In the Unlikely Event

When I watched her teaching us the fundamentals of emergency crash position, I thought, this woman likes her movies too much. How else to account for the way she smiled through her tears? Why turn her back on us and sob into her fist? (I looked over my shoulder. Were we sure this wasn’t being filmed? Allen Funt? Where on the plane was Allen Funt?) Nevertheless, I behaved as I was supposed to behave. I tried not to fuss. I tried not to make too much of the coiffed businesswoman to our left, who reached into the seat pocket in front of her, and with refinement and discretion put her airsickness bag to good use. Surely, we’d land and clap and laugh at the whole damn thing. And it was only when Mark took my hand, the way others around us took their neighbors’ hands, that I felt the surge of heartbreak, adrenaline, and embarrassment that lets us know we’re not asleep.

How, then, in the time that followed, did I become someone I didn’t know? It wasn’t wisdom. I had as much wisdom in my head as there were pain pills in my back pocket—which meant none. And it certainly wasn’t cool. Even strapped in my seat and chastened, I felt my left heel tapping out a warning code. Maybe some of it had to do with the years I wouldn’t get to live out with Mark. The fun we’d miss. Our house. Our dogs. Who would watch over our dogs? At least the two of us would go down at once, if that was any kind of comfort. But what did comfort mean when Mark looked so unguarded and hurt, as if he were determined to take it personally, and couldn’t foresee that he’d one day get a poem out of the experience?

And here’s where another stepped in. I wouldn’t have believed it either if you’d told me that my mother leapt up from her house in Florida like some superhero ready to save the day. But there she was in my imagination, standing at the sink, running hot water over a jar she couldn’t open. And when I thought of her getting that phone call the next morning, just as she wrenched off the lid, I numbed. Not because she loved me better than anyone, or because I remotely approximated the son she’d wanted me to be, but because she’d had enough for one life. And the thought of making her suffer (guilt! even in my last minutes above earth, guilt) was not something I could take on right now. So my two legs pushed into the floor as if it were possible to pilot the plane myself, even as the damn thing wobbled and swung, and the silos of the Midwest looked nearer and nearer.

That’s when I went through the window, the tiny square window to my right. Pinned to my seat, squeezing Mark’s hand, I thought myself into that sky, taking myself out of the body that was sure to be pummeled and burned. I was aware of my ability to influence, and not, and there was a calm to the procedure, like what it must feel like to be an addict, on a good day, when you push your blood back and forth through the works. Was that why the treetops beneath us looked greener than mangrove? Or why I could so readily think of each person who mattered, and put a hand on each forehead, and each face, at least in my imagination, as if I’d always been faithful to the God I’d prayed to as a child, but hadn’t known that till now?

I thought some of that light into the head of each person on the plane—to Mark, to the flight attendant, even to the pilot, who must have been doing the best he could with the creature that was trying and failing to hold us aloft.

Not to mention my mother.

Maybe that’s why...