Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

safety procedures

LORRIE didn’t want me to go and was embarrassed to come out with it. My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters, extremist political groups Right and Left tossing bombs into restaurants, hijacks, holdups, a city plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life; life is dangerous. We live with that; in the one certainty that fear is the real killer. We’ve never gone in for steel grilles on our doors or been afraid to walk in the streets. We’ve succeeded in keeping our children free; with sensible precautions. But these last few months there have been a number of airline disasters not really accounted for — pilot error, radar control affected by ground staff strikes, possibility of a fellow passenger aboard with the Damocles weapon not overhead but as explosives down in his boot-soles. Who has the ultimate Black Box that really knows. And only a week ago two people shot dead while queuing to register at an airline desk. We usually make love the night before I leave, I kiss the children in the morning and we all accept naturally that we’ll talk on the phone the moment I can use my mobile in the terminal of my arrival — with Lorrie, at least, even if it’s night for her and day for me. It’s as much a routine as going to my executive office of the company every day.

— Why’d you let Isa book you on that route?—

Lorrie knows my secretary organises my schedules with perfect efficiency. — Why not? It’s obvious. The best airline to get me where I have to go.—

— But the country it belongs to. In some conflict among them all… These days.—

— For God’s sake — you know what the security process is like these days. Anyway, that airline’s country isn’t in any hassle between India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine — whatever. Since when have we given in to fear of flying my darling. — Quoting (if I remember) the title of a book we once read.

— No connection you — we — know of.—

But she’s heard what I was really saying: since when do we have a little-wifey boring conventional scene when hubby goes off on business, since when do we cower, you and I, before life as it is.

And then she says something the way she has (part of what I love her for) that strikes aside my patronising inference of little-wifeyness.

— You don’t know whose enemy you are.—

— What’re you talking about? I’m nobody’s enemy.—

— By boarding a plane you become one. There’s the line’s insignia painted on the tail. Logo of nationality.—

I hugged her quickly in recognition of her special quirky intelligence, and laughed. Our closeness made her smile past the issue. No fuss. That’s our way. The company driver picked me up and delivered me to the airport.

Good young Isa had reserved my favourite seat, window, not too far back in the business class cabin (the company has decided to be globally politically correct, no more first class wasteful expenditure), but not near the toilets and galley — too many people queuing up to pee and too much chatter among the attendants.

There was a long flight ahead with time sliding backwards all the way. On these journeys I keep home time, I don’t change my watch until I reach time as measured at my destination. Wonder how many hours of my life-span I’ve lost — maybe gained? — on these many trips to and fro across date-lines.

I tell people I actually like to work in planes, I can take out my laptop and prepare myself for the meetings and decisions awaiting me, in productive isolation among strangers. It’s not often there’s someone I know on the same flight, and if there should be I don’t want any change of seat to place me beside an acquaintance. Of course, in recent years there’s been the unavoidable distraction of the fold-out individual TV screen which goes with every seat, and invariably my anonymous neighbour will have the thing set up and flickering away in my peripheral vision although thank God the sound passes directly into the individual’s ears, spares mine. The truth is — no, the fact is — truth’s too important a word for such a trivially boastful lie — it’s never long before I pack away the monitor of my industriousness, the laptop, wrestle a few minutes with folding back the pages of the newspapers offered (why aren’t there special tabloid editions of The New York Times, Herald Tribune, Figaro, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Corriere della Sera, et al., for airline distribution) and then look — gaze — at what’s outside. The window: nothing. All right. The void that, from the ground, is called the sky. Intruded by puffy herds and castles of cloud for a while, scribbled across with a fading vapour trail, a chalked rainbow drawn by another plane out of sight. Other times become an enclosing grey-white element without latitude or longitude or substance like blindness descended upon the eyes. Perhaps what I’m saying is that I’ve half dozed-off, there’s an inbetween form of consciousness that’s not experienced anywhere else but up here. With nothing. The cosy cockpit voice keeps exhorting its charges to sit back and relax. But this state is not relaxation, it’s another form of being I have for a while and have never told anyone about, even Lorrie (specially, perhaps, not Lorrie, with marriage it’s possible you give too much about yourself away).

Nothing. Up there, out there, I do not have within me love, sex, wife, children, house and executive office. I do not have a waiting foreign city with international principals and decisions. Why has no artist — not even the abstractionists — painted this state attainable only since the invention of passenger aircraft? The gaze. Freedom.

On this trip I have beside me — I notice only when the bar trolley pauses at my row — a middle-aged woman who’s evidently slim, doesn’t overflow or hog the armrest space between us, something at least in her favour. We exchange ‘Good evening’ and that’s that. She is good-looking (as her face turns towards me in the brief greeting) in an impersonal way, without any projection of her fiftyish remains of beauty, as if the face is something she has assumed as you take along an umbrella. I dread, on my numerous long flights, someone in the next seat who wants to talk and will take up a monologue if you don’t respond. This one, apparently, no more wanted conversation than I did. She didn’t set up her TV screen, either. I was aware that after dinner was served she leant forward and took from her cabin bag a book.

I suppose it was the food, the wine. I returned to the laptop, to the presence within me of the voice and body of my wife, the hands of my children upon me, the boardroom, known expressions of the faces, and the issues I was to meet. Nothing. Replaced by tomorrow.

As I worked at my computer and time was lost in passage the aircraft began to shudder. The seatbelt sign was illuminated. Turbulence, we expect to climb out of it, the cockpit voice soothingly reassured. But my window went black — it was afternoon, not nightfall — the swollen black of a great forest of storm. Out of nothing: this was the other power, like the opposition of Evil to Good religions tell us about on earth. I was determined to ignore what became the swooping, staggering of the plane, its teeth-chattering of overhead lockers, the collision of trolleys, spilling of glasses. I tried to focus on the screen of the laptop jiggling on my knees, but my eyes refused to function. As I managed to stow the laptop in a seat pocket I saw the woman beside me had put down her book. In a violent lurch of the enraged structure that encased us the book flung itself from her lap to the floor. I watched it slither onto the aisle, where it was joined by someone’s shoes taken off, as we do on long flights, for comfort. Now the cockpit voice commanded everyone to stay seated, forbidden to walk about the cabin, make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened. For your own safety.

I’ve weathered (that old cliché) a few spells of ‘turbulence’ in the hundreds of flights I’ve survived. There was never in my memory anything like this. Lorrie feared for me: a hijack. This was a hijack by the elements. Whatever force had us wouldn’t let go, no escape by gaining height or lowering it. There were crashes sounding from the galley. Two cabin attendants collided and the one fell across a passenger’s head. The commands from the cockpit became a gabble. Behind the seats where the woman and I were strapped, trapped, someone was vomiting in heaving waves and gurglings. The plane dropped as under a great blow and then bounced this side and that. It wanted to rid itself of us, our laptops, our headsets, our dutyfree, the caverns weighed with bags of possessions we lug around the world as if our life depends upon them.

Our life.

The voice from the cockpit made itself heard through broken-up amplification, the captain was going to attempt an emergency landing at a military airfield whose name I recognised as a sign that we had been blown off course. A woman was screaming, there were sobs and voices calling out for help — from whom, where? — praying — to whom, for what? My heart thudded wildly Lorrie’s fear: now mine. I suddenly realised that while everyone was appealing in the solidarity of human terror to everyone else, the woman beside me and I had not looked to each other, had not spoken. So I turned to her.

Incredible.

She was sitting calmly with one hand loose upon the other, not clutching — the seat the armrests anything — as I was. She was letting the fury of the plane slap her about, her lips at rest, no grimace of the animal fear that was everyone’s face. She flicked her quiet open eyes to acknowledge my presence, this unknown human who was going to die in intimacy beside me. My last woman. And then she turned directly to me and I heard again the voice that had spoken only once, two words, Good evening.

— It’s all right. The plane will somehow land. You’re safe. Everyone.—

I didn’t know if she was unbelievably courageous, duped by some religious faith, or mad.

She spoke again, her head resisting the tumultuous pulls against her body. — It won’t happen. Because I’m aboard. This last year I have to tell you I have tried three times, three different ways, to end my life. Failed. No way out for me. So it seems I can’t die, no flight I take will kill.—

THE order came from the cockpit to assume the emergency landing position, heads bowed over knees. The plane struck the earth as if it would crack the rock of the world. We descended in a fairly orderly way — those desperate to live pushing through women-and-children-first, I restraining the instinct — by slides let down from the plane’s sides. Banners of flame unfurled about it behind us as we ran. In the confusion I did not see whether the woman was among us, the saved, all of us.

I’m sure she was.