"Sky Daddy"

[fiefoe]

Kate Folk carried the remarkable premises to a predictively ambiguous end, but just carrying it through is quite a feat.

• I believed this was my destiny: for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate mid-flight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity. I couldn’t alter my fate, but perhaps, with the vision board’s help, I could hasten its arrival.
• * I couldn’t truthfully present my vision, nor did it seem wise to craft a fraudulent board. I didn’t want to give the universe the wrong idea, which might cause it to mix up my destiny with another person’s, as when a traveler picks up the wrong suitcase at baggage claim.
• Jet bridges nuzzled their temples, their rear ends pointed provocatively toward me. A beefy Boeing 777 pulled back from F4, pivoting on his slender ankles with surprising grace for such a big fellow.
• Though I’d take no pleasure from sex with this pilot, or any person, I would submit to the act to please him, and remain in good standing as his wife. I’d be caressed—infrequently, I hoped—by fingers that had recently touched the most intimate parts of a plane, and been anointed.
• I was grateful for the drippings of companionship she offered, in the form of our weekly happy hours and occasional mall excursions... As a rule, I avoided forming deep connections with other people. I knew my fate could manifest upon any flight, and I didn’t want to burden additional loved ones with grief.
• I lived in a windowless room, from which I could not view the sky’s traffic. Hearing the cry of planes above me as I lay in bed, while not being able to see them, added to the romance of our separation.
• * I preferred to fly near a mountain range, whose choppy airstreams, I hoped, would embolden a plane to yield to his lust for me, as alcohol primes a human lover for intercourse.
• Still, those were far better odds than winning the Powerball, a chance of one in three hundred million. The people I saw buying lottery tickets at 7-Eleven would surely think my dream was insane, but theirs was thirty times less likely, so who was the madwoman, really?
• Images of planes climbing to cruising altitude, in clear skies or against sherbet-hued sunsets. Lewd shots from below, that long stretch of belly, fish-smooth and flanked by testicular engines. I amassed dozens of juicy plane pics in a special VBB folder on my desktop.
• As my interests matured, I progressed from clouds to the harder stuff of contrails, which I learned to read like tea leaves, by a system of my own devising. An abundance of contrails was a sign my day would go well.
• I was a few minutes early, as a life devoted to air travel had molded me into neurotic punctuality.
• * The software’s artificial intelligence was refined by each decision we input, though our own decisions were cross-checked with the software and our efficiency ratings climbed the more frequently we concurred. I was happy to be paid twenty dollars an hour to flatter a machine that would soon replace me.
• my shard of plane. I’d purchased it on eBay for forty dollars and carried it everywhere, as a talisman and a tool of sexual gratification. The piece was white and roughly rectangular, the size of a domino... First there was the A320, who possessed, in my opinion, the handsomest face of any commercial airliner. I proceeded to the 787 Dreamliner, whose beauty was augmented by his lovely name. Next up, a vintage magazine ad of the retired McDonnell Douglas DC-9, a plane that flaunted a certain “bad boy” appeal, having been involved in 276 aviation occurrences with a combined 3,697 fatalities in his forty-nine years of service, among the worst safety records in the industry.
• N92823 had been in operation only two years at that point. We were both adolescents, and I hoped our flight had been as formative for him as it was for me. I became N92823’s biggest fan,
• They were SF State students like Kevin Chen, son of my landlords, who presumably had some stake in the world, being enrolled at an accredited institution.
• He was a handsome fellow, with sparkling blue eyes and a wide, affable face reminiscent of the A310.
• I’d had sex maybe ten times in my life, with two different men. Afterward, I always felt disgust, along with a bloated emptiness, as when I’d eaten a large quantity of popcorn for dinner.
• Stacy tore the nose from a croissant, which seemed to signal the start of things, as though the knob of pastry were the pin of a grenade. Esme volunteered to go first.
• “Maybe you should all mind your own business,” Karina said. Everyone—we humans, the glass animals on the credenza, Jesus on the wall behind me—remained still, as if the air had gelled.
• * The women crouched one by one to examine my board. They seemed delighted, as though it were the morbid artwork of a child.
• We stood and joined hands for the final stage of the ceremony. Esme led us through a manifestation mantra she’d learned at a corporate retreat: “Universe, empower me to become the best version of myself, in accordance with your infinite wisdom.”
• I reflected on the jacket, dangling with an attitude of nonchalance, as though it had never doubted its own worthiness.
• * I allowed people to assume I was heterosexual, and I suppose I was, as all planes are male in spirit, just as all boats are female, and helicopters possess the souls of mischievous children.
• I was stocked and fueled, my safety inspection complete. I was a cockpit of a woman—a warm, buzzing cavity ready to receive him.
• So Pilotdate.net was merely a front for a sunglasses-oriented spam operation. My hopes sank into the hollow core of the yoga ball on which I’d stationed my pelvis.
• I was pleased by how normal I looked in them. I could have been a stock model myself, my image summoned by the search term “woman on overpass.”
• We repeated this transaction a few times, getting our routine down to two minutes flat, but on the fourth day our manager returned early from her break to find the counter unattended, and fired us both.
• Then we were led through a drill featuring heavy turbulence. As the simulator rocked, the other candidates moved through the protocol we’d been trained in, while I collapsed into a seat, liquefied by desire. The drill was paused, and I claimed to have had a panic attack, which disqualified me from further training.
• I now understood a fraction of what Karina experienced each day. I felt they were taking something from me that I hadn’t offered. I’d dressed up on behalf of my date with a pilot, not to be gawked at by my coworkers. The planes didn’t care what I wore.
• * I was telegraphing to the world that I’d posted photos of myself on the internet for the purpose of finding someone to have sex with, or, worse, to build a life with. I wanted to assure the smirking silver fox that I only wanted to marry a pilot to maximize my access to planes before commercial flight became financially prohibitive due to the collapse of fossil capitalism.
• Could Simon be such an exalted fool? As I observed him rocking back and forth on his Asics Gels, tongue pressed into cheek as he squinted at the menu, I knew the truth in my heart: this man was no pilot.
• I ambled dreamily through Terminal 2, pausing to admire planes stabled at their gates, as though the terminal were my personal red-light district.
• I’d often wondered if flying alongside an aerophobe might provide the final ingredient in the stew of destiny. Like me, fearful flyers invested great stores of psychic energy into flight, commensurate with its grandeur and peril. I felt a kinship with them, and with everyone I flew beside, considering us spiritual siblings, our fates intertwined. There is no greater intimacy than to be fellow passengers of a doomed flight.
• * My eyes fell upon a blank space of wall where the sunset painting had hung. For the first time, I shared the outrage my coworkers had expressed yesterday. The loss of the painting was a more intimate offense than the destruction of the monitors or even the depositing of feces. By taking the sunset painting, the offender was attempting to deplete our wellness at its source. <> Seeking to calm myself, I watched videos of go-arounds—instances in which a landing is attempted and then aborted due to unsatisfactory conditions.
• * Scott admitted his brother had been taunting the bison, as he had a volatile temper and an imperious urge to dominate the natural world through camping.
• he’d come to understand the importance of “virtual hygiene,” a term I’d never heard before or since. Effective moderation, Scott claimed, could have spared him from seeing the video. We were doing the world a service.
• * my niece, Claudette, who’d been born last June. I’d met Claudette at Christmas and felt intimidated by the blank slate of her consciousness, and her proximity to the realm of nonexistence, from which she had so recently emerged.
• There were cubes of fruit pierced with skewers, as if to be roasted on a spit. There were canapés of smoked salmon folded into a flower shape, with the tiny roe of another fish piled on top, which seemed like a cruel joke at the expense of both animals.
• Judy, Stacy, and Nikki moved through their boards, which repeated similar themes from the last VBB. I noted they didn’t directly ask for higher salaries—overt material requests must have been considered gauche.
• I hadn’t actually agreed to go, but Karina’s will seemed impossible to resist. I accepted that this was the consequence of getting close to someone and calling her my best friend: she would want to do things with me.
• * It was risky to take advantage of a boss-like figure while his judgment was addled by horse tranquilizer in order to indulge my obsession with planes. In the moment, though, I wanted to fly more than I wanted my job, and anyway, Dave seemed set on doing it. My suggestion had coalesced into a plan that now throbbed with its own life. I trusted the universe wouldn’t lead me astray.
• My phone buzzed in my clutch. What??? Karina had written. I switched it to airplane mode. I was off the clock, as far as friendship went.
• I teared up, imagining N92823 lying dormant in a boneyard alongside other condemned planes, white angels arrayed in the desert like the lines of cocaine Dave had done with his friend.
• “Rather than going to dinner and a movie, people could take a flight together. We could make an app for it.” <> “I don’t think it would catch on,” I said, offended by the idea. I hated to think of my personal religion, access point to the eternal sublime, diminished to harmless fun for pampered tech workers.
• he shuffled into the aisle without complaint, and I felt guilty about the indignity we were about to subject him to. Alone, I could commune with the plane discreetly, but with Dave, the endeavor took on a more sordid quality. <> I took the window seat. Dave removed his sweatshirt and draped it over my lap. I gathered he wanted to use the sweatshirt as a shield beneath which he could stimulate me. His forethought unnerved me. I felt like a dead bird whose cavity he wanted to stuff with seasoned breadcrumbs.
• I realized that what he wanted from me was more onerous than a simple sexual exchange. He wanted an empathetic ear, someone to listen to his accounting of his life’s disappointments. Dave wanted a girlfriend, or at least someone who’d pretend to be his girlfriend. I didn’t see much difference between the two.
• * The loss of my laundry felt symbolic of a larger dissipation at the center of my life, a whirlpool sucking the edges of my attempts at respectability. My wardrobe had been bare-bones to begin with, and the loss of an entire load, comprising all the clothes I wore in a typical week, was devastating. I dreaded having to spend money to replace them, which would eat into my flight budget, especially now that I’d cut off my source of free flights.
• Helios Flight 522: The left engine flamed out, and the plane began his descent. It was possible the passengers were still alive at that point—that, as oxygen returned to their brains, they had regained consciousness, only to experience the last terrifying moments before impact. <> To be the sole conscious human on board a ghost plane was my ideal scenario. The video showed an animation of the plane cruising serenely above the Greek islands.
• * Dave was clearly unwell, chasing ghosts from his past, trying to make sense of how his life had arrived at this point. But this compulsion to excavate was part of the problem. It fed into his pathological self-absorption, the root, probably, of why Mike and Michelle had come to despise him. I felt sympathy for Dave, and regretted having placed him on my vision board, which seemed to have eroded the last load-bearing column of dignity within him.
• That afternoon, I’d gorged on crash animations until the air of my cube felt charged, hotboxing catastrophe as Anthony had hotboxed Karina’s car with cannabis. I was the last person they should trust when it came to flying.
• * I allowed Dave to believe this, when in fact, he’d been a tool I had used that, over time, had become more trouble than it was worth. Perhaps this was what it meant to care for people: to distort reality in a way that flattered them.
• * I felt a tenderness for Dave, after he’d been so kind to me, with the sparkling water and the tofu. I wanted to see how far I could ride this wave of tepid affection. What better way to prove I was reformed than to have sex with a man?
• I’d never introduced them to a romantic partner, or even mentioned the existence of one, and they must have found this lack unsettling. I could use Dave as proof I’d reached the shore of normal adulthood, exempt from speculation.
• Dave gazed at me across the table, and I knew he was thinking that I looked pretty, or something equally degrading. He was enjoying the idea of himself on a sexy sojourn with a younger woman. I resented him for casting me in this role, though I’d invited him to do so by asking him to accompany me, and letting him pay for everything.
• * I had a chance now to go after N92823 with all the funds I could garner. I hadn’t wanted our reunion to be funded by Dave, but this seemed different from asking for a loan. I wasn’t begging for charity; I was demanding compensation. It seemed like a form of justice. We’d make Dave pay for his recklessness, so that maybe he’d be more careful in the future. I texted his number to Simon, writing that I’d changed my mind, and wanted in on the deal. Hell yeah, Simon replied.
• It was funny that I, a person who had no interest in sex with people, was always getting tied up in workplace sex scandals.
• accusing me of being jealous of her relationship and saying I was weird—which I certainly was, but such an insult seemed beneath the person I’d thought she was. I saw Karina differently now. She was blinkered by conventional values, swaddled by her own beauty, the adult version of the popular girls I’d grown up with in Irvine.
• “What happens if there’s a fire?” Morgan said from the doorway of the bathroom. <> “I suppose I would burn to death,” I said. “Please, everyone, have some donuts.”
• The garbage bags further reduced the floor space. No one seemed to recognize them as makeshift beanbag chairs, and I feared the women would think I was such a slob, I’d left trash strewn around the room. <> “These are chairs, by the way,” I said, gesturing to them. Stacy plopped down on a bag, too exuberantly, it turned out, as the plastic burst, exposing a tangle of old leggings and underwear.
• When the flight attendants made their way down the aisle, I observed their movements closely, monitoring for erratic behavior that would indicate the onset of hypoxia. A woman in the row ahead of mine was served regular Coke, when she’d asked for Diet. The hairs rose on my forearms. Perhaps N92823’s pilots were already unconscious beyond the locked door of the cockpit.
• I’d felt similarly defeated at the end of my last binge, four years ago. I’d been trying to outrun my grief, and it worked as long as my money lasted. While I was airborne, I could imagine my dad was still alive. Flight was suspended animation, a period in which a person was exempt from obligation, cut off from the grounded world. I felt secure while locked in the pressurized cabin, 35,000 feet above the earth.
• * Soon I needed to use the lavatory. I peed and flushed, exulting in the violence with which my urine was sucked away. For once, I felt no shame in sullying a plane’s holding tank with my fluids. It was my spiteful parting gift to him. <> By the time we landed, I’d entered a state of grim acceptance. Not only had N92823 rejected me—so had the universe. The vision boards were a fraud. No transcendent fate awaited me, only a dull procession of days.
• By the time we’d traversed the tunnel, and emerged into the bright halls of Concourse B, my perspective had shifted. I’d forsaken humanity on behalf of planes, but humanity, in the form of Karina, had arrived to pull me back into its fold.