The Plane Was Readying Itself To Take Off

The plane was readying itself for take-off.

I wondered if a plane was called a plane because it interleaved several planes of reality and dream in order to achieve flight for a heavier-than-air object that it surely was. A transporter for people across the tightening borders of the world. Some countries these days even had walls between them, and only a plane could cross them. This plane, today, was not readying itself on an old-fashioned runway, as runways had all become walls themselves. No, it was on a sloping ramp, pointing to the sky at forty five degrees angle, almost like the way rockets used to take off before the North Korean events of history.

Whilst the ramp looked like a giant youthful Meccano model, it did bear the weight of the plane, and now up closer it seemed like a mighty monster of metal which glinted in the setting and rising suns. This was to be home – for me, my family and friends together with a single stranger – lasting at least an optimum length of time. I learned that gradually. It was not a sudden knowledge. I had to be tutored into the idea of taking off on this plane. And persuade my family and friends and a single stranger to join me. It was a sort of embellishment against entrenched echoes of Trump and Brexit that continued to plague our human world.

So, imagine my shock when I was allowed closer to the plane, and saw that it was pointing down the ramp not up it!

Indeed the bodywork of the plane sloped towards the ground upon the ramp and creaked like a regular clock, each tick representing a separate strain on its rivets. This was its way of readying to take off, and there was nothing in the words 'take off' to prevent it taking off rather than soaring off or lifting off or catapulting off into the sky. The nearer I got, I could see it was measured in hundreds of metres, and even thousands, widening out towards the top, tapering down to the deeply spiralled drillbit on its fuselage's nose, a drillbit poised half a centimetre above the desert floor. It spun gently as the powerful engine above in the main body took light revving exercises and clambering labourers leaned from the gantries to squirt huge gouts of black sludge into the moving parts. As the sun rose – blinding off the shiny areas of the mighty fuselage – the drillbit spun harder; then I, now suddenly being the project leader, pressed a button which I knew was the real starter-switch, all the other switches built into the pilot’s console being just for show.

Years of arranging suddenly entered my memory – poring over incomprehensible charts of aeroplane or now terraplane engineering – debating the ways and whyfores of the avenues towards which it might lead me – vicariously enjoying the false start romances which alternated like misfiring currents between members of the crew – carefully monitoring my own sanity – yes, after all these things, surely the day had arrived. I got to get there. Really got to.

A plane readying itself for take off as a Noah’s Ark, yes, but one with no need to take to the open skies, as had been predicted. It was to be home for humanity’s hope not as the Lark Ascending but, in darker moments of delving doubt, more a Lurk Descending.

The lady was younger than myself, although we both dreamed independently that we had once been the same age – separate dreams that neither could admit to the other. She had peach-blossom cheeks and a name she kept hidden, making me call her by all manner of endearments. She played on my good nature and my deep desire for a partner (even at my advanced years). She stood beside me as I pressed the starter switch.

The ignition turned the mighty engines, one sparking off another, until the drillbit spun so fast it was just one among many scintillating shafts of the dawning sun. The tip met the hard redness of the Essex desert just this side of its wall, throwing up a wormcast fit to outshadow an Ancient Egyptian pyramid. It eased into the undersoil, to where centuries of misbegotten seasons had sunk. Then it ground into the first layer of bedrock, setting off a rain of white-hot splinters which cascaded past the windows of the plane's cabins. Somehow the wings and propellers continued to be integral even as they entered the ground. Whether the propellers continued spinning was something beyond my ability to see.

My family and friends merely sat and stared, amid the juddering, as the darkness of Earth enveloped them. No need for concern, I told them: the lights on board would not even flicker, since the relentless power of the drillbit's torque would feedback and regenerate the cells. I showed them where the fuse membranes were stored, so these could be replaced with just one turn of a screw and a snap-on-snap-off cassette. The chosen stranger in the crew was less confident, for I did read fear in his eyes, behind the hope. He was suspicious of why I had chosen him to ride at all. Suspicious, indeed, of himself for having agreed to come on such a wayward mission.

'On to the core, away from Trump and Brexit!’ I announced over the ship’s tannoy. ‘That’s where we shall pitch our tents!’

She laughed. She knew at the bottom of her heart that it was far too hot at the core for anything to exist, especially for our bodies of human parchment and the spontaneously combustible brains that our skulls freighted. Global warming was never to be denied.

I had always felt that I possessed two brains: two lumps of grey matter with hot-rod lightning Z-tracking between. I was not schizophrenic, but merely overburdened with thoughts and ideas which, by turns, conflicted and merged. It was like being married to myself. And as the mammoth plane delved downwards between rocks which shifted amid the sluggish marrow of Earth’s inner sky, I had to calm the nerves of everybody on board, needing to contain their fears concurrently while not allowing my own sanity to slip. I boasted that we were the ultimate pioneers, ones that history had foretold would boldly bodily go to the outer reaches of the Universe, finding a new home to flee a terrible world. But this great escape, I told them, was not up, but down. The dire diseases, you see, were wilder, deeper, stronger in the places where the stars flowed in the sky.

They listened open-mouthed, but I soon saw that none of them had ever believed me. No wonder they couldn’t even trust themselves.

How could I have even hoped that any of them possessed the nous for such concepts, when times were so backward? There were other questions, too. Indeed, I set them pub quizzes to pass the time along its rightful channel, tested them on knowledge and on historical perspective. Until the stranger pointed out that we had forgotten to stow the books. How were we meant to preserve the spirit of the world, the very posterity we hoped to further? Old people were meant to have wisdom, weren’t they. Otherwise, they’d be young again.

I unconsciously bit my lip and indicated towards the carved slabs of map-crazed rocks which slid past the plane's portholes, but if I were meant to speak, to smooth away the puzzles on our brows, I could only find two words: ‘Trust me’.

Suddenly, we all heard an edge-toothed rasping and outlandish crunching noise, like the strongest tide upon loose shingle, when trying to claw a way back from drowning. The plane and its drillbit ground to a ricocheting halt, sending the passengers in all tilting directions, my lady collapsing on top of me with a screech which the drillbit itself must have felt as it met an impermeable Hard Core. Sparks in a molten silver river flowed past the portholes, as my family clambered across the steepening floor towards me, yearning for comfort and words of unalloyed wisdom. But she, my lady, spoke first: ‘The air is escaping, we can’t breathe.’

Two brains merged – at this optimum point of time. We gathered that the fuselage of the plane had been stove in by the force of the jolt, and the carefully preserved life support systems were seeping out – not rapidly as they would have done in outer space, but gradually enough to warrant immediate donning of Q-shaped masks. My mask was in the image of Ancient Pan, and my lady’s in that of a birdlike creature with oversize beak. The stranger’s mask was designed along the lines of my own face whilst the rest of the crew presented a motley array of fictitious heroes and villains, spinning on their rumps like dying bluebottles, all doped to the white-clogged gills.

Only two masks possessed the secret air supply instead of the snorts of dope. But such supply was to last for a mere one minute – suitable for my lady and I to consummate our loving union at last. But not before my two brains alternated endlessly between Death and Life. Until, finally, even endlessness eventually ended and, after much debate, Death itself started to write these words.

‘Trust me,’ the stranger said with his last words – but he knew, in his heart, if not his two brains, that these words were trapped between the hard covers of a book, the ink-trod paper crumbling to choking dope-dust in his throat. The lady tugged a washing-line of pure white oblong flags from under her skirt. She smiled and held it out for him to help pull them free from endlessness. They were the virgin pages for a book which became banknotes for invisible money, most blank but some bearing the head of Charles Dickens in the corner. A few even were denominated.

One of my eyes, I somehow know, weeps an old man’s tears; the other eye sparkles like a child’s. Got to get there. Really got to. Right to the core of dreams. Away from Trump and Brexit. Taking off beyond the Wall of Sleep.