Day 33
Day Thirty-Three
“Connie?” the copilot asked.
“Lally.”
Lally spotted them immediately from the galley window, three unidentifiable lights, maybe a thousand yards off the wing in triangle formation, an apex and two more back and to the sides forming the base.
Every few seconds the lights would switch positions at random, so rapidly if you blinked you truly would miss it.
“What the…” Lally said, mostly to herself, as she almost forgot she was holding a phone.
“Show Connie,” the copilot, Mark Pinkstaff, instructed.
He was new to the airline, young and single and fun to drink with on layovers and even seemed to have a thing for older women.
Lally had to make it clear when they first met that she didn’t date pilots and that included first officers.
While that was a lie, it was mostly true lately and she didn’t want to lead him on.
It was clear from the outset that Mark was someone to keep clear of; you could spot the ones that became emotionally attached.
Which isn’t to say she and Connie didn’t have a little fun with his name.
“Pinkstaff? Why not just Fleshdong,” Connie had said over Vegas, sending Lally into uncharacteristic fits.
“First Officer Rosepecker,” Lally joked in return, then held out her hand with bravado, the way Mark did when he first introduced himself to the crew.
“What are they?” Lally asked of the lights. She endured a long pause, static crackling on the line. There was only a steel door between them, but it might as well have been a mountain range.
“Boeing, Boeing, Boeing,” Mark said, his doofy voice making onomatopoetic bouncy sounds.
Lally didn’t laugh. She didn’t know what to think, but she knew for certain those were not planes. Aircraft did not move like that, that smoothly, that quickly. She wished he would just tell her the truth. “You know what they say about bad airplane jokes.”
“Yeah,” Mark said, defeated. They don’t land.
Lally waved her arm to get Connie’s attention and motioned for her to come to the front of the plane.
Connie nodded and stormed the aisle at the pace flight attendants have perfected, the one that said they were too busy to get you headsets but that there was no cause for alarm.
Connie was older by a few years, but had only started up again with the airline recently after taking time off to raise kids when her husband left her for a woman who sold long-term-care insurance policies.
“Do you have any of the Sun Chips up here?” Connie asked as she surveyed the galley for any signs of trouble, like the coffee maker acting up. The Garden Salsa flavor was her favorite. Noticing the phone in Lally’s hand, she pointed. Who are you talking to?
Lally shot her a look back. Who do you think?
Dickfingers? Connie mouthed.
Lally pointed at the formation out the window. “What do you make of this?”
Connie looked, and then looked closer, taking a full step toward the window.
“Watch,” Lally encouraged her, and waited until she was certain Connie had seen the lights jump. Connie snatched the phone from Lally without saying a word.
“Pinkstaff, what the hell.”
Lally observed Connie as she listened intently to their copilot, nodded, and finally hung up. “What did he say?” Lally asked as Connie started digging in a drawer for her favored Sun Chips, the ones in the little red bag.
Connie found her prize and stood upright, triumphant. “He said it was just one of those things.”
“One of those things?” Lally placed her hands on her hips incredulously.
Connie opened the bag with a pop and offered Lally the first chip; she declined. “Don’t tell me this is your first UAP.”
On second thought, Lally took a chip. UAP sounded like some kind of gynecological exam.
“Unidentified aerial phenomenon.” Connie pressed a chip against her tongue, turned it over and did the same again, then tossed the chip in the trash without eating it.
When she clocked Lally’s confused look, she said, “Oh, I just like the flavor crystals,” like that was a perfectly normal thing to do, akin to a bump of coke in the eighties.
“And I’m still trying to fit back into this uniform. ” She slapped a hand on her hip.
But that wasn’t what Lally was reacting to, although it was disconcerting behavior at best. “Unidentified…”
“Wait,” Connie said as she tossed another now-naked chip in the trash. “Anomalous phenomenon. The A stands for ‘anomalous.’ Connie denuded a third chip with her tongue.
Lally’s jaw went slack. She’d heard stories from some of the other flight attendants she’d been scheduled with over the years—everyone has a story.
She just assumed they were like ghost stories, maybe there was a kernel of truth, but exaggerated over the years if not outright made up. “You mean a UFO?”
Connie laughed. “ ‘UFO’ sounds so…” She trailed off without finishing her sentence, but made some spooky sound right out of a 1950s sci-fi TV show with little green men.
“And that’s that?” Lally asked. She looked down the aisle and at the sleeping passengers. No small part of her was ready to leap into action, but to do what she wasn’t sure. Just then, the cabin lights flickered and for the first time a look of concern spread across Connie’s face.
“That’s weird.”
Lally swallowed hard, but the oxygen masks weren’t dropping, they hadn’t changed altitude as far as she could tell, and no one seemed all that bothered.
“Not that weird,” Connie said. “Just the APU.”
This one Lally knew. APU was auxiliary power unit.
In fact, lights flickered on planes all the time when switching power sources.
From the ground power to the power generated by a plane’s engines upon takeoff.
Switching to auxiliary power in the sky.
If it hadn’t been for the lights hovering off the starboard wing, Lally would not have given it a second thought.
But right now, it felt like an unexpected knock on the door in a horror film after something else had gone bump in the night.
“Jumpy,” Connie said, placing her hand on Lally’s arm to calm her; it had the opposite effect. “Don’t tell me you still cling to the idea that nothing soars the skies but us, a few satellites, and our own imagination.”
Lally wasn’t sure she’d ever given it that much thought. “Well, no.”
A woman decked in head-to-toe Lululemon like she owned stock in the apparel company approached the galley with a sour expression; Lally preemptively handed her a bottle of water without so much as making eye contact.
Fortunately, that was exactly what the woman was after, what most women who flew in yoga pants were after, and once she completed some obnoxious stretching in the aisle she quietly slipped back to her seat.
“We used to see these sorts of things all the time back when I first started. Nine times out of ten, they’re nothing. Birds, clouds, toy balloons, weather balloons, research balloons, dust…birds.”
“You said birds already.”
“Lightning. Now we don’t even notice them because we’re so used to drones and satellites and all that. Pilots see these things and just roll their eyes.”
“Dust?” Lally was replaying this list in her head.
“You know. Light refractions due to pollutants in the air. Harmless.”
Lally remained unconvinced. “Mark didn’t just roll his eyes. Mark picked up the phone and called me.”
“Mark’s bored. It’s the middle of the night. We’ve got…” Connie checked her watch, which was small and gold like a grandmother’s. “Roughly two and a half hours left in this flight. He’s just pulling your leg.”
Lally looked out the window again and, sure enough, the lights were still there. That might be true, but also true: This was no light refraction.
Connie peered into her snack bag as if counting the number of chips remaining. “Sometimes they’re psychological manifestations.”
Being called crazy didn’t sit well with Lally, especially by another woman. She was beginning to think Mark and Connie were both putting her on. A hazing of sorts, even though they were the ones new to the route.
“Well, you know. I don’t mean that as harsh as it sounds.
They overwork us, we’re tired. The short turnarounds.
A bad night’s sleep in an airport hotel.
Different pillow every night. The altitude.
Pressure in our heads. Not to mention…” Connie made a whistling sound as she leaned back and nodded up and down the aisle at the passengers.
“It adds up. And it just gets harder as we age.”
Lally was pretty sure she’d just been called crazy and old, and she still wasn’t sure what to do. “So we just…forget we saw it?”
“Unless you want to start alarming passengers.”
“Connie!”
But Connie was rummaging for the right zero-calorie beverage to pair with her flavor crystals and didn’t take her protest seriously.
“What do you want us to do, shoot them down? We’re not exactly a fighter jet.
You think Mark is some top gun? He had to have me help him download the American app on his phone.
Me! Like I’m his mother.” She finally gave up the ghost. “I’m going to head back to the rear.
I think there’s one apple juice left.” She held her finger to her lips to keep Lally quiet, lest a passenger hear and request it before Connie could claim it.
“Don’t worry. I just take two sips, then spit it out. ” She patted her hips a second time.
“Connie, come back here.”
As Connie left the galley she pointed one last time at the window and said, “Just you wait, in a few minutes they will be gone.”