I am on a plane with Fomo and I realize I need to pee and I have no idea where the bathroom is. The plane is swallow-shaped, with seating aisles and various utility spaces along and through two curved wings as well as down the thoracic center from head to tail. I am frustrated by the lack of signage as I wander down one wing to its terminus with no loo in sight. Around the central chamber where we're sitting, there ought to be bathrooms, dammit! but alas, it's just doors to the kitchen. So down the other wing I go, half-convinced by reasons of symmetry that it's another dead end. In a small, dark room that looks more like a train compartment for cargo, I find some people to talk to. I seem also in search of some object in my toiletries bag, because at one point I reach out and grab a tube of something, only to realize I've taken it not from my own bag but from the luggage belonging to the guy who's sitting right in front of it, attending to all its contents; and it doesn't look anything like my tube of something, anyway. I apologize. He is forgiving, and helpful, pointing out where my bag might be. And there it is, under a thing. One of its bottles or tubes has spilled or broken, and less than 3 ounces of liquid is all over the contents.
We have just taken off (again?) and I'm looking out a large observation window with a couple elderly women. We are clearly looking forward, in the direction of travel, and I wonder where on the plane we are to have such a vantage point. We must be near the tail because almost the whole of the plane is visible before us; but then the plane I thought we were on pulls away just out from under us, and it's clear we're right at the front of our plane—I guess above the cockpit. Wow, I think, we were way too close to that plane at takeoff. With mounting alarm, we observers note the pilots' seeming difficulty with the ascent: we're nearly running into concrete overpasses, which are hundreds or a thousand feet above the ground. (It's a major urban area I sometimes visit, part Philly, part San Francisco, with a familiar, elaborate I-highway ingress/egress via a huge, high semicircular bridge over a bay.) The women watching with me are fretting, complaining about the reckless driving, growing more concerned (not panicked! more annoyed than anything else). But then we're taking off tops of trees (the scraping and crashing is palpable) and it's clear the pilots are fighting even to keep the plane in flight and the passengers alive. We're still in motion through the city center when I see fires break out, new stories begin to tell of our plane's woes, various signs of the apocalypse; I wonder whether my family and friends (I have family, and friends) know the flight number I was on, excuse me, AM ON; and when it's absolutely clear the plane is crash-landing, without explanation I am outside the plan on the ground in the city, alive, unscathed. I know that I am unique among the passengers—either they are all dead and I'm the only one alive, or they are all still on the plane and I am the only one missing. In either case I realize it is the perfect opportunity to disappear and start over as somebody else. I consider the pros and cons and decide con.
So I'm back on the plane, and voilà! there's the bathroom. Of course, it's next to another kitchen door, where I greet a buddy of mine (I think her name is Shelly). I had emptied my pocketses and put everything on the desk before heading to the loo, and when I get back, I pick stuff up from the precise spot I had left my stuff, only to find that it's not my stuff but a bunch of professional artifacts—suspect cards and whatnot—belonging to the police detective who's sitting right at the desk there attending to stuff in front of her. Silly! she says, and points to my stuff, which she has moved off to the side to give herself room for her investigation.
It seems everyone on the plane is alive and well, but the investigation is vigorous and all-encompassing, and we must stay on the plane until it's done. "I don't suppose we have any idea how long they're going to keep us?" I ask, and somebody replies, "Anywhere from 3 p.m. to 3/6." Then, realizing that utterance was a bit opaque, he qualifies, "As in March sixth." It occurs to me that the current month is January.
(Later, separately, two FAA types, one of whom is James Cromwell, are discussing the crash over a relief map of the city; Cromwell issues an opinion, in a perfect quatrain, about the rarity of saving all the passengers.)
I head back to "my seat" (I'm not sure I've ever sat in it) to find Fomo, who appears to have been a MacGuffin; various other friends are there ("there" now resembles an academic courtyard, circular, with pillars and graduated stone seating, accommodating—oh, look, there's a fire pit in the middle!) including Greg Wolford, who, due no doubt to the stress of the plane crash, has got himself all looped up on muscle relaxants. He is thinner than I remember him, and he is smoking cigarettes. I ask for one and he tosses me a pack of Marlboros (wait: this is the movies, so make that Morleys). I take one out but then realize I already have a cigarette in my hand... seconds later, like some unwitting illusionist, I now have three cigarettes in my hands, and they're all lit. I show this nonsense to Greg, who laughs and asks whether I've gotten one of the *blah blah* cigarettes—thin and black, with a robin's egg blue filter. Yup, one of the three is such. I love those, Greg says. (Actually, he probably says something like, "They're the ginchiest.")
Finally off the plane, I think: Like Renfield but not perceptibly mad, FilthE is in search of vermin. There is contextual justification for this hunt, but I forget it now. Anyway, Filth and Dodo and one other friend and I are exploring, and in a antique store showroom (or possibly back room) we run across two Victorian-looking sofas, each of which is fitted with a removable bier (coffin-shaped, decoratively etched) mounted on the front for a "corpse" to lie upon, for public display. There is museum signage telling us that one of these was built for Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (the other, perhaps, for Mr. Poe), but both items were stolen or lost at some point and so what you see here are replicas. The sofa parts look comfy.
Filth finds a rat and tries to keep it from disappearing through a door or hole in the wall; I help corral the rat by snapping a shirt in strategic places near the floor. It is less adept at or insistent on escape than most rodents: it cowers from the fabric snapping like Tontín. Filth eventually pounces on the rat, manages to neutralize its various pointy threats, and holds it down. It is a very large rat. It is a Hallowe'en rat, made expressly to be scary. "It wanted to bite me," Filth says; "It still does," says I, and indeed, the rat is straining against Filth's grip to get at his hand.
The company discuss the relative scariness of real rats and mechanical rats. We decide they are both scary.
P.S. In the process of recalling all of the above, I flashed on some wandering I did just before boarding the plane; I revisited that subterranean place, all curved spaces, with the human queues and the railway tracks, which are part transit shuttle (e.g., work commutes) and part Disney attraction point of embarkment; and then grander public spaces, almost like casino floors, vast, carpeted, with steps/ramps up and down a few steps in various places, giving an elaborate split-level effect. I retrace my steps as best I can, I look around... and I say to myself: "Holy crap. I have an airport."
I add the airport to the cruise ship/hotel, the long city block of bank offices, the presidential museum, the barely inhabited long house, the much-inhabited labyrinthine long house, the nine-room square house in Newark with the garden porches, the skyscraper dorm/hotel, the not-quite-Olga's diner, the split-level formal dining room, and the place of inscrutable elevators; all of which I have visited with some regularity.
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