Read by Camila Fiori
I was born in a storm, somewhere several miles above the Atlantic Ocean. This was unexpected, to say the least, as my mother was only six months pregnant at the time, but so it was. She went into short, sharp labour in the aeroplane toilet during the in-flight movie (Heaven’s Gate – she didn’t miss much) and by the time the nuts and Bloody Marys were being handed around, I was squealing and squalling tinily in the washbasin.
There were jokey, heartwarming articles in a number of newspapers, and a bit of debate about what nationality I was (it was a KLM flight from Amsterdam to New York, in international airspace), but all I got out of it in the end was dual Dutch-US nationality and a fascination with aeroplanes that led me to train as a pilot. And thanks in part to this, I haven’t set foot on solid ground for the last seven years.
It’s sort of a curse thing.
See, seven years ago, when I was just a captain-in-training on my first long-haul flight to Cape Town, there was a terrible storm over the South Atlantic. The aircraft was shaking, lights flickering, trolleys careening down the aisles, the works. I was only 25 and I didn’t want to die. Well, nobody wants to die at any age, I suppose, but the will to live is considerably stronger when you haven’t had nearly as much sex as you want or know you’re capable of – when the world is your Rubik’s cube and you haven’t got bored of playing with it yet.
I handed over the control column and watched my co-pilot’s nostrils whiten as the plane yawed and pitched. This got me worried. As a long-haul newbie I was well within my rights to be shitting myself in the midst of a sudden electrical storm; but Hanne, who had worked the Asian and African routes for twelve years, was ghost-pale beneath her peach foundation, and fingering her St. Christopher. Only then did I start to panic.
“We’re going to be OK, aren’t we?” I asked. She nodded greyly, but I could see her frosted lips moving in prayer.
“I expect you’ve seen worse than this?” I added, cheerfully. “Hanne?”
Lightning crashed into a wing, and the port engine burst into blinding flames. Various alarms began sounding and half the instrument panel went red.
“Jesus Christ,” said Hanne, blanching even further, and crossing herself. The craft began to list and turn; I could feel the skewed g-forces pushing me out of my chair. I grabbed the control column and wrestled it, my hands slick with sweat, and through my head ran a mantra: Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Jehovah, Beelzebub – just get us out of this alive and I will give you anything.
Needless to say, that’s something I now rather regret.
The passengers and crew have all got to know one another rather well over the ensuing years; well, privacy’s not really an option when you have to spend the rest of your immortal life flying the unfriendly skies as a warning to other planes, dragging the lethal weather behind you like an ominous black comfort blanket. No aircraft that sights us emerges unscathed, although a few struggle back to an airport or landing-strip, to pass on the legend of the ghostly, blazing 747 that rides on a stormcloud, and heralds death and disaster to anyone who sees it.
Relationships form and dissolve and occasional fights break out, and I’m pretty sure that every adult on the flight is now a member of the mile-high club several times over – but what else can we do? We’ve all seen the in-flight movies a hundred times. We ran out of peanuts, microwaveable meals and lemon-scented hand-wipes years ago, but still we drag on our unearthly existence. It appears that, as the living dead aboard a ghost plane, we have no need to eat any more, and no way to die.
Our sole entertainment has become watching others crash, explode and plummet to a longed-for oblivion, lit by the phantom firelight of our eternally burning port engine. People place bets on the manner of these unfortunate passengers’ demise, or take pictures on their mobiles as the falling bodies plunge past the Perspex portholes. From the cockpit, Hanne and I can usually hear the desperate maydays of the crew on our radio, and that entertained us for the first few years, but after a while I switched it off – we can’t talk back to them, and listening to their awful pleas and prayers gets repetitive and depressing after a time. They don’t know how lucky they are: at least they aren’t cruising the skies eternally, with no prospect of ever coming in to land.
And then, one day – the seventh anniversary of the Cape storm, as it happens – as we are surfing a hurricane above Nevada, waiting to intercept a northbound Airbus which has a date with destiny, my radio crackles into life.
“You’re cleared to land, KLM0815, over”
I don’t understand. I bang the mike and stare at Hanne.
“What, over?” I flick the switch to open the comms channels to the cabin. I don’t want anyone on board to miss this.
“You are cleared to land at Las Vegas. McCarran International airport, Runway Three. Shore leave, twenty-four hours, every seven years. If you – or someone you can persuade to replace you – aren’t back in the air this time tomorrow, you die. Make the most of it. Over.”
And the voice cuts out again.
“Who the fuck was that?” gasps Hanne.
“I don’t want to know,” I say, as I start to bring us in to land.
Vegas isn’t a hard place to find all the things we’ve been missing during our seven-year stretch in the air. Booze and drugs are the two main items on most people’s shopping lists, closely followed by sex of the anonymous, expensive variety, CNN, the internet, and a working phoneline. Everybody wants to know what’s happened while they’ve been away; wants to send messages of love and hope and hello and goodbye to their families. Everybody needs to decide, in their waking life of twenty-four hours, after the living death of the last seven years, whether they are going to get back on the plane. Maybe death would be better after all.
What do I do?
Well, I wander. I can hardly believe I’m back on land after so long in the sky – and while everyone else rushes lemming-like to the casinos, the brothels and the phonebooths, I stand still in the towering lobby of the Luxor hotel and watch life blur around me. My parents are dead (in an air-crash, ironically, a few years before I got my pilot’s licence). I’ve got no brothers and sisters, and nobody to miss me. I can do anything I want in this single, precious day. Problem is, I don’t want to do anything, except maybe find myself a bar and a bed and a boy. Preferably someone who’ll stay faithful over the next seven years until I get shore-leave again. Or even better, someone who’ll swap places with me for my next tour. As if that’s going to happen.
This being Vegas, I find everything I want in no time flat, and by midnight, Pacific Standard Time, I’m relaxing in the Mandalay Bay’s
high-roller suite with a gorgeous Texan called Jody and keeping a nervous eye on the ticking clock.
“You know this is just a one-night stand, right?” I tell Jody, as I chop up a few more lines of the grade-A coke my roulette winnings have bought me.
He doesn’t look at me.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Not that I don’t want to … you seem like a nice kid, you know?”
“So why not?”
What the hell.
“I’m kind of cursed. It’s complicated.”
He snorts like I don’t know the half of it.
“You’re cursed.”
I get the sense he doesn’t really believe me, and this makes me annoyed.
“Yes, I’m cursed, I’m fucking cursed, do you want to make something of it? You want proof?”
“That I’d like to see,” he says in his long, sexy Texan drawl.
“Well, tough. You’ll just have to take my word for it. But trust me, it’s pretty shitty.”
“Whatever.”
“What do you mean, whatever? I’m cursed, goddammit! Tomorrow night I’ve got to get back on a phantom 747 and spend the next seven years flying round the world heralding plane crashes! A little sympathy would be nice.”
Jody shrugs.
“You think you’ve got troubles? You’re lucky, man. I’ve got pancreatic cancer and like six weeks to live.”
“Oh,” is all I can say to this.
And then I realise that if Jody wants to live, and I want to get off KLM0815, we can do each other a huge favour.
Twelve hour later I’m standing in the cockpit showing Jody the controls. Quite a few of the passengers and crew seems to have had the same brainwave as me and the seats are now filled with junkies and cancer patients, AIDS victims and transplant-listers and the very, very old: anyone, in fact, for whom seven years on a ghost plane seems like a good alternative to what they’ve got waiting for them down below.
Hanne’s huddled in the co-pilot’s seat, staring blankly at the artificial horizon. I guess she couldn’t find anyone to swap with her – or
maybe she just didn’t try. She always was soft-hearted. When she called her husband he refused to believe it was her; he thought it was some sick prank. Everyone knows 815 vanished seven years ago, he said. We’ve moved on. Her son’s in hospital and her daughter’s getting married next week and she can’t be with either of them. Jody and I try to ignore her.
“Well,” I say, “It’s mostly automatic, plus I’m pretty sure this bird can’t crash whatever happens, but still – good luck man,” and I put out my hand to shake his. But he’s staring in concern at Hanne. We’ve taken on as many supplies as we can and she’s working her way through the vodka miniatures while they still have an effect.
“Is she OK?”
I think of Hanne’s husband and children. I think of my own personal network of one, and then I surprise myself.
“Hanne,” I say, “Go.”
She looks up.
“What?”
“Get out of here. Go on. Find your family. Take my free pass. Jody’ll stay here and so will I. He can replace you instead of me. Ok?”
“But what about you?” she says, hope igniting in her eyes.
“Fuck it, this is all pretty much my fault anyway. Plus, what’ve I got to stay here for? C’mon, scoot. We’re taking off in ten.”
Hanne hugs me hard, shakes Jody’s hand, and wipes her tears away.
“You’ll be OK?” she asks, and I shrug and smile.
As we make our ascent, breaking through the scrappy cloud cover and out into the black desert night, Jody leans over to me. He really is awfully cute. I start to wonder whether the next few years staring at that handsome profile is such a terrible punishment after all.
“Did I hear you say something about this whole ghost plane thing being down to you?” he asks.
“It’s a long story,” I tell him.
“What the hell,” he says, “We’ve got seven years.”
I glance at him and grin. Already he’s looking healthier; the stasis of the curse is starting to work on him. Never grow old, never die – until next shore leave, that is. I flip on the cabin camera. The junkies and terminals in the cheap seats have all gone quiet, staring out of the portholes at the astonishing stars. Our port engine reignites with a soft whump, and we glide on into the dark.
© Christopher Samuels, 2008
Touchdown was read by Camila Fiori at the Liars’ League “Fight & Flight” event on Tuesday 8th April 2008.
Your pulse is suddenly racing, your ears pricked, your breathing much, much faster - it can only mean that your body is alert and ready for... another packed evening at the Wheatsheaf in Central London for April's Liar's League: Fight & Flight.
