Loop 392
The pilot finishes the same exact announcement for the 392nd time.
Only eight more times until I reach four hundred. I can't even process the thought. Four hundred loops.
I'm going mad. At some point during the last fifty loops, my sanity hit a snag and started unraveling so fast I can't stop it.
I never thought it would get to this. The baby wails behind me. I reach under my chair, mechanically grabbing the pacifier in my limp fingers. I always thought it would eventually change, somehow, in one way or another. I swing my heavy hand over the back of the seat and hold it there until the mother takes it.
But will there be a time when 400 loops seems like nothing? When this exact point will one day feel like it's just the very beginning of this awful nightmare?
The thought unnerves me. Makes my insides tremble.
Already, every second of every loop is like the worst version of déjà vu. Everything is known, has been played out. I'm sick of talking to almost everyone on this plane. The fact that I haven't already gone off-the-wall batshit is honestly a feat in itself.
Heather offers me a packet of pretzels, but I shake my head, and she hands it to Margaret instead.
"Can I get some coffee?" I ask, knowing the beverage service doesn't come for another ten minutes. I lick my cracked lips, and add, "The hotter the better."
Heather flashes me a plastic smile – a necessity for the job, she once told me – and jots it down on her pad. Then she's on to the next row.
Lately I've been feeling the desperation growing inside me, building in pressure from loop to loop, like a chamber of magma pooling beneath the surface. I know from past experience that there's no way to dissipate it. It just grows and grows until I do something stupid, which usually results in me ending up facedown against the ground, restrained by two large men – usually Bryan Cooke, a retired general who sits in 23C, and Mason Kahn, a mechanic in 28E. Last time Bryan dislocated my shoulder and although it only lasted for a few minutes, the memory of the buckling pain still makes my knees weak.
I reach for my Chapstick but change my mind, and let my lips stay dry. Everything's futile, anyways.
Margaret leans forward. "You alright, dear?" Worry spreads across her face, but I turn away, blocking her out.
The turbulence starts and the seat shakes underneath me. But it's nothing compared to the shaking happening inside me.
I'm at my breaking point. I have to do something. Have to try something. But I wrestle with exactly what I should do, and how much I should risk. While I clearly want out of this loop, I realized a long time ago that it's probably the only reason I'm still alive. The plane was nosediving. And while I'm certainly no aerodynamics expert, it's beyond obvious that nosedives are bad. Like really, really bad. Jason DeSouza in 48B, a chiropractor who sometimes flies small planes recreationally, told me that there reaches a point – VNE, or Velocity to Never Exceed – after which you can't just level out of a nosedive. It's in freefall, and there's no stopping it.
So as much as I despise living in this hellhole and slowly losing my grip on reality, it's also the only thing keeping me alive.
That is, if you call this living.
Sibyl Erly spills her drink all over herself again, and a minute later the turbulence causes an overhead luggage compartment a few rows back to snap open. Heather rushes towards it, repositions the luggage and slams it shut, and then heads towards the front of the plane. I close my eyes, as the shaking continues.
My conversation with Dekor Asher from a hundred or so loops ago, flashes through my mind. I jolt, in horror. I'm the thought experiment, aren't I? I'm the one stuck inside this time loop, with an agent that can kill me. A crashing plane. It's me that could, hypothetically, be both dead and alive at the same time.
The thought haunts me to my core. While I'm stuck in this metal coffin flying through the sky, I'm both dead and alive at the same time. And until the metaphorical box opens and this loop is finally broken, no one – including me – will ever never know which it is. Whether I end up being... dead or alive?
I'm the cat in the box.
I sit, frozen by the thought, until Cheyanne places a Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of me. It's only lukewarm but I swallow it in one long gulp, knowing I'll need the caffeinated boost if I'm going to pull off what I'm thinking of doing.
It's a plan I had at least fifty loops ago, but never had the nerve to try before.
Until now.
I eye the front of the cabin. An open bathroom door closes, and then I eye the snack cart, stowed in the corner. No one is near it.
It's unattended. Just waiting for me.
The caffeine buzzes through me, wakening my limbs with a wild energy. Before I can think twice, I'm in the aisle. Around now, I usually head towards the back of the plane to try to help Janelle Fiori from collapsing, or to throw myself into another four-minute session with Dr. Sheryl. Or sometimes, just to lose myself in a TV series on someone's laptop that I've already watched a dozen times.
But this time I'm heading to the front of the plane. I pass Rion in 5F sleeping as always, but this time I pay him no attention as I keep moving. Then I'm at the front of the plane, next to the closed hatch leading to the cockpit.
I rest my hand against the door, almost in some sort of prayer. I imagine the pilot, just a few feet away from me, and wish I could reach him somehow. Warn him what's about to happen.
I've tried so many times to get into the cockpit. It's virtually impossible. I've tried screaming, too. I can't count the number of times I've shouted at the top of the lungs to the pilot and co-pilot. CAN YOU HEAR ME? THE PLANE IS GOING TO CRASH! I once screamed, until I was restrained. YOU HAVE TO STOP THE NOSEDIVE! I yelled another time, on repeat, until I was tackled and held flat against the floor. But it never changed anything. I have no idea if they even heard me. It could be super loud in the cockpit from the wind, or they might be trained to stay inside when a crazed passenger is on the loose. Probably both.
But this time I'm going to try to get the pilot's attention a different way. Or at the very least I hope I'll be able to get the pilot to do something slightly different, change his course of action in some small way, and somehow stop the nosedive.
After all, one tiny, imperceptible moment has the ability to change everything.
I grip my hands around the metal handle of the flight attendant's cart that's stowed in the corner, and kick the foot brake to unlock the wheels. Then I'm pushing the cart backwards, down the aisle. When I reach the fifteenth row, I have plenty of room ahead of me.
Some of the passengers begin to stir, catching on to the fact that something isn't quite right with this situation. With me gripping the handle of a flight attendant's cart, my eyes locked on the door to the cockpit.
But it's too late. I spring off the balls of my feet and run, pushing the metal cart filled with barely edible sandwiches and sealed soft drinks between the lit borders of the aisle as hard as I possibly can. I sprint, my arms outstretched in front of me, my fingers clenched around the textured handle as the cart shakes unsteadily. I don't slow down. Can't slow down. I run, with everything I have, towards the cockpit door.
"I DON'T WANT TO BE A CAT IN A BOX!" I yell as I hit row twelve.
I keep running, but I'm barely at row six when Bryan Cooke grabs me from behind – shit, that guy is fast – and tackles me. My fingers slip off the cart as my chin collides with the ground, pain splitting through my jaw. Something's wet. I glance down to see a stream of red dripping onto the carpeted aisle underneath me. A nosebleed. Spots dance in my vision as I crane my neck and watch the cart continue to rush down the aisle. Nothing is in its way. I hold my breath as the cart crashes against the cockpit door.
Two of the flight attendants, Cheyanne and Lydia, are behind me now, assisting Bryan by wrapping a plastic zip tie around my wrists, securing my arms low against my back. Mason is driving his knee into my shoulder blades, a sharp sensation that will definitely leave a bruise. Except that it won't, of course.
Meanwhile, a loud metallic clatter ricochets through the cabin as the cart, and all the loose contents within it, hits the barrier separating the cabin from the cockpit. A soda can flies out from one of the drawers and explodes, its carbonated liquid spraying the front of the aisle. I wait, my cheek pressed against the ground, listening – hoping – to hear commotion behind the locked hatch.
But I can't hear anything except the haunting white noise whistling through my ears, and then Marty Stapleton, a furniture salesman from Phoenix in 4B, who starts screaming that I'm a psychopath as his wife, Claire, records the scene on her phone. Meanwhile, the cart bounces back and collides into an armrest in the first row, which starts a chain reaction I can't stop.
Simon Graetz, an elderly man in 2C, jumps up and his foot catches around the strap of his bag at his feet. He trips, falling sideways. He grabs onto the headrest of the woman across the aisle, catching himself, which makes her jump. Her thigh smacks against her extended drink tray, where there's a pile of trail mix lying on a brown airline napkin.
The tray snaps up, sending the assortment of nuts, raisins and chocolate flying through the air. My eyes widen as the snack pellets arch towards Rion James as he sleeps in 5F.
Bryan, now along with Mason, both hold me down, pushing their weight against me with their large hands. I'm already unable to move an inch when Mason decides to press his knee deeper in between my shoulder blades, crushing the oxygen from my lungs. Pinned under their weight, I'm forced to watch it play out in front of me, powerless to do anything.
Breathless, I watch in absolute shock as a cluster of nuts sail the three and a half rows backwards. They separate, branching apart, and my eyes focus on a single peanut as it curves downward and hits Rion directly in his left temple.
"No!" I yelp, but it comes out as a hoarse whisper, a small sound lost in a sea of nothingness.
Lydia, the flight attendant, shouts something behind me but I tune it out. I can't focus on anything except Rion.
My heart races as I watch him stir. He moves his head and then stretches his neck to the side. His closed eyes squint tighter. The muscles of his nose and cheeks contract, squeezing together, and then release. He fidgets, tucking his shoulder under him and shifting his body to the side, in my direction.
No, I silently beg. Roll back over. Please, just stay asleep.
But Rion's eyes crack open as his hands reach up and pull the earbuds from his ears. He rubs at the spot on his head where the nut pelted him, and sleepily glances around at the commotion.
Then his eyes drift down to the ground, in the aisle beside him, where I'm forcefully pinned to the ground under two men twice my size, with a steady stream of blood dripping from my nose.
Rion's bright blue eyes are shocked open as confusion spreads across his face. His bewildered look seems to say, WTF is happening here?
Then his eyes lock with mine.