Wiring

New York · December · Told by Yan Ardatovskiy

The flight left New York at a quarter to eleven, a few days before Christmas. I love New York, and I had loved that week: the tree at Rockefeller Center with half the planet photographing it, the windows on Fifth Avenue, the steam rising from the street as if the whole city were running a slight temperature. But there comes a moment at the end of every trip there when you have had enough of being impressed, and what you want is a small town, a quiet street and your own bed. My wife and I had reached that moment somewhere around the third department store. We boarded tired and happy, with the particular tiredness of people who have walked twenty kilometres a day in shoes chosen for dinner. Above our heads, wedged carefully into the locker, were the presents: a stiff paper bag with ribbon handles, a box I had been told not to tilt under any circumstances, and a scarf wrapped so well that it no longer looked like a scarf.

I like night flights for one reason: nobody expects anything of you. The phone goes dark, the emails stop, and for seven hours the world agrees to leave you alone. The cabin was warm and quiet, and somebody in the crew had tied a sprig of silver tinsel to the galley curtain, which moved gently whenever anyone walked past. The flight attendant, a tall woman with a Texan vowel and a badge that said Dolores, brought champagne before take-off and remembered my name without looking at her list, which in my experience is the first sign of a good crew. Across the aisle a man in his sixties, wearing a red Christmas jumper under a very serious blazer, had already folded the newspaper to the crossword and uncapped a fountain pen. I remember thinking that this was going to be a boring flight. I remember being pleased about it.

We climbed out over Long Island, over the scatter of Christmas lights along the shore, whole streets of them, blinking red and green and gold as if the houses were signalling to each other. Then the lights ran out. That is the moment on any eastbound night flight when the window becomes a mirror. Beyond it there is nothing: no towns, no roads, no ships, only the water below, black and enormous and entirely indifferent to the fact that Dolores had just brought round the caviar.

About an hour and a half out, I was halfway through a film I would never finish when my screen went black. Not frozen. Black. I glanced across and saw my wife's screen do the same, then the crossword man's, then every screen in the cabin, one after another, like the windows of an office block when someone walks down the corridor switching off the lights. For a second, nothing. Then they all came back at once with the same white logo and a small spinning wheel. Rebooting. “Technology,” said the crossword man, without looking up. “Fourteen letters, and it isn't that.”

Then the flight attendants began to move. Not the smooth glide of service, trolley and smile, but the other walk, the quick one, heels hard on the carpet. Dolores went forward to the cockpit door, came back, went forward again. A younger colleague passed my seat twice in one minute, and the second time I looked at her face. I have spent a good part of my life reading faces across tables, and I know what it looks like when someone has put her professional expression on very carefully, the way you put on a coat when you know it is raining. Nobody announced anything. Somewhere further back a child asked, quite clearly, “Mum, is it broken?” and was hushed.

Then the cabin lights went out. Not dimmed for sleeping. Out. The reading lights, the aisle strips, the glowing little seat numbers, all of it. For a moment the plane was a dark tube travelling at nine hundred kilometres an hour, and the only light came from the spinning wheels on the screens, which then also died. After that there were just the engines. I noticed that I could still hear them, and that I was listening to them more carefully than I have ever listened to anything in my life. If that note changed, I thought, I would know before anyone told me. I very much did not want to know before anyone told me.

What struck me afterwards was the silence. I had expected noise. Films had promised me noise: screaming, oxygen masks, a man standing up to shout about his rights. Instead there was nothing. A whole aircraft full of people, tired, full of Christmas shopping and airline dinner, sat in the dark and said nothing at all. The man across the aisle had stopped writing but had not put his pen away; in the faint blue of the floor lighting I could see his lips moving, and could not tell whether he was praying or still working on fourteen letters. My wife found my hand without looking for it. Her glass of champagne stood on the armrest, half full, its surface perfectly still, and I found that oddly reassuring. If the plane was falling, the champagne had not been told.

So I did the maths, because that is what my mind does when it is frightened. Ninety minutes out at cruising speed: something like thirteen hundred kilometres. Behind us, New York. Ahead, more water than I could picture, and Ireland somewhere on the far side of it, four or five hours away. Below us, eleven kilometres of air and then the sea, which in December is cold enough to make the question of lifejackets largely philosophical. I thought, briefly and quite unreasonably, of the box in the locker that must not be tilted. I did the sum twice, got the same answer, and decided not to do it a third time. My wife asked, very quietly, what I was thinking. I said the caviar had been excellent. She did not believe me, and was kind enough not to say so.

The captain came on. His voice was pure American aviation, that slow Midwestern calm pilots seem to be issued with their wings, the voice of a man announcing a slight delay in Denver. Ladies and gentlemen, he said, we have an issue with some of our electrical wiring. The aircraft is flying normally. But I am not willing to take her across tonight with a problem I cannot fully see, so we are going to turn around and head back to Kennedy. He thanked us for our patience. He did not use the word emergency. He did not need to. I remember liking him enormously, a man I would never meet, for the word normally.

The turn came a minute later. You felt it rather than saw it, because there was nothing to see: a long, patient lean to the left, the floor tilting, the black window tilting with it, the champagne finally sliding a centimetre up the side of the glass. Above us something shifted in the locker with a soft paper sound. It went on and on. It is a very large thing to turn an aeroplane around over the ocean, it takes far longer than you think, and for the whole of it I was aware that we were no longer going home, only back. Then the wings levelled. A long time later the engines changed their note, and my stomach went with them, and the nose dipped, and we began to descend. Ahead, very small and very far away, a thin line of lights appeared on the edge of the dark. Nobody spoke. Everyone on board was looking at the same lights, and waiting to find out whether we would reach them.

What did we fly over for ninety minutes, and never cross?

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people in these stories. So have some of the stories. Not all of them, and not everything that sounds invented is. Please do not treat it as a fair coin.