I stand up and turn around because that is what I always do. We were travelling together but now are dying alone. We speak and when we speak, whine or whisper, it is to and for ourselves. The sub-text of the announcement is that the plane will return to the ground in a way the engineers never intended. Advances against gravity are temporary. Obvious risks must be ignored.

When we are advised we are obedient. We root for belt straps and once we hear the decisive click of that metal tongue we feel a little better about 1000 G forces, fireballs, compaction, sparks igniting fuel, flaps jamming, hillsides and ravines. Seatbelts on a plane, I say to you, are like airbags on a space shuttle. This makes you cry every time.

I present the tape recorder as a solution, hanging from my hand, this thing that always seems like a good idea but never is. It always surprises you. Sometimes you refuse it. Today you talk the black box silly, describe the most passionate moments of your life with the most mundane words. No one will want to hear your tape. It will rip them apart. It will make them disintegrate.

Through the window I see bright blue, then the fields, then blue and a flash of the sun, and I can't watch but I have to. So the plastic blind goes down, then up, then down again. A man behind me does the same. The gravity of each action is tremendous.

Last night, while flat pools of gas in the wings were filled, men and women touched, poked, traced their hands along the outer skin of this plane. These were people who experienced screaming jets, whirring turbines, creaks and thumps as a language. They felt rivets under fingertips as text, a kind of raised lettering. Sometimes they didn't like what they read. Clear, easy, without emotion, these thoughts with their detached, foreign texture, these feelings, these funny feelings. Four people had funny feelings before this flight:

Raj - a technician

Karen - a mechanic

The person seated in 15E

The person seated in 11A

Last night Karen gave Raj a lift to the terminal. His index finger picked at his thumbnail but he was unaware of this. She almost asked him a question.

I turn towards and into you as I always do. Even with the arm rests up it's not an easy place to join. Sometimes the flip up trays will rattle loose and hit me in the back and always the stewardess is tapping me on the shoulder.

-Any sharp objects. Could you put them in the bag.

By now I know you quite well, stranger. My curiosity an excellent complement to your attention. You grind into my pubic bone, squirming and wriggling. I slip into your tight hot, press you deep into those cushions. Pressed against those cushions. Pinned against. You are arching and shagging into me. Your leg cramps so you swing it past my face to rest on the other one. I am waiting for you to start shaking. But there's this thing that always happens. The mutual becomes exclusive and everything around me is forgotten. The better you feel, the farther you move away. A few seconds before and after our orgasms there is separation, and the fact that we are back moments later, full of warmth and generosity, well, that doesn't matter because you left. I left. We separated and nothing changes that cold event, that gap. I remember who I am with a touch.

This is the thing that always kills me: one of your broken ribs punctures my heart. Our bones and flesh are crushed together and I like that. Here are some things I don't like: someone's intestines in a tree hanging like a Christmas decoration and still steaming, a rescue worker walking around with someone's pinkie stuck in his boot tread.

The last time we crashed, everybody came together in the end. It was fire that joined us, made us all the same. Before that though, I worked you sweaty and you worked me. You were close, moving faster. I knew you, how you wanted to time it right. I was approaching your ear with my lips. I was almost there. I was getting close to telling you something, really.

Exit was published in Event, Volume 25, Number 2.

Copyright © 1999 Oscar Martens