I don’t fly a lot. I don’t like it, makes me nervous. Of course, I also haven’t learned much about it. I admit that, freely. But what I did know, or at least what I thought I knew, was that you needed a pilot to fly a plane. Maybe not now, who knows? But back then, when all this occurred, pilots, as far as I knew, were mandatory. And our plane had one, or at least it started out with one. Dale, I think his name was. Fifties maybe, with gray hair and a thick mustache. Handsome. But then, something happened to him. I don’t know what, maybe he got sick or something, but about halfway through the flight the cockpit door swung open and he came running down the aisle straight for the bathroom. My seat was at the rear, right next to the bathroom, so I got a good look at his face. I’d never seen a face like that before, I don’t even know how to describe it. Frightful, yes, but more than that.

By then I’d already had a few drinks, not so much that I was tanked, but enough that I had a buzz going. Still, I knew what I saw, and I looked around to see if anyone else had seen it, too. But no one had, or at least no one was behaving like they’d seen it. Granted, from where I was sitting, there were only a handful of people I could get a good read on, but still, none of them looked worried or put out in any way. They were all behaving just as they’d been before the pilot came running down the aisle with that strange look on his face—reading, sleeping, listening to music on their headphones. A few were talking, either to someone they were traveling with or perhaps a stranger. But not one of them seemed troubled by the fact that no one was flying the plane.

I turned to my wife. She was sitting next to me, with an eye mask on. I could tell she was asleep because she makes this little noise with her breathing, like a sheep. Bah-ah-ah—that sort of thing. It’s cute, once you get used to it, though I’m probably over-used to it by now. We’ve been married awhile. Anyway, I gave her a nudge and she woke up. She wasn’t mad. She doesn’t anger easy. She’s a very relaxed person. That’s how she’s able to sleep on a plane, which I can never do. No, she didn’t get mad. She just slid her eye mask onto her forehead and asked me what was up.

“Dale’s in the bathroom.”

“Who?”

“The pilot.”

“I think his name is Darren.”

            “He came running by a second ago and he looked sick or, I don’t know what. I’m worried. Shouldn’t someone be flying the plane?”

My wife smiled like I was being silly. “Hon,” she said, “that’s what the co-pilot is for.”

“Co-pilot?”

“Flights like this, they always have two pilots. A main pilot and a co-pilot.”

            “Are you sure? Because when we boarded the plane the cockpit was open and I specifically remember looking into it and only seeing one pilot. The one that just ran into the bathroom.”

“The other pilot must have boarded after.”

“After what?”

“After you looked.”

She had a point there. That could have happened. It wasn’t like I’d kept my eye on the cockpit the whole time. In fact, my back was turned to it when I was walking down the aisle to my seat, and while I was stuffing my luggage, and my wife’s luggage, into the overheard compartment, I wasn’t looking at the cockpit either. And for a while there, while the other passengers were boarding, I couldn’t see into the cockpit, at least not after I sat down, because they were in my way. So this other pilot, this co-pilot, he could have come on while all that was happening, just like my wife said. Still, I wasn’t convinced.

            “What if he didn’t though? What if something happened? Like say he got caught in traffic on the way to the airport, or he’s sick, too.”

“Then that’s what the autopilot is for.”

“Autopilot?”

“It flies the plane, keeps it on course.”

            “Yes, I know what autopilot is,” I said, and I did, too, that was something else I knew about planes, that they had something called autopilot, though I had no idea what it did or how it worked. Not that I was about to admit that to my cool, calm, collected wife who was completely failing to see the danger we were in. “But aren’t you still supposed to have someone in the cockpit looking out for, for, you know, for whatever? I mean, really, I don’t think we should be hurtling through space at god knows how fast a pace without someone looking out for what’s ahead of us.”

           “Hurtling,” my wife laughed. She patted my forearm and said, “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine.”

“But what if it isn’t?”

“Well then, we’ll have to make the most of it.”

Most of what? I thought. Our untimely deaths? But I kept my mouth shut, because I was used to it now, my wife saying something pithy that didn’t mean anything. She was always saying things like that, things like “be happy, at least you’ve got your health” or “a friend in need is a friend indeed.” And if there was one thing I could change about her, it would be that. Not the extra weight she’d put on since I married her, or the wrinkles that were forming all around her face, or the fact that a few months ago she stopped shaving her armpits for no reason whatsoever. Just that. Those dumb pithy sayings. That’s what I’d like to change about her.

But right now I didn’t care about that. The only thing I wanted to change was our situation. I no longer wanted to be hurtling—that’s right, hurtling—through space without a pilot. I thought maybe I should check on the pilot, see how he was doing, so I got up and walked around the corner, and after listening at the bathroom door for a while without hearing anything, I knocked. 

“Hello, Dale?” I said. “Are you okay in there? Mr. Pilot?”

I looked at the occupancy indicator, if that’s what it’s called—anyway, the thing that tells you whether someone’s in the bathroom or not. The letters were green and said, “VACANT,” so I tried the handle, just to see if the door would budge. It did.

“Dale, you in there?”

Again, no answer, so I opened the door. The bathroom was empty. Obviously, I was surprised, because where else could Dale have gone? There were no other doors back there, none that I could see anyway, so either he should have been in the bathroom or standing right in front of me, except he wasn’t. I looked again at the bathroom, this time into the toilet. I noticed there was a hole in it, not like the one you find in every toilet, the one that lets the poop out, but a different one, a different kind of hole. This hole was dark, real dark, like staring into a well at sunset. And I couldn’t see the end of it, it seemed to go on forever. Yet the water was still there, hovering above it, clear as day. 

Not knowing what to make of it—either of Dale going missing or the fact that there was a strange hole in the toilet—I closed the bathroom door. Then I looked down the aisle at the cockpit at the other end. The door to it was still open, not so much that you could see through to the windshield, but open enough. I started thinking about what my wife had said, about there being a co-pilot. But I couldn’t just take her word for it—that wasn’t how our marriage worked—so I started up the aisle. It seemed to take forever. Part of this may have been because I wasn’t in any kind of rush, I was too scared of what I might find to walk fast. But on top of that, the aisle seemed to be getting longer, extending itself, with each step I took, and as a result the cockpit kept getting further and further away. It occurred to me to look around for one of the flight attendants, because maybe they could shed some light on what was going on, but I couldn’t find either one of them, as if they had disappeared as well. Instead, I happened to lock eyes with an older woman, sixties maybe, who looked just as scared as I was about what was going on. She nodded at me, nothing demonstrative, but firm, as if to say, “Yes, please, go. It’s about time someone did something.” So I kept walking, as long as it took, and when I finally reached the cockpit, I took a deep breath and eased open the door. Just like the bathroom, it was empty—there was no one flying the plane. 

I entered the cockpit and stared out the windshield at the sky, all that blue we were hurtling toward without a pilot. Then I glanced down at the dashboard with all its gauges and buttons and whatnot, none of which meant anything to me. I decided I’d had enough, and turned to leave, to go back into the cabin and warn the others of our impending doom. But then, out of nowhere, a flight attendant appeared at the door, blocking my path. 

“No, stay,” she said. “We need you to fly the plane.”

            “What?” I said, or perhaps I said nothing. I might have been too shocked to speak. At any rate, I was thinking it, I was thinking this can’t be happening, or that I must have misheard her. But then she touched my arm and encouraged me to turn back around.

“Sit here,” she said, “in this seat, and grab the yoke.”

I don’t know why, but I did exactly what she asked of me. I sat in the pilot’s seat, the one on the left, and took hold of the funky-looking steering wheel in front of me, which instead of a circle like in a car, had two levers or sticks or whatever to latch onto. The flight attendant, she sat down next to me, in the other seat, the one, presumably, for the co-pilot. I noticed that she looked different from the flight attendants who had been on the plane before—prettier, but also wearing a different uniform. The flight attendants who had greeted us when we boarded the plane had been wearing a kind of green, whereas this woman was wearing blue, sky blue, just like they used to wear when they were called stewardesses. At any rate, in spite of the situation, she was completely composed, and with her smile and general demeanor tried to project her composure onto me, though I have to say, it wasn’t working so well.

“Look, miss,” I began, but she cut me off.

“Daisy,” she said.

“What?”

“My name’s Daisy.”

“Fine, Daisy. What’s going on here? What happened to Dale?”

“There is no Dale. There never was.”

            “Darren, then. The pilot. I saw him run down the aisle and into the bathroom, but when I checked the bathroom he wasn’t there.”

“Yes, it happens sometimes.”

“What? What happens?”

“Please, veer to the left.”

“No, I don’t—listen, I’ve never flown a plane before. I don’t know how. Also, I might be drunk.”

            “You’re not drunk,” she kept on smiling at me. “We water the drinks down, to save on costs. And besides, flying a plane isn’t like driving a car. There won’t be any traffic you have to contend with, or deer running onto the road. All you need to do is keep to the flight plan, and when it comes time for you to land, just make sure to use the runway.”

“The runway.”

            “It shouldn’t be difficult. It’s wider than the plane.” She stuck her arms out at her sides to show me just how wide the runway was, her fingernails clipping my shoulder as she did so. “Just keep doing what you’re doing for now and I’ll guide you through the rest.”

“Well if you know how to fly the plane so well, why don’t you do it?”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t. It’s against regulation for flight attendants to fly a plane.”

“But it’s okay for passengers?”

She didn’t answer that. She just sat there and stared contentedly out the windshield, as if everything were normal, as if she’d gone through this exact scenario a thousand times before. I kept glancing over at her, trying to see if I could make out what was really going on, but she gave nothing away, behaved as if there was nothing to give away.

             “Isn’t if funny?” she said finally. “How we can be in one place and then another, and how quickly we can adjust?”

            “Maybe you do,” I said brusquely. “For me, it takes time. Look, can you at least tell my wife what’s going on? Otherwise, she might get worried that I’m not there.”

             “Your wife is fine. She’s reading the in-flight magazine. She keeps licking her fingers before she turns the pages. I asked her politely not to do that, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“No, she wouldn’t.”

            “Besides, it’s better we keep this to ourselves.” She leaned close, as if sharing a secret. “We wouldn’t want to alarm the other passengers, now would we?”

I wasn’t so sure about that. At least, I knew that if I were in their position, I would want to be informed. I would want to know that the one and only pilot on the plane had vanished, and that my life was now in the hands of a man who had never flown a plane before, who had in fact only been on a plane a few times in his entire life, and who may have also been drunk, so that I could experience the appropriate amount of fear, and perhaps say a few prayers before I plunged horrifically to my death. But I wasn’t going to get up and inform them myself, now that I was flying the plane, and nor did I know how to work the intercom. I remained where I was, and for the next hour or so, however long it took, I flew the plane, following to the letter every instruction that Daisy gave to me, and when it came time to land, I did everything within my power not to kill us all. I’ll admit, it wasn’t a perfect landing—we bounced a couple of times—but given that it was my first, and hopefully last, time that I’d ever landed a plane, the other passengers could count their lucky stars.

There was one issue, however. Our flight was supposed to have taken us to Miami, Florida, in the good old U.S. of A. But as it turned out, we had flown in the opposite direction, and were now in Tokyo, Japan. Whose fault this was I have no idea, and before I could ask Daisy how this might have happened, she got up and ran off to help the passengers deplane. I remained in my seat, or rather, the pilot’s seat, reviewing the last several hours of my life, and also gazing out at the tarmac, where for some reason two enthusiastic macaques were holding up before the plane a red and white Japanese flag.

After a time my wife poked her head into the cockpit. “You ready?” she asked, saying it just like she would when returning from the bathroom at a restaurant.

“You realize we’re in Japan?” I said, getting up.

She glanced past me, through the windshield, and waved at the monkeys. Perhaps sensing my unease, she said, “Well, at least it’s not Cleveland.”

“Is that another one of your sayings?” I asked. “Because I’ve never heard that one.”

We found a hotel near the airport. The room they gave us was small, hardly bigger than the queen-sized bed that had been stuffed into it. We dropped off our luggage and went down into the lounge to eat. I was starving. Flying a plane really takes it out of you. I ordered a Kobe steak, two Kobe steaks. Why not? I figured I’d earned it. And I also had a sake, which wasn’t as strong as I had hoped. My wife ordered a regular hamburger, as if we were still in America, and spent the entire time we were waiting for our food telling me about a story she read in the in-flight magazine. 

“Did you know that about Gwyneth Paltrow?”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”

“Fascinating.”

“Don’t you want to talk about what happened?”

“What happened to what, hon?”

“You know, on the plane.”

            “You mean how you got up and went into the cockpit and flew the plane because the pilot had disappeared?”

“Yes, that.”

She smiled and gave my knee a pinch under the table. “I was quite proud of you. It’s nice to have a husband who knows how to do things.”

           “Yes, I’m a regular jack-of-all-trades. But what about the fact that we’re in Japan? Doesn’t that bother you?”

           “Well, it’s no Miami, but I have always wanted to visit. They seem like such nice people. I can’t understand why we went to war with them.”

          “Because they joined forces with the Nazis and bombed Pearl Harbor.”

          “Say, you know what we should do while we’re here? We should go to one of those Buddhist monasteries, you know, the ones with the funny roofs. Is it roofs or rooves? Anyway, I’ve heard just setting foot in one of those can bring you peace and harmony, if you’re receptive to it. I wonder how we might find one.” 

“Maybe ask the waiter,” I muttered, sipping my sake.

            “Oo, good idea.” She called our waiter over and began speaking to him in Japanese. I didn’t know my wife knew Japanese; I’m still not convinced she does. But whatever she said to him, he seemed to understand, and after a moment she reached into her purse for a pen and wrote down what he was saying to her on a napkin. When he was done she thanked him and showed me what she’d written with a kind of proud, whimsical smile. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“Speak Japanese?”

“Write something on a napkin.”

She placed the napkin in her purse, and then the pen, and when our food arrived we ate in silence.

By the time we got back to our room it was late. Much as I had been hungry, I was even more exhausted, so much so that I spurned my wife’s advances when we got into bed. “I guess there’s a first time for everything,” she said, then gave me a kiss and went to sleep. I, too, tried to sleep but couldn’t. The day was still too much with me. For a while I just lay there, my feet and ankles hanging off the end of the bed, and listened to my wife making her sheep noise. She looked peaceful, content, like she was having a lovely dream. I picked up her arm and looked at her pit hair, then set it back down again. Then I rolled over and drew the curtains aside—the window was right there, inches from the side of the bed. The first thing I noticed was the sea, how serene it appeared in spite of the bombs going off in the distance, their flashes lighting up the sky. And then I saw a large bird—no, it was a pterodactyl, soaring in front of a volcano that shouldn’t have been there. The last thing I saw was some kind of ancient pillar sticking out of the water near the shore. Whether it was a Greek pillar or a Roman pillar I couldn’t say—I know about as much about classical pillars as I know about planes—but it definitely looked out of place to me. What was a Greek or Roman pillar doing in the water just off the coast of Japan? Finally, I let the curtains go and laid my head back on the pillow, and thought about my wife’s pithy saying, the one she’d said to me when I was worried about not having a pilot to fly the plane. “We’ll have to make the most of it,” I whispered into the darkness, right before my tongue swelled up, filling my entire mouth and preventing further speech.