“Is Copenhagen our last stop?” he asks.
“What?”
“Is that where Thomas and Mette are?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t tell you? He lives on an island off of Funen. Funen’s the big central island. We’ll take a train, then a ferry.”
“I didn’t try to reach Mette.”
“Neither did I.”
“I was worried if she knew we were coming—”
“Same here. I meant to tell you not to, I’m glad you figured it out on your own.”
The plane is pushed back. Mark wishes he had a window seat. He prefers, during interminable descents, to have visual confirmation that there remains plenty of room between the plane and the ground. But he’s on the aisle. Saskia insisted on taking the middle seat so that he would have more leg room. He leans forward to glimpse what he can through the window. “Will you just look at that parking lot,” he says.
“Hm?” Saskia says.
“Something I saw in a movie.”
“The Coen brothers. A Serious Man. It’s their best movie.”
“You remember that?”
“I’m an actor. I have a good memory for scenes.”
The plane begins its long trundle toward the runway, occasionally thumping in a worrisome manner. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Norwegian Air Flight 187—” Mark continues to look as well as he can out the window, consciously appreciating, in an attempt to allay his anxiety, the extraordinarily pretty geometry of the intersecting lines of different colored ground lights. It always reminds him of flights he was taken on out of Boston’s Logan Airport when he was little, to visit his grandmother in Florida. He was with his mother and Susan, and felt completely safe. They always let him have the window seat. It feels very strange to be the only person from his family who is still alive.
Now they are turning onto the runway. The brilliant yellow lines seem to extend for miles. The plane pauses, contemplating for a moment—Mark always imagines—its mortality. Then the engine noise rises to a reckless moan, the acceleration begins. Mark breathes. He never can quite believe the Bernoulli effect will be strong enough to lift this huge hunk of metal off the ground. But the nose lifts, the vector of motion curves upward, the city lights fall away. By god, they seem to be cheating the laws of physics once again.
The baby is not crying. Since the ascent is so fast, maybe the crew is careful to keep the cabin pressure steady for the first few minutes. He and Saskia have not flown together before, so he thinks it better to admit it: “I don’t like flying.”
“No kidding.”
“You can tell?”
“Something about the Lamaze breathing and the convulsive grip on the armrest.”
“It’s ridiculous, airplanes are statistically the safest form of travel.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“I get more nervous when there’s turbulence, even though pilots say turbulence poses little risk.”
“Maybe it’s a control thing. I remember my driving made you nervous.”
“Did it?”
“Come on. You tried to hide it.”
Mark has to think for a moment. “It had nothing to do with your skill.”
“Thank you, that’s a given.”
“I guess I don’t like being a passenger in anyone’s car.”
“Like I said, a control thing. You should get a pilot’s license, then you can fly wherever you want.”
Mark has nothing intelligent to say to this.
“It could also be a conditioned response,” she goes on. “When I walk alone down a dark street in the city, I think of similar scenes in movies. They don’t bother to film those scenes unless some mugger is about to appear, so naturally I think of muggers. It’s even more true for scenes on airplanes. They’re a bitch to film, so pretty much 100 percent of the time, if there’s turbulence, one character will get nervous and the other character will reassuringly say that turbulence is nothing to worry about, and right after that the plane falls out of the sky.”
“That’s an interesting point. I don’t watch many movies anymore, though.”
“Back to theory one, you’re a control freak.”
“. . . ”
“I’m kidding.”
“No, I am a control freak.” A few seconds go by. He goes on, “I was walking around campus a few weeks ago, and I stopped to look at the construction some company was doing on the new computer sciences building. It was evening, all the workers had gone home. They’d been installing glass panels for the lobby, eight feet by four, each one must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. Flawless surfaces, edges true to probably less than half a millimeter, double paned, high insulation and reflectivity indices. In each corner were set these delicate mounts of brushed steel secured with steel cylinders in black rubber collars, and the mounts interlocked so that each glass panel could be attached directly to its neighbor. I thought of all the research in materials science, all the advances in precision engineering that went into creating those beautiful objects. Then I noticed the assembly directions in the lower right-hand corners of each pane, these little labels that hadn’t been removed yet. They were on the outside, and each label said, ‘Install this side in.’ That’s the sort of thing that comes to my mind whenever I fly.”
He gazes down the length of the cabin. He can see over all the other heads. The baby is out of sight, maybe asleep in its mother’s lap. “Or I think about the Mars Climate Orbiter. On any interplanetary trajectory, tiny disruptive forces such as solar wind need to be corrected for. Lockheed calculated the forces and reported them to JPL, which sent the correction commands. But Lockheed calculated the forces in English units, while JPL thought they were in metric units. So JPL was overcorrecting. After a trip of 670 million km, the orbiter was only about 100 km off course, but that was enough to cause total failure.
