Laugh, Baby

         Usually, the window seat is my favorite: watching the sun rise or watching the earth come closer as we land has always made flying that much more enjoyable for me. But during a storm, the window is seat is probably the scariest seat in the plane other than the cockpit; there is a certain amount of fear and impotence that comes with watching lighting flash in the distance, silent but terrifying. I sighed, lowered the blind and closed my eyes, trying to calm my nerves. Fortunately, the flight was still generally smote, so I turned my attention back to the movie.

         Not long after, the first bumps started, and after a while they got so bad that I had to close my eyes just keep myself from getting nauseous. Up and down and up and down, the turbulence was becoming unbearable until, finally, things seemed to settle down once more and the plane began to fly along smoothly again.

         All of a sudden, the plane dropped and I felt my heart beating faster and faster as the plane’s shaking become more intense than ever. I could no longer keep my eyes closed, but opening them would certainly cause me to throw up, so I chose what seemed like the best compromise: I covered my eyes and titled my head forward, as if I were starting at my feet, and tried to sleep. I failed miserably. Though I barely listened, this is when the pilot spoke; I only heard a few words: “turbulence”, “buckle up” and “hope for the best”, and ironically, hearing the pilot speak of hope only ensured that I lose it.

When the lights dimmed, I tried once again to fall asleep, but to no avail, as the plane was shaking so violently that the only thing I could do to not vomit was to hold my head between my legs and try not to think about anything. It was then that the plane dropped once again, this time more sharply. The flight attendants sprang to life and the pilots spoke, but it all meant the same thing in the end: we were in trouble.

         “Ladies and gentlemen, we are currently experiencing serious technical difficulties, but we are now attempting to change course towards the nearest airfield so that these issues can be resolved and hopefully until the weather improves,”

When the plane began to turn, ever so gently, I felt that I was safe, I felt that, perhaps, things were not as bad as I might have thought, that the pilots were in fact in control of the situation and that we’d soon arrive at a small airport where we would stay the night and then tomorrow I’d be off to my destination once more, relaxed and hopefully as far away from lightning as it is possible in the sky. Never could I, nor anyone else on that plane except maybe the pilots, could have guessed what would happen next: I heard the loudest metallic tearing sound that I could even imagine, and all of a sudden I was jerked violently to the side, as if the entire plane had just been swatted away by some gigantic hand.

         When the lights went black, pandemonium broke out in the cabin as people began to scream in fear. Flight attendants, who until now had remained seated for the most part or who were otherwise busy pacing the corridor trying to comfort those few people who had already begun to break down (an ominous sign which no one cared to notice at first), joined the chorus. We could no longer hear the pilots, and so the terror was compounded by the fact that it soon devolved into a loud cacophony of shouts and screams as people began to worry about what would happen next.

         I do not understand why, but it was when everything went black that I finally managed to calm my nerves and try to analyze the situation. I considered for the moment the likely implications of that loud metallic tearing sound I’d heard: either a wing or the tail had been sheared off, and the plane would likely be unable to fly much longer. From then, it was a short, simple conclusion to make: we were going to die. This realization quickly robbed me of all serenity that darkness had provided, and I soon added my own voice to the angry sobs and screams that echoed through the cramped, black space that would likely be our coffin. As I shouted in terror, I listened to those around me, and was simply shocked to hear so many different reactions: I heard how a young woman wept, asking god why someone so young has to die so soon, how could that possibly be fair. I heard an old lady, I imagined clutching rosary beads tight to her lips as she prayed loudly, asking god for forgiveness and begging, begging for His Grace to save them and allow them safe passage to a nearby airfield. And then I heard the middle-aged man, who was neither bargaining nor asking, he simply cursed, he cursed God for this hideous misfortune, he cursed his employers for sending him on this flight, he cursed the air company for making him sit in economy class on what would be his last trip, he cursed at everyone, he cursed at everything. But by far, the most common reaction, the one to which I instinctively I rushed, was the simple wordless, weeping scream that can only be heard from those who are about to die or who have had to see someone close to them die.

         The shouts and screams and prayers and curses and questions all rang out through the fuselage, filling my ears with the anguish of every single one of us there. My heart ached painfully as I wept swollen tears as I thought of my father, my brothers, my wife and my children, as I considered their heartache once I was gone. I considered also the heartache of all the other families and friends who would inevitably suffer because of this accident. Essentially, both the verbalized and the ineffable plucked at my heart until nothing but pain and anguish remain, driving me to a teary breakdown as I thought “I’m going to die, I’m going to die…”

         But nothing, absolutely nothing in life could have prepared me for what would follow. The ineffable and the effable in the cries of the other passengers seemed entirely logical, I knew why they felt those things, and for the most part I knew perfectly well what they felt. But all that certainty was dashed in an instant, the saddest, most bizarre moment in my life: I heard a baby laugh. Cruelly, as if to intensify the sadness of our imminent doom, the lights came back just in time as we spun and fell faster and faster towards the water for me to look to my right and see the origin of the laughter: a little girl, dressed in the sweetest pink dress I’d ever seen, was visibly floating off her seat, laughing in delight with her hands in the air. So innocent, so ignorant, it was then that my sadness became most intense, it was knowing that that small, innocent life would be lost because of mere coincidence… I was soon filled with an impotent rage as well as sadness.

         But the last thing I remembered as cold air embraced me and sucked the life out of me was that laughter, that inappropriately joyous laughter, that innocent laughter that one can only laugh when they do not truly know. I wept, we screamed, others prayed and cursed, but she laughed, and I was only too happy to welcome death if it meant an escape from that chilling joy.



END