Final Descent

Lightning flashed, and the airplane dropped again. As I floated off my seat, I decided something. I should not have gone to Egypt to watch my brother play baseball.

This was back when my family lived in London. My brother Paul’s baseball team had no local competition, so it flew around the world in search of opponents. The big tournament that year was in Cairo, a dusty city where motorcycles flout traffic laws, vendors sell barbecue through clouds of flies, and crowds halt to pray when a voice sings out from the nearest mosque.

But sprinkled through the scene are reminders of America. Starbucks, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s—you can eat in Cairo like you never left Cleveland. And you’d better, too, because the local food will give you diarrhea. Still, it’s jarring to find a KFC beside the pyramids. The Sphinx stares at it, endlessly, craving a bucket of chicken wings. So was it weird to watch baseball in Egypt? Yes, but it fit.

After the tournament, my brother John and I boarded a plane to New York. John let me take the window seat because periodically during a flight I like to check that the wings are still attached. I don’t think they would snap off, but the image tortures me. The wings snapping, the engines exploding, a flight attendant weeping into a square paper napkin.

Welcome to my mind. It’s always like this, a parade of calamities. The stomach ache is colon cancer. The eighteen-wheeler will swipe into me. The bathtub upstairs will crush me when the earthquake topples the house. In Cairo, I had been a wreck, seeing a bomb in every bag, a knife in every pocket, and there were lots of bags and pockets on the plane.

After takeoff, the pilot announced there was a storm on our route. But not to worry, he would avoid it. My stomach clenched.

The screen at John’s seat would not turn on, and the flight attendants could not fix it. So John stared at nothing for hours, regretting that he gave me the window seat. Occasionally, he glanced at my screen to see what I was watching, but I was always watching the flight map, double-checking the pilot’s work.

Dinner came and gave John something to do, but as he ate, a tray of food landed on his shin, splattering his pants. We looked up and found an old man shaking in the row ahead, across the aisle. His arms pumped. His head trembled. He looked like he was wrestling someone invisible.

A flight attendant ran to him. “Seizure!” she called, and all the flight attendants gathered round, crowding the aisle with their butts in John’s face. They tried to hoist the man forward as he choked on his vomit. An announcement went out: “Is there a doctor onboard?”

A middle-aged couple caught my eye. The man stared at his dinner, his arms limp and his face sad, while the woman stared at him. Each was waiting for something.

“I’m a doctor,” the man admitted at last with a sigh, getting up from his dinner, looking annoyed. “Of course this happened,” he seemed to be thinking. “Of course…”

I worried for the man having seizures, but even more, I worried he would make the plane crash. I know that’s irrational, but flying in a big metal tube never felt rational to me. It felt like a delicate miracle, barely pulled off. Like a soap bubble. Any disturbance could pop us.

As the doctor examined his new patient, the plane started to rumble. We had hit the storm. At the first bump, I jumped and grabbed my armrests, but after a minute I got control of myself. “You’re OK,” I said, rubbing my knee. “It’s just some bumps.” Then the plane dropped.

You know that feeling when your bike goes over a curb? Imagine that but bigger, like your bike goes over a curb and down a manhole, and the ground you took for granted has vanished, and you’re falling, and before you can even register what’s happening, you collide with something hard. The plane dropped like that. The passengers screamed. The doctor fell over. The woman in front of us threw up her hands, still holding her wine glass. The wine flew out of the glass, over her seat, and onto John.

The plane dropped again and again, having a seizure of its own. All around me, passengers said their last words. “I love you!” they cried to each other. “I love you.” But I did not tell John I loved him; I was too busy begging God to save me. John said nothing either. He was too wet.

An old woman began to hyperventilate in the seat behind John, and to give her space, the crew pushed John’s backrest forward, beyond its normal setting, until his head hung over his knees. At John’s side, one of the pilots questioned the doctor. Did the man having seizures need a hospital? Should the plane land?

Lightning flashed outside, and the plane lurched, knocking the pilot to the floor. As he tried to stand, the plane lurched again, so he crawled up the cabin, grabbing the curtain at the front to hoist himself into the cockpit. Over the loudspeaker came the scariest four words in English: “Flight attendants, brace yourselves.” The nose of the plane swung down, my body lifted with the sensation of falling, and we plummeted.

I was going to die. I was certain. And I felt no panic, no grief—only relief. I did not have to keep guard anymore. No more fretting. No more struggling. A fog lifted, and I could perceive the divinity everywhere. Look at the light, even the light from the tiny bulb above my head. It’s holy. It’s the light Caravaggio saw. See how it illuminates the grey plastic tray table, revealing a texture like a desert landscape. Hear the plane roar and rattle. It’s a rhythm, a song. And this feeling of floating, which I mistook for G forces, is my soul ascending to God.

John looked at me, terrified. “It’s OK,” I told him, meaning the whole universe. Everything was a gift. We would die together, my brother and I, and that was a beautiful, lucky way to die. I had been wrong, always so wrong, about death.

But all things pass. The pilot found the altitude he wanted, the plane leveled out, and the turbulence subsided. I realized I was not going to die after all, and I vowed to remember what I had learned here, to live the rest of my life with this peace. But within minutes I was a wreck again, worse than ever, strangling my armrests, jumping at every bump. Over the next few hours, the plane grew dark and peaceful, but while the other passengers dozed, I kept my nose pressed to the window, watching for lightning, until a flight attendant gave me a beer I had not ordered. “You need it, honey,” she said.

Oh, I forgot to mention John and I had diarrhea the whole time. (We should have eaten at KFC.) While the plane and the old man were having seizures, we pooped our pants. When the plane settled and the old man recovered, John and I debriefed and decided to debrief, taking turns waddling to the bathroom and stuffing our boxers in the trash. On any other flight, that would have been a whole story worth telling.