Crash, Fin, a Bientot

I had spent all day in Bamako watching the Malians make their way to the crowded polls. I tried to sleep but found it impossible. I waited the whole day, throughout the night, and into the morning before catching a taxi to the airport, where I'd wait some more for my 3:30 AM flight to Casablanca. In the terminal, everyone slept sprawled out on the benches. The voice echoed through the stark room at 2:30 that passengers were to board. We lined up in a long line, me between a French couple and a procession of Malians. A few people behind me was a girl who looked South American.

At the front of the line, the two Malian guards, not without their own special brand of corruption, were harassing a jittery little man, who was screaming hoarsely, raising nerves all around. I walked through the metal detector and the bigger of the two guards checked my passport, smiled a smile I didn't trust, and beckoned me to come forth. Behind him, the tiny jibbering man was in the throes of struggle with the other guard, who promptly picked up his suitcase and kicked it against the wall. The guard in front of me leaned in and whispered deeply, "Cadeau." I gave him my old Bic pen and passed.

The passengers waited in another holding area before being led out onto the tarmac. The Royal Air Maroc jet hummed quietly as we filed up its steps. It was an older plane, probably from the 1980s, that was kept around because she had some life in her yet. It's difficult to recall the events leading up to take-off, because I was falling asleep in my hands. I remember there was a beautiful Moroccan flight attendant who ran through the safety protocal with glazed-over disinterest, and I watched with an equal lack of lustre. She put the mask over her mouth and showed us how to click a seatbelt. If this plane goes down, I thought, we'll all be vaporized, regardless if we know how to click our seatbelt. A plane crash is all or nothing. You are either dead or dashed between shredded metal, clinging to breath. I recall trying to read my Shakespeare book, but the words bled together.

I remember feeling vaguely uncomfortable because there was an Muslim man with a tremendous beard sitting next to me, thumbing his prayer beads. After all this time traveling through Islamic Africa, my mind still goes on feeble alert. I had briefly read about some isolated "terrorist" attacks around Casablanca since my time there, next to a Yahoo! News pop-up listing all the ways you can make yourself appear skinnier in photographs. I took note and vowed to turn 45 degrees the next time someone raised a camera, catching the light on my good side. While doing this, I made sure not to remove my lips from the mass media's tit, which steadily dripped drops of poisonous racism and paranoia into my being. Nourishing me with thoughts of Islamic rebel factions kicking down my doors or abducting me in the streets. The man quietly and peacefully stared ahead and began to nod off. My heavy eyes stared out the window at the left engine as it fired up and jolted the plane to a taxi. We arrived at the mouth of the runway and slowly began to accelerate.

Earlier that day in Bamako, I had returned to some old Buddhist texts concerning death and dying, most of which proclaimed that most people are in denial of their own mortality. They encourage the practitioner to look at the certainty of his own death, to not shy away from the thought of it, so he can make the best use of his short time here. The notion is to familiarize oneself with death's imminence so that its coming is something that is handled skillfilly, even "blissfully", as it says.

The jet picked up speed and I remember ruminating on these thoughts, though they seemed to sit too nice in my brain, and remained very far off. I had always taken faith that death would come quick, without giving me much time to witness it, without having to feel the experience of it courting my life away. The plane soared down the runway and reached the critical moment of acceleration just before lifting into the air. The nose picked off the ground and my steady gaze was interrupted by the sight of the engine outside my window bursting into flames.

I felt like I was in on some secret that was being revealed too quickly for me to report, as no one else seemed to see it. The engine just became black and nullified, engulfed in fire. We slammed back down to earth, blasting forward at 200 km/hr. The passengers didn't start screaming for their lives until we were crashing through the field, when nothing was visible outside of our windows save a whirlwind of dirt mixing with the growing fireball. At frightening speed, we bounced across the rising and falling ground beneath us. Everyone was screaming now, but their voices were choked. The shouts came in violent bursts all over the plane. A man behind me yelled, "Oh no! Oh no!" because he saw it coming, as I thought I did. I thought our wing would be ripped off and we would flip and break in half. Or explode. My life did not pass in front of me, as they say. Just the opposite. It seemed to be a slowed-down present moment where everything was clear and focused. I was just waiting for the moment of impact. I remembered wondering what it would feel like, if it would feel like anything.

After at least a minute, the jet slid to a stop, with the fire still burning outside. The stench of earth and fuel filled the cabin. People jumped from their seats, humanity in panic, and shockingly scrambled for their luggage instead of trying to find a way out. I remember seeing a big man pull his suitcase down on an old woman's head without even taking note of it. After some moments of shock, I got to my feet, barely aware of anyone else in the jet. I heard people yelling, "Don't open the door!", which seemed like utter madness to me as we all waited here to be cooked alive. An explosion seemed imminent. The glass around the handle to the emergency exit was already shattered, so I walked up to it and ripped the door off and walked out onto the wing. Other passengers sensibly followed and began flinging themselves off the enormous drop into the black bush below. As heroic as we like to imagine the human race to be, I saw a fair share of men pushing aside the smaller and weaker to ensure their escape. I stood out on the edge of the wing, not ready to jump, and saw behind the plane a long trail of scorched, burning earth under the near-full moon. When everyone was off, we were shuttled back to the airport like refugees and I remember having a shaky conversation with a musician from New York. We both knew we had come very close to death. Later, word spread that the pilot had steered us into the field to avoid hitting a cement wall at the end of the runway.

They passed out bottles of water in the airport. It felt cruel to be alone here. I looked around the room. An Italian man had his arm around his Malian friend. The big-bearded man who was next to me on the plane sat talking quietly with another man. A spooked Frenchman held his infant daughter in his arms, wanting very much to be done with the night. I saw the South American girl sitting alone. I approached her and said, "I need to talk to you."

Her name was Silvina. Her face was light and seemingly unaffected by what had just taken place. She told me she was an Argentinian living in Belgium for ten years. She has been traveling through Mali for a month, all alone. The Royal Air Maroc apologists cycled through the aisles asking if there was anything we needed and Silvina was the only one who said, "Yes, a croissant and a cafe au lait would be nice." As the flight attendant hurried away to see what could be done, I suggested to Silvina that, when the woman returned, she should put on a strong face and say, "I've changed my mind. Duex croissants" and then listed off a series of absurd demands she could make through the night. She laughed for half a minute, mouth wide open, rocking back and forth, trying to keep back the squealing sound that escaped out of her throat. She had a will of steel and a sweetness on top. I couldn't understand how she wasn't more shaken by this.

Royal Air Maroc put all of us into a luxury hotel, though sleep was barely an option for me. The throbbing feeling continued in my chest that said, "This is your life. This is your life." Whatever that means, I knew it had almost been taken away. The paranoias and anxieties and fears and hardships that have sprung up throughout my life did not seem trivial now, as they say. No, I felt like I loved them and knew that having them was a part of the fabric of being sentient, of existing. The pounding feeling did not stop, and I did not want it to.

We were all woken up a few hours later and fed handsome breakfasts and shuttled back to the airport. The frightened French father and his daughter had disappeared. In the same terminal we waited, all of us, for Take Two. While before there was a feeling of joy and relief at our survival, dread and fear began to creep back in. The New York musician sat in stoic silence, shaking his head at the thoughts that were springing up inside of it. All around us hung a hushed expectation. Silvina and I took out my Shakespeare book and began deciphering the sonnets. The rich characters and complex emotions he paints calmed both of us, took our minds off of the reality ahead. It was not so much that we feared another crash. It was that our foundations had been rocked, and we knew that nothing was certain anymore.

The plane rolled to a taxi and a jovial flight attendant roamed through the aisles, telling jokes to all of us, promising champagne once in the air, to celebrate our lives. I must say, it helped. We accelerated at the mouth of the runway and all passengers rested in each other's warm and comfortable gazes. I sat next to Silvina and we made each other laugh all the way up the runway.

At that critical moment, when the nose tipped to the sky, we took each other's hands and held on as we left the grounds of Africa. We were in the air, steadily rising in elevation, upward, upward, shooting over the desert that had taken David and Wes and I weeks to cross. Silvina stared out the window, then turned to me and smiled, and the tears were rolling down her cheeks.

THE END