The Anthills of Men
When the aircraft starts its descent, I think of Air France flight 447 that crashed in 2009, killing all 216 passengers and its crew.
It’s a knee-jerk reaction that I blame on my parents: My dad’s tendency to dramatically over-escalate (“I can’t find my phone — it was STOLEN”) and my mom’s — uh — fear of heights.
When the news broke, all stories reported the Air France aircraft had been lost in a thunderstorm with iced-over sensors, which, admittedly, is not a super promising situation. At the outset it looked as if Lady Fortuna had swung her mighty BanHammer and sent the aircraft into disarray, when in reality it was the young simpletons at the wheel who had somehow managed to worsen an already dire situation, with no help to be had from the captain’s last minute, post-coitus entrance (You read that right — he was an old-school dude).
While Fortuna plays dice with the universe, we play with half a deck, and the passengers are just sat there in the back with no idea of what’s going on until it’s well too late. And as for Air France flight 447 there was no happy ending in sight: Fortuna shrugged, inhaled deeply on her Marlboro and sent the panicking crew spiralling into the deep, purple sea below, never to be seen again. Mais qu’est-ce que se passe?
People were squeezing over in order to get by, threading their way through a dizzying blur of figures with expressionless faces. The air was heavy with background radiation and then there was the fatigue: A thick ooze sliding down my forehead. The morning had been unusually hot and humid, hovering around 25 degrees: One of those April days that foreshadow a brutal summer.
Airport security is usually pedestrian, but the guard checking boarding passes that day was a weird dude: Smiling like a labrador with his tongue hanging out. He barely looked at me but wandered off on a monologue on how happy he was for his job, annoying chirpy voice and all. The kind of happy person you want to bring to your backyard and pulverize with a sledgehammer.
An American capital-P Patriot saw his opportunity to pitch in: “… And you’re doing a great SERVICE”, he told the security guard. Brick-faced, khaki pants, eye sockets popped. Whenever an American says “service”, it echoes. Three women swooned.
Cut to the money shot, parental notice, terms and conditions may apply
“Yes”, the guard intoned, “A great service”. Then seriousness slowly morphed into a sly smile and outright finger guns and dabbing: “… but in exchange for money”. Wink wink.
A CompSci college kid in a dorky hoodie — sporting his acid rock band, Kernel Panic — had made the queue grind to a standstill. The intense colours and floating abstract shapes of his band logo jumped off with the visual punch of an advertising billboard: Bright red, orange and yellow against green and blue. Listening to a “Zen Oasis” meditation podcast he was desperately trying to find the one track that would grant him the inner peace to optimally colour-code all incoming e-mail. Amateur. I had the routine down to a science: Belt, wristwatch, computer, empty pockets — bish, bash, bosh — and here was the one guy who hadn’t understood it’s all a competition.
When the error dawned on him the queue snailed forward again, inch by inch until you saw it. Bulging from the floor, a conveyor belt ran up towards the machine that decided which of your toiletries to render unto Caesar, that is, the imperial high court of the Transportation Security Administration. Stacks of plastic trays, steely boxes, red-yellow-green diodes furiously blinking left and right, and the looks of apathy: “You are not wanted”
At the very end of the conveyor belt stood the archetypical Parisian boy who had been born as a fifty-something-year-old partner in contract law. A short fellow, but burly and with a neck wider than his head. He was primed with testosterone and had the air of a man who could be… a top insurance salesman. And now a random spot check had soured his day — could they not see he was late? And important? And also busy? “This isn’t right”, he sputtered. C’est pas vrai! The displays of plumage, resistance calcifying all opinions, he was backed in a corner and the response was sulky teenage nihilism, arms-crossed, whatever man. Do your thing.
Outside the gate was the usual grim riot of bithnith people with their grey and navy suits, brown shoes, brown leather bags, glassy eyes, e.coli-ridden smartphones glued to their temples. People say capitalism is evil, but forget it’s also sad: Take the twenty-something-year-olds — overbite, braces, “let’s align on next steps” — high on frequent flier miles and thinking they’re making a difference:
“We are happy to partner with you on this …”
“… understand your value proposition”
“Starting to centre around these opportunities”
“… without an acquisition path to accelerate”
“Get our feet wet”
Chicks in the bar fawn over them: “He is no astronaut, but he sure knows how to handle a spreadsheet” [wink-emoji].
With the bithnith people, you’re never wrong, just “off-base”. Not cost-cutting, but right-sizing. Opinions are aligned (like planets), directions are course-corrected (like boats), gears are shifted (like, uh, gears). Something happening down in marketing? Better get your antennae out.
These are the people who wolf down protein bar lunches while claiming to be pathionate with their mid-level-management Supply Chain position in your everyday evil retailer. A misuse of language, see also: Purpose, value, sustainable, customer-centric demand. It’s not passion if you rely on alarm clocks snoozed ad nauseam, but get a tattoo with the company values if you’re so inclined. Just remember that existence is pain and stoned teenage summers with Machu Picchu Instagram pictures won’t redeem you.
Instead we sing songs of praise to Mammon and Moloch, while the heavens weep sun onto the anthills of men who connect to shoddy airplane WiFi, God forbid they miss a beat of what’s happening a million miles below. The men who do mindfulness meditation to more efficiently do their expense reporting and whose favourite colour is the aptly named “default dark grey”.
“Greg, I completely echo that. But what can I say, I think we’re already half-pregnant at this point heh heh heh”
You know who I’m talking about.
This is the sorry lot I count myself among and the irony is not lost at all (so allow me a moment to centre myself). We rarely take the outside-in view on ourselves and I’m no exception. It’s easy to think of yourself as the protagonist: The gladiator in the arena, in that amphitheatre, sandwiched somewhere in the Great Chain of Being, perched atop a tower of turtles stretching all the way to the bottom of the universe.
If you’re thinking “weird flex, but ok”, take a moment to check yourself, because anyone with an iota of a man’s fragile ego will know the feeling when the sun hits just right, #nofilter, and this sort of nonsense bubbles up from the cerebellum.
And yet I am mindful that every hero’s tale involves hardships. Fortuna has a way of making this painfully clear to me. Almost always I find myself in the middle seat of cattle class at the very back end of the plane, where the lights flicker and the stewardesses nervously swan by. There are no cool kids, rockstars, or Big Swinging Dicks after row 20.
Standing at the very back, as I was, you could see row upon row of caffeine-deprived passengers converging like railway lines at the counter somewhere in the horizon. The “30B” on my boarding pass confirmed the trip would, once again, disappoint me at a deeply fundamental level.
Ugh, this is so sad. Alexa, play Despacito
The only countermeasure left was to spike my coffee with the museum dose of acid I was saving for the weekend, but hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.
***
He was built like an oil burner, the man on my left, a heavyset middle-aged man who clocked in well above 300 pounds. He had thick black hair slicked around an enormous skull. I had found a moment of peace in the middle seat while the morning’s triple espresso made its way through the blood-brain barrier, but in the next instant his heavy fleshy odor metastasized into pungent, dank rot: Mein Gott, this dude was septic. Tubes of yellow bile squeezed out of every pore, the stench cut straight through the stomach. Every shuffle in his seat opened his legs and his groin where the ball sac had been firmly plastered to his thighs. Now free and exposed to oxygen, the yeast in his skin folds fermented the groin sweat and the day-old piss into a toxic broth that slowly released fumes — great fluffy fumes — in a cascade of waves.
The woman to my right, a behemoth of a similar ilk, masked the stench of sewage with a heavy perfume defined by strong notes of synthetic juniper and pine. Her skin looked like dried oil paint, dragged on already painted oil, layer on layer on layer. Even before she said a word, she had saturated the air with fine particles of skin. Her mountainous body took on a distorted form, almost dehumanised. I had to crane my next to see the top of her, a huge sculpture rising almost twenty-feet high. Even if she ended at her waist, I’d feel dwarfed.
“Hewaya” (How are you?), she asked. She spoke with a cured voice, a deep rumbling timbre: She was from Alabama, the husband died, re-married, a brother in prison (Jesus Christ, sweetheart, let’s not stand on ceremony … Tell me how you really feel). Her words were just gushing out in torrents, all the marvellous things about her husband, his tragic death, and I was beginning to dislike the, conversation, on, every, single, level.
(In case you think I’m being unnecessarily harsh, let’s take stock of what’s happening: Fortuna has wedged me between two butter golems and you expect me to reach for a gold star in ethics? No bueno.)
The aircraft had only begun to inch out the gate, inch round the corner, inching up as far as the runway, where it came to a complete stop.“Juh hear that?”, she said with an accent full of tortured vowels. A clank from the outside, perchance, as if something had fallen off. Nothing to worry about, really. Airplanes make weird noises all the time.
“Mmmm,” I said. The sort of mmm you say that really means: “I just fundamentally don’t care.” (Sorry, I never really boasted a high social wattage.) As the aircraft started moving, it moved: Jumping to warp speed, the ceiling pressing down, the fuselage crumbling around the edges, my heart flailing against the chest wall.
I want to align us on some starting points
The oil burner coughed so you could hear the slime in his throat vibrate, followed by the stank of vomit and stomach acid and rot. Small membraneous strings in the wall of his throat resonated with a timbre for each cough — HAWK, HAWK, HAWK — and released a gas that seeped out through his teeth. I had smelt rot before, but never this viscerally — this was pungent in the extreme and it became clear something was seriously wrong with his respiratory system. He looked at me and smiled weakly, but only for a moment.
***
The view from the top of the world is undeniably magnificent: Skyscrapers propping up clouds, a shimmering purple dome covering the city, glowing as if inflamed by a fever. The soothing voice of the captain over the intercom followed shortly: “‘Morning everyone, we have reached our cruising altitude at 38,000 feet. Outside the temperature is -57 degrees, our current speed is 490 miles per hour, and death waits for no man”
The stewardess rolled by heaving at boxy little cart. Her face was heating up into a great field of monochromatic red: Not the glossy red of a sports car, not as bright as that. Not the dark liquid red of blood either. A deep, saturated red. She served coffee, the New Yorker CAW-fee, to a landscape of pale faces ready for a little sharpie high: Loaded with milk powder and sugar until it was just heavy, yellow bile and shot up like black tar heroin.
The behemoth had ordered a sandwich with green ham (almost as if it were grown in space). Meanwhile, a boy in the front had been peering through seats until the tip of his nose was almost pushed completely through the gap, his soft skull giving way for the pressure showing a face with islands of grey paint and a screaming red forehead: Plain surrealism at its most violent.
The aircraft jolted and one of the stewardesses calming voice explained over the intercom: Jus a bit uh turbulence. At that very moment, in the very middle seat experience I so hated, I felt that familiar default mode reaction bubble up: Primal, deep-seated, please-hold-my-hand fear. On perd le contrôle de l’avion, là!
Stop me if you’ve seen this before — the fear of death and the existential crises that follow — if you’ve read about it in the in-flight magazines. The angst we all know (“Will I be remembered? Is it all a simulation?”), the cartoonish screams into the abyss. I mean, the absurd theme on the “meaning of life” may warrant some investigation, but let’s be honest: It probably couldn’t carry its own franchise
“Uhm, ackchyually”, chirps the local Dungeon & Dragons troll, “think about the statistics”. Every white man becomes a certified statistician at cruising altitude — I see now how annoying we can be. “More people die from car crashes, didyaknowthat??”, they say. Nothing more appetising than getting highly valued input from a mansplaining cunt with all the charisma of a rhesus monkey in its final hour, but ok — humour me, bozo!
And statistics? Never mind the statistics. It was never about the “numbers”. It’s not about safety. That’s a different conversation. It’s — spoiler alert — about autonomy.
But hey, the system is the solution, results may vary, check with your doctor.
At some point (when the acid wears off) you’re bound to come up against the frightening reality: You are strapped into a chair in a kerosene-powered piece of carbon fibre surfing the jet stream, alright. A car ride at least affords you a role in the movie of life: Turn the wheel, pump the brakes — there is something you could do. And if you’re shit outta luck, your mother gets an open casket funeral. In a plane crash, your body is atomized and spread across the French Alps. That is a difference in both degree and in kind.
Press the green play button for more insight into surrealism
The deep irony is that this is where humanity has always longed to be: To float like giants in the sky, looking down at miniature roads lined with toy houses. It was the dream of DaVinci, the majestic eagle, the simple freedom of superheroes — and who in their right mind would trade the birds-eye view for the worm’s? Don’t we all understand why Icarus instinctively flew towards the sun like a moth into the neighbour’s porch light? Or why Alex Honnold took on the El Capitan free solo? (Well, maybe not)
To lift into the air, to glide freely, in a place unconstrained by its past. That serene moment where you roll down the window to appreciate the winter light that showers icy fields of grain in a heavenly auburn glow.
Maybe a better analogy is the story of Phaeton, the Greek emo teenager who got permabanned by Zeus for driving his dad’s SUV off a cliff, and foretold a super-duper monumental lesson for us all: “Take the train next time”
If Zeus strikes down the chariot with bolts of lightning, will the trolls still scream about “the numbers” as they hurl towards terra incognita? What keeps me up at night is the tail risk that you cannot fortify against. Where you are not the master of your fate, but a premium economy passenger on a trip to the lands of the undying
Let’s ask the astrology people: Mercury in retrograde, Scorpio rising, what’s my end-game?
Airplanes have instruments to help avoid this. They have built-in redundancy: A disabled plane can glide home to safety. But if you’re on open waters like Air France Flight 447 was and if your co-pilot has the mental fortitude of a 4-year old on amphetamine you will glide to certain death with all the aerodynamic grace of a boulder.
The fear really runs much deeper: That man, in his hubris, flew too close to the sun, to the wrath of the Cosmic Jester. We go through swings and roundabouts, but forget the house always wins.
***
A sinking feeling was soon followed by more turbulence, the pounding of the eardrum, cabin pressure dropping, dropping, dropping. Non, non, non… Ne remonte pas… non, non. It’s funny how you walk into an aircraft and suddenly all bets are off: A museum of modern art where all the classics have been replaced by the esoteric and abstract and grotesque.
Immobilised in my seat, I looked around at stoned faces, beady eyes, supersized citizens chomping down sickly green ham sandwiches. It’s the witching hour and no one seemed to care. If you’re not following along, this may seem completely insane (it is). But there are no possible sacrifices to Moloch when you’ve already shown your hand. Putain, on va taper… C’est pas vrai!
And somewhere down on Earth a jock in acid-wash jeans lights a blunt and says: “Hey babe, what if it’s just turtles all the way down?”