So this fella in the shirt

So this fella, the one in the shirt (you saw the shirt, the whole country saw the shirt, the Prime Minister hugged the shirt on camera) this fella is telling someone who tells someone who tells the television that the plane just tipped. Not a bump, not weather. Tipped, like a table when somebody leans on the wrong corner, and then it kept going, over Jordan, over all that brown nothing where the map runs out of names. And he said the funny thing was how quiet it got first. Before the screaming. Like the whole cabin took one breath together and forgot to let it out.

And I said, Well how did he get in, though, because the doors, you know the doors, they've been bolted shut since 2001, steel and codes and a little camera, and the man inside can say no. That's the whole point of the door. And he said (or the fella's cousin said, or it was on the radio, I'm honestly not sure anymore) that nobody knows how it opened. It just did. Maybe the captain, bleeding, reached over. Maybe the other one was too busy to say no. Maybe it was never locked at all, and all those years we were trusting a door that was only ever a suggestion.

So he goes in. This is the part I keep turning over at night. He goes toward it. Everybody else on that plane is doing the sensible thing, which is holding the armrest and praying to whoever's on shift, and this ordinary man in an ordinary seat (row eleven? fourteen? nobody wrote it down) stands up into the tilt and walks uphill toward a knife. Into the little room where the instruments are blinking all their colours at once and the windows are full of ground where the sky should be. And a crew member with him. Two people and a dive. And then somebody's hands on the controls, somebody who wasn't supposed to be the one flying, pulling it back level like you'd lift a sleeping child.

They put down in Tabuk, which is a place most of them had never heard of and some of them, I'd wager, will never stop hearing of now. Both pilots to the hospital. One of them to a small room with Saudi men asking him questions in the dry heat, and what he's saying in there, what he meant, whether he meant anything at all, nobody outside that room knows. Not the Prime Minister, though he's talking like he does. Not the fella in the shirt. Not me. I finish my coffee. I tell Andrew, or I'll tell him in November, that the strangest part isn't the knife or the dive. It's that somewhere in every one of us there's a door, and you don't find out which way you'll walk through it until the floor starts to tilt.