Heaven for Paul | Mark Doty

[mercifulserpent]

Heaven for Paul | Mark Doty

The flight attendant said, We have a mechanical problem with the plane, and we have contacted the FAA for advice, and then, We will be making an emergency landing in Detroit, and then, We will be landing at an air force base in Dayton, because there is a long runway there, and because there will be a lot of help on the ground. Her voice broke slightly on the word help, and she switched off the microphone, hung it back on its hook, turned to face those of us seated near her, and began to weep. Could the message have been more clear? Around us people began to cry themselves, or to pray quietly, or to speak to those with whom they were traveling, saying the things that people would choose to say to one another before an impending accident of uncertain proportion. It was impossible to hear, really, the details of their conversations--it would have been wrong to try-- but one understood the import of the tones of voice everywhere around us, and we turned to each other, as if there should have been some profound things to be imparted, but what was to be said seemed so obvious and clear: that we'd had a fine few years, that we were terrified for the fate of our own bodies and each other's, and didn't want to suffer, and could not imagine the half-hour ahead of us. We were crying a little and holding each other's hands, on the armrest; I was vaguely aware of a woman behinds us, on the aisle, who was startled at the sight of two men holding hands, and I wondered how it could matter to her, now, on the verge of this life--and then I wondered how it could matter to me, that she was startled, when I flared on that same margin. The flight attendant instructed us in how to brace for a crash landing--to remove our glasses and shoes and put our heads down, as we did long ago, in school, in the old days of civil defense. We sat together, quietly. And this is what amazed me: Paul, who of the two of us is the more nervous, the less steadily grounded in his own body, became completely calm. Later he told me how he visualized his own spirit stepping from the flames, and visited, in his picturing, each person he loved, and made his contact and peace with each one, and then imagined himself turning toward what came next, an unseeable ahead. For me, it wasn't like that at all. I had no internal composure, and any ideas I'd ever entertained about dying seemed merely that, speculations flown now while my mind spiraled in a hopeless sorrowful motion, sure I'd merely be that undulant fuel haze in the air over the runway, hot chemical exhaust, atomized, no idea what had happened to me, what to do next, and how much of the next life would I spend (as I have how much of this one?) hanging around an airport. I thought of my dog, and who'd care for him. No heaven for me, only the unimaginable shape of not-myself-- and in the chaos of that expectation, without compassion, unwilling, I couldn't think beyond my own dissolution. What was the world without me to see it? And while Paul grew increasingly radiant, the flight attendant told us it was time to crouch into the positions we had rehearsed, the plane began to descend, wobbling, and the tires screeched against the runway, burning down all but a few feet of five miles of asphalt before it rolled its way to a halt. We looked around us, we let go the long held breath, the sighs and exhalations, Paul exhausted from the effort of transcendence, myself too pleased to be breathing to be vexed with my own failure, and we were still sitting and beginning to laugh when the doors of the plane burst open, and large uniformed firemen came rushing down the aisles, shouting Everybody off the plane, now, bring nothing with you, leave the plane immediately --because, as we'd learn in the basement of the hangar where they'd brought us, a line of tornadoes was scouring western Ohio, approaching the runway we'd fled. At this point it seemed plain: if God intervenes in history, it's either to torment us or to make us laugh, or both, which is how we faced the imminence of our deaths the second time. I didn't think once about my soul, as we waited in line, filing into the hangar, down into the shelter --where, after a long while, the National Guard would bring us boxes and boxes of pizza, and much later, transport us, in buses, to complimentary hotel rooms in Cincinnati.