The Strange Fate of Flight QF11
You will disappear for a bit, but don’t be afraid.
Maren took her earbuds out, turned to the man sitting next to her, and asked if he heard the announcement. He surfaced from a real estate document on his laptop to tell her he hadn’t heard anything. It was a male voice, monotone, different from the pilot’s, and came through her earbuds over Enya’s “Orinoco Flow.”
“You don’t sleep much on these do you?” he said. He introduced himself as James. “You should try, we have about 7 hours left.” Travel fatigue, she thought. An artifact of a liminal state, that warm ethereal looseness between dreaming and waking, a green ocean flickering in and out—Let me sail, let me sail and Maren moving in and out of awareness, gliding over it all, under it, coming up, feeling the pressure of her head against the plane window, then swept back under the submersive vibrational hum of the 767’s engines.
Maren felt safe in her logic, with her dreams reflecting a familiar sequential rhythm as in she entered a house and left the house and entered the house again through the same door an order reflecting a life of sound deductions and linear deliberations. Daughter of a mathematician and doctor, Maren savored the solace she extracted from any tree of facts, no matter how small, ten years into a notable career as a corporate contracts attorney from Sydney. She lived a line-itemed, sleep-deprived, but never inefficient life, a first choice by her clients in exchange for the subjugated emotional intimacies of her five-year-old marriage to a talented guitarist from Tanzania, a marriage ebbing into an intercontinental malaise, with fewer connection points between her consulting trips and his gigs in Gosford, Springwood, and Sutherland. On this particular week long trip to Los Angeles, it crossed her mind that he might ask her for a divorce. It would probably arrive by text, late at night, his time, while in the arms of someone else or sitting at the edge of a disheveled Airbnb bed, her one-word reply prepared in her messages app well in advance: Okay.
So with the crystalline ocean and bell tones luring her further away from a life she had already departed, Maren thought that her mind decided to speak to her, giving her permission to disappear for a little while without a fractal collapse of the order she had for years cultivated in precise syncopated appointment-blocked hours. Its invitation: to muster the courage and linearity she knew she would need to rearrange being in relationship—to her husband, to her work, to time itself. In her broken sleep, the single beam of an overhead reading light became the moon over a green sea turning a dark midnight blue and back to green. The sun came out beside it, an orange glowing circular fire, cutting a gold path across the Orinoco ocean. Maren opened her eyes as one does when the sun first touches you in the morning, resting against your forehead and cheeks, to discover a smaller version of that sun just outside her oval window, hovering in the night a foot or so above the plane’s wing. A latticework of white electrical streaks coursed across its surface in shifting geometrical patterns. She grabbed James’ arm hard and pointed at it.
“What the hell is that?” he said, the orange light illuminating his face like a campfire.
It’s an orb, she said. They’ve been in the news, over past few weeks, over the ocean and Sydney and in the Blue Mountains. My god, it’s beautiful.
You will disappear for a bit, but don’t be afraid.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
Of course he didn’t, but they were not thoughts anyway, not anyone’s, not a voice but an understanding, a knowing, not internal or external. The orb rose and fell slightly but never touched the wing. The cabin’s overhead reading lights went dark throughout the cabin, as did the seat screens and no smoking and lavatory signs. The orange light fell over everyone’s faces, many sleeping remaining asleep. As Maren stared into the sphere, a warmth expanded through her mind and spread from there down the back of her neck, forward into her chest, and then down into her stomach, like someone had flipped her upside down and dipped her in warm bathwater up to the waist. Maren almost didn’t register the feeling of James pulling at her arm as he pointed to the opposite side of the plane. When she disconnected from it and looked across the aisle to where he pointed, she saw the second orb bobbing above the other wing. Gasps, exclamations, phones out but not filming since they had gone dead.
Both orbs shot up, leaving the cabin in total darkness. She wondered out loud if the cockpit controls had power. Maren grabbed James’ hand and squeezed it, her heart accelerating. She said they’re gone and James said he didn’t think so and he was right. Two bolts of orange lightning flashed simultaneously on opposite sides of the plane, just missing the wings. More gasps and exclamations. A few seconds later two orange bolts again. After the second flashes, Maren pressed her face against the window, getting as close as she could, squinting to see better what they were if they recurred. They did. She counted. One, two—and flash. Flashes on both sides of the plane every three seconds.
It occurred to her that they weren’t lightning bolts but the orbs, no longer floating but moving at unimaginable speeds, high to low back to high, crossing the wing edges, and doing it over and over. It’s them, she said to James, breathless. They’re circling us. They’re circling the plane. Every three seconds became every two seconds and then every second, as they seemed to speed up, creating an orange strobe effect. With each pulse they could see other passengers’ faces gripped by fear, awe, or both. Some people cried thinking there was something wrong with the plane and that they wouldn’t make it. The captain never said anything over the speakers to soothe nerves, but probably because the speaker system had gone out with the interior lights. The flight attendants hurried up and down the aisles, trying to calm people down without success.
Every second became a constancy of blinding orange light pouring in through the windows, as if a hundred orbs had joined the first two, spinning at light speed around the plane, around its full length, circling it in perfect rotational synchronization as if weaving a sleeve of solid light around them. Then the plane’s engines stopped, their loud whir giving way to the sound of wind rushing across the wings. Night turned to day in the cabin. People covered their eyes and pressed their heads against the seat backs because the orange light hurt from its brightness and people cried and hugged their children and prayed out loud. A stillness washed over Maren, her heart slowing to its sleep rhythm. She looked at James who also seemed to feel that equanimity, not a thread of panic in his eyes, only knowing. It’s going to happen now, Maren said. Yes, James said. Then everything went black.
The Edge Harmonic
Maren felt herself as a breath moving through a micro-thin membrane of iridescence, shrunk to a few molecules in size. She felt her mind still somewhat intact glinting with dislodged and jumbled memories: swinging high with her brother on that rusty swing set in their backyard in Katoomba, kissing Ibrahim on their second date in a smokey underground jazz club, spreading her mother’s ashes from a frog urn into Wentworth Falls, her name called in court after a motion of admission to solicitor status, locking herself in the bathroom after a fight with Ibrahim over his infidelity.
When she felt the outline of her body again, it was right where she had left it. Window seat, row 20. She looked around the empty cabin at the vacant seats, belts neatly buckled and centered on the seat cushions. She did not remember pulling her window shade down. Someone had drawn them all, except for one on the opposite side of the plane, open a crack and ushering in a thin blue glow. Maren unbuckled herself, got up, and made her way down the aisle to the front of the plane. The open side door revealed a step-off, an edge where the jetway should have started and instead of a tarmac below, she found herself looking down into a blue glowing chasm. She closed her eyes and put one foot out over the void and pushed off with the other. She floated down instead of falling fast. Her feet landed on a spongy wet material, squishing as she came down on it. A blue mist engulfed her, so thick she couldn’t see more than one arm’s length in any direction, nor determine the source of the illumination. James? Are you here? Is there anyone here?
You are here.
Where is here? Who are you? Where is everyone from the plane?
You are a notion now, an edge harmonic. Look back.
Maren looked back at the 767. The blue mist cleared around the fuselage. Layers of aluminum began peeling off without sound as if a massive heat gun made them curl up and off the plane. When they curled off it, they floated up in silence and disappeared into the blue mist which had thickened like cloud cover over her. Soon every physical piece of the plane had peeled off and risen up into that cloud. Only a grayish outline of the plane remained, a 767-shaped cut-out. A notion of a plane.
Will you do that to me?
It’s already happened. The body you feel is a trace, an edge harmonic. You are a notion now. This is how you are able to pass through.
Pass through where? Who are you?
We are the ones to whom you speak. Who have been with you before you were born and who are with you again now, at the beginning.
The beginning of what? Are you angels?
We are an assemblage, a culmination, the interstices of all things felt and held.
Can I see you?
The blue mist parted like a curtain rising up into the low cloud ceiling and there before her stood a group of four thin eight-foot beings with bluish skin that seemed to shine, long arms, long legs, small heads. Under her feet, a wet moss extended for hundreds of yards around them and curved upward in the distance as if carpeting a giant bowl-shaped valley. Rows of planes lined the valley, some as large as the 767 behind her and some as small as Cessnas. At least a hundred of them glowed with gaseous blue swirls and wisps, a fluorescence she felt as sadness.
Where are the people from the planes?
They are beginning their new journey elsewhere.
Will I go too?
Yes, but you will begin someplace special.
Where?
A place like where you are from, but at its beginning.
Like another earth?
A place of possibility.
Will anyone be there?
Yes. One like you.
I am afraid.
You don’t seem afraid. The notion of your heart is not afraid.
But I am.
You see order in all things. The crystalline notes. You are elemental.
One of the beings came toward her, taking two large steps forward, smooth and graceful as a ballet dancer. It slowly extended its arm toward her and touched the top of her head with one of its fingers. Maren gasped because upon contact she saw a blue ball floating in space, twice the size of earth. This is where she would be going.
I don’t think I can be what you want me to be. I cannot go. I will disappoint you.
The being crouched down so its head was eye-level. Maren reached up and touched its face. It was smooth, shining, serene. It had a small line for a mouth it did not seem to need. Its dark eyes felt human and kind, familiar as though of someone she had met once, years ago, at the outdoor Rocks Markets by Circular Quay.
You will be who you are, who you need to be, to begin again.
As she looked around at the derelict planes and the mossy holding ground, Maren understood what this meant. Not beginning again as in starting her own life over, but as in the lives of all those she would split off into.
Will we not hurt each other anymore?
The being removed her finger and backed up with grace to rejoin the others.
It’s time for you to go.
The blue mist descended from the thick cloud ceiling, its brightening glow consuming the planes and their edge harmonics and the beings and Maren. She took a deep breath of it, a deeper breath than she had ever taken before and felt weightless, ascending, accelerating out of that atmosphere into space with stars of all kinds—red, orange, blue, white—rushing past her in a bow-like arcs, bending streaks. She felt herself curve around the edge of a black hole, grazing its horizon, but not drawn into its center. She traveled like this for hours it felt like, every memory of every moment in her life tumbling across her mind. She felt herself as a consciousness outside of those memories but still integral to them, as if they could not fully separate from her, nor she from them. In that waterfall of unbounded mind she began to feel other memories that were not hers flooding through her in such rapid infinite succession that she felt like she had become the recipient of all human memories from the beginning of existence, all the terrible and beautiful articulations of a life left to become what it would be. Moving at the speed of light where every passing energy took some from her and gave some back, she felt like she needed to hold onto these traces most of all, so that they would be there with her when she began to slow and the stars around her slowed to points and she felt in her widening field of awareness the curvature of that enormous place they had promised with its untouched oceans and quiet forests and snow-capped mountains.
You can listen to this story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and on the web