3.11 The Abyss of WonderLand
Just as Timothy was about to respond, the pilot announced that we were approaching our destination. “Welcome to San Diego. We are right on schedule, despite that little bit of turbulence. We will be setting down at the local time of 5:15 pm. The weather in San Diego is a pleasant 73 degrees, so if you speed through baggage claim, you may be able to catch one of our lovely ocean sunsets. “The seat belt sign has been turned on. We ask that you return to your seats, fasten your safety belt, and place your seat in the upright position. Please remain seated until the all clear is announced. Your safety is our first priority,” he chanted with a smoothness that told me he gave this same rehearsed speech daily. I hope safety is your first priority, I thought, remembering how landings were the most dangerous part of airflight. Why would anyone take off their safety belt, anyway? It wasn’t like we could do somersaults in the aisles. I scoffed at the pilot’s message, but then I saw people refastening their safety belts. Amazing. Through the window, I could see the ocean and patches of houses and roads. We were flying over a major freeway. The buildings got taller, then we passed those by and were suddenly over the runway. My stomach churned. The wings flapped. A stewardess came over the loudspeaker, reminding us to remain seated. Dull noises were rumbling from beneath us. “The wheels are dropping.” Timothy said. That was a good thing. Without wheels, we wouldn’t do well. I knew that. I felt it the moment we touched down. It wasn’t smooth, but the fact that we’d made a touchdown was a big relief, because it meant we were back on land. The plane was still coasting along, probably moving faster than a car on a freeway, but I could feel the plane braking. “We made it!” I said, which made Timothy chortle.
3.10 The Abyss of WonderLand
“You are pondering something. I can see it in your expression,” Timothy said. I shrugged. “I was just thinking about flying and how all these people do it so casually. They seem blasé, but airplane flight is such an odd concept, climbing into a huge metal object that lifts up and pretends to be a bird with a hundred people sitting inside its belly.” Timothy smiled and patted my leg. “I love your thoughts, Penelope.” He reached out with the hand I’d squeezed to death and lifted a strand of my hair to kiss it. “You always smell of coconut and strawberries. It’s a very pleasant scent, especially on my favorite lady.” “That’s Simone’s choice of shampoo,” I told him, glancing out the window to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything, but we were in the center of a cloudbank. Whiteness had swallowed us. “It doesn’t smell like this on Simone,” Timothy said, looking bemused. Bemused? I’d never even thought that word before. How amusing. Next I’d be talking of museums, amusements, plain old muses, and ignoramuses, although I had no idea if the last one was part of the word family. Snapping my mind out of its silly pathways, I kidded Timothy. “So, you sniff at Simone’s hair, do you?” His eyes darkened. “She is a friend of long standing, but I have never sniffed her hair, nor had any inclination to do so. This compulsion to touch, taste, and analyze aromas centers exists only with you, my darling.” I could see that he was about to say more, but then he clammed up. It must be something about being a pooka or about Simone, a thought he couldn’t share. But I wasn’t going to pry, not in a public place. I dropped the subject, deciding that Timothy was much too serious about such statements to tease him any further. I shot another glance out the window. The plane was doing an elevator drop. My stomach felt the movement. “Are we landing?” I asked.
3.9 The Abyss of WonderLand
Timothy and I started hunting through the shows on my screen when the plane ran into some turbulence. I’d never been a fan of roller coasters. Even mad rides in the small cars at amusement parks seemed unfathomable to me. But here I was bouncing around and clinging once again to Timothy’s hand as if he had the power to correct whatever was wrong with the plane. “It’s just a little turbulence,” Timothy kept saying. “It’s only the air currents, and the pilot knows how to fly us through them safely. No worries. It will be over in a minute.” All around me, people were bobbing about like toy balsa boats in the current. No one was screaming or acting in the least bit frightened by the jet streams that Timothy was babbling about. And, just as Timothy had said, the turbulence soon settled down, or else our pilot had flown us through it. I let out a big sigh of relief and released poor Timothy’s overly squashed hand. Then, as if nothing onward had occurred, we resumed our search of the monitor’s offerings and finally found a comedy series, which we watched for a few minutes. It was funny, and I hadn’t seen the show before, but I was in an airplane, up in the air, and it seemed much more important to peer down at the ground and take in all that was happening around me. For instance, the people sitting near us, bottled up inside this capsule, were all strangers mixed and seated among other strangers. Like being in an elevator, trapped and pretending that you didn’t see those standing next to you. How could anyone relax when the person beside them was an unknown — a CEO, a famous physician . . . a murderer. What were these people feeling and thinking? Didn’t being surrounded by so many mysteries bother them? And where were they going? Who would they be meeting at the airport? Were the passengers visiting relatives, traveling for business, or returning home? Were they happy about that? Was it the start of a vacation or the end of one?
3.8 The Abyss of WonderLand
I sipped at my drink. It was tart and sweet. I guess it was like the cranberry sauce we had at Thanksgiving, but that was usually eaten with dressing or a biscuit. This drink had pucker power. I laughed softly. “You enchant me, my darling,” Timothy said, leaning closer to whisper in my ear. “Why?” I asked, turning to face him. “Because I almost mashed your hand into black and blue bruises?” He let out a laugh that turned heads in our direction. But with all the eyes on him, he only shrugged and smiled. That was all it took. Everyone stopped frowning and went back to their activities. “Everything about you pleases me. Even the way you’re testing that cranberry juice as if it’s startling new, and you haven’t decided whether you like it or not.” “It’s awfully sweet,” I said, not sure what to do with something I didn’t want any more of. Timothy took the glass from me. “Are you done with it?” he asked. When I nodded, he drank the rest. I think he liked it better than I did, or at least, he didn’t pucker his lips like I had. “Too bad we don’t have time for a movie,” he said. “But I want you to open your water and drink some. Cabin air is dry. Your body needs the water.” Like an obedient child, I twisted off the bottle top and drank a few sips. There was no way I planned on walking to the bathroom on a plane high up in the sky. I guess I was slightly curious about what a toilet room looked like on an airplane, but I could just look it up on the Internet if I was really that snoopy.
3.7 The Abyss of WonderLand
I was reassuring myself that flight was safe when the extremely noisy engine suddenly got quiet. Engine failure. I knew that right off. I’d seen it happen in a movie once. But I didn’t say anything. I just looked around the cabin and observed that everyone else was watching a movie, reading a book, or had their eyes closed and were relaxing. It was only me that seem all bits and pieces of frazzled. I realized then that I’d been gripping Timothy’s hand, holding on as if he could save me in case something went wrong. I suppose he could, but that was something else I didn’t want to think about. I released him, said, “sorry,” and started inspecting the pocket in front of my seat. I pulled out the magazine the attendant had mentioned, then flipped through the pages. There were things to buy, a drink page, and a picture of our flight path. I stared at that the longest. In fact, I was concentrating on it so hard, I wasn’t ready when a stewardess came by to ask what I’d like to drink. “She wants a bottle of water,” Timothy said and asked for one for himself. When I flipped back to drinks, I saw exotic things like cranberry juice. I’d never had that. I guess Timothy saw my wistfulness. He called the lady back and said, “I was wrong, my fiancé wants something else in addition to the water.” I think the stewardess was about to say something about having a lot of passengers to tend, but she didn’t. One look at Timothy’s smile, and she melted. “What would you like, ma’am?” she asked me. Ma’am? That was a first. I hadn’t really decided, but I chose the cranberry juice. It sounded interesting. The woman poured it into a little plastic glass. The juice was an absolutely gorgeous color, exactly like the rug in Timothy’s living room. I started to thank the stewardess, but she’d already moved on, handing out drinks and snacks right and left.
3.6 The Abyss of WonderLand
Timothy was holding my hand. I think he was trying to give me support for the ordeal, but I was suddenly glued to the window, watching the ground as we sped along and then lifted up into the sky. It wasn’t that bad, not like floating in air or jumping off a bridge or something, because we were sitting in our comfy seats and nicely safety belted in, which made me feel kind of protected. I was doing all right until I heard an even louder noise underneath us. I knew it couldn’t be cargo still being loaded since we were already up in the air. I glanced at Timothy, not wanting to show my panic, but really, really uncertain about how things were going. “Are we okay?” I asked, biting my lip. “They’re retracting the wheels, Penelope. Everything is normal.” But then the wings started making noise like they were about to fall off. That was even more worrisome. Timothy told me that the wings were doing what they were supposed to be doing. He seemed extraordinarily calm about it. That’s when it hit me that I was turning into what my grandmother used to call a Nervous Nelly. I should just close my eyes and ignore everything. It wasn’t like I could save the plane if something went wrong. I suddenly wished that I could pray for our safety, but that ship had long ago sailed with my parents’ death and years later, my grandmother’s cancer, followed by her death. Any faith I’d ever had evaporated like puddled water when the sun comes out. I suppose I could excuse my fear by repeating that it was my first time on a plane and the fact that there were so many alarming noises, but who would listen to such excuses? The other passengers looked relaxed. Timothy was calm. The guys behind us were chatting about things to see in San Diego. No worry there.
3.5 The Abyss of WonderLand
I was leaning back against the lounge chair seat, when the most horrible noise roared. It was louder than a lawnmower or a garden blower, or perhaps the two combined. “Relax. It’s just the engine revving up,” Timothy said, patting my hand. “I have a tranquilizer tablet if she needs one,” Bob said in a harsh whisper. “Do you want one?” Timothy asked me. “Not unless the plane is going to crash, and you said it wouldn’t.” I was careful to whisper that very quietly into Timothy’s eat because someone had once told me that it was illegal to say the word crash at an airport. I tried to ignore the smoke coming out from the engine, but Timothy must have felt my panic. “It’s supposed to do that,” he said with a soothing voice. (I was lucky that he hadn’t decided to pitch me out of the plane by then. I was turning into a real basket case.) I thought we’d hit the noisiest part of the whole process, but I was wrong. The engines began to rumble and scream like angry dragons. And the whole plane began to vibrate. It was like sitting on top of a clothes dryer — not that I’d ever done that. At some point, we finally started down the runway, bumpety, bumpety bump bump. I wondered why the plane didn’t have better shocks on their wheels. But maybe the runway just wasn’t smooth. Wouldn’t that be hard on the tires? A plane did have tires, right? The lift off was scarier than getting up on a horse, except with an increase of noise, a tooth-jarring vibration, and a steady forward propulsion. I think it was what an astronaut might feel, being shoved back against the seat, and crushed by the pressure.
3.4 The Abyss of WonderLand
The male flight attendant who had escorted us to our seats stood up and demonstrated air bags. Duh. Like we couldn’t figure that one out? Still, I checked to make sure my forward pocket had one. Better to be sure than empty-handed in dire circumstances. The attendant placed the barf bag down and then carefully explained how to buckle our safety belts, (like we didn’t use them every day in our automobiles?) He demonstrated the quick release button, so I tried that out. Mine worked. So did the side buttons on my seat and the footrest. The stew spoke a moment about the magazine each pocket contained. I’d already seen that while searching for the barf bag. Next the man explained about the plane’s exits and how we were forbidden from carrying our bags with us if we needed to get off the plane quickly. “Why would we need to exit quickly?” I asked Timothy. “Wouldn’t we be up in the air?” “Sh,” Timothy said, and I realized then that the flight attendant had overheard me. “Do we have a first timer?” the man asked. Timothy nodded, so the man carefully repeated that it was only in case of fire. Then he went on to assure us that such a thing wasn’t likely. I still didn’t understand how exiting midflight would help us, but I kept quiet after that. The attendant continued as if there’d been no interruption. His canned speech discussed a slide that would pop out if we needed it at landing and oxygen masks that would drop down if the cabin pressure changed. He said some other things about opening the exits, and safety tips for emergencies, but I’d had heard more than I wanted to hear and tuned him out. Honestly, the more the man talked, the more nervous about flying I became. He finally stopped lecturing, and a really pretty stewardess walked down the aisle to check seat belts. I’d fastened mine the moment we got onboard, which is what I always did in a vehicle. She stopped at our seats to chide Timothy for not having his strap buckled. He sighed heartily and obediently fastened his. He also put the divider down between us. Was that a safety thing, too?
3.3 The Abyss of WonderLand
I’d heard that seats were crowded and uncomfortable on airplanes, but when we arrived at ours, I found them to be fancy and plush. I sat down in my designated seat, the one next to the window and admired everything around me. I was puzzling over the roominess and the elegance of everything, which seemed so contradictory to all I’d heard, when I discovered that we were flying first class. Terry and Bob had seats directly behind us. I learned their names only after we were already seated. We didn’t shake hands because we were buckled in by then, but I twisted my neck and smiled at them. I was pleased when they smiled back. No grouches were accompanying us. Big plus. Terry was the one with hair so fair it was almost white. He resembled a picture I’d seen of a Viking warrior. Bob had black hair and looked like he might have Japanese heritage. Both were in their thirties, tall and well-muscled, and they were each attractive enough that I’d seen women eyeing them out in the waiting area. Our seating arrangement was two seats next to each other, although I saw that the section on Timothy’s other side were single seats with screens around them. I liked our configuration better and was thrilled that Timothy had given me the window seat. It seemed more secure than being out in the open, which I realize is a completely irrational thought. (But, I’d once heard that people liked the front seat of a plane because they figured they’d get to their destination first, which was an equally bizarre idea.) Anyway, I’d be able look out the window and see the ground. I hoped I’d be brave enough to do so. When my friends and I rode amusement rides, I always kept my eyes tightly shut until the ride was over. Seeing the speed and angle our little car was going seemed only to make the ride scarier. I suddenly heard a loud bang. I gasped, thinking that the plane was already collapsing, even though we hadn’t gotten off the ground yet. Timothy reassured me that it was a sign that the cargo had been loaded, and the bin doors were being shut. Explanations really helped to steady nerves, I decided.
3.2 The Abyss of WonderLand
The two guys nodded to him and then to me. Both men had backpacks over their suits and acted like they’d done all this before. My legs were shaking, and I didn’t have a passport. I tried to tell Timothy that, but he was walking too fast. I tugged on his arm. “I don’t have a passport,” I said, trying to stop his forward propulsion. Timothy smiled. “Yes, you do, darling. I ordered one for you the moment I met you. It’s always wise to stay ahead of necessity.” That was impossible. Peggy, one of the secretaries at the office, had been filling out forms, getting her pictures, and setting up an appointment to get her passport for her upcoming vacation in Paris. She’d complained daily about how difficult and time consuming the process was. I started to say something, but Timothy pulled out a passport from his breast pocket and handed it to me. “Here, you go. This one will work until we change your name to mine, which I hope happens soon.” I halted completely to give myself time to study the passport. It had a picture of me and all the right information. How could that be? “I don’t have a driver’s license either,” I added, regretting the fact as I always did. Timothy pulled an envelope out of the same pocket. “Here. You’re a lot of work, my darling girl, but you’re worth it.” We boarded at the end of a big mob. Timothy showed his phone, which seemed to hold all four of our tickets, then, holding my elbow, he guided me forward after I’d flashed my two very new and very fake ID’s. (Yes, I was half expecting the alarms to go off, or for a stewardess to say, “Definitely not. These are counterfeits.”) It was only later that I realized how many laws I’d broken. How many years in jail would they sentence me to? Would Timothy hire an attorney for me? Would Mr. Sanders rue the day he hired me? We were walking through a long tunnel while I was doing all my worrying about what could have happened if . . . so I hardly noticed our approach to the big plane we were about to fly on, not that I could have seen it, actually, since the airline seemed very secretive, keeping the jet veiled from us. Our passage along the path was very noisy and kind of creepy. I kept wondering what the airline was hiding, and why we couldn’t just walk out on the runway and climb up into the plane. When we finally reached the plane, with the metal monster’s gaping open door, two stewardesses greeted us, rechecked Timothy’s phone for a peek at our tickets, then waved us inside. A young male flight attendant escorted us to our seats. We walked down another passageway, except this time, there were people sitting in seats on each side, some of them staring at us as if already bored with their surroundings.