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30. [Nadine Gordimer] Safety Procedures.doc
The New Yorker, September 23, 2002
Safety Procedures
by Nadine Gordimer
Lorrie didn't want me to go and was embarrassed to come out with it. My work means that we have lived in different parts of the world, and in each there has always been something to be afraid of. Gangsters; extremist political groups, right and left, tossing bombs into restaurants; hijacks; holdups; a city sitting plumb on the line of an earthquake fault. We have long had a compact, with ourselves, with life. Life is dangerous. We live with that, and with one certainty: that fear is the real killer. We've never gone in for steel grilles on our doors or been afraid to walk in the streets. With sensible precautions, we've succeeded in keeping our children free. But these last few months there have been a number of airline disasters not really accounted for—pilot error, air-traffic control affected by ground-staff strikes, the possibility of a fellow-passenger with the Damocles weapon not overhead but down in his boot soles. Who has the black box that really knows? And, only a week ago, two people shot dead while queuing to check in at an airline desk. We usually make love the night before I leave, I kiss the children in the morning, and we all accept naturally that I'll phone the moment I can use my mobile in the terminal of my arrival—even if it's nighttime for Lorrie and daytime for me. It's as much a routine as going to the executive office of my company every day.
—Why'd you let Isa book you on that route?
Lorrie knows that my secretary organizes my schedules with perfect efficiency.
—Why not? It's obvious. It's the best airline to get me where I have to go.
—But the country it belongs to. In some conflict among them all . . . These days.
—For God's sake, you know what the security procedures are like these days. Anyway, that airline's country has no connection to any hassle between
—No connection that you—we—know of.
But she'd heard what I was really saying: since when do we have a boring, conventional little-wifey scene when the hubby goes off on business? Since when do we cower, you and I, before life as it is?
And then she said something, in that way she has (part of what I love about her), that struck aside my patronizing inference of little-wifeyness.
—You don't know whose enemy you are.
—What're you talking about? I'm nobody's enemy.
—By boarding a plane you become one. The airline's insignia is painted on the tail. Logo of nationality.
I hugged her quickly, in recognition of her special quirky intelligence, and laughed. Our closeness made her smile past the issue. No fuss. That's our way. The company driver picked me up and delivered me to the airport.
Good young Isa had reserved my favorite seat, a window, not too far back in the business-class cabin (the company has decided to be globally politically correct, no more wasteful first-class expenditure), but not near the toilets or the galley—too many people queuing up to pee and too much chatter among the attendants.
There was a long flight ahead with time sliding backward all the way. On these journeys I keep home time; I don't change my watch until I reach time as measured at my destination. I wonder how many hours of my life span I've lost—or maybe gained?—on these many trips across datelines.
I tell people that I actually like to work in planes. In productive isolation among strangers, I can take out my laptop and prepare myself for the meetings and decisions awaiting me. It's not often that there's someone I know on the same flight, and if there is I don't want any change of seat to place me beside an acquaintance. Of course, in recent years there has been the unavoidable distraction of the fold-out TV screen that comes with every seat, and invariably my anonymous neighbor will have the thing set up and flickering away in my peripheral vision, although, thank God, the sound passes directly into the individual's ears, spares mine. The fact is it's never long before I pack away the monitor of my industriousness, the laptop, wrestle a few minutes with the pages of the newspapers offered (why aren't there special tabloid editions of the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, Le Figaro, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Corriere della Sera, et al., for airline distribution?), and then look—gaze—at what's outside the window: nothing. All right. The void that, from the ground, is called "the sky." Intruded on by puffy herds and castles of cloud for a while, scribbled across with a fading jet stream, a chalked rainbow drawn by another plane, out of sight. At other times, an enclosing gray-white element without latitude or longitude or substance—like blindness descended upon the eyes. Perhaps what I'm saying is that I half doze off; there's an in-between form of consciousness that's experienced only up here. The cozy cockpit voice exhorts its charges to sit back and relax. But this state is not relaxation; it's another form of being I have, and have never told anyone about, not even Lorrie (especially, perhaps, not Lorrie—in a marriage it's possible to give too much about yourself away).
Nothing. Up there, out there, I do not have within me love, sex, wife, children, house, or executive office. I do not have a waiting foreign city with international principals and decisions to be made. Why has no artist—not even the abstractionists—painted this state, attainable only since the invention of passenger aircraft? The gaze. Freedom.
On this trip, I had beside me—I noticed only when the bar trolley paused at my row—a slim middle-aged woman who didn't overflow her space or hog the armrest between us, something, at least, in her favor. We exchanged a "Good evening," and that was that. She was good-looking (as she turned toward me in the brief greeting) in an impersonal way, without any projection of beauty, as if her fiftyish face were something she had assumed as you might take along an umbrella. I dread, on my numerous long flights, having someone in the next seat who wants to talk and will take up a monologue if I don't respond. This one, apparently, wanted conversation no more than I did. She didn't set up her TV screen, either. I was aware that after dinner was served she leaned forward and took a book from her bag.
I suppose it was the food, the wine. I returned to my laptop, to the presence within me of the voice and body of my wife, the hands of my children upon me, the boardroom, the familiar expressions of the faces, and the issues I was to meet. Nothing, replaced by tomorrow. As I worked at my computer and time was lost in passage, the aircraft began to shudder. The seat-belt sign was illuminated. Turbulence—we expect to climb out of it, the cockpit voice reassured us. But my window went black—it was not nightfall— the swollen black of a great forest of storm. Out of nothing: this was the other power, like the opposition of Evil to Good that religions tell us about on earth. I was determined to ignore what became the swooping and staggering of the plane, the teeth-chattering of overhead lockers, the collision of trolleys, the spilling of glasses. I tried to focus on the screen jiggling on my knees, but my eyes refused to function. As I managed to stow the laptop in a seat pocket, I saw that the woman beside me had put down her book. In a violent lurch of the enraged structure that encased us, the book flung itself from her lap to the floor. I watched it slither into the aisle, where it was joined by shoes that someone had taken off, as we do on long flights, for comfort. Now the cockpit voice commanded us to stay seated, to make sure our seat belts were securely fastened. For your own safety.
I'd weathered (that old cliché) a few spells of turbulence in the hundreds of flights I'd survived. There had never in my memory been anything like this. Lorrie feared for me: a hijack. This was a hijack by the elements. Whatever force had us would not let go, no escape by gaining height or losing it. Crashes were sounding from the galley. Two cabin attendants collided, and one fell across a passenger's head. The commands from the cockpit became a gabble. Behind the seats where the woman and I were strapped, trapped, someone was vomiting in heaving waves and gurglings. The plane dropped as if under a great blow and then bounced to this side and that. It wanted to rid itself of us, our laptops, our headsets, our duty-free, the bags of possessions we lug around the world as if our life depended upon them.
Our life.
The voice from the cockpit made itself heard through broken-up amplification: the captain was going to attempt an emergency landing at a military airfield whose name I recognized as a sign that we had been blown off course. A woman was screaming. There were sobs and voices calling out for help—from whom, from where? Praying—to whom, for what? My heart thudded wildly: Lorrie's fear now mine.
I suddenly realized that while everyone was appealing, in the solidarity of terror, to everyone else, the woman beside me and I had not looked at each other, had not spoken. So I turned to her.
Incredible.
She was sitting calmly, with one hand loose upon the other, not clutching—the seat, the armrests, anything—as I was. She was letting the fury of the plane slap her about, her lips at rest, no grimace of the animal fear that was on everyone's face. She flicked her quiet open eyes to acknowledge my presence, this unknown human who was going to die in intimacy beside me. My last woman. And then she turned directly to me, and I heard again the voice that had spoken only once, two words, "Good evening."
—It's all right. The plane will somehow land. You're safe. Everyone is.
I didn't know if she was unbelievably courageous, duped by some religious faith, or mad. She spoke again, her head resisting the tumultuous pulls against her body.
—It won't happen. Because I'm aboard. This last year, I have to tell you, I have tried three times, three different ways, to end my life. Failed. No way out for me. So it seems I can't die—no flight I take will kill.
The order came from the cockpit to assume the emergency-landing position, heads bowed over knees. The plane struck the earth as if it would crack the rock of the world. We descended in a fairly orderly way—those desperate to live pushing through women-and-children-first, I restraining the instinct—on slides let down from the sides of the plane. Banners of flame unfurled behind us as we ran. In the confusion I did not see whether the woman was among us, the saved, all of us.
I'm sure she was.
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