It’s past two in the morning when the bottle spins to Alyssa; we see her tilt the rest of her shot into her mouth and the way she’s grabbing the glass lets us know we’re in for a hell of a story. She crosses her legs and leans into the circle, beckoning us in.
“There’s two thing I want to make clear before I begin this. The first is trust. I know the truth of what I’m about to say with my own body, and I swear on my tits that I’m not making this shit up. The second is the Vegas rule. What I’m saying here stays in here. Doesn’t leave the room. You’ll never hear this again from me, so listen close.”
Ramzi shuts the window and the draft in the room hisses to a stop.
Alyssa says:
“So some of you know this—some of you don’t—but me and my mother, we’re from the Philippines, right? Cebu City, same as our friend Ferdi. We’re not very close, but I got to asking her one night about why she’s never gone back to visit her family. I figured she’d be a little more open that night since I’d finally sat down with her to watch our national team get their asses handed to them in the AFC, and we’re both just staring at the screen watching the slow-motion massacre when she tells me this story she’s never told me before.
(“Pinoy soccer is garbage and everybody knows it,” says Ferdi. He is shushed with a shot of rum.)
“She calls me Lisa. She only calls me Lisa when she’s drunk or it’s my birthday and she’s trying to show that she gives a shit or whatever, okay? She calls me Lisa, and she tells me about how we flew into the country. I was like six, seven months in the womb, I’m not supposed to remember this. This grown woman tells me about how she squeezed onto that plane—seat 35A, she remembers very clearly, because it was her first time flying long distance and she wanted to get a window seat to see as much of the view as possible. Turns out on most planes that’s the wing seat, you look right outside your window and all you’ll see is a hundred feet of sheet metal and maybe a little bit of sky. This part becomes important later. Remember it closely, right?
“Turns out there are a whole lot of problems when you go on a plane while pregnant. I don’t kick very much as a baby, but the cabin pressure’s acting on her blood vessels and I imagine the extra load of having to pump a second tiny heart just makes your own work in really fucked-up ways when you’re thirty thousand feet up in the air, so she gets up a couple times, not even to piss or anything, but to walk up and down the aisle a couple of times just to stretch her legs. And she tells it to me with this sense of incredible urgency, because she’s this five-foot-tall tiny brown woman without a legal passport and every time she has to go to the aisle, she has to push aside these two very British elderly men, okay? She doesn’t sleep a wink on that flight because she’s so anxious. She can feel the blood stopping in her veins, she tells me. Like that feeling you get just before you throw up drunk but you’re still lucid enough to get up and place yourself square in front of the toilet bowl before it all vents out. Six or seven times she excuses herself and gets up with utter conviction, utterly precise in the notion that if she doesn’t move right now, she’s going to die.
“Which is a whole ‘nother metaphor for the undocumented migrant thing, which affects both of us dearly, but I’m not going to go into that here.
(Someone snaps their fingers like it’s a poetry slam. I forget who.)
“It’s the fourth or fifth time, she says, when she meets the eye of this other Pinoy woman who’s sitting way across the cabin from her. She remembers very clearly where this woman is sitting: same row as her, the opposite window seat, so 35J or K or something. This woman, she has the most brilliant silver hair my mother has ever seen. Like the kind you only get by getting old, except this woman also didn’t look a day over forty. It sounds creepy now, but it’s also halfway through a redeye flight and the cabin is nearly pitch-black, so when I hear it I think she’s misremembering. Anyway, this woman locks eyes with her and smiles in that courteous ‘I’m glad we’re both here’ kind of way that just sticks with her because it seemed so gentle, so expansive, that for a while that gesture felt like the biggest thing in that enclosed space. She remembers feeling relieved. She walks as far as the galley and asks for a cup of juice and the steward pours it for her for the fourth or fifth time. She apologises to the steward, who doesn’t seem to understand.
“Then she turns around and walks back. On the way back she turns to look at the woman again. The woman is now leaning her head against the window, looking out, resting her hand on her chin, and because it’s the wing seat, every time the wing light flashes it illuminates her head in vibrant silver. This grandma, my mother thinks, must be visiting her grandchildren or whatever, she looks like she’s travelling alone, so she makes a note talk to her somehow when they disembark. We’re outgoing people like that, okay? She gets back to her seat, squeezing past the two white men again, who have given up trying to sleep and are talking to each other in words she can’t understand clearly at this point. It’s eight hours into the fifteen-hour flight. She can hear people tossing and turning in the rows ahead and behind her, because nobody ever sleeps properly when strapped to a chair in a moving tube in cattle class. She closes her eyes and tries to sleep upright so as not to disturb the people behind her. She can feel the rumble of the airplane, she can feel the blood pooling in her legs again, she can hear the British men discussing her to her right, and she think she would have absolutely given up and wrenched open the emergency exit door by now if that nice woman with the white hair hadn’t smiled at her when she crossed the cabin.
(“British ‘people’,” scoffs Ramzi with air quotes. About two people laugh.)
“At some point she is awoken because the plane is about to land. This is the hard part because it’s the tail end of the flight where you can’t get up from your seat but if you’ve just woken up there are a whole lot of bodily functions you need to execute. Her bladder and legs feel hot and heavy. She tries to get up once or twice but the captain is saying something over the speakers and there are dinging sounds coming on from all around the cabin, which makes her want to sit down. The cabin lights are on and her eyes have not adjusted. This part of the story seems very important to her because she is gesturing to me with her hands over her face, two OK-signs like this, and leaning in very close to me. The lights were in her eyes. It was very hard to see.
“I am in the womb in this story. I have been surprisingly well-behaved during this flight. This is not a story where she brings me up only to blame me for making her put on weight, for getting her addicted to Coca-Cola. It’s almost hard to believe that she’s pregnant in this story at all. But I’m in this story all right, because at that moment she feels an intense panic in her body localised in her womb. She wants to get up and she can’t. She wants to walk around, but physically and psychically can’t. The sensation consumes her body and tenses her every muscle. Her voice is very soft when she is telling me this.
“The captain’s voice comes on, this time in Tagalog. He says the plane will not be landing at the appointed time. He says there is a layer of heavy air that the plane cannot break through, and that the plane and five others have entered a holding pattern in the sky above Los Angeles International. This is when my mother notices the entire cabin has been frozen at like, a twenty-five degree tilt. The plane’s banking, and holding it tight. It is neither ascending nor descending. This is not helping the panic in her belly. There was something wrong about the way the plane was angled, she tells me. It made sense in her head that a banking plane would tilt that way, but the angle was all wrong.
“The plane is hovering over the terminal, stuck in this queue for what feels like absolutely forever. She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to count the seconds. She finds that she cannot. The people all around her have gone deadly silent. There is only the sound of the plane and the blood rushing in her body. All sorts of hormones are firing off inside her by now, she’s sure of it. And as she tells it to me I can also feel some sort of strange tension rising in my body, from my diaphragm upwards into my throat, a yellow sort of rush like I’m just about to say something really stupid but can’t. I don’t know if epigenetics is real or whatever, but I felt what she was telling me. It was like my body was remembering the moment from inside the womb, and recreating it from her words.
“I speak to this woman a total of twenty words a month, okay? But the feeling, this feeling was real, like it came from the blood. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t terror. It was something else.
“She tells me: she opened her eyes. She tells me in that cabin tilted horribly wrong at twenty-five degrees she can see right across the row because the two British men are gone. Everybody in that row is gone. Instead of people all that remains are like these piles of white dust, like crushed pottery. And the interior of the cabin is lit, but the walls and ceiling and upholstery are all dirt black. At the other end of the row is the Pinoy woman from before with the silver hair. She is looking straight at my mother. And she is smiling that same, kindly smile as if everything is going to be okay. As if this was meant to happen all along.
“The head of the woman is blocking the window behind her, my mother remembers. It is bright outside because the plane is scheduled to land at eight forty-five a.m. But there is something about the brightness that disturbs my mother. It is bright in the same way that the woman’s head of hair is bright. She realises the woman is looking past her, over her shoulder to where the window is. She doesn’t remember doing it—she tells me—but she finds herself turning to look. She finds herself reaching for the window shutter and sliding it upwards and open.
“And that’s what saves her. The wing. The brightness is coming from the ground. It is shining around the edges of the wing, refracting around it, I guess—but my mother gets the sensation that the plane is flying over something incredibly hot and bright, something she’s not supposed to look at—except that the entirety of what she’s not supposed to look at is blocked by the motherfucking wing.
“The next thing she knows, there is a hot towel in her hands, the window is half-closed again, the British men next to her are saying something incomprehensible, people all around the cabin are folding their tray tables and putting their shit away in their handbags or something and it’s like absolutely fucking nothing has happened. The plane’s still banking but it feels like it’s easing out, or at least like it’s tilting in a way that’s physically conceivable. And of course, with all the people in their seats she can’t see the woman with the silver hair on the other end of the cabin. When the plane taxis to a stop—fifteen minutes behind schedule, mind you—and everybody stands up to get their bags or whatever, the woman is, you guessed it, nowhere to be found.
There are a few seconds of silence as we mark what we’ve just heard. This is wild, even for Alyssa’s standards. But stranger things have happened, and some of us have the scars to prove it. Alyssa looks around at every one of us and we look at her and nobody dares to make a sound.
“Here’s the thing. When I hear this story, of course I get real obsessive over whether it’s like, symbolic or something, right? I go on a deep dive on plane crashes and aircraft safety and near-death-experiences and whatnot. I’ve never found a thing on this. No anniversary of any tragic crash, no significant numerological coincidences, nada. I’ve tracked down the history of this exact flight—don’t ask me how—and absolutely nothing abnormal comes up with that either. It’s just one of the numerous flights in the industry with an absolutely perfect track record. And my mother lands and stays with her sister for two months until I get born and we move into Queens and she gets a job at the laundromat across the street and the rest is history. I grow up a perfectly unhaunted child. I finish high school, get into college, and I’m here right now in this room telling you this story like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“But there’s something about the window that still gets me, when I remember the way she’s telling it. Her exact words were: ‘The view of the ground was blocked from me.’ I think what she really meant to say was ‘taken’. Fate itself had not permitted her this kindness. She’s never sat on a plane since then, mostly because of the passport thing—but I feel like if she could, she would not have hesitated at a second chance to look out of that window again.”