Monday, November 13, 2006

Arrival From an Unseen World

It was four in the morning on a cold, clammy November Tuesday when the flying wing sizzled out of the misty, moisture-speckled sky two hundred feet above Lake Michigan.

First there was nothing, then a faint dance of sparkling lines spreading sideways across the air. And then the sleek, gleaming silver wedge of the vast plane, nearly a third of a mile from wingtip to wingtip, knitted itself crackling out of nothingness and emerged full and whole into the chilly predawn air.

Its six powerful turbine engines whined, settling down to sleep. The flat belly of the craft drifted lower, skimming the waves, then hitting with a juddering clap of water and steel. It skipped like a stone across the choppy waters, spinning out of control, smashing a buoy against the massive edge of one wing, and settled with a great splashing surge of water.

As the flying wing began to sink, lights blinked all along its periphery, glowing through the murky water. Bubbles erupted all around the outline of the craft, and it slowly rose again out of the waves, tossed and floated on a ring of inflated gasbags. In accordance with proper emergency procedures, exit hatches on either side of its fore compartments, and all along both wings, unfolded into the water with the choreographed grace of chorus girls, and waited open and expectant.

No one disembarked. Indeed, there was no longer anyone at all aboard.

So the flying wing sat on the surface of the lake, forlorn and lightly jostling, its silver skin dimly reflecting the glowing lights of the Chicago skyline, and waited to be discovered.

Secrets of the Phantom Jetliner

Nora Swift got boatsick.

Nora Swift got carsick, too. Airsick. Bus-sick. Train sick. Anything short of a bicycle, if it moved under its own power, it made Nora Swift feel a queasy burning on the inside of her skull.

So as the small motorboat lurched and sputtered its way across the lake, eastern sky just lighting with the first glimmers of dawn, Nora Swift was too busy wishing she’d brought her Dramamine to appreciate the wonders of first light, or the pinkish glow it cast upon the receding line of proud skyscrapers, or even the silvery swell of the strange craft rapidly approaching over the prow of the boat.

On a normal day, she would have done something with her hair. Now it frizzed uncontrollably in tight black curlicues around her head, and made her hope that she wouldn’t show up in the background on somebody’s TV camera, lest her cell phone start buzzing with her mother’s urgent concerns that she wasn’t taking good care of herself.

On a normal day, she would have worn a pantsuit, a skirt maybe, something nice for work. A shirt with buttons, at least. Pants not made with denim, and definitely not bearing any sort of pizza stains.

Then again, on a normal day, the alarm would have woken her at 6, to whatever was playing on XRT, and she would have gotten dressed and grabbed a cup of coffee and gone in to the office and sat at her desk for a few hours, filling out paperwork. Or, if she was really lucky, looking at photographs of dead people and tiny bits of things that used to be jet planes.

But today, she’d been yanked from the black, buoyant depths of sleep by the shrill clamor of her cell phone, whooping and buzzing itself along the surface of her nightstand. And once Murray, on the other end, had managed to promise her that he wasn’t joking, and once her brain had managed to process what he was saying, she’d lurched out of bed and gone to see the U.F.O. that had splashed down in Lake Michigan.

She was NTSB, one of the low-level staffers in the accident investigation division. This generally meant that she wrote reports, or rewrote other people’s reports, or if she was very lucky, spent hours poring over photographs that only intensified her pure, primal terror of ever setting foot in anything with wings and engines.

This would be the first crash she’d actually seen.

“How are you holding up?” her boss shouted over the roar of the motor. He sat opposite from her in the back of the boat as the cop up from steered them out. Murray Doyle was a nice enough guy, if too damn cheerful too damn early in the morning. He looked the same as he had at her job interview a few years back -- same bald pate, same owlish glasses, same never-ironed button-down shirts.

She still remembered the way he’d leaned across the table at her, smiled, and said, “What the hell are you doing here? Really?”

And she’d sighed, shrugged her shoulders, rejection letters from the maintenance shops of all the major airlines out of O’Hare and Midway blurring past in her memory, and said, “I guess I picked a really bad time to want to fix planes.”

“Hey, Nora!” Murray shouted at her again, snapping his fingers in front of her face. “You’re not going to throw up on me, are you?”

“Depends,” Nora said, staring determinedly at the horizon and thinking calm, cool, stable thoughts. “You mean literally or figuratively?”

“You should be excited!” Murray hollered back. “First crash for you. Crew musta bailed out ‘cause we’re not getting reports of any floaters, or pieces thereof, so hooray for a day without dead people. Tail number matches a United 747 that’s currently on the ground, in one piece, in Pittsburgh. And the damn thing looks like something outta Star Wars.”

“And this is supposed to make me feel less anxious?” Nora said, but she couldn’t keep a smile from quirking at the corners of her mouth.

At last the boat slowed, Nora stomach turning a few loops in gratitude, and coasted to a stop amid the cordon of police boats surrounding the downed craft. It was huge, bigger than a 747 easily, all streamlined and bulletlike. Ruby squinted in the pinkish half-light and read the markings painted on the side.

“Murray,” she said, tugging at his upper arm as he traded pleasantries with the cop at the boat’s wheel. “Murray, look at this.”

PAN-AMERICAN AIRLINES was painted across the length of the fuselage in three-foot letters. Murray drank it all in with his owlish eyes and slowly ran a hand back across his scalp, making Shar-Pei furrows in the shiny skin. “Damn,” he said. “Hell of a way to make a comeback.”

The boat pulled alongside a larger police vessel, where cops in yellow rain slickers stood on deck drinking from Starbucks cups. Murray flashed his badge to the one who trudged over to take a look at them, and the cop nodded in recognition.

“Anyone been on board yet?” Murray asked. The waves slopped against the hulls of the boats with round, friendly sounds.

The cop shook his head no. “We been waiting for you NTSB guys,” he said, in a voice that Nora pegged as South Side Polish, probably somewhere under the Midway flight path. “Procedures. She’s all yours.”

Murray went first, clambering over the wave-slick prow of the boat and leaping, in his Rockport loafers, onto the open silver hatch near the front of the massive jetliner. Nora followed, unsteady, clutching a flashlight, a satchel bag slung around one shoulder. She was grateful for Murray’s offered hand as she made the last step onto the stairway leading up into the plane.

They found themselves in a narrow, carpeted corridor, pleasantly marbled plastic walls on either side, still smelling of pristine, processed, pressurized air. Murray nodded toward the front of the craft. “I’m gonna check out the cockpit. You get the lay of the land, see if there’s anyone still on board, okay?”

Nora nodded and switched on the flash, playing the beam up and down the walls. “Watch out for E.T.!” Murray called as he headed off into the grayish gloom.

“Not funny!” she shouted back, but he’d already rounded a corner. She took a deep breath, feeling the whole plane gently undulate beneath her feet, and started walking forward.

The corridor opened up into a passenger section as wide as a small auditorium, and half as long as a good-sized football field. Nora counted six rows of three seats apiece spanning the width of the cabin horizontally, and at least forty rows stretching back. Dawn light filtered in in shafts through the windows. Oxygen masks dangled from the overhead compartments -- strange, artful flowers of plastic, some new design Ruby had never seen -- but the seats were all empty.

But the seatbelts, nearly every one, were fastened.

The plane lurched on a sudden wave, and Nora stumbled sideways, hand falling against an overhead luggage compartment to steady herself. She reached up and hit the latch -- then jumped backward with a yelp as the door vanished up into the plane itself, leaving only a nub of a switch peeking out to close it again. Nora had read the technical manuals for damn near every commercial plane in the air, and there was nothing like this in any of them.

It was, she thought idly, the way she’d always thought they ought to work.

There was luggage in the compartments, neat little carry-on bags; but elegant somehow. Trimmed in leather or alligator skin, monogrammed in swooping initials, handles made of wood and mother-of-pearl instead of cheap plastic. She hit the switch again, and the door reappeared and slid shut -- slowly this time, as if out of regard for any fingers that might be in the way.

Nora spotted an in-flight magazine tucked into one of the seatbacks, and bent down to fish it out. The masthead read PAN AM EXPEDITION in bold, stylish letters, and the cover made Nora do a double-take. It showed grinning tourists strolling the beaches of a lush, tropical island in the shadows of vast blimps, row upon row of them, moored into the sand.

NEW ATLANTIS BY ZEPPELIN: 7 DAYS IN PARADISE, the teaser copy read. Nora had to squint to see the dateline, and had to squint again to make sure she’d seen it right. She was about to flip through it some more, when her eyes landed on something else -- a newspaper, left on the window seat, folded in fourths to some inside page.

She stuffed the magazine hastily in her satchel bag, next to the pocket pack of tissues and her cell phone, and bent over to snag the paper. It was folded to the crossword section, and Nora smiled, seeing that someone had been filling it in in pencil. She unfolded it right-way-round again, and looked at the headlines.

It was the New York Times, today’s date. Same flowing script in the masthead, same gray stolidity in its headlines. But the headlines themselves...

The lead photo showed two deeply tanned men in turbans shaking hands in some elaborate garden, rows of roses stretching back behind them like a hall of mirrors. CALIPHATE, INDIA SIGN PEACE PACT, the headline exulted. Leaders Herald “New Age” of Peace, Stability.

And below that, a somber, reverent portrait of a weathered old man in a dress shirt and suspenders, smiling and winking at the camera with still-youthful eyes, and an inset black-and-white photo of a much younger man -- same nose, same chin, Nora saw -- punching some hulking, tattooed man in the jaw.


Nora took the paper with her as she walked down the aisle toward the back of the plane, occasionally putting out a hand to steady herself on one of the headrests. She saw flat-panel screens in the back of each, blank and gray and glossy in the dimness of the cabin.

She passed the kitchen alcove -- no stewardesses, though Nora found a lovely jeweled hairpin lying on a folded-down jump seat -- and found herself in another corridor. Red exit lights led past some kind of panel on the wall, marked EMERGENCY -- but Nora was too tempted by the spiral staircase leading up to a second level of the plane not to climb up.

Her head emerged above the stairs to a vast, empty, silent space, dimly lit by sunlight from the portholes dotting its periphery. It took a few seconds for Nora’s eyes to adjust to the dimness, and when they did, she let out a low, disbelieving whistle.

It was a ballroom. Nora’s wet sneakers squeaked on wooden parquet floor, still littered with old confetti. There was a bar behind her, toward the aft of the plane; dining tables and buffet tables empty and waiting along either wall, and a stage framed in swoops and curls of aluminum before her.

She stowed the newspaper in her bag and crossed the floor to get a closer look at the stage. Instruments -- electric guitars, amps, drumps, a small electric organ -- were strapped into special holders next to the sort of pedestals Nora had seen in old movies, the kind you always saw with bandleaders in nightclubs. A card had fallen from a stand at one side of the stage, and Nora walked over and picked it off.

APPEARING ON THIS FLIGHT BY EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT, it said: JAMES MORRISON AND HIS DOORS OF PERCEPTION. The accompanying photo showed middle-aged men, leaning toward elderly. The lead singer -- there was something about his craggy face, some familair intensity in his eyes. She’d seen it a thousand times, on every album cover in her college roommate’s CD rack -- and the poster hanging on her roommate’s side of the room.

“Oh, hell no,” Nora said quietly. Suddenly the whole place felt strange, wrong somehow -- like she’d stepped into some carnival funhouse and couldn’t get out. She needed to find Murray.

She nearly stumbled going down the staircase, head whirling, sneakers thumping against the carpeted steps. The plane lurched again as she ran down the aisle of the passenger compartment, and she lurched with it, but righted herself and kept running.

There it was -- familiar daylight, the hatch to the outside world. Nora stuck her head out, eyes shut, and breathed in clean, cold lake air. For a moment, she felt much better. Then she opened her eyes.

The police boats were gone. She could just see them churning up wake, far in the distance, headed for shore. In their place, a sleek black boat with two powerful engines bobbed against the steps leading down from the hatch, tied with a silvery metal cable to the railing.

“Murray!” she shouted, clinging to the edge of the door as the world began to slowly spin under her feet. She pounded off in the direction he’d gone, tripping against the yielding plastic walls, and rounded a corner to find herself standing before the open cockpit door.

It was huge, tall enough to stand it without stooping, with a wide curving windshield allowing a nearly 180-degree view. A dizzying array of switches -- Nora’s mind immediately picked out a few familiar-looking ones, trying to comfort her -- raked themselves along the instrument panels before each of the three pilot’s seats. And there were people in the cockpit.

Murray was one of them, down on his knees, staring straight ahead. His eyes were strangely glazed, and he breathed with a rhythm Nora had heard many times, first from little sisters and later from boyfriends. He breathed like he was asleep. Like he was dreaming.

Small silver needles stuck out of the back of his skull.

A woman, prim and stern in a long, sweeping black overcoat stood in front of him, her head cocked sideways to calmly regard Nora. She held a round, wide-brimmed, old-fashioned had calmly under one arm, and wore a gray tweed suit, matching below-the-knees skirt, black stockings and sensible, heavy black shoes beneath the coat. Her hair was strikingly silver, pulled back in a tight bun secured with a thick metal needle, one that echoed the single sewing needle pinned like an emblem to the lapel of her gray suit jacket. Her face was unlined but somehow bore the wisdom of age, and her eyes were the same unsettling gray as her suit.

Another man in a black coat, gray suit, and black fedora stood on the opposite side of Murray, eyes fixed on a fat calculator-like device he held in the palm of his hand. It occasionally blipped softly, soothingly.

Nora’s mouth twitched, lips trying for syllables and finding none. The woman met Nora’s eyes and smiled indulgently, like a schoolteacher.

“Shhhhh,” she said gently.

“What--” Nora managed. “What the hell--?”

“Language, please,” the woman chided. “We’re not hurting him. Don’t worry. But this is a very delicate procedure, and Maximillian here needs to concentrate.”

She leaned her body toward Nora, stretching a long graceful arm out, and handed Nora something small and rectancular. “My card,” the woman said. It was black, embossed in silver. Mrs. Valencia Stitch, it read on one side, and on the back, it bore the image of a sewing needle like the one in the woman’s coat.

“And may I say it’s quite a pleasure to meet one of the Gale heirs,” Mrs. Stich said calmly. Nora didn’t know how to respond, or even what that meant.

“What are you doing to him?” she said at last, swallowing hard, not daring to move.

“Just tidying things up a bit,” Mrs. Stitch said calmly, crisply, fluttering one hand. Her nails were impeccable, manicured and lacquered in glossy red. “Sorting out his memories, trimming out a few bits, and sewing together the ragged ends good as new.”

“His memories?” Nora said, feeling her stomach curl in on itself. “How -- why are you doing that?”

Mrs. Stitch smiled again, warm and sympathetic. Murray’s head slumped gently, and his eyes closed. Maximilian looked up -- beneath the brim of his hat, his face was sharp-featured, youthful, and his eyes were the same strange gray -- and nodded at Mrs. Stitch.

“It’s quite simple, my dear,” Mrs. Stitch said, drawing the thick needle from the bun at the back of her head as a violinist would run her bow across the strings. Nora took an involuntary step back, and Mrs. Stich smiled even wider.

“We’re ensuring that no one will miss you,” she said.

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