Cataclysmic Engine Failure

It sounds a little drastic, if you ask me. Two bells chime and the pilot comes on the overhead and declares he is doing all he can. Three stewardesses with panic in their eyes are in the aisle holding inflatable devices and oxygen masks and flailing their arms and hands about as calmly as possible. This just might save your life, I hear one shout at a dazed passenger. Looking out my window, I have a clear view of the problem. The left engine is on fire and is streaming black clouds that look like ribbons. Ribbons I don’t recall from where, but ribbons, nonetheless, that I recall. The pilot says again to stay calm, he is doing everything he can, which I know to mean we are in deep shit because he said it twice. Had he just said it once, I may have thought that everything was going to be okay.

There's not much he can do over the Pacific. Let’s not shit ourselves here, I say to myself. Ourselves had become another variant pronoun for myself several years ago and I converse with both in inner-dialogues regularly. There is no airport the pilot can contact, no emergency landing he can make that would result in anything but a near-certain catastrophic loss of life. 85-100%, if you were paying me to assess the risk, calculating speed and mass and the probability that the plane would explode upon impact, and a rescue crew that would not come for several hours, at the earliest, sharks, of course, malfunctioning inflatable devices, and the probability of panic-induced drowning.

I am an actuary, so it is my business to assess risk. If I knew why the plane was in flames, I would assess the risk in incurring the cost of recalling the model versus the possible payout of future lawsuits resulting from the risk of other planes malfunctioning similarly. Until this plane goes down, and I am smithereens, I am assessing various other risks, trying my best not to be a self-absorbed hyperventilating asshole the way people get when they don't think it is their turn to die. 

My hand is penning these words. I don’t know why I am writing. I guess because I really have no one to call, but even if I did, I wouldn’t want them to hear it this way. To be scared while it happened to me, and be tortured as the plane plummets, if they ever cared for me at all. Or maybe I don’t call because I am afraid they will not answer and I will be stuck leaving a voicemail, saying something of an I love you and a goodbye. How do you apologize to a machine for being absent? Why call now after not calling for several years? Truthfully, I don’t like the sound of my voice on voicemail and I tell myself that isn’t how I sound at all. And I am afraid that if I record something I don’t like, some proper farewell, I will not have the chance to re-record the message. Now seems like the perfect time for the truth.

It isn’t like anyone will recover this journal amongst the millions of shreds that will become of this plane and its animate and inanimate contents. Of legs and arms and heads and blood and gasoline and underwear and luggage that will be scattered all over the seabed after briefly floating there. An Easter egg hunt, of sorts, for a black box by a multinational search effort that makes everyone feel good about the future of the world. Japanese patrol boats, and U.S. Navy destroyers, and Chinese military submarines, all in one harmonious effort to find me, or him, or her. One of those search parties all over CNN with dramatic intros before and after commercial breaks for prescription medications, new cars, soap, low-fat yogurt, and house paint. One of those search parties that go out to find the remains of us as though it means something to find what’s left. What does it matter?

Long ago, it is certain, I suffered cataclysmic engine failure and I became a ginger-ale and bourbon on the redeye to Dallas, or London-Heathrow. I lost myself years ago over an ocean such as this flying to Tokyo, to Beijing, or Calcutta. In an ice-cube that dissolved in the bottom of a plastic cup and diluted what was left of the liquor. In the crumbled-up wrapper of a pack of honey-roasted peanuts, tossed away without a thought. On a cocktail napkin with a lonely ring on it. I am all that which is hardly noticed by anyone, including myself. 

It is as though I am invisible, except to those who want a tip. I stopped putting my tray-table in the upright position long ago. I never fasten my seatbelt, nor do I ever switch my cellphone to airplane mode. At some point, I stopped smiling at children, or saying excuse me and thank you to stewardesses and waiters, and I never make it as easy as I can on TSA through the gates. They have to tell me every time to take off my shoes and belt. I no longer have a name. They just call me sir. Or A27, or B16, whatever my boarding pass number happens to be on this flight or the last.

The journal was an anonymous gift that came in the mail last Christmas, which I have not used before now. I don’t know who sent it, or why, but I assume they don’t know me very well. In gold letters on the front it says, Know Thyself. Sometimes I stare at those letters and think absently of the meaning of life. I am not one to write my thoughts, but I know myself just fine. It sunk to the bottom of my carry-on where it was buried under the usual white t-shirts, a cashmere sweater, a neck pillow, deodorant, a toothbrush, and a book about vampires I have carried for two years, but have never read. It is a nice journal. Italian leather-bound with gold-trimmed pages. They said it was the kind Hemingway and Picasso used. A Moleskine, they call it. I don’t know what or who Moleskine is. They is a generalized pronoun I use so to be vague because in ambiguity and anonymity, I find peace. When you don’t personalize anything, or talk to anyone unnecessarily, no one can have you by the throat.

The pilot comes back on and says little more than that conditions haven’t changed and there is little hope of anything else. He said he is going to attempt an emergency landing. He says something about prayers and cabin pressure. The oxygen masks are down and dangling there like clear-plastic spiders on a string of web, and though people don’t need them yet, they push their faces into them as though air will save them, while I write these lines. I drink a Seagram’s ginger-ale and Wild Turkey bourbon. My third. I ask the stewardess for another and she looks at me incredulously as though I said something vulgar to her.

She says three is the limit and that it is airline policy. I ask if that maybe, since we are all going to die, they might make an exception. Just this once. She huffs and walks off to try to calm some heavyset woman who is bawling hysterically and some screaming baby three rows in front of me. What does that baby know about life and death and cataclysmic engine failure? He knows his mother is hysterical and therefore he is hysterical. Give him a drink. A gin and tonic on my cash-reward credit card.

It amazes me the people who crowd me to see the engine burn and stream those pretty black ribbons out my window. As though they are trying to diagnose the problem and might scale out on the wing like Bruce Willis and fix it and save themselves. They have no faith in the pilot’s honesty. Maybe he is saying it is worse than what it is, they think. It isn’t about anyone else to them. It is about themselves and their lives. What they have to do. Their work. Their house and mortgage. They give no thought of their life insurance payout to their wives, husbands, or kids at home, which is double, maybe even triple, depending upon the policy and if this is a business trip or not.


The stewardesses tell them to go back to their seats and prepare for landing. They shove their faces in those oxygen masks again so they don’t hyperventilate or drown like virgin snorkelers. Little do they know their chances of survival is next to nothing on the risk of impact alone. A few go ahead and activate their inflatable vests and it looks as though they are choking to death, which makes me laugh a little and think of Kobashi's Python Sleeper-Hold.

I stare at the old lady’s head in front of me and I think of the Enola Gay and how my fourth grade teacher told me I should be happy we dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. Then the thought evaporates. The lady’s gray perm looks like a mushroom cloud. This flight was scheduled to land in Tokyo at 8:10pm this evening. My hotel is waiting. The same room. They are all the same. even when they are different. The same cabbies are lined up in small Toyotas in the curb lane at the airport, smoking cigarettes in their cabs. I always wonder why they don’t get out and smoke. Why they just sit in there.

It is the same hotel I always stay at in Tokyo. Same bed. Same sheets and tiny white soap wrapped in thick gray paper. Same cocktails in the room refrigerator. Same TV and channels. Same Japanese amateur daredevils on TV on balance beams and rope ladders, falling on their faces, or into water until I am tired enough to go to sleep. Same Japanese restaurants at the hotel. Same waiters and waitresses and cooks who look out the corner of their eyes at you from a kitchen window as you wait to be seated. When I get drunk, I will start calling everyone Kobashi in an affectionate way, the way some people back home call others champ or buddy because Kenta Kobashi is my favorite wrestler. No one in America knows who the hell he is. It is only when I get drunk in Japanese bars that I can rave about my hero and his sundry moves that set him apart from all other wrestlers, including Tiger Mask II, or Misawi. I never met him, but I wish I could have. Too late now.

There is a black box in the cockpit or somewhere that is being filled with words. The last words of the pilot. His communication with air traffic control, or airline executives, is being recorded to help figure out why this is happening and to hopefully successfully make a case against the plane’s manufacturer and to absolve the airline of any wrongdoing and any culpability in a surely forthcoming class-action lawsuit. Hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line. It is the kind of thing that can bankrupt an airline and make any executive lose his house in Lake Tahoe.

Of all the words the pilot ever said, these are the words they will play in court over and over. Of all his I love yous, and hellos, and goodbyes, and the beautiful things he ever said to anyone about anything, he goes out speaking grim pilot jargon and answering technical questions which he knows why they are asking him. To save their asses because it is about them and the company. I bet he talked about cataclysmic engine failure, loss of cabin pressure, emergency landings, dumping fuel to reduce the risk of explosion upon impact, and his, rather, our coordinates. The longitude and latitude of us. He probably will not say anything to his wife and kids, but maybe I’m all wrong. Maybe he is saying everything he forgot or didn’t have time to tell them.

I think of the song “Major Tom.” I name the pilot Tom, though I never met him. Tell my wife I love her very much. She knows. Ground control to Major Tom, your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong. Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? I start to sing it until I see the stewardess and I ask her again about my drink. Mr. Ginger Turkey, she probably calls me to the other stewardesses. For godssake, I say. My goddamn drink. Please. She has the audacity to tell me to stay calm and I think about using one of Kobashi’s moves on her. A dragon suplex. The Burning Hammer. The Moonsault. The Brainbuster. The Black Crush. Or my favorite, The Kobashi DDT. Any one of them would learn her to refuse a man his drink. She glares at me. Now that everyone is sitting down, she has no excuse besides airline policy and I say to hell with it and to hell with her.

The plane loses altitude and there is a chorus of screams. He dumped the fuel. We are now just a few hundred feet above sea level and it seems as though the plane could tilt its wing and skim the ocean like a mother does a child’s bathwater to see if it is too hot or cold. And then I think how a plane carried an atomic bomb named Little Boy over Nagasaki and dropped it on women and children. And how years later, teachers would be telling confused children it was a good thing they did. It makes me incredibly sad. They desensitized me at a young age and I wonder if I ever had a chance. It’s part of the program. The sociology of education.

I wish again, for some reason, to see the American Midwest, knowing I will never get the chance. Those boring flights from CMH to LAX, or LAX to CMH, and that patchwork quilt of browns and greens spread across the bed of Earth for an eternity it seems when you’re above them. They never seem to move for hours, then suddenly they are gobbled up by the Rockies. It’s been a long time since I saw or thought of them. Or of the dirt roads and the wire-and-post fences. Of wheat and corn and combines and cattle and county fairs. 

For some reason, it would be more comforting to me if we went down there, and maybe the small town nearest the place we all died would have a fish fry, or a bingo tournament, to pay for a small monument that might sit in the middle of the cornfield where we all were scattered and scorched into the soil. And there on that monument would be the baby’s name, the stewardesses’ names, Major Tom’s name, and my name, hopefully, somewhere near the bottom. And maybe someone, sometime, would bother to read it. To come see it. To look around the cornfield and imagine something grand, like I had become the Earth.

They don’t put markers in the Pacific, and likely not even the sharks will care much for what little of me is left in a gas and debris-filled pocket of dark-blue lifeless sea. But some smaller fish will nibble my corpse and I will become them and they will become the sharks. And I think how odd it is that I wanted to be anonymous in life, but remembered in death. And I wonder if I really know myself at all. I am happy for the old couple behind me who are holding hands and praying to God for not themselves, but for their grandchildren. It isn’t everyone who gets to go out that way. Or to simply go out of this life content, happy and in love.

The pilot comes on the overhead and says prepare for the emergency landing and the stewardess, who reminded me earlier they have been called “flight attendants” since around 1985 by some official decree, pushes forward a service cart and stops at my seat. She has lost her mind, apparently, because other stewardesses follow her and implore her to go back and strap in. But she has four little bottles of Wild Turkey, two cans of Seagram’s ginger-ale, and four cups of ice with red sword stirs poking up out of them. And as they try to reason with her, she calmly opens the first can of ginger-ale and pours half a cup and then opens the bourbon and fills the rest. She gives it a good stir. Her eyes are wide-open and she smiles as she gives me the drink. I thank her and hand her a nice tip, but she says airline policy forbids her from accepting tips so I put it back in my pocket. She laughs. Deranged.

She leaves the cart there and is pulled back to the front of the cabin to strap herself in as the plane begins to gyrate and howl. I snatch the other three bottles of Turkey and put them in my suitcoat pockets just as the plane plunges and the cart rolls away on its own as though to chase after her. The mother screams and the baby cries and I can’t hear anyone else because the noise gets so deafening it is almost completely silent. The plane engine roars and hisses and the water seems to rise as the engine spits more violent flames to my left.


Then there is no sound. Everything is still and I think of those ribbons of smoke that have become streaming banners and they take me back. I help my wife lace up the back of her black dress. She is wearing black stockings and shoes. Her hair is curled and from the curls fall those black ribbons and I stare at them as she waits for me to finish lacing up her dress. She turns and smiles at me and her eyes are like the ice in the bourbon when there is more bourbon than there is ginger-ale. A short time later, we sit at the funeral and she reaches over and holds my hand and I don’t know how many years ago that was, but it is all I have left. And I say goodbye to her again, though I never really said it before.

The plane lands in Tokyo. I am sick, my legs are weak, and I am drenched in sweat. The stewardess grins at me as I leave the plane. It is a loathsome grin. One that is rife with sarcasm and indignity. I don’t know if I dreamt what I frantically wrote, or if I am dead and the airport is some sort of afterlife. God plays cruel jokes, I know well. I imagine what it must have been like for the people who survived Nagasaki to read about what the Americans had named the bombs that melted their grandparents and grandchildren to the earth. That destroyed everything they knew. I pass the pilot and he smiles as though nothing happened at all and tells me to enjoy Tokyo and to fly with them again soon. His name tag reads Tom. Of all the names under the sun. His is Tom.

The airport is as I remember it. The cabbies are having their smokes in their small Toyotas in the curb lane and waiting for tourists to spill out the way fishermen wait for nets to fill with fish. I stop and look over at the bar where I usually have a drink before I get a cab and there stands Kenta Kobashi, my hero, with only a few people around him. He is wearing black sunglasses, a black suitcoat and jeans. I want to ask him for his autograph and a picture and if I can buy him a drink, but I don’t. I just look at him the way I look at the baggage carousel. Then I puke in the airport bathroom and wash my face and neck in the sink and collect my scattered thoughts in the mirror the way they might have collected our scattered parts in the ocean. I walk out and hop in a cab that stinks of cigarettes and go to the hotel where I shower and sit at the side of my bed with the phone in my hands thinking if I should call her and tell her about my flight. I wonder if she still wears black ribbons and how she knew me so well to send me a journal.

There are three bottles of Wild Turkey in my suitcoat pocket which I put on the nightstand along with the phone I don't use. There is more ginger-ale and Wild Turkey in the little refrigerator and I make myself a few drinks and drink until the emotions of the flight wash away and I feel tired. Then I lay down and Kobashi does dragon suplexes on the ceiling until I fall asleep.