They were encouraged to write essays on worst-case fantasy flying scenarios and were shown how to “stack positive imagery,” slowly replacing bad thoughts and images with good ones. The counselors guided the class through breathing meditations — Lisanne was glad to be reminded of something so familiar. She had done a lot of “sits” at the hospice, but it was well over a year since she’d meditated on her own, as she used to.
On the last weekend, everyone trooped into a hangar and boarded a 727. They talked to pilots and stewards, mechanics, air traffic controllers, and engineers. They revolved through the cockpit for comprehensive demonstrations and Q & A. They sat in coach seats (seat belts on) while the counselors played a tape reproducing all the sounds one might hear in the course of a normal flight. The tape was constantly stopped and started, each sound discussed and overexplained.
• • •
THE GRADUATION FLIGHT to San Francisco was optional, but nearly everyone signed up. The airline gave them a special rate.
At the suggestion of the counselors, some Fearless Fliers wore rubber bands around their wrists to snap away negative thoughts and feelings. The librarian offered Lisanne herbs and essential oils that she picked up at a health food store. The blue “Fear of Flying” package read, “This box contains enough remedies for one flight.”
All of them sat together. Lisanne took her place by the window — hardly anyone wanted a window seat, and besides, she didn’t need to be bothered by the bathroom comings and goings of someone in the midst of a preflight freak-out — and quickly got into meditative posture. She focused on her nostrils, following the breath as it filled up her lungs. Sounds of the cabin — the bustle and stowing of bags by unneurotic passengers not in their group, the little suck-rush of air through vents, the buckling and unbuckling, the coughs, sneezes, and throat clearings, the sporadic groaning gallows humor of fellow graduates along with the soothing running commentary of Fearless Fliers counselors — floated in and out of her awareness. (She wondered if anyone had cheated and taken a tranquilizer.) Whenever a bad thought intruded, say, the jackscrewed Alaska Airlines Flight 261 plunging into the Pacific — they would soon be flying over the very place it had gone down — or the documentary she’d watched a few months ago on the Discovery Channel about the famous golfer and his buddies who died on a Lear — the plane broke contact and inexplicably drifted off course, fighter jets were scrambled and got right up close to see the windows frosted over, meaning the cabin had lost pressurization — or the time she had a drink with a temp Reggie hired and the gal said she was supposed to have been on the PSA flight to San Francisco that crashed because a vengeful employee went berserk. The temp said that at that time of her life she was commuting a lot and always took that particular morning flight and this one time she was late: she remembered being at the gate begging them to let her on but they said the flight was already closed. That reminded Lisanne of the English movie she saw when she was a girl, about the supernatural. A woman in a hospital kept dreaming that each night she awakened to ride the elevator down to the morgue, where a man stood and said, “Room for one more.” When the woman was finally discharged, she was about to board an airplane, and the attendant at the gate said the same thing—“Room for one more”—and because she’d had the premonition, the woman didn’t board and of course the plane crashed. Whenever Lisanne was jolted by a morbid train of thought, she used one of the relaxation techniques the counselors had walked them through. She was able to get back in touch with the core of her zazen practice and found that its reawakening served her well.
There came that iffy time when taxiing was over and things got serious because there was now no turning back and the engines roared and the plane and all its guts began a sprint to the void. Lisanne’s eyes remained closed, but she noticed her section was quiet — that animal-fear quiet, before slaughter. Poor things. They’ll be all right. She was doing OK and suddenly felt maternal. She would meditate on their behalf, to help them through. She actually didn’t mind this part too much because you could really feel the power of the machine, the aircraft flexing its muscles, strutting its stuff, and it was so mightily definitive that it was a comfort — a hint of the kind of majestic strength the machine could summon if called on. (Besides, it was common knowledge that most crashes occurred during descent.) A jet like this one could take a lot of roughing up. That made Lisanne think of another documentary she’d seen about a research plane that flew into the eyes of hurricanes. (It even had propellors.) She remembered being shocked to watch it pierce the “wall” of a thunderstorm system, amazed that could even aerodynamically be done.
The graduates broke into huzzahs as they leveled off from the ascent. Soon, the drone would become that all-encompassing vibratory OM, filling ears and senses, the collected, collective hum of airspace within and airspace without. They were now over the Pacific. She pushed Alaska Airlines from her mind and tried to think of the water as a good thing, but again, it was common knowledge that crashing in water is actually worse than crashing on land, experts said the impact was somehow more devastating — even putting aside the likelihood of drowning if by some insane miracle one had managed to survive the collision. (It was one thing for Tom Hanks to endure his ocean crash in Cast Away, she thought, but would be quite another for Lisanne McCadden.) Still, this wasn’t a long flight, they weren’t even going all that high, nowhere near the altitude of a plane on its way to New York. Or maybe they were. If something went wrong, they could probably just glide down and land on the 5 or the 101. Regardless, she didn’t want to break meditation or pseudomeditation to ask one of the counselors about altitude because somehow she thought that might trigger something bad, some kind of small mechanical failure — when she caught herself having that nonsensical, superstitious notion, she laughed — and breathed — and suddenly felt normal again — then remembered something she hadn’t thought of in a long time. When she was nineteen, a friend asked her to fly with another couple in a Beechcraft to Catalina. Even though the trip was relatively smooth, she had been so unexpectedly terrified that she hadn’t flown again until the shit-filled jaunt with Philip et alia. Years later the friend who’d invited her to Catalina had crashed in the very same plane, and though he didn’t die, he had his jaw clamped shut for six months and everywhere he went carried wire cutters in case he choked on something or got sick and vomited. It was eerie that she had actually ridden in the same machine that had subsequently gone down and been damaged beyond repair. Room for one more… The soothing 29,000-year MIT statistic floated back to her and then the OM drone came and the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light went off and there was more jubilation from the grads. She thought of Philip, poor Philip and his unseemly death, death by hanging, what would that be like, and what a strange personage he was in her life, what a marvel it was that he’d come along to protect her, taken her in, her and the boy, and his perversions didn’t matter because he never touched Sidd or made him bear witness, and Lisanne thought how glad she was that she’d never judged him, Philip had enough pain, and her judgments would have hastened his death. Imagine your mother being cut from her own mother like that. She knew that children of Holocaust survivors were damaged by their parents’ mind-sets just the way people’s lungs were damaged by secondhand smoke. It is so common for the child of a suicide to commit the same act, she imagined the suicide of a parent like a magnet or dare, an enticement to join the dark fun. He’d written Lisanne a final note that had disturbed her. He said she had given him a book on rebirth that spoke of the Buddhist realm of the gods. In that they died, the gods were actually mortal yet because their lives were of such incomprehensible length and because they had lived them in unfathomable luxury it was particularly agonizing when they realized the end was upon them. He rambled in his letter and said that he had lived like a god and America had lived the same way and now the end had come, for both him and America, and what a fantastic shock it was for him and the Republic but that it was her duty, hers and Siddama’s, to carry on — he said he would make sure to think of them at the end because the Buddha said how important was one’s final thought, that if one had lived one’s life raging then one would rage at the end or if one had lived one’s life lusting one would lust at the end and Philip said he wished he could be like Gandhi was at death’s door and call out for Krishna or whatever the equivalent but was afraid he would shout something fearful or profane not devotional though he would do his best to think of her and the boy and even if he wasn’t sure that he could or would he joked he would die trying. She never showed those last words to anyone, not even Mattie — he was not in his right mind and no one would benefit. Philip bequeathed her the Rustic Canyon house and what he poignantly called a “dowry” so she would never have to work again in her life. To put it mildly. She asked Robbie and Maxine to move in and they did, but they kept the Fairfax duplex, and sometimes she and Robbie even slept in the same bed, without sexing. It was a comfort to have a body to curl up into. And he was a decent man. She didn’t understand his relationship with Maxine, but why should she? What business was it of hers, or anyone’s? She was a firm believer in “whatever gets you through the night.” No one understood anything anyway. All she knew was that Robbie was kind to Max and loving to Siddhama. What more could one ask for than loving-kindness?