A fragment from one of the intermediary chapters in my final manuscript for graduate school, a book/collection of essays entitled Last Seen:
When Alaska Airlines Flight 261 went down in the Pacific, just off the coast from Los Angeles, it spun and spun as if the whole plane were a propeller. Captain Ted Thompson told the passengers there was a flight control problem, nothing big, that the plane would land in LA in twenty minutes, and that everything would be smooth from then on. One minute and seventeen seconds later, everyone on board was dead.
Ah, here we go, Thompson said, as if the problem were only a loose screw that he could tighten back into place, as if he didn't feel the thrust downward. Ah, here we go. The last words on the cockpit voice recorder before Flight 261 disappeared from radar.
Sometimes I wonder if he knew has dying, that he was already half-dead just for knowing it. Here we go. Not to a place, but to a new state of matter. As he sped toward the water, Captain Ted Thompson transformed into light and sound, his voice the only trace left of his life.
I first read the cockpit transcript while sitting in LAX, just minutes before a flight home, and my first thought: Let me leave my luggage behind for the forensics team and swim from the wreckage to an empty stretch of beach no one knows. Let me move like a radio signal through the world, passing through buildings and bodies undetected, unseen, unfelt. Let me transit my signal so weakly, so far below radar that no one ever finds me. I tore that last line from the transcript, tucked it under my arm, and boarded an Alaska Airlines MD-80 jet, the same model that crashed just one year before.
Ah, here we go. Every day is like getting on that plane.
___
This fragment holds another clue to my current investigation: Why do I always write about missing people? Even when my essays explore other subjects or themes, missing people begin to populate the pages - literally haunting my work.
So back I go to Flight 261. I have all the transcripts, and I will study them intensely. Process, process, process.
You can find another fragment from the final manuscript Last Seen, in this old post at evidentiary:alchemy.