Flight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales (19 page)

JANICE MUMFORD IN BUSINESS

“Mom!” Janice shouts. “Mom, lookat! What’s that?”

What’s happening in the sky is less alarming than what’s happening in the cabin. Someone is screaming: a bright silver thread of sound that stitches itself right through Janice’s head. Adults groan in a way that makes Janice think of ghosts.

The 777 tilts to the left, and then rocks suddenly hard to the right. The plane sails through a labyrinth of gargantuan pillars, the cloisters of some impossibly huge cathedral. Janice had to spell CLOISTERS (an easy one) in the Englewood Regional.

Her mother, Millie, doesn’t reply. She’s breathing steadily into a white paper bag. Millie has never flown before, has never been out of California. Neither has Janice, but unlike her mother, she was looking forward to both. Janice has always wanted to go up in a big airplane; she’d also like to dive in a submarine someday, although she’d settle for a ride in a glass-bottomed kayak.

The orchestra of despair and horror sinks away to a soft diminuendo (Janice spelled DIMINUENDO in the first round of the State Finals and came thi-
i-i-i-is
close to blowing it and absorbing a humiliating early defeat). Janice leans toward the nice-looking man who has been drinking iced tea the whole trip.

“Were those rockets?” Janice asks.

The woman from the movies replies, speaking in her adorable British accent. Janice has only ever heard British accents in films and she loves them.

“ICBMs,” says the movie star. “They’re on their way to the other side of the world.”

Janice notices the movie star is holding hands with the much younger man who drank all the iced tea. Her features are set in an expression of almost icy calm. The man beside her, on the other hand, looks like he wants to throw up. He’s squeezing the older woman’s hand so hard his knuckles are white.

“Are you two related?” Janice asks. She can’t think why else they might be holding hands.

“No,” says the nice-looking man.

“Then why are you holding hands?”

“Because we’re scared,” says the movie star, although she doesn’t look scared. “And it makes us feel better.”

“Oh,” Janice says, and then quickly takes her mother’s free hand. Her mother looks at her gratefully over the bag that keeps inflating and deflating like a paper lung. Janice glances back at the nice-looking man. “Would you like to hold my hand?”

“Yes please,” the man says, and they take each other’s hand across the aisle.

“What’s I-C-B-M stand for?”

“InterContinental Ballistic Missile,” the man says.

“That’s one of my words! I had to spell ‘intercontinental’ in the regional.”

“For real? I don’t think I can spell ‘intercontinental’ off the top of my head.”

“Oh it’s easy,” Janice says, and proves it by spelling it for him.

“I’ll take your word for it. You’re the expert.”

“I’m going to Boston for a spelling bee. It’s International Semi-Finals, and if I do well
there
, I get to go to Washington, D.C., and be on television. I didn’t think I’d ever go to either of those places. But then I didn’t think I’d ever go to Fargo, either. Are we still landing at Fargo?”

“I don’t know what else we’d do,” says the nice-looking man.

“How many ICBMs was that?” Janice asks, craning her neck to look at the towers of smoke.

“All of them,” says the movie star.

Janice says, “I wonder if we’re going to miss the spelling bee.”

This time it is her mother who responds. Her voice is hoarse, as if she has a sore throat, or has been crying. “I’m afraid we might, sweetie.”

“Oh,” Janice says. “Oh no.” She feels a little like she did when they had Secret Santa last year, and she was the only one who didn’t get a gift, because her Secret Santa was Martin Cohassey, and Martin was out with mononucleosis.

“You would’ve won,” her mother says and shuts her eyes. “And not just the semi-finals, either.”

“They aren’t till tomorrow night,” Janice says. “Maybe we could get another plane in the morning.”

“I’m not sure anyone will be flying tomorrow morning,” says the nice-looking man, apologetically.

“Because of something happening in North Korea?”

“No,” her friend across the aisle says. “Not because of something that’s going to happen there.”

Millie opens her eyes and says, “
Sh
. You’ll scare her.”

But Janice isn’t scared, she just doesn’t understand. The man across the aisle swings her hand back and forth, back and forth.

“What’s the hardest word you ever spelled?” he asks.

“Anthropocene,” Janice says promptly. “That’s the word I lost on
last
year, at semis. I thought it had an ‘I’ in it. It means ‘in the era of human beings.’ As in ‘the Anthropocene era looks very short when compared to other geological periods.’”

The man stares at her for a moment, and then barks with laughter. “You said it, kid.”

The movie star stares out her window at the enormous white columns. “No one has ever seen a sky like this. These towers of cloud. The bright sprawling day caged in its bars of smoke. They look like they’re holding up heaven. What a lovely afternoon. You might soon get to see me perform another death, Mr. Holder. I’m not sure I can promise to play the part with my usual flair.” She shuts her eyes. “I miss my daughter. I don’t think I’m going to get to—” She opens her eyes and looks at Janice and falls quiet.

“I’ve been thinking the same thing about mine,” says Mr. Holder. Then he turns his head and peers past Janice at her mother. “Do you know how lucky you are?” He glances from Millie to Janice and back, and when Janice looks, her mother is nodding, a small gesture of acknowledgment.

“Why are you lucky, Mom?” Janice asks her.

Millie squeezes her and kisses her temple. “Because we’re together today, silly bean.”

“Oh,” Janice says. It’s hard to see the luck in that. They’re together
every
day.

At some point Janice realizes the nice-looking man has let go of her hand and when she next looks over, he is holding the movie star in his arms, and she is holding him, and they are kissing each other, quite tenderly, and Janice is shocked, just
shocked
, because the movie star is a lot older than her seatmate. They’re kissing just like lovers at the end of the film, right before the credits roll and everyone has to go home. It’s so outrageous, Janice just has to laugh.

A RA LEE IN COACH

For a moment at her brother’s wedding in Jeju, A Ra thought she saw her father, who has been dead for seven years. The ceremony and reception were held in a vast and lovely private garden, bisected by a deep, cool, man-made river. Children threw handfuls of pellets into the current and watched the water boil with rainbow carp, a hundred heaving, brilliant fish in all the colors of treasure: rose-gold and platinum and new-minted copper. A Ra’s gaze drifted from the kids to the ornamental stone bridge crossing the brook and there was her father in one of his cheap suits, leaning on the wall, grinning at her, his big homely face seamed with deep lines. The sight of him startled her so badly she had to look away, was briefly breathless with shock. When she looked back, he was gone. By the time she was in her seat for the ceremony, she had concluded that she had only seen Jum, her father’s younger brother, who cut his hair the same way. It would be easy, on such an emotional day, to momentarily confuse one for another… especially given her decision not to wear her glasses to the wedding.

On the ground, the student of evolutionary linguistics at M.I.T. places her faith in what can be proved, recorded, known, and studied. But now she is aloft and feeling more open-minded. The 777—all three hundred-odd tons of it—hurtles through the sky, lifted by immense, unseen forces. Nothing carries everything on its back. So it is with the dead and the living, the past and the present.
Now
is a wing and history is beneath it, holding it up. A Ra’s father loved fun—he ran a novelty factory for forty years, fun was his actual business. Here in the sky, she is willing to believe he would not have let death get between him and such a happy evening.

“I’m so fucking scared right now,” Arnold Fidelman says.

She nods. She is too.

“And so fucking angry.
So
fucking angry.”

She stops nodding. She isn’t and chooses not to be. In this moment more than any other she chooses not to be.

Fidelman says, “That motherfucker, Mister Make-America-So-Fucking-Great over there. I wish we could bring back the stocks, just for one day, so people could hurl dirt and cabbages at him. Do you think this would be happening if Obama was in office? Any of this—
this
—lunacy?
Listen
. When we get down—
if
we get down. Will you stay with me on the jetway? To report what happened? You’re an impartial voice in all this. The police will listen to you. They’ll arrest that fat creep for pouring his beer on me, and he can enjoy the end of the world from a dank little cell, crammed in with shitty raving drunks.”

She has shut her eyes, trying to place herself back in the wedding garden. She wants to stand by the man-made river and turn her head and see her father on the bridge again. She doesn’t want to be afraid of him this time. She wants to make eye contact and smile back.

But she isn’t going to get to stay in her wedding garden of the mind. Fidelman’s voice has been rising along with his hysteria. The big man across the aisle, Bobby, catches the last of what he has to say.

“While you’re making your statement to the police,” Bobby says, “I hope you won’t leave out the part where you called my wife smug and ignorant.”

“Bobby,” says the big man’s wife, the little woman with the adoring eyes. “Don’t.”

A Ra lets out a long slow breath and says, “No one is going to report anything to police in Fargo.”

“You’re wrong about that,” Fidelman says, his voice shaking. His legs are shaking too.

“No,” A Ra says, “I’m not. I’m sure of it.”

“Why are you so sure?” asks Bobby’s wife. She has bright bird-like eyes and quick bird-like gestures.

“Because we aren’t landing in Fargo. The plane stopped circling the airport a few minutes after the missiles launched. Didn’t you notice? We left our holding pattern some time ago. Now we’re headed north.”

“How do you know that?” asks the little woman.

“The sun is on the left side of the plane. Hence, we go north.”

Bobby and his wife look out the window. The wife makes a low hum of interest and appreciation.

“What’s north of Fargo?” the wife asks. “And why would we go there?”

Bobby slowly lifts a hand to his mouth, a gesture which might indicate he’s giving the matter his consideration, but which A Ra sees as Freudian. He already knows why they aren’t landing in Fargo and has no intention of saying.

A Ra only needs to close her eyes to see in her mind exactly where the warheads must be now, well outside of the earth’s atmosphere, already past the crest of their deadly parabola and dropping back into gravity’s well. There is perhaps less than ten minutes before they strike the other side of the planet. A Ra saw at least thirty missiles launch, which is twenty more than are needed to destroy a nation smaller than New England. And the thirty they have all witnessed rising into the sky are certainly only a fraction of the arsenal that has been unleashed. Such an onslaught can only be met with a proportional response, and no doubt America’s ICBMs have crossed paths with hundreds of rockets sailing the other way. Something has gone horribly wrong, as was inevitable when the fuse was lit on this string of geopolitical firecrackers.

But A Ra does not close her eyes to picture strike and counter-strike. She prefers instead to return to Jeju. Carp riot in the river. The fragrant evening smells of lusty blossoms and fresh-cut grass. Her father puts his elbows on the stone wall of the bridge and grins mischievously.

“This guy—” says Fidelman. “This guy and his goddamn wife. Calls Asians ‘Orientals.’ Talks about how your people are ants. Bullies people by throwing beer at them. This guy and his goddamn wife put reckless, stupid people just like themselves in charge of this country and now here we are. The missiles are flying.” His voice cracks with strain and A Ra senses how close he is to crying.

She opens her eyes once more. “This guy and his goddamn wife are on the plane with us. We’re
all
on this plane.” She looks over at Bobby and his wife, who are listening to her. “However we got here, we’re
all
on this plane now. In the air. In trouble. Running as hard as we can.” She smiles. It feels like her father’s smile. “Next time you feel like throwing a beer, give it to me instead. I could use something to drink.”

Bobby stares at her for an instant with thoughtful, fascinated eyes—then laughs.

Bobby’s wife looks up at him and says, “
Why
are we running north? Do you really think Fargo could be hit? Do you really think we could be hit
here
? Over the middle of the United States?” Her husband doesn’t reply, so she looks back at A Ra.

A Ra weighs in her heart whether the truth would be a mercy or yet another assault. Her silence, however, is answer enough.

The woman’s mouth tightens. She looks at her husband and says, “If we’re going to die, I want you to know I’m glad I’ll be next to you when it happens. You were good to me, Robert Jeremy Slate.”

He turns to his wife and kisses her and draws back and says, “Are you kidding me? I can’t believe a fat man like me wound up married to a knock-out like you. It’d be easier to draw a million dollar lottery ticket.”

Fidelman stares at them and then turns away. “Oh for fuck’s sake. Don’t start being human on me now.” He crumples up a beery paper towel and throws it at Bob Slate.

It bounces off Bobby’s temple. The big man turns his head and looks at Fidelman… and laughs. Warmly.

A Ra closes her eyes, puts her head against the back of her seat.

Her father watches her approach the bridge, through the silky spring night.

As she steps up onto the stone arch, he reaches out to take her hand, and lead her on to an orchard, where people are dancing.