The Malfunction of a Small Airplane as Seen From the Ground

John Rieder

10:00 a.m. and you’re leaning out the window of your third-story apartment in an old suburb just downwind from the city. You’re leaning out, just so, Monday, cracked mug half-full of Darjeeling tea, earthy, with honey, your eyes lazy on the four-story across the street.

You’re leaning out, just so, and the sky seems to pop (then roar), a bass-heavy spiraling grind just above you.

An airplane, tiny and white from this distance, a Cessna, a toy almost, is breaking apart against clouds that boast rain.

You’re looking up now, straight up, and this whole sequence, this whole linear narrative, plays out in seconds.

The malfunction. Plane breaks in two. Pilot falls to earth.

But this event and the few moments that comprise it become yours. You can almost pluck the whole logic of the sequence out of the sky, let it idle in your cupped hands indefinitely.

The malfunction. Plane breaks in two. Pilot falls to earth.

You’re looking up now, straight up, and you almost laugh because it all does seem to happen in slow motion, the cliché of every bad movie, every imparted near-death experience, every session of hypnotic regression The malfunction. Plane breaks in two. Pilot falls to earth.

therapy. The way the little airplane’s wings and cockpit diverge from the tail, its fuselage cometburning, disintegrating against the overcast backdrop.

The way the pilot falls fast, much more quickly than the whirling X of the cockpit and wings. And from where you stand, leaning out of your window, the pilot, for only a fraction of a moment already so fractured, is superimposed against the wings. And you channel so many thoughts (an ocean of questions) of angels falling to earth, like García-Márquez wrote, and who believes in fucking angels anyway? And can he fly now? And are you (is he) my angel? And that angel and angle are so close so if he’s falling straight downward is that still acute? And now you’re standing outside, just up the street from your apartment.

Now you’re moving further up the street. You hear the first sirens, still a few minutes away, and you’re suddenly aghast, this gently cupped moment swatted from your hands. Who could’ve called? Who else saw the plane come apart, saw the white heat of the fuselage bloom against the gray, the man tumbling downward, faster even than the front half of the airplane, saw the superimposition of man against spinning wreckage overhead?

But now you’re there, on a side street just a block past your apartment, where the pilot is sprawled out on the sidewalk next to a shrub

yellowed by dog piss and drought. He’s fully intact, not a bloody splat, not the dramatic red smear that you thought would be the result of such a great fall.

You’re closer now, and his body at rest reminds you of images from a book of Civil War daguerreotypes you once saw, the way the battlefield dead lay in contortion. A leg crossed over the other. Torso half-turned at the hips. Arms bent behind the head, the head resting in the crook of one elbow. A hand bent slightly back at the wrist.

You’re standing over him now. Now you’re kneeling beside him. Kneeling in the blood that is seeping from his head and stomach, his intestines herniated. And one thing that surprises you the most about this dead pilot, besides his moustache, which reminds you of your father’s, very thick and dirty-blonde, is that his watch, a silver-plated thing, is still audibly ticking.

You give your synopsis to a local reporter, a woman with a smart suit and perfect teeth, and to a buff young cop with no hair: the unseen malfunction, the plane splitting in two, the pilot falling.

You go home and sleep for 17 hours. You dream deeply. Odd visions. Civil War dead that bleed Darjeeling tea. Silver-plated teeth that bite the rain from clouds.

A comet cupped gently in the palm of your hand.