Arrival

At thirty thousand feet, I watch the sun set over the clouds, and then the light fades gently and that same golden horizon becomes a subdued spectrum of blues and grays, glowing ephemerally through the little window against which my face was pressed. I am reading Umberto Eco.

I am deeply lost. People often find themselves lost, in literature and in life, and the hard grindstone of a worldly existence makes it necessary to accept this hollow feeling paradoxically as a part of the wholeness of experience—or to numb it however possible. I am lost—but at thirty thousand feet, the sensation is remote—a formality, a premonition. In this moment I am overwhelmed by the enormity of things. I tell myself, “Remember this enormity—the vast silence of the world at night, from thirty thousand feet. This is much more real than the daily struggle--to survive and to forget the awfulness of the past. Of your broken promises.”

Beneath the clouds, the Caribbean Sea—to give a name to such vastness seems ludicrous. I am like an old sailor unsettled by the sea—I have been this way since I first saw it, I think. When I look at the sea I think—this tranquil surface, this pregnant void, leads to Cape Town, to Matadi, Mombasa, Mumbai, to Shanghai and Vladivostok; I think—storms roiling the depths, surfing, sex, seahorses, the leathery arms of old fishermen, the echoing calls of whales, sunbathing walruses, a million frenzied sharks that are scarcely a blip in the belly of the beast, the dark mother Kali, the womb of life.

This is a romantic reflection. This is why I like to gaze upon the ocean: the small things in my personality take leave of the foreground; the somnolent routines of life that are a product of the small things’ tyranny are momentarily transcended. I still need them, they beckon me from the ground, thirty thousand feet away, a ten thousand and one leagues away, in a far-off land called Arrival—they are there, waiting. But at the moment the foreground is dark and free.

From this empty, oceanic consciousness I am willing myself to remain anchored in, a point of attention emerges and directs itself toward a red blip on the blue-green screen at the front of the cabin; we are south of Jamaica. The soft head of an old sleeping woman is pressed gently against my shoulder. The cabin is chill.

Two flight attendants, a big woman with fake red nails, and a wiry man with large, deep-set eyes, are dragging the drink cart through the aisle, whispering to drugged and dreamy passengers. I turn back to my slice of sky. Now the pastels of the evening have given way. Ghostly clouds loom on a jet canvas; beyond, the specter of the ocean at night, pervasive and intangible.

The drop is sudden: a lurch, a creak, a tilt to the left, and then the sensation of free falling—or rather, the sensation is of everything in the cabin suddenly moving up, vaulting toward the freedom of the night sky by way of the ceiling. The big woman with fake nails stumbles and falls sideways into a disoriented passenger’s lap. In every seat, streams of liquid fly into the air, where in a state of sudden panic they appear to me momentarily suspended, a rainbow of frozen fountains dangling in a chaotic abyss. People are screaming.

The plane is rocked sideways by a heavy gust of wind. The big woman with fake nails careens back into the aisle. The soft head on my shoulder snaps up and shakes its limp grey hair and bloodshot eyes to and fro, instinctive, animalistic, seeking sense and order in this unexpected milieu. I close my eyes and in my mind there is a static-scrambled voice—a faux-soothing electronic voice, like the kind that lists extensions at a doctor’s office—saying, “There is statistically very little chance of a commercial plane crash. Remain calm.”

I open my eyes. The free fall has stopped. We have leveled out, though the cabin is still wobbling. A very young girl with caramel skin and jet black hair is screaming two rows up and across the aisle from me. Her bright yellow shirt and salmon capri pants are covered with a dark liquid—blood?—No. An empty metallic coffee mug is rolling at her feet. Her mother is yelling in Spanish as two stewardesses with big blonde hair run toward her with wet towels and tubes of cream. The old woman next to me still looks dazed and alarmed, like a translucent, wrinkly baby gazelle.

In the next seat over, a young and attractive woman is sitting in her seat with her knees pressed against her face, her trembling hand counting on a rosary. The stewardesses are frantically applying cream, wiping away the scalding liquid from the still-screaming girl’s skin and clothes, while her mother shouts curses at them. A nun with a face like cold blue marble has approached, and is being calmly but firmly pushed away by the steward with deep-set eyes. Another man is walking hurriedly down the aisle, continually matting down his hair with a long, leathery hand, saying to no one in particular, “I’m a doctor. Let me have a look, I’m a doctor.”

We rock and dip, shake and shudder. Occasionally my cloud-veiled window lights up with scintillating veins of yellow, and then thunder rumbles—a low, diffuse rumble, much different here in the dome of the heavens than on land.

The nun’s face is the face of death, I think to myself. There is statistically very little chance of a commercial plane crash. Remain calm.

The captain’s voice. It’s always the same voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, please bear with us and, ah, remain calm. Ah, as you know we are, ah, experiencing some severe turbulence here over the Carib—.”

Free fall. Shrieks.

This time it doesn’t stop. My buckle is pushing violently against my churning stomach as the latter tries to launch itself into space.

What can be said of this moment? It is the arrival of one’s entire life; your whole life walks up and sits down calmly beneath your feet as your body flies upward into a fiery heaven.

I think, I want to snort more Oxycontin before I die.

This is a pathetic sentiment.

I think, I wish I were sitting next to the attractive girl a few seats away, the one who was praying and sobbing a few moments earlier. What if death is an icy void, bereft of the hot fusion of sex and animal lust?

The noise in the cabin is an electric, alien chorus. It’s the sound of neural signals rushing up my spine at light speed. I am in a blender. I’ve vomited on myself. How strange that I feel so distant from this ultimate terror. I am observing a plane crash. This is a statistical outlier. How fucking stupid and silly. Remain calm. You’re never going to die.

I remember that in that moment, suspended before death, my human mind was suddenly revealed to me in its awful splendor. The veil falls and a crystal blue ocean swims up to touch and caress my bare feet. Its horizon is interminable.

I inhale the salt breeze rolling off the waves. I become aware of another presence. There is a pair of smaller, paler bare feet at my side, their toes wriggling. I touch my daughter’s soft hair and she presses her cheek against my hip.

She is Sophia's daughter, the daughter of the universe.

I lost her, years ago. I should have been there, I broke my promise. To be there with her: that was my sole purpose—I missed the whole point. Now I can’t see her face.

Here, from beyond the veil, I cannot see her face. Nor will I ever see it again.