Arrival (excerpt from "Where All the Waters Meet," a novel)
by Nick Fowler
Annabel sits inside a golden cone of window light. With the drink service completed, the flight attendants seated and for the time being relieved, the pilot imaginary and omnipotent, air travel's tinkling equilibrium has been mastered at last. A pleasant vacuum fills her ears. Earthly worries are silly in miniature; The New York Times in the lap of the garlicky woman next to her is a neurotically involved comic book. Slowly, the jet's resolute hum begins to enfold her. Dimly, she hears the pilot's weathered voice, ticking off details about the ocean allegedly spinning beneath a thin layer of cloud, like cheese over French onion soup. Despite his voice, which seems to be suppressing a sort of paranoia, both his own and his passengers', Annabel lets her limbs loosen with delicious fatigue.
Soon she can see, she can feel, all at once, all points of space and time. And though there are certain of these she chooses for the moment to ignore, she focuses on those things intimately proximate, like each of the million ball bearings, turbines, and gears in the jet's nooks and crannies. She becomes coolly aware of the massive thing calculating, taking stock of itself, as it hurtles toward infinity--a vast metal imagination, the clouds its daydreams. And then in a minute, or an hour, or a past lifetime- as the worn flight attendant serves plastic cubicles of chalky mash potatoes and rubbery veal Parmigiana to the odd little girl who's been nodding off since the flight attendant's safety routine---the hum becomes the murmur of Annabel's own longing.
Or is it her fear?
Somewhere along the line the two have entangled, into something she now envisions as the Hippocratic symbol on the medication bottles her mother Caddy kept on her nightstand. Suddenly she understands that she's dreaming the plane, that as long as she remains under sleep's peevish spell, she can keep the thing afloat. This tremendous fight against gravity is, she realizes now, in that hypnagogic half-light in which she often makes discoveries about that world just above, an artistic one. Gravity is mortality.
She would not know for months what exactly was the sudden dark shape that fell a few feet from her window-- the strange bird, wings flailing, who'd forgotten how to fly. For now she lets herself believe it's an angel. Lets herself believe in the symbolism of her new City. Which she can see in the distance, promising, an immense cereal box toy.
Lullabiss.