On a Wing and a... Coffee?

Shaun was ecstatic about his vacation. He hadn’t taken a real vacation in nearly a decade. There was always work to be done around the house, or a sick family member, or a funeral, or some other important activity that kept him close to home instead of taking a trip to someplace new. This year, he put in his vacation request at work three months prior to the date, and it was immediately approved. He made his hotel and flight reservations the same day his boss approved the request. And for the past three months he had been dropping hints and reminders to everyone who knew him that he would be out of the country for two weeks, in hopes that nobody would try to rope him into anything “important” this time. 

Unfortunately, his wife didn’t have any vacation time saved because her job was still new. So he was traveling alone this time, which meant he had to sit next to a stranger on the plane – in this case it was a man big enough to cover nearly two seats all on his own. But at least Shaun was able to reserve the window seat for himself. And for the past hour he’d been staring out the window, watching the clouds pass by beneath the aircraft, trying to find the ones that looked like dragons or funny cartoon characters. Currently he was musing about how one cloud in particular bore a strong resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. It had the beard, the big beaked nose, and the stovepipe hat. Through occasional holes in the cloud cover, all he could see was an expanse of blue, darker than the blue above the clouds. He had a book stowed for if/when he got bored of looking at clouds. The gentleman in the seat beside him was also reading; Shaun had spied the cover of the book about half an hour ago, and immediately lost interest upon seeing that it was one of those “how to invest your money” self-help books. Shaun preferred books that were an escape from reality. Science fiction, fantasy adventure, even some historical fiction. He got enough of that “serious financial business” stuff at work, he certainly wasn’t interested in reading it while he was on vacation.  Fun and adventure awaited on all fronts, even though he would need to check in with his wife every night before he went to bed.

After a few more minutes of cloud-gazing, Shaun started to tire of finding fluffy shapes outside. He reached into the pocket on the back of the seat in front of him to pull out the novel he brought for the flight. It was one he hadn’t actually read before, and thus far he was only a few chapters in. He had also brought a second book, one he had read before, since the flight was seven hours and then there would be a layover of a few more hours in Heathrow before the connecting flight… after thinking about it for a moment he pulled that one out, too. He turned to his neighbor, extending a hand. “Hi, I’m Shaun, from Boston,” he introduced himself. 

“Hi Shaun, I’m Jim,” the bigger man replied, and they shook hands briefly. He had quite an accent. “I’m from Manchester, so I’m actually flying home after a few work meetings in Boston.” 

“Oh, really? What kind of work do you do?” Shaun asked.

“I’m in computers. My company licenses software from other companies, so we can then mix and match the bits we want in a modular fashion, resulting in a larger and more cohesive software platform.”

“Oh, wow,” Shaun said. “I’m a financial analyst for an insurance company.” He paused for a moment before continuing. “I can’t help but notice your choice of reading material there…”

Jim chuckled. “This is just a random book I picked up from the airport’s gift shop, something to pass the time. Honestly it’s pretty dry stuff, and a lot of the advice the author gives requires a huge amount of startup capital. Your average investor wouldn’t have the money to put most of these ideas into practice.”

Shaun raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, sounds like a lot of my boss’s ideas. That’s why they hire guys like me, to keep idiots like him grounded in reality. If you want to try something a little more fun, I can let you borrow this one until we land.” He offered the book he had read before: a thrilling tale of swashbuckling pirates and corrupt naval officers.  

Jim took the book and looked it over. The cover art portrayed a half-naked woman on the deck of a ship, her hair flowing wildly in the wind and her dress strategically torn, in the arms of a man with an eyepatch and a saber. “Is she the damsel in distress, or does she get killed in the first couple of chapters?” He laughed. “Thanks. Anything is better than that other drivel.” 

As Jim opened the swashbuckling adventure book and started to read, Shaun started thumbing through his own book trying to find the page he was previously on. For some reason, he didn’t believe in bookmarks. He was reading “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card. He’d seen the movie, and the book had been on his shelf for quite some time but he just hadn’t had time to do much reading for pleasure since he was put in charge of a whole team of analysts at work. His opinion thus far was that the book was actually better than the movie, but it also involved a lot of political machinations that he didn’t care for, which were left out of the movie. As he started getting into the book, his subconscious mind began to imagine that the plane’s engines were actually the HVAC system on the orbital station where Ender Wiggin and his friends were training.

Some time later, after the stewardesses had made a couple of passes with the snack and drink carts, there was an audible “thump” against the aircraft. Jim looked up from his book and jokingly said “Did we run over a deer?” 

Shaun replied in kind, “Maybe it was a speed bump?”  But when he looked out the window he was quite sure that it was not a speed bump or a deer… and he found that assumption was correct. From where they were sitting, Shaun could see about half of the left wing. And now there was something there that hadn’t been there the last time Shaun looked out the window. It was a man, sitting with his legs dangling off the trailing edge of the wing. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, then gently smacked his cheeks, to make sure he was actually awake. And the man was still there. So Shaun poked Jim in the arm and said “Hey, Jim, do you see that man out there, or am I going insane?” 

“You’re going insane,” Jim immediately replied, because they were 30,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean and still thousands of miles from any shore… so how could there be a man out there. But just to humor Shaun he leaned over him to look out the window. And there was, in fact, a man seated on the wing. “On second thought, Shaun, I think we’re both going insane. Because I see him, too. What the hell is he doing out there?” And then he slid back into his own seat. 

Shaun took a closer look through the window. “It looks like he’s… having coffee.” The man was using his body to block the wind, and in his hand was a “Dunkin” coffee cup. He had short brown hair and big hands, and was wearing khaki cargo pants and a maroon long-sleeved shirt with tan work boots. If he hadn’t been sitting on the wing of a jumbo jet on a trans-Atlantic flight, he would have just looked like some random guy. Shaun reached up and hit the call button for the stewardess. He hit it several times. When she arrived, he told her she needed to look out at the left wing, but he didn’t say why because he knew how crazy it would sound. The stewardess walked up to the emergency exit door, which didn’t have a row of seats in front of it, and looked through the little window. She gasped, eyes wide. And then she made a beeline for the cockpit. Shaun turned to Jim. “Apparently, she’s insane, too.” 

A minute later, the stewardess came back out of the cockpit, with one of the pilots trailing behind her. She reached the emergency exit door overlooking the left wing and pointed. The pilot pressed his face up to the glass for a moment, then stepped back, removing his hat and running a hand through his hair. He looked out the window again… then stepped back and just shrugged before returning to the cockpit without saying a word. There was no announcement made. Even though several other passengers on the left side of the plane were now curious and started looking out the window and talking amongst themselves about the fact that there was a man sitting on the wing, it seemed as if nothing had really changed for the crew and passengers. So Shaun and Jim just went back to their reading. 

As they were coming up on final approach over London, Shaun put his books away and looked out the window again. He was just in time to see the man on the wing stand up and jump off the wing. The strange thing was he didn’t fall after he jumped; he floated alongside, keeping pace with the plane for a couple of minutes before he finally finished his last sip of coffee (certainly cold and stale by now) and sped off UPWARDS and over the plane. Then everyone on the right side of the plane who happened to be looking out the window gasped as he flew into view on that side. 

After they landed, the flight attendants went through the regular rigamarole with luggage and de-boarding. But the pilots never made any sort of announcement about the man on the wing. Shaun stopped at the desk by the gate and asked one of the attendants there about him, only to be told “No comment, sir.” After he retrieved his luggage, he even asked at the customer service desk. The lady there just stared at him as if he had two heads, so he left. 

As he was waiting in line for his rental car, he noticed another customer picking up a car on the curb outside as the valet brought it around. He had short brown hair and big hands, and was wearing khaki cargo pants and a maroon long-sleeved shirt with tan work boots. “SON OF A BITCH!” Shaun exclaimed, as the man got into his car and drove away. The other six customers in line turned to look at him, as if he had just shouted an obscenity in a public space - because that is exactly what he had done. “Sorry,” he said, smiling nervously, “Apparently I’m slightly insane today.”

The balding man in front of him turned back to face the front of the line, rolling his eyes in disgust. “Hmph! Americans!”