The Life of the Fly: With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography
It began with a little *thump* *thump* sound, making its way down the aisle.
It was barely audible over the sound of the engines, but there it was... *thump*. Thump.
More feeling than sound, like someone tapping a hammer on a tambourine being held under water in an old wooden barrel.
There was a rustle across the rows, down the plane, but that was more the rustle of early flight settling in than anything. People fixing pillows in place, pulling blankets across their laps without intruding on their neighbor. Only 26C looked back to see what, if anything, was making the deliberate thump, thump down the aisle of the plane.
If it weren't for the airplane engines, most passengers would have been able to hear a very faint, syncopated "ah AH, ah AH, ah AH, AH ah, AH ah..." and so on, gaining strength as it went.
A tall man in a gray suit and sunglasses, not the type of man you'd expect to see minding a baby, or walking behind one close enough that you'd think he was minding the baby, was doing just that. He was walking behind the little baby, in a blue all-in-one, thumping his way down the airplane aisle. The man had his hands linked behind his back, as if nonchalantly following a baby down the aisle is exactly what he was meant to be doing at that exact moment in time. 26C glanced back and forth between the baby and the man a few times, before he caught the man, staring intently in his direction. That was the sort of thing you'd expect from a man wearing a gray suit and sunglasses. If 26C had looked closer, and been a spy, or at least watched a lot of crime and spy dramas on television, he would have noticed the tell tale bulge of a gun underneath the man's jacket, near his right hip.
It was, in fact, a teething ring on a loop normally put into service holding extra rounds for the man's gun, which was back on the ground, safely in a locker in the staff lounge of the airport.
The baby, being a baby, started to tire around row 29. So he sat down, and examined the contents of each bag on either side of the aisle. Neither one having anything that acted in a fascinating way to spit and drool, he commenced his journey down the aisle, only to stop less than a half a foot later, when all the maneuvering and machinations were completed to get the baby, once again, from a mobile to a seated position. Despite what, to a full grown person, would be an overpowering stink off of 29D's feet, at the moment free of their shoes in a post-takeoff attempt to relax for the next six hours of flying time to San Jose, the baby lingered by 29D's bag, tugging at a promising looking strap.
Then, as quickly as he sat down (which is to say, not very), the baby was off again. Crawling ineluctably down the length of the plane, going west slightly faster than the rest of the occupants on the plane.
The syncopated rhythms grew faster, as he gained speed passing 29, 28, 27, 26 and the nosy passenger in C, 25, 24, and a near painful incident at 23 with a passenger with an amazingly small bladder. The man in gray gave her a look, and she sat herself back down, before realizing there was a baby underfoot. Or under where her foot would have been, had she made it all the way out of the tangle of her seat belt buckle, her headphone cord, and blanket.
So the baby made it down the 20s. And there was a rustle, somewhere around row 17, and this was no early flight settling rustle.
The gray man hung back, letting the baby get more than a leg's length away. If the baby were to, say, leap up to his feet and start sprinting for the front door, the man in the gray suit would have to sprawl headlong to catch him. That is assuming the baby and man would be sprinting at the same speed, and the man would react quickly (which, looking at him, you imagined he would, anyway), and that neither one would tire or slow down over the course of the short sprint.
At any rate, the baby didn't leap up and sprint. He toddled on all fours down the aisle, until he planted himself at 17C's feet. Or not his feet, but one of his dirty, ragged tennis shoes. His feet were tucked up under his seat, pushing one of his tennis shoes under the seat back to 18C's under-seat carry on space. This didn't sit well with 18C, who had packed an intentionally crushable bag full of paperback books, a blanket, toothpaste, a pair of amazingly resilient reading glasses, an extra sweatshirt, two extra pairs of socks, a pair of slippers from the Boston Harbor Hotel, a rubber duck, one of those pillows that wrap around your neck, an eye mask, and three stuffed lobsters, each one slightly larger than the other, until the largest, at three quarters the length of his arm. 18C nudged his stuffed bag, pushing 17C's shoe out into the baby's path.
The baby promptly drooled onto his own arm, reached across, and grabbed the shoe, which he held up to the man in gray and said, some of the people nearby swore, "Ta da!"
The man in gray whipped out a heretofore unseen plastic case from behind his back, pulled out a set of wire clippers, which he set upon the shoe he'd taken from the baby, until the frayed ends of a red and green wire stuck out from above the rubber sole of the shoe. He did this in conjunction with a very calm, collected move, in which he leaned across the man in 17C, pinning him to the seat with his free arm on 17C's formerly free neck, immobilizing his upper body with a teething ring -equipped hip.
The bomb defused, the man in gray deftly swung a pair of handcuffs from his other hip onto the man's wrists, and yet another man in a gray suit came from the front of the plane to take the seat of the woman beside 17C, who complained, at first, about having to move, and made a big show of unpacking the snacks she'd brought on board and promptly buried in the seat front pocket back into her own carry on baggage, and then making yet another big show of struggling to get around the handcuffed passenger beside her. She gave a little dig into his knee with her own bony knee as restitution for the inconvenience of making her move, and an elbow was thrown in the general direction of the second man in gray's chest as she struggled past in the aisle to her new seat, but she only connected with Kevlar, so it was somewhat unsatisfying for her.
The baby wailed like a banshee when the first man in gray picked him up, and pointed further down the aisle at the floor. But it would be back to the car seat for the remainder of the flight for him.
disclaimer:
In New England, sort of melting, but not too bad.
I'm sure you were dying to hear that update/status.
In light of recent events, this may not be the most... I don't know, sensitive? What? Issue. But it's here, I predicted it (because we had someone write it, for Pete's sake), and tough luck. Maybe the TSA and airline security authorities should start employing babies to sniff out bombs. Or maybe we should all just stop flying. I want my futuristic, non-terrorizable hover car!
Ze Frank's daily show comment on this mess. If you can get past his annoying intro, and his possibly annoying way of speaking, it's an interesting message. Umm, not for the kids. So get 'em out of the room. Start training 'em to sniff bombs out or something.
Oh, and that bit of fiction about 18C carrying on toothpaste? Well, now it truly is fiction, as we're not allowed anything on flights except the skin we were born in and maybe a mint, so long as it's a non-mint mint, because mint might burn, should it be rubbed in someone's eyes, or injected into their bloodstream, or rubbed on a bullet and shot at someone.
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