For a moment, everyone shut up, together with the engines. Usually, I liked silence, but this was all wrong—a plane should not be silent while cruising the atmosphere at an altitude of 35,000 feet.
The aircraft lurched and my stomach with it.
"Fuck," said a pale-faced man across the aisle.
Not now, I was tempted to answer. But I bit my lips—hating my mind to come up with a joke at a moment like this. Then I bit them some more to stop the scream raging in my lungs.
Back in economy, someone shrieked. A second voice joined.
The flight attendant pushed past her cart, nearly tilting the thing onto my lap. An open water bottle on top of it tottered and then fell, sprinkling my neighbor and me.
Abandoning her vehicle, she ran forward and disappeared behind the curtains.
I caught the bottle to stop it from bleeding Perrier over us. My hands were shaking as I put it back on the cart.
My neighbor looked out of the window. I followed his gaze. We were still well above the clouds, but it felt as if the plane's attitude had changed, just by a tiny angle. We had to be heading towards the water.
Stretching my neck, I tried to get a glance at the airplane's wing and at one of the big, fat engines hanging there. It still did—hang there—its gentle curve glistening in the sun. No smoke, no fire.
"What's happening?" I asked.
My neighbor shrugged. "I don't know more than you do. It seems—"
A chime in the loudspeaker above us stopped him.
"This is your senior flight attendant speaking. Please remain seated. We need maintenance and are heading for an unscheduled landing at Guam airport. Again, please remain seated. Make sure your seat belts are secured and keep calm."
Another chime ended his message. It was followed by a tide of voices from the passengers.
I shook my head. "He's not telling the truth, is he?"
"I'm not an aviation expert," my neighbor said with a remarkably calm voice and closed his book with a clap. Then he looked at me, a smirk on his face. "I understand that planes like this can glide for a quarter of an hour or more. Maybe he's trying to restart the engines or to sail to the next airport." He shrugged. "Whatever it is, I guess now is not the time to read a book."
I glanced at the book's cover—anything but thinking of what might be happening around me. And I couldn't help it; books pulled at me like magnets. Checking them out was automatic for me.
Titus Alone, by Mervin Peake. I knew it well. And it gave me a reason to say something normal. "A good book to go down with, though." I giggled as I squeezed the armrest between us, my palms sweaty.
He nodded, hesitated, then opened it again and looked at me over the top of its cover. His mouth was hidden by the book, but the corners of his eyes wrinkled in what may have been a smile. Then he looked down at the page and began to read aloud.
I was flabbergasted. Our aircraft's engines had gone silent, and that man read from a book. But when I heard the lines, their normalcy and familiarity mesmerized me.
"To north, south, east, or west," he began, "turning at will, it was not long before his landmarks fled him. Gone was the outline of his mountainous home. Gone that torn world of towers. Gone the gray lichen; gone the black ivy. Gone was the labyrinth that fed his dream—"
I held up a hand to stop him. "Gone ritual, his marrow, and his bane. Gone boyhood. Gone."
Anything to ignore the events around me.
He raised his eyebrows. "Do you know many books by heart?"
I laughed. "No. I guess that's the only one. And I only know the first few lines. I memorized them when I was younger, to impress a guy."
"And..."
"And what?"
"Did you get him, the guy?" He lowered the book to his lap, studying me with an earnest face.
"Yes, he married me." My reply was automatic while I wondered why he was so relaxed and why I didn't freak out.
He nodded. "Good. Time well invested, then."
Should I tell him he was dead? Torn from life by a drunken driver speeding through suburbia?
Probably not. Not now.
"My name's Farid," he said and offered his hand.
"Megan." I shook it.
This was absurd. I shook hands with a stranger on a plane whose engines had gone silent.
The light in the cabin dimmed. The murmur of the passengers around us gained volume.
"We've entered the clouds." I gestured at the white stuff outside, which was quickly losing its brilliance and turned into a gray mass of nothing.
His palm was hot and dry, and yet it was steady and calm. Afraid that without this anchor I'd start screaming, I held on to it. I swallowed, and my eardrums popped.
Why didn't I scream already? Our plane was going down in the middle of nowhere, its engines still silent. Why didn't someone else scream?
"Earth is waiting for us..." He let go of me. "Or the Pacific, I guess."
"I—"
My words were cut short by a woman's voice from the aisle behind me. Quick, rough syllables in a language I didn't understand. Farid looked up and replied, his foreign words as unintelligible as hers.
I turned to see the newcomer. She was thin, short, and pale, her undulating waterfall of red hair bound into a long ponytail.
"Madam, please stay seated." Our flight attendant, Adriana, had returned and challenged the woman across the cart still blocking the aisle.
For a moment, I wondered how many security regulations were broken by leaving a cart in this position during an emergency situation.
The redhead gazed up at her briefly, slitting her eyes. "You wait." Then she turned back to Farid and spoke again. She wore a white shirt with flower motifs stitched to its collar. She looked about Farid's age.
The purser, a black man with a bushy mustache, joined Adriana. "Madam—"
"You must wait, I said." The woman had a gravelly smoker's voice. She grabbed the cart handle, shielding her from the airline's personnel.
Farid got up, obviously having unbuckled, and hissed a string of foreign speech, gesticulating.
The woman held up her hands, said something, and walked aft towards economy.
As he sat down, Farid said a few words I didn't understand, but their tone was heavy with the pan-lingual melody of swearing. "Sorry," he finally added with a look in my direction.
The purser and Adriana went forward, pulling the obnoxious cart with them.
"Bruna doesn't have manners," Farid said.
"A friend of yours?" My mouth spoke before my mind was able to reign it in. "Sorry, none of my business."
He shrugged. "She's one of the people I'm traveling with." He pointed his thumb aft.
"And why's she sitting back there while you're..." I hesitated. "Sorry, again, none of my business."
He pulled the corners of his mouth into a brief grin. "I got upgraded, too. Same as you. They weren't."
"I see. Er..." I hesitated. "Would you like us to swap seats? Me and her. Or one of them. They're your friends, after all. And this..." I gestured at the ceiling above us but meant the mess we were in. "It might be a good moment to be with someone you know."
As I said this, I realized that I didn't want to leave his side, his reassuringly calm presence.
For a moment, his eyes searched my face. Then he shook his head. "No, but thanks for the offer. That's kind of you."
Muffled voices from the forward galley and a banging of metal reached us. I didn't see what was going on behind the curtain.
Farid nudged me.
When I turned towards him, he gestured to the window.
We had broken through the clouds.
Below us, amidst torn sheets of fog or rain, there were patches of dark ocean—a wasteland of wetness.
"Shit," I said.
"No, that's water."
I huffed.
A babble of voices filled the plane.
What do you say in a moment like this? How do you make the last minutes worthwhile?
A man at my back said something about hydraulics and engine power. A woman answered him in a strident voice, asking if their daughter was still at work and when this would be on the news.
The guy two rows ahead, the one that had worked himself into a frenzy about the lavatories, was talking to a bald head beside him, ranting about organization and control.
Farid and I said nothing.
I looked at him, silently imploring him to stay calm.
He raised an eyebrow.
"The emergency instructions," I said, "should include advice on... what to talk about when you're waiting for the crash."
His lips twitched in an almost-smile. "You're right."
A stout lady across the aisle started to pray, her voice strident and piercing. "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..."
The words flooded through me, evoking no epiphany but childhood memories of church and my mom.
Maybe not the worst words to say in an unpowered, descending plane gliding over an endless waste of water.
Water that had come much nearer.
The forward curtain moved. The purser and a long-haired, thin-limbed flight attendant appeared and hurried up the aisle to economy. Adriana emerged behind them and stopped at the curtain. She held up her hands. The hubbub and the praying stopped.
Everyone's attention in the business class was on her.
"Listen, everybody." She cleared her throat. "We may have to make an emergency landing on water. The first thing you need to do, right now, is put on your life vests. They're under your seat." She held one of them in her hand.
I groped under my seat and found mine.
"Put them on but don't inflate them yet." Adriana unfolded hers and pulled it over her head. "These straps go around your chest, clip them securely. Then pull this part to tighten them. But don't inflate the vest yet."
I did what she showed us.
A hissing sound from the seat in front of me. The guy there had inflated his.
"I repeat, don't inflate the vests yet." Adriana's voice had a high pitch. "Only when you leave the plane, pull this toggle. But don't pull it now." She showed the toggle in question.
I checked on Farid. He had his vest on, and his gaze was on the flight attendant.
"Now, make sure you've all buckled up again." She waited for us to comply. "Before we set down on the water, you will have to adopt the brace position. I'm going to explain it to you now. It's easy. Listen carefully."
"You start by placing your feet firmly on the floor and put your knees together. Then, you'll—"
She was stopped by a flash of light, followed by a giant's bellow thundering through the cabin.
A hot, explosive blast washed over me.