to be calm.” He should speak only for himself. He has not earned the full-hearted place in her life that would allow him to speak for her.

Her skin marks easily. There are already flushes of blood around the white marks where his fingers grasped her arm. And her bones are thin. As it turns out, there's not much to her. Tiny freckles on the backs of her hands would sizzle in flames; her bones would collapse at the slightest downward spiral, shatter at a touch of land.

Or, she remembers, ocean.

This is the sort of circumstance in which the deft, sausage-fingered, life-saving Geoff might have come in handy.

Or, more likely, he'd do well in the aftermath, stitching together the uncountable bits and pieces that may fall from the sky.

Poor Geoff, perhaps she was unfair. Perhaps she is also unfair to Tom, and to other people along the line, and to herself, as well.

Don't think and don't look. Keep the mind in the air.

On Geoff, connected as he is anyway with life converted from death. Six years she spent with him, slightly longer than she has so far been with Tom.

The night of her thirty-fifth birthday, Nell and Patsy took her to a restaurant to celebrate. He was at the next table with friends, or more likely colleagues. There was much laughter and drinking of champagne, and the two tables ended up together. Geoff sent her a half dozen white roses the next morning—“A day late, but it should never be too late” the card said, somewhat cryptically, somewhat enticingly.

“I've had some awkward moments,” he confided a few nights later over dinner, “since my divorce. Sometimes I've learned that a woman has gone out with me because of my work. I mean, because I'm fairly well known, I guess.”

“Yes,” Lila agreed, “I expect that can be a hazard.”

Down the road there were further words, in other tones. “For god's sake, Lila, you knew from the start how busy I am.” Quite true. He went to some pains to tell her his marriage, for one thing, had failed precisely because he was a busy man, and not only that, busy in such a virtuous and necessary way that there was no point in merely personal complaints.

Who would, could, reasonably expect his presence when on the other side of the scale a life was in the balance? Geoff's skilful, pudgy fingers were needed, absolutely needed, to dig beyond flesh into organs and arteries, pulling them out, turning them over, replacing them, sewing bodies together maybe moments from death.

A woman could hardly say to such a man, “Yes, I know the guy has only one kidney and it's disintegrating as we speak, but I've had a really bad week and I'd like to rest on your shoulder, if you wouldn't mind.” On the other hand, who unfailingly agreed that, always, it would be more urgent to give pleading speeches to Rotarians than to comfort someone who'd had a bad week?

“I have to,” he said. “It's important.”

“So are some other things. You should know that. I hope you do.”

He said he didn't like her tone; that it sounded threatening. “Up to you”—she shrugged—“what you hear.”

She read accounts of his speeches in the newspaper (how well publicized, for one reason and another, some of her lovers have been). “It's difficult,” he told audiences wherever he could grab them, “for a physician to ask a grieving family to make such a wrenching decision. But to offer a chance of life—as physicians we must give families that opportunity. It's a greater memorial to the values and spirits of loved ones than the grandest gravestone, or the most eloquent epitaph.” Didn't he sound fine! Didn't he give the most eloquent speeches, himself!

There will be no salvageable organs if this plane goes down, nothing useful for surgeons to “harvest,” as Geoff used to put it. Lila found the expression chilling; but it was nothing compared with this bone-clattering cold.

“I'm sorry, sweetheart,” Geoff said when Lila's mother died, folding large, pink, freckled arms around her. “I wish I could be with you.” A keynote speech he was giving, at a national conference. He had to fly west, she had to drive east. “I'll call you when we both get where we're going.”

Lila's mother died, climbing into bed for the night, from a ferocious attack from her heart. She was only sixty-four, so it came as a shock. Like Aunt June, she lay dying and dead for more than a day before she was found by a neighbour. The despair, picturing those last hours—Lila surprised herself with sounds she'd never heard herself make before.

But Geoff, with his higher purposes, flew off; and Lila, not unreasonably, began developing a horror of dying alone and going undiscovered.

It appears she may have frightened herself with the wrong pictures entirely. She may die in quite the opposite fashion: in a great crowd, very publicly.

Several times driving back to the town where she grew up, where her stomach knotted and her head developed unaccountable aches when she visited, to which she'd driven eight years earlier for her father's funeral—several times Lila had to pull to the side of the road to weep. Tears broke down roughly half for her mother, half for herself.