02
BOOM! The plane explodes.
Immediately I am ejected from my seat like air being released from a punctured tire. The seatbelt! I should’ve obeyed the seatbelt sign flashing on the ceiling above me! The heat from the fire wraps itself around me as I shoot skyward. Joining me in flight is an array of backpacks, handbags, teddy bears, laptops, a part of a play doll, or is that the arm of a real baby (?), and mixed shapes of metal from the plane’s body.
Later, a team of aeronautics experts with fancy titles and pristine certificates will determine that the cause of disaster was orographic turbulence, or in layman’s terms, unusual weather. As the flight’s only survivor, I know that pilot overconfidence was the true fault at play. “Who wants to see Fuji from above?” he spouted over the speakers. Everyone cheered. I cheered. How could we have known we were endorsing our own demise? Moments later the shakiness began. At first it seemed like regular turbulence, to be expected, but as we flew onwards signs of disaster made themselves more evident. Lights went out. Oxygen masks fell. Babies screamed. Flight attendants wept.BOOM! The plane explodes.
“Orographic turbulence often goes completely undetected by weather scanners and pilots are encouraged to notify the Air Traffic Control Centre when they encounter it. In this particular instance, no pilots had notified the ATCC about the updrafts near Mount Fuji so Mr. Shinzo Wataya (pilot) and his co-pilot Mr. Ivan Velsor had no prior indication of its presence. Think of a wave above a reef; at a high altitude when rapidly moving air collides with a wall, in this case a mountain, the produced effect is a strong upsurge, which can prove hazardous and sometimes, fatal, to commercial jetliners.”
My eyes began feeling heavy and I raised two fingers to try to rub the weight off.
“So concludes my presentation. Thank you ladies and gentleman.”
“Thank you, Mr. Papillon,” said the judge.
Mr. Papillon, I chuckled to myself. A small, long-haired purse dog with googly eyes, I imagined. I wonder how a Papillon would fare. I pictured a Papillon navigating the Pacific with nothing but constellations and a hand mirror, sailing through rough waters on a makeshift lifeboat, spearing fish and small ocean creatures; fending off sharks with its paws.
“It is now time to hear from our key witness, Mr. Nyāya.”
A papillon would probably be a nice snack for a White.
“Mr. Nyāya?” the judge repeated, interrupting my reverie.
“Sorry, honorable judge.”
I walked towards the crown, ignored the hundreds of eyes fixed upon me as I made my way to the crown. I began feeling self-conscious about my clothes and worried my discomfort was palpable. I wasn’t used to dress clothes. Suits and ties are inauthentic. Nobody describes a person for the suits they wear. Oh, that Mr. Crohn? The one with the suit? Yes, him. No. It’s always oh, Mr. Crohn? Yes, he’s the one that’s always going off into the woods, camping with his family, or, yes, he’s amassed a wealth of knowledge through his literary endeavors. I felt imprisoned. My beard was gone, my face naked. My hair was too neatly folded over. It had only been 16 days since I’d returned.
“I agree with Mr. Papillon’s assessment, Mr. Judge. The turbulence was bad, that’s what brought it down.”
What would tarnishing Wataya’s reputation do? He was dead, his family still living, let them be. Small procedural matters were trivial to me. Jotting a few notes into a technical manual is futile when it comes to real life disasters. The room was cold, lambent, and unnerving.
I looked intently at the scores of faces in the audience and pictured them as gulls waiting for a crab to lap its head out from pockets in the sand. Looking down, I quickly walked back to my seat.
“Okay. Well, thank you Mr. Nyāya,” the judge said, closing the matter.
Four hours later I returned home. I leaned my back against the front door, shutting it behind me, and lifted my head to the white popcorn ceiling above me. I closed my eyes and saw the ocean. I blinked twice before closing my eyes again to the same ocean-view I had moments prior. Despite the time being only 5PM my body felt fatigued and I made my way across the hallway towards my room. Pulling the covers of my bed open I stripped my clothes off, exhaled deeply, and shifted underneath. I closed my eyes again and a cold, wet splash struck my face.
Exult O shores, and ring O bells.
Moments later the sun had set and the room was darkened. I reached under the bed and pulled out a small withered notebook. I examined the title and softly pressed my fingers into its font, feeling the kern and depth of each letter.
I opened the front cover and touched the book’s naked brim, which exposed torn, missing pages. I read the book’s first page and my eyes watered:
Estimated location: Pacific, hundreds of miles off the coast of Okinawa (?).Weather notes: Airy, open sky, smoldering, water a refuge from sun, blazing.
Health: Red blisters pervasive, hydration levels low (too low), persistent headache (always), severe hunger (for past day), last urination yesterday – dark orange/yellow in colour, no bowel movements since day 1.
Personal notes: A ship will come soon (hopefully).
A wave of nostalgia washed over my face more powerful than a stroke of lightning. The first two days were the worst. When I hit water and realized I had survived the impact I questioned if I were truly alive. I remember thinking, am I in the Rapture? Am I about to face Lord’s final judgment? Treading fiery water, I held my eyes shut, blocking the saltiness of the sea, winced my face in a squeeze like manner, and opened them quickly. The sun was above, the sea was surrounding me, and nothing but who knows was underneath me. I was still alive. Adrenaline coursed my veins as I swam to a nearby woman who was screaming. “Halp!” she wailed. Thousands of small debris pieces, scattered materials, and lifeless bodies floated about in the waters surrounding us. I rushed over to the woman. An unintelligible scream filled the air between us. Putting one hand on her back and the other behind her knees, viscous, warm blood covered my hand. No legs.
Red water.
I continued swimming to what appeared to be the door of the plane and hastily pushed it over along the water’s surface to the agonized woman. Helping her aboard, she lay on the frame motionless. I then heard an older man wail some distance away, making his position known. Another survivor? He was on the other side of the plane. I pushed aside ashy pieces of metal and metallic chunks of skin as I swam over to meet him. When I arrived he was still wailing and I wondered if he even knew I was there. His hand was gripping a lifeless woman’s hand and he was sobbing inconsolably. Too caught up in the moment, I briefly forgot about my mother. Her memory soon came back to me. Where was she? Scourges of dead passengers floated helplessly in their lifejackets. Some of them burned, some missing limbs, heads, some had severed organs, altogether forming a grotesque ocean cocktail.
“Sir? I am here to help.” . . .
*Sobs.
“Sir!”
The exercise was pointless. I swam back to the lady from before and observed only silence. She was now facedown in the water, presumably tilted over by the waves. The door was gone. Sunk. I turned her over, looked into her milky eyes and sighed deeply. I focused my attention on myself now. I had to survive. I searched frantically for anything I could use to float on. The plane was upside down and sinking. I swam under the surface and opened my eyes. If I was attempting to find something useful, it was futile. I saw only red and black. With urgency, I swam back over to the other side of the plane where the man had been. Vanished. Looking at the plane as it lay on the surface, I spotted a faint red tarp near the plane’s elevator. A lifeboat. I tried to pull at it, but something was wedging it in. I’d have more leverage if I could push it from the inside. I rubbed something stringy off my face that clouded my vision and looked to my right then to my left. An open door near the rear! I swam over, grabbed the edges of the frame and thrusted my body inside. Black water. My body rubbed against various plane parts; seats, metal sheets, TVs. I used these clues to sense my surroundings. Sharp plane parts pierced my side and bloody bodies pecked at me as I pushed through. Intense heat smothered my body. A trivial attempt at harbour, I counted my losses (many) and headily returned to the surface.
What was left of the plane disappeared in a shadowy veil of darkness, bringing with it dozens of dead passengers and crew and the only lifeboat onboard. Gone. In an encore presentation, a string of white bubbles danced up to the surface marking the planes point of descent. In despair, I stretched my limbs out and floated on the surface, glancing upwards at the cloudless sky. I bathed in air pockets and sunlight.
With all his beams full-dazzling.
Defeated. After a moment of solitude, I felt something slippery rub across the underside of my legs and detected an ominous figure zoom by. What happened next was perhaps more terrifying than everything I’d encountered previously, perhaps the most terrifying thing a person could experience. A 20-foot Great White Shark emerged from the surface and gripped its teeth into a woman’s body only 30 feet away from me. I watched in shock as the shark returned to the ocean and swam away with its prize. A plane disaster in the mid-Pacific is a lottery win for a shark. In astonishment, I vomited. I was living a nightmare and just realized a school of sharks would soon arrive as I bobbed helplessly about. I needed to find something I could drift on. I knew search teams would come if I could just hang on. I started to centralize everything still floating nearby that I could. Including bodies.
It quickly became obvious that ‘centralizing items’ was an impossible task without something, anything, to use as a platform. As the ocean stole back bodies, scraps of material, and stocked goods from the plane I began tying bodies together by way of the lifejackets hanging on them, creating a makeshift landing spot. The more bodies I connected, the more material I could pile. Sharks. The sharks returned, ripping bodies away, slashing into them and tearing organs and limbs. The work I was doing was intensified as the occasional shark would erupt from the water and steal an edge from my lifeboat. Body. A somber solution wafted over me; remove the bodies and keep the lifejackets together. Above me was a cemetery of passengers and below me a zoo of sharks. I was caught in the middle. I worked hastily but meticulously, steadfast in my approach and focused on the task at hand. It was another futile attempt to distract from the knowledge of my grim reality. Then a shark would steal a body I had detached and I’d feel ashamed for feeling relieved. The more distance I could put between us the better. Then I moved another body from the string of lifejackets, readied myself for another, turned it over, glanced it in the face and closed my eyes, hung my head and wept. The body of my mother was in my hands.
I allowed myself to cry, then recollected myself. Gazing down at the body, I saw a deep gash through the midsection and the skin was completely charred. This was uniform to the other bodies in my pile. I knew my mother; she had lived a good life, too short. I wondered about the other passengers on the plane. What stories did they have? Did the screaming woman who lied faceless on the door pane have any kids? Was the man holding the dead woman’s hand loved? My thoughts then circled back to myself, this was my story now. This is how I’d be known. In agony I closed my eyes and held back tears. I couldn’t let her go. I pushed her body on top of the string of lifejackets I had tied and suppressed the grief in favour of the earnestness of the work required for my survival. I continued tying lifejackets. I continued releasing bodies, and they floated away.
The sky had grown as dark as my mind. In the end I had tied 96 lifejackets together and saved dozens of other materials. In near exhaustion, I climbed aboard the jackets, sprawled across, relaxed my limbs, sunk into the surface and gazed back up at the night sky.
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.