Exit Row

"They sat me next to the emergency exit and asked whether I was willing and able to help. Nobody had asked me anything that easy in days."

The airbridge was freezing, and it smelled of jet fuel and rubber, and it flexed a little underfoot as I walked up it, which it always does, and which I have never much cared for.

There was a woman standing at the aircraft door with her hands folded in front of her, saying good morning to every single person who came through it, individually, in exactly the same tone every time, and getting a reply from perhaps one in four of them. She said good morning to me, and I said good morning back, and it came out of my mouth almost entirely normally—and I was so astonished by that, by the discovery that the ordinary machinery was still in there and still working, that a man could sit on a bench in a departure lounge weeping over his own shoelaces and then, a very short while afterwards, produce a serviceable good morning for a stranger, that I did not go and find my seat at all. I stood in the galley with my bag on my shoulder, blocking the way, until a woman with a suitcase had to say excuse me to me twice.

The cabin smelled of coffee and of that particular chemical sweetness they use on the seats, and it was cold in there, and the overhead bins were standing open all the way down the length of it with people reaching up into them with their arms above their heads. A man in a hi-vis vest was walking backwards up the aisle looking at the floor. Somebody's toddler was already crying somewhere near the back and showed every sign of being prepared to go on with it for some time. And not one particle of any of it had the slightest thing to do with me.

My boarding pass said 14C. I found it, and I sat down in it, and I had my seatbelt half done up before I understood where I was.

Then I turned my head to the right, and there was a door.

An exit row. Of course it was an exit row. I had booked that flight in a state of blind panic at my own desk with a requirements document open in the window behind the browser, and I had not chosen a seat, and I had declined—with a small flare of contempt that I can now recognise as the last piece of pride I had left—to pay an additional twelve dollars for the privilege of choosing one. And so the system had allocated me what the system allocates to men who leave it late, which is a row that nobody else wants, and a great deal of legroom, and a responsibility.

The door was about eighteen inches from my elbow. It had a red handle on it, and a diagram, and an instruction printed in white capitals which I read four times over without absorbing a single word of it.

And then the flight attendant crouched down in the aisle beside me.

"Morning. You're in an exit row, so I just need to run through a couple of things with you."

She was somewhere in her thirties and she had plainly done this ten thousand times before, and she said it kindly, and she looked at me while she said it, which was a great deal more attention than anybody had paid me in a fortnight and considerably more than I was in any condition to receive.

"That's fine," I said.

And she went through it. The handle, and which way it turned, and the weight of the door, which she said was significant and which I was not to underestimate. That I was not to attempt to operate it unless instructed to do so by a member of the crew. That in the event of an evacuation I would be expected to move quickly, and that I should take a moment to familiarise myself with the card in the seat pocket in front of me.

And then she said: "So can I just confirm that you're willing and able to assist in the event of an emergency?"

And I sat in seat 14C with a doorway to another world in my right trouser pocket, and I said, "Yes."

She smiled at me and said thank you and moved on to the man across the aisle, and I sat there with my ears going hot and my throat closing, because I had meant it. That is what did it. It was the plainest and the easiest and the most completely honest word I had said out loud to another human being since Seth Holder put an envelope into my hands in a laneway and walked away from me—and a woman in a scarf had crouched down in an aisle and asked me whether I would help, if it came to it, and I had said yes, and I had meant it without one particle of reservation anywhere in me. I could have wept about that too. I very nearly did.

"Sir? That'll need to go up."

She had come back. She was pointing at my backpack, which I had put down between my feet without thinking about it at all.

"It fits," I said.

"Sorry—exit row. Nothing under the seats. It's got to go in the overhead."

And I sat there and looked up at her, and there is a version of the next three seconds in which I did something extremely stupid, and it was considerably closer than I have ever admitted to anybody since.

Because what was in that bag was three doorways into another world. What was in that bag was the only thing left anywhere in my life that was carrying any weight at all. And this perfectly reasonable woman, correctly, in accordance with the aviation regulations of this country—regulations which I could have explained to her, and which I would have defended in a meeting without a moment's hesitation, and which existed for reasons I entirely endorsed—was asking me to put it above my head and behind my shoulder and take my hands off it.

"It'd be easier if I—"

"There's nowhere for it, love. Exit row. Regs."

And there was a queue behind her now, four or five people standing in the aisle with their coats over their arms, waiting for me to stop being a problem in their morning.

So I stood up and I went to put my bag into the locker directly above my seat, and the locker directly above my seat was full—a hard-shell case, and somebody's coat, and a duty-free bag with a bottle in it—and so I had to walk two rows back down the aisle, against the flow of people still coming forward, and lift it up and slide it into a bin above row twelve, in behind a rucksack with a Bunnings sticker on the flap of it, and close the locker door on it, and come back to my seat, and sit down, and do up my belt.

And when I had done all of that and turned my head, I could not see it.

I could see the underside of an overhead locker. That was the extent of it. A long grey plastic panel with a line of seat numbers printed along the edge—and somewhere behind that panel, in the dark, two rows back and above my left shoulder, sitting on top of a stranger's rucksack inside a metal box that any one of two hundred people on that aeroplane could open, were three objects capable of taking a hole out of the wall of the world.

I put my hand into my right trouser pocket and closed it round the fourth one.

It was still cold. It had gone cold in the X-ray machine and it had not warmed up again, and I sat in an exit row holding on to a cold thing through the fabric of my trousers and looking at the underside of a luggage bin, and understood that this was going to be the entire content of the next hour of my life.

They did the safety demonstration and I watched every second of it.

I always do. It is one of about four things I do that people find faintly amusing about me, along with reading the terms and conditions and knowing where the stopcock is in a flat I have rented for a fortnight, and I have never once been able to see the joke in any of it. Every procedure that exists anywhere in the world exists because something went wrong at some point, and somebody sat down afterwards and worked out what ought to have happened instead, and wrote it down so that the next person would not have to find out the hard way. That is the entire content of my trade. I have spent my whole working life turning what one person knows into something a stranger can follow, and I have never in my life sat on an aeroplane and not looked at the woman doing the demonstration, and I do not expect that I ever will.

So I looked at her. The belt, and how it fastened, and how it released. The mask, which would drop automatically, and which I was to pull towards me and fit over my nose and mouth and breathe normally through, and I was to fit my own before assisting others. The whistle and the little light on the lifejacket. The floor-level lighting that would lead me to the exits, which were, she said, pointing without looking, in eight locations—and one of those eight was eighteen inches from my elbow with a red handle on it.

And it steadied me. It genuinely, measurably steadied me, and I was not expecting that. It was the first thing that had happened to me in days that went exactly the way it was supposed to go, and a woman in a scarf stood up in an aisle and told two hundred strangers what to do if the worst came to the worst, calmly, and in order, and without leaving anything out—and I sat in an exit row and let her do it, and something in my chest came down about half an inch and stayed down.

Then they pushed us back, and the engines came up, and we went out to the end of the runway and stopped, and sat there for a moment with the whole aeroplane shaking very gently around us.

And then they let it go.

I had not expected the force of it. I have flown a great many times, and I have always rather enjoyed a take-off in a mild and unexamined way, and it has never once done to me what it did to me that morning. The whole thing leaned into it, and I went back into my seat, and the tarmac began to go past the window faster and then very much faster, and it was enormous, and it was brutal, and it was entirely and completely indifferent to me—and somewhere about halfway down that runway I discovered that I had tears in my eyes again and could not have told anybody why.

Except that it was real. That is the only account of it I have ever been able to give. Something in the order of twenty tonnes of metal was being thrown down a strip of concrete by a process I could have explained to a child, and it was working, and it was going to go on working, and not one part of the physics of it cared in the slightest about anything that had happened to me in Meeting Room 4B. The wing was going to make lift. The lift was going to exceed the weight. And the thing was going to fly—whether or not there was another world underneath it all, and whether or not a parcel had ever been lodged, and whether or not my own brother remembered a conversation I had bled for—and I sat with my head back against the rest and my hands flat on my thighs and let it happen to me, and I do not think I have ever been more grateful for anything.

We came off the ground, and the nose came up, and Hobart went away underneath us.

I had the window. I had not chosen it and I did not want it and I looked out of it anyway, because I have never once been on an aeroplane and not looked out of the window either.

The airport went past, and then the river, and then all of it laid out and going smaller and smaller: the Derwent, and the bridge, and the eastern shore, and that great flat sheet of grey water I had not been able to make myself look at from the causeway. And the city itself. My city, the one I had walked about in for a decade, reduced to a smudge of grey and orange along the western bank with the mountain sitting over the top of it—and Battery Point in there somewhere, and my own flat in there somewhere, and a plastic bag in the bottom of my own wardrobe with a shirt folded up inside it that had another planet ground into the weave.

And a laneway. Somewhere down there, underneath all of that, was a laneway with a café halfway along it and a handful of metal tables out on the cobbles, and one of those tables was the one I had been sitting at when a man came up behind me and told me not to move.

Seth was in that city, or Seth was not in that city.

That was the entire sum of everything I knew about the matter. And it was going away underneath me at three hundred knots.

And I sat there in an exit row with my forehead nearly touching the perspex, and it arrived—unhelpfully, and completely without warning, and with absolutely nothing left in the world to distract me from it—that I had not looked for him.

I had not looked for him. Not once. I had spent every waking hour of the last three days on a parcel. I had refreshed a tracking page so many times that the browser had learned the address off two keystrokes. I had rung Australia Post and been put on hold and been passed to a supervisor. I had stood in a queue at the GPO and read a laminated sign about lithium batteries twice over. I had bought an aeroplane ticket without any idea what I intended to do when I got off the aeroplane, and I had lain awake most of the night working out how to get three objects past an X-ray machine, and I had not spent one single hour of any of it trying to find Seth Holder.

Because I had sat at my own kitchen table in the dark and established that he could not be found. No telephone number. No address. No photograph anywhere on the internet. No employment history worth the name and a PO box in Moonah. I had gone through every avenue that was open to me, one at a time, methodically, and I had established to my own entire satisfaction that every single one of them was closed—and then I had done exactly what I have been trained to do, and what I would have done with any item on any project in any workshop I have ever run in my life.

I had marked it as blocked. And I had moved on to the next item.

And now I was leaving. And if he came back—if he walked into Cornerstone and sat down at that table, or turned up at my desk, or put another yellow square of paper on the top of my monitor—I would not be there.

The window went white. We had gone up into the cloud, and there was no city underneath us any more, and I sat back in my seat.

There is nothing whatever to do on an aeroplane. I had never properly appreciated that before.

I had flown for work perhaps thirty times over the years and I had always had something with me. A laptop. A document to mark up. A stakeholder pack to read on the way. A book I had been meaning to get to for eighteen months and would not get to on that flight either. And I sat in seat 14C above the cloud with a phone in flight mode and a backpack two rows behind me and absolutely nothing at all in my hands, and I discovered that an hour is a very long time indeed.

There was no tracking to check, because there was no longer anything to track.

There was nothing on my phone, and nothing coming to it, and no signal in any case with which to bring me anything.

And there was nobody to talk to. The man across the aisle had gone to sleep before the wheels were off the ground, with his head right back and his mouth open. The woman in the window seat of my own row—and I had not registered that she existed until that precise moment, which is some measure of the state I was in—had a paperback out and was reading it with her knees up against the seat in front of her, and had made it entirely clear without saying one word to me that she was not available for conversation.

And I could not see my bag.

I turned round to look at that locker at some point early on, and there was nothing to see, because it was a closed locker with a number on it. And then I turned round and looked at it again a few minutes later. And then I turned round and looked at it a third time, and a woman in an aisle seat two rows back caught me doing it, and I watched her face change while she looked at me, and then she went back to her magazine—and I turned round and faced the front and did not do it again for a long while, because she had seen exactly what I was, and whatever conclusion she had drawn about me from it was very probably a good deal closer to the truth than anything I could have offered her by way of explanation.

So I sat with my hands in my lap and looked at the seat back in front of me, and I made myself think about it properly, because it was the first uninterrupted hour I had been given since Seth walked away from that table and left me holding an envelope.

The Portal Key was in my pocket. It was, so far as I understood the thing at all—which was hardly at all—a doorway. You point it at a wall. You press it. The wall stops being a wall.

And I was at thirty thousand feet.

What, precisely, was on the other side of the wall of a Boeing?

Nothing. Air. Three hundred knots of it at fifty degrees below, and a pressure differential that would take the fuselage to pieces in about a second and a half, and that was not what was frightening me, because I had no intention whatever of pressing the thing and never had. What was frightening me, sitting there with my hands in my lap, was that I did not know. I did not know whether it would open onto the air outside that aeroplane, or onto the dust of Saint Phillis, or onto nothing at all. And I turned that question over for a while and got precisely nowhere with it, because there was no way of establishing the answer that did not involve doing it.

And if it did open into Clivilius—

Would I arrive on the plain? Or would I arrive thirty thousand feet above the plain?

I put my hand over my mouth.

Because I did not know, and there was nobody on this earth I could ask, and the entire body of human knowledge available to me on the subject consisted of one man with a cut on his jaw who had come off the telephone network, and one letter I had read once in a cold meeting room and never read again, and a voice inside my own head that had said my name twice and had not offered to explain anything at all.

I have spent my working life being the man in the room who puts his hand up and says we don't actually know that. It is what I am for. I sit in workshops with a marker in my hand and I say that the assumption has not been tested, and people sigh at me, and somebody rolls their eyes, and then six months later, when the thing has fallen over in precisely the way I said it might, somebody buys me a beer and tells me I was right.

And I sat above Bass Strait with a device in my trousers whose behaviour inside a pressurised aircraft cabin was entirely unknown to me, and to every other living person on the planet—and the honest answer, the only defensible answer, the answer I would have given in any meeting in any building anywhere, was that I did not know, and that I could not find out, and that I was going to be making decisions in the dark for the rest of my life.

For eleven years I had stood in front of people and told them that an unknown could always be reduced. That somebody could go and look. That somebody could go and ask. That if a thing was tested the fog would get smaller.

There was nowhere to go, and there was nobody left to ask.

The trolley came about halfway.

"Tea, coffee, water?"

"Coffee, please," I said. And then, because she had already turned away from me and put her hand on the pot, and because something in my chest opened up quite suddenly and without asking my permission first: "Sorry—is there anything to eat?"

There was not, really. There was a small foil packet with two biscuits in it, of the kind they hand out, and she put it down on the tray table beside the coffee and said there you go, and I said thank you, and she said no worries and moved along.

And I ate them.

I ate both of those biscuits sitting in an exit row above the cloud, and they were dry and sweet and floury and entirely unremarkable in every way, and I ate the first one far too quickly and then made myself eat the second one slowly. And when they were both gone I turned the empty packet over and read the ingredients on the back of it, twice, from top to bottom, and then I sat with my hand shaking very slightly round a paper cup of coffee.

Because I had wanted them. That is what got me. I had actually wanted them, in my mouth and in my stomach, and the body that had gone silent on me somewhere between a plate of cold toast and a taxi in the dark had put its hand up and asked me for something, and I had given it what it asked for, and it had taken it.

I drank the coffee. It was hot and it was bad and I drank every drop of it.

And then I sat with the empty cup in both hands and looked out of the window at the top of the cloud, which was white and endless and going past underneath us in long slow hills, absolutely silent, going on and on to the edge of everything—and it was so beautiful, and so enormous, and so entirely uninterested in what had been happening to me, that something in my chest gave way at last, quite quietly, and I put my head back against the seat and my eyes went and I let them go.

Nobody noticed. The woman beside me turned a page. The man across the aisle slept on with his mouth open. The engines went on making their noise, and the cabin went on being cold, and a bell went somewhere up in the galley and somebody answered it.

And underneath all of it, coming up through the middle of everything else once the crying had stopped, was a tiredness so enormous and so old that it did not feel like something happening to me at all, but rather like something I had been standing on top of for days without ever once looking down at it. I had not slept properly since before any of this began. Not once, not for a whole night. I had lain on top of my own covers in my clothes with a Portal Key in my fist, and sat on the edge of a bed looking into a tobacco tin, and listened to the floorboards of my own hallway giving up the last of the day's heat one at a time, and I had not slept.

And there was nothing left for me to do about any of it. That was the whole mercy of the thing. There was no drawer to open, and no screen to refresh, and no tin to look inside, and no bag to put my hand on—because the bag was in a locker two rows back that I was not permitted to open, and the phone was in flight mode in my pocket, and the entire world had been taken out of my hands for the duration.

I had a doorway to another world in my trousers, and one hour in which nothing whatever was required of me.

I turned my head and looked back at that locker one last time. Then I faced the front, and I shut my eyes.