Marcus drifted into consciousness high above the earth and, as if to double check, he carefully pulled the plastic grey shutter up. The ovalular window to reveal a patchwork of browns, a distance with almost imperceptible textures as if they were the scruff of a molted buffalo.
A burst of movement caught Marcus’s eye to his left and he turned slightly see an aging Tom Cruise enter a room with his gun drawn. Then screen sat on the back of a chair before the passenger next to him. Cruise lowered his weapon and nodded to his female companion, who looked relieved. Marcus’s eyes lingered for a moment, then fluttered closed.
When he awoke, Tom Cruise was fighting another greying man on the roof of a fast-moving train. Marcus wondered idly how long it had been since the fighting-on-the-roof-of-the-train scene had been entertaining to him. He had seen maybe a hundred such scenes. He wanted to ask the writers who wrote this particular scene were proud of their contribution to cinema.
Perhaps they simply consulted a spreadsheet that said things like “The expense of a normal car-chase-scene is half of the expense of filming it, while the train fighting scene’s expenses are slightly higher but gross a three times multiplier in viewership so I think with our budget, it’s the better investment.”
Maybe the characters simply ended up on the train roof organically, and Marcus was being cynical. He looked at the passenger in front of the Tom Cruise movie and saw he was not facing the pixels of the action movie at all, but instead watching golf on his phone. Sensing that his eyelids were on the brink of fluttering closed again and he would soon lose consciousness, Marcus turned back to the window in the hopes that he could absorb some of the landscape far below while he was still in the air.
The patchwork was still there in some places, but the tendrils of forested mountains crept in like the hands of some great piedmont god attempting to snatch away the blanket from the deity of the plains, who had been occupied by other business in her vast kingdom.
“Would you care for a cookie, a fruitbar, or pretzels?” the calming voice of an older air hostess murmured just beyond Marcus’s consciousness.
“Would you care for a cookie, a fruitbar, or pretzels?” said the voice of another, younger air hostess. The voices were far off, as if Marcus was asleep and they belonged to the real world of the cabin, while Marcus’s eyeballs stubbornly remained fixed on this tapestry of tans and golds, crusts of snow, the faint gleam of a semitruck gliding impossibly slowly on a small scrape laid into the surface of the world.
For an instant, Marcus imagined the trucker sitting in his cab, listening to a Joe rogan podcast and drinking Monster. He was thinking about his kids at home, maybe he was thinking about fly fishing. Hell, maybe he was thinking about Monet, who knows? He belonged in yet another world on the ground. He was moving the materials into the small glittering piles of metal and concrete every hundred miles or so, passing by as brief exceptions to the expanse of space.
Marcus savored the textures. The mysteries of certain colors. Was he seeing the brown of the sweeping bank of a river, or was that the water itself? It was a bank; the river was low.
How many wind turbines were in sight? At first glance, maybe a dozen, but upon extending his search all the way to the shadows from the approaching clouds, there were hundreds. How much power did they generate? Who used that power? How many hundreds of miles of cable did it travel to be used in a microwave, to charge a neglected vibrator, to power a rural hospital that saved the residents of this part of the country?
These were the questions of the sky culture, Marcus thought.
""Would you care for a cookie, a fruitbar, or pretzels?”
“No thanks,” said Marcus.
“Water please, no ice though,” said the woman next to him.
“Here you are.”
The cart was approaching, with its many paper and plastic containers for water, alcohol, plastic-wrapped snacks. Perhaps the petroleum used to mold the disposable coffee stirrers had a brother who was refined into the very jet fuel that propelled this plane from Minnesota to San Francisco. Marcus felt a pang of guilt. The land below, though sparsely piled with refined materials, sat below the subtle jet streams of invisible C02 that the scientists, and really the world, condemned for warming the planet and melting glaciers, their icefalls crashing into the bays on the eastern side of Greenland, displacing the Rohingya who drowned off the coast of Myanmar trying to escape an authoritarian genocide, causing the war in Ukraine as Russia vied for better access to a Mediterranean oil pipeline. Killing corals that would never be vibrant again.
And this coloradan land below, somehow already stripped of some older magic, crimes against the planet a hundred or so years older. These grasslands that now sprouted windmills like dandelions to power a grid that spread across the planet like curious, enterprising lichen. These grasslands used to hand a couple million buffalo. The same energy from the sun that powered photovoltaics and caused convection currents that cursed through the great white tri-blades of the wind turbines once grew the grass that was broken down into sugars coursing through the blood of the buffalo, hunted by the natives of that place, some warlike, some peaceful. Most here in this part of the country, nomadic, accustomed to putting hundreds of miles under their feet in a season, as accustomed to movement as the wind itself. The same wind under the wings of this airbus, roaring mutely around Marcus as loud as time itself, quietly pushing itself forward guiltlessly.
And yet to see the surface of the earth stretched out so wide below like a myth, this timeless stage that had seen the very dinosaurs and ancient furs that now sat as oil deep below the earth, was to worship. Marcus sat devoutly in his temple. His worship was peaceful, and yet it also contained conflict.
I used credit card points to buy this flight, Marcus said in prayer to the sky god. So it doesn’t count, right? Because it isn’t allowing the air travel industry to consume extra fuel?
But he knew his question did not merit a response, and was surprised that he would think to plead in this way to begin with.
I know better than that, he thought, scolding himself.
“Could I get through to use the bathroom?” asked the woman to his right who had graciously offered him gum earlier.
“Oh of course”, Marcus said, unclipping his seatbelt. Perhaps she was a disciple as well. Standing to let her through, he looked out over the many faces. Some looked back, others did not, bathed in the glow of the screens in front. Some dozed peacefully. The inquisitive glance of a toddler swiveled his way, aware it was inside of a miracle, but quickly distracted.
Marcus continue to peak out the window from this new vantage point. The world continued to change around him at a puzzling pace. It moved so slowly, but in just a moment, changed to dramatically. All of this space, replete with a million unique biomes as well as a million warehouses built on filled-in marshes. The familiar, needlessly contoured shapes of a half-built housing development sickened Marcus, but in the next moment he forgave humanity his bitterness for what was he doing to honor this sweeping earth? Who could be held accountable if not himself for the gross movement of materials, the bull-dozering of earth? He craved, familiarly, to live below there in a time before the warehouses and the scrapes in the earth and the collapse of the great ecosystems at the foot of suburbia and interstate infrastructure. But it was a pointless fantasy.
“Excuse me,” the woman said, smiling, having returned form the bathroom.
Marcus gave the kind of smile where one bunches their lips together for some reason, hoping to convey good will to this stranger, and moved aside briefly before returning back, awkwardly, to his seat and buckling up again.
The modern sky faith was a flawed one, Marcus mused. It was rich in perspective, but it was hypocritical.
“Hey folks, it looks like we’re hitting a bit of turbulence here, so I’ve put the fast seatbelt sign on. Please refrain from moving around the cabin.”
Yet it seemed to wash Marcus clean. His worries below him, insignificant of course in contrast to the enormity of the world below him and the great yawning journey of time, Marcus felt baptized by the clouds he drifted through with this cohort of ninety-or-so strangers. He felt privileged to worship here with them. To honor the temple of these skies, he tried to evoke the wide eyed wonder he had seen in the eyes of the toddler. This miracle, flying in a great metal bird, was the kind of thing that had been prophesied. It was in great myths of prophets in transit between mount olympus and the mortal world, the the Mongolian Sky God Tenger speaking to the humans and the wolves with lightning and thunder. Icarus flying too high. Belephron literally crashing his flying friend Pegasus, and morning him. Raven stealing the sun.
The body of the great metal bird rocked, gently at first, then slightly more violently. Marcus automatically returned to the sky meditation.
If I fall from the sky and die, I am content because it is a miracle to have flown and foolhardy to believe it has no cost. I am content for all of the modern wonders of the world and the prices I have not had to pay for it. And if I survive, I am born again, for I have seen the impossible, for I have flown higher than any human was supposed.
As the plane continued to rock, people began to shift and make noises of discomfort, others of guidiness. Marcus unconsciously glanced to the passenger to the right of him, and they shared a nervous smile, a small duet of laughter in the face of a miracle, and of death, like toddlers driving a semi as they tried to reach the brake pedal with their stubby feet.
We are Raven, Marcus knew, and we have stolen the sun.
“We will be landing in Denver in about ten minutes, where the local time is 3:55pm and the weather is a pleasant 68 degrees. One of our attendants will be passing around a brochure for our exclusive sky miles program, for you to peruse at your leisure, which incudes a 60 thousand mile initial bonus.”
*Notes Wrote this on a plane after finishing the excellent book Ceremonies by Sayaka Murata *