jd87: Shiny-Winged Aluminum, First Go

by Josh Delman

I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"

If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.

This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.

2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September

Shiny-Winged Aluminum, First Go FICTION

A twenty-thousand pound hunk of aerodynamically shaped, shiny winged aluminum soars upwards through the sky, scorching and twisting the air behind it, carrying within one hundred and ninety-nine passengers, two pilots (one, a really, a co-pilot), and a dozen flight attendants, all human. Seat 25A, a window, commences conversation with 25B, the middle seat, as the craft reaches what’s commonly known as “cruising altitude,” awkward passive-aggressive elbow-placing competitions not yet played out:

“I believe it’s customary, I mean, that’s my belief – it’s my belief that the middle seat ought to get both arm rests to herself.”

“That’s kind of you,” 25B says. She gets comfortable in her seat as a full-body chill runs from the back of her neck through the terminus of her spine. “But I think that it’s possible, and it really depends on who’s sitting where, you know, I really think it’s possible that there can be two elbows on the same arm rest.”

25A nods in surprised approval; the arm-rest thing was just an opener. He wasn’t expecting an intelligent, cogent response, one that was both morally sound and could be seen, he thought, as counter-flirtation – but it was a damn good response, that response. And she demonstrates her theory by placing her own left elbow on the front part of the left arm rest, then seizes 25A’s right elbow and puts it on the back half. QED.

“Amazing,” 25A says. “Simple.”

He goes on to tell her that he feels much more comfortable opening up to strangers than to people he knows. And he can actually run through a mental list, he says, of his friends, and in doing so realize that he is probably closest and most specific in personal detail with his newest acquaintances, and almost cryptically vague with his oldest friends. The reasons are myriad, but they basically revolve around his self-perception as a complete phony, a faker, and that strangers usually don’t realize that he’s faking. Of course, he doesn’t tell her this. He tells her something about working as a car salesmen way, way back, and how he couldn’t help but be painfully honest with the customers, and then uncovers a small Ziploc bag from his suitcase containing five or six small three-oz. bottles of variously colored liquids. One looks milky-white and swirly. A couple others are a Barbicide-colored, a deep pool blue. 25B’s hair is not a deep pool blue; it’s more like a brown, neatly tied into some kind of bun at the back. A fairly conservative hairstyle, if you asked 25A.

25B looks around. She counts fifty-five rows of seats, horizontally packed. The starboard side has three seats next to each other: a window, middle, and aisle. The port side has just the two: window and aisle. Some of the seats are empty, but there is no apparent design to the empty seat/occupied seat layout. This is frustrating to several flight attendants, who wish that everyone was just bunched up in the front. Especially frustrated is Jenny Fitzgerald, who is more upset about the lack of any apparent pattern than the fact that she has to mush her cart around.

“I’d end up telling them that they could get a better deal at a different dealer,” 25A says. Everyone bounces up and down a little bit in their seats. Must’ve hit an air pocket. 25A looks over his shoulder; 26A is sound asleep, despite the violent takeoff. It sounded as if rusted metallic objects were angrily throwing themselves at one another then. 25A personally thought that it didn’t bode well, but then they successfully reached cruising altitude – that time when everyone on the plane hears a soothing ding and the seat-belt sign turns off and the plane levels out and evens itself (well, not quite – the pilots take care of that), and everyone collectively exhales.

25B responds in kind, telling him about her boyfriend – a real “jerk and a half.” 25A carefully picks up on little phrases like this during her spiel, focusing more of his attention on her impossibly intense blue eyes, which reflect tiny dots of overhead light. She tells him of a depressed man, a person who appears to darken the air around him, if only through his utter inability to feel anything remotely close to joy. But what to make of a soul like this one?

“Do you think he wants to hurt you? To be so depressed, to sulk on purpose?”

“I think he wants the attention.”

“But does he want you?”

The question floats in the air, a reality that nobody wants to face right now. 25B looks out her window and sees absolutely nothing identifiable, except maybe a small white thing somewhere out there, but she’s not quite sure. Her pre-flight ritual involves baking and then eating a small batch of brownies with marijuana. She hasn’t been on a flight sober in years. She takes a certain pleasure watching everyone else freak out about the historical significance of this particular flight. Not 20 minutes earlier, a flight attendant, Jenny Fitz-something, had wrestled a carry-on bag into the overhead compartment. 25B feels like the overhead compartments are like a negative-matter zone. She’s still a bit superstitious. She thinks maybe the bags disappear when the door is closed and they reappear when the doors are opened. This kind of thinking, which is the sole reason for the existence of games like “peek-a-boo,” is supposed to recede into the deepest parts of the brain around age 2.

25A goes on to say that not only does he feel more comfortable talking to strangers, but that he feels most comfortable talking to 25B, as in the young woman sitting right next to him. This type of sincerity is discomforting to most. Even if people really feel this way – and we’re not quite sure whether or not 25A is sincere, his self-perceived phoniness hindering his own ability to say anything without a slight zest of sarcasm – not everyone is equipped to handle it. People are trained at a young age to present themselves, as in warp themselves, bending and jimmy-rigging their personalities into effective, personable personas, and this sort of need to limit oneself for the benefit of others perpetuates simply because of the fact that everyone else is doing it. So then the question becomes, 25A thinks, how honest should I be? 25A leans in closer to 25B now (he had, only 5 minutes before takeoff, began chewing a thin slice of Extra gum, peppermint flavored, but spit it out shortly after, the gum having lost its initial orgasm of invigorating bluish-white mint flavor, 25A resolving to chew the remainder of the 24-pack over the duration of the flight as needed) and can’t help but wonder if there is perhaps some unintended hostility in his voice, if only because he needs to speak louder because of the persistent hum of the engine.

The quad-jet engines, a late-aught custom design, are a distant hum inside the fuselage, though the hum is quite persistent and spread over a wide area of the spectrum, say 30 to 3000 Hz; the hum is right in that meaty part of the spectrum where human voices reside, so that everyone has to speak a little louder to be heard, and passengers have to turn up the volume on their iPods so they can hear the snare drums clearly. There are also vibrating subfrequencies within the distant hum so that there is a slow but consistent ooeeeeemmmmmmmm crescendoing in and out every couple seconds that can actually be felt and resolves in a few passengers’ loss of sphincter control.

25B tells 25A that she admires honesty in a man, and reveals in a sort of sexy way that nothing turns her on more than honesty. All types of honesty, she says: honesty in friendship, honesty in business, honesty in relationships, honesty about being dishonest. 25A starts to think that 25B looks vaguely domestic. He can see in her face where wrinkles might some day appear. Her smile is not overly-toothed, correctly proportioned, and looks like one of those post-op pictures that dental surgeons hang in their office. No, no, no, 25A says. You have no idea the extent of my honesty. His face is deadly serious when he says this – completely affectless, like a wax figure. 25B makes a noise like she’s about to shoot a booger out of her nose and then starts laughing. This guy, who’s so serious that he can’t help but be serious about everything, cannot be taken seriously.

“It’s almost pathological. I can’t help but be honest about a lot of things,” 25A says. There’s a low grumble that sounds like a 20,000 ton hunk of aluminum with an empty stomach. People on the plane are starting to freak out a little bit, but 25B keeps laughing. Her mouth is open wide and her uvula is bouncing up in down in the back of her mouth, but barely any air escapes; in the hum of the plane, her cackle is silent.

The seats they are sitting in were constructed in the late-aughts, maybe 2008 or 2009, given shape by a new type of squishy off-white polyurethane foam that the California state government later ruled to be unconstitutional because of its propensity to violently burst into flames without warning. The seats are upholstered in dark blue leather with a red-and-white ‘AA’ insignia on the headrest. Something like five hundred cows raised and nurtured on flat Midwestern farms were ritualistically killed for the covering of these seats. Five hundred cows, standing stoically on green fields, cumulus clouds hanging high overhead, completely unaware of their grand purpose, their role in the creation of super-comfortable, ultra-luxurious seats, so that frontier tourists may comfortably rest their rotund cellulose deposits. It’s all very patriotic and American. 14D actually said this, while boarding, to his wife. There is nothing better or more appropriate, 14D had said to his wife – a shortish woman with an excessively large bottom, who was obviously a prime consumer for such seats – than the Right to Travel for long periods of time in a comfortable chair. So they sat.

14D, now sitting in his chair with his back straight, letting his body sink in to the leather-wrapped flammable foam, tells the female flight attendant passing by that he would like a Phizzo, no ice.

“I ran out of Phizzo in this cart. Is Pepsi okay?”

Is Pepsi okay? Of course not. Pepsi is not okay. And had Coca-Cola been a possible option, it too would not be O.K. There’s a reason why Phizzo has claimed significant portions of both Coca-Cola’s and Pepsi’s respective market shares, despite their brand longevity in the cola market. There is a reason why Pepsi beats out Coca-Cola in blind consumer taste tests, yet remains at the bottom of surveyed Americans’ cola preferences year after year. There is a damn good reason why Phizzo is now #1. Whereas Coca-Cola and Pepsi aim for consistency in taste throughout the Drinking Experience, Phizzo aims for change-whilst-drinking. Whereas Coca-cola and Pepsi eschew the “Shake Well” text familiar on drinks like O.J. and milk for practical purposes involving carbonation and exploding liquids, Phizzo has much cooler reasons for eschewance. In fact, the very idea of serving Phizzo in any other drinking container other than the original manufactured container seems ridiculous because of Phizzo’s dedication to a complete Drinking Experience, which would not be but for the ingenious Taste Engineers at Phizzo, Inc.

14D makes this all clear to his wife, who halfway through 14D’s rant decided to stop paying attention and pick at a hangnail on her left thumb, which continues to progressively worsen because of all the incessant picking. Not to be outdone in the revolting habit department, however, is 39A, who insists that this flight is supposed to be full, and that something is particularly shady about all the empty seats; he’s picking at a scab on his left knee, right at the fleshy part of his knee below the cap. “This is a landmark flight,” he says. “And it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. No one in their right mind is going to give something like this up.”

39’s B and C, then, start making up stories about the missing passengers; a flight this long is an opportune time to exercise one’s imagination. The window view, after all, gets boring above a certain height, when the fuzzy, diffracting upper atmosphere starts to blend things together in a soupy blue haze. One of the potential passengers, according to 39C, had terminal cancer, despite planning on making the flight, and died the day before today. Another potential passenger, 39B alleges, was sitting on the toilet just a week before the flight, minding his or her own business (sex not determined – but this p.p. was definitely doing a #2) and 39B, telling the story, says, “You think you might know where this one is going – a la Elvis – but actually, he’s just sitting there on the porcelain throne – the John, the crapper, the hole, the pot, the potty, the latrine, the shit-collector – anyway, you get what I’m saying, and the and an errant baseball goes flying through the bathroom window and smashes the window into a million pieces, and the baseball has enough momentum to keep going and strike the guy right in the head, and it cracks his skull open and the protective liquid around his brain, the meninges I think they’re called, start leaking out, and he also coats the wall in a spray of explosive diarrhea.”

40C isn’t enjoying this. He just feels despair. He feels a deep pit in his stomach, like he’s falling, even though he’s just sitting with a rather contented look on his face. If he shifts his body even a couple degrees to the left or right, the sensation of falling gets so intense and real-feeling that he has to literally grab hold of something, close his eyes, and simulate right there on the plane the feeling of being absolutely still. Really, there’s hardly anything that can be done about the falling feeling. He’s tried equalizing, as in equalizing the pressure in his ears, by opening his mouth wide and pushing his lower jaw forward, which sometimes has the added effect of not only unpopping his ears but also setting off a fleshy-sounding crack in his ear, and 40C is not sure whether or not that’s a good thing. Sometimes he chews gum and swallows, as per his mother’s recommendation some twenty years hence.

The little kid in the seat next to him is reciting, in sotto voice, what sounds to 40C to be a chronological list of every McDonnell DC-10 plane crash. 40C feels his forehead with the back of his right hand; when he pulls the hand away, it’s coated in salty sweat. The flight isn’t very bumpy, but that’s not helping 40C. It feels like the temperature is rising maybe .1 degree Celsius every 5 minutes. You can really get stuck in your head on a flight like this. The fuselage is boring and unadorned. Nothing to plainly observe, so the mind must make its own sense of the vast blankness. Place its own order on disorderliness. There are maybe eighty other people on this thing, 40C thinks, and yet he feels a sense of loneliness, as if he shares absolutely nothing in common with anybody else on the plane. Anybody else in the whole entire fucking universe! He pines for visitation by extraterrestrial life; maybe they would “get” him. Understand where he’s coming from, you know? Because when he was a little kid, 40C loved flying. It was a delight. Then, later in life, a certain twisted reality sunk in. 40C’s read the statistics. They don’t help. 40C can’t help but think that he’s always going to be the 1/10th of a percent. He wonders about whether or not his life means anything. It’s a brutal line of thought that is sometimes worth pursuing but seldom has any short-term benefits. He wonders whether having won a contest means anything to his life. When other people won contests in which winners are seemingly chosen at complete random, like a raffle or something, he always felt like it wasn’t so random, like there was some kind of overarching hand guiding the numbers. Maybe that’s why he’s headed towards that glowing white ball – the greyish, pockmarked chunk of rock that every rock on earth wishes it were a part of, its shiny glare reflecting on the surface of the cockpit’s only window.

“You ever fly this route before?” the pilot asks his copilot, speaking into his headset. There’s a little switch coming off of his headset, a set of Bose over-the-ear cans, that lets him switch between infra-aircraft and air-ground communication. Their voices sound tinny and distant over the radio.

“No.”

“She’s a good’n.”

“Should be.”

The pilot flips the switch.

“Ground control, this is six seven two two one niner, releasing second stage now.” The cockpit is illuminated only by the electronic displays, which have the advantage over standard mechanical displays because of their informational triage; only the important stuff is displayed. The pilot can cue up which instruments he needs when he wants them – a sort of informational triage. t can get quite overwhelming with the altitude, the barometric pressure, the vertical speed, the navigational information, etc. and allows for full Situational Awareness. The pilot flips a red cover and pushes a button underneath and something large and cylindrical drops off the aircraft.

“Feels lighter.”

“How you think these people can afford this kinda shit?”

“What shit?”

“This shit. Costs big money to send a bird to the Great Rock in the Sky.”

“Oh, you don’t know?”

“Didn’t tell me.”

“There was a contest. Phizzo.”

“Phizzo?”

“Phizzo. The soft drink.”

“Phizzo. I prefer Coke.”

“Me too.”

“They had one of those under the cap dealies.”

“Shit man, I never look at those. Always toss the cap.”

The pilot flips his headset switch. “Ground control, vector set.”

He hears back from ground control: “You’re cleared for landing on runway bravo charlie echo.”

The co-pilot: “That’s not us, is it?”

“No. Must be another flight. They’re all asses and elbows up there.”

Jenny Fitzgerald opens the door and pokes her pompadoured head in. “The P.A. isn’t working. I’ll have to use yours.”

“Uh, okay,” the pilot says, who turns around and eyes the woman up and down. Jenny’s breasts are large and almost comically proportioned to the rest of her body. She picks up a blue phone and speaks emphatically: “Attention passengers, attention passengers.” She expects to hear her own voice on the speakers in the fuselage, but nothing comes out. “I said: attention.” Still nothing. “Attention passengers: go to fucking hell. Eat shit. I repeat, eat shit.” She blows a stream of air out of the side of her mouth. “Well this is annoying,” she says. “The thing’s broken.”

“It is?” Either the pilot or the co-pilot says this; both of their voices are the same monotone. Jenny isn’t sure whether or not these two are related. She suspects that every pilot is related, somehow.

“Yes. It is. And I need you to make an announcement about bumps. Some of the passengers are wondering what’s going on.”

They say nothing, their eyes fixed on the window in front of them.

“I said they’re wondering what’s going on.”

“Are they?” His tone is non-professionally flirtatious. It’s pretty standard among pilots to treat flight attendants like garbage.

“Yes!”

“Okay, okay.” The two possibly related gentlemen start laughing.

“Alright,” the pilot says, drawing in a large breath. He breathes meditatively for a few seconds. Then, in his standard monotone voice: “Okay I’m ready.”

He flips a different switch on the console in front of him and speaks into his headset: “Attention passengers, this is your captain speaking. Despite the fact that we are currently travelling through a vacuum, this flight is subject to the same kind of bumps that you’d expect on a standard commercial flight. We just want to let you know that this is perfectly one-hundred percent normal. Thank you.”

40C grips his arm-rest tight now, his knuckles whitening. He tries to open his mouth to equalize, but something’s wrong. It’s not moving. 40C doesn’t know why. He focuses all of his conscious attention on trying to open his jaw, but nothing happens. Doesn’t feel stuck, though. It’s as if his brain’s forgotten that there’s even a jaw there. He wonders, on behalf of all of humanity, about how we tell our arms and legs to do things. He can think about lifting his arm without actually lifting it. But doing it is as easy as, well, just doing it. It’s like the muscles in his jaw just won’t do it.

15 seats ahead, 25’s A and B are still talking to each other.

“What are you saying,” 25B says, now about 5 to 10 percent annoyed. She wishes that she could take back her whole conversation with this airplane stranger. At first she was intrigued, and the arm-rest thing was slightly interesting, in the way that kids in her university classes would say that something was “interesting” – as in worth twenty to thirty seconds of devoted mental flexing, and that’s it. But she can’t help but think that 25A’s simply playing an angle, manipulating her, carefully calculating responses, a robot that might fail a Turing test. 25A feels her pushing back and responds accordingly.

“I’m saying that I prefer honesty as well, but that most people would prefer a lie to the truth.”

“The whole P.T. Barnum thing.”

“Yeah,” 25A says, his chest rising and then falling, “that.”

“Okay,” 25B says. “But how do I know that everything you’re saying right now isn’t a lie? How am I supposed to know that everything you’re saying about truth and honesty isn’t just something you tell people on airplanes to get into their pants?” She’s a clever one, this 25B.

“You overestimate me,” 25A says. “I have no ulterior motives.”

“Right, but how am I supposed to know that? How do I know what you’re saying isn’t a complete lie?”

“Well, geez.” 25 rubs a little mole on his left arm with his right hand. “How do you know that everything isn’t just one big lie? How do you know we’re really this flight right now? I mean, you know where we’re headed. Doesn’t that sound like fiction to you?”

“It does, it does.”

“Well it’s not. We’re here and we’re flying there!” 25A says, and then there’s a significant bump as 25A points out the window. Everyone jostles around a bit. A couple passengers wonder how gravity is working if they’re out in space, but 40C is not. He’s positively reeling now. He feels like he’s being violently shaken around. He pictures himself as a single molecule of vermouth in James Bond’s martini, bouncing off the walls of an aluminum shaker. The kid in the seat next to him (whose mother is sound asleep, drool hanging daintily from the corner of her mouth) pulls an old grey mobile entertainment device out of his backpack. The kid flips a little grey switch (a darker grey) at the top of the device and a second later it emits an emaciated du-ding. Then there’s the sound of falling blocks and a computerized, robotic sounding version of some obscure Russian tune. The kid is clearly good at the game; he won’t stop playing. The Russian music repeating over and over again gives 40C a wicked headache. 40C’s head feels like it’s being repeatedly dropped from the rooftop of a very tall building. He looks out the window, for some kind of solace, and the desolate vacuum of space stares back, wallowing in its dark splendor. At the corner of the window a small white speck appears. 40C scratches the window, thinking that the speck was on the window the whole time, and that he had just now noticed it – but he realizes he is mistaken after he glides the tip of his thumbnail across the outer edge of the window for the third or fourth time. He wants to get out of his body and just be without feeling everything: the peculiar weight of false gravity, the rising temperature, the itchy feeling in the exact center of his back that he can’t seem to reach. He had gotten up shortly after take-off to go to the bathroom and take advantage of the unique properties of the low pressure fuselage; it seems that airborne bathrooms are good places for popping pimples. He stared at his lumpy nose in the mirror and sighed, and then pinched out a few little white pus worms. He collected them with his right thumb and forefinger and then rubbed them together and his mouth started to water.

14D, meanwhile, is relishing all of the bumps. He enjoys the bumps. He thinks that Americans are entitled to both luxury and an exhilarating ride. He tells his wife this, and she looks at him with furrowed eyebrows and her face seems to be saying something like, “just shut the fuck up until we fucking get there.” But 14D’s thinking about Phizzo. “Briefly,” he says to his wife, “The oft-noted reason why Pepsi used to win blind taste tests before the introduction of Phizzo to the American marketplace.” It is sweeter than Coca-Cola. Briefly, the reason why Coca-Cola remained on top, despite Pepsi’s constant annoying-little-brother-type nagging that it was better tasting, before Phizzo’s introduction to the American marketplace: it is not as sweet as Coca-cola. “In a one-off taste test,” 14D says, his eyes lit with a sort of greedy pride. An image of Gordon Gekko comes to mind. Bespoke suits and hair that’s permanently wet. “Consumers prefer the sweeter drink.” But in terms of long-term, grocery-store purchases, they prefer the less sweet drink. Phizzo takes advantage of the properties of liquids of different densities within the same container; much like oil and water, the Three Stages of Phizzo remain separated and distinct. Upon first taste of Phizzo, one enjoys a burst of pure saccharine goodness, the very smell of which is said to activate certain regions in the brain responsible for feelings of nostalgia and recovering of very old memories; this is the First Stage, which makes up the top layer of Phizzo and fills the first 27% of the unconventional, upside-down looking frosted plastic container that makes people say “Wow, that’s Phizzy!™” The Second Stage, which makes up about 70% of the drink, is a less sweet, more full-bodied flavor, tinged with bits of cinnamon and caramel and salt and [TRADE SECRETS REMOVED] and would fit in heartily well with any meal, and which may induce gleeful hiccupping after each thirst-quenching sip. (Phizzo may or may not, in the future, market the Second Stage in pure form as its own solitary drink – called “P2O” – which would be much more like the conventional colas.) Finally, the Third Stage, which makes up approximately 3% of the drink, is sort of a watered down version of S2, and is regarded by most consumers to be some kind of ‘bottom-of-the-barrel’-type leftover, much like the last sip of a beer – but it actually may or may not contain carefully engineered isomers of S2 flavor-compounds that are responsible for an undeniable hankerin’ for more Phizzo.

40C contemplates. Why him? Why was he chosen? Sure, sure, the bottles were randomly distributed to different convenience stores and groceries stores throughout the contiguous U.S.A. (Alaskans and Hawaiians simply having never been introduced to Phizzo) – but randomness allows for strange coincidences: like what if all the winners were in one state? They couldn’t have something like that happen. No, it couldn’t be truly random: in the pre-boarding area, when 40C could still move his jaw, he spoke to some of his fellow passengers. They told him they were scared, that they had never done this before. He tried to reassure them in his most fatherly voice that everything would be okay, that they would be hitting one-thousand yard drives and slam dunking on ten foot baskets in no time. And he took note of their accents: a bunch of New Yorkers, someone from Boston; he even heard the distinct Pittsburghean yinz. There seemed to be some kind of order to it all. But all this thinking starts to get to 40C. Plus there’s the white speck outside, which seems to grow larger each time 40C looks away and then back out the window. Everything feels weird to 40C now. It’s weird that he’s sitting on this plane. It’s weird that he is here, and not somewhere else. It’s weird that he could reason things out, imagine things in his head, without moving a single muscle on his body. It was enough to drive a guy like 40C fucking bonkers. He still couldn’t move his jaw.

“I think I may have figured out the reason,” 25A says. “I think I may have figured out the reason, I think it’s the reason, at least – I think I may have figured out the reason why I have to be so honest. It’s because I have these two voices in my head, you know? One of them is just like this constant unfiltered stream of information, like a firehose just bursting through my head. The other one is like the adaptive, outward appearance: what I should say to people. It’s cool and calculated. But sometimes they just become one, and the firehose takes over.”

“The firehose.”

“Yeah, it takes over.”

“So which one am I talking to now? The firehose or the… the other one?”

25A didn’t really know. That was probably the problem – it was that he wasn’t sure if what he was telling was the truth, even when he thought he was.

“Probably the firehose.”

“So could I ask you anything right now, and you’d tell me?”

“I guess.”

“So tell me a secret.”

“Whoa, whoa – it doesn’t work that easy. It’s gotta be more specific than that.”

“What do you want to do when we get there?”

“When we get there. Hmm. I guess I haven’t thought about it.” 25A pauses and looks out the window. Among the nothingness are the stars and a white thing that looks like it’s flying towards the ship.

“What do you mean? There’s so much to do!” Her eyes beam with incredulity.

“You’re right. You’re right. Man, I can’t believe I didn’t think about it more.”

“Well, I can help you decide. You know, there’s the Apollo 11 landing site, and.”

“And?” 25A tries to shake 25B out of her gaze, her eyes fixed in a focus beyond the little rounded window. 25A, meanwhile, carefully drinks the first 27% of his Phizzo.

“Yeah well, supposedly, the winners of the Phizzo contest get chosen at random.”

“Supposedly?”

“Supposedly.”

“Why supposedly?”

“Supposedly because I bet we could find something in common between all of these people.”

“Yeah? Wouldn’t be that all hard. Start with this: they’re all homo sapiens.”

“Shittin’ me?”

“No shit.”

“I’m talking way more specific than that.”

“What, you mean like they all have a flat-grey Volvo or something?”

“Something like that.”

Waves of electromagnetic radiation ripple through a vacuum, passing through the infinitesimal spaces between electrons, and resonate harshly in our pilot’s headset: “You are clear for landing.”

“What the heck,” the co-pilot says.

“I don’t know. Something must be wrong up there.”

“Oh, shit.”

“What?”

“What the hell is that?”

“What?”

“That.”

“What?”

“Look out the window.”

“Oh. Looks like a white… thing.”

“We need to report this.”

25A pours the Barbicide-looking liquid into his drink, catalyzing a chemical reaction within the bottle of Phizzo, which seems to have been designed for this kind of thing. The bottle’s plastic swells; the embossed and stylized PHIZZO on the side fills out out, making a crunchy noise.

All 40C can think about, though, is that he’s acutely aware of the fact that everybody was breathing in other people’s exhalation, a noxious concoction of carbon dioxide and the discreetly-belched gaseous remnants of the morning’s breakfast (bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches, Venezuelan coffee, orange juice – acidic breakfasts lead to heartburn and gassy stomachs before lunch), and holding that thought in his mind causes his eye to twitch uncontrollably at unpredictable intervals. It’s nearly time to land now. Everything on the plane sort of slows down. The pilot and co-pilot argue. There’s an ionic, charged feeling to the air, like the minutes before a thunderstorm. And the shiny winged aluminum moves ever forward, surrounded by white globular objects. ♦

September 8, 2009

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