Flight or Fright Read online

  Her mother gives Gregg and Veronica a tight smile, and pats her daughter’s arm. “Don’t disturb the other passengers, dear.”

  “She’s not disturbing me,” Gregg says. “I don’t know, kid. But a lot of them live on farms, scattered across the countryside. There’s only the one big city I think. Whatever happens, I’m sure most of them will be okay.”

  The girl sits back and considers this, then twists in her seat to whisper to her mother. Her mother squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head. Veronica wonders if she even knows she is still patting her daughter’s arm.

  “I have a girl about her age,” Gregg says.

  “I have a girl about your age,” Veronica tells him. “She’s my favorite thing in the world.”

  “Yep. Me too. My daughter, I mean, not yours. I’m sure yours is great as well.”

  “Are you headed home to her?”

  “Yes. My wife called to ask if I would cut a business trip short. My wife is in love with a man she met on Facebook and she wants me to come take care of the kid so she can drive up to Toronto to meet him.”

  “Oh my God. You’re not serious. Did you have any warning?”

  “I thought she was spending too much time online, but to be fair, she thought I was spending too much time being drunk. I guess I’m an alcoholic. I guess I might have to do something about that now. I think I’ll start by finishing this.” And he swallows the last of his Scotch.

  Veronica has been divorced—twice—and has always been keenly aware that she herself was the primary agent of domestic ruin. When she thinks about how badly she behaved, how badly she used Robert and François, she feels ashamed and angry at herself, and so she is naturally glad to offer sympathy and solidarity to the wronged man beside her. Any opportunity to atone, no matter how small.

  “I’m so sorry. What a terrible bomb to have dropped on you.”

  “What did you say?” asks the girl across the aisle, leaning toward them again. The deep brown eyes behind those glasses never seem to blink. “Are we going to drop a nuclear bomb on them?”

  She sounds more curious than afraid, but at this, her mother exhales a sharp, panicked breath.

  Gregg leans toward the child again, smiling in a way that is both kindly and wry, and Veronica suddenly wishes she were twenty years younger. She might’ve been good for a fellow like him. “I don’t know what the military options are, so I couldn’t say for sure. But—”

  Before he can finish the cabin fills with a nerve-shredding sonic howl.

  An airplane slashes past, then two more flying in tandem. One is so near off the port wing that Veronica catches a glimpse of the man in the cockpit, helmeted, face cupped in some kind of breathing apparatus. These aircraft bear scant resemblance to the 777 carrying them east … these are immense iron falcons, the gray hue of bullet-tips, of lead. The force of their passing causes the whole airliner to shudder. Passengers scream, grab each other. The punishing sound of the bombers crossing their path can be felt intestinally, in the bowels. Then they’re gone, having raked long contrails across the bright blue.

  A shocked, shaken silence follows.

  Veronica D’Arcy looks at Gregg Holder and sees he has smashed his plastic cup, made a fist and broken it into flinders. He notices what he’s done at the same time and laughs and puts the wreckage on the armrest.

  Then he turns back to the little girl and finishes his sentence as if there had been no interruption. “But I’d say all signs point to ‘yes.’”

  JENNY SLATE IN COACH

  “B-1S,” her love says to her, in a relaxed, almost pleased tone of voice. “Lancers. They used to carry a fully nuclear payload, but black Jesus did away with them. There’s still enough firepower onboard to cook every dog in Pyongyang. Which is funny, because usually if you want cooked dog in North Korea, you have to make reservations.”

  “They should’ve risen up,” Jenny says. “Why didn’t they rise up when they had a chance? Did they want work camps? Did they want to starve?”

  “That’s the difference between the Western mindset and the Oriental world view,” Bobby says. “There, individualism is viewed as aberrant.” In a murmur, he adds, “There’s a certain ant-colony quality to their thinking.”

  “Excuse me,” says the Jew in the middle aisle, sitting next to the Oriental girl. He couldn’t be any more Jewish if he had the beard and his hair in ringlets and the prayer shawl over his shoulders. “Could you lower your voice, please? My seatmate is upset.”

  Bobby had lowered his voice, but even when he’s trying to be quiet, he has a tendency to boom. This wouldn’t be the first time it’s got them in trouble.

  Bobby says, “She shouldn’t be. Come tomorrow morning, South Korea will finally be able to stop worrying about the psychopaths on the other side of the DMZ. Families will be reunited. Well. Some families. Cookie Cutter bombs don’t discriminate between military and civilian populations.”

  Bobby speaks with the casual certainty of a man who has spent twenty years producing news segments for a broadcasting company that owns something like seventy local TV stations and specializes in distributing content free of mainstream media bias. He’s been to Iraq, to Afghanistan. He went to Liberia during the Ebola outbreak to do a piece investigating an ISIS plot to weaponize the virus. Nothing scares Bobby. Nothing rattles him.

  Jenny was an unwed pregnant mother who had been cast out by her parents, and sleeping in the supply room of a gas station between shifts, on the day Bobby bought her an Extra Value Meal and told her he didn’t care who the father was. He said he would love the baby as much as if it were his own. Jenny had already scheduled the abortion. Bobby told her, calmly, quietly, that if she came with him, he would give her and the child a good, happy life, but if she drove to the clinic, she would murder a child, and lose her own soul. She had gone with him and it had been just as he said, all of it. He had loved her well, had adored her from the first; he was her miracle. She did not need the loaves and fishes to believe. Bobby was enough. Jenny fantasized, sometimes, that a liberal—a Code Pinker, maybe, or one of the Bernie people—would try to assassinate him, and she would manage to step between Bobby and the gun to take the bullet herself. She had always wanted to die for him. To kiss him with the taste of her own blood in her mouth.

  “I wish we had phones,” the pretty Oriental girl says suddenly. “Some of these planes have phones. I wish there was a way to call—someone. How long before the bombers get there?”

  “Even if we could make calls from this aircraft,” Bobby says, “it would be hard to get a call through. One of the first things the U.S. will do is wipe out communications in the region, and they might not limit themselves to just the DPRK. They won’t want to risk agents in the South—a sleeper government—coordinating a counterstrike. Plus, everyone with family in the Korean peninsula will be calling right now. It would be like trying to call Manhattan on 9/11, only this time it’s their turn.”

  “Their turn?” says the Jew. “Their turn? I must’ve missed the report that said North Korea was responsible for bringing down the World Trade Towers. I thought that was al-Qaeda.”

  “North Korea sold them weapons and intel for years,” Bobby lets him know. “It’s all connected. North Korea has been the number one exporter of Destroy America Fever for decades.”

  Jenny butts her shoulder against Bobby and says, “Or they used to be. I think they’ve been replaced by the Black Lives Matter people.” She is actually repeating something Bobby said to friends only a few nights before. She thought it was a witty line and she knows he likes hearing his own best material repeated back to him.

  “Wow. Wow!” says the Jew. “That’s the most racist thing I’ve ever heard in real life. If millions of people are about to die, it’s because millions of people like you put unqualified, hate-filled morons in charge of our government.”

  The girl closes her eyes and sits back in her chair.

  “My wife is what kind of people?” Bobby asks, lifting one eyebrow.<
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  “Bobby,” Jenny cautions him. “I’m fine. I’m not bothered.”

  “I didn’t ask if you were bothered. I asked this gentleman what kind of people he thinks he’s talking about.”

  The Jew has hectic red blotches in his cheek. “People who are cruel, smug—and ignorant.”

  He turns away, trembling.

  Bobby kisses his wife’s temple and then unbuckles his seatbelt.

  MARK VORSTENBOSCH IN THE COCKPIT

  VORSTENBOSCH is ten minutes calming people down in coach and another five wiping beer off Arnold Fidelman’s head and helping him change his sweater. He tells Fidelman and Robert Slate that if he sees either of them out of their seats again before they land, they will both be arrested in the airport. The man Slate accepts this placidly, tightening his seat belt and placing his hands in his lap, staring serenely forward. Fidelman looks like he wants to protest. Fidelman is shaking helplessly and his color is bad and he calms down only when Vorstenbosch tucks a blanket in around his legs. As he’s leaning toward Fidelman’s seat, Vorstenbosch whispers that when the plane lands, they’ll make a report together, and that Slate will be written up for verbal and physical assault. Fidelman gives him a glance of surprise and appreciation, one gay to another, looking out for each other in a world full of Robert Slates.

  The senior flight attendant himself feels nauseated and steps into the head long enough to steady himself. The cabin smells of vomit and fear, fore and aft. Children weep inconsolably. Vorstenbosch has seen two women praying.

  He touches his hair, washes his hands, draws one deep breath after another. Vorstenbosch’s role model has always been the Anthony Hopkins character from The Remains of the Day, a film he has never seen as a tragedy, but rather as an encomium to a life of disciplined service. Vorstenbosch sometimes wishes he was British. He recognized Veronica D’Arcy in business right away, but his professionalism requires him to resist acknowledging her celebrity in any overt way.

  When he has composed himself, he exits the head, and begins making his way to the cockpit to tell Captain Waters they will require airport security upon landing. He pauses in business to tend to a woman who is hyperventilating. When Vorstenbosch takes her hand, he is reminded of the last time he held his grandmother’s hand; at the time she was in her coffin, and her fingers were just as cold and lifeless. Vorstenbosch feels a quavering indignation when he thinks about the bombers—those idiotic hot dogs—blasting by so close to the plane. The lack of simple human consideration sickens him. He practices deep breathing with the woman, assures her they’ll be on the ground soon.

  The cockpit is filled with sunshine and calm. He isn’t surprised. Everything about the work is designed to make even a crisis—and this is a crisis, albeit one they never practiced in the flight simulators—a matter of routine, of checklists and proper procedure.

  The first officer is a scamp of a girl who brought a brown-bag lunch onto the plane with her. When her left sleeve was hiked up, Vorstenbosch glimpsed part of a tattoo, a white lion, just above the wrist. He looks at her and sees in her past a trailer park, a brother hooked on opioids, divorced parents, a first job in Walmart, a desperate escape to the military. He likes her immensely—how can he not? His own childhood was much the same, only instead of escaping to the army, he went to New York to be queer. When she let him into the cockpit last time she was trying to hide tears, a fact that twists Vorstenbosch’s heart. Nothing distresses him quite like the distress of others.

  “What’s happening?” Vorstenbosch asks.

  “On the ground in ten,” says Bronson.

  “Maybe,” Waters says. “They’ve got half a dozen planes stacked up ahead of us.”

  “Any word from the other side of the world?” Vorstenbosch wants to know.

  For a moment neither replies. Then, in a stilted, distracted voice, Waters says, “The U.S. Geological Survey reports a seismic event in Guam that registered about six-point-three on the Richter Scale.”

  “That would correspond to two hundred and fifty kilotons,” Bronson says.

  “It was a warhead,” Vorstenbosch says. It’s not quite a question.

  “Something happened in Pyongyang, too,” Bronson says. “An hour before Guam, state television switched over to color bars. There’s intelligence about a whole bunch of high-ranking officials being killed within minutes of one another. So we’re either talking a palace coup or we tried to bring down the leadership with some surgical assassinations and they didn’t take it too well.”

  “What can we do for you, Vorstenbosch?” says Waters.

  “There was a fight in coach. One man poured beer on another—”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Waters says.

  “—they’ve been warned, but we might want Fargo Pee Dee on hand when we put down. I believe the victim is going to want to file charges.”

  “I’ll radio Fargo, but no promises. I get the feeling the airport is going to be a madhouse. Security might have their hands full.”

  “There’s also a woman in business having a panic attack. She’s trying not to scare her daughter, but she’s having trouble breathing. I have her huffing into an air sickness bag. But I’d like emergency services to meet her with an oxygen tank when we get down.”

  “Done. Anything else?”

  “There are a dozen other mini crises unfolding, but the team has it in hand. There is one other thing, I suppose. Would either of you like a glass of beer or wine in violation of all regulations?”

  They glance back at him. Bronson grins.

  “I want to have your baby, Vorstenbosch,” she says. “We would make a lovely child.”

  Waters says, “Ditto.”

  “That’s a yes?”

  Waters and Bronson look at each other.

  “Better not,” Bronson decides and Waters nods.

  Then the captain adds, “But I’ll have the coldest Dos Equis you can find as soon as we’re parked.”

  “You know what my favorite thing about flying is?” Bronson asks. “It’s always a sunny day up this high. It seems impossible anything so awful could be happening on such a sunny day.”

  They are all admiring the cloudscape when the white and fluffy floor beneath them is lanced through a hundred times. A hundred pillars of white smoke thrust themselves into the sky, rising from all around. It’s like a magic trick, as if the clouds had hidden quills that have suddenly erupted up and out. A moment later the thunderclap hits them and with it turbulence, and the plane is kicked, knocked up and to one side. A dozen red lights stammer on the dash. Alarms shriek. Vorstenbosch sees it all in an instant as he is lifted off his feet. For a moment, Vorstenbosch floats, suspended like a parachute, a man made of silk, filled with air. His head clubs the wall. He drops so hard and fast, it’s as if a trapdoor has opened in the floor of the cockpit and plunged him into the bright fathoms of the sky beneath.

  JANICE MUMFORD IN BUSINESS

  “MOM!” Janice shouts. “Mom, lookat! What’s that?”

  What’s happening in the sky is less alarming than what’s happening in the cabin. Someone is screaming: a bright silver thread of sound that stitches itself right through Janice’s head. Adults groan in a way that makes Janice think of ghosts.

  The 777 tilts to the left, and then rocks suddenly hard to the right. The plane sails through a labyrinth of gargantuan pillars, the cloisters of some impossibly huge cathedral. Janice had to spell CLOISTERS (an easy one) in the Englewood Regional.

  Her mother, Millie, doesn’t reply. She’s breathing steadily into a white paper bag. Millie has never flown before, has never been out of California. Neither has Janice, but unlike her mother, she was looking forward to both. Janice has always wanted to go up in a big airplane; she’d also like to dive in a submarine someday, although she’d settle for a ride in a glass-bottomed kayak.

  The orchestra of despair and horror sinks away to a soft diminuendo (Janice spelled DIMINUENDO in the first round of the State Finals and came thi-i-i-i-is close to blowing i
t and absorbing a humiliating early defeat). Janice leans toward the nice-looking man who has been drinking iced tea the whole trip.

  “Were those rockets?” Janice asks.

  The woman from the movies replies, speaking in her adorable British accent. Janice has only ever heard British accents in films and she loves them.

  “ICBMs,” says the movie star. “They’re on their way to the other side of the world.”

  Janice notices the movie star is holding hands with the much younger man who drank all the iced tea. Her features are set in an expression of almost icy calm. The man beside her, on the other hand, looks like he wants to throw up. He’s squeezing the older woman’s hand so hard his knuckles are white.

  “Are you two related?” Janice asks. She can’t think why else they might be holding hands.

  “No,” says the nice-looking man.

  “Then why are you holding hands?”

  “Because we’re scared,” says the movie star, although she doesn’t look scared. “And it makes us feel better.”

  “Oh,” Janice says, and then quickly takes her mother’s free hand. Her mother looks at her gratefully over the bag that keeps inflating and deflating like a paper lung. Janice glances back at the nice-looking man. “Would you like to hold my hand?”

  “Yes please,” the man says, and they take each other’s hand across the aisle.

  “What’s I-C-B-M stand for?”

  “InterContinental Ballistic Missile,” the man says.

  “That’s one of my words! I had to spell ‘intercontinental’ in the regional.”

  “For real? I don’t think I can spell ‘intercontinental’ off the top of my head.”

  “Oh it’s easy,” Janice says, and proves it by spelling it for him.

  “I’ll take your word for it. You’re the expert.”

  “I’m going to Boston for a spelling bee. It’s International Semi-Finals, and if I do well there, I get to go to Washington, D.C., and be on television. I didn’t think I’d ever go to either of those places. But then I didn’t think I’d ever go to Fargo, either. Are we still landing at Fargo?”