I’m surrounded by strangers, she thinks. I’m unknown to all of them . . . and unconnected.
The plane is filled with people she’s never seen before and will never see again—filled with hundreds of lives that intersect nowhere but on this plane. The feeling is eerie to Jana, and unnatural.
The woman beside her is several sizes too large for the seat, and her large body spreads toward Jana, taking over Jana’s armrest, and forcing her to lean uncomfortably against the cold window.
“Sorry, dearie,” says the woman, with a British accent. “You’d think people have no hips, the way they build these seats.”
Jana sighs, calculates how many seconds there are in a two-hour flight, and begins to count down from seven thousand two hundred. She wonders if a flight could possibly be any worse. Soon she finds out that it can.
A woman with a baby takes the seat next to the large Englishwoman, and the moment the plane leaves the ground, the baby begins an earsplitting screech-fest. The mother tries to console the child, but it does no good. Grimacing, Jana notices an old man sitting across the aisle turn down his hearing aid.
“Why do I always end up on Screaming Baby Airlines?” Jana grumbles to herself, and the large woman in her airspace accidentally overhears. She turns to Jana with a smile.
“It’s the pressure in its ears, the poor thing,” says the large woman, pointing to the wailing baby. Then she adds something curious. “Babies on planes comfort me, actually. I always think, God won’t crash a plane carrying a baby.”
The thought that seems to give so much comfort to the large woman only gives Jana the creeps. She peers out her window, watching as the plane rises above little puffs of clouds that soon look like tiny white specks far below.
“We’ve reached our cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet,” and blah, blah, blah,drones the captain, who seems to have the same voice as every other airline pilot in the world. It’s as if they go to some special school that teaches them all how to sound exactly alike.
The baby, having exhausted its screaming machine, can only whimper now, and the plump woman, who has introduced herself as Moira Lester, turns to Jana and asks, “You’ll be visiting someone in Boston, then?”
“School,” says Jana curtly, not feeling like having a conversation with a stranger.
“Boarding school, is it?” asks Moira, not taking the hint. “I went to boarding school. It’s all the rage back in Britain. Not many of them in the States, are there?” And then she begins to spin the never-ending tale of her uninteresting family, all the boarding schools they attended, why they went there, and which classmates have become famous people that Jana has never heard of.
Jana nods as if listening but tries to tune her out by gazing out the window at the specks of clouds below. It is just about then that the feeling comes. It’s a sensation—a twinge, like a spark of static electricity darting through her, that causes a tiny, tiny change in air pressure. It’s like a pinprick in her reality—a feeling so slight that it takes a while for Jana to realize that she has felt anything at all.
As she turns from the window to look around her, nothing appears to have changed: Moira is still talking, the baby is still whimpering.
But as for Jana, she has a clear sense that something is suddenly not right.
“Something wrong, dearie?” Moira asks.
But Jana just shakes her head, trying to convince herself that it’s only her imagination.
Then, about ten minutes later, Jana asks, “Where’s the old man?” The sense of something wrong had been growing and growing within her, and now she has finally noticed something different.
The mother, bouncing her baby on her knee, looks at Jana oddly. “What old man?” she asks.
“You know—the old man who was sitting across the aisle from you. He was wearing a hearing aid.”
The mother turns to look. Sitting across the aisle is a businessman with slick black hair. Certainly not old, and definitely not wearing a hearing aid, he sits reading a magazine in seat 16C as if he belongs there.
“Don’t you remember him?” Jana persists. “He turned down his hearing aid when your baby was screaming.”
The mother shrugs. “I didn’t notice,” she says. “Who notices anybody on airplanes these days?”
“Looks like there are some empty seats on the plane,” suggests Moira. “Perhaps this man you’re talking about moved.”
Jana sighs. “Yeah, maybe that’s it,” she concedes, although not really convinced. She would have noticed if the man had gotten up.
“Excuse me,” Jana says, and climbs over Moira and the mother and her baby, then heads down the aisle to the bathroom. There is something wrong, she knows it. Something terribly wrong. She can feel it in the pit of her stomach, like the feeling you get a few minutes before becoming violently ill.
Jana pushes her way through the narrow bathroom doorway and into the tight little compartment. Jana looks in the mirror, then splashes cold water on her face. Maybe it’s just the excitement of going back to school,she tells herself. Maybe it’s just airsickness.
But where is the man with the hearing aid?
She dries her face with a paper towel and makes her way back to her seat, looking in every row for the old man. She goes to the front of the plane. No old man with a hearing aid. What did he do? Jump off the plane?
When Jana returns to her seat, the mother and baby have moved to where she can lay her baby down on an empty seat—a few rows back on the other side of the plane. As Jana looks around, she notices that there are empty seats, and even empty rows on the plane now—but all the vacant seats appear to be on the side of the plane opposite her.
Jana stands there watching as several people from her side of the plane shift over to make use of the empty rows, making more room for everyone. How odd—the plane seemed crowded when she got on.
When Jana retakes her seat, Moira welcomes her back with a wide friendly smile. Jana forces her own smile, and as she settles in, she happens to glance out the window . . . then freezes.
“Moira,” she says, “everything’s covered in clouds!”
Moira glances out the window at the cotton-thick clouds rolling toward the horizon below. “Why, I suppose it is,” she says.
“Excuse me,” Jana says as she climbs back over Moira and crosses the aisle. She then leans awkwardly over the businessman and two other passengers to get a look out theirwindow. She is certain she hadn’t seen the clouds out of the other side of the plane on her way back from the bathroom.
Sure enough, from this window, Jana can see the ground—a patchwork quilt of greens and browns gilded by the afternoon sun.
“It—it’s differenton this side of the plane,” she says, her voice shaky.
“So what?” asks the businessman, annoyed at the way Jana is still leaning across him. “We must be traveling along the edge of a front. You know—the line where cold air meets warm air, and storm clouds form.”
Jana just stares at him, feeling her hands growing colder by the moment. It’s a logical explanation, she thinks, but it’s wrong.
Quietly Jana returns to her seat. She pulls out the magazine in the pouch in front of her and tries to read it, but finds nothing can take her attention away from the clouds beneath her window, and the perfectly clear sky on the other side of the plane.
That’s when the captain comes on the loudspeaker again.
“Just thought I’d let you know,” he says in his every-pilot voice, “that we’ll be passing Mount Rushmore shortly. If you look out the right side of the plane, you’ll be able to see it on the horizon.”
Jana doesn’t bother to look, since she’s on the left side. But she does notice that people on her side of the plane are chuckling, as if the pilot has made some kind of joke.
Then it hits her.
Geography was never one of Jana’s best subjects, but she’s sure that Mount Rushmore is not in Michigan—the state they should have been over right now! She turns to Moira
. “Where is Mount Rushmore?” she asks, trying not to sound panicked.
“Can’t say for sure,” the heavyset woman replies. “I haven’t been in the States long.”
“This isthe flight to Boston, isn’t it?”
“As far as I know,” says Moira. “At least that’s what my ticket says.”
Jana uneasily mulls over everything as she goes back to staring out her window . . . at nothing but clouds.
About an hour and a half into the flight, Jana has bitten her nails down to the stubs—a habit she thought she had broken years ago. That tiny tear in the fabric of her world that happened a while back has shred so rapidly, Jana wonders if it can ever be sewn back together again.
It is now dark outside her window. Jana reasons that that is perfectly normal. She has flown enough to know that when you fly east at dusk, the sun always sets behind you incredibly fast. It has to do with the curvature of the earth, and time zones, and that sort of thing. Perfectly natural . . . except that the sun is still shining on the other side of the plane.
The plane is filled with anxious murmurs. Perhaps Jana was the first one to realize things were screwy, but now everyone sees it.
“There’s some explanation,” one person whispers.
“We’ll probably all laugh about it later,” another says.
And indeed, some people are laughing already, as if laughing could make it all better.
Sitting there, with no nails left to bite, Jana wonders if it is always like this when things go wrong in midair. Do people not scream and wail the way they do in the movies? Do they get quiet . . . like this . . . or just whisper, or laugh? And if they do scream, do they only scream on the inside?
Jana calls the flight attendant over.
“Excuse me,” she says, her voice quivering with panic, “but we have to land this plane. We have to land it now!”
The flight attendant smiles and speaks with practiced reassurance, as if Jana is nothing more than an anxious flier. “We’ve begun our final descent,” she tells her. “We should be on the ground shortly.”
“Haven’t you looked out the window?” Jana snaps at the flight attendant. “Haven’t you seen what’s happening out there?”
“Weather conditions up here,” says the flight attendant, “aren’t like weather conditions on the ground.”
“Night and day aren’t weather conditions!” shouts Jana. The nervous murmurs can now be heard around the cabin.
The flight attendant looks into Jana’s eyes, grits her teeth furiously, and says, “I’ll have to ask you to sit down, miss.”
That look on the flight attendant’s face says everything. It says, We have no idea what’s going on, but we can’t admit that, you stupid girl! If we do, everyone will start panicking. So shut your face before we shut it for you!
The flight attendant storms away, and Jana dares to do something she’s been wanting to do since the sky began to change. She looks across the aisle to the businessman and asks him where he’s going.
“Seattle,” he says. “I’m going to Seattle—of course—just like you.”
Several people on Jana’s side of the plane gasp and whisper to one another, as if being quiet about it makes the situation any less horrific than it is.
“I thought this flight was going to Boston,” say Moira.
“She’s right,” says another passenger behind Moira. “This plane is going to Boston.”
The businessman swallows. “There must be some sort of . . . computer mix-up.”
Jana sinks in her seat as the plane passes through the heavy cloud cover—on herside of the plane—and as soon as they punch through the clouds, she can see the twinkling lights of a city below. She doesn’t dare look out the windows on the other side of the plane anymore.
In Seattle,Jana thinks, it would still be light out.
The truth was simple, and at the same time impossible to comprehend. Somehow, some grand computer glitch—not in any simple airline computer—got two flights . . . confused.
A flight like this will never reach the ground,she tells herself. How can it?
Suddenly the plane shudders and whines as the landing-gear doors open. People are looking out their windows at the night on the right side of the plane, and then at the day on the left. Cold terror paints their faces a pale white.
Across the aisle and three rows back, the baby screams again as they descend. To Jana, the screams are far less disturbing than the whispers and silences of all the other passengers, but not to everyone.
“Shut that child up!” shouts the businessman.
But the mother can do nothing but hold her baby close to her as they sit across the narrow aisle, waiting for the plane to touch down.
Across the aisle?Jana’s mind suddenly screams. And then that sickening feeling that began almost two hours ago spreads through her arms and legs, until every part of her body feels weak. Jana glances at the empty seat right next to Moira and erupts with panic. She opens her seat belt, stands and shouts to the mother, yelling louder than the woman’s screaming baby.
“Get up!” Jana shouts. “You have to come back to this seat!”
“But we’re landing,” says the mother nervously. “I shouldn’t unbuckle my seat belt.”
“You’re not supposedto be there!” Jana insists. “You started on thisside. I can’t explain it now—but you have to come back to this side of the plane—NOW!”
Terrified, the mother unbuckles her seat belt and, clutching her screaming baby, crosses the aisle the moment the tires touch the runway. Others who had moved to the empty seats on the left side sense what is about to happen. They race to get out of their seat belts and back to their original seats—but they are not fast enough.
In an instant, there is a burst of flame, and the world seems to end.
“Help me!” screams the mother.
Jana grabs the woman’s hand while Moira grabs the baby. They fall into the seat next to Moira, and the mother shields her baby from the nightmare exploding around them.
Everyone screams as the plane spins and tumbles out of control—everyone but Jana. She glances out her window to see that nothing seems wrong. The plane is landing in Boston, just like planes always land.
But on the other side of the plane, the left side of the plane, there is smoke and flames and shredding steel. And, beyond the shattering windows, the ground is rolling over and over. In awe, Jana watches as the smoke billows . . . but stayson the other side of the aisle. In fact, Jana can’t even smell it!
Moira leans into Jana. “Don’t look!” she cries. “You mustn’t look at it!”
And Jana knows that Moira is right. So instead, she holds Moira’s hand and turns to look out her own window. Tears rolling down her cheeks, she watches the terminal roll peacefully toward her. She feels the plane calmly slow down, and she tries to ignore the awful wails from the other side of the plane . . . until the last wail trails off.
Then the captain begins to speak, uncertain at first, but then with building confidence. “Uh . . . on behalf of our crew, I’d like to welcome you to . . . Boston. Please remain seated until we are secure at the terminal.”
The screaming has stopped. The only sound now is that of the engines powering down to a low whine. Slowly Jana dares to look across the aisle.
There she finds the man with the hearing aid staring back at her, aghast.
On the other side of the plane are all the people who had been there when they had taken off. Now that Jana sees their faces, she can recognize them.
Someone must have fixed the computer,Jana thinks, and then she turns to Moira. “Do you suppose that while we were watching the right half of that flight to Seattle—”
“—that the people on the other side were watching the left half?” finishes Moira. “Look at their faces. I can only imagine they were.”
The mother, whose baby has stopped screaming and has fallen asleep, thanks Jana with tears in her eyes. Jana touches the baby’s fine hair, then smiles. Suddenly
it seems that all those long stories Moira has told on the plane don’t seem so boring, and in a way Jana longs to hear all of them again. In fact, she longs to hear every story of every person on that plane. There are so many lives intersecting on an airplane,she thinks. So many stories to hear!
Jana walks with Moira to the baggage claim, where suitcases are already flying down the chute and circling on the baggage carousel. There, Jana watches people from her flight greet friends and family who have been waiting for them.
“I just heard that a flight out west didn’t make it,” someone says. “It was the same airline, too.”
But no one from Jana’s flight says anything. How can you tell someone that you saw a plane crash from the inside, but it wasn’t yourplane?
“It’s good that things ended up back where they belong,” Moira says.
“There’s nothing ‘good’ about it,” says Jana flatly.
“No, I suppose not,” Moira agrees. “But it’s right. Right and proper.”
Together, Jana and Moira wait a long time for their luggage, but it never comes. Jana has to admit that she didn’t expect it to.
Not when all the luggage coming down the chute is ticketed to Seattle.
RALPHY SHERMAN’S ROOT CANAL
Ralphy Sherman is my one recurring character. Ralphy appears briefly in almost all of my books, and I give him his own stories in MindQuakes, MindStorms, and all of my other short story collections. Anyone who reads more than one of my books gets the added treat of trying to find Ralphy. It’s kind of like Where’s Waldo?
Ralphy is a teller of tall tales that just keep getting taller, and I have to admit, I have a lot of fun with him. For all of you Ralphy followers out there, you’ll be happy to know that I’m going to be writing an entire Ralphy Sherman book.
Where did Ralphy get his name? That dates back to when I was in college. I had this friend who was a maniac, and often he dragged me into wild and questionable situations. One time we crashed a private country club. “But what’ll we do if we get caught?” I asked. “Easy,” said my friend. “We’ll tell them we’re the Sherman brothers. I’m Ronny, you can be Ralphy.” When security came to quesion us (because we looked like two college students crashing a private club), we gave them the Ronny and Ralphy Sherman story. I really got into it. I went as far as to act all insulted when the guard accused us of making the whole thing up. I told him how upset our parents—highly respected members of the club—would be if they knew how terribly we were being treated. The security guard apologized, let us stay, and even gave us a coupon for a free buffet lunch. (Actually that’s not true, he threw us out—but Ralphy would never admit to being thrown out!)
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