The woman passenger who had been out of her seat when the two explosions happened appeared, rising over the headrests. She had been thrown into the row in front of them; it was empty and she seemed unhurt.
Max heard children crying. The flight was loaded with kids. “A good sign,” Jeff had said as they boarded. After Max caved in about taking the DC-10, Jeff did his best to reassure him. “Planes with kids on them don’t crash,” he whispered. There were a lot of children, but one of the flight attendants explained why and it had nothing to do with guaranteeing Max’s safety. To fill its seats off-peak the airline discounted their tickets seventy-five percent for children flying on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Some were very young — four, five, six. Max had seen at least three pairs of siblings traveling without parents and he had noticed one child, a towheaded boy, going it totally alone.
Max had flown alone as a child. His parents put him on a plane (for the first time when he was six) to visit his maternal grandparents in California at Christmas and for two weeks every summer. A shrink had told him that the fear he repressed then, pressured by his parents to pretend he enjoyed the experience, was forever resurfacing now that he was an adult. At first Max had been in love with this theory; but its uselessness (the next time he flew his terror was keener) eventually caused him to lose faith in it. Just last week Max had offered his own explanation to the doctor: “The simple truth is: I’m a coward.”
The towheaded boy seated alone three rows up had sat through boarding in a very grown-up, dignified, slightly shy and sad manner. Max used to put on a similar behavioral disguise when he had to travel as a child to California: he was concealing fear. Max wondered whether the boy was injured by the plane’s roll to the left. But the noise of crying children wasn’t coming from up ahead where the boy sat, it originated from behind Max. He freed himself of the handcuff Jeff’s fingers had made around his wrist and unbuckled his seat belt.
“Help her,” he ordered Jeff, pointing to the flight attendant, who was still unable to get off her knees. Twice she had reached for the top of the seats, gotten hold, risen slightly, only to have her legs give out. She seemed to be in shock: her pupils were big and she didn’t react to the blood running down the side of her face.
Jeff’s face had calmed, but his arms and hands were rigid. “I can’t move,” he said.
The bad smell, at least some of it, came from Jeff’s pants. Max, out of his seat by now, touched his rear to make sure that his skin had correctly informed him that he hadn’t crapped. He hadn’t. He was glad — and then disgusted by Jeff. “Clean yourself up!” he shouted and breathed through his mouth. He reached over and took hold of the flight attendant’s hand—
The little world of the plane in which they were trapped, wobbled and bobbed and then…dropped.
“God!” Jeff shouted. Max stumbled into Jeff’s lap and imagined he was falling into shit. The flight attendant lost her grip again and flopped over like a Raggedy Ann doll into the narrow river of blue carpet.
Engines fought the air. Max pushed himself up from Jeff. He was facing backwards. He looked at the rows and saw mostly little faces and young parents, younger than he. On every one there was frozen the terror of imminent death.
This is it.
Max was forty-two. He announced his age to himself, paused to consider how the fact of his death would read in the paper, and felt surprised. Not at dying so young, but to have lived so long and feel that he hadn’t really done anything.
The plane found a ramp in the air and swooped up it, leveling. They were much lower, perhaps no more than ten thousand feet off the ground; Max didn’t know, he was guessing. He noticed that the right wing dipped and then rose abruptly, without the usual smooth sway. Instead the plane jerked like a drunkard stumbling on his way home, landing heavily on each foot, threatening to topple over, rescued only by an equally precarious tilt the opposite way. Max peered at the wings and saw the flaps were up. They had been in that position before the roll, and after it, and again before the sudden drop. They hadn’t moved. Their immobility probably wasn’t a choice made by the captain; more likely he had no control over them. If so, Max knew that meant they would eventually crash. He had read about the safety backups: everything was supposedly designed to prevent such a catastrophic failure. If somehow the impossible had occurred and the captain couldn’t steer, then they were doomed.
You’re going to die, a voice in Max’s head informed him, not his conscience, maybe his God. Anyway it was someone with a lot of authority, no fear, and very little sadness. Consider it over and done with, he was told. He felt the terror leave him, discarded below as inconsequential. Relieved of his own dread, he concentrated on the others. The passengers’ faces still showed fear, but there was hope, desperate and fragile, returning. Max pitied them, because they continued to fight the inevitable and therefore had no peace.
Max stepped over Jeff, careful not to hurt the floundering flight attendant. He helped her up, hooking her by the armpits. The fabric was rough and scratchy. His fingers accidentally grazed the sides of her breasts. Even through the starched material Max had an instantaneous sensation of soft and bouncy flesh, probably a hallucination, and he was sad to think of sex just then. He gently maneuvered her down into an empty seat next to a silent and pale, but calm, elderly male passenger who applied his tiny cocktail napkin to the flight attendant’s cut. No one spoke.
When Max turned back to apologize to Jeff for yelling about soiling his pants (why meet the end on a quarrel?) he saw the senior flight attendant — her name tag read Mary — open the curtain from first class and grab hold of the food cart. It was stuck sideways in the aisle, wedged into the seats. She couldn’t budge it. Max moved up to help her from his side.
The cart was jammed against the armrest of the seat of the boy traveling alone. The boy watched them and pitched in, pushing from his seat with both hands, frowning with a manly seriousness at the effort.
“You okay?” Max asked the boy after they freed the cart. During the roll it must have struck him in the side of the leg.
The boy’s nod was casual, but there was a lonely fright in his eyes, a plea for rescue. At the thought of the loss of this child’s life Max wanted to cry.
“Could you help me stow it?” Mary asked, nodding down at the cart. She was stocky and almost completely gray-haired, cropped short, as if she wished to give a military appearance of neatness.
Max and Mary pushed the cart to the galley. They passed a lot of frightened people but no one was panicky or made any demands of Mary, not even to ask what was happening to the plane. Most of the overhead baggage compartments had opened. A few passengers were out of their seats shutting them; otherwise people sat still, clutching their armrests. There was a smell in the air, not only of rectal fear but of cold sweat. The plane was hot, too, as if the air-conditioning had been shut down. Outside it was sunny. Beams of yellow light streamed in from the windows, bobbing with the plane’s rough bouncing motion. Their touch was warm to the skin, and their glare intrusive and blinding. On the ground it was a hot July day.
Another flight attendant joined them in the kitchen, approaching from the other aisle. She had come up from the back of the plane. She was small and skinny and wore a lot of makeup. She must have slid against something because her lipstick was smeared down one side of her mouth, transforming that half of her face into a clown’s sad paint. Her name tag read Lisa.
“Anyone hurt?” Mary asked.
Lisa shook her head no, but she answered, “I think the man in thirty-three A may be having a heart attack.”