When Seconds Seem Like Hours
~GCS~
The flight was relatively calm after that. We
landed briefly in
AJ wore headphones for almost the entire flight. His seatmate was a big blond kid who spent the hours either sleeping or wired. From my dealings with children, I suspected an overgrown case of ADHD. I learned that his name was Nicky. I learned this when the tall man with the dark hair got up to walk to the rear of the cabin and had to kick his foot out of the aisle.
“Move it, Nicky,” he barked, shoving the kid’s athletic shoe with his sandal.
He was a man of few words. Nicky shifted
and grumbled but the offending foot left the aisle and the tall man
moved on but not before he caught me staring. For
a second, his eyes locked on mine and I have to say that he had the
greenest eyes I had ever seen – and the longest lashes.
I know women who would kill for those eyes.
They were beautiful but also painfully penetrating.
The green played against the black of his lashes and hair in
an intense way, making the green seem greener and the black, blacker.
I was reminded of a web site I had been to when I was preparing
a lesson on
Anyway, he smiled somewhat tentatively and I think I smiled back – at least I’m pretty sure I didn’t scowl or stick out my tongue.
The Hispanic looking man who sat across from me mimicked the tall man in a sing-song voice.
“Yeah, Nickeeeeee, move it!”
To which Nicky responded by hurling an airline peanut at this person, which burrowed into his curls.
“Shut-up, D – which stands for ‘douche bag’….”
I was relatively certain that the ‘D’ didn’t really stand for douche bag but I did remember a BSB folder that one of my second grade girls carried with a picture of a brown eyed teen dream. Across his neck was lavishly scripted the name ‘Sweet D’. The guy on the folder had long, straight hair that was parted down the middle but they could be the same person, I suppose. So now I knew who JK was and Nicky and Sweet – or ‘D’ or whatever. It became a little game for me. I had two more to figure out.
After a few minutes, the tall man returned to his seat and I heard him call to the guy who was seated in front of him.
“Hey Cuz… throw that magazine over here!”
‘Cuz’ leaned forward and handed back a current issue of GQ.
“No skirts in there Snoop, but there’s a nice article on barrettes and pocketbooks…”
Snoop’s sarcastic ‘ha…ha…’ was accentuated by a thumb-pop on the back of ‘Cuz’s’ head.
My little game was over. It didn’t really take too long and I had all of their names: JK, Nicky, Sweet, Cuz and Snoop. Big deal. Talk about useless information…
It was then, that I thought I detected a vibration under my seat. I ignored it at first but then the vibration became more intense. I glanced at my seatmate, the Prof. He was staring at me – questioningly. He felt it, too. One flight attendant whispered to another and then disappeared into the cockpit. By the time she returned, the vibration was evolving into a shake and threads of panic were beginning to wind their way through the cabin. She took the little microphone from its holder on an interior wall and began to issue instructions.
“Please fasten you seatbelts and return your trays to an upright position…”
She was smiling and her voice was steady but her face had paled considerably. I remember thinking that she could use a touch of blush.
“What’s wrong?” the male nurse shouted towards the front as the other attendant began to pick up cans, miniature bottles and food containers.
“There appears to be…”
She never finished her statement. A ball of fire appeared through the right windows and the plane suddenly dropped. Then I heard a loud whistling scream that was soon overcome by the screams of the passengers in first class. I guess that’s when I went into a kind of shock. The panic I heard all around me became a white noise as I clutched the arms of my seat. The faces around me were blurs, except for one.
The dark haired stranger, Snoop, had turned his head and was looking back at me. I don’t know why. Maybe my face was the easiest one for him to see. I remember that he didn’t look afraid. He smiled just a little as his green eyes filled. He looked ……sad.
The science and theory of time bends when you’re facing death. Things really do move in slow motion and your senses are extremely heightened. I stared at the stranger for a few seconds longer and noticed, even from several feet away, that he had a faint scar on his right cheek. Then I closed my eyes and waited.
*****
~KSR~
The jerks finally quieted down and I tried to do a little writing. My hand was willing but my brain wouldn’t cooperate. I was trying to break out of a writing rut but you know how it is – like when someone tells you not to think of an elephant, all you can think about is elephants. I was trying to avoid the ‘I’m sorry, forgive me’ genre of ballads with which I had become prolific. I was tired of feeling guilt over something that I couldn’t control. I didn’t want forgiveness anymore. I wanted freedom. It was a huge step for me to admit that I couldn’t control the direction my marriage had taken. Lord knows, I didn’t want it to fail…
She wanted a career. I knew that going in. I wanted a partner and not just in the financial sense. She knew that going in. Our priorities were different and we both knew that going in, but thought things would shift and change if we were officially a couple. The fact is that we were together less after we were married than before. The underlying fact is that I didn’t really care. I liked her fine. We had a certain history but history is not the same as love and trust is not the same as passion. I began to wonder if it was even possible for me to feel those things. I was such a fool. I thought the failure in my personal life could be compensated by success in my professional life. It took me a long time to realize that they were two separate and distinct entities, like apples and oranges.
Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood to write lovey-dovey ballads. I wanted to come up with something hard and edgy – kind of a ‘Fuck you’ song, but my muse wouldn’t cooperate. Neither would my bladder. I hate airplane toilets – feel like I’m trying to piss into a cereal bowl or something – but when you gotta, you gotta, so I stood up and stretched and headed towards the back of the cabin. Of course Nick – ‘Mr. Considerate’ – had his damn hoof sticking out for everybody to trip over. He always has his legs spread out so you have to step over him. We’ve ‘discussed’ this before.
“Dammit, Nick! My legs are as long as yours and you don’t see my feet takin’ up everybody’s space.”
“Yeah, well Kev, that’s because you sit like a woman, crossin’ your legs like somebody’s gonna snatch your balls or somethin’….. Let ‘em breathe, man!”
I really didn’t want to get into a discussion about breathin’ balls, so I just kicked his foot out of the way. The woman with the light brown hair was sitting behind Nick. She never opened her mouth but I think I caught a teeny smile….kinda.
After I did my business, I went back to my seat and got Brian to pass me a magazine. I thought maybe if I got my brain thinking about something else, I could stop with the relationship replay and free my mind up a little. He glanced at me and I saw him look at my empty ring finger but, to his credit, he didn’t say anything – just made some smart ass remark about skirts and shit as he passed the mag back. At least he was speakin’. Leighanne didn’t say anything. Thank God for small favors…
I was flippin’ through the magazine when
I felt the tremors start. I’m no airline
pilot but when the shakin’ got worse, I
knew this couldn’t be good. I watched the
attendants and that told me all I needed to know.
We had trouble. I heard a loud bang back and to the right and then the
plane dropped some. That’s when everything
went quiet for me. We were over the
It was the eeriest sensation. I don’t even think my heart sped up. People around me – my brothers – seem to dissolve into wisps of smoke before my eyes. My biggest sorrow at that moment was totally selfish, I’m ashamed to say. I looked at the empty seat beside me. I was alone. I’d spent so much of my life alone, separated from others by ….what? Age? Responsibility? Personality? Fear? Choice?
They say we all die alone and I guess that’s true but I figure that if you’re lucky, you die knowing that at least you had a great love in your life. I wasn’t lucky. I turned to look at the people behind me. They were unfocused and hazy except for two – Nicky and the woman with the light brown hair. I couldn’t help but stare at her. Hers was the last face I would see. Such a pretty face….
The Miracle
~GCS~
I guess I was what they call ‘semi-conscious’. I couldn’t seem to open my eyes and the crash landing hadn’t improved my ability to communicate. My senses were working but the information they picked up wasn’t traveling to my brain very well. I was disoriented and numb, which kind of made me one of the lucky ones.
I could smell gasoline – I mean it wasn’t gasoline, it was jet fuel but I remember thinking ‘gasoline’. I knew I was in water and I knew my feet weren’t touching bottom. I was leaning on something – something that felt padded and buoyant. My forearms were out of the water and so were my head and shoulders but that was all. Sometimes I could feel objects bump into my body and then to move on. I hate to think now what some of those things might have been. I remember the taste of salt but the worst thing I remember was the sounds – crying and wailing and yelling. The moans were the worst. In my numbness and confusion, those moans seemed louder to me than the wails. And when a moan would suddenly stop, the quiet almost seemed louder. That old expression about silence being deafening developed new meaning for me that day.
I couldn’t move my body. It was like my muscles had been sucked from my bones. I was as limp as a dish-rag. I guess that sometime after the crash, or maybe during the crash, my brain went into overdrive and instinct took over because I was told later that a seat cushion kept me afloat. Thank God the water was calm and my body was positioned so that I could take advantage of that ‘floatation device’ because if I had slipped from that cushion, I would have surely drowned.
Amidst the cries and screams, a couple of voices distinguished themselves. Both had southern accents.
“Get her! Pull her in here!”
“Is she dead? I see blood…”
I felt myself being yanked up by my arm, pulled away from my cushion and over an inflated lip of canvas. My back hurt.
“Do you see anyone else? Where’s Nicky? NICKY!!”
“I see him!” another voice cried. “He’s in the water by the third raft!”
“Is he okay?”
“I think so! He’s holding someone up…”
My eyes cracked open just a bit and, for a moment, all I could see was orange. And some green… It was that dark haired man. Snoop.
“Can you hear me?”
I couldn’t answer. Then more voices. I couldn’t tell who was saying what. Everything was confusion and chaos.
“Let me on!”
“We have to move her out of the way…”
“Is that everyone?”
“Where’s my sister!”
“She’s going under!”
“Keep looking!”
“Grab everything you can reach!”
And then…
“I think I see land!”
The dark haired man lifted me up to his shoulder and then leaned me against the edge of the raft. I was aware of him lifting my shirt.
“She’s still bleeding, but it doesn’t look too bad….”
There was a little boy on the raft who looked to be about four or five years old. I recognized one of the flight attendants – the one who had yelled at me and given me the zippered airline bag. Then my eyes closed again.
Thankfully, we had followed the sun. If this had happened in the darkness, I think more people would have been lost. As it was, there were fifty-eight survivors. Four people died later, bringing our total to fifty-four, including the little boy. I found out later that his name was Sam. Sam Whaley. His mother wasn’t among the saved.
So, out of the 167 passengers on the flight, fifty-four ultimately survived. The entire first class section made it, plus one flight attendant who had the coolness of mind to disengage four life rafts which some trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic flights had begun carrying as a matter of course following safety crackdowns by the FAA. Each raft held twenty people.
The pilot and co-pilot didn’t survive. As it turned out, they had attempted to land the aircraft in relatively calm waters. The attendant later said that that was an impossible task and that, at best, the plane would ultimately break and not explode. Still, there would be little hope of survival. It was simply the best they could do. What she failed to tell us, until later, was that the failure in the electrical system, which had caused the ‘right wing engines to malfunction’ had also cut ‘communication capabilities’. This might have happened some time before the plane went down.
Bottom line: Flight 189 had crashed landed into the Pacific in an unspecified area. It hadn’t taken the wreckage long to sink. We might be difficult to find. It would be hours before anyone would even start to look.
*****
~KSR~
Although most of the people seated around me seemed to dissolve, three distinct images would remain in my memory: Leighanne had thrown her head back against the seat, eyes closed, mouth wide open, screaming. I wanted her to shut the fuck up. Let us die in peace, ‘ya know? I guess she couldn’t help it. Then there was Nicky. God help me, I still felt responsible for that little twit. I say that with affection, but don’t tell him that. When I glanced at him, all I could see was eyes – big and blue and tearing. He hated to fly and now his worst nightmare had come true. He was a man now, but still carried a boy’s insecurities. No amount of pre-show jitters, fan attacks and scary moments could have prepared any of us for this… He had been staring straight ahead when I looked at him, his lips pursed as if he were about to kiss someone. Then our eyes met for a brief moment and I saw him mouth my name. ‘Kevin…’ His brows disappeared under his bangs as if he were about to ask me a question. I thought my heart would break. I couldn’t help him… The last image I recall before we hit water was of the young woman with the light brown hair. She seemed calm - almost serene, as if she had expected something like this to happen. I remember thinking that I didn’t know her name and so I gave her one. Right then, as we were about to crash, my brain decided to name this quiet stranger after a virtue that had become alien to me – Hope. I never told her that….
Anyway, the next thing I remember was darkness and not being able to breathe. I was underwater and tangled in God knows what. My body was working by itself now. I don’t think my brain was of much use. Not for reason, anyway. Primal instinct drove me towards the surface and when my head broke the water I had to take a minute to refill my lungs. I was choking out water and gulping in air at the same time. My side hurt. I think it took me a while to get my senses back. Then I heard someone calling out to me. It was AJ.
“Kevin! Man, come on! Come on, Kev, you’re okay man! You made it! Give me your hand…”
I squinted into the sun. The salt water made my eyes burn but I could see that skinny bastard leaning out from a raft with his tattooed arm stretched towards me. Damn – he was beautiful… You don’t have to repeat that, either…
. “Where is…”
That’s all I could choke out before he started blabbering a mile a minute, answering before I could even get the question out.
“Brian and Leigh are in another raft. Howie’s okay. I saw him a minute ago. I think he was trying to push someone out of the water…
Then he stopped. My heart stopped, too and panic set in.
“Where’s Nicky?” He paused for a nanosecond too long and I started yelling. “NICKY! NICKY – where are you?”
I thought I was going to puke.
“I got him! He’s over here – beside the raft!”
I could barely hear the voice but I recognized it. It was Brian. I couldn’t see him. I screamed again.
“NICKY!”
“He’s okay, Kev! I got him!”
AJ and a couple of others hauled me up out of the water and into the raft. There must have been about sixteen others in there, including a little kid. I was one of the last to be pulled out. AJ told me later that he thought I was dead.
My brain finally started to work again and that’s when I noticed the devastation. Survivors had started to haul floating luggage and manageable chunks of debris into the rafts. My eyes searched the water and that’s when I spotted her at the edge of the smoke. She was hanging onto a seat cushion. Her eyes were closed and I could see blood. A floating body bumped against her hip.
“Get her!” I yelled. “Pull her in here!”
The raft that Brian was in floated nearby.
“Is she dead?”
I didn’t think so. She cracked her eyes when I started to pull her up and she moaned a little when she fell onto my shoulder. I asked her if she was okay but she didn’t answer. I tried to find out where she was hurt and lifted up the hem of her shirt. She had been cut by something and was bleeding but it wasn’t a bad gash and thought that maybe after she was out of the water, the bleeding would stop.
The plane started to sink fast. I remember seeing an arm pressed against one of the windows before it sunk below the surface. I guess people had been yelling back and forth the whole time but I hadn’t really heard them. I just remember thinking ‘Well, what the fuck do we do now?’ Then somebody from another raft yelled.
“I think I see land!”
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