Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction

by Alison Macleod

  Kurt looks at his watch. Sixteen past nine New York time, an hour since take-off. Hal’s meal tray is already empty, his Coke glass empty. He seems to doze. Kurt eyes the phone once more. He is reaching for his wallet when a flight attendant’s voice interrupts the programme. She announces that the captain has switched on the seatbelt sign. The flight, she explains, is to be diverted to Halifax, forty-eight kilometres away. A small electrical fault is suspected. It is not a cause for concern. However, the captain has decided it would be prudent to correct it before beginning the long haul over the Atlantic. In the meantime, the cabin lighting will be switched off, purely as a precaution. Attendants will collect meal trays with the aid of flashlights. The in-flight entertainment will resume once they recommence their journey out of Halifax.

  Sometimes, in the shower, on the subway, or in the line-up at his local deli, Kurt dreams of the entropic disclaimer, of the loophole that will allow him to undo the wild kinetics of heat and roll time back. He would like to be able to say to Ginny, ‘I am not going to New York without you.’ He would like to say to his mother long ago, ‘You cut your face. Does it hurt?’

  Hal comes out from under his earphones and taps Kurt’s elbow. ‘What do you make of that, Kurt? Halifax. Where is Halifax, for Pete’s sake?’

  The pretty stewardess with the mole on her cheek collects their trays. The cabin is dark, except for the bobbing beams of light. She says, ‘We’ll be landing soon. Could you straighten your seatback, sir?’

  Somewhere, a baby cries. Just ahead of him, Kurt can see a white flutter of hands: Joan’s patting John’s. To his right, a heavy-set man in his sixties holds a small dark bag embroidered with gold thread, and turns it over and over again in his lap.

  In the darkness of the cabin, people speak in low tones, as if in a foreign church, while far below them, Brenda Murphy is doing the crossword at the kitchen table in her mobile home. Now and again, she reaches down without looking and gives Lucky a good scratch. She glances at the clock. Twenty past ten. And still one clue she cannot get. ‘A ten-letter word for “fate”, Lucky. Then I’ll let you out. It’s not “destiny”. Too short. The first letter is “p” and the sixth is “d” – at least it’s a “d” if twelve down is “DiCaprio”, as in “Leonardo”.’

  In the days to come, Ron McLelland will read and reread the timetable of disaster in his morning paper. He will plot in his mind the routine of his own movements that night, implausible now in their banality. He will see himself putting out the garbage, locking the front door, shutting the girls’ bedroom door, and curling up next to Linda’s just-bathed talcum smell. He will mark time against the movement of a clock that moved two hundred and twenty-nine people out of time.

  10.00

  Co-pilot smells smoke in cockpit. Checks. Finds nothing.

  10.10

  Smoke confirmed as the MD-11 widebody plane crosses the coast of Nova Scotia.

  10.14

  Captain radios Moncton Area Control Center. ‘Swissair 111 heavy is declaring Pan, Pan, Pan.’ Situation serious, not desperate. ‘We’ll divert to Boston.’

  ‘Swissair 111, we’d suggest Halifax. Boston is three hundred nautical miles away. Halifax is seventy.’

  ‘Confirm Halifax.’

  10.16

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has switched on the seatbelt sign. We regret to inform you that this flight will be diverted to Halifax, forty-eight kilometres away. An electrical fault is suspected. It is not a cause for concern. However, the captain has decided it would be prudent to correct it before continuing our journey over the Atlantic. In the meantime, the cabin lighting will be switched off, purely as a precaution. Attendants will collect meal trays with the aid of flashlights. We thank you in advance for your cooperation.’

  10.18

  ‘What do you make of that, Kurt? Halifax. Where is Halifax, for Pete’s sake?’

  ‘Swissair 111, you’ve got thirty miles to fly to the runway.’

  ‘We need more than thirty miles.’

  ‘Turn left to lose some altitude.’

  ‘Roger, we are turning left to heading, uh, north.’

  ‘We’ll be landing soon. Could you straighten your seatback, sir?’

  ‘Swissair 111, when you have time could I have the number of souls on board?’

  ‘Halifax, we must, uh, dump fuel. May we do that in this area during the descent?’

  ‘Linda, is it the recycling tomorrow or just the garbage?’

  ‘Recycling’s on Wednesday, Ron. You ask every week.’

  ‘Uh, okay, I’m going to take you – are you able to turn back to the south or do you want to stay closer to the airport?’

  ‘Okay, we can turn towards the south to dump.’

  ‘John, it doesn’t matter. Just try to close your eyes until we land.’

  ‘If necessary, sir, well put you up in a hotel overnight.’

  ‘See, honey. I said that, didn’t I?’

  ‘Hal. Hal Huskins. Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Bernie Rothenberg.’

  ‘An electrician would come in handy about now, eh, Bernie? How are you on wiring?’

  ‘As my dear wife would be quick to tell you – Hal? – Hal, I never was the handyman type. I’m a retired Hebrew teacher.’

  ‘Turn to the left heading of two-zero-zero degrees and advise me when you are ready to dump. It will be about ten miles before you’re off the coast. You’re still within thirty-five, forty miles of the airport if you have to get here in a hurry. I’ll advise you when you are over the water. It will be very shortly.’

  10.20

  ‘A ten-letter word for “fate”, Lucky. Then I’ll let you out.’

  10.23

  ‘Halifax, our autopilot is gone. Going over to manual.’

  ‘Roger. You’re almost there.’

  ‘Kurt, you awake? This is Bernie. Bernie’s an expert Hebrew teacher.’

  ‘A retired Hebrew teacher.’

  ‘Kurt’s a physicist. Particular to particles.’

  ‘What about you, Hal? What is it you do when you’re not several thousand feet in the air?’

  ‘Well, Bernie, I could lie but what the hell? I’m told by people who assure me they know that I’m what’s called a “fantasist” – no, really, no kidding. A few years back, I took a stab at white-collar crime, failed – failed so badly I wasn’t even arrested – then went crazy the next day in Central Park with a butterfly net. Landed myself on a doctor’s couch. No, don’t be embarrassed. Like I say, God knows I could have lied if I’d wanted to.’

  10.24

  ‘Swissair 111 is declaring emergency. I repeat, Swissair 111 is declaring emergency.’

  ‘God, you’re freezing, Ron. You didn’t go outside in just your robe again, did you?’

  ‘Who’s looking, Linda? Jesus, it’s cold out there tonight. Enough dew on the grass to sink a boat. Neil call today?’

  ‘My biggest problem, Bernie, has always been believing everything’s possible – and that’s actually more limiting than it sounds.’

  ‘Roger, Swissair 111. You’re off coast.’

  ‘We – dump. We have to land immediate –’

  ‘No. But he’s your brother. You could call him for a change.’

  ‘Swissair 111, you are cleared to commence your fuel dump on that track. Advise me when the dump is complete.’

  ‘Swissair 111 check. You’re cleared to dump.’

  ‘He said he’d phone me. Anyway, there’s no point –’

  ‘I repeat: you are cleared to dump.’

  At twenty-five past ten Swissair III disappears from radio contact. In the tower at Halifax, two hundred and twenty-nine lives condense to a single pulse on the radar screen. In the starless night over St Margaret’s Bay, the plane has begun its descent, spiralling like ticker tape in the air. It will be five minutes more before Brenda Murphy opens her door at New Harbour Point and marvels at the luminous mist of the September sky.

  ‘My God,’ Kurt mutters. ‘We’re go
ing down.’

  ‘Always good to have a physicist on board, Kurt. Now listen to me. Here’s your life jacket. Remember the security position? Bernie, you okay? Grab your life jacket. Don’t blow it up till you leave the plane. It’s under your seat. Go on, Bernie.’

  ‘Thank you, my friend. But I suspect this will suffice.’ Bernie shakes out a wide piece of fringed cloth. ‘My prayer shawl. I stuck it in my carry-on at the last minute.’

  ‘There’ll be an inflatable chute, Bernie, lifeboats, plenty of room, high-intensity flares till the Coast Guard arrives. Are we over water? We could be over water. Trust me. I used to work as a Security Adviser for United. In no time, you’ll have the Gideon Bible in one hand and a stiff drink from your minibar in the other. Me, Bernie, I’ll be stealing souvenir towels by morning. Kurt, you okay? Kurt?’

  Overhead, compartment doors spring open; bags, boxes and coats fly into the darkness of the cabin. Flight 111 is in the jaws of sudden gravity.

  John’s head is on Joan’s lap. ‘I’m right here, right here,’ she murmurs. ‘We’re okay, you and me. Always have been, always will be.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Joan, I can’t hear you!’ he cries. ‘My ears. I can’t hear you!’

  Bernie wraps himself tightly in his shawl and bows his head. He moves his lips in fast, hot prayer as smoke billows in from First Class.

  Oxygen masks do not drop.

  ‘Kurt? Talk to me. You okay?’

  Kurt feels a surge of hot urine between his legs. He is alone. Ginny is far away, asleep, and he is alone. He is rigid in his seat, strapped into circumstances, into an unbearable privacy. He feels he will burst with the sudden pressure of loneliness; that he will collapse under its immitigable force; that the crush of it, and not sudden impact, will, any moment now, take his life.

  In their bed, Ginny turns, caught in a falling dream she will not remember.

  Ron switches off the bedside light and gathers Linda to him, letting her warmth become his, while, in the closeness of the near night, a wing bursts into flame.

  ‘Go on, Lucky. Go on.’

  Heat rises, unknowable, infra-red. It is the heat of crackling circuitry and burning steel. It is, too, the ineffable heat of life in extremis: of Hal’s desperate butterfly-net faith in a tomorrow that will not come; of Joan’s twenty-five-year love for a man who could not love. It is the heat of Bernie’s prayers for his wife’s milky-white breast, shadowed with tumour – only now does he understand what she could not quite tell him over the phone at the gate. It is the heat of Kurt’s sudden longing to press himself to his wife, to slip inside her, to make of their bodies a new third. It is radiant heat that rises high into the atmosphere.

  Brenda Murphy looks into the night sky above St Margaret’s Bay, wonders at something bright, alive, on the dim horizon between sea and sky, and, in that still moment between moments, in a moment that will be lost in the next, feels as porous as the mist is to the light; feels herself dissolve into something bigger, wider.

  Then, ‘Here, Lucky. Here, boy. Come on with you. It’s late now.’