Kate was back in the crew compartment rifling through the belongings of the crew. She felt very uncomfortable doing this and more than once she stopped and looked behind her. It felt just like being a burglar. She tried not to disturb things too much. She didn’t want it to look like she’d been rummaging through everything. “Not that they will care,” she thought.
She found that Dr. Ford had an iPod and ear buds. Kate turned it on and found a great collection of classic rock. “Oh yes. That’s what I need.” Kate’s parents had been rock fans and she had picked up on the music when she was young. She fitted the ear buds, put the playlist on shuffle and set the volume to near the max. Five minutes later she was singing along to Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive.”
Having found the iPod , she was less inclined to dig around much more and gave up searching.
She wrestled the mattress from her own bed down into the galley. Once down there, she rummaged around and found a box of one gallon zip-lock bags. She put the iPod and headphones into one, partially zipped it, then sucked out the rest of the air and closed it fully.
That bag went into another and she repeated the air extraction process. She looked at the bag. It was a nice iPod. She used a third bag to be sure, and then looked at the mattress. There was no way to protect it from the water so she didn’t even try. She put the iPod in a pocket in her BC and then pushed the mattress down through the opening in the floor into the water below. It went down easily until she let go, when it floated back up again. She pushed it down trying to gauge the amount of weight it would take to keep it down. It felt like five or six pounds. Certainly not much more than that. She had no idea how to attach weights to it so she decided to just wrestle it.
Kate suited back up and put on the scuba gear. She ran through a buddy check playing both parts. “This is like playing chess with yourself and trying not to cheat,” she said out load.
She stepped down the ladder a few rungs until she was almost wedged by the mattress. Then she pushed down on it and pushed it sideways under the ceiling below. It stayed there, so she dropped down into the water and descended to the deck of the storage room.
The mattress was almost flat on the ceiling of the room and took some effort to pull down and get started in the tunnel. This was a lot more work than Kate had expected and she found herself breathing quite hard by the time she had pushed it into the moon pool room. The stupid thing caught on every pipe, overhead light and gas valve it could find.
Once on the other side of the tunnel hatch in the moon pool room the mattress floated up under the ceiling and Kate had to reach up, pull it down and wrestle it some more to orient it and get it to go up into the ops room. She climbed up the ladder behind it, pushing it ahead of her. It got a lot harder as it started to emerge from the water. It was well waterlogged by now and the water weight made it fold over as it was about half way through which jammed it in the opening. Kate put her head against the mattress, went up one more step and pushed hard. The mattress popped free and flopped onto the ops room floor leaking water. Kate climbed out behind it and pulled off her mask. A pool of water surrounded the mattress and she thought it looked very unappealing as a place to sleep. And then she realized she had forgotten to look for garbage bags while she was in the galley.
Sighing, she put the mask back on and climbed back down the ladder.
Vijay Subramanian sat in a window seat at the back of the A320. Beside him was a small child with an iPad apparently intent of smearing the screen with grease from a block of cheese she was eating while playing Minecraft. Subramanian watched in wonder. The child was about 7 or 8 years old and was busy building a fascinating castle. How could such a young child master a thing like this? The blocks seemed to appear under the child’s fingers as if by magic. The motions were swift and sure. It was like watching a master painter at work. The painting was already there, it just had to be revealed by the paint. He thought this child would be an interesting subject. She was obviously very confident and he wondered what it would take to shake that. The death of a pet? A parent? It was very interesting. He wanted to pull out a pad and make some notes but that was impossible. He was in the back row and the seats did not recline. The passenger in front of him had pushed the seat all the way back so that Subramanian’s knees were well trapped under his little plastic table on which stood the plastic cup containing the remains of two small bottles of scotch.
He starred out of the window. It was a clear, sunny day. The sea below was calm. A small boat was out fishing. He thought about sharks. His years of work concocting stressful situations often made him see the opportunity to introduce danger or some other stressor into almost any situation.
The plane banked to the left and he had a spectacular view of the West end of Grand Cayman as the plane lined up for the short runway that pointed into the shallow bay to the North of Georgetown. He knew from the irritating inflight advertising on the television screens that the bay held a large population of supposedly friendly stingrays. He didn’t much care for the sea, or the creatures that lived in it, unless he was eating them. The thought of being subjected to an environment where these large poisonous creatures surrounded him made him feel quite uneasy. He really needed his writing pad. This was good stuff. He would try to remember the feeling and the imagery in his head.
The Airbus touched down very gently and almost immediately applied full reverse thrust. The rather rustic looking airport buildings went by and the plane pulled up just short of the end of the runway. He wondered how many had ended up in the sea. Was it deep? How quickly would the plane fill with water? How would the passengers react? Badly, he suspected. Most people behaved terribly when they perceived danger to themselves or their obnoxious children.
The Minecraft child had not even noticed the landing. She had also ignored all announcements to shut off electronic devices, simply turning it over on her lap when the flight attendant had walked by. The kid was good. With some training she could become a great manipulator.
As the plane pulled into its parking position, Subramanian was surprised to see two sets of boarding stairs pushed up to the plane, one at the front and one at the rear. Perhaps he would not be last off the plane?
As soon as the door opened, the usual mad rush to stand up crammed a third of the passengers into the aisle. Little miss Minecraft added more blocks. Her parent reached down and took the iPad, shut it off and slid it into a shoulder bag. “Mom! I’m not done yet.”
As Subramanian exited the plane on to the top of the stairway he was hit with the Caribbean air. It was warm and moist and smelled of the sea. Not quite like India but much better than Massachusetts. He might like it here.
It took 20 minutes to get through customs and immigration. The Caymanians were polite but a little difficult to understand and wanted to know why he was on the island. “Business or pleasure?”