The Best American Essays 2011 Part 4

I AWOKE IN A FIELD, on my back. My left eye was sealed shut. Out of the corner of my right eye I spotted a girl. She sat with her legs crossed. Her torn clothes hung off her shoulders. At the elbow she cradled her arm and shook her head. Down my right cheek I felt something wet. When I caught myself trying to wipe it away, I readjusted my head. The girl looked over at me and held up her arm. From wrist to elbow it shone black and slick, with a single suppurated crease folding in on itself. "My skin will never be the same," she lamented.

Tactically scattered at the end of the runway were suitcases, a car seat, and a teddy bear. Some of the suitcases were closed, but had sticking out from their zippers and pockets a sock or a shirtsleeve. To an outsider this gave the impression of a hastily done packing job. One of the suitcases. .h.i.t the ground near the girl. When it did something popped and sirens came alive. I couldn't see the flames, but when the girl looked up, her irises blazed and I heard a whoosh. In the distance the air traffic control tower loomed over a bright green field and some taxiing regional jets. A warm southwesterly breeze blew the smoke our direction. With the back of my hand I covered my mouth.

"Couldn't have picked a better day for-" started a fireman. His sentence was blotted out by the screams of a nearby woman. "I've got burns over eighty percent of my body and I've been waiting fifteen minutes for an ambulance!"

"Ma'am-" began the fireman.

"I guess I'm just not burned enough," shouted the woman. Someone laughed and someone else said, "Relax. The man seated next to me had a heart attack and it took them forty-five minutes to get to him."

"He should have been dead," murmured the girl.

Something exploded.

The girl began to rock herself.

Seconds later a woman was seen running. "My baby! My baby!" she yelled. "Help me find my baby!"

The morning breeze blew loose hair across my cheek and settled it into one of the cuts. A woman wearing a blue uniform walked over and knelt down beside me. "What's your name?" she asked, taking two fingers to my wrist.

"Bernadette," I told her.

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-three."

"You've got significant trauma to the bridge of your nose, Bernadette. I'm concerned that if these bones are fractured they may cause the brain to connect with the outside environment. Where does it hurt?"

"I can't see out of my eyes," I told her.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"Flamingos. Six of them, in the marsh along the runway."

"Flamingos?" She slid a green tag onto my wrist.

"Yes. Pink ones."

She wrote something down, stood up, and gestured toward the fire. "We've got a confused head injury, right over here."

As we ascended over the Mediterranean on a routine flight to Paris, the engine over which I was seated exploded. It was a systematic and orderly blow. It did not build as in a Berlioz cantata or culminate from a collection of small, meaningless gestures-a whistle, a hiss, a persistent rattle-in a cacophony of tearing metal, snapping cables, and shattering gla.s.s. It was a noise so full and palpable, so concise and final, that whatever followed I hoped would follow swiftly.

The source of the explosion was not immediately discernible to all pa.s.sengers-it seemed to come from the back of the airplane, yet it had an all-encompa.s.sing quality leaving those seated forward or aft craning their necks like hungry birds. Not far from where I rested my head against the window of an over-wing seat, a smoke-choked engine burned. The flames, refracting through the window, illuminated my reflection. We were in a sharp right bank and I looked down, astonished to see the deep green of the Mediterranean against the fire and smoke.

My first reaction was not one of tragic realization-I did not bury my face in my hands or scream or yell or weep. In other circ.u.mstances I might have found comic the heady response with which the universe had answered my persistent and recurring dreams, but this felt like a cruel cosmic joke, like Hamlet laughing along with the gravediggers. Holy Mother f.u.c.k! I said aloud. You've got to be kidding me. The lights went out. The plane shuddered and yawed. The woman across the aisle began to cry.

A disquieting silence I interpreted as a French response to crisis followed. No announcements were made, no instructions given. I slid the shade down over the window and stared ahead. The tray table in front of me, the seatback cover, and the armrests all took on the dreadful significance objects acquire in bad dreams. I began to pray aloud. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. It was not so much a prayer as an uninflected mantra modulated by my strained breathing. Blessed art thou among women.

"Are you all right?" the man seated next to me asked in a French accent. He patted my clenched hand. "We've just lost an engine," he a.s.sured.

But lost was too pa.s.sive, too quiet a word. People lost dogs or lost family to cancer, when in actuality cars ran over dogs and cancer metastasized. What I felt and what I witnessed prior to this loss of engine power was an explosion: an earsplitting bang, accompanied by a forceful jerk of the airplane and the sudden and lurid and unrelenting spewing of fire and sparks and smoke.

"I am a pilot," the Frenchman said. "The airplane can fly on one engine. But not for very long."

My memories of crashing planes date as far back as I can remember. As a five-year-old I saw on the news a photograph of an American Airlines DC-10 taken by an amateur photographer seconds after it took off and seconds before it rolled over. The plane hung perpendicular to the ground, a thin white stream of leaked hydraulic fuel trailing from the place where the engine had severed. The news described the photographer as "stunned" and "shaking." The photographer described the plane as "slow-moving" and "horrifying." At seven, I watched coverage of an Air Florida DC-9 after it crashed into the 14th Street Bridge during a blizzard. Pa.s.sengers, bobbing around the Potomac River, clung to chunks of ice as a helicopter tried and failed to toss them life preservers. At fifteen, live coverage of the United DC-10 crash in Sioux City, Iowa, aired on TV. Midflight, on its way to Chicago from Denver, the plane experienced catastrophic hydraulic failure rendering it unable to steady itself, make left turns, or slow down. The wingtip hit first, leaving a three-foot gouge in the runway. It cartwheeled. Broke into four pieces. Survivors who, from their hospital beds, saw the crash on the news asked, "What crash was that?" and "Were there any survivors?"

When my sister called to tell me she heard something on the radio "about that crash in Iowa you always talk about," I took down the information. They were interviewing Jerry Schemmel, "the voice of the Denver Nuggets," who went back into the burning plane to save a baby whose cries he heard from the cornfield. I ordered a used copy of his book Chosen to Live. Aside from the t.i.tle's unsettling suggestion that those who perished had been so chosen, I stopped reading after Schemmel prosaically describes the feeling of the crash as "exactly how you'd expect it to feel if you'd dropped thousands of feet out of the sky and hit the ground."

Schemmel's account of the moments between the failure of the number-two engine on the tail of the plane and the crash landing in an Iowa cornfield is vivid as far as it goes. What's more interesting is the exchange he has with a crying woman and her seven-year-old son seated in front of him in row 22. Compelled to soothe the two after he overhears the child ask his mother if they are going to die, he lies and tells them that he is a pilot, and a.s.sures them that they are not going to die: planes are made to fly normally when an engine fails.

My fear of flying was not so much informed by memories of crashing planes as it was characterized by a priori knowledge of a crash. Loosely translated, I feared receiving a sign, a peremptory warning that an airplane might at any moment send me a crazy vibe before hurling itself from the sky. The fear was accompanied by a lesser, secondary fear, that upon receipt of the sign, I might take the wrong course of action. Earlier in my life, I had become so anxious after booking a flight to Chicago that I swallowed a roommate's prescription sleeping pills on the way to the airport. The pills induced a paranoid delusion involving New Age prophet Edgar Cayce and an elevator. Edgar Cayce could read auras, a gift I discovered we had in common when I began working at a psychic fair in my late teens. For five dollars customers could stand in front of a white backdrop while I outlined in Crayola marker the colors emanating from their crown chakras. A green aura meant healing; a yellow, intelligence; pink, love. There were vibrant auras, indicating health and vitality, and lackl.u.s.ter auras, indicating the soul's withdrawal from the body. One day while shopping for sweaters Edgar Cayce stepped into a department store elevator. It was brightly lit and full of shoppers, yet it felt "dark," a feeling he ascribed to catastrophe and impending doom. When he could not see the auras of the other occupants, he quickly stepped out. The doors closed, the cables snapped, the elevator fell to the bas.e.m.e.nt, killing everyone aboard.

If I could not see the auras of the other pa.s.sengers, I would get off the airplane. But the effects of the sleeping pills had grown more intense, heightening my paranoia. The closer I got to the gate, the more I feared misreading luggage for auras and vice versa. As I walked down the jetway, I decided that unless either of my recently deceased grandparents appeared on the flight, I would stay on the airplane. From then on, I avoided certain flight numbers, flying on certain dates, during inauspicious astrological aspects such as squares and oppositions, as well as on the days leading up to the peaks of these aspects, which, as it turned out, were also terrible for bill-paying and dental treatments.

The Rockwell Collins hangar looks like the set of a zombie movie. Inside, children dressed in torn T-shirts and old pajama bottoms, their faces and arms smeared with shades of red, gray, and purple paint, chase one another. "We're dead! We're dead!" yells a boy covered in gray paint. He points behind me. "See that plastic bag?" I turn to where I think he is pointing and shake my head. "Right there. Can't you see it? It's filled with DEAD people!" He laughs maniacally.

I ask his friend, who is less cheerful and also painted gray, if he too is dead. He nods solemnly, lifting his arm to reveal the tag on his wrist: DOA. "My grandma gets to ride in an ambulance to the hospital and watch TV all day and I have to lay there," he says. "So unfair."

The grandma walks up, covered in fake blood. A blue poker chip juts from her forehead. "What happened to you?" she asks me.

I hold up my wrist: lacerations.

Since my teenage years my sleep has been disrupted by crashing planes. So vivid and specific are the dreams in terms of make and model of the airplane that for a while I believed them an augury of a crash to come. "Those are anxiety dreams," my mom pointed out when I told her about a disturbingly vivid crash in which a Russian airliner carried some uniformed schoolchildren. "You're worried about teaching," she said. Over the years I have followed the trajectory of the dreams in a journal and notice that they fall into three categories. In the first kind of dream, I watch from a verdant field as the distressed plane struggles to stay aloft; in the second, I stand in line with other pa.s.sengers preparing to jump from the falling airplane and devising my strategy for hitting the ground; and in the third, I sit patiently in my seat waiting for the plane to crash, telling myself it will all end soon enough. There are nuances, of course. Often, as I stand in the field, watching the distressed airplane, the engines or the wings fall off. Often the plane takes off too steeply, makes it about fifty feet into the air, stalls, and falls back to earth. Sometimes, when I am on the airplane, I take off my shoes before jumping.

In my waking life, I understand the impossibility (not to mention the ensuing complications were it possible) of opening a bulkhead door and leaping from a cruising 747. But the dreams do not obey the laws of physics. One feature remains immutable in all of them, and yet it contains the single most frightful aspect of a crashing plane: the unmitigated spinning with which it drops from the sky. Never do they fall the way Alaska Airlines fell from 31,500 feet to 23,000 feet in eighty seconds and then fell again in an inverted nosedive at 18,000 feet for eighty-one seconds off the coast of Ventura, where a pa.s.senger seat and tray table had washed up on the beach and I learned to surf.

The idea of a one-and-three-quarter-inch-thick piece of fibergla.s.s separating me from cold water beneath which thrived a vast and unforgiving ecosystem did not inveigle me. Still, something about the surfers bobbing on the sea, sleek and elegant, shiny and black, had me wondering what sort of Elysian secret propelled them into all that deep water again and again. My board was seven feet one inch long, a c.u.mbersome thing, with the maker's name, Total Commitment, written across it. I liked taking my Total Commitment out late in the morning or early in the afternoon when the sun was bright and the white water came in full and frothy. Waves are best in the early morning and evening, but at midday the white water was beautiful: it gathered around my knees like big tufts of tulle from a ballerina's skirt. Once I got my board beyond the break it took a great deal of effort-my duck dives were not efficient. I could not push the nose of my board far enough beneath the wave without it dislodging me several yards closer to sh.o.r.e. I stretched out belly down, exhausted, hung my hand over the top, and let the water lap over it in neat little swirls.

More often I found myself floating around at dusk, staring at the line on the horizon where the water meets the sky. I was content to float and had even begun to enjoy the firmament reflected in the water around me. The salt.w.a.ter had the same effect as that of cold, clear air pa.s.sing across a glacier on Mount Rainier and the hot, sagey smell of the Mojave Desert and the rustling of corn on a Midwest highway. But floating was not typical surfing behavior. It caused other surfers to paddle over, suggesting I slide my body a little further up or reach my arms like this or kick my feet while reaching my arms like this. These are helpful suggestions when you are trying to paddle beyond the surf. But if you are trying to get back to sh.o.r.e, as I was when I finished floating, you must negotiate the crashing waves around you. And so, quite unintentionally, I caught my first wave. A tug and a pull nudged me from behind and in one smooth motion I was dropped into and carried down the face. It happened so fast that by the time I thought to pop up onto my feet, the g-force was too strong. I sped along, my stomach soldered to the board, the sh.o.r.e out of the corner of my eye approaching at an angle.

Anyone who has caught a wave knows that once you catch your first and ride it to sh.o.r.e, you will-as long as you are near water and there are waves-seek another and another after that. But knowing which waves to paddle for and which to let pa.s.s is not instinctual; my timing was off. I was too far in front of the wave: the nose of my board pitched forward and up. When the wave began to break, the nose pitched down. As frequently as this happened, I was never prepared for the plunge followed by the violence with which the wave would thrash me and toss me and press me into the ocean floor. But I knew the drill: take in as much air as you can hold, grab the back of your neck with your hands, brace.

The hangar opens to a road designated for emergency vehicle transport only. Members of the county medical community, the Transportation Safety a.s.sociation, search and rescue, firefighters, and police officers eat doughnuts with reporters whose cameras sit on tripods and chat with members of local news stations who are testing mikes. The children linger on the precipice, making faces at the cameras and daring one another to step outside of the hangar. The morning is beautiful and dew-filled, with clear skies and a warm breeze. In the distance an air traffic control tower looms over a bright green field and some taxiing regional jets. "Couldn't have picked a better day for a crash," says a fireman. Soon all the partic.i.p.ants, nearly one hundred volunteers-all victims-have gathered at the opening-crossed arms, shifting-while those whose various suppurations are punctured by poker chips and oozing Vaseline and fake blood stand still and supine. The man next to me acknowledges those around him by bending his torso and nodding adroitly like the Tin Man. A fake plastic bone protrudes from his forearm, a red poker chip from his leg. The morning May breeze blows loose hair across my cheek and settles it into one of the cuts. I smile and try not itch where the fake blood has sealed my eyelashes to the upper eyelid, forcing my eye open. We grow quiet. Some of the dead are restless, asking to go home already. The airport transit buses arrive and cheers erupt. We are herded back to the cafeteria tables in the center of the hangar for a debriefing. Attention is called. Sincere thanks are given. Special thanks are given. Time taken from our busy schedules is given appreciation. And then the tone of voice changes and instructions are given: It's very important that you take your individual role seriously. You are actors and we expect, when the time comes, you act your designated part. That means no laughing. If you start laughing the person next you starts laughing and pretty soon everyone is laughing. If you have a real emergency and you need attention, you need to say I have a real emergency; otherwise the medical teams will a.s.sume you are playing your designated role. Finally, when the drill is over, please return any shrapnel you have on your person, including the poker chips, the Plexiglas, and the plastic intestines. Thank you.

I booked my flight from Paris to Los Angeles for the ten-year anniversary of the death of Jerry Garcia. I had notions of arriving in Southern California to various commemorations involving drum circles and calico dresses, and to ensure my August ninth arrival, I booked in haste a flight from the South of France to Paris for the evening of August eighth. The flight had been delayed. I sat in the airport eating black licorice and reading the letters of Abelard and Heloise. When I finally took seat 22F on an over-wing window, I was bored with the patriarchal prerogatives of twelfth-century France and wanted to go home. I closed the book and propped my head against the window. The long starboard wing of the Airbus spread out before me, the engine hummed, and the slats retracted. As we began to ascend I noticed the flamingos.

A decade earlier, in my daydreams, I played the protagonist in a small southern French village redolent of lavender. Between smoking cigarettes and writing doleful descriptions of old windows and doors in an outside cafe, I spent my days flirtatiously stirring the foam of a cafe creme while charming locals named Etienne or Solange chuckled at my broken French and asked in broken English my thoughts on American policymaking. When the sun dropped below the lavender fields, I carried my baguette and fruit in a bicycle basket along with fresh flowers and a bottle of Bordeaux. I imagined myself at night sipping wine and rereading what I had written, smugly telling myself that these descriptions suffused with significance would one day enlighten the curious reader.

My old journals are full of entreaties earnestly t.i.tled "THE LIST OF WHAT I WANT AND HOW I CAN GET IT," offset by roman numerals that included such headings as Graduate College, Run Boston Marathon, Write in the South of France, under which were suggestions for doing so: Pell Grant, fix foot, cross-train, yoga, money, time, other people. My friend MuRasha told me that you cannot desire that which is not possible to manifest somewhere in the universe. MuRasha channeled Pleiadians, beings of Love and Light, from the constellation Taurus. Pleiadians do not come in darkness, she said. They come in Light, where all things are revealed. MuRasha's tiny studio apartment in Olympia was lined with old milk jugs. Every couple of months she took the jugs to Mount Shasta, where she filled them with Saint Germain water. Ascended Master of the Seventh Ray, Saint Germain, who has come to earth embodied as a high priest of Atlantis, Plato, Saint Joseph, Hesiod, Christopher Columbus, and Francis Bacon, fed the poor, worked for peace, and wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. One day in 1930, he was met on Mount Shasta by another hiker. Together the two took astral trips through time and s.p.a.ce, to other worlds and lost civilizations. One of these, an interplanetary, interdimen-sional portal whose citizens travel on electromagnetic subways and use amino-acid-based computer systems, is the mythological underground city of Telos. Telos lies beneath the town of Shasta. Its people are descendents of Lemurians, highly evolved beings, who were given permission to build their city after a tussle with the Atlantians over whether less evolved civilizations ought to be left to evolve at their own pace. The Pleiadians instructed MuRasha to collect and drink the water from Mount Shasta. She says she doesn't ask why, she just does what they tell her to do. When I visit MuRasha she puts beautiful translucent stones in a gla.s.s and pours the Saint Germain water over the stones. After I drink it, she instructs me to lie down with my eyes closed. She takes the stones out of the gla.s.s and places them on my heart chakra and solar plexus. Her voice pitches several octaves higher in a kind of operatic yodel she describes as a dolphin call.

"You can see them," she coaxes. "Pleiadians work through consciousness." In my mind's eye I feverishly erase the chalkboard, open my consciousness to the vibrational frequencies, the octaves of the fifth dimension, as she calls them. A few short minutes pa.s.s.

"Are they blue?" I ask.

"Yes! Yes! What shade?"

"Cobalt?"

"Yes! Yes! What are they doing?"

"Sitting in the window of my childhood bedroom?"

The first time I saw a silver cigar-shaped object float quietly and un.o.btrusively in the evening sky I began to scream. My sister turned around. When she saw what I saw she began to scream. My mom came running out of the house, her arms in the air, her eyes wild. We pointed up. She shielded her eyes and put her hand flat on her chest. "It's a blimp," she yelled. "The Goodyear Blimp." To my sister she said, "Don't ever scream like that unless you crack your head open," and to me she said, "Don't ever scream like that, unless your sister cracks her head open." She went back inside. Full of relief and disappointment, we flopped down in the front yard and watched the blimp make its silent way over the tree line until it disappeared behind the towers of Wheaton Center. I imagined lots of people huddled cozily inside the blimp, its curved surfaces cradling them like beanbag chairs. But I did not get to steep for very long in my blimp fantasy. "That's not the way a blimp works," my mom told me. People don't sit in the blimp. They sit in a tiny gondola beneath it, in seats with seat belts, just like driving in a car or flying in an airplane. This came as a disappointment. I wanted badly for there to exist a flying object whose occupants, inside of which, lolled around in Mickey Mouse sleeping bags watching The Wizard of Oz in color and eating sugary cereals. Blimps are really just big balloons, my mom said. They float because they are filled with an invisible, lighter-than-air substance called helium.

In my world things that float in the air float because they are balloons or because they are clouds or bubbles. I was four and I could not accept that a blimp was nothing more than a colossal silver balloon, whose contents I was now being told were lighter than air and invisible. I accepted other systems: inside my chest was a heart, inside my head a brain. Between the s.p.a.ces of my four fingers an orange hue I knew to be blood glowed as I pressed them together in the light. But the blimp with its big open s.p.a.ce of invisible substance meant there were objects un.o.bstructed, un.o.bscured in my line of sight whose contents I could and would not, under any circ.u.mstances, ever see.

Inside the falling airplanes of my dreams a sober scene belies the vertiginous horror pa.s.sengers must have felt when, in full view of the Pittsburgh airport, US Air flight 427 rolled out of the sky. In my dreams no spidery fissures race up the walls, no overhead bins pop open, no chunks rip loose the plane's belly. The g-force does not drain the blood away from my brain or pull down my rib cage. The force of the acceleration does not cause bruising or a rash of broken blood vessel called geezles. While federal crash standards require that a pa.s.senger in a typical accident not experience g-loading for longer than thirty-six milliseconds, a typical person can function under heavy g-loads within the first five seconds. After five seconds a loss of peripheral vision and color perception called a grayout occurs, followed by the complete loss of eyesight called a blackout. Unfortunately, graying and blacking out does not ensure a loss of consciousness, which pa.s.sengers of Pan Am flight 103, who were not injured from the explosion or the decompression or the disintegration of the aircraft, are believed to have regained at some point during their 35,000-foot fall. A mother was found holding her baby, seatmates were found hand-in-hand, pa.s.sengers were found clutching crucifixes. During a grayout or a blackout, an altered state of awareness called A-LOC (Almost Loss of Consciousness), characterized by the disconnection between cognition and the ability to act on it, overcomes you-you will still hear and think and feel-before G-LOC (loss of consciousness) occurs. When it does, you will lose bladder and bowel control. You will experience sudden muscle contractions called myoclonic convulsions or jumps, similar to those we feel just as we are dropping off to sleep. During the jumps, you will have vivid and memorable dreams.

I was a reverent and devout Catholic child, named for a young missionary and messenger of the Immaculate Conception. When my mom was nineteen she watched The Song of Bernadette. In it a young peasant girl named Bernadette is taking off her shoes to cross a ca.n.a.l when she feels a gust of wind. A bright light catches her eye in the cliff face running along the ca.n.a.l. Something white in the shape of a lady motions for her to come closer. Bernadette is fearful. She begins to say the rosary. Over several visits the apparition, dressed in white and holding her own rosary, tells Bernadette to return for fifteen days. News spreads and crowds gather. Though they do not hear what she hears, they see Bernadette's lips move. And though they do not see what she sees, they watch her dig in the muddy ground below the grotto. As the water pools before her, she scoops it into her hand to drink. She is crazy, they whisper.

Later, Bernadette tells the priest, "She indicated that I drink from the spring and wash in it."

"Why did she ask you to do that?" wonders the priest.

"I am drawn there by an irresistible force," Bernadette tells him. "When I see her I feel I am no longer in this world. When she disappears I am amazed to find myself still here."

I believed in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. I prayed to Saint Anthony for my lost crayon barettes, a missing two-dollar bill, the mouthpiece from my alto sax. Each time my faith in the procession of the saints was matched by my faith in the power of prayer, both of which were reaffirmed when the lost object was discovered under my pillow, in the desk of Andy Besh, or inside the neck of my alto sax by a confused music store employee. I was too young to ask for clarity or strength or foresight, but old enough to feel the weight of my conscience. I confessed to thinking a cla.s.smate ugly or my sister stupid, and for those I was asked to say three Hail Marys and a Glory Be. But the weight was no more than a jab. I feared the real urge to clear my conscience came less from a penitent heart than from a belief in the conditional: If I confess, then I can receive the Body of Christ. For a child, the silent contemplation of Catholic ma.s.s-the forty-five minutes of sitting, standing, and kneeling-is finally broken when at last we file out of the pew and down the long line to receive the Eucharist. The break is enhanced by the belief that something real and holy happens as the host dissolves on the tongue. Despite learning all the secrets of wafer-making from my altar-boy friends and despite a detailed account from my neighbor, who said she was given loaves of white bread and taught to press the slices into tiny half-dollars after she and her friend were caught in the sacristy eating the wafers, I felt the Holy Spirit move through me. Many years later I discovered that the perceived physiological effects-the rush of energy, the pounding in my chest, the flush on my cheeks-I had long ascribed to the profound sacrifices made for me by Jesus were really just the effects of oxygen coursing through my body after forty-five minutes of stillness and silence.

When, decades later, I arrived at a writing workshop in the South of France and a self-proclaimed recovering alcoholic Buddhist poet told me to Go to the dark place, I had well embraced the notion that thoughts dictate reality. I believed in the laws of attraction. And while I understood that they did not exactly promise fulfillment, I had only partially begun to accept that if you put attention and thought into something you wanted, you got it. But if you put attention and thought into something you didn't want, you got that too.

The moments that elapsed between the engine explosion and the subsequent emergency landing on one instead of two engines were, physically, some of the most uneventful of my life. As a young person I loved being flung and spun and tossed into the air. I rode roller coasters that twisted and dropped so fast they left strings of saliva across my face. I jumped out second-story windows and balconies, off rooftops and into piles of snow, out of trees and into raked leaves, and when I was sure I could not get any higher, I jumped from the apex of the longest swing in the playground, savoring that airborne second before landing with a thud and a roll. Once during a school a.s.sembly I volunteered to sit on the shoulders of a blindfolded man riding a unicycle. I trusted the laws of motion: action-at-a-distance and the tendency of objects to resist change, that all would end with the intact simplicity of a falling apple. Airplanes followed that course. I not only believed in them, I wanted to be a part of a cast that kept the belief alive.

I was six when I was given a flight manual. That year my first-grade cla.s.s stood outside to watch the flicker that was the s.p.a.ce Shuttle Columbia launching out of Cape Canaveral. When I was ten I wrote to Sally Ride. By then I had cemented my career choice. By then I had also become suspicious after reading that Amelia Earhart had fallen victim to the Bermuda Triangle. Uncle Tom took me up in his Cessna, attached a pair of headphones around my ears, talked me through the preflight check, telling me where to push and pull: that pedal to turn the plane, this steering wheel to lift the nose up and down. The plane wants to fly itself. During climb out you want your flaps at zero degrees. This dial right here. You want the nose of the plane to touch the place where the horizon and the sky meet. Keep an eye on the wingtips. When we're in the air, your job is to keep the nose of the plane one fist below the horizon at all times. Calm your hands. Calm your hands. If you pull your steering wheel up too high and the nose of the plane lifts too far too fast, you'll stall. You feel it? This is what happens when you stall.

The plane shuddered and yawed and banked momentarily before steadying itself. The cabin lights came on, the woman across the aisle stopped crying, and I resumed my praying, silently. Anyone could hear that the engine was no l onger powering the airplane, but the illusion of normalcy alarmed me.

In kindergarten, Eddie told me that in his backyard beneath the big blue slide lived the Devil. Uncle Tom told me that the Spanish moss which hung limp on the cypress trees during the day came alive when the sun set. A certain white house on the main thoroughfare gave me "the heavies." As I grew up, books filled with dead bodies floating in quarries were read in front of curtain-less picture windows after dark. Scenes were snuck from The Exorcist and Halloween: foot-long needles sliding through eyeb.a.l.l.s, flesh melting in loose, serrated chunks. When the Ted Bundy made-for-TV movie aired the year I turned twelve, my siblings and I taped it. The Deliberate Stranger, a two-part series, follows Ted Bundy from Washington to Utah to Colorado to Florida as he lures women into his tan VW. We loved The Deliberate Stranger. We argued over his victims as if we were arguing over the backyard shenanigans of friends and neighbors. "They did not find Carrie-Anne's skull at Lake Sammamish," insisted my nine-year-old sister. "That was Dawn's, you idiot." We clutched one another each time Ted flashed a fake badge or emerged from a wooded state park, when hair and dental records were collected and scrutinized by baffled patholo-gists.

Why are we still ascending? I asked the pilot. They have to disengage autopilot, he answered.

"They did a real number on you," says the grandma, aiming her camera.

I point to the poker chip in her forehead. "Looks painful," I joke. "Bad gambling accident?"

"Shrapnel," she says, pointing her camera at two teenage girls who walk past us calmly and importantly. They hold their heads as though they're balancing books so as not to disturb the oozing cuts across their necks.

"I am actually dying from this," says the taller girl. She points to her friend. "You're already dead."

"I'm not actually dead," says her friend.

There's an evident hierarchy. The survivors, who consequently look in much worse shape than the deceased, are getting all the press, while the dead, played mostly by younger children who will not be required to do anything but lie in the gra.s.s, vie for attention-and fake blood.

The boy grabs his neck and rolls his eyes into his head. The girls keep walking. "Grandma?" he asks. "Don't you want more fake blood?"

"No, I don't want more fake blood."

The friend brightens. "You know you can eat it," he says, stretching his tongue across his cheek to where the blood has splattered.

"Don't eat it," says Grandma.

I am told the fake blood is a mixture of corn syrup, flour, and red food coloring and most of the children partic.i.p.ating are scouts or members of school drama clubs and church groups.

"We do this all the time," says the boy.

"Every few years," says Grandma. "FAA requirement."

If the other dreams were about approaching a crash, the strangest dream, which did not fit into any of the other categories, was about reaching it. In it I watched the ground through a window on the floor of the airplane as it ricocheted violently from one side to the other. We knew we were in trouble, but were kept calm by a woman who talked us through the final moments. She spoke in the soothing way a yoga teacher might talk you through a difficult posture.

"The closer we get to impact," she said, "the slower time will move."

As she spoke my limbs grew heavy, my movements full of effort.

"We will see the crash happen before our eyes," she said, "but we will not feel anything or remember anything at the moment of impact.

"We are all going to die," she added, "Except for Steve."

I felt disappointed that I had not been "chosen" and annoyed by what seemed to be a presumption of the outcome. Yes, I could see the ground moving toward us through the window on the floor of the airplane, but who was she to tell me death was imminent? The farther we fell and the slower we approached the end, the less I believed her.

The scene changed. We were being ushered into a large conference room, with big picture windows along the walls. When we were told that we had died in the plane crash and this was the beginning of our afterlife, some people began to cry. "Where are we going?" "What are we doing?" "It's not true!" they yelled.

I looked around and noticed that we were all dressed in the same green shirt. We were ushered up to a long conference table on which were stacks of brochures and bowls full of tiny gold charm medals. The medals, intended to hang from gold chains, were the size of silver dollars. On them were inscriptions and ill.u.s.trations appropriate for the occasion: a seagull flyi ng over water, hands folded in prayer. We were told to choose one we felt represented who we were in life. The inscription on mine read, "I was a nice person."

The dead and dying have already been chosen, says the woman at the registration table. She looks apologetic and, in a cheerful voice, suggests I play a survivor. After I sign a release form stating my understanding of the terms and conditions (damage of personal effects and stains to clothing are not the responsibility of the county), I walk to a long cafeteria table on the other side of the hangar. "Dead, dying, or surviving?" asks a woman with a clipboard. I hand her my release form and she instructs me to take a seat.

"We're gonna make you look really gross." She grins, nodding to a man who is opening a jar of Vaseline. "Should we cut off her arm?"

He shakes his head. "Lacerations!"

"This is Don's first time," she says, winking at Don.

Don pushes my hair away from my face. "Don't worry," he says. "I'm trained."

In three minutes he maneuvers the Vaseline and the putty and the fake blood, starting at my forehead, along the bridge of my nose, under my left eye, and down my cheek. He holds up a mirror. I not only look more infected than newly lacerated, I look like I hit the ground face first. Cameras click. Video cameras roll. A man from the county shouts, "That's one h.e.l.l of a facial!" Another says, "I'd be writing a letter."

"What happened to me?" I ask.

Don grins. "I think it'll be pretty obvious."

Topic of Cancer.

Christopher Hitchens.

FROM Vanity Fair.