Tristan can hear, in the pitch-dark, the violent fumble of hands.
Don’t, he begs silently, but the woman is frantic, as well as clumsy, and goes on tearing at her gas mask. He assumes a woman; they seem to have lower thresholds of panic. He will have to act quickly. He can hear the muffled rip of the Velcro fastener, her collar beginning to give way. She fights to escape the way a drowning person claws at water. Then she will emerge from her grotesque headpiece and rise up, transfigured, into death.
Seat 27D, he calculates. Two rows in front of him. Isn’t that the East Indian family, that whole row? So, the mother, then. Or possibly the tiny elderly one, the grandmother, who was wearing a white sari, not that anyone can see a thing in the dark. It is night and the air-conditioning and all electrical systems have failed, though the fog of heat and body sweat is not the worst of it.
Don’t, he begs, willing the message down the aisle.
Think of your children, for God’s sake.
Think of all of us.
There is a lull then, a brief lull, as though the Indian woman hears his thought and is checked in her frenzy. Is that such a crazy idea? It seems to Tristan that everyone’s edges have dissolved, that they have begun to think and act as one multicelled being. They seem to hear one another’s thoughts, or rather to sense them, to receive them whole in some direct intuitive way, the way a swarm of bees or a herd of cattle thinks. And certainly everyone subscribes to this cardinal rule: that it is unacceptable to give way to hysteria because they are all part of one fragile organism now, at unbearable risk. Nevertheless, their swarm-brain knows only too well the seduction of giving way: a few brief minutes of agony and it will be done. Giving way is as totally understandable and forgivable as it is inadmissible.
Tristan shapes these thoughts into a projectile and aims them at Seat 27D. Think of the contagion, he calls silently. He imagines his words, as hard and speedy as a small rock, striking the woman on the edge of her gas mask. He imagines the impact: the way her neck will snap and go limp. For the greater good, he wants to let her know.
He reasons with her. Think of your children, he pleads. Somewhere, he begs her to remember, somewhere, almost certainly, your children are watching us on a TV screen. See, the world’s journalists are telling them, there is the plane, that dull silver gleam in the dark, at the outer edge of the airstrip, just beyond the halo of light. We cannot get closer, the journalists are explaining, without risking the precipitation of some rash act. The hijackers cannot be counted on to behave rationally or logically or with any recognizable human compassion, the newscaster is saying. They are extremists. They are psychopaths. They are ideologically mad.
And there, on some stranger’s sofa, Tristan reminds her, or on a camp stretcher in some church hall, your children are huddled, watching. A counselor has been assigned to them. A second cousin on your uncle’s side is being flown from Bombay. Your children suck the woolen corners of blankets donated by a local church, and they watch the screen, shivering and wide-eyed. They are too ashamed to mention their underwear, which is hotly wet and ammoniac from their fear. Mommy and Daddy are still inside, their wide eyes say, with those Pigmen who made us fly down the slide. Your youngest begins to sob noisily. “The Pigman touched me,” she screams, and a counselor holds her.
Think of your children, Tristan pleads. They have been through horrors. They are watching more unfold on TV. Do not inflict this on them: the sight of your body tossed from the plane.
Tristan sends his argument, passionate, intense, synapse to synapse, and he has a direct connection, he is sure of it, but to his dismay, the sounds of fumbling and tearing recommence. They escalate. He can feel then, in his agitated need, the transformation of his own body into rock. He can feel his hard edges. He pivots on the mass of himself. The Indian woman is only two rows in front of him. He readies himself as projectile. He will smash her head against the seat.
But it is too late. Already the panic is rising and twisting up above 27D like a water spout, like a king tide, like a tsunami, and it is swelling and thrumming and curling along its upper edge and sloshing over the middle block of seats and up the aisle toward the rear of the plane. In the dark, Tristan closes his eyes. He has just enough time, before the rogue wave swamps him, to ask himself with real curiosity: Why is that necessary, closing the eyes, when nothing is all that any of us can see?
He hangs tightly to the spar of this question.
He hears people going under on all sides. He feels the pull of the rip tide and is himself tempted to rip off his mask.
At such times, the choice is stark: survival or peace.
At such times, no one has any illusions that survival will be other than trial by horror; and yet most choose it.
Tristan clings to the spar of his question.
It is instinctive, he realizes, to close the eyes. Dark or not, behind the eyelids, we focus better and we hear more acutely. It is instinctive, Tristan sees—think of somewhere else, quickly, quickly—yes, it is instinctive to close the eyes, the way it was on the beach that time, the first time, his ocean debut, and he hunches up again, bracing his small body, being barely thirteen and on the wrong side of his growth spurt, with the wave hanging over him like a vast implacable wall. Terror. He sees the fluted green frown beetling above, utterly indifferent. You are nothing, boy, nothing, it says, bored. He prostrates himself before Wave, the annihilator, the God of Smash. He sees the foaming white of its eyes. I will pound you to shell grit, it hisses, a frothy creaming shussing sweep of sound that enters his lungs. He pukes ribbons of sea salt.
His brother Pierre keeps shouting: Like this, like this, keep your eyes open. You have to watch over your shoulder, watch for it, see? Like this. And curl yourself up in its armpit, give yourself to it, like this, so that you are the wave.
And he does, because he knows he has crossed over, he is beyond help and recovery, he is sea, he is salt water, he is force. He is oceanic ferocity itself. And then he is on the hard wet sand and Pierre is thumping him on the back. You see? You see? Pierre laughs, and Tristan laughs too, a moment of pure and thrilling joy, and he tugs at his older brother’s hand and drags him back into the waves.
Again, again! Tristan is breathless on the wild Moroccan coast …
Morocco.
Might they not be in Morocco at this moment? he asks himself, shaken, pressing his hands hard against the arms of the airline seat because the panic has passed over him and he has not succumbed. Might they not be on the tarmac at Rabat? or perhaps Tangier? Yes, it is more than probable, or perhaps Morocco was only the first landing and perhaps they are somewhere else, well, it could be anywhere, there have been too many night landings and night takeoffs to keep track, too many even before the gas masks were issued, but isn’t it likely that they are flying in small circles because who is going to let the hijackers land? So this means perhaps that they are farther afield, in space more sympathetic to the hijackers: Libya? Syria? Iraq? He knows he has all the necessary clues.
He believes he could plot the course of Air France 64, which departed from Paris on time but has never reached its scheduled destination of New York. (Or has it? No. It is impossible, he thinks, that they could be on the ground in New York. And yet …? He cannot be sure of anything. He knows he is in a severe state of sensory disorientation.) There are myriad details crammed into the grab bag of his mind. What he needs is time and calm to sift them through. He needs to unpack them one by one, he needs to classify and sort: the fragments of language heard at two airstrips; the stifling heat of the first two landings, presumably in North Africa somewhere; the smell of an occasional current of fresh air: for example, when the children were off-loaded, which must have been Europe since the dreadful heat had gone. The off-loading could have been at Marseilles, he believes; he is sure he could smell salt air, though it might have been the north Italian coast. Or even, he supposes, somewhere with industrial smells, salt works, phosphate works close by. Frankfurt, perhaps? The security at Frankfurt is known to be poor. It is a city known to harbor terrorist cells. Yes, he thinks, it might have been Frankfurt where the children were disembarked.
The Pigmen (they look like pigs in their space suits and gas masks; they look like ape pigs, alien pigs; sci-fi pigface-people) speak both French and some other language which he supposes is Arabic. When they bark orders in English over the PA system, for the most part their speech is broken and difficult to understand, though one of them, clearly the leader, has issued announcements twice and speaks like a newscaster on the BBC. Tristan recognizes the accent. In his eagerness to improve his English, he has been listening regularly to the European broadcasts of the BBC. The other hijackers—the ones who speak English so poorly—are probably pieds noirs, he surmises; Algerian Frenchmen, or Muslims with French citizenship, the same old story, in other words; the same old fugue, variations on an overworked theme. He imagines the banner headline: ALGERIAN JIHAD STRIKES AGAIN.
At another landing, there was the smell of rain and something fragrant: Jasmine? Gardenia? Daphne? So, Martinique? Mauritius? Is that possible? Surely too far afield? The Cape Verde Islands, perhaps?
He needs time to fit the pieces together.
Time and calm. These he will have to arrange. He will need, in the lulls between panic waves, between onsets of claustrophobia, to pace himself. He has to shut out altogether the gas, the knowledge of the constant possibility of fire, the impending inferno.
The frenzy of clawing hands all around him is like padded thunder. In another five minutes, he estimates, the Indian woman will have freed herself into a scream, and then the high beam will come out of the dark and touch her like the finger of God. Oh yes, they will all be made to watch, he knows that. They will be forced to witness the whole horror show again: the blistering, the vomiting, the contortions, the last agony. Sarin, he suspects, though the Pigmen have not bothered to designate which toxic gas they have released. The Indian woman will be the third death, only the third, but her dying will be contagious, Tristan fears. There will be a rash of deaths, an epidemic, maybe a dozen, maybe more within the next hour, and then things will settle down for a while.
This can be survived, Tristan tells himself. It is not in the Pigmen’s interests to let too many die (though there, he admits to himself, he could be making a crucial error: the error of assuming a correlation between cunning intelligence on the one hand and logical behavior on the other) but the East Indian woman has succeeded now in ripping off her gas mask, and the spotlight swings and focuses on her, and it turns out that she is not after all from the Indian subcontinent, she is not even a woman but a man, tall, solid, white, American probably, of substance probably, someone used to authority, Tristan thinks, a banker, perhaps, or maybe (this is economy class, after all) a construction foreman, someone used to giving orders, because it is outrage, not fear, that suffuses his face in the moments before agony claims him, before he writhes and jackknifes and crumples, and Tristan concentrates, as mass panic and struggle swirl about him, on whether this is or is not Morocco, he devotes himself afresh to the puzzle that he knows he must solve. He has much of the data. Perhaps he has all of it. It is possible, indeed, that with sufficient care and diligence, in a sufficient state of meditative attentiveness, he can recover details that he is not currently aware he knows. Things float up in dreams, and in terror. He understands this. The unconscious casts a wider net than the conscious mind can grasp. What he needs, simultaneously, is purity of focus and slack. He needs to be loose in his mind.
He thinks of Génie, his body turns instinctively to the thought of Génie, but this agitates him violently, because where is she? How will he get to her? How many hours, how many days, since they parted at Row 11? Is she still alive, even—? He feels panic like marsh fire at his nerve ends and forces his thoughts to jump tracks.
He has been trying to devise a system for telling time, a complex logistical problem for which he is grateful. He is grateful for anything that demands obsessive concentration. It passes the time—a thought which gives him sardonic amusement; even language cannot manage without time—and anything which helps to pass the time is no small matter when he is floating loose in a nightmare, when he is trapped in a dream in which masked men with machine guns appear but he cannot run, in which the world collapses in on him in slow motion and he knows he will be crushed, he will be pulverized, unless he can run like the wind, but he finds he is running through molasses. His legs are made of something heavier than lead. This terror, he knows, will last until he wakes, but he cannot wake out of this dream. He has to find a way to measure back to when the nightmare began.
He makes marks, like Robinson Crusoe, on a blank white page in his mind.
Day 1. Takeoff. Almost immediate announcement from the pilot that due to expected turbulence, passengers are to remain in their seats until given permission to move.
Interesting, that, Tristan thinks in retrospect. The pilot must be part of it, unless a gun was already being held to his head. But how could machine guns have been brought on board? How could all that have been spirited past security if flight and loading crews were not involved?
We are expecting extreme turbulence … All passengers are to remain in their seats …
But there is no turbulence.
An hour passes. The meal is served; the flight attendants seem nervous and pale; the passengers are forbidden to move about. And then, at last, breaking the rules, Tristan makes his way down to Row 11, but Génie’s seat is empty and so is 11B. “Excuse me,” he says to the man across the aisle, “do you know where—?” and at that precise moment the hullabaloo breaks out. From the first-class cabin, figures with machine guns appear, Pigmen in gas masks, three in each side aisle, six in all, and Tristan has a gun barrel in his chest and he is being forced back back back down the plane.
On the PA system, in broken English, a voice keeps saying: This is the Black Death. If you obey exactly, you will not be hurt. This is the Black Death avenging many century of wrong. Obey or you will be shot. Everybody is prisoner of Black Death. Obey or you will be shot. This is return of the plague. Obey or you will be shot. This is Black Death.
The first shot comes then. The first killing. It is a random one, for show, and the hijackers wave their guns above their heads, triumphant as schoolyard bullies. Look, Pa! We scared the shit out of them.
And then time becomes hazy. A landing. Hours in stifling heat. The stewardesses, at gunpoint, distribute water. Babies and children cry incessantly. Someone goes crazy—with thirst? from the hallucination-inducing heat?—and runs down the aisle and is shot. The body is thrown from the plane.
Negotiations are going on. Sometimes shouting can be heard from the cockpit: radio voices coming in, shouted messages going out.
Night falls. Apparently the plane is being refueled. There is a takeoff. There are more flying hours, perhaps three, perhaps four, but no one is allowed to leave his or her seat, not for any reason whatsoever. The plane begins to stink. People pass out. There is another landing. There are more hours that seem to float in heat. Food and water are distributed. Bodies have slumped into aisles and on to the floor. The Pigmen pass through the plane and collect these bodies like garbage. They drag them down the aisles and toss them from the forward door.
There is another takeoff.
Somewhere here, Day 2 has begun. Tristan marks that on the blank page in his mind, but how is he to keep track of time when the plane is in the air? Two hours? he wonders. Three? He might as well be suspended in thick black ink. Then there is another landing: Tristan’s body can sense the loss of altitude. He feels the thump when the wheels hit the ground, then bounce, and then hit again. An amateur landing. He wonders what they did to the pilot. He wonders if the pilot, seriously inexpert, is one of the hijacking team.
This is Black Death, the PA system announces. The plague falls upon the infidel, but Allah, the All-Merciful, spares the children. Obey or you will be shot.
The children are herded up and off-loaded; mothers with babies in arms are permitted to leave, though not if the babies are dead. Two mothers are sent back to their seats, the bundles in their arms quite still. Many children do not wish to leave their parents, but the men with pig heads and guns pull them roughly from their seats. Passengers reach out to touch and caress as the little ones are pushed down the aisles. When the last of the screams and the sobbing—Mommy! I want my mommy!—have been pushed out of the escape hatch, a terrible silence prevails inside the plane.
All that, Tristan thinks, must have happened on Day 2.
Then night falls. A refueling, another takeoff. How many hours of flying? Another landing. They must have landed into Day 3.
The plane stinks. People have vomited. People have wet and fouled themselves. Trips to the bathrooms are permitted now, but are monitored, row by row, and a turn comes around again only three times a day. Bathrooms are blocked up and the stench is so terrible that people back away from their turn. Each time he is escorted from his seat, Tristan tries to insist on the bathrooms forward but is always forced back. He has not caught so much as a glimpse of Génie.
On the Day 3 landing (the fourth landing, unless he has lost count), supplies of food and water are brought on board, the bathrooms are cleaned; more refueling, another takeoff, a much longer flight, another landing. Somewhere in here, he thinks, Day 4 begins.
On Day 4, more food and water are brought on board. The plane is fumigated, the bathrooms are cleaned again. Supplies of a different kind are brought on: the gas masks arrive at this point, hundreds of them, one for every passenger. So this must be home territory for the terrorists, Tristan decides. Libya? Iraq? Morocco? Or maybe farther south, closer to the equator, because the heat is extreme. Sudan or Uganda? The masks are distributed, and the passengers are ordered to put them on. The effect is grotesque. A number of people vomit into their gas masks and promptly suffocate. Their bodies are removed.
The leader, the one who speaks BBC English, makes an announcement.
“The world has its eyes on this plane,” he says. “The world is listening to me as I speak.”
Tristan tries to imagine himself into his apartment in Paris, watching himself on TV. There is the long doomed silver Air France cocoon on the screen, indistinct at its edges. He imagines himself reading the message streaming across the base of his set: Hijacked plane on airstrip in Uganda. (Or in Egypt, perhaps? Or in Iraq?) Tristan squints. In peripheral vision, he can see the volumes of Proust and Stendhal on his shelves. If he could just see his television set more clearly, he could find out where he is.
“Toxic gas has now been released into the cabin,” the leader of the hijackers says to the passengers and to the television audience of the world. “Your masks will protect you. If you remove your mask, you will die very quickly, in great agony.
“We are returning to Paris,” the leader explains. “Before landing, canisters of highly volatile, highly flammable gas will be released inside the plane, so that any misguided attempt at sharpshooting, either by airport security or by American special troops, will result in a firestorm. If our demands are met, if the ten prisoners whose names will be given to Le Monde are released from French jails, and if these Muslim freedom fighters are permitted to board the aircraft, then all passengers will also be released. We are asking a small thing: ten Muslim freedom fighters for more than four hundred civilians.”
There is another takeoff and a long flight.
Tristan tries to measure the hours.
“We are beginning our descent into Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris,” the leader announces, and the words boom like thunder, but the plane circles, and banks, and levels out, and circles again. The voice of the leader over the PA system is sharp with fury. “We are refused permission to land,” he announces. “Idiots. Imbeciles. Cretinaceous-moronic-NATO-American snobs!” His words trip over themselves. “You are dogs!” he tells the passengers icily. “Your lives are nothing to your governments. You are dogs, and you will die like dogs.”
We are beyond fear, Tristan thinks. We are far beyond fear. Dying like dogs, when we have been living like dogs for days: it barely even touches us.
When the moment comes, he thinks, when the moment presents itself, he will leap snarling at that fake-BBC throat, though for the time being he seems to have misplaced his own ignition key, and the PA system by which his brain gets messages to his body seems to be on the blink. He tells his hand to make a fist and it drifts like seaweed.
This is a very strange dream, he thinks. When I wake, he thinks, what a story this will be.
He thinks the plane is still circling Paris because he believes he can see the loops of the Seine and the towers of Notre Dame, but he knows this might be part of the dream. He feels sleepy. He dreams that oxygen, like a knight in armor, is battering at the walls of his mask. He sees Génie on a cloud at his window. Have you left us, then? he asks her, and he feels the plane plummeting in grief, but he cannot remember what grief feels like, and the plane levels out and flies south. Tristan knows they are flying south because the sun that he thinks he sees spells Africa. Génie raps on his window. Prepare for landing, she says.
“We have been permitted landing rights for refueling,” the leader announces, and they are on the ground in Toulouse, Tristan thinks. Or perhaps they are in Marseilles? He knows he is watching French on the lips of the men at the gasoline pumps. They handle the rubber hoses as snake charmers might, and the sucked-in hollows in their cheeks are making French. Tristan draws a question mark with one finger on his window and one of the refuelers looks back at him directly and says: Toulouse.
The plane takes off from Toulouse and flies into the fifth night, Tristan thinks, though it could be the sixth. There is a long flight and another landing, perhaps—probably—a return to the point where the gas masks first came on board.
This is where they now are, several hours from Toulouse, very late on the fifth or sixth day, and the Indian woman who has turned out to be an American man has finished dying, and the ripples of panic throughout the plane have played themselves out.
Nothing moves. The passengers are bewitched.
Tristan is light-headed. He believes he can fly.