The plane banked over the city in a clean arc. Several thousand feet below in the dusk of a cloudless day, the field of lights related to each other in predictable ways. In the centre, densely packed strings of red flashing in waves down it’s spine were guarded by two steady columns of white and yellow. This structure repeated throughout a vast maze until the cities edge, a hazily lit ribbon where lights raced around each other and a crawling convoy of lorries travelled toward the coast.
Ben, who had been allocated a seat in the aisle, turned his head to the left and right to catch glimpses of the sight, his gaze cutting across a couple and a young man who didn’t seem bothered. For half a second he couldn’t resist the impulse to make eye contact with the woman sitting in the middle of the row opposite. He felt intense embarrassment and stared at the safety information on the back of the seat in front of him.
The plane levelled off its wings and Ben looked at his phone. The time was three minutes past seven, the plane was delayed by almost forty minutes. Ben had not considered the fact that this could irritate him. He was returning home from a visit with family and, save for a damp and expensive flat which he rented near the city centre, had nowhere to be upon landing.
‘Shall we get a taxi after we land?’, the woman to his right said to her husband, holding a book open with her thumb. The man was staring out the window, his brow only a few centimetres from its surface. He shifted his body toward her, his chapped face one of slight exasperation.
‘We’ll have to, we’re late as it is.’, he said looking back at her, his lips pressed together as if the question didn’t need to be asked. They remained looking at each other for a moment, then the man turned his back and pressed his face once again into the window. The woman resumed reading.
The plane landed with a small bump and the engines filled the cabin with an enormous sound as Ben was pulled forward from the back of his seat. The sound of sporadic clapping could be heard but failed quite decisively to catch on. Ben leant into the aisle to look down the planes length. At the far end, an air hostess sat facing the planes rear. She had an entirely vacant look on her face, her gaze directed toward the small window in the door next to her.
The plane slowed and began its journey toward the gate, the passengers seemed to wake from a sort of lull. The plane was full, The people he could see in front of him either sat motionless or fiddled with various items and bags and pockets.
‘I don’t think it’ll take long to get the bags’. The man faced forward in his seat, his hands resting on his thighs. The woman didn’t look up as she placed a bookmark.
‘Hopefully.’ She replied, devoid of tone, closing the book and looking back at him. Ben got the impression that they had been married for what seemed to both of them to be countless years. Every possible configuration of remark, inquiry, and reply on all topics ever likely to occur to either of them had been thoroughly trodden, and neither of them particularly minded this fact. Ben tried to imagine the two of them being physically intimate with each other and failed.
The plane swung around for a final time and crept forward to it’s designated position. The moment it stopped moving, a handful of people rose from their seats. Observing this, a wave of people unbuckled their seatbelts. The hostesses, like hounds alerting to a scent, jammed themselves into a standing position to remind everyone of the illuminated signs above their heads. Some bashful, some indignant, all returned to their seats.
For several long moments nothing appeared to happen, several people craned their necks into the aisle as if to catch a glimpse of the pilot activating the handbrake and flicking the switch which would set them free. Ben heard the man to his right let out a sigh which bordered on performative. In response the woman lifted her head to get a view over the seat in front. The wings emitted a series of high-pitched, creaking noises and the man pressed his face into the window once again. The sun had now set completely and the passengers sat quietly, protected from the darkness inside their great illuminated tube, all waiting in unison.
With a soft ding, the entire plane erupted with activity and noise. Within two seconds the aisle was crammed with people hauling down luggage from above. Those unable to access the aisle immediately stood with their necks hunched over helpless to effect the situation. The woman and the man who Ben shared the row with stood up also.
Ben remained seated and now felt like a tiny mouse peering through the long grass. He had found himself with his face at the average genitals height. Psychologically, this was devastating. Some dark corners of his brain now activated to try and convince him of the impending crush, or mauling, or ritual humiliation, it wasn’t clear exactly but he felt entirely surrounded. Ben shifted in his seat and retreated further into his head.
He resorted to a deep breath. In spite of these feelings of doom, he would not stand until it made sense to do so. He could feel the eyes of the man and the woman peering down through the top of his skull and into his soul out of curiosity, perhaps concern. The pressure to give in to the herd and stand up was intolerable but, Ben decided, if he could not withstand this then what kind of a person did that make him.
This represented a behaviour that Ben had not yet consciously observed within himself. For the most part, Ben was not a strong-willed person. Taking the path of least resistance was as basic an instinct to him as the urge to blink. As far as ambition, Ben wanted only to feel secure and safe. To achieve this, he spent most of every waking moment thinking about how to avoid those things which made him insecure and unsafe.
Under certain conditions not entirely clear to him, however, he tested himself. Not methodically but in the spur of the moment. He would step outside the feeling of crushing anxiety and allow himself wrapping each breath around the writhing dull ache in his chest and stomach to expel it piece by piece, as if bailing out a small boat. For a series of small moments, he could anchor himself in place, feel in control of himself and not as a seagrass moving in step with the ebbing tide.
So, Ben sat and let a couple of minutes pass. He pulled his rucksack into his lap as if to indicate to the two of them that he had a grasp of the situation. The plane prepared for de-boarding, unfamiliar noises with a resemblance to one another the only interruption to the soft din of the cabin. The man and woman shifted awkwardly in a space not designed for standing, as if sitting back down would be some defeat impossible to bear.
‘Sorry... I just need to get our bags...’ The woman said to him all of a sudden with an almost inquisitive condescension, moving forward a little and lifting her arms in a gesture as she spoke.
Ben, internally and externally, froze. His guts turned to water, his heart leapt into his throat and thumped. This was everything he had feared. What could he do? In spite of the principle or the logic, there was no way for them to actually get their bags after all, Ben now perceived himself as the villain, every fraction of a second an intolerable agony. His brain grasped for a solution, sending his arm an erroneous signal to reach up blindly into the overhead locker which he overrode before it came to pass. He realised there was no solution. He felt like a small child looking up at a stern grandparent.
‘Sorry I can’t really go anywhere.’ Ben mustered, swivelling a little in his seat to gesture toward the line of people behind him, looking back up at her as the man’s face appeared from behind hers.
‘Can you grab them? It’s just the two black cases above you there?’ He asked with a mix of earnest expectation and naked disdain, the latter he believed to have masked well. Ben looked at the back of the seat in front, growing overwhelmed to the point of anger, He tried his best to keep this feeling from rising any higher than his chest out of fear that he’d be perceived as petulant.
He considered ignoring the man completely. The idea gained traction in his mind so as to delay his response by a second or two and this passage of time pushed him further into a corner. He took a breath as if to speak but stopped. His legs tensed as if to stand but he lacked conviction. Ben had lost all sense of what anyone ought to do in any given situation. He disassociated wildly as a soft ding sounded from above and one of the hostesses began to speak over the PA in a deeply measured tone.
‘I apologise for the delay to our de-boarding ladies and gentleman, unfortunately we are experiencing a technical malfunction with the stairs.’ People began to converse with one another. Some gasped. Ben felt almost as if he could weep with joy with the relief of pressure in his chest. ‘It should be no more than ten minutes whilst we wait for another set to arrive, but if anything changes we will let you know. We apologise once again for the inconvenience to your journeys this evening.’
‘For fucks sake’, the man exclaimed, turning his head toward his wife who had already sat down again, he sighed deeply and followed suit. Such as he was Ben wanted to stop time with a device to laugh and scream without reproach, instead he focused on the diagram of a woman de-prioritising her child to apply her own oxygen mask and bathed in a rush of adrenaline.
A single file of exasperated people clutched at their luggage in the aisle, stranded, what with the option of re-stowing their luggage and returning to their seats apparently feeling somewhat obscure to them. Some sat in vacated seats with suitcases in their laps looking up to talk with their loved ones. Ben briefly considered admonishing himself for deriving a selfish glee from the relative comfort he felt, but the feeling flowed away as he glanced his eyes across the faces he could see.