Something jolted the plane and she opened her eyes. A counselor smiled vacantly, patting the arm of a frightened Fearless Flier, and then it happened again and the plane rolled over, plunging downward. Oxygen masks popped out, uselessly entangling themselves, and people in the aisles slammed into each other, concussed by flying debris. The jet righted itself with as little warning, and she noted there wasn’t even a scream because what happened had been so shocking and dreamlike. The librarian clutched onto Lisanne, who watched the scene in front of her with great stillness as a child would a snow globe he had shaken and stood on its end. A dazed and bloodied steward threaded the aisle. A loud whooping alarm went off with a robotic male voice attached, but she couldn’t understand what it was saying. Lights flashed too, then came the rhythmic bloodcurdling screams of a passenger, contrapuntal to the lights and alarm, and a baby choked and bawled, maybe it was more than one baby, and whimpering rose up from somewhere — from mindstream, mindground, or buddha-field, she couldn’t tell, and when it seemed as if all was not lost or at least that small deathless moment arrived when things seemed to settle, relatively, because nothing had or really could settle at all, just then the plane lurched and thudded and the metal itself shrieked and came a primal chorus of Ohs! — more screaming — this time of those who knew whatever impossible hint of a sliver of chance they were absurdly thinking they might have had was now irrevocably gone and Lisanne saw a counselor screaming too and the plane was nose-diving. She watched all this with her strange stillness, wondering why it was so and wondering why she was unruffled, knowing of course that planes rarely pull out of such dives. Bodies and everyday flotsam rained down past, a true rain because there was coffee and water and even blood, and the librarian nearly got her head chopped off by a PowerBook and everything slowed down: anatomies careening or flopping or weirdly edging their way under dictates of velocity and g-force through clouded, ruined aisles, and Lisanne went deaf but her eyes and heart opened and oddly she thought, Should I have known this, did I know this, was this meant to be, everything so still, she even had time to think of the guidebook that said if on the first day of the month the pinpricks of light and color that normally appear whenever one closes one’s eyes, if those pinpricks should on the first of the month appear no more, then soon death is coming. That when one no longer hears a subtle ringing in the ears, that ever-present subtle sound-presence that all of us, even children, are so familiar with, then soon death is coming. She closed her eyes and saw only blackness, and in her ears heard only blackness. The guidebook said that if one should have a recurring dream of donning dark robes and descending or if one recurrently dreams of the sun and moon descending in the sky, then soon death is coming. Amidst everything, she thought about it but could not remember her most recent dreams. She could not remember ever having a recurring dream in her life, except the one about the snake after Philip died. The librarian was dead, but her hand was still in Lisanne’s. Now everything sped up again to faster than real time, if there could be such a thing, because of the brutal velocity and dreamlike movement, and Lisanne tried reaching to the librarian, whose disfigured face kept getting slammed torn pummeled rivened by debris, tried grabbing the head with her free hand to cradle it from harm’s way, and during those epic librarian labors fittingly all she could think of were books, the black box book whose nearly biblical concordance they once both laughingly shared, and that Lisanne had carried with her on the train to Albany: a chapter that now came to mind with eerie, still, cool remembering was of the plane that crashed because the maintenance crew forgot, after scrubbing down the fuselage, to take a piece of masking tape off a certain hole that in flight always needed to be left uncovered, in order that all kinds of vital gauges and readings could be taken. She recalled puzzling over that account again and again, never understanding how such an essential indicator could be a simple hole and not an actual piece of attached equipment, or why such a hole wouldn’t at least have had some kind of protective grate around it the way meters or pipes do, and if the hole didn’t, which it didn’t seem to, why hadn’t this sort of tragic thing happened before, or if it had she’d never heard about it or read about it, not in all the time Lisanne ever spent reading about crashes. And that seemed strange. In the case of the covered hole, the heroic pilots had flown the plane blind, in the darkness of night, without idea of direction or altitude, for well over an hour before it finally came down. She remembered thinking how cruel that was because the transcripts revealed them to be so noble and meticulous under the circumstances, pilot and copilots continuously alternating glimmers of hope, adroitly skillful, drawing on their collective expertise, natural born problem solvers, yet they were never to know what went wrong or how hopeless their situation was, all because of a masked-over hole, and Lisanne thought with great empathy about the pilots of her own plane just now, what they must be going through, the terrible sorrow of an unflappable captain and his sinking ship, the transcripts sometimes revealed that pilots shouted out the names of wives or girlfriends at the very end or simply said “Mother” or “Mama” (she remembered that the Alaska Airlines pilot had said, “Here we go”), and part of her was grateful everyone was going to die soon, less cruel than flying on and on in delusion, righting the plane then rolling over again then righting it and so forth, postponing the inevitable. She remembered covering her own holes that terrible time she stabbed Philip’s pug. She contrived to cover every orifice as did the careless maintenance crew but in Lisanne’s case it was mindfulness not negligence because the guidebook said one made such coverings during phowa, taping over the apertures of the dead, all but the crown, in order to force ejection of consciousness through the fontanel or top of the head now