The Wandering
The world never seems less real than when he is in a plane. Not just the physics of it all, which are beyond him. Not just the ominous mechanical clank and hum, the restricted views and body creep of other passengers, the glaucomic tint of the windows and the vectors of recycled air.
No, he feels less himself, less human somehow. Mind disentangled from body, consciousness trailing behind him in contrails at 31 000 feet, roaring at the threshold between blue and white, leaving just a skinsack of sinew and blood, tendons and meat in the piebald seat creaking above an unseen flotation device. Mind contemplating body’s end. When the plane crashes (this seems unavoidable, given that ominous clank, the way the wings won’t stop shuddering) he will be atomized back to cosmic dust and particles of marrow. Material fragments are what the salvage crews will be hunting for. Just a few strands of DNA to give friends and family the closure they desire. He doesn’t think it will hurt, can only imagine the endless plummet and then blackness, seats 13-E and 12-E and 11-E and 10-E and on and on plowing — the verb is insufficient to account for the forces at work — plowing through him at speeds beyond pain, ending everything about him.
The true terror comes from imagining the screams of the people all around him. Plummeting — this verb he likes — plummeting to his death with strangers sharing a gutfull of reheated lasagna and limp salad. What will their faces look like as they scream their farewells and final lamentations? Will they lunge at him, bind him in their deathclutch?
A blade of light bends across his tray table. At first he thinks it is the sun hitting a crack in the window, some microscopic imperfection in the fuselage that will doom them all, unseen by an overworked single-parent safety inspector in a nondescript factory in the Pacific Northwest or perhaps even introduced in that same factory not by the inspector, no, but by an automaton of some sort — robot arm or mechanized rivet gun or conveyance device—that nicked the window and created a molecular faultline that now, this instant, after repeated takeoffs and landings, hours of exposure to thrust and torque and g-forces (the physics are beyond him — are these even the right words?) is failing, catastrophically, against a sky so piercing blue it makes something at the back of his eyeballs ache in a way that is vaguely pleasurable.
Then Spenser sees the tiny matrices of ice crystals taking shape inches from his face. And he finds that the tips of his three longest fingers are pressed, gently, against the window, tracing the miniature crystalline pathways from the inside, but he can’t recall starting this action, doesn’t remember instructing his body to do this.
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