Twilight Zone The Movie (15 page)

I’m scared, that’s the problem.
Only Valentine couldn’t tell him that.
It’s been eighty years since the Wright Brothers took off at Kitty Hawk, and nobody’s afraid of flying anymore.

A glance around the cabin confirmed Valentine’s thought. There were two stewardesses up front near the galley—one quite young and the other in her thirties—chatting calmly together, smiling as if they didn’t have a care in the world. But of course they’d be calm. Even if they weren’t, they’d
look
calm; that was part of their job.

The passengers seemed to be calm, too. As a matter of fact, most of them had turned off their reading lamps and were dozing. In one of the seats ahead, an enormous man had assumed the fetal position; a fat baby, with his head resting against the window. Nearby, a young couple reclined in entwined embrace. An elderly couple across the aisle from them slept without touching one another, their indifference born of long association. In the seat directly before him, a mother sat beside a little girl, her impassivity a sharp contrast to her daughter’s wriggling. No one seemed troubled by the slight rocking motion of the plane or by the presence of the purple clouds gathering beyond the window.

So why was he upset? Valentine frowned. Obviously there was no sense trying to rest—the way he felt, sleep was out of the question. But perhaps work might spell salvation. He reached up and turned on the reading lamp, pulled out his tray table. Groping into his opened briefcase on the empty seat beside him, Valentine produced the tools of his trade—a note pad, a pocket calculator, and a textbook. He opened the volume to a page indicated by a bookmark and concentrated on the array of equations thus revealed. Taking a ballpoint pen from his breast pocket, he unscrewed the cap and held the point over the blank note pad. For a moment he stared at the letters and numerals on the page of the textbook, only to find his eyes blurring.

Valentine blinked, but his vision did not clear. Neither did his thoughts. How could a man put his mind to math, concentrate on abstract theory, in the midst of menacing reality? And the reality was all around him; the reality of shuddering motion, the reality of swollen storm clouds just beyond the windowpane.

Valentine put down his pen and shut the book, but he couldn’t shut out his thoughts. Perhaps it was time to face the truth. Just what was there about flying that troubled him so greatly? Where did his exaggerated dislike of air travel come from?

Could it be the commercials? Even when sitting in the security of his own home, with no seat belts trapping him into his easy chair, he had always been conscious of a vague irritation when confronted by the paeans of praise for flight, which emanated from his television screen. All those images of scenic grandeur and jumbo jets sailing serenely through the blue and cloudless skies over shining seas—all those unseen heavenly choirs chanting about the high adventure and low fares to be found in the skies—what nonsense! Most of the flights he had taken offered nothing of visual grandeur; what he usually saw from his window were clouds and smog, or a combination of both. And the fare-structure had always been a source of irritation to him. It seemed to turn out that so-called bargain rates were offered only to family groups traveling at some ungodly hour of the night to one of a very few major cities. The moment you embarked on a journey at a sensible hour, traveling alone, the rates escalated to astronomical proportions. Why did it cost $99 to fly three thousand miles across the country as opposed to $400 or $500 for a journey one-third that distance? No matter how loudly the choir sang or how often the offscreen announcer boasted of bargains—fair or unfair—Valentine always seemed to end up trapped in a situation like this.

Trapped.

That was the operative word. The whole trip was a trap. That’s how you started—trapped in a tangle of traffic as you approached the airport. Trapped in a maze of jammed parking lots. Trapped in a staggering, stumbling dash from lot to terminal, hefting the bulky burden of your luggage. Trapped in the line waiting at the passenger counter. Trapped in the anxiety of anticipation once you reached it: Were your tickets in order? Was your flight departing on time? Could you be certain, once you checked in, that your luggage would be put through to its proper destination?

Then, of course, there was the business of passing through the security check. The X-ray eye scrutinizing the contents of your hand-luggage was bad enough, but the cold, fishy stare of the security people was even worse. Foolish, of course, but Valentine always went through the procedure with the feelings of a felon; the whole thing reminded him all too vividly of police procedure. He half expected one of the uniformed guards to grab him by the collar with a curt command:
“Up against the wall, clasp both hands behind your head. It is my duty to warn you that you have the right to remain silent; anything you say may be used in evidence.”

Then there was a long walk to the terminal gate, the endless plodding through the white-walled corridor under the harsh glare of fluorescent illumination.
The last mile.

Only worse. At least the prisoner condemned to execution could expect to reach his destination and pass through the little green door without interruption. But air terminal procedure was different. Once at the gate, you stood in line again, waiting for the door to open. From overhead came the canned cacophony of tape recordings, punctuated abruptly by an announcer squawking static-riddled gibberish, which involuntarily evoked one’s nerve-racked attention. Would your name be called to report to the nearest telephone? Was your flight going to be delayed for an extra hour? Standing before the departure gate was always an ordeal, and even if you could disregard what issued overhead, there was no way to ignore the presence of your fellow prisoners. Correction—fellow passengers. But as far as Valentine was concerned, he heartily wished that those passengers had been in prison. Perhaps he was squeamish; he preferred to think of himself merely as a private person who lacked the normal quotient of gregariousness. Whatever it was, he disliked the close proximity of young mothers with squalling infants in their arms or the overweight oldsters who seemed to think it necessary to embark on a flight to Philadelphia wearing cowboy hats with brims pulled down to shadow their fat, bespectacled faces. Again, at least the condemned man is granted the privilege of taking his seat in the electric chair alone; he doesn’t have to put up with the indignity of a crying baby seated beside him, or the presence of one of those pseudo-cowboys who will talk him to death during the journey into oblivion. Better to suffer the brief pain of electrocution than the endless agony of elocution.

Valentine sighed softly. This was nit-picking, he knew, over-dramatization. All he was doing was trying to forestall the ultimate reality—the fear that possessed him after the waiting interval at the terminal—the terminal illness, ending when he finally boarded his flight.

Again, the situation contrasted unfavorably with that of a condemned prisoner. When they put you in the electric chair, you at least have the comfort of knowing that you don’t have to lay out an exorbitant sum—to say nothing of an exorbitant tax—to pay for your seat; and no one sentenced to death is expected to strap himself into the hot seat. He doesn’t have to sit there in endless anticipation of what is to come; he doesn’t have to listen to the sound of the engines revving up and wonder whether or not they seem to be in proper working order. He doesn’t have to endure the long, slow, bumpy shudder of movement as the plane heads into position for its takeoff at a distant runway. He doesn’t face the repetition of the engines’ roaring, followed by the thrust of acceleration as the plane suddenly swoops forward with a surge of shrieking sound as it seeks to rise.

And when it does finally rise, when one is conscious of being airborne at last, there is always the clamor of one’s inner voice: Will it clear those power lines just beyond the airport boundaries? Will it manage to soar above the high-rises of the city streets or the mountains ringing the desert location—or the roaring waters of an ocean takeoff? And what about that dangerously steep slanting of wings when the aircraft swerves, as it inevitably seems to do, before heading into the flight-path?

Naturally, these questions are never voiced, let alone answered, in the little recitation that a bored stewardess hastily delivers prior to takeoff.
Fasten your seat belts . . . place your seat in the upright position . . . extinguish all smoking materials . . . blah, blah, blah, oxygen mask overhead, blah, blah, blah, emergency exits . . .
Valentine could almost recite the standard reassurances from memory, but there was no point to it, because they were meaningless.

How many times had that same speech been made just before a takeoff where the plane did
not
clear the wires, or the buildings, or the mountaintop, or the surface of the sea? How many times had the mechanical reassurance been given before an aircraft started to bank, only to spin into the spiral of a fatal crash? Once you hit the power line or the jutting obstacle ahead, it didn’t much matter whether or not the oxygen mask descended on schedule; and the emergency exits offered no escape from the fiery explosion.

Valentine shifted in his seat. Why was he wasting his time with such morbidities? He’d already gone the route; run the gauntlet of traffic and terminal, endured the anticipatory dread of waiting and survived the perils, real and imaginary, of the takeoff. So why was he still uptight now?

Then realization came. It wasn’t fear of danger that produced his palpitations of mind and body. The real terror came from the realization of his helplessness.

Here he was, sailing along serenely at an elevation of thirty-five thousand feet. The
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS
sign had blinked off, and nicotine-addicts were free to risk lung cancer again. The stewardesses would go into the galley soon to load the refreshment cart, and up front, behind the closed door sealing off the nose of the plane, the pilot and his crew were huddled over their instrument panels.

Or were they?
For all he knew, they might be discussing this afternoon’s football games, or last night’s adventures on the town. Somewhere Valentine had read that employees of flight crews were instructed not to indulge in alcohol or any form of dissipation for twenty-four hours prior to a scheduled assignment. But how could you be certain they’d followed those instructions? There were also those reassuring public-relations statements about mandatory regular physical checkups for all flight personnel, but again, there was always the random factor of unpredictability. Suddenly he remembered an episode in his own family history—how Uncle Joe had gone in for his usual annual physical checkup and emerged from the doctor’s office with a clean bill of health, only to drop dead of cardiac arrest in the elevator that was taking him down to the street. Good old Uncle Joe—only forty-eight years old, pink of condition, best tennis player in the annual competition at the country club. No smoking, no drinking, no bad habits—but suddenly, without warning, no heartbeat. If it could happen to his Uncle Joe going down in an elevator, it sure could happen to somebody else’s uncle going up in an aircraft. The difference being that when Uncle Joe’s heart gave out, the elevator didn’t crash.

For goodness sake,
Valentine told himself,
stop acting like a baby! Try to think of something else.

And so he did. He thought about air pockets—unexpected wind currents that could envelop the plane suddenly, without warning, and hurl it to destruction below. He thought about wind-shears that crumpled wings and turned jumbo jets into helpless insects unable to withstand the buffeting of a storm.

Valentine blinked and jerked erect at the sudden glimpse of green slashing through the sky beyond the window.

Lightning.

He’d been right about the presence of the storm ahead. Only it wasn’t ahead anymore; they were actually into it now. The skies beyond the windows were almost black and raindrops spattered against the glass.

The plane bounced into a sickening lurch and so did Valentine’s stomach.

Glancing down, he noted that his hands were gripping the edges of his armrest.

White knuckles.
How he hated that casually used slang phrase! But his knuckles
were
white and he was pretty sure that his face was turning green.

Better find out about that. As plane and stomach wrenched again, Valentine released his grip on the armrest and scooped up the objects on his tray table, depositing them in the briefcase. Pushing the table up and securing it in position against the back of the seat directly ahead of him, he rose and made his way down the aisle in the direction of the lavatory. Two stewardesses were in the galley now and neither of them—a rather attractive young girl and her somewhat older companion—noticed him as he moved past and entered the lavatory on his left.

The cubicle was small and dark, like an upright coffin, but when the door closed behind him, the fluorescence flickered on. Valentine found himself facing the washstand mirror and there his worst fears were confirmed. His face
did
have a greenish cast. He stared at his reflection, noting the telltale terror in his eyes. Confronting his countenance, he found the final fear. Helplessness was not the ultimate horror, nor was the fear of flying. The thing that really got to him was the fear of
falling.

Who knows where it started, or when: probably in infancy. As far back as he could remember he was aware of that particular phobia, both in waking life and in his all-too-vivid dreams. It was in those dreams, dreams that survived into adulthood, that he would suddenly find himself dropping down into darkness—deep, deep darkness, like that of the storm clouds outside the plane. There were no windows in the lavatory and he couldn’t see the sky here, but he could feel the force of the storm that surged around the aircraft. The wrenches came faster now, quickening in a regular rhythm. A tiny light flickered on behind the lettered inscription:
PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR SEAT.