Blissful Unawareness
The plane echoed with screams and shouts. The drone of several hundred voices sounded like the ocean's waves during a storm, making it impossible to single out any tone from the overwhelming roar. The safety belt sign flashed its unheeded warning to the passengers while stewardesses clung onto seats, trying to remain standing as the plane continued its rapid descent. Mayday calls could be heard from the front of the plane. A shaky voice that was broken by the microphone's static attempted to yell above all the noise but few words could be heard before they were completely swallowed. A tiny girl with big brown eyes sat bewildered, holding a doll. Her mother absentmindedly twisted the cord from an AT&T phone which was locked onto the seat in front of her. The cord became twisted around her fingers causing them to turn red then white. The man beside her had his eyes closed. His head was bent forward while he gently moved his lips in prayer.
Julie sat staring at the scene before her. She felt like an observer of this chaos. The action around her was simply a movie, with its heroes and extras coming together to form a cast in a fast pace action movie. She had seen movies like that before. The characters had seemed of little importance to her at the time. She was partial to some characters; of course, hoping that they would somehow survive the crash, but in the end whatever happened was of as little consequence to her as a shoelace coming untied. Now she felt pity for those characters. More pity than even the well-groomed actors felt. She could smell the salted peanuts which they smelt. She could watch the ground below her spin about just as they could. The plane made great swooping loops, biding its time before having to make its thunderous drop to the ground below. She watched the cast members of this plane one by one.
Next to her was a rather large woman, about the age of Julie's mother. She took deep, unsteady breaths desperately trying to get air. Julie wanted to say, "Take it easy," or "It's going to be alright." Anything she would say would sound artificial and besides she could not physically say anything. Her mouth felt numb and swollen.
The woman had lent her the People magazine which Julie still held in her hand. The issue was all about what teen celebrities of the eighties were doing now. It was a couple of months old and the pages were ragged from use. She was reading the magazine when the plane first lurched forward. The plane was shaking, as if from turbulence, when it gave one mighty lunge sending many people tumbling out of their brown checked seats. Cans slide off the plane's plastic trays and a man waiting in line for the restroom rolled halfway down the aisle.
Julie had not understood what the stewardess was saying when she told the plane's occupant what was happening. She could not force her brain to think about the irrelevant information that was being given to her. All she could think about was the plane not landing and how she would survive.
The air seemed thinner. Julie's nose began to burn. An oxygen mask dropped on her lap.
"Please place the mask securely over your mouth and nose," the stewardess said. She automatically began modeling how to put the mask on like she had when the plane first took off. This time, however, her hands trembled.
Julie watched the woman next to her struggle to imitate the stewardess and strap the tiny mask around her head. She breathed even more laboriously than before.
Julie shifted her attention to the window. Everything looked so peaceful on the earth below. Nothing seemed to be moving. The land remained unaffected by the terror that was happening in the sky. The fields and woods remained in a state of blissful unawareness. Julie felt herself floating outside of the plane. She fell gently through the quiet blue background with white clouds surrounding her until the land below her became clearer. The blanket of green gradually turned into individual evergreens that stood proud and tall on the Rocky Mountain hills. The plane was only a small speck in the sky now; the screams coming from it became muffled and were blocked by the chirps of birds as she landed safely in between the walls of evergreens.
A voice broke forth from the drone, interrupting Julie's thoughts and yelling its proclamation, "We're not going to make it." The weeping mother across the aisle covered her child's ears.
"We will try our best to land this plane," the stewardess said in reply over the microphone. "Our pilots are some of the best." Our pilots.not simply the pilots. They were the whole plane's pilots, American pilots. Julie knew that she would survive. The pilots may have to give their lives for the passengers like in any great tragic movie but the thought she would survive filled her with hope.
Even with this renewed hope her lungs still burned. She remembered this feeling from when she ran cross-country. The air was so crisp and fresh in the fall with the smell of dying leaves all around. She would run for miles. After a while, her ragged breath would start to even out as she felt a kind of rhythm seizing her. After a mile or so her calves and feet would no longer burn; she would feel no pain as she prodded along the path, only the burning in her lungs would remind her she was still running. At the end of a race when she could see the finish line with the crowd lining the last leg, a sort of freedom took hold of her, her stride lengthened, and an indefinable force began to push and pull her along.
By the time she could see the finish line clearly with a rope pulled across, signaling the end, she was no longer doing anything. Her body was automatically going, like a machine. She did not even need to think about finishing, she simply knew she was.
She looked down at her long, slender hands. They were trembling. Someone had put an oxygen mask around her mouth and nose. She couldn't remember who had helped her. Maybe it was the stewardess or maybe it was the man in prayer across the aisle.
Her sister would be waiting for her at the Denver airport. She could see her sister's eyes glistening with tears when the fate of flight 219 was announced. Her sister would see the people in the airport like she was seeing the plane's occupants right now. They would all become characters to her in some horrific nightmare that wasn't true, couldn't possibly be true. She felt wetness in her own blue eyes.
She had been reading People magazine when the plane first lurched forward. She was thinking about getting to her chiropractor appointment on time and how she wanted another glass of sprite to wash down the complimentary peanuts.
She lifted up her oxygen mask, took a few gulps, trying to free her mouth and tongue so she could say something to the woman beside her.
"Thanks for letting me read the magazine," she said, placing the special edition issue in the woman's hand. The woman nodded while still gasping for air. Julie thought about taking advantage of her attentive audience and telling the woman about a squirrel that she had seen fall from the sky once and asking the woman if she thought that's what it would be like if they fell from the sky. The squirrel had been jumping among the golden tipped leaves and in its last jump it missed the branch entirely. It dropped fast through the sky with gravity taking hold of its body, scolding it for trying to defy it. It appeared to be an inanimate object as it fell, until it hit the ungiving sidewalk below. A horrible sound that rung in her ears for weeks. She remembered looking down at the squirrel- its lifeless body broken into a deformed mass- she felt genuine pity for the animal. The creature was made to live amongst the tree tops and one miss calculated jump ended its life. She decided not to tell the woman sitting beside her because she wouldn't understand the horror of the scene. She wouldn't be able to hear the sound the squirrel made when it hit. A sound that was so final, so unnatural. Instead she said something artificial, something of little consequence.
"What's your name?"
The woman continued to make a horrible face, sucking in as much air as she possibly could, realizing what a valuable commodity it was. She pinched in her round mouth trying to form syllables but nothing came out. She scribbled something on paper instead. "Megan," it read.
"I'm Julie," Julie said in reply. She was a beginning journalist and had already introduced her self countless numbers of times to different sources. She had developed a kind of confidence through the interviews she had conducted. She would stand her five feet eight inches with pride as she smiled at the person. She would look them in the eye and shake their hand firmly. But somehow knowing these words might be her last made them sound cold and foreign. This could be her last hour, her last plane ride. she looked at the girl across the aisle who was staring at her. The child let the doll dangle head first as she looked at Julie with a questioning gaze that seemed to beg to know what was happening. She could not explain to the child what was happening. She simply wanted to take hold of her hand and bring her soaring through the clouds with her. She would tell her to hold on as they continued their safe descent toward the evergreens. This time, as Julie imagined herself falling through the air with the little child, the trees did not separate. There were too many of them. The sea of green stretched on for miles, allowing no space for them to land.
Somehow the earth no longer seemed peaceful below her. It was now wicked, daring the plane to stay in the sky and daring it to fall, unwelcome to the ground.
Megan gasped. "What if we don't make it?" Her words echoed the thoughts of everyone in the plane. Julie was quiet for awhile. To answer that question she would have to think about all the things she had yet to do and all the things she had done. At this point that would be more work than she could handle.
"So where do you do work?" Julie asked instead.
Megan was staring at the plane's exit with an ashen face.
"He's threatening to jump," she said, pointing at a man standing by the exit.
"Might as well," yelled the man behind her, "We'll all reach the same place in a few minutes anyway."
"Not all of us will," said the man who had been praying. The woman beside him was still crying, clinging tightly to her child. "Only some of us will be going to heaven."
"Sit down," someone yelled. "Let me live the rest my life in peace."
Another person yelled out for him to continue and began to hum Amazing Grace.
The plane seemed to be shaking more as it circled. People started rushing into the aisles unable to wait for something to happen. They screamed and pushed like wild animals.
"He's going to jump," Megan shouted. "Look at him pull at that door, we'll all be sucked out." Her breathing had become even once again, the initial shock fading.
"I'm too young," a woman screamed.
The climax of the movie hit. Julie watched the action in silent awe. The man praying with his peaceful countenance, the young woman crying, the confused child with the doll, the big man trying to escape. They all knew so little about each other, yet here they were sharing this one experience.
The stewardesses had given up trying to quiet and calm the passengers. They were crying themselves, hugging one another to show their last attempt at comradeship.
Julie thought at first they might be rescued. That by some miraculous, heroic deed, tomorrow's newspaper headlines would read, "Plane Survived Impending Crash, Hundreds Saved." She would tell news shows across the country how she thought at one point she wouldn't survive and all about how she had been reading People magazine when the plane first lurched forward. The sound of the squirrel falling echoed, her lungs burned, the praying man across the aisle sat in peace, and the child had begun to cry.
