Occupy Me

by Tricia Sullivan

  But all that physicality was just a cover. He had stolen me from my nest, taken me for a joyride somewhere, and dumped me. What kind of person does that? What might he do next?

  I experienced a falling sensation. I don’t like to admit it, but maybe it was fear. It was the kind of feeling that puts a sharp edge on everything in the world. My wings began to swell instinctively. My thighs bulged and my back started to broaden – all the strength training I do becomes obvious when I’m under pressure. I had to stop pouring coffee and focus all my efforts on maintaining my Earthly appearance, or the wings would burst into visibility.

  The passenger I was serving cleared her throat. I held up an index finger without looking at her. Wait. She let out a peeved sigh. With great control, I faded the wings and shrunk my body, literally pulling myself together. I would not let my hijacker freak me. I would not. I would have control.

  Then I turned to her, apologised, and took her cup.

  ‘Enjoy the rest of your flight,’ I said in my smoothest voice, and gave her an extra surge of loving kindness just to prove to myself that I could. She smiled like a kid cuddling her security blanket and took a sip.

  I walked back up the aisle and set the coffee pot on the cart. Then I headed for 72B, ignoring the passengers trying to get my attention for coffee. I moved with careful deliberation, but even so I could hear the thunder of my own footsteps. I am much larger than I appear.

  I stood over him. He glanced up from his magazine and as his gaze passed over my chest he did a double-take. I glanced down and saw that the top button of my blouse had popped off in the sudden Bill Bixby-to-Hulk surge just now. I’d been so worried about my wings breaking into visibility that I’d forgotten about the other effects of my body beginning to assume its true size.

  I have muscle, you know.

  I bent down beside him so that 72A wouldn’t hear me. 72B wriggled a little in his seat, making it obvious how uncomfortable he was. Of course, he didn’t fool me. I could sense his instability like a fault line in the fabric of reality.

  ‘Did you forget you made me a promise?’ I murmured. ‘Get up. Come with me.’

  I don’t lay on the Jedi mind tricks often, but I know how. He was walking ahead of me up the aisle before he even realised what was happening. We stood by the seats reserved for cabin crew, alongside the emergency exit.

  This wasn’t an American flight, so I didn’t have the problem of an air marshal getting in my way. But I also had no backup. I mean, Rory? Your grandmother could snap him like a toothpick.

  ‘Give back what you took from me,’ I told 72B quietly.

  He blinked charmingly. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Where is it? You said it was safe.’

  ‘I’m sorry, uh . . .’ He checked out my badge. ‘Pearl, there’s been some mistake.’ His glance tripped to the locker over his seat, then returned to me. He was worried about something up there. Oh, great. Had somebody sneaked a detonator past airport security again?

  ‘You’ve wasted my time for a year. I’ve had enough of this. You said if I did the helicopter thing I’d get it back. Then you blew me off. So give it back now, or I’ll crush you back into HD where you come from.’

  ‘HD, where’s that? I live on Long Island.’

  There was an uneasy coupling of annoyance and nervous laughter in his voice. His accent was indeterminate: a little New York City, a little London, a little . . . Cameroon? Congo? I couldn’t place him, and I took this as another sign of his metaphysical transience.

  ‘Higher dimensional space,’ I seethed. ‘It’s not in Nassau County.’

  ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Pearl. I’m going back to my seat now and I want to be left alone.’

  I stepped to block his way.

  ‘What’s in the overhead compartment?’ I whispered.

  He swallowed. If ever I saw a guilty face, his was it.

  ‘It’s my launcher, isn’t it? You’re carrying it around? Get it down and give it to me. If you’ve endangered these passengers in any way . . .’

  I was swelling again. Shit. In my disguised form I’m required to maintain the dimensions of female cabin crew; i.e, undernourished. But my real body is considerably larger and stronger. My wings were screaming to get out. I’m not supposed to show my wings. Small but targeted acts of human kindness, that’s what the Resistance permits. Problem is I don’t do ‘small’ very well.

  ‘You stole from me,’ I said softly. ‘And then you used my better nature against me. Do you even know what I am?’

  ‘A lunatic?’ he guessed, and tried to move around me the other way. He was agitated; frightened, even. Out of his depth, like a two-bit gangster in a monster movie. ‘I want to speak to your supervisor.’

  I used my wings to make nearby passengers feel sleepy. Multi-tasking is a big part of cabin work anyway.

  ‘I’ve had enough of your games. Get whatever’s in that compartment down. Now. I’ll give you ten seconds before I crush you back to the dimension you came from.’ I flexed my fist. ‘You’ll be like a piece of spaghetti stretching from here to Charybdis.’

  ‘OK, that’s enough,’ he yelped, wild-eyed, as if he really were scared of me.

  ‘Three . . . four . . .’

  ‘Look, you’ve made a mistake. I’m a doctor! I can prove it!’

  He was climbing on the seat to try to get around me, but I threw out an arm and grabbed him.

  I said, ‘Six!’ There was an electric shock as we made contact. And I’m not talking about the frisson of meeting a sexy stranger. I’m not talking about two people walking across a carpet in their socks and then a spark flies. I’m talking a jolt that physically throws you back.

  Well, it threw him back. He got his feet under him halfway down the aisle, and he fumbled at the overhead locker, never taking his eyes off me.

  By now I was up to nine.

  The look on his face was so convincingly freaked that I might have been tempted to hesitate, to question whether I’d made a mistake and whether he was just a regular guy – if it hadn’t been for the feeling of him on contact. I knew him all right. If he’d launched me from HD then there was nothing he wasn’t capable of. He had to be stopped.

  I said, ‘Ten.’

  He said, ‘Help!’

  ‘Fasten your seatbelts, everybody!’ I shouted. I thought about my spiritual commitment to this job. I thought about the dental plan. There was no choice. I had to take care of this.

  He had his luggage down and was holding it in front of him as a shield. It was a black 1970s style briefcase. Like something out of the Rockford Files. Oh, please.

  I strode down the aisle and grabbed 72B with both hands. We wrestled; I was a lot stronger. He screamed and kicked, scrambling against me and swinging the briefcase around. In a second he’d give one of my passengers a concussion.

  I unleashed.

  In hindsight, it was stupid of me. Good old hindsight.

  I began to grow. My muscles popped out. I braced my legs against the seats and with a surge, black-feathered wings burst into this world, jamming between the overhead lockers and the seats. Passengers were shouting. Even Rory was lady gaga, his mouth hanging open.

  The hijacker shoved the briefcase at me.

  ‘Take it!’ he screamed. ‘I don’t fucking care anymore! Just take it!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘That’s not my launcher, it’s a briefcase.’

  ‘Be careful, the gravity—’

  The briefcase hit me in the chest and I grasped it with both hands. It was my launcher. It was my stolen launcher and it weighed about 1/117th of a neutron star but whatever gravity it was operating under, the force vector didn’t point down. It pointed up. I managed to grab the handle as it swung into the air. My arm windmilled like the tail wagging the dog. The briefcase pulled me into the ceiling of the plane.

  What happened next was completely outside my experience. The briefcase hit the ceiling and tore through it like a hot knife through
butter. It ripped the ceiling panel off and tore a hole in the fuselage. Just like that. Only my wings braced against the cabin ceiling stopped me from shooting out into the sky.

  And then, just as suddenly as it began, the force on the briefcase stopped. I was still holding it, but it was outside the plane in the freezing wind. I found myself trying to establish a position with my feet on the tops of seat rests, looking for leverage to pull the briefcase back in. I think I stepped on someone’s head. Rory screamed and ran for the intercom. Air rushed out of the cabin. Oxygen masks deployed. Empty plastic dinner trays flew off the food cart and into the blue.

  And then came 72B. There was something almost poetic about the way he shot past me. He looked like a doll as his slim body was sucked into the sky. He tried and failed to get purchase on the plane’s hull; then he grabbed on to my arm, then the briefcase itself as the drag of the plane’s passage tore at him. His face was a mask of human terror, but I knew better. No human could have done the things he’d done to me.

  His mouth was moving. It was like a cartoon.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong man. I’m not that guy.’

  Together we tumbled over the roof of the plane. We slid a little on the freezing surface, lifted and bumped by an impossibly strong wind. Then we went over the side. I glimpsed a passenger’s face through a little window as 72B and I pitched into the sky.

  The plane sailed on its way above us, and he still had the briefcase in a frantic grip. In the roots of my teeth I felt his despair, his fear, his incalculable hate. I had to get him off me before he climbed into my insides and took control of me. Like before.

  I flapped my arm violently as if shaking sand out of a towel, but instead of shaking him off I lost my own grip on the briefcase.

  No.

  He was still clutching it like a child holds a teddy bear as he fell away from me. I watched him go. Smaller and smaller, a tiny dot with arms and legs flailing, he fell.

  Just like a human.

  Never revealing his true nature. Falling to certain death.

  Oh, shit. Oh shit ohshit oh shit. I must have made some kind of terrible mistake.

  I thought: Why did I ever let Marquita talk me into this stupid job?

  Quetzlcoatlus with the very big teeth

  Another perfect day at your perfect job, Pearl. Pour them coffee, soothe their troubles, and punch a hole in the fuselage at 32,000 feet.

  I don’t fly much. I mean, fly-fly, with my actual wings. (The Resistance discourages it; in fact, my wings seem to be an embarrassment to my employers. The title ‘angel’ isn’t supposed to be taken literally.) But I knew enough about flying to understand that even with my wings folded, there was no way I could catch up with my hijacker. It was physically impossible. He had a head start. Gravity acted on us both equally, and with my greater size I offered more air resistance. No matter what I did, he would smash into the waves of the north Atlantic and be destroyed before I could swoop beneath him to break his fall.

  It was a terrible realisation.

  Self-recriminating thoughts were banging around inside my head like a swarm of stinging bees. I had no time for them. My heart was swelling with the determination to make things right. And my wings, after all, hail from higher dimensions.

  I had to save him.

  I was spiralling downward, my skin battered by the brute force of the air, opening my wings slightly and turning my body in the air so that I could track him visually. Below and to the south I could see a dark speck somewhere between me and the bright sea. I fixed my eyes on him, willing away all human limitations. Living among humans, I’d picked up baggage; I had to drop all of it as one. No pain, no sorrow, no fear, no limits. I was a messenger. Pure intention, expressed physically. I would save him.

  I leaned into HD. My body folded like a paper airplane and I went down as a shaft, shedding importune photons like confetti. He got closer and closer. Every beat of my heart was dedicated to this one thing. Fly like an arrow. Fly. Every breath. Every impulse to muscle and every thought. My teeth sang in the wind.

  I passed him in a flash. The sea was getting near. I curved beneath him and began to rise, like a needle sewing the air. He grew larger now as he came down, holding on to the handle of the briefcase as it seemed to drag him down. His legs were flailing horribly – he hadn’t lost consciousness. I moved up towards him, to slow his descent, to catch him gently and then battle gravity. Reverse what I had done. Undo my mistake. I would be so gentle. I would make sure he was not harmed.

  As I rose toward him, the sun was above him and his body lay in silhouette, a black star-shaped mass, falling. I opened my arms, spreading my wings, preparing to absorb the shuddering momentum of contact—

  —and the briefcase flapped open.

  A fireball burst out of its open mouth. The fireball engulfed the briefcase. It engulfed the man. It hit me like a star.

  At first I didn’t feel pain. There was a physical jolt as the heat struck me, and I veered away from the light of it, folding my wings back and diving for the sea through a roiling cloud of black smoke. I smelled oil. I looked behind me and saw tiny flames racing along my feathers. Above me: what had come out of the fireball.

  What had been a man and his briefcase was now an animal of epic proportions. It was flying. I formed the hasty impression of a giant bat. Claws extended from its outstretched limbs. Its smoking translucent wings fanned out as wide as a house, and its long, narrow head on a sinewy neck craned back to take in the sight of me. It looked like a giant pterosaur displaced by sixty million years, give or take. It was coming after me now.

  The teeth were bigger than you’d think possible.

  I indulged in a split second of self-congratulation: 72B hadn’t been innocent.

  Then my hair caught fire.

  I folded my wings and dived like a cormorant, corkscrewing in the air. I smacked at my head to put the fire out. The water spun towards me, bringing with it the shadow of the pterosaur flying between me and the sun. I saw a whale spout not far away, and light dazzled on the waves with a hypnotic intensity. The light made me feel detached. I would soon be with it, pure and empty. The whale would be the whale, and I would be the light, and I hoped the oxygen would last long enough for the pilot to get the plane down from the upper atmosphere. They would have to make an emergency landing. All my fault. And I am but here to serve.

  I could see the individual waves now, and smell the decay and salt and the rising cold. The shadow on the water grew bigger as the great wings followed me down. I approached my own reflection, hurtling from on high, burning. The fire had spread to my uniform.

  The pain was like nothing I’d ever felt. I tried to retract my wings into HD, but they wouldn’t go. I glanced back, straight into the open mouth of the animal. Its teeth were long, slanted spikes, gates to a purple-grey throat veined with white. Deep inside was a darkness that looked like more than darkness. It looked like the end. I turned my face away.

  Water hit me, aggressive, pulling me in. Stunned by its icy weight, the absence of noise, the sudden otherworldly stillness, I sank. The fire ceased, but everything was pain as freezing cold curled around me. I could sense the organic matter suspended in the water as it shifted, adjusting to my presence. Everything in my orbit cleared as if all life were giving me space, getting out of my way. I turned over and looked back up toward the surface, still sinking. I could see the pterosaur’s head and its blurred eyes, staring down at me.

  It glided over me, circled, eyed me first with the left eye, then the right. I swear there were lasers in those eyes.

  But it didn’t come for me. It flapped ponderously away across the surface of the water, leaving me in the cold.

  Airless, numbed by cold and heart slowing, I dragged myself to the surface by the power of my arms and legs. Back, abdomen. Neck. Straining against the depths and working without oxygen, I swam up until finally I got my head out of the water. Wind battered my ears so hard I couldn’t hear myself gasping.

  I
spread my wings on the water to stop myself sinking. I couldn’t see the plane anymore. Or the pterosaur. I was alone.

  What. The fuck. Just happened.

  * * *

  My wings sang with pain, but they were not as badly damaged as I’d expected. A residue of black oil oozed from the feathers. It left swirling rainbows on the surface of the sea. I could find no logic for the oil. The protective mechanisms in my skin would repair the burn damage faster than human skin could fix itself, but I couldn’t imagine what had happened in my wings to produce oil. If anything, oil should have made my feathers burn faster.

  There were archives written in my skin, in my bones – but most of all in the higher dimensions of my wings. Imagine living in a library, surrounded by all the wisdom of the ages. Now imagine that you are the library, but you don’t know how to read yourself. It’s a weird, pregnant sensation. Knowing and not knowing.

  Now archives were unresponsive. Probably waterlogged. I wasn’t thinking so good. It seemed I had no choice but to drag myself through the sea. Towards land, however far away.

  I began to swim. The sea was frigid, but I was getting used to it. Little by little, my body returned to its smaller, more disciplined shape. The wings folded up. My head cleared a little.

  After a couple of hours I saw a fishing boat. I wasn’t really surprised. When you work for the Resistance, you expect funny coincidences to govern your life. This coincidence came in the form of a Portuguese fisherman going on deck for a cigarette and spotting me, against all odds, among the whitecaps. They picked me up. I pretended not to understand Portuguese so I wouldn’t have to explain how the remnants of my clothes were blackened or why I had no hair. It was awkward, but I had no qualms about mentally smoothing the sailors down so they wouldn’t ask too many questions. The man who had first spotted me rhapsodised about the beautiful light in the water around me, but his crew mates thought he was drunk.

  They wrapped me in blankets and fed me. When we got closer to land I borrowed a phone and called Marquita.