The Best American Essays 2011 Read online

  Tactically scattered at the end of the runway were suitcases, a car seat, and a teddy bear. Some of the suitcases were closed, but had sticking out from their zippers and pockets a sock or a shirtsleeve. To an outsider this gave the impression of a hastily done packing job. One of the suitcases hit the ground near the girl. When it did something popped and sirens came alive. I couldn’t see the flames, but when the girl looked up, her irises blazed and I heard a whoosh. In the distance the air traffic control tower loomed over a bright green field and some taxiing regional jets. A warm southwesterly breeze blew the smoke our direction. With the back of my hand I covered my mouth.

  “Couldn’t have picked a better day for—” started a fireman. His sentence was blotted out by the screams of a nearby woman. “I’ve got burns over eighty percent of my body and I’ve been waiting fifteen minutes for an ambulance!”

  “Ma’am—” began the fireman.

  “I guess I’m just not burned enough,” shouted the woman. Someone laughed and someone else said, “Relax. The man seated next to me had a heart attack and it took them forty-five minutes to get to him.”

  “He should have been dead,” murmured the girl.

  Something exploded.

  The girl began to rock herself.

  Seconds later a woman was seen running. “My baby! My baby!” she yelled. “Help me find my baby!”

  The morning breeze blew loose hair across my cheek and settled it into one of the cuts. A woman wearing a blue uniform walked over and knelt down beside me. “What’s your name?” she asked, taking two fingers to my wrist.

  “Bernadette,” I told her.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “You’ve got significant trauma to the bridge of your nose, Bernadette. I’m concerned that if these bones are fractured they may cause the brain to connect with the outside environment. Where does it hurt?”

  “I can’t see out of my eyes,” I told her.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Flamingos. Six of them, in the marsh along the runway.”

  “Flamingos?” She slid a green tag onto my wrist.

  “Yes. Pink ones.”

  She wrote something down, stood up, and gestured toward the fire. “We’ve got a confused head injury, right over here.”

  As we ascended over the Mediterranean on a routine flight to Paris, the engine over which I was seated exploded. It was a systematic and orderly blow. It did not build as in a Berlioz cantata or culminate from a collection of small, meaningless gestures—a whistle, a hiss, a persistent rattle—in a cacophony of tearing metal, snapping cables, and shattering glass. It was a noise so full and palpable, so concise and final, that whatever followed I hoped would follow swiftly.

  The source of the explosion was not immediately discernible to all passengers—it seemed to come from the back of the airplane, yet it had an all-encompassing quality leaving those seated forward or aft craning their necks like hungry birds. Not far from where I rested my head against the window of an over-wing seat, a smoke-choked engine burned. The flames, refracting through the window, illuminated my reflection. We were in a sharp right bank and I looked down, astonished to see the deep green of the Mediterranean against the fire and smoke.

  My first reaction was not one of tragic realization—I did not bury my face in my hands or scream or yell or weep. In other circumstances I might have found comic the heady response with which the universe had answered my persistent and recurring dreams, but this felt like a cruel cosmic joke, like Hamlet laughing along with the gravediggers. Holy Mother Fuck! I said aloud. You’ve got to be kidding me. The lights went out. The plane shuddered and yawed. The woman across the aisle began to cry.

  A disquieting silence I interpreted as a French response to crisis followed. No announcements were made, no instructions given. I slid the shade down over the window and stared ahead. The tray table in front of me, the seatback cover, and the armrests all took on the dreadful significance objects acquire in bad dreams. I began to pray aloud. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. It was not so much a prayer as an uninflected mantra modulated by my strained breathing. Blessed art thou among women.

  “Are you all right?” the man seated next to me asked in a French accent. He patted my clenched hand. “We’ve just lost an engine,” he assured.

  But lost was too passive, too quiet a word. People lost dogs or lost family to cancer, when in actuality cars ran over dogs and cancer metastasized. What I felt and what I witnessed prior to this loss of engine power was an explosion: an earsplitting bang, accompanied by a forceful jerk of the airplane and the sudden and lurid and unrelenting spewing of fire and sparks and smoke.

  “I am a pilot,” the Frenchman said. “The airplane can fly on one engine. But not for very long.”

  My memories of crashing planes date as far back as I can remember. As a five-year-old I saw on the news a photograph of an American Airlines DC-10 taken by an amateur photographer seconds after it took off and seconds before it rolled over. The plane hung perpendicular to the ground, a thin white stream of leaked hydraulic fuel trailing from the place where the engine had severed. The news described the photographer as “stunned” and “shaking.” The photographer described the plane as “slow-moving” and “horrifying.” At seven, I watched coverage of an Air Florida DC-9 after it crashed into the 14th Street Bridge during a blizzard. Passengers, bobbing around the Potomac River, clung to chunks of ice as a helicopter tried and failed to toss them life preservers. At fifteen, live coverage of the United DC-10 crash in Sioux City, Iowa, aired on TV. Midflight, on its way to Chicago from Denver, the plane experienced catastrophic hydraulic failure rendering it unable to steady itself, make left turns, or slow down. The wingtip hit first, leaving a three-foot gouge in the runway. It cartwheeled. Broke into four pieces. Survivors who, from their hospital beds, saw the crash on the news asked, “What crash was that?” and “Were there any survivors?”

  When my sister called to tell me she heard something on the radio “about that crash in Iowa you always talk about,” I took down the information. They were interviewing Jerry Schemmel, “the voice of the Denver Nuggets,” who went back into the burning plane to save a baby whose cries he heard from the cornfield. I ordered a used copy of his book Chosen to Live. Aside from the title’s unsettling suggestion that those who perished had been so chosen, I stopped reading after Schemmel prosaically describes the feeling of the crash as “exactly how you’d expect it to feel if you’d dropped thousands of feet out of the sky and hit the ground.”

  Schemmel’s account of the moments between the failure of the number-two engine on the tail of the plane and the crash landing in an Iowa cornfield is vivid as far as it goes. What’s more interesting is the exchange he has with a crying woman and her seven-year-old son seated in front of him in row 22. Compelled to soothe the two after he overhears the child ask his mother if they are going to die, he lies and tells them that he is a pilot, and assures them that they are not going to die: planes are made to fly normally when an engine fails.

  My fear of flying was not so much informed by memories of crashing planes as it was characterized by a priori knowledge of a crash. Loosely translated, I feared receiving a sign, a peremptory warning that an airplane might at any moment send me a crazy vibe before hurling itself from the sky. The fear was accompanied by a lesser, secondary fear, that upon receipt of the sign, I might take the wrong course of action. Earlier in my life, I had become so anxious after booking a flight to Chicago that I swallowed a roommate’s prescription sleeping pills on the way to the airport. The pills induced a paranoid delusion involving New Age prophet Edgar Cayce and an elevator. Edgar Cayce could read auras, a gift I discovered we had in common when I began working at a psychic fair in my late teens. For five dollars customers could stand in front of a white backdrop while I outlined in Crayola marker the colors emanating from their crown chakras. A green aura meant healing; a yellow, intellige
nce; pink, love. There were vibrant auras, indicating health and vitality, and lackluster auras, indicating the soul’s withdrawal from the body. One day while shopping for sweaters Edgar Cayce stepped into a department store elevator. It was brightly lit and full of shoppers, yet it felt “dark,” a feeling he ascribed to catastrophe and impending doom. When he could not see the auras of the other occupants, he quickly stepped out. The doors closed, the cables snapped, the elevator fell to the basement, killing everyone aboard.

  If I could not see the auras of the other passengers, I would get off the airplane. But the effects of the sleeping pills had grown more intense, heightening my paranoia. The closer I got to the gate, the more I feared misreading luggage for auras and vice versa. As I walked down the jetway, I decided that unless either of my recently deceased grandparents appeared on the flight, I would stay on the airplane. From then on, I avoided certain flight numbers, flying on certain dates, during inauspicious astrological aspects such as squares and oppositions, as well as on the days leading up to the peaks of these aspects, which, as it turned out, were also terrible for bill-paying and dental treatments.

  The Rockwell Collins hangar looks like the set of a zombie movie. Inside, children dressed in torn T-shirts and old pajama bottoms, their faces and arms smeared with shades of red, gray, and purple paint, chase one another. “We’re dead! We’re dead!” yells a boy covered in gray paint. He points behind me. “See that plastic bag?” I turn to where I think he is pointing and shake my head. “Right there. Can’t you see it? It’s filled with DEAD people!” He laughs maniacally.

  I ask his friend, who is less cheerful and also painted gray, if he too is dead. He nods solemnly, lifting his arm to reveal the tag on his wrist: DOA. “My grandma gets to ride in an ambulance to the hospital and watch TV all day and I have to lay there,” he says. “So unfair.”

  The grandma walks up, covered in fake blood. A blue poker chip juts from her forehead. “What happened to you?” she asks me.

  I hold up my wrist: lacerations.

  Since my teenage years my sleep has been disrupted by crashing planes. So vivid and specific are the dreams in terms of make and model of the airplane that for a while I believed them an augury of a crash to come. “Those are anxiety dreams,” my mom pointed out when I told her about a disturbingly vivid crash in which a Russian airliner carried some uniformed schoolchildren. “You’re worried about teaching,” she said. Over the years I have followed the trajectory of the dreams in a journal and notice that they fall into three categories. In the first kind of dream, I watch from a verdant field as the distressed plane struggles to stay aloft; in the second, I stand in line with other passengers preparing to jump from the falling airplane and devising my strategy for hitting the ground; and in the third, I sit patiently in my seat waiting for the plane to crash, telling myself it will all end soon enough. There are nuances, of course. Often, as I stand in the field, watching the distressed airplane, the engines or the wings fall off. Often the plane takes off too steeply, makes it about fifty feet into the air, stalls, and falls back to earth. Sometimes, when I am on the airplane, I take off my shoes before jumping.

  In my waking life, I understand the impossibility (not to mention the ensuing complications were it possible) of opening a bulkhead door and leaping from a cruising 747. But the dreams do not obey the laws of physics. One feature remains immutable in all of them, and yet it contains the single most frightful aspect of a crashing plane: the unmitigated spinning with which it drops from the sky. Never do they fall the way Alaska Airlines fell from 31,500 feet to 23,000 feet in eighty seconds and then fell again in an inverted nosedive at 18,000 feet for eighty-one seconds off the coast of Ventura, where a passenger seat and tray table had washed up on the beach and I learned to surf.

  The idea of a one-and-three-quarter-inch-thick piece of fiberglass separating me from cold water beneath which thrived a vast and unforgiving ecosystem did not inveigle me. Still, something about the surfers bobbing on the sea, sleek and elegant, shiny and black, had me wondering what sort of Elysian secret propelled them into all that deep water again and again. My board was seven feet one inch long, a cumbersome thing, with the maker’s name, Total Commitment, written across it. I liked taking my Total Commitment out late in the morning or early in the afternoon when the sun was bright and the white water came in full and frothy. Waves are best in the early morning and evening, but at midday the white water was beautiful: it gathered around my knees like big tufts of tulle from a ballerina’s skirt. Once I got my board beyond the break it took a great deal of effort—my duck dives were not efficient. I could not push the nose of my board far enough beneath the wave without it dislodging me several yards closer to shore. I stretched out belly down, exhausted, hung my hand over the top, and let the water lap over it in neat little swirls.

  More often I found myself floating around at dusk, staring at the line on the horizon where the water meets the sky. I was content to float and had even begun to enjoy the firmament reflected in the water around me. The saltwater had the same effect as that of cold, clear air passing across a glacier on Mount Rainier and the hot, sagey smell of the Mojave Desert and the rustling of corn on a Midwest highway. But floating was not typical surfing behavior. It caused other surfers to paddle over, suggesting I slide my body a little further up or reach my arms like this or kick my feet while reaching my arms like this. These are helpful suggestions when you are trying to paddle beyond the surf. But if you are trying to get back to shore, as I was when I finished floating, you must negotiate the crashing waves around you. And so, quite unintentionally, I caught my first wave. A tug and a pull nudged me from behind and in one smooth motion I was dropped into and carried down the face. It happened so fast that by the time I thought to pop up onto my feet, the g-force was too strong. I sped along, my stomach soldered to the board, the shore out of the corner of my eye approaching at an angle.

  Anyone who has caught a wave knows that once you catch your first and ride it to shore, you will—as long as you are near water and there are waves—seek another and another after that. But knowing which waves to paddle for and which to let pass is not instinctual; my timing was off. I was too far in front of the wave: the nose of my board pitched forward and up. When the wave began to break, the nose pitched down. As frequently as this happened, I was never prepared for the plunge followed by the violence with which the wave would thrash me and toss me and press me into the ocean floor. But I knew the drill: take in as much air as you can hold, grab the back of your neck with your hands, brace.

  The hangar opens to a road designated for emergency vehicle transport only. Members of the county medical community, the Transportation Safety Association, search and rescue, firefighters, and police officers eat doughnuts with reporters whose cameras sit on tripods and chat with members of local news stations who are testing mikes. The children linger on the precipice, making faces at the cameras and daring one another to step outside of the hangar. The morning is beautiful and dew-filled, with clear skies and a warm breeze. In the distance an air traffic control tower looms over a bright green field and some taxiing regional jets. “Couldn’t have picked a better day for a crash,” says a fireman. Soon all the participants, nearly one hundred volunteers—all victims—have gathered at the opening—crossed arms, shifting—while those whose various suppurations are punctured by poker chips and oozing Vaseline and fake blood stand still and supine. The man next to me acknowledges those around him by bending his torso and nodding adroitly like the Tin Man. A fake plastic bone protrudes from his forearm, a red poker chip from his leg. The morning May breeze blows loose hair across my cheek and settles it into one of the cuts. I smile and try not itch where the fake blood has sealed my eyelashes to the upper eyelid, forcing my eye open. We grow quiet. Some of the dead are restless, asking to go home already. The airport transit buses arrive and cheers erupt. We are herded back to the cafeteria tables in the center of the hangar for a debriefing. Attention is called. Sincer
e thanks are given. Special thanks are given. Time taken from our busy schedules is given appreciation. And then the tone of voice changes and instructions are given: It’s very important that you take your individual role seriously. You are actors and we expect, when the time comes, you act your designated part. That means no laughing. If you start laughing the person next you starts laughing and pretty soon everyone is laughing. If you have a real emergency and you need attention, you need to say I have a real emergency; otherwise the medical teams will assume you are playing your designated role. Finally, when the drill is over, please return any shrapnel you have on your person, including the poker chips, the Plexiglas, and the plastic intestines. Thank you.

  I booked my flight from Paris to Los Angeles for the ten-year anniversary of the death of Jerry Garcia. I had notions of arriving in Southern California to various commemorations involving drum circles and calico dresses, and to ensure my August ninth arrival, I booked in haste a flight from the South of France to Paris for the evening of August eighth. The flight had been delayed. I sat in the airport eating black licorice and reading the letters of Abelard and Héloise. When I finally took seat 22F on an over-wing window, I was bored with the patriarchal prerogatives of twelfth-century France and wanted to go home. I closed the book and propped my head against the window. The long starboard wing of the Airbus spread out before me, the engine hummed, and the slats retracted. As we began to ascend I noticed the flamingos.

  A decade earlier, in my daydreams, I played the protagonist in a small southern French village redolent of lavender. Between smoking cigarettes and writing doleful descriptions of old windows and doors in an outside café, I spent my days flirtatiously stirring the foam of a café crème while charming locals named Etienne or Solange chuckled at my broken French and asked in broken English my thoughts on American policymaking. When the sun dropped below the lavender fields, I carried my baguette and fruit in a bicycle basket along with fresh flowers and a bottle of Bordeaux. I imagined myself at night sipping wine and rereading what I had written, smugly telling myself that these descriptions suffused with significance would one day enlighten the curious reader.