Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  “Even if we could make calls from this aircraft,” Bobby says, “it would be hard to get a call through. One of the first things the U.S. will do is wipe out communications in the region, and they might not limit themselves to just the DPRK. They won’t want to risk agents in the South—a sleeper government—coordinating a counterstrike. Plus, everyone with family in the Korean Peninsula will be calling right now. It would be like trying to call Manhattan on 9/11, only this time it’s their turn.”

  “Their turn?” says the Jew. “Their turn? I must’ve missed the report that said North Korea was responsible for bringing down the World Trade Towers. I thought that was al-Qaeda.”

  “North Korea sold them weapons and intel for years,” Bobby lets him know. “It’s all connected. North Korea has been the number one exporter of Destroy America Fever for decades.”

  Sandy butts her shoulder against Bobby and says, “Or they used to be. I think they’ve been replaced by the Black Lives Matter people.” She is actually repeating something Bobby said to friends only a few nights before. She thought it was a witty line, and she knows he likes hearing his own best material repeated back to him.

  “Wow. Wow!” says the Jew. “That’s the most racist thing I’ve ever heard in real life. If millions of people are about to die, it’s because millions of people like you put unqualified, hate-filled morons in charge of our government.”

  The girl closes her eyes and sits back in her chair.

  “My wife is what kind of people?” Bobby asks, lifting one eyebrow.

  “Bobby,” Sandy cautions him. “I’m fine. I’m not bothered.”

  “I didn’t ask if you were bothered. I asked this gentleman what kind of people he thinks he’s talking about.”

  The Jew has hectic red blotches in his cheeks. “People who are cruel, smug—and ignorant.”

  He turns away, trembling.

  Bobby kisses his wife’s temple and then unbuckles his seat belt.

  MARK VORSTENBOSCH IN THE COCKPIT

  Vorstenbosch is ten minutes calming people down in coach and another five wiping beer off Arnold Fidelman’s head and helping him change his sweater. He tells Fidelman and Robert Slate that if he sees either of them out of their seats again before they land, they will both be arrested in the airport. The man Slate accepts this placidly, tightening his seat belt and placing his hands in his lap, staring serenely forward. Fidelman looks like he wants to protest. Fidelman is shaking helplessly, and his color is bad, and he calms down only when Vorstenbosch tucks a blanket in around his legs. As he’s leaning toward Fidelman’s seat, Vorstenbosch whispers that when the plane lands, they’ll make a report together and that Slate will be written up for verbal and physical assault. Fidelman gives him a glance of surprise and appreciation, one gay to another, looking out for each other in a world full of Robert Slates.

  The senior flight attendant himself feels nauseated and steps into the head long enough to steady himself. The cabin smells of vomit and fear, fore and aft. Children weep inconsolably. Vorstenbosch has seen two women praying.

  He touches his hair, washes his hands, draws one deep breath after another. Vorstenbosch’s role model has always been the Anthony Hopkins character from The Remains of the Day, a film he has never seen as a tragedy but rather as an encomium to a life of disciplined service. Vorstenbosch sometimes wishes he were British. He recognized Veronica D’Arcy in business right off, but his professionalism requires him to resist acknowledging her celebrity in any overt way.

  When he has composed himself, he exits the head and begins making his way to the cockpit to tell Captain Waters they will require airport security upon landing. He pauses in business to tend to a woman who is hyperventilating. When Vorstenbosch takes her hand, he is reminded of the last time he held his grandmother’s hand—she was in her coffin, and her fingers were just as cold and lifeless. Vorstenbosch feels a quavering indignation when he thinks about the bombers—those idiotic hot dogs—blasting by so close to the plane. The lack of simple human consideration sickens him. He practices deep breathing with the woman, assures her they’ll be on the ground soon.

  The cockpit is filled with sunshine and calm. He isn’t surprised. Everything about the work is designed to make even a crisis—and this is a crisis, albeit one they never practiced in the flight simulators—a matter of routine, of checklists and proper procedure.

  The first officer is a scamp of a girl who brought a brown-bag lunch onto the plane with her. When her left sleeve was hiked up, Vorstenbosch glimpsed part of a tattoo, a white lion, just above the wrist. He looks at her and sees in her past a trailer park, a brother hooked on opioids, divorced parents, a first job in Walmart, a desperate escape to the military. He likes her immensely—how can he not? His own childhood was much the same, only instead of escaping to the army, he went to New York to be queer. When she let him into the cockpit last time, she was trying to hide tears, a fact that twists Vorstenbosch’s heart. Nothing distresses him quite like the distress of others.

  “What’s happening?” Vorstenbosch asks.

  “On the ground in ten,” says Bronson.

  “Maybe,” Waters says. “They’ve got half a dozen planes stacked up ahead of us.”

  “Any word from the other side of the world?” Vorstenbosch wants to know.

  For a moment neither replies. Then, in a stilted, distracted voice, Waters says, “The U.S. Geological Survey reports a seismic event in Guam that registered about six-point-three on the Richter scale.”

  “That would correspond to two hundred and fifty kilotons,” Bronson says.

  “It was a warhead,” Vorstenbosch says. It’s not quite a question.

  “Something happened in Pyongyang, too,” Bronson says. “An hour before Guam, state television switched over to color bars. There’s intelligence about a whole bunch of high-ranking officials being killed within minutes of one another. So we’re either talking a palace coup or we tried to bring down the leadership with some surgical assassinations and they didn’t take it too well.”

  “What can we do for you, Vorstenbosch?” says Waters.

  “There was a fight in coach. One man poured beer on another—”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Waters says.

  “—and they’ve been warned, but we might want Fargo PD on hand when we put down. I believe the victim is going to want to file charges.”

  “I’ll radio Fargo, but no promises. I get the feeling the airport is going to be a madhouse. Security might have their hands full.”

  “There’s also a woman in business having a panic attack. She’s trying not to scare her daughter, but she’s having trouble breathing. I have her huffing into an airsickness bag. But I’d like emergency services to meet her with an oxygen tank when we get down.”

  “Done. Anything else?”

  “There are a dozen other mini-crises unfolding, but the team has it in hand. There is one other thing, I suppose. Would either of you like a glass of beer or wine in violation of all regulations?”

  They glance back at him. Bronson grins.

  “I want to have your baby, Vorstenbosch,” she says. “We would make a lovely child.”

  Waters says, “Ditto.”

  “That’s a yes?”

  Waters and Bronson look at each other.

  “Better not,” Bronson decides, and Waters nods.

  Then the captain adds, “But I’ll have the coldest Dos Equis you can find as soon as we’re parked.”

  “You know what my favorite thing about flying is?” Bronson asks. “It’s always a sunny day up this high. It seems impossible anything so awful could be happening on such a sunny day.”

  They are all admiring the cloudscape when the white and fluffy floor beneath them is lanced through a hundred times. A hundred pillars of white smoke thrust themselves into the sky, rising from all around. It’s like a magic trick, as if the clouds had hidden quills that have suddenly erupted up and out. A moment later the thunderclap hits them and with it turbulence
, and the plane is kicked, knocked up and to one side. A dozen red lights stammer on the dash. Alarms shriek. Vorstenbosch sees it all in an instant as he is lifted off his feet. For a moment Vorstenbosch floats, suspended like a parachute, a man made of silk, filled with air. His head clubs the wall. He drops so hard and fast it’s as if a trapdoor has opened in the floor of the cockpit and plunged him into the bright fathoms of the sky beneath.

  JANICE MUMFORD IN BUSINESS

  “Mom!” Janice shouts. “Mom, lookat! What’s that?”

  What’s happening in the sky is less alarming than what’s happening in the cabin. Someone is screaming: a bright silver thread of sound that stitches itself right through Janice’s head. Adults groan in a way that makes Janice think of ghosts.

  The 777 tilts to the left and then rocks suddenly hard to the right. The plane sails through a labyrinth of gargantuan pillars, the cloisters of some impossibly huge cathedral. Janice had to spell “cloisters” (an easy one) in the Englewood Regional.

  Her mother, Millie, doesn’t reply. She’s breathing steadily into a white paper bag. Millie has never flown before, has never been out of California. Neither has Janice, but unlike her mother she was looking forward to both. Janice has always wanted to go up in a big airplane; she’d also like to dive in a submarine someday, although she’d settle for a ride in a glass-bottomed kayak.

  The orchestra of despair and horror sinks away to a soft diminuendo (Janice spelled “diminuendo” in the first round of the State Finals and came thi-i-i-i-is close to blowing it and absorbing a humiliating early defeat). Janice leans toward the nice-looking man who has been drinking iced tea the whole trip.

  “Were those rockets?” Janice asks.

  The woman from the movies replies, speaking in her adorable British accent. Janice has only ever heard British accents in films, and she loves them.

  “ICBMs,” says the movie star. “They’re on their way to the other side of the world.”

  Janice notices that the movie star is holding hands with the much younger man who drank all the iced tea. Her features are set in an expression of almost frosty calm. Whereas the man beside her looks like he wants to throw up. He’s squeezing the older woman’s hand so hard his knuckles are white.

  “Are you two related?” Janice asks. She can’t think why else they might be holding hands.

  “No,” says the nice-looking man.

  “Then why are you holding hands?”

  “Because we’re scared,” says the movie star, although she doesn’t look scared. “And it makes us feel better.”

  “Oh,” Janice says, and then quickly takes her mother’s free hand. Her mother looks at her gratefully over the bag that keeps inflating and deflating like a paper lung. Janice glances back at the nice-looking man. “Would you like to hold my hand?”

  “Yes, please,” the man says, and they take each other’s hand across the aisle.

  “What’s I-C-B-M stand for?”

  “Intercontinental ballistic missile,” the man says.

  “That’s one of my words! I had to spell ‘intercontinental’ in the regional.”

  “For real? I don’t think I can spell ‘intercontinental’ off the top of my head.”

  “Oh, it’s easy,” Janice says, and proves it by spelling it for him.

  “I’ll take your word for it. You’re the expert.”

  “I’m going to Boston for a spelling bee. It’s International Semifinals, and if I do well there, I get to go to Washington, D.C., and be on television. I didn’t think I’d ever go to either of those places. But then I didn’t think I’d ever go to Fargo either. Are we still landing at Fargo?”

  “I don’t know what else we’d do,” says the nice-looking man.

  “How many ICBMs was that?” Janice asks, craning her neck to look at the towers of smoke.

  “All of them,” says the movie star.

  Janice says, “I wonder if we’re going to miss the spelling bee.”

  This time it is her mother who responds. Her voice is hoarse, as if she has a sore throat or has been crying. “I’m afraid we might, sweetie.”

  “Oh,” Janice says. “Oh, no.” She feels a little like she did when they had Secret Santa last year and she was the only one who didn’t get a gift, because her Secret Santa was Martin Cohassey and Martin was out with mononucleosis.

  “You would’ve won,” her mother says, and shuts her eyes. “And not just the semifinals either.”

  “They aren’t till tomorrow night,” Janice says. “Maybe we could get another plane in the morning.”

  “I’m not sure anyone will be flying tomorrow morning,” says the nice-looking man apologetically.

  “Because of something happening in North Korea?”

  “No,” her friend across the aisle says. “Not because of something that’s going to happen there.”

  Millie opens her eyes and says, “Shhh. You’ll scare her.”

  But Janice isn’t scared—she just doesn’t understand. The man across the aisle swings her hand back and forth, back and forth.

  “What’s the hardest word you ever spelled?” he asks.

  “‘Anthropocene,’” Janice says promptly. “That’s the word I lost on last year, at semis. I thought it had an i in it. It means ‘in the era of human beings.’ As in ‘the Anthropocene era looks very short when compared to other geological periods.’”

  The man stares at her for a moment and then barks with laughter. “You said it, kid.”

  The movie star stares out her window at the enormous white columns. “No one has ever seen a sky like this. These towers of cloud. The bright sprawling day caged in its bars of smoke. They look like they’re holding up heaven. What a lovely afternoon. You might soon get to see me perform another death, Mr. Holder. I’m not sure I can promise to play the part with my usual flair.” She shuts her eyes. “I miss my daughter. I don’t think I’m going to get to—” She opens her eyes and looks at Janice and falls quiet.

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing about mine,” says Mr. Holder. Then he turns his head and peers past Janice at her mother. “Do you know how lucky you are?” He glances from Millie to Janice and back, and when Janice looks, her mother is nodding, a small gesture of acknowledgment.

  “Why are you lucky, Mom?” Janice asks her.

  Millie squeezes her and kisses her temple. “Because we’re together today, silly bean.”

  “Oh,” Janice says. It’s hard to see the luck in that. They’re together every day.

  At some point Janice realizes the nice-looking man has let go of her hand, and when she next looks over, he is holding the movie star in his arms, and she is holding him, and they are kissing each other, quite tenderly, and Janice is shocked, just shocked, because the movie star is a lot older than her seatmate. They’re kissing just like lovers at the end of the film, right before the credits roll and everyone has to go home. It’s so outrageous that Janice just has to laugh.

  A RA LEE IN COACH

  For a moment at her brother’s wedding in Jeju, A Ra thought she saw her father, who has been dead for seven years. The ceremony and reception were held in a vast and lovely private garden, bisected by a deep, cool, man-made river. Children threw handfuls of pellets into the current and watched the water boil with rainbow carp, a hundred heaving, brilliant fish in all the colors of treasure: rose-gold and platinum and new-minted copper. A Ra’s gaze drifted from the kids to the ornamental stone bridge crossing the brook, and there was her father in one of his cheap suits, leaning on the wall, grinning at her, his big, homely face seamed with deep lines. The sight of him startled her so badly she had to look away, was briefly breathless with shock. When she looked back, he was gone. By the time she was in her seat for the ceremony, she had concluded that she’d only seen Jum, her father’s younger brother, who cut his hair the same way. It would be easy, on such an emotional day, to momentarily confuse one for another—especially given her decision not to wear her glasses to the wedding.

  On
the ground the student of evolutionary linguistics at MIT places her faith in what can be proved, recorded, known, and studied. But now she is aloft and feeling more open-minded. The 777—all three hundred–odd tons of it—hurtles through the sky, lifted by immense, unseen forces. Nothing carries everything on its back. So it is with the dead and the living, the past and the present. Now is a wing, and history is beneath it, holding it up. A Ra’s father loved fun—he ran a novelty factory for forty years, so fun was his actual business. Here in the sky, she is willing to believe he would not have let death get between him and such a happy evening.

  “I’m so fucking scared right now,” Arnold Fidelman says.

  She nods. She is, too.

  “And so fucking angry. So fucking angry.”

  She stops nodding. She isn’t and chooses not to be. In this moment more than any other, she chooses not to be.

  Fidelman says, “That motherfucker, Mr. Make-America-So-Fucking-Great over there. I wish we could bring back the stocks, just for one day, so people could hurl dirt and cabbages at him. Do you think this would be happening if Obama were in office? Any of this . . . this . . . lunacy? Listen. When we get down—if we get down. Will you stay with me on the jetway? To report what happened? You’re an impartial voice in all this. The police will listen to you. They’ll arrest that fat creep for pouring his beer on me, and he can enjoy the end of the world from a dank little cell, crammed in with shitty raving drunks.”

  She has shut her eyes, trying to place herself back in the wedding garden. She wants to stand by the man-made river and turn her head and see her father on the bridge again. She doesn’t want to be afraid of him this time. She wants to make eye contact and smile back.

  But she isn’t going to get to stay in her wedding garden of the mind. Fidelman’s voice has been rising along with his hysteria. The big man across the aisle, Bobby, catches the last of what he has to say.

  “While you’re making your statement to the police,” Bobby says, “I hope you won’t leave out the part where you called my wife smug and ignorant.”