Delayed Arrival

by Lucy Joyce

The authoritative clicks of Tanya’s high-heeled boots were the only noise in the entire world at that moment. The silence of the crowded but frozen airport was not disconcerting to her; she was experienced with artificially created stillness. She was its master.

Tanya ducked under the snaking ropes and bypassed the frozen forms of security personnel. A man stood stock-still in mid-yawn, halfway through re-looping a belt collected from a plastic security tray. Neon names - PARIS, DUBAI, LONDON, ceased their cyclical progress from “go to gate,” to “boarding,” to “final call,” and instead stood in suspended, obedient stillness.

Her small bag, which would never be checked by security, contained a single change of clothes, a toiletries bag, and a sealed, tightly wrapped one kilogram ‘brick’ of cocaine. The dealers she worked with had no idea how this polished young woman calmly moved such great quantities of illicit substances around the world. The higher-ups—whose names were initially withheld anyway—were happy for her to try her luck with small amounts. At first they thought she was a fool. Before long, they realized that she was a prodigy.

Drug smuggling attracted none of the investigative fanfare that large-scale robbery did. It also enabled her to travel the world. She had no qualms about her chosen career path; dishonesty had begun early and came naturally. She would freeze time during exams to copy the smarter kids’ answers, or to carefully draft masterful essays using online samples, wandering from the exam hall into a free computer lab with a leisurely yawn. Her peers, faces creased in worry and fingers gripping pens, waited in unknowing, frozen silence. No one was ever aware of the elapsed time once she regained her seat and focused her surroundings back into existence. The entire world played her game of musical statues; she was always the winner.

She walked into a restaurant in the terminal, pushing her way through the double doors of the kitchen. She took a bowl of pasta from the stainless steel pass of the warm and bright kitchen; a bead of sweat stood frozen on the face of the young chef who had just placed it there. Next, she retrieved a tall-stemmed wine glass from behind the bar and expertly removed the cork from one of the ‘by the bottle only’ range to pour herself a generous glass of blood-colored shiraz. Relaxed, she ate in the silent terminal among the motionless masses.

Satisfied, she wiped her mouth, dropped the napkin on the table with her dishes, and walked to a bathroom across the terminal. She shut herself in a bathroom stall, closed her eyes, and focused. Abruptly, the world outside restarted with sudden noise and animation.

A toilet in the stall next door flushed while a terminal wide announcement tinnily resumed, “-avelling to Paris on Air Canada flight 722 please proceed to gate 13; boarding will commence shortly.” Tanya brushed her lustrous hair and reapplied perfume and lipstick at the mirror before rejoining the hum of movement and noise in the terminal.

She boarded her flight and settled herself, ordering a Veuve Clicquot and taking a valium. With irritation, she noted that a child was seated across the aisle. She resented children who flew first-class, wriggling and crying on seats which were excessively large for their small bodies.

The girl seemed to notice her attention; “Mummy and I are going to Paris!” she informed Tanya shrilly, leaning across the aisle. Seemingly unperturbed by Tanya’s silence, the girl continued, “I’m Shania, what’s your name?”

Tanya turned to stare out of the window, pretending not to have heard. The valium started to take hold; Tanya sighed deeply. Memories of her own childhood floated, unaccountably and seemingly at random, to the surface. The valium sometimes had this effect; it relaxed the parts of her subconscious which were usually tamped down.

She remembered the day her mother found out about her ability. The kitchen was filled with the scent of freshly baked cookies. They were cooling on the countertop, beyond Tanya’s reach. Her mother told her sternly that the cookies were to be eaten when their guests arrived—not yet. But Tanya was five and she wanted a cookie now. In an instant, a kitchen chair had unaccountably moved. It was in front of the counter, not tucked under the table as it had been a single moment earlier. Tanya’s mother’s eyes widened in shock as her daughter stood, defiant and smug, eating a cookie on the other side of the kitchen. The discovery of Tanya’s strange talent was overshadowed by Tanya’s father’s illness and death later that same year; Tanya had only vague memories of him.

Her mother still lived in the same aged, suburban home, featuring the same dated carpets, sun-aged curtains, and tiny, pockmarked pine dining table in the middle of the kitchen. She continued to refuse Tanya’s offers of money, and was unimpressed with her LA mansion nestled in the cliffs above the city. Tanya watched with mounting irritation as her mother had glanced across the marble countertops, the expensive artwork and the infinity pool, and had seemingly appreciated nothing; if anything, she had seemed actively unimpressed. Her mother’s cheap, yellow-gold cross bobbed above the neck-line of an old blouse and Tanya noticed the edge of a beige bra strap. Suddenly her mother had seemed infuriatingly suburban and bland. Churchy and self-righteous. With unexpected vigor, Tanya had abruptly wanted her to leave her beautiful home.

Bothered by the memory, Tanya took another valium for good measure. She absently watched the ground below recede as the pilot detailed their flight ahead: “A very happy New Year’s Eve from all of our crew. All those on the eastern, or left-hand, side of the plane can keep their eye out for a solar eclipse predicted to occur about an hour into our journey—an auspicious flight!”

“Auspicious ... what a weird word to say,” Tanya’s wandering mind considered, “auspicious...

suspicious... malicious...” She slipped into sleep.

The screams of panic cut through the valium.

Tanya opened her eyes as an unmanned cart careered past her down the aisle, towards the front of the plane.

“The cart is rolling downhill,” she thought, groggily. “Why is the plane downhill?”

She struggled to regain clarity, and suddenly registered that the plane was tilted at an unreal angle. She woke up properly as a jolt of adrenaline cleared her mind. The plane was hurtling downwards. She wrenched open the window shade beside her and saw, with horror, that the ground was only a few hundred feet away.

She willed her mind to focus, to stop time, but the sickening terror was getting in the way. Precious seconds slipped by.

“Stop! Stop the plane!” She realized that she was screaming the words out loud in her frustration and fear. They were lost in the cries and screams from elsewhere: a cacophony of terror—braying, screaming, wailing. She squeezed her eyes shut and focused with all her might.

And then, suddenly, blessedly, there was silence. She had done it; time was suspended. The child and her mother across the aisle were frozen in wordless screams, holding each other. Tanya looked out of the window.

“Holy shit,” she breathed, seeing the ground only thirty feet below.

She fumblingly unbuckled her seatbelt with trembling fingers. As had been blandly advised in one of the many thousands of pre-departure safety spiels which Tanya had only ever half listened to, “lights at floor level will illuminate the way to your nearest exit.” Feeling half mad, she repeated this to herself as she climbed on badly shaking legs up the aisle, needing to grip onto head rests to pull herself up the steeply sloping floor towards the rear of the cabin.

She side-stepped around an air hostess who was strapped into a fold-down chair in the galley between cabins. The woman, who had delivered Tanya’s champagne a little over an hour earlier, silently screamed in a hyperbolic mask of horror, tears and spittle frozen in place.

Tearing her eyes away with a shudder, Tanya opened a plastic box on the exit door and moved a dial to enable the door to be opened manually. She wrenched the large handle on the exit door. To her surprise, it opened fairly easily. A yellow emergency slide efficiently and automatically inflated itself before her, making contact with the field below.

Tanya took a steadying breath and slid down it. She tumbled off onto a field of yellowed grass. The prairies stretched out in every direction, flat and endless. Dappled clouds were fanned out at intervals across the sky, seeming to reach down to touch the earth on the edges of the horizon.

She walked away from the slide to look at the plane, suspended at an unreal angle and bearing down, the tip of the nose only a few feet from the earth. It was such an incongruent sight in this otherwise unremarkable agricultural scene that she paused to stare, fascinated and appalled, at the strange plateau. She registered that the light was muted, as if it were dusk or dawn. Tanya realized, topping off the unreal display, that the sun was almost completely eclipsed by the moon. Above the plane, a tiny, bright crescent was frozen in the middle of the dusty blue sky. She stood for a few long moments, transfixed by the strangeness of the situation.

“What now?” she thought.

She was pleased that she had brought her handbag; losing the drugs would have been costly, and replacing her passport and the contents of her wallet would have been inconvenient. She considered that she should have bought water and food with her, though. Who knew how far it would be to reach the nearest road or house. She would walk for a while, she figured, before restarting time, rather than watching this unreal dusky day turn to horror, explosion and death. Blood, broken bones, and decimated corpses within the plane. She shuddered. What a horrific thing it would be to witness—best to leave now.

As she turned to walk, she thought of the girl who had been sitting across the aisle and suddenly her resolve faltered.

“Shit,” she said aloud.

This was not fair. It wasn’t her fault that the plane was crashing; it wasn’t her responsibility. Resentment coursed through her. Yet she knew that she would not have been able to banish the image of the little girl—Shania—(why did she have to tell Tanya her name?) sobbing as she held her mother.

Tanya emitted an exasperated sigh and awkwardly clambered back up the evacuation slide. She moved quickly down the aisle to the girl, bracing herself against seats so as not to tumble forwards. With some difficulty, she extricated the girl from within the tight loop of her mother’s encircling arms.

Tanya carried the awkward and stiff body up the sloping first-class cabin back to the top of the evacuation slide and rolled her down it. The frozen-crying girl tumbled to a stop in the grass like a strange and terrifying mannequin. But then what? This girl would come to as her mother exploded in front of her. How would Tanya explain it? What was she supposed to do with her?

She shouldn’t have climbed back up here, into this terrifying death-plane. She made the mistake of looking behind her to the crowded cabin beyond. She was used to being around the many varied, frozen faces of humanity, but this was different. Every face on the plane contained such anguish, such terror. Mouths were open in wails, eyes wide with terror. Hands clasped strangers’ hands. Tears were frozen on the face of an old man.

Tanya felt panicked, trapped in a horrifying tableau of suffering.

“I didn’t cause this!” Tears of frustration and anger filled her eyes; the fearful and grief-stricken faces seemed to be sending silent pleas for help.

“It’s not my fault!” Tanya announced to the silent cabin, furious with the injustice, “I can’t save you all!”

The frozen faces in the silent plane over the endless prairie offered no consolation. Her tears subsided after a time and she hauled the girl’s mother up the aisle to the slide. Next Tanya grabbed the air hostess—she was right there, after all—hauling her out of her seat and pushing her down the inflated slide. But then, the next passenger was only a few feet further away.

That was how the 221 passengers and crew of flight AA722 awoke to find themselves in the middle of a prairie in Manitoba, as the plane they had just been seated in exploded in front of them. It had taken a little over two months of arrested time to wrestle and drag all of the frozen forms to the site a few hundred feet away. Tanya arranged blankets and inflated life vests at the bottom of the slide to arrest the tumble of bodies, and had used fire blankets, which slid best over the dirt and grass of the field, to tug the stationary forms a safe distance from the impending plane crash.

Tanya had never kept the world in stasis for that long; the toil of moving bodies under the unreal twilight of the frozen eclipsed sun felt like a maddeningly lonely fever dream. She wondered about the people as she moved them—sometimes checking their names in their passports if they were handy—wondering what they were like, how they filled their days, and what they would make of this unconventional relocation of their frozen selves. Sometimes she would even talk to them, explaining what she was doing, or tell them about her flashy LA mansion, or about her role in the drug cartel. As the days turned into weeks and then months, she yearned to have a conversation.

She became desperately sick of plane food: pretzels and wine and endless small containers of salad and lasagne. There were a small number of—carefully rationed—first-class servings of caviar, preserved in fresh coolness by Tanya’s strange curse (it occurred to her that she had only ever previously referred to it as a blessing).

Tanya had wept when she was defeated by the last hurdle; she could not access the cockpit to reach the pilot or co-pilot. They were sealed in their coffin by a locked door. She cried again now, as she sat among the dazed passengers in the yellow grass under the eclipsing sun. She arranged herself inconspicuously in the crowd of prostrate forms, ready to feign shock and surprise as she watched the finality of the deaths which she could not prevent as the plane crashed in an explosion of metallic noise, flames and dirt.

The little girl beside Tanya sat up dazedly. Tanya grabbed her hand, “Shania, my name is Tanya. You asked me before.”

Shania—tears still wet on her face—looked blankly at Tanya and said nothing; instead, she turned to stare at the crater of flames before them. If Shania had been calm enough to look more closely, she may have noticed that the beautiful woman now had wild and desperate eyes, ripped and stained clothing, and fingernails caked with dirt.

Some of the people continued screaming, as they had been only a moment before in the plane; others abruptly stopped. Some fell on their knees to pray. Family members embraced. All of them gazed around in uncomprehending disbelief. The sky began to lighten. Residents of local small towns in Manitoba came in their pick-up trucks to house the stranded passengers and crew, and international media crews rushed to the sight of the incomprehensible event which had grabbed the interest of the world.

The worst injury, apart from the tragic deaths of the pilot and co-pilot, was a broken collarbone. A number of other passengers reported sprained ankles or mild concussions. Aviation experts, interviewed on news bulletins around the world, were baffled. Religious leaders praised the intervention of God, Jesus, Allah, Jehovah, and countless others. Conspiracy theories exploded. The occurrence of the crash on New Year's Eve, at the moment of a solar eclipse, seemed only to enhance the mystery and intrigue. Interviews with passengers filled every news channel and talk-back show: “we were on the plane, and then we just weren’t,” a Texan man drawled, shaking his head uncomprehendingly, “and then the sun appeared like it had just risen!”

The funerals of the pilot and the co-pilot, whom many somehow credited with the survival of the passengers and crew, received international press coverage. Also mysterious were the cheques for $500,000 which arrived anonymously to each pilot’s family. Only one woman, watching on her small TV in her modest, suburban home, understood everything completely. Glowing with quiet pride, she began to make up the single bed in the long-abandoned bedroom.

When Tanya finally came home several weeks later, she looked both older and younger, her mother considered. The toil of the two months was clear, but there was a vulnerability and tenderness which had crept into the usually poised and indifferent face.

Tanya’s mother ran her a hot bath and laid out clean clothes for her on the bed, including an old sweatshirt which had belonged to her father—comforting and soft. Tanya sat at the familiar pine table. The kitchen smelled of onion, tomato, and beef—reminiscent of a thousand childhood nights. She considered her mother’s favorite proverb, framed in pride of place on the wall -

“Better is little with righteousness
Than great income with injustice” - Proverbs 16:8

“Do you remember, when I was little, that I used to always have a glass of ...” Tanya stopped midway through her sentence. She had been about to say, “milk,” but there was now a glass of milk at her elbow, cold from the fridge. Freshly poured. It had not been there a second earlier.

She turned to her mother, mouth open in shock, utterly speechless.

Her mother smiled knowingly and patted Tanya’s hand. She shrugged, “When your father died, I realized that it wasn’t that helpful after all. I couldn’t change anything. I couldn’t preserve our time together. I couldn’t give you a father back. I always hoped the lord would present me with a way to use it for something worthwhile. But he presented it to you.”

“But...the pilots,” Tanya said, chokingly. A lump was in her throat. She thought of the locked door.

“You did all you could. I’m so proud of you.”

Her mother took her daughter’s hands in her own and held them tightly, as Tanya’s tears fell onto the pine table.