The Day Katherine
Touched Death
The icon of a blazing sun, half orange and half red, and
totally
abstract, was certainly an interesting contrast to the horrid blizzard
that was pushing its way through the vast suburban sprawl of Washington
DC. Katherine stared out of the 10-foot high windows and locked
eyes with the symbol for Air Florida Flight 90, Southbound for the
sunny seaside of the Tampa Bay. An abstract image of the sun was
painted onto the tail of the otherwise white Lockheed Tristar jetliner
that was to whisk her to the arms of someone more loving than her own
absent husband.
The jetliner was among the last ordered from Lockheed, for the Tristar was a final attempt at the commercial passenger market for the ailing company in the early 1970’s. It was an appropriate model of aircraft to transport the ever unique Katherine Kunakovich because of its odd arrangement of having three turbocharged engines; hence the ‘Tristar’ designation. The unique appearance appealed to Katherine and she reminded herself that it stood out as the only jetliner in the aviation market to have never yet experienced a crash of any sort during the 11 year production run.
Yet she was still nervous. The emotionless brilliant sun emblem didn't appear to be at all concerned, and Katherine bit her lower lip. The mixture of snow and freezing rain pelted against the glass and the strong gusts of wind pressed into the wall of glass, making it undulate back and forth momentarily. Katherine looked to her right and watched as the slight buckling of the glass moved down the concourse towards the doorway leading to the hallway that she would soon walk down to meet her flight. It was something similar to the ripples created by a stone skipping across a pond, only it was vertical in orientation. The sight was enough to give Katherine a moment of butterflies in her stomach.
It was 7:30 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, and as always, Katherine was early for her flight out of the cold hell of a brutal Virginian January and into the brilliant weather of Florida.
Katherine briskly walked over to a bank of pay phones along the wall parallel to the windows. She noticed more than one of the few gentlemen sitting in the waiting area giving her more than a second glance. The tall blonde woman, an imposing figure of elegance in the midst of slight chaos, smiled a coy smile into the reflective metal of the telephone and checked her teeth for lipstick. She noted that the airport had replaced all of its phones with a new touch-tone system that, in her opinion, looked much more proper for the surroundings. There was still some clear shipping tape along the side of the number pad, and she peeled it off. It would give her something to toy with while she wasted some time waiting for first class passengers to be called to the board the aircraft. With her long red fingernails she tapped in the 10-digit phone number for Marianne’s high-rise apartment.
The phone rang four times and Marianne Delamonde's answering machine kicked in.
“Hi, you’ve reached Marianne. I’m probably out working on my tan, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I pull myself away from the beach. Caio!”, sputtered the machine, with a great deal of distortion. It almost didn't sound like Marianne.
“Marianne, I know you’re there, and not on the beach, you yuppie queen,” laughed Katherine. “Pick up the damn phone right now before I’m there personally to drag you out of bed and make you talk to me!”
She paused. It was a ‘sisterly ritual’ for Katherine and Marianne to harass each other at ungodly hours of the day on each other’s answering machines. In fact, they each had independently sent answering machines to each other as Christmas gifts just several weeks earlier. It was the kind of happening that you talk about for years to come each Christmas, or at least that’s how Katherine thought of the incident.
There was a rattling noise in Katherine's earpiece as Marianne finally picked up the pink phone sitting on her nightstand.
“Marianne! What's wrong, was your flight canceled? I've been watching the news and it looks like you’re in the middle of a blizzard!” bolted Marianne, who had been up all night on her drug of choice, the ‘white angel’. “Do you know what the weatherman called it? The Siberian Express! How funny is that?”
“Bitch, slow down!”, laughed Katherine as she quickly realized that her ‘sister’ was clearly in another universe. It was especially obvious since Marianne had been notorious for being cranky in the mornings in their old dorm room at Lakecross College during the mid-1970s.
“Listen, I got to National Airport early and I’m bored. Way bored. And I’m eye candy for an old geezer in a horrid teal blazer, apparently. The bastard’s been staring at me the whole time I've been on the phone!”
“Oh, you still have your touch, don't you darling?”, cooed Marianne. “I should rather think that Kathy would prefer being in some nose candy to being eye candy, am I right?”
Katherine felt the need to blush but her heavy application of foundation at 4:00 a.m. had nullified that possibility.
“You little nut, I am in public! It's a place that you tend to deny the existence of, but indeed, Marianne, I am out here on the stage of cutting-edge transit. But yes, you are correct that this Miss Kathy would be happier in that place that you’re in right now. My flight's not canceled. It damn well better not be!”
Katherine twisted around and strained to see the annunciation panel that was some ways down the concourse. Flight 90 was still listed as being on schedule.
“I might be an ice cube when I get there, but I’ll get there, damn it!”, laughed Katherine, breathing a sigh of relief. She crossed her fingers, hoping that her flight would take off before the blizzard disrupted any operations of the countless jetliners milling about on the endless tarmac that surrounded the terminals.
The intercom system came to life with the charming declaration of several tones sounding through the speakers that Katherine imagined existed even in the broom closets of the facility. A generic voice echoed through the airport: “Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that due to the present weather conditions of the Metropolitan area, National Airport will be hereby suspending all outbound flights after 9:00 a.m. today. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thank you.”
Katherine returned her attention to the telephone in her hand and resumed her conversation with Marianne.
“Did you hear that? Shit, Marianne, this weather is worse than I thought, they're closing the damn airport after my flight leaves!”
“Well good for you! It's our lucky day!”, squealed Marianne.
“Lucky-Shmucky...I don't know girl, this is like taking off from the North Pole!”
“Well, in that case, tell Santa to send me some snowballs!”, laughed Marianne, dreaming of baseball sized quantities of cocaine under her Christmas tree.
The intercom system again began to spill the news of the airport's impending closure, this time in French, Katherine's favorite language.
“Les dames et les messieurs, l'Aéroport National suspendra tous vols sortants de la ville après 9:00 du matin aujourd'hui. Nous nous excusons de n'importe quel dérangement que ceci peut causer. Merci.”, echoed another generic female voice.
In a desperate attempt to allay any nervousness among the passengers who were still on schedule to depart, Dennis Spaulding, the airport manager on duty, quickly switched over the usual mix of modern music and turned on some Vivaldi. It was the best he could do in a panicky situation like National Airport was in at the moment.
“Oh listen honey, it must be a good sign!”, said Katherine as she turned the phone to pick up the sounds of their favorite composer during college.
Katherine noticed that there was a large vehicle, something like a fire truck with a cherrypicker attached to it. It was painted red and it was spraying a steaming solution onto the wings of her awaiting flight. A sheet of ice broke up and slid off of the wing and fell apart into a thousand shards as it slid off of the front of the wing. The sight gave Katherine a bit more confidence.
It was 7:40 a.m., and unknown to Katherine, the phone lines running down parallel to the National Airport expressway suddenly broke and shattered under the strain of the ice. The phones all throughout the airport went dead and suddenly one could look down the row of fifteen pay phones and see a wide variety of people looking around in a slightly confused state.
The lights flickered and the annunciation machine shut off, and the flipping plastic cards that were an analog format of a digital looking set of numbers and airline codes. Katherine gave a quizzical look to the phone and hung it up. A hostess came across the intercom system for her lounge area and announced the boarding of first class passengers for flight 90.
“It's about time for this Siberian Express to take off!”, said Katherine in a slight pout. She briskly clicked her way across the marble floor and soon hit the silent brown carpet that was the motif for the waiting area. She swept up her carry on luggage and her purse, and strode towards the reception area.
She handed her ticket to the attendant who looked at it twice and then picked up a phone. Katherine wondered what the hold up was for her boarding. She also wondered who he thought he was going to call since the phones were dead. The young man put down the phone and gave her an awkward smile.
“Ma’am, I’m terribly sorry but we’ve overbooked the first class section…the best I can offer you is a seat in the back of the plane in coach class.”, and with that John Brennan bit his lip, awaiting the snobby-looking woman's response.
“You’re kidding me, right?”, said Katherine with an expression that was devoid of any real emotion.
“No, ma’am, I’m not kidding. Would you like to board now or will you be taking another flight when the airport reopens later this afternoon? That is, if it reopens. This blizzard might end up stopping any outbound or inbound flights for the whole day. Maybe even through tomorrow.”
“I’ll be on this plane, you jackass,” huffed the prima donna, and she looked down the corridor leading to the jetliner with a stare that could kill.
The anonymous young man opened the door and she jerked her leather pouch behind her with a dramatic huff.
The stewardess waiting at the door of the jetliner had a plastic smile across her face and she seemed to continue to stare at the panel behind Katherine as she welcomed her aboard and gave her the corporate line of generic statements. Katherine was annoyed by her distant look, and turned around to notice that the young ditz was in fact staring at a control panel with two red lights flashing, and one amber light on steadily. Katherine spun back around with an inquiring look upon her face.
A frigid cloud of dense white fog rose around the stewardesses who were straddling a two inch gap between the moveable hallway and the actual jetliner doorway. The stewardess forced an even more tense smile and quickly tried to usher her into the waiting jetliner without any time for unnecessary questions. Katherine was none to pleased with her trip already.
She clipped her way to the back of the jetliner and lowered her gaze towards the various rows of seats she was passing. She was assigned to seat 85, row S. She was now in an even worse mood and she was not comforted by the sight of the big red cherry picker machine spraying a hot solution onto the wings with the intensity of a fire truck fighting a fire. She flopped herself into her back row seat and looked around. She was alone and was actually separated by several rows of empty seats from the next passenger.
The privacy was nice, so she began to think that perhaps it wasn't so terribly bad that the airline had fudged on her ticket. She pawed through an airline industry magazine and soon found herself fishing in her purse for her cigarettes and her silver lighter. She quickly recovered both from the leather abyss and flipped the lighter open. It was nicely elegant, at least she thought so. But it was 1982, she thought, and silver wasn't quite as popular as gold was; maybe she would go shopping for a new lighter in Tampa. Katherine took a long drag from her brown-colored ‘More’ brand cigarette and quickly pushed out a large cloud of smoke that rolled and billowed out over the two rows directly ahead of her. She was bored and nervous, an annoying combination at any time.
The stewardess rolled past her with a cart of beverages and stopped in front of her.
“Welcome aboard flight 90 ma’am! My name is Amy, and I promise today will be so much better once we're out of this terrible weather...so don't be nervous, I never am. Air Florida is proud to be the carrier of your choice today, and I'll be taking care of this area of the cabin for the duration of our five hour journey to the blue waters of Tampa Bay! ...Could I get you something to drink?”, chirped the bouncy redhead with a somewhat genuine smile upon her face.
"Five hours? Are you serious, Miss Amy? How on earth is that possible, I might as well walk to Tampa!"
Amy bit her lip, and in the process smeared some red lipstick on her teeth.
"Well, I have to inform you that this is no longer the direct flight it was initially scheduled to be. We are flying first to Atlanta, where we have a layover of two hours. But this jetliner will be the one that also transports you on to Tampa. I hate that this is the situation today, but we're just lucky that we're takin' off just before National Airport is shut down for the day...", and she drifted off into a distant stare.
Katherine followed her eyes and saw the large red machine standing up at eye level, almost towering over the jet. It was blasting a steaming jet spray of hot de-icing solution all over the wing that Katherine and Amy could easily see from their vantage point.
It certainly wasn't worth complaining about any further, thought Katherine. She owed it to good fortune to be on any flight going South, so she forced herself to procure a faint smile towards Amy's general direction. She only wanted something to take the edge of the day off. That was all.
Katherine looked the cart up and down and finally made up her mind. She wouldn't be choosing a damn thing off of the coach class cart. She might not have a seat in the first class section, but she was still certain that she qualified as a first class type of person.
“Champagne, Amy...I am positive you have some in the galley, you know you do. And if you have fresh strawberries, I’d like some of those too, please. Hell, I'll take frozen strawberries, whatever the hell you all might have. Forget the fresh crap...I'm sorry, Amy. I'm just so frightened by icestorms...snow, I like that type of precipitation. But not ice, not ever...”, said Katherine with a minimum of expression, and even less eye contact. She flipped her now useless first class ticket out of her brown purse and held it towards Amy without looking towards the young woman.
“Yes ma’am,” quipped the stewardess, a 24-year old from the south Keys of Florida. She had joined Air Florida in 1980 as a fresh college graduate who wanted free travel and hot dates with the rich pilots who flew the phallic beasts across the nation.
Katherine smiled to herself as she slid the ticket back into her purse. Amy hadn't even had the courage to dare question someone who was in a Cardini fur coat with a diamond necklace that certainly cost more than Amy would have made in a year; at least that is what Katherine assumed. The materialistic eighties were fully embraced by the obsessed woman that Katherine had become during the years after she graduated from Lakecross College.
By this point the plane seemed to be full and the pilot began to recite his long oration regarding air regulations and safety precautions. Katherine didn't bother to listen. The jetliner began to roll backwards away from the terminal and she stared out of her window out towards a scene of very low visibility. The sky was a deep gray, and the torrid scene The blizzard was now even worse than it had been just an hour earlier. Katherine bit her lip again.
The jetliner seemed to take five minutes to roll into position to begin the final run down runway three. It paused for a second at the beginning of the 3000 foot stretch of concrete, and Katherine almost wished she had stayed at home. And she wondered why all of a sudden she was realizing that perhaps this entire trip had been a bad idea. But it was too late by the time that thought crossed her mind.
The engines roared up to full thrust and she was pressed back against her seatback as flight 90 accelerated down the runway. The downward onslaught of snowflakes now looked like thousands of horizontal streaks slipping past Katherine's gaze, something like static on an old television set that was broken. The airliner seemed to be gaining speed slower than it should, at least for the amount of noise that was emanating from the three turbo engines. Katherine locked her eyes on the ‘fasten belt’ sign that was flashing at the front of the coach class section.
The interior began to shake slightly, and the jet bounced off of the ground for a few feet, only to slip back down and again hit the concrete with stomach-turning ‘thud’ type of noise. The jolt was certainly not needed, and it then occurred to Katherine that they were traveling down a runway that was not plowed, or at least that’s how it appeared to Katherine. She was appalled, and realized that she was in fact in a jet that was pushing its way through three inches of slushy ice and snow. She closed her eyes and tried to keep her stomach from rolling with the nervousness it was spawning.
That initial shock of the jet hitting the ground was only the beginning for Katherine, and in fact it was the beginning of the end for Flight 90.
The turbulence from the runway continued as the plane finally began to climb up into the gray sky. The were up maybe 100 feet in the air. Katherine's eyes widened as she registered the fact that the jetliner was not going any higher. The engines seemed to roar even louder and the small vibration in the interior turned into a full out shake. Luggage in the overhead compartments rattled and made odd noises all throughout the plane.
A stewardess, who didn't look very happy ran towards the front of the jetliner and disappeared into the cockpit. The disconcerting shaking went on for about a minute and the fact that the jetliner was now beginning to descend was not noted by many passengers because of the chaos developing within the cabin.
A luggage compartment burst open and a suitcase and a small bag fell out and tumbled down onto a woman several rows ahead of Katherine. The woman let out a slight squeal and tried to block her head from the falling mess. Katherine gripped her fingernails into the armrest. She wanted another cigarette but she was scared to get one right that minute.
Three more compartments burst open simultaneously and more luggage and personal affects began to rain down on the seventy-eight passengers. More luggage burst out as the shaking intensified and more passengers began to scream. The lights began to flicker on and off rapidly and the same distressed stewardess ran out of the cockpit and raced towards Katherine and the back of the plane. She had tears running down her face and she was almost like a pinball bouncing between seats and rows as she ran. The plane was now shaking in all directions, vertically and horizontally. Luggage and clothing burst from Nattie Stromand’s compartment and showered down in front of the stewardess. It was a surreal scene that Katherine almost couldn't deal with.
The vibrations now made the plane feel more like a runaway freight train on the ground. The plane was jerking as it tried to speed up and gain altitude. Katherine was tossed back and forth in her seat as the speed of the aircraft undulated up and down. The snow and winds were bearing down on the plane and it felt as if the hand of God was pressing down on the aircraft, forcing it back to the ground from where it came. An odd sounding alarm began emanating from the rear galley and Katherine impulsively bit down on her lip, tears beginning to stream down her face. Her fashionable dark mascara was now a liability, and it smeared down her pale cheeks as her mind rushed with thoughts about this moment perhaps being among the final minutes of her life. The idea that death was upon her was far too much to bear and she began to hyperventilate. The plane shuddered and jerked with a horrific amount of noise blasting from the three engines.
The yellowish fluorescent lighting that glowed from the various sections of the ceiling panels began to flicker on and off, sparkling up and down the isle in a wild fashion. It became like a tortured disco from hell. Katherine closed her eyes tightly and began to count to ten in a desperate attempt to calm herself down, her fingernails tearing into the brown fabric of her seat. She was on number eight when a resounding cascade of banging noises echoed from the front of the cabin. Throughout the interior, the tan plastic panels over every single seat in the jetliner were bursting open, and oxygen masks dangled as a terribly tactile reminder of the severity of what was going on.
The sickening whine of an electronic alarm slurred through its tones with the repeating surges and losses of electricity; to Katherine, it sounded like a drunken version of a British ambulance siren.
The entire situation was out of control; it didn't lay in the hands of the disgustingly chipper Amy or even the esteemed Captain David Norberg, who was today piloting the 230th flight of his career. It would turn out to be the flight that he would never get a chance to forget.
The chorus of alarms grew louder and more disturbing. It was as if the jetliner was having a very violent seizure, and it was now at death's doorstep, ready to collapse into the hellfire of insanity. The engines din was overwhelming for some passengers, and one woman began to become hysterical, screaming and crying about her opinion of the situation that the plane was in. It didn't matter that she was freaking out, for nobody could possibly hear her as Captain Norberg pushed the turbo jet engines past their maximum operational capacity. He was determined to force the computerized monstrosity to climb into the dark clouds that were over Washington D.C. Yet still in spite of the tremendous effort of the turbines, the jet continued to slow in speed, lumbering like a migrating bird over the Potomac river.
The horror of the situation was that this particular bird was about to fly into history.
Air Florida Flight 90 was flying straight towards the 14th street bridge, a common-looking four lane concrete piece of roadway that was at the moment packed with federal employees rushing home after the government closed early that morning due to the blizzard like conditions of the “Siberian Express”.
Amy ran past Katherine towards the front of the aircraft, her makeup smearing under the stream of tears running down her cheeks. The plane suddenly jerked to the left and she was thrown into an empty row of seats. Her head slammed into the brown plastic of the armrest support and she didn't get back up again.
“Amy!”, was the only word that Katherine managed to shout, horrified at the drama unraveling before her eyes.
Katherine pulled off her seatbelt and grabbed onto the seat in front of her, trying to navigate towards the motionless woman. The aircraft was now jerking in a vertical motion, as if it were jumping down a series of steep steps through the air. Katherine pulled herself around the several rows separating her from the legs and pair of red high heels she could see hanging in the isle. Katherine glanced out of the window to her right and her stomach turned and she was clearly able to look into the windows of office buildings flashing past. The surreal scene was glazed over in a mist of white from the rushing flakes of snow that the aircraft was plowing through in the air.
As the deafening roar of the engines seemed to grow even louder, she finally stumbled across the isle that contained Amy. She had a cut along her forehead that ran back into her hair. Blood was smeared in her hair and a sickeningly thick stream of the red liquid was running down her face and neck. The navy blue blazer that was a part of her outfit was quickly turning a deep purple at the top where the flow of blood met the polyester material. Katherine tried to pull her out of the foot well but the jerking motions of the plane were so intense that Katherine was unable to get a secure footing to allow her enough leverage on the woman's body. A young man in an airline outfit from the first class section rushed up behind Katherine and pulled on her shoulders, motioning for her get back into a seat since there was far to much noise to allow him to speak.
Katherine fell backwards into the isle as the plane jerked to the right, and she crawled on her hands and knees into an open seat next to a businessman in a gray pinstriped suit. He was holding onto his designer briefcase with such force that his fingernails had began to cut into the expensive leather. He was pressed back into his seat and hyperventilating into his oxygen mask, his face wet with a mixture of sweat and tears, a combination that seemed unreal when contrasted against his otherwise perfectly manicured appearance. His eyes were tightly shut as if he were completely denying the visual nightmare unfolding with each passing second.
Katherine defocused her eyes beyond the businessman to look out of his window. The scenery alone made her stomach turn even harder. It was difficult to properly concentrate on what she saw, for a number of reasons; the jerking motions of the dying jetliner made it difficult to process a clear image, but even with those distortions, Katherine was well aware that they were presently flying directly over the frozen Potomac River, blazing down a corridor of endless high-rise office buildings. The aircraft was at that moment traveling at one hundred miles per hour, a horrifically slow speed for the one hundred ton machine.
Katherine began to cry even harder as she realized that she could actually see hundreds of faces pressed against the thousands of windows that were rushing past her eyes. Office workers, some crying more hysterically than Katherine, were violently ripping open the blinds and curtains of their offices to see what on earth was echoing like a racing bomb through the normally placid corridor cut by the Potomac river through downtown Washington D.C. The sight before them was more than enough to make more than several of them burst into tears, and throughout the usually dull offices in these buildings, a few lightheaded workers promptly fainted at the sight of the 400-foot long Lockheed Tristar barreling down into the icy blizzard that was the Siberian Express.
Katherine suddenly was filled with the desperate wish that she were one of those anonymous workers, watching a scene from hell unfold, rather than being in her current position of helplessly sailing into hell.
The engines, choking on the improper air mixture produced by the Siberian Express began to make a grinding noise that was so hideous that Katherine ceased being able to think at all. It sounded like the plane might simply explode before it even could hit the ground. Were they going to all die on the most hellish stage ever assembled in the history of the District of Columbia? Katherine gritted her teeth together as trails of heavy gray smoke began to stream from the overheating turbo engines attached to each wing. If she could have seen the third engine on the tail of the flying machine, the sight would have made her pass out. It wasn't just leaking out smoke; hundreds of small metal shards were blazing forth from it as the massive turbines began to disintegrate under the stress of the situation. Red lights and nauseating alarms began to flood the cockpit and Captain Norberg for the first time began to cry. The controls were failing all around him, and he couldn't help but to think that it was all his fault that on this day, everyone on his craft was doomed to perish. The computerized maze of buttons began to utter out a very distorted voice that was part of what made the Tristar the most amazing jetliner of 1982; not only did this machine have alarms and lights spread in front of the damned Captain, it was programmed to utter out several major warning in the case that an impact was imminent.
“Pull up. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.”, was all the speaker in the cockpit was able to spit out.
The non-human voice of the aircraft trying to ‘communicate’ with Captain Norberg was something no pilot ever wanted to hear. It was the sound of doom and the symbol of death for everyone. At this point, there was no saving this jet. The only possibility was to try with every ounce of his soul to not slam into an office building. The co-pilot was sweating profusely and he was simply ignoring the unraveling reality of what was in front of his face. He turned towards Captain Norberg and simply stared at him, biting his lip so hard that a small amount of blood began to stream down from his mouth. They mixed with the tears and sweat pouring forth and he simply tried to focus on admiring how Captain Norberg was still somehow focused on being the authority over the Tristar. The two men had less than ninety seconds to finish their lives.
The switchboards of the D.C. Metropolitan Emergency Services call center suddenly began to light up with a stunning speed. It was 7:55 a.m. and within sixty seconds the plethora of phone lines that fed into the ultra modern phone banks were completely locked up; all twenty-five telephone lines were flooded with calls from desperate workers in the offices lining the Potomac River. The fifteen call operators who were all getting ready for the 8 a.m. switchover to the first-shift set of employees suddenly found themselves drawn back to their workstations, their black headsets filled with the panicked voices of office workers who had not yet been sent home due to the massive amount of freezing rain and snow that was piling up on the downtown streets.
Within another sixty seconds, it had become clear to those in the now chaotic call center that this jetliner in question was going to either crash into an office building or land right into the ice-clogged abyss that was the Potomac River in January. The desperate operators began hitting the push buttons that set off alarms in the firehouses and police stations of downtown D.C., an area that was already struggling to keep up with the many minor car crashes that had resulted from the Federal Government closing all of their offices roughly twenty minutes earlier. Several sections of the city had lost electrical power and the disabled stoplights in those areas had added to the chaos that was already in the streets due to the Siberian Express.
It now looked as if the morning from hell was just turning to an express of its own: an express to certain disaster.
The streets surrounding the Potomac were packed with the cars of federal employees, and traffic within a ten-block area had locked up to a standstill. The numerous bridges crossing the Potomac were complete traffic jams, and the four lanes of the 14th Street Bridge were totally full with cars and trucks, all stopped in a bumper-to-bumper mess. These were the people who would get to touch death for a moment that morning.
Among those unfortunate individuals was Sandra Taylor, a forty-year old secretary for the Department of Education. She had never even walked into her office that morning; for as she had pulled into her parking spot, her radio station interrupted the morning classics to inform commuters of the immediate closure of all Federal offices. Sandra simply pulled into her usual parking spot, smiled to herself in the mirrors, and subsequently put her car into reverse and re-start her hour-long commute back to the suburbs of Northern Virginia. It was 7:56 a.m., and she was the tenth car stopped in the westbound set of lanes on the 14th street bridge. Sandra would have been more annoyed at the traffic jam if it weren't for the pleasant fact that she had an unexpected day off. Perhaps she would slug through the deepening snow and ice to Tyson's Corner and browse through the new mega-mall of exclusive shops and department stores. Sandra had a strong weak spot for Nordstroms’ department store and the five floors of fashion that it held, and no simple snowstorm was going to prevent her from expanding her already heavy credit card debt load She turned up the morning classics on the radio and adjusted the heater to keep the car a bit warmer.
It was several seconds past 7:56 a.m., and Sandra had just placed yet another cigarette between her deep red lips when she heard it for the first time. As she rolled down her window, she realized that there was a noise emanating down through the city that was simply not normal. She tilted her head in an odd way in an attempt to better understand the deep rumble that was echoing towards her from the left. Sandra was confused and suddenly a bit frightened as she sat motionless in the traffic jam on the 14th street bridge. The sound was totally foreign to her office-accustomed ears. It was unearthly, and almost evil. She turned off the radio and realized for the first time that the sound was more than a sound; it was a vibration. The hard plastic radio knob was very quietly chattering between her long fingernails, and she paused to stare at the horrific sensation of her car vibrating as if it was a cheap motel bed with a vibration machine that you could turn on for a quarter. The sound of evil began to consume the air around her car, and her heart rate suddenly jumped even though she had yet to light her fifth cigarette of the morning. The fear that was sweeping through the downtown business district had now gripped her, and the long Virginia Slim cigarette tumbled from her lips as her mouth dropped open. The sound was getting louder with each passing millisecond. In the next blink of Sandra's widening eyes, a well dressed business woman, who was screaming hysterically, ran past Sandra’s sedan, her fur coat floundering in the wind as she tried to run in high heels.
A part of Sandra wanted to follow her, but she was frozen with fear, too panicked to be able to process the situation at hand.
Katherine could not believe what she was watching through the window. The wing on the right side of the plane was slicing through the tops of barren trees, their branches exploding into shards as the thick metal sliced into them. Gray smears of tears ran down her cheeks, her over use of mascara now an issue that she didn't have time to worry about. She thought about Marianne and wondered what she would say when she saw on the news that her best friend’s flight had been a victim of the Siberian Express. The entire situation was beyond what Katherine had expected to encounter during the day.
She realized that she would perhaps be best off in her original seat, against the back wall of the cabin. She pulled herself past the four rows that separated her from Seat 85. Katherine fell into the brown seat and quickly buckled her seatbelt.
Sandra could now attach a visual image to the sound of evil that was vibrating her sedan. Peering through the other cars, she caught her first glimpse of a massive jetliner settling down towards the bridge as if it were a proper place to land.
Sandra began to scream louder and with more passion than she had ever in her life. Before she could even begin to contemplate the situation, the white underside of the plane was pressed right above her. It was skidding across the roof of the delivery van in front of her, and the shower of sparks and ripping metal was at that moment enough to make Sandra think that she must be in hell. The windows of the van’s rear doors exploded into a shower of glass shards as the aircraft weighed down into the vehicle, and the entire roof seemed to melt down right before her eyes. The van was now being pulled over towards it’s right side at a disturbing angle and pressed into the side of the concrete bridge. There was a long blackened scrape expanding along the underside of the plane as the burning and melting metal of the delivery van became a massive welding torch. The heat was so intense from the blizzard of sparks and fire that were billowing around the van's former roof that Sandra felt the temperature rising. The snow on her hood was dissolving into nothing as the immense heat wave rolled over the cars around the damned white van.
Suddenly the horrid white machine disappeared from sight and the burning van bounced back down onto it’s four wheels, popping two of them instantly. It had only taken several seconds for the jetliner to slide across the traffic, but to Sandra it had been several hours worth of torture.
Mrs. Taylor pulled at her hair and continued to scream, tears rushing down her face.
Katherine was gripping the armrest with a terrible intensity. She pressed herself into the seat, praying to whatever would hear her, to please, please make this hell end quickly. There was a tremendous impact as the aircraft sliced into the frozen waters of the Potomac River.
Katherine could see several passengers being thrown into the air as the bolts holding the seats to the floor failed. Everything around her was disintegrating. The baggage compartments and the plastic panels that comprised the ceiling splintered into many pieces. It was like watching a massive puzzle being torn apart as wires and tubes burst out from places that they should have always remained. In a crescendo of sparks flying all around the remains of the ceiling, all of the lights went out as their casings tore apart and flew through the interior towards the front of the cabin. There was a tremendous noise, something like the sound of thunder, rolling all around Katherine.
Suddenly the plastic wall panels two rows ahead of her burst apart as the end of the jetliner tore away from the rest of the dying machine. A horrid mixture of slushy ice exploded through the crevasse that had developed and water surged under her feet and within a second rose up around her waist. It was the end, Katherine thought to herself.
The water rushed up around her neck and then suddenly there was a bright white sky above her, snow and sharp ice blowing in her eyes. Katherine watched as the gigantic airliner slowly slid below the water and within seconds disappeared under a thick mess of broken ice. She was at this point completely confused; why was she still alive? The air and water were filled with the scent and taste of aviation kerosene. Her frozen body was beginning to burn slightly as the horrid fuel sank into her sensitive skin. However, this pain was ended quickly, for the icy waters almost numbed her whole body and shut down her senses enough to forget about the jet fuel.
She realized that the last twenty feet of the aircraft had sheared away from the rest of the plane, and she was sitting in the remains of the tail end of the plane, which for the time didn't seem to be sinking. The water was so cold that Katherine found it hard to breathe. She pushed her numb hands around in her lap, trying to find her seatbelt release. She pulled at the metal clasp and began to drift away from her seat, which was now slipping beneath the water with a frightening speed. Katherine looked up found herself on stage for what looked like hundreds of people. All along the bridge there were people, waving and screaming. Sirens wailed through the air all around, echoing among the tall buildings.
The abstract sun, with its unending stare was still blazoned on the tail of the aircraft. Katherine felt sick from being so cold, her stomach had never felt worse. Her teeth were chattering together and she struggled to tread water, trying to float. A red seat cushion floated near her and she grabbed at it, wrapping her aching arms around it. She looked back towards where the rest of the plane had been, and saw seven other people splashing around as she was. They were all in shock. It was an oddly silent group of people. Every bit of energy that they had was being spent on trying not to succumb to the horrid waters. Communication wasn't needed, really, thought Katherine. What was there to talk about? The weather? For the woman who was obsessed with being unique, the situation was ironically exactly the kind of event that she longed for; she was now among the seven people who survived crashing into the Potomac River, quite an exclusive club indeed.
Katherine swam a few feet towards the group, and she realized that there were now only six other people. One of the men she had seen had apparently sunk under. Katherine could only blink a few times as she pondered the relevance of the fact that she was in such a deadly situation. At least she and the remaining six were still alive, she thought. But then she realized that they too were going to die as well, because there was no way to get up the steep, ice covered banks of the Potomac. The moment of joy that Katherine had experienced due to her surviving the crash quickly passed.
The riverbanks were now surrounded by emergency vehicles, and the combined sirens from the mass confusion was continuing to grow louder. She paddled her feet and turned towards the bridge, which was now even more crowded with people who were all trying to gain a sight of death up close. Katherine noticed that there was a television crew pushing their way through the crowd and it occurred to her that Marianne was just during the past two weeks devoted to her new best friend, the Cable News Network. Marianne might actually witness the last moments of her former college roommate's life via satellite beamed television signals. Katherine felt proud to be alive in the year of 1982, and even if she had to die today, at least it was on national news, she thought to herself.
The picture was not exactly the clearest, due to the haze of snow that was falling in front of the camera's lens, but the television picture still conveyed the basic problem: a jetliner had landed in a river. In the middle of a city. In the middle of a blizzard. In the middle of rush hour. What was she looking at? Marianne’s cocaine-filled head felt like it was spinning. One moment she had been brushing some more green into the pastoral scene on her canvas; then she had glanced up to the television that was on the Cable News Network. It was her replacement for a newspaper since she hadn't had time yet to pick one up from the street vendor. The bottom of the screen had the words ‘Live from Washington D.C.’ written in a slanted yellow text. Marianne’s cocaine-lit eyes widened and she hopped off of the bar stool that was in front of her easel. She swiftly picked up Samantha, her cat, and rushed over to the overstuffed leather couch she had bought a week earlier. She sat with her legs crossed, Indian style, and placed Samantha in between her legs. She was possessed with a chill that made her shiver for a moment.
Up until that point, she had been painting a watercolor landscape which she had planned to give to Katherine as a surprise gift. Marianne laughed nervously at herself, in an effort to calm down. It couldn't be Katherine's flight. That was silly to think. Katherine didn't have the bad karma that it would take to deserve that kind of death, thought Marianne.
Her body was wired after a night spent watching horror films accompanied by her white angel, which into her nose she had sniffed three hundred dollars worth.
It was at that moment that the smile fell from her face and she realized it was real.
The 1980 Metropolitan Tampa Graphic Designer of the Year of recognized the expressionless logo that she had first designed for Air Florida some eighteen months earlier. And she was sure that Katherine had told her that she was on Air Florida. She began to shiver as the unthinkable horror consumed her mind. The television was muted as the stereo was playing Handle's ‘Zadok the Priest’ from a record that she had found in a box of things from college. Marianne could not move from the couch. Her mind could not accept more than the visual information from the television. Fear swept over her as the yellow text on the television changed to read, ‘Air Florida Flight 90 Southbound to Tampa has Crashed’.
Marianne’s heart was racing, and not simply due to the excess of cocaine.
“OH MY GOD, Samantha! Oh my GOD! Katherine was on that plane!”, screamed Marianne, her hands pulling sharply at her own long flowing hair.
The long haired white cat was startled by her sudden outburst and scrambled to get away from her.
Katherine finally appreciated the aerobics classes she had forced herself into during the previous two years. Treading water in surroundings that resembled Antarctica was not exactly how she had intended to spend her morning, but the energy it required was something close to that of her obsessive workouts at the YMCA. It was a challenge.
Fate had already been kind to her. Now she was in a competition for her life. This was the only way in which Katherine was able to maintain sanity. It was a game. She was going to win, she had to. Helicopters flew around overhead, and one of them had the new iconic markings of the letters C.N.N. on it.
It was then that Katherine knew for sure that Marianne was probably witnessing this event simultaneously.
Marianne didn't know what to do, since really there wasn't anything she could do from where she was sitting. She thought that having the phone in her hand would be a comfort at least, so she picked it up and began to tap in the numbers to reach Carmen de Vaux in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She was shaking and her tears were starting to stream onto the keypad of her beige AT&T Slimline telephone.
Her fingers stumbled around the buttons of the ridiculous mess of eighteen numbers it took to reach the central Royal Palace of Haiti.
By the tenth digit, Marianne knew that she was making mistakes.
“Damn it!”, she burst out, and she slammed the handset back onto the base of the phone.
The emotions of contemplating Katherine's hideous demise compounded with the mania of her all-night cocaine binge to create a tornado of thoughts. Was it her fault for insisting that Katherine venture South during such a bizarre time of year? Did the constant presence of drugs in her system ruin her ability to judge the safety of such a trip? Was all of this her fucking fault, and some horrid sign from God?
As she released a primal scream, Marianne suddenly grabbed the beige phone and threw it in the general direction of the massive black television console.
Perhaps the volume of her agonizing wail could have been the culprit for the cascade of shattering of glass, but in any case, the unexpectedly mobile leased telephone set slammed into the glass door that covered the shelves holding the multiplicity of electronic devices that Marianne was well known for collecting. The plate glass exploded into a sheet of falling chaos, with the area directly hit by the phone being obliterated into countless small shards.
A large segment of the former door in the shape of an upside-down triangle was still holding onto one of the brass hinges and it meekly swung out several inches before it too fell to its death on the marble floor.
The Sony record player shuddered and the music suddenly scratched in a horrid way, totally stopping because the needle had bounced off of the turntable.
Samantha witnessed the entire spectacle from the kitchen bar and scrambled to spin around and run off into the guest bedroom, suddenly afraid of her irrational master.
Marianne unsteadily pulled herself up from her temper tantrum and stumbled towards her workstation. Her hands shaking uncontrollably, and her face bleached a sickening shade of white, she sat down on the bar stool and slumped forward onto the large angled drafting table that still had Katherine's surprise painting taped down on it. The wet paint was immediately smeared and the addition of her flooding tears transformed the artwork into a meaningless distortion on the paper.
After counting to one hundred in her head, Marianne took a deep breath and pulled herself into an erect position. With trembling fingers, she picked up a cigarette and her lighter.
Perhaps that would help to calm her down, she thought to herself, although Marianne didn't really believe it would do much good.
The long cigarette was trembling worse than her hand, the bright orange tip exaggerating the shuddering motions that were coursing through Marianne’s body. Her mind was racing with an unsuccessful attempt at diverting her attention away from the television. Helicopters were hovering over the frozen disaster area, and several heads were bobbing around in the midst of the Januarian ice floes that shifted about on the chaotic riverfront. The weather seemed to be getting worse, or perhaps it really wasn't, and it was just Marianne’s mind making the scene appear even more hideous than it was in reality.
The entertainment console was in shambles, with the usually organized video cassette tapes pushed about in a sloppy fashion, quite a contrast for the normal obsessive environment which comprised Suite 715 of The Mirashann Towers. The gated community of career-obsessed yuppies was a great place for the most part, aside from the palpable lack of caring neighbors who would usually have stopped by Marianne’s apartment to check on her and ask what she was screaming about.
It occurred to her that she could have been in the midst of a violent rape, screaming for her life and liberty, and even now, some twelve minutes into her binge of screaming and self-destruction. Nobody on her hallway apparently gave a damn nor second thought as to what was happening behind her double locked door.
Marianne bit into the cigarette filter and looked down at her artist’s smock. It was still a mess from her experimentation with oil painting that had occupied many of her lonely evenings. Her decision to create a watercolor painting for Katherine had been motivated by witnessing Katherine's unstoppable bidding on a watercolor by S. F. Hauger at the Sotheby’s Annual Art auction that they had attended a year earlier in New York City.
She and Katherine had traveled by an Amtrak Metroliner Turbo Train to the city in the midst of a bitterly cold but uneventful series of days and as far as Marianne could recall, they had never considered flying even though it would have cut out the two days it took Marianne to reach Staunton prior to reboarding the Cardinal Express that whisked them off to New York at four in the morning. They had picked out seats in a deserted passenger car and smoked what seemed like two packs of cigarettes during the five hours it took to reach the outskirts of NYC.
Why on earth had Marianne insisted that Katherine rush to Tampa on board an Air Florida jetliner?
Then it all hit her. Horribly illogically and incorrectly, but emotions non the less.
It had to be the drugs. The cocaine, the marijuana, and the pills of NDMA that Marianne was popping in every Tampaian bar that sold them -- 'ecstasy pills', some drunken patrons were beginning to call them.
And the alcohol, the gateway drug that had started to control Marianne as early as 1976, it was all of the trash that had apparently distorted her mind beyond reason and logic. And now this lack of control that normally had no negative impact on her life, or anyone else's for that matter, had now played a miserable role in indirectly causing the death of her best friend, her sister that she never had, her confidante in life.
It was too much to bear.
Katherine Kunakovich was dead, or at least Marianne thought so, due to the deliberate insanity that Marianne had brought into her own life, and perhaps it was time to end this subtly evil lifestyle.
Hell, it wasn't subtle at all, not now that a death had resulted from her lifestyle.
Marianne realized that she had forgotten that she was in the midst of smoking a cigarette and looked down to notice that the cigarette was nearly burnt out, a long, delicate inch and half of ashes barely hanging onto the smoldering tip of her Virginia Slims 120.
She felt like pressing the burning embers down into her leather couch, to ruin it and punish herself for fucking up as she had. A feeling of desiring some twisted punishment overcame her, and tears streamed down her pale face with an increasing speed. Yet she didn't attempt to set the couch on fire as she sat in the middle of it, curled into a whimpering ball of self-hatred. She simply sat it down in her crystal ashtray and continued her distant stare towards the television, unable to move more than the amount it took to dispose of her stick of nicotine.
The jetliner was among the last ordered from Lockheed, for the Tristar was a final attempt at the commercial passenger market for the ailing company in the early 1970’s. It was an appropriate model of aircraft to transport the ever unique Katherine Kunakovich because of its odd arrangement of having three turbocharged engines; hence the ‘Tristar’ designation. The unique appearance appealed to Katherine and she reminded herself that it stood out as the only jetliner in the aviation market to have never yet experienced a crash of any sort during the 11 year production run.
Yet she was still nervous. The emotionless brilliant sun emblem didn't appear to be at all concerned, and Katherine bit her lower lip. The mixture of snow and freezing rain pelted against the glass and the strong gusts of wind pressed into the wall of glass, making it undulate back and forth momentarily. Katherine looked to her right and watched as the slight buckling of the glass moved down the concourse towards the doorway leading to the hallway that she would soon walk down to meet her flight. It was something similar to the ripples created by a stone skipping across a pond, only it was vertical in orientation. The sight was enough to give Katherine a moment of butterflies in her stomach.
It was 7:30 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, and as always, Katherine was early for her flight out of the cold hell of a brutal Virginian January and into the brilliant weather of Florida.
Katherine briskly walked over to a bank of pay phones along the wall parallel to the windows. She noticed more than one of the few gentlemen sitting in the waiting area giving her more than a second glance. The tall blonde woman, an imposing figure of elegance in the midst of slight chaos, smiled a coy smile into the reflective metal of the telephone and checked her teeth for lipstick. She noted that the airport had replaced all of its phones with a new touch-tone system that, in her opinion, looked much more proper for the surroundings. There was still some clear shipping tape along the side of the number pad, and she peeled it off. It would give her something to toy with while she wasted some time waiting for first class passengers to be called to the board the aircraft. With her long red fingernails she tapped in the 10-digit phone number for Marianne’s high-rise apartment.
The phone rang four times and Marianne Delamonde's answering machine kicked in.
“Hi, you’ve reached Marianne. I’m probably out working on my tan, so leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I pull myself away from the beach. Caio!”, sputtered the machine, with a great deal of distortion. It almost didn't sound like Marianne.
“Marianne, I know you’re there, and not on the beach, you yuppie queen,” laughed Katherine. “Pick up the damn phone right now before I’m there personally to drag you out of bed and make you talk to me!”
She paused. It was a ‘sisterly ritual’ for Katherine and Marianne to harass each other at ungodly hours of the day on each other’s answering machines. In fact, they each had independently sent answering machines to each other as Christmas gifts just several weeks earlier. It was the kind of happening that you talk about for years to come each Christmas, or at least that’s how Katherine thought of the incident.
There was a rattling noise in Katherine's earpiece as Marianne finally picked up the pink phone sitting on her nightstand.
“Marianne! What's wrong, was your flight canceled? I've been watching the news and it looks like you’re in the middle of a blizzard!” bolted Marianne, who had been up all night on her drug of choice, the ‘white angel’. “Do you know what the weatherman called it? The Siberian Express! How funny is that?”
“Bitch, slow down!”, laughed Katherine as she quickly realized that her ‘sister’ was clearly in another universe. It was especially obvious since Marianne had been notorious for being cranky in the mornings in their old dorm room at Lakecross College during the mid-1970s.
“Listen, I got to National Airport early and I’m bored. Way bored. And I’m eye candy for an old geezer in a horrid teal blazer, apparently. The bastard’s been staring at me the whole time I've been on the phone!”
“Oh, you still have your touch, don't you darling?”, cooed Marianne. “I should rather think that Kathy would prefer being in some nose candy to being eye candy, am I right?”
Katherine felt the need to blush but her heavy application of foundation at 4:00 a.m. had nullified that possibility.
“You little nut, I am in public! It's a place that you tend to deny the existence of, but indeed, Marianne, I am out here on the stage of cutting-edge transit. But yes, you are correct that this Miss Kathy would be happier in that place that you’re in right now. My flight's not canceled. It damn well better not be!”
Katherine twisted around and strained to see the annunciation panel that was some ways down the concourse. Flight 90 was still listed as being on schedule.
“I might be an ice cube when I get there, but I’ll get there, damn it!”, laughed Katherine, breathing a sigh of relief. She crossed her fingers, hoping that her flight would take off before the blizzard disrupted any operations of the countless jetliners milling about on the endless tarmac that surrounded the terminals.
The intercom system came to life with the charming declaration of several tones sounding through the speakers that Katherine imagined existed even in the broom closets of the facility. A generic voice echoed through the airport: “Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that due to the present weather conditions of the Metropolitan area, National Airport will be hereby suspending all outbound flights after 9:00 a.m. today. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thank you.”
Katherine returned her attention to the telephone in her hand and resumed her conversation with Marianne.
“Did you hear that? Shit, Marianne, this weather is worse than I thought, they're closing the damn airport after my flight leaves!”
“Well good for you! It's our lucky day!”, squealed Marianne.
“Lucky-Shmucky...I don't know girl, this is like taking off from the North Pole!”
“Well, in that case, tell Santa to send me some snowballs!”, laughed Marianne, dreaming of baseball sized quantities of cocaine under her Christmas tree.
The intercom system again began to spill the news of the airport's impending closure, this time in French, Katherine's favorite language.
“Les dames et les messieurs, l'Aéroport National suspendra tous vols sortants de la ville après 9:00 du matin aujourd'hui. Nous nous excusons de n'importe quel dérangement que ceci peut causer. Merci.”, echoed another generic female voice.
In a desperate attempt to allay any nervousness among the passengers who were still on schedule to depart, Dennis Spaulding, the airport manager on duty, quickly switched over the usual mix of modern music and turned on some Vivaldi. It was the best he could do in a panicky situation like National Airport was in at the moment.
“Oh listen honey, it must be a good sign!”, said Katherine as she turned the phone to pick up the sounds of their favorite composer during college.
Katherine noticed that there was a large vehicle, something like a fire truck with a cherrypicker attached to it. It was painted red and it was spraying a steaming solution onto the wings of her awaiting flight. A sheet of ice broke up and slid off of the wing and fell apart into a thousand shards as it slid off of the front of the wing. The sight gave Katherine a bit more confidence.
It was 7:40 a.m., and unknown to Katherine, the phone lines running down parallel to the National Airport expressway suddenly broke and shattered under the strain of the ice. The phones all throughout the airport went dead and suddenly one could look down the row of fifteen pay phones and see a wide variety of people looking around in a slightly confused state.
The lights flickered and the annunciation machine shut off, and the flipping plastic cards that were an analog format of a digital looking set of numbers and airline codes. Katherine gave a quizzical look to the phone and hung it up. A hostess came across the intercom system for her lounge area and announced the boarding of first class passengers for flight 90.
“It's about time for this Siberian Express to take off!”, said Katherine in a slight pout. She briskly clicked her way across the marble floor and soon hit the silent brown carpet that was the motif for the waiting area. She swept up her carry on luggage and her purse, and strode towards the reception area.
She handed her ticket to the attendant who looked at it twice and then picked up a phone. Katherine wondered what the hold up was for her boarding. She also wondered who he thought he was going to call since the phones were dead. The young man put down the phone and gave her an awkward smile.
“Ma’am, I’m terribly sorry but we’ve overbooked the first class section…the best I can offer you is a seat in the back of the plane in coach class.”, and with that John Brennan bit his lip, awaiting the snobby-looking woman's response.
“You’re kidding me, right?”, said Katherine with an expression that was devoid of any real emotion.
“No, ma’am, I’m not kidding. Would you like to board now or will you be taking another flight when the airport reopens later this afternoon? That is, if it reopens. This blizzard might end up stopping any outbound or inbound flights for the whole day. Maybe even through tomorrow.”
“I’ll be on this plane, you jackass,” huffed the prima donna, and she looked down the corridor leading to the jetliner with a stare that could kill.
The anonymous young man opened the door and she jerked her leather pouch behind her with a dramatic huff.
The stewardess waiting at the door of the jetliner had a plastic smile across her face and she seemed to continue to stare at the panel behind Katherine as she welcomed her aboard and gave her the corporate line of generic statements. Katherine was annoyed by her distant look, and turned around to notice that the young ditz was in fact staring at a control panel with two red lights flashing, and one amber light on steadily. Katherine spun back around with an inquiring look upon her face.
A frigid cloud of dense white fog rose around the stewardesses who were straddling a two inch gap between the moveable hallway and the actual jetliner doorway. The stewardess forced an even more tense smile and quickly tried to usher her into the waiting jetliner without any time for unnecessary questions. Katherine was none to pleased with her trip already.
She clipped her way to the back of the jetliner and lowered her gaze towards the various rows of seats she was passing. She was assigned to seat 85, row S. She was now in an even worse mood and she was not comforted by the sight of the big red cherry picker machine spraying a hot solution onto the wings with the intensity of a fire truck fighting a fire. She flopped herself into her back row seat and looked around. She was alone and was actually separated by several rows of empty seats from the next passenger.
The privacy was nice, so she began to think that perhaps it wasn't so terribly bad that the airline had fudged on her ticket. She pawed through an airline industry magazine and soon found herself fishing in her purse for her cigarettes and her silver lighter. She quickly recovered both from the leather abyss and flipped the lighter open. It was nicely elegant, at least she thought so. But it was 1982, she thought, and silver wasn't quite as popular as gold was; maybe she would go shopping for a new lighter in Tampa. Katherine took a long drag from her brown-colored ‘More’ brand cigarette and quickly pushed out a large cloud of smoke that rolled and billowed out over the two rows directly ahead of her. She was bored and nervous, an annoying combination at any time.
The stewardess rolled past her with a cart of beverages and stopped in front of her.
“Welcome aboard flight 90 ma’am! My name is Amy, and I promise today will be so much better once we're out of this terrible weather...so don't be nervous, I never am. Air Florida is proud to be the carrier of your choice today, and I'll be taking care of this area of the cabin for the duration of our five hour journey to the blue waters of Tampa Bay! ...Could I get you something to drink?”, chirped the bouncy redhead with a somewhat genuine smile upon her face.
"Five hours? Are you serious, Miss Amy? How on earth is that possible, I might as well walk to Tampa!"
Amy bit her lip, and in the process smeared some red lipstick on her teeth.
"Well, I have to inform you that this is no longer the direct flight it was initially scheduled to be. We are flying first to Atlanta, where we have a layover of two hours. But this jetliner will be the one that also transports you on to Tampa. I hate that this is the situation today, but we're just lucky that we're takin' off just before National Airport is shut down for the day...", and she drifted off into a distant stare.
Katherine followed her eyes and saw the large red machine standing up at eye level, almost towering over the jet. It was blasting a steaming jet spray of hot de-icing solution all over the wing that Katherine and Amy could easily see from their vantage point.
It certainly wasn't worth complaining about any further, thought Katherine. She owed it to good fortune to be on any flight going South, so she forced herself to procure a faint smile towards Amy's general direction. She only wanted something to take the edge of the day off. That was all.
Katherine looked the cart up and down and finally made up her mind. She wouldn't be choosing a damn thing off of the coach class cart. She might not have a seat in the first class section, but she was still certain that she qualified as a first class type of person.
“Champagne, Amy...I am positive you have some in the galley, you know you do. And if you have fresh strawberries, I’d like some of those too, please. Hell, I'll take frozen strawberries, whatever the hell you all might have. Forget the fresh crap...I'm sorry, Amy. I'm just so frightened by icestorms...snow, I like that type of precipitation. But not ice, not ever...”, said Katherine with a minimum of expression, and even less eye contact. She flipped her now useless first class ticket out of her brown purse and held it towards Amy without looking towards the young woman.
“Yes ma’am,” quipped the stewardess, a 24-year old from the south Keys of Florida. She had joined Air Florida in 1980 as a fresh college graduate who wanted free travel and hot dates with the rich pilots who flew the phallic beasts across the nation.
Katherine smiled to herself as she slid the ticket back into her purse. Amy hadn't even had the courage to dare question someone who was in a Cardini fur coat with a diamond necklace that certainly cost more than Amy would have made in a year; at least that is what Katherine assumed. The materialistic eighties were fully embraced by the obsessed woman that Katherine had become during the years after she graduated from Lakecross College.
By this point the plane seemed to be full and the pilot began to recite his long oration regarding air regulations and safety precautions. Katherine didn't bother to listen. The jetliner began to roll backwards away from the terminal and she stared out of her window out towards a scene of very low visibility. The sky was a deep gray, and the torrid scene The blizzard was now even worse than it had been just an hour earlier. Katherine bit her lip again.
The jetliner seemed to take five minutes to roll into position to begin the final run down runway three. It paused for a second at the beginning of the 3000 foot stretch of concrete, and Katherine almost wished she had stayed at home. And she wondered why all of a sudden she was realizing that perhaps this entire trip had been a bad idea. But it was too late by the time that thought crossed her mind.
The engines roared up to full thrust and she was pressed back against her seatback as flight 90 accelerated down the runway. The downward onslaught of snowflakes now looked like thousands of horizontal streaks slipping past Katherine's gaze, something like static on an old television set that was broken. The airliner seemed to be gaining speed slower than it should, at least for the amount of noise that was emanating from the three turbo engines. Katherine locked her eyes on the ‘fasten belt’ sign that was flashing at the front of the coach class section.
The interior began to shake slightly, and the jet bounced off of the ground for a few feet, only to slip back down and again hit the concrete with stomach-turning ‘thud’ type of noise. The jolt was certainly not needed, and it then occurred to Katherine that they were traveling down a runway that was not plowed, or at least that’s how it appeared to Katherine. She was appalled, and realized that she was in fact in a jet that was pushing its way through three inches of slushy ice and snow. She closed her eyes and tried to keep her stomach from rolling with the nervousness it was spawning.
That initial shock of the jet hitting the ground was only the beginning for Katherine, and in fact it was the beginning of the end for Flight 90.
The turbulence from the runway continued as the plane finally began to climb up into the gray sky. The were up maybe 100 feet in the air. Katherine's eyes widened as she registered the fact that the jetliner was not going any higher. The engines seemed to roar even louder and the small vibration in the interior turned into a full out shake. Luggage in the overhead compartments rattled and made odd noises all throughout the plane.
A stewardess, who didn't look very happy ran towards the front of the jetliner and disappeared into the cockpit. The disconcerting shaking went on for about a minute and the fact that the jetliner was now beginning to descend was not noted by many passengers because of the chaos developing within the cabin.
A luggage compartment burst open and a suitcase and a small bag fell out and tumbled down onto a woman several rows ahead of Katherine. The woman let out a slight squeal and tried to block her head from the falling mess. Katherine gripped her fingernails into the armrest. She wanted another cigarette but she was scared to get one right that minute.
Three more compartments burst open simultaneously and more luggage and personal affects began to rain down on the seventy-eight passengers. More luggage burst out as the shaking intensified and more passengers began to scream. The lights began to flicker on and off rapidly and the same distressed stewardess ran out of the cockpit and raced towards Katherine and the back of the plane. She had tears running down her face and she was almost like a pinball bouncing between seats and rows as she ran. The plane was now shaking in all directions, vertically and horizontally. Luggage and clothing burst from Nattie Stromand’s compartment and showered down in front of the stewardess. It was a surreal scene that Katherine almost couldn't deal with.
The vibrations now made the plane feel more like a runaway freight train on the ground. The plane was jerking as it tried to speed up and gain altitude. Katherine was tossed back and forth in her seat as the speed of the aircraft undulated up and down. The snow and winds were bearing down on the plane and it felt as if the hand of God was pressing down on the aircraft, forcing it back to the ground from where it came. An odd sounding alarm began emanating from the rear galley and Katherine impulsively bit down on her lip, tears beginning to stream down her face. Her fashionable dark mascara was now a liability, and it smeared down her pale cheeks as her mind rushed with thoughts about this moment perhaps being among the final minutes of her life. The idea that death was upon her was far too much to bear and she began to hyperventilate. The plane shuddered and jerked with a horrific amount of noise blasting from the three engines.
The yellowish fluorescent lighting that glowed from the various sections of the ceiling panels began to flicker on and off, sparkling up and down the isle in a wild fashion. It became like a tortured disco from hell. Katherine closed her eyes tightly and began to count to ten in a desperate attempt to calm herself down, her fingernails tearing into the brown fabric of her seat. She was on number eight when a resounding cascade of banging noises echoed from the front of the cabin. Throughout the interior, the tan plastic panels over every single seat in the jetliner were bursting open, and oxygen masks dangled as a terribly tactile reminder of the severity of what was going on.
The sickening whine of an electronic alarm slurred through its tones with the repeating surges and losses of electricity; to Katherine, it sounded like a drunken version of a British ambulance siren.
The entire situation was out of control; it didn't lay in the hands of the disgustingly chipper Amy or even the esteemed Captain David Norberg, who was today piloting the 230th flight of his career. It would turn out to be the flight that he would never get a chance to forget.
The chorus of alarms grew louder and more disturbing. It was as if the jetliner was having a very violent seizure, and it was now at death's doorstep, ready to collapse into the hellfire of insanity. The engines din was overwhelming for some passengers, and one woman began to become hysterical, screaming and crying about her opinion of the situation that the plane was in. It didn't matter that she was freaking out, for nobody could possibly hear her as Captain Norberg pushed the turbo jet engines past their maximum operational capacity. He was determined to force the computerized monstrosity to climb into the dark clouds that were over Washington D.C. Yet still in spite of the tremendous effort of the turbines, the jet continued to slow in speed, lumbering like a migrating bird over the Potomac river.
The horror of the situation was that this particular bird was about to fly into history.
Air Florida Flight 90 was flying straight towards the 14th street bridge, a common-looking four lane concrete piece of roadway that was at the moment packed with federal employees rushing home after the government closed early that morning due to the blizzard like conditions of the “Siberian Express”.
Amy ran past Katherine towards the front of the aircraft, her makeup smearing under the stream of tears running down her cheeks. The plane suddenly jerked to the left and she was thrown into an empty row of seats. Her head slammed into the brown plastic of the armrest support and she didn't get back up again.
“Amy!”, was the only word that Katherine managed to shout, horrified at the drama unraveling before her eyes.
Katherine pulled off her seatbelt and grabbed onto the seat in front of her, trying to navigate towards the motionless woman. The aircraft was now jerking in a vertical motion, as if it were jumping down a series of steep steps through the air. Katherine pulled herself around the several rows separating her from the legs and pair of red high heels she could see hanging in the isle. Katherine glanced out of the window to her right and her stomach turned and she was clearly able to look into the windows of office buildings flashing past. The surreal scene was glazed over in a mist of white from the rushing flakes of snow that the aircraft was plowing through in the air.
As the deafening roar of the engines seemed to grow even louder, she finally stumbled across the isle that contained Amy. She had a cut along her forehead that ran back into her hair. Blood was smeared in her hair and a sickeningly thick stream of the red liquid was running down her face and neck. The navy blue blazer that was a part of her outfit was quickly turning a deep purple at the top where the flow of blood met the polyester material. Katherine tried to pull her out of the foot well but the jerking motions of the plane were so intense that Katherine was unable to get a secure footing to allow her enough leverage on the woman's body. A young man in an airline outfit from the first class section rushed up behind Katherine and pulled on her shoulders, motioning for her get back into a seat since there was far to much noise to allow him to speak.
Katherine fell backwards into the isle as the plane jerked to the right, and she crawled on her hands and knees into an open seat next to a businessman in a gray pinstriped suit. He was holding onto his designer briefcase with such force that his fingernails had began to cut into the expensive leather. He was pressed back into his seat and hyperventilating into his oxygen mask, his face wet with a mixture of sweat and tears, a combination that seemed unreal when contrasted against his otherwise perfectly manicured appearance. His eyes were tightly shut as if he were completely denying the visual nightmare unfolding with each passing second.
Katherine defocused her eyes beyond the businessman to look out of his window. The scenery alone made her stomach turn even harder. It was difficult to properly concentrate on what she saw, for a number of reasons; the jerking motions of the dying jetliner made it difficult to process a clear image, but even with those distortions, Katherine was well aware that they were presently flying directly over the frozen Potomac River, blazing down a corridor of endless high-rise office buildings. The aircraft was at that moment traveling at one hundred miles per hour, a horrifically slow speed for the one hundred ton machine.
Katherine began to cry even harder as she realized that she could actually see hundreds of faces pressed against the thousands of windows that were rushing past her eyes. Office workers, some crying more hysterically than Katherine, were violently ripping open the blinds and curtains of their offices to see what on earth was echoing like a racing bomb through the normally placid corridor cut by the Potomac river through downtown Washington D.C. The sight before them was more than enough to make more than several of them burst into tears, and throughout the usually dull offices in these buildings, a few lightheaded workers promptly fainted at the sight of the 400-foot long Lockheed Tristar barreling down into the icy blizzard that was the Siberian Express.
Katherine suddenly was filled with the desperate wish that she were one of those anonymous workers, watching a scene from hell unfold, rather than being in her current position of helplessly sailing into hell.
The engines, choking on the improper air mixture produced by the Siberian Express began to make a grinding noise that was so hideous that Katherine ceased being able to think at all. It sounded like the plane might simply explode before it even could hit the ground. Were they going to all die on the most hellish stage ever assembled in the history of the District of Columbia? Katherine gritted her teeth together as trails of heavy gray smoke began to stream from the overheating turbo engines attached to each wing. If she could have seen the third engine on the tail of the flying machine, the sight would have made her pass out. It wasn't just leaking out smoke; hundreds of small metal shards were blazing forth from it as the massive turbines began to disintegrate under the stress of the situation. Red lights and nauseating alarms began to flood the cockpit and Captain Norberg for the first time began to cry. The controls were failing all around him, and he couldn't help but to think that it was all his fault that on this day, everyone on his craft was doomed to perish. The computerized maze of buttons began to utter out a very distorted voice that was part of what made the Tristar the most amazing jetliner of 1982; not only did this machine have alarms and lights spread in front of the damned Captain, it was programmed to utter out several major warning in the case that an impact was imminent.
“Pull up. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up.”, was all the speaker in the cockpit was able to spit out.
The non-human voice of the aircraft trying to ‘communicate’ with Captain Norberg was something no pilot ever wanted to hear. It was the sound of doom and the symbol of death for everyone. At this point, there was no saving this jet. The only possibility was to try with every ounce of his soul to not slam into an office building. The co-pilot was sweating profusely and he was simply ignoring the unraveling reality of what was in front of his face. He turned towards Captain Norberg and simply stared at him, biting his lip so hard that a small amount of blood began to stream down from his mouth. They mixed with the tears and sweat pouring forth and he simply tried to focus on admiring how Captain Norberg was still somehow focused on being the authority over the Tristar. The two men had less than ninety seconds to finish their lives.
The switchboards of the D.C. Metropolitan Emergency Services call center suddenly began to light up with a stunning speed. It was 7:55 a.m. and within sixty seconds the plethora of phone lines that fed into the ultra modern phone banks were completely locked up; all twenty-five telephone lines were flooded with calls from desperate workers in the offices lining the Potomac River. The fifteen call operators who were all getting ready for the 8 a.m. switchover to the first-shift set of employees suddenly found themselves drawn back to their workstations, their black headsets filled with the panicked voices of office workers who had not yet been sent home due to the massive amount of freezing rain and snow that was piling up on the downtown streets.
Within another sixty seconds, it had become clear to those in the now chaotic call center that this jetliner in question was going to either crash into an office building or land right into the ice-clogged abyss that was the Potomac River in January. The desperate operators began hitting the push buttons that set off alarms in the firehouses and police stations of downtown D.C., an area that was already struggling to keep up with the many minor car crashes that had resulted from the Federal Government closing all of their offices roughly twenty minutes earlier. Several sections of the city had lost electrical power and the disabled stoplights in those areas had added to the chaos that was already in the streets due to the Siberian Express.
It now looked as if the morning from hell was just turning to an express of its own: an express to certain disaster.
The streets surrounding the Potomac were packed with the cars of federal employees, and traffic within a ten-block area had locked up to a standstill. The numerous bridges crossing the Potomac were complete traffic jams, and the four lanes of the 14th Street Bridge were totally full with cars and trucks, all stopped in a bumper-to-bumper mess. These were the people who would get to touch death for a moment that morning.
Among those unfortunate individuals was Sandra Taylor, a forty-year old secretary for the Department of Education. She had never even walked into her office that morning; for as she had pulled into her parking spot, her radio station interrupted the morning classics to inform commuters of the immediate closure of all Federal offices. Sandra simply pulled into her usual parking spot, smiled to herself in the mirrors, and subsequently put her car into reverse and re-start her hour-long commute back to the suburbs of Northern Virginia. It was 7:56 a.m., and she was the tenth car stopped in the westbound set of lanes on the 14th street bridge. Sandra would have been more annoyed at the traffic jam if it weren't for the pleasant fact that she had an unexpected day off. Perhaps she would slug through the deepening snow and ice to Tyson's Corner and browse through the new mega-mall of exclusive shops and department stores. Sandra had a strong weak spot for Nordstroms’ department store and the five floors of fashion that it held, and no simple snowstorm was going to prevent her from expanding her already heavy credit card debt load She turned up the morning classics on the radio and adjusted the heater to keep the car a bit warmer.
It was several seconds past 7:56 a.m., and Sandra had just placed yet another cigarette between her deep red lips when she heard it for the first time. As she rolled down her window, she realized that there was a noise emanating down through the city that was simply not normal. She tilted her head in an odd way in an attempt to better understand the deep rumble that was echoing towards her from the left. Sandra was confused and suddenly a bit frightened as she sat motionless in the traffic jam on the 14th street bridge. The sound was totally foreign to her office-accustomed ears. It was unearthly, and almost evil. She turned off the radio and realized for the first time that the sound was more than a sound; it was a vibration. The hard plastic radio knob was very quietly chattering between her long fingernails, and she paused to stare at the horrific sensation of her car vibrating as if it was a cheap motel bed with a vibration machine that you could turn on for a quarter. The sound of evil began to consume the air around her car, and her heart rate suddenly jumped even though she had yet to light her fifth cigarette of the morning. The fear that was sweeping through the downtown business district had now gripped her, and the long Virginia Slim cigarette tumbled from her lips as her mouth dropped open. The sound was getting louder with each passing millisecond. In the next blink of Sandra's widening eyes, a well dressed business woman, who was screaming hysterically, ran past Sandra’s sedan, her fur coat floundering in the wind as she tried to run in high heels.
A part of Sandra wanted to follow her, but she was frozen with fear, too panicked to be able to process the situation at hand.
Katherine could not believe what she was watching through the window. The wing on the right side of the plane was slicing through the tops of barren trees, their branches exploding into shards as the thick metal sliced into them. Gray smears of tears ran down her cheeks, her over use of mascara now an issue that she didn't have time to worry about. She thought about Marianne and wondered what she would say when she saw on the news that her best friend’s flight had been a victim of the Siberian Express. The entire situation was beyond what Katherine had expected to encounter during the day.
She realized that she would perhaps be best off in her original seat, against the back wall of the cabin. She pulled herself past the four rows that separated her from Seat 85. Katherine fell into the brown seat and quickly buckled her seatbelt.
Sandra could now attach a visual image to the sound of evil that was vibrating her sedan. Peering through the other cars, she caught her first glimpse of a massive jetliner settling down towards the bridge as if it were a proper place to land.
Sandra began to scream louder and with more passion than she had ever in her life. Before she could even begin to contemplate the situation, the white underside of the plane was pressed right above her. It was skidding across the roof of the delivery van in front of her, and the shower of sparks and ripping metal was at that moment enough to make Sandra think that she must be in hell. The windows of the van’s rear doors exploded into a shower of glass shards as the aircraft weighed down into the vehicle, and the entire roof seemed to melt down right before her eyes. The van was now being pulled over towards it’s right side at a disturbing angle and pressed into the side of the concrete bridge. There was a long blackened scrape expanding along the underside of the plane as the burning and melting metal of the delivery van became a massive welding torch. The heat was so intense from the blizzard of sparks and fire that were billowing around the van's former roof that Sandra felt the temperature rising. The snow on her hood was dissolving into nothing as the immense heat wave rolled over the cars around the damned white van.
Suddenly the horrid white machine disappeared from sight and the burning van bounced back down onto it’s four wheels, popping two of them instantly. It had only taken several seconds for the jetliner to slide across the traffic, but to Sandra it had been several hours worth of torture.
Mrs. Taylor pulled at her hair and continued to scream, tears rushing down her face.
Katherine was gripping the armrest with a terrible intensity. She pressed herself into the seat, praying to whatever would hear her, to please, please make this hell end quickly. There was a tremendous impact as the aircraft sliced into the frozen waters of the Potomac River.
Katherine could see several passengers being thrown into the air as the bolts holding the seats to the floor failed. Everything around her was disintegrating. The baggage compartments and the plastic panels that comprised the ceiling splintered into many pieces. It was like watching a massive puzzle being torn apart as wires and tubes burst out from places that they should have always remained. In a crescendo of sparks flying all around the remains of the ceiling, all of the lights went out as their casings tore apart and flew through the interior towards the front of the cabin. There was a tremendous noise, something like the sound of thunder, rolling all around Katherine.
Suddenly the plastic wall panels two rows ahead of her burst apart as the end of the jetliner tore away from the rest of the dying machine. A horrid mixture of slushy ice exploded through the crevasse that had developed and water surged under her feet and within a second rose up around her waist. It was the end, Katherine thought to herself.
The water rushed up around her neck and then suddenly there was a bright white sky above her, snow and sharp ice blowing in her eyes. Katherine watched as the gigantic airliner slowly slid below the water and within seconds disappeared under a thick mess of broken ice. She was at this point completely confused; why was she still alive? The air and water were filled with the scent and taste of aviation kerosene. Her frozen body was beginning to burn slightly as the horrid fuel sank into her sensitive skin. However, this pain was ended quickly, for the icy waters almost numbed her whole body and shut down her senses enough to forget about the jet fuel.
She realized that the last twenty feet of the aircraft had sheared away from the rest of the plane, and she was sitting in the remains of the tail end of the plane, which for the time didn't seem to be sinking. The water was so cold that Katherine found it hard to breathe. She pushed her numb hands around in her lap, trying to find her seatbelt release. She pulled at the metal clasp and began to drift away from her seat, which was now slipping beneath the water with a frightening speed. Katherine looked up found herself on stage for what looked like hundreds of people. All along the bridge there were people, waving and screaming. Sirens wailed through the air all around, echoing among the tall buildings.
The abstract sun, with its unending stare was still blazoned on the tail of the aircraft. Katherine felt sick from being so cold, her stomach had never felt worse. Her teeth were chattering together and she struggled to tread water, trying to float. A red seat cushion floated near her and she grabbed at it, wrapping her aching arms around it. She looked back towards where the rest of the plane had been, and saw seven other people splashing around as she was. They were all in shock. It was an oddly silent group of people. Every bit of energy that they had was being spent on trying not to succumb to the horrid waters. Communication wasn't needed, really, thought Katherine. What was there to talk about? The weather? For the woman who was obsessed with being unique, the situation was ironically exactly the kind of event that she longed for; she was now among the seven people who survived crashing into the Potomac River, quite an exclusive club indeed.
Katherine swam a few feet towards the group, and she realized that there were now only six other people. One of the men she had seen had apparently sunk under. Katherine could only blink a few times as she pondered the relevance of the fact that she was in such a deadly situation. At least she and the remaining six were still alive, she thought. But then she realized that they too were going to die as well, because there was no way to get up the steep, ice covered banks of the Potomac. The moment of joy that Katherine had experienced due to her surviving the crash quickly passed.
The riverbanks were now surrounded by emergency vehicles, and the combined sirens from the mass confusion was continuing to grow louder. She paddled her feet and turned towards the bridge, which was now even more crowded with people who were all trying to gain a sight of death up close. Katherine noticed that there was a television crew pushing their way through the crowd and it occurred to her that Marianne was just during the past two weeks devoted to her new best friend, the Cable News Network. Marianne might actually witness the last moments of her former college roommate's life via satellite beamed television signals. Katherine felt proud to be alive in the year of 1982, and even if she had to die today, at least it was on national news, she thought to herself.
The picture was not exactly the clearest, due to the haze of snow that was falling in front of the camera's lens, but the television picture still conveyed the basic problem: a jetliner had landed in a river. In the middle of a city. In the middle of a blizzard. In the middle of rush hour. What was she looking at? Marianne’s cocaine-filled head felt like it was spinning. One moment she had been brushing some more green into the pastoral scene on her canvas; then she had glanced up to the television that was on the Cable News Network. It was her replacement for a newspaper since she hadn't had time yet to pick one up from the street vendor. The bottom of the screen had the words ‘Live from Washington D.C.’ written in a slanted yellow text. Marianne’s cocaine-lit eyes widened and she hopped off of the bar stool that was in front of her easel. She swiftly picked up Samantha, her cat, and rushed over to the overstuffed leather couch she had bought a week earlier. She sat with her legs crossed, Indian style, and placed Samantha in between her legs. She was possessed with a chill that made her shiver for a moment.
Up until that point, she had been painting a watercolor landscape which she had planned to give to Katherine as a surprise gift. Marianne laughed nervously at herself, in an effort to calm down. It couldn't be Katherine's flight. That was silly to think. Katherine didn't have the bad karma that it would take to deserve that kind of death, thought Marianne.
Her body was wired after a night spent watching horror films accompanied by her white angel, which into her nose she had sniffed three hundred dollars worth.
It was at that moment that the smile fell from her face and she realized it was real.
The 1980 Metropolitan Tampa Graphic Designer of the Year of recognized the expressionless logo that she had first designed for Air Florida some eighteen months earlier. And she was sure that Katherine had told her that she was on Air Florida. She began to shiver as the unthinkable horror consumed her mind. The television was muted as the stereo was playing Handle's ‘Zadok the Priest’ from a record that she had found in a box of things from college. Marianne could not move from the couch. Her mind could not accept more than the visual information from the television. Fear swept over her as the yellow text on the television changed to read, ‘Air Florida Flight 90 Southbound to Tampa has Crashed’.
Marianne’s heart was racing, and not simply due to the excess of cocaine.
“OH MY GOD, Samantha! Oh my GOD! Katherine was on that plane!”, screamed Marianne, her hands pulling sharply at her own long flowing hair.
The long haired white cat was startled by her sudden outburst and scrambled to get away from her.
Katherine finally appreciated the aerobics classes she had forced herself into during the previous two years. Treading water in surroundings that resembled Antarctica was not exactly how she had intended to spend her morning, but the energy it required was something close to that of her obsessive workouts at the YMCA. It was a challenge.
Fate had already been kind to her. Now she was in a competition for her life. This was the only way in which Katherine was able to maintain sanity. It was a game. She was going to win, she had to. Helicopters flew around overhead, and one of them had the new iconic markings of the letters C.N.N. on it.
It was then that Katherine knew for sure that Marianne was probably witnessing this event simultaneously.
Marianne didn't know what to do, since really there wasn't anything she could do from where she was sitting. She thought that having the phone in her hand would be a comfort at least, so she picked it up and began to tap in the numbers to reach Carmen de Vaux in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She was shaking and her tears were starting to stream onto the keypad of her beige AT&T Slimline telephone.
Her fingers stumbled around the buttons of the ridiculous mess of eighteen numbers it took to reach the central Royal Palace of Haiti.
By the tenth digit, Marianne knew that she was making mistakes.
“Damn it!”, she burst out, and she slammed the handset back onto the base of the phone.
The emotions of contemplating Katherine's hideous demise compounded with the mania of her all-night cocaine binge to create a tornado of thoughts. Was it her fault for insisting that Katherine venture South during such a bizarre time of year? Did the constant presence of drugs in her system ruin her ability to judge the safety of such a trip? Was all of this her fucking fault, and some horrid sign from God?
As she released a primal scream, Marianne suddenly grabbed the beige phone and threw it in the general direction of the massive black television console.
Perhaps the volume of her agonizing wail could have been the culprit for the cascade of shattering of glass, but in any case, the unexpectedly mobile leased telephone set slammed into the glass door that covered the shelves holding the multiplicity of electronic devices that Marianne was well known for collecting. The plate glass exploded into a sheet of falling chaos, with the area directly hit by the phone being obliterated into countless small shards.
A large segment of the former door in the shape of an upside-down triangle was still holding onto one of the brass hinges and it meekly swung out several inches before it too fell to its death on the marble floor.
The Sony record player shuddered and the music suddenly scratched in a horrid way, totally stopping because the needle had bounced off of the turntable.
Samantha witnessed the entire spectacle from the kitchen bar and scrambled to spin around and run off into the guest bedroom, suddenly afraid of her irrational master.
Marianne unsteadily pulled herself up from her temper tantrum and stumbled towards her workstation. Her hands shaking uncontrollably, and her face bleached a sickening shade of white, she sat down on the bar stool and slumped forward onto the large angled drafting table that still had Katherine's surprise painting taped down on it. The wet paint was immediately smeared and the addition of her flooding tears transformed the artwork into a meaningless distortion on the paper.
After counting to one hundred in her head, Marianne took a deep breath and pulled herself into an erect position. With trembling fingers, she picked up a cigarette and her lighter.
Perhaps that would help to calm her down, she thought to herself, although Marianne didn't really believe it would do much good.
The long cigarette was trembling worse than her hand, the bright orange tip exaggerating the shuddering motions that were coursing through Marianne’s body. Her mind was racing with an unsuccessful attempt at diverting her attention away from the television. Helicopters were hovering over the frozen disaster area, and several heads were bobbing around in the midst of the Januarian ice floes that shifted about on the chaotic riverfront. The weather seemed to be getting worse, or perhaps it really wasn't, and it was just Marianne’s mind making the scene appear even more hideous than it was in reality.
The entertainment console was in shambles, with the usually organized video cassette tapes pushed about in a sloppy fashion, quite a contrast for the normal obsessive environment which comprised Suite 715 of The Mirashann Towers. The gated community of career-obsessed yuppies was a great place for the most part, aside from the palpable lack of caring neighbors who would usually have stopped by Marianne’s apartment to check on her and ask what she was screaming about.
It occurred to her that she could have been in the midst of a violent rape, screaming for her life and liberty, and even now, some twelve minutes into her binge of screaming and self-destruction. Nobody on her hallway apparently gave a damn nor second thought as to what was happening behind her double locked door.
Marianne bit into the cigarette filter and looked down at her artist’s smock. It was still a mess from her experimentation with oil painting that had occupied many of her lonely evenings. Her decision to create a watercolor painting for Katherine had been motivated by witnessing Katherine's unstoppable bidding on a watercolor by S. F. Hauger at the Sotheby’s Annual Art auction that they had attended a year earlier in New York City.
She and Katherine had traveled by an Amtrak Metroliner Turbo Train to the city in the midst of a bitterly cold but uneventful series of days and as far as Marianne could recall, they had never considered flying even though it would have cut out the two days it took Marianne to reach Staunton prior to reboarding the Cardinal Express that whisked them off to New York at four in the morning. They had picked out seats in a deserted passenger car and smoked what seemed like two packs of cigarettes during the five hours it took to reach the outskirts of NYC.
Why on earth had Marianne insisted that Katherine rush to Tampa on board an Air Florida jetliner?
Then it all hit her. Horribly illogically and incorrectly, but emotions non the less.
It had to be the drugs. The cocaine, the marijuana, and the pills of NDMA that Marianne was popping in every Tampaian bar that sold them -- 'ecstasy pills', some drunken patrons were beginning to call them.
And the alcohol, the gateway drug that had started to control Marianne as early as 1976, it was all of the trash that had apparently distorted her mind beyond reason and logic. And now this lack of control that normally had no negative impact on her life, or anyone else's for that matter, had now played a miserable role in indirectly causing the death of her best friend, her sister that she never had, her confidante in life.
It was too much to bear.
Katherine Kunakovich was dead, or at least Marianne thought so, due to the deliberate insanity that Marianne had brought into her own life, and perhaps it was time to end this subtly evil lifestyle.
Hell, it wasn't subtle at all, not now that a death had resulted from her lifestyle.
Marianne realized that she had forgotten that she was in the midst of smoking a cigarette and looked down to notice that the cigarette was nearly burnt out, a long, delicate inch and half of ashes barely hanging onto the smoldering tip of her Virginia Slims 120.
She felt like pressing the burning embers down into her leather couch, to ruin it and punish herself for fucking up as she had. A feeling of desiring some twisted punishment overcame her, and tears streamed down her pale face with an increasing speed. Yet she didn't attempt to set the couch on fire as she sat in the middle of it, curled into a whimpering ball of self-hatred. She simply sat it down in her crystal ashtray and continued her distant stare towards the television, unable to move more than the amount it took to dispose of her stick of nicotine.
