III.
When the Pilot died, it came to light that he in fact did have a copilot. The pregnant woman’s son, it turned out, had been spending more and more time in the Pilot’s cabin, learning the technique of flying, learning the secrets of our perpetual oil. At first, we were relieved. The Pilot was gone, we could finally land, and the boy, now a young man, would certainly land the plane, just as his mother had asked him to. But, of course, why should he? In a way, it made more sense to us — perhaps not to the boy’s mother — that we continued to circle Dallas even after the Pilot’s death. In all of our time circling with the Pilot, we never learned, were never told why we could not land, why we had been hijacked. Now that the boy was in charge, though, what else should he have done? What other world did he know but this one inside the plane? Would he so easily give up its comforts, its familiarity?
Most of us had some memory of what it was like to stand straight, to walk on an object that does not so noticeably move, to breathe air that has not been cycled and recycled a hundred thousand times, and even we were a little afraid of what our lives would become if we were to finally land on solid ground. The prospect of seeing a building up close and from below must have been a devastating and frightening one for the boy. Despite his mother’s weeping and crumpled body outside the Pilot’s door, he did not alter the Pilot’s original course, not even to change the direction of our circle.
Shortly after the Pilot hijacked the plane, he had us pose for pictures taken with a Polaroid camera. As with everything else, he did not explain why he wanted these pictures. The flight attendants had us stand in front of the lavatory between first class and coach, and after the picture was taken and had developed, they let each of us look at our photograph before placing it in a box with the rest of them that was eventually handed over to the Pilot.
The Copilot — he had a name, but since the Pilot’s death, he refused to answer to anything but Copilot — found these photographs and decided to take another series of them, and we lined up again and posed. Once these had developed, the Copilot had his mother give everyone the original photograph and the new photograph. A sizable pile of old pictures with no matching new ones remained in the box, and these, we decided, should be placed in the now empty seats, but once this had been done, we changed our minds and took them all back up and placed them back in the box and returned the box to the cockpit.
I had begun to put on some weight before my trip, and I remember feeling self-conscious about the way my pants had begun to fit. There is a difference of maybe thirty pounds between the first man pictured and the second man pictured. Still, the thinness looks no better on me than the extra weight did. Whereas my clothes once seemed uncomfortably small, they look, in the more recent photograph, ridiculously large. Furthermore, along with the weight, my face has lost whatever charm it once had. Oddly, and this seems to be the case with nearly everyone else’s pictures, too, I am smiling in both.
IV.
I often find myself lost in thought, trying to imagine the paths of our lives after we have landed. In this I am, I believe, alone.
Suppose the Copilot falls ill and we are forced into an emergency landing, or simply, as he matures, he experiences an epiphany, a change of heart, a desire to do something more with his life. Whatever the reason, some small part of me would not be terribly surprised if one day the Copilot were to step out of his cabin and ask, nonchalantly, “Does anyone know how to put us down?” I wonder, then, which we will choose: to rebuild our former lives or begin them anew. Is twenty years long enough to wipe away bad marriages, poor career choices, too many long hours spent following someone else’s dreams? How many of us will return to our old homes, rented out to new tenants or boarded up or sold, settle ourselves back into old routines now occupied by new people?
Some of us have already made our choices. The former accountant practices sleight of hand tricks for hours on end. He has told me, while pulling quarters out of my ear, while filling and emptying the overhead bins with the wave of a blanket, that he plans to change his name, buy a few costumes, and take up the birthday party racket, or aim for the big time, the comedy club circuit. “Carpe diem,” he told me.
For others, the choice seems to have been made for us. My wife has remarried. It is likely that by now my parents have both died. The friendships I enjoyed have surely unkindled themselves after twenty years. I will step out of this plane and onto the tarmac with no human connection but to the people on board with me, most of whom I have not spoken to in months. I am afraid that I will, if I’m not careful, seek out a life that most closely resembles the one I have for twenty years been living. Perhaps when we land, I will buy a bus ticket and ride the Crosstown 404 as it loops through its never-ending circuit. Or I might rent or buy a car and drive to Belt Line Road and continue to circle the city in that way. It would be good to devise a plan to prevent this sort of life taking hold, but no such plan comes readily to mind. In my imagination, then, I often wind up on the side of the road, kicked off the bus by the driver or having run out of gasoline, forced then to continue my course on foot. These thoughts bring me little comfort, which explains, perhaps, why the others have given up such fruitless speculation and why all plans of overpowering our hijacker and taking control of the situation were long ago abandoned.
I will not be here for the more realistic ending, of course. How could I be? Though not yet the oldest person on the plane, I am not far from it, either, and it’s not likely that I’ll live as long as the Copilot, who seems to be in excellent health. We can hear him perform his calisthenics every morning after he wakes and every night before he goes to sleep, a regimen he must have learned from the Pilot. When we glimpse it, his face has a ruddy glow.
As I imagine it, everyone else will have gone by then, too. Even now there is only the one flight attendant left, and though younger than many of us, she has long since stopped taking her drops, and her once pretty face is gaunt and withered. Soon, then, no members of the original crew will be left, and there will be only the seven other passengers who remain. And once we have all died and there is only the Copilot, what then? It’s unlikely that he will land — I doubt he even knows how. But he might become lonely. He might tire of the Dallas skyline, which has changed not at all since we first took off, and seek some new skyscape. Flying straight ahead for some time, east or west, toward sunrise or sunset, perhaps finding himself soon over the Pacific Ocean, wondering what this world is that he’s flown himself to, blue above and blue below, until, following the sunset each day, he eventually finds the Asian continent, or perhaps Africa, and then Europe, and then the Atlantic, and the Eastern Seaboard, until he reaches Dallas again, at which time perhaps he will turn left, or right, or continue on straight again, circling the world the way he has for so long circled Dallas. I can’t see how it will or should matter to me, since I will have long since died by then, but at times I feel sorry for the boy, sorrier for him than for us. He will fly and fly and fly, until he one day slumps over in his captain’s chair, the dead weight of his body pushing the controls forward. I can feel my stomach lurch even as I imagine the nose dipping, the wings turning downward. The plane will break through the clouds, condensation beading up along the windows like rain. The world will rush past below, cars and buildings and trees and people becoming larger by the moment, as if they are rising to meet us, until at last, with great and terrible speed, the Copilot finally lands.