a message in a bottle

a message in a bottle

‘What! You dropped down from the sky?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, modestly.
‘Oh! That is funny!’
– The Little Prince, Antoine de St Exupéry

The sky is a volume of infinite mercy. I place my faith in its vast height, its depth, its world spanning breadth. The world’s breath! If I were an icon maker then, given the wherewithal, I’d fashion some version of it for my devotions. In my present circumstances this is quite unnecessary. Of course I could as easily despise the void above me for having brought me to my present pass. But that would be peevishness. Without an optimistic view of things I’d have gone under long ago. Devout or iconoclast, the sky hangs over me, it is all of my horizon. It’s everywhere I look except for when I look at myself and even then it’s there if I see beyond as I can’t help but do. So you see it’s different for me than it is for a city dweller, which is what I am or was or…

Let me explain. This is a survivor’s tale, the story of someone saved. What saved me was – and here you’ll understand the nature of my devotions – what saved me was a piece of cloth, a vast quilt’s worth, a sky in itself you could say. It would be my icon I suppose but for the fact that the real thing is closer, but for the fact that time in its action of infinite wisdom has shredded the thing past use. This I admit is one of civilised time’s few measures here, the rate of rot or something made, something other than me. I suppose I could call my shreds together a relic. I have no icon but nevertheless I have a holy souvenir to show where I’ve been, how I came. I lack the mirror to gauge my own rate of rot, though I do get a glimpse, days when the waters are glassy.

What else is there of civilisation? A certain amount remains in my head. And that’s it for round here. That and what washes us. Detritus from which I mend my fortune. The pencil and paper were in my pocket. I preserved them falling, and later from the elements, when the quilt was still in service.

I could have put that quilt in the hold, but I have no faith in the holds of planes and I hate waiting around carousels for my things to arrive and once, on Continental, I had had all of my luggage soaked in fish water and got some pretty strange looks going home on the jetfoil with it. As to this particular piece of outsize carry-on, I knew I was going to be in a hurry at the other end, in L.A. That’s a joke from where I sit now of course. Although I did go on being in a hurry for a surprisingly long time. Look where it got me. The main thing though was the preciousness of the cargo. That’s why I wouldn’t let it go.

So I made my vast sack carry on. I tried to be inconspicuous with it. The overcoat I was wearing because I’d need it at the other end, that and the jumpers underneath – the gear I’d worn in order to avoid having a second bag – all that incongruous bulk made me far from inconspicuous. I was sweating. I probably looked like a terrorist coming aboard. The cabin crew gave me some strange looks climbing up the last steps from the tarmac and into the wreck to be. The sky marshals sneered but then one and the other dozed off again. They seemed like great ungainly bears. Where could they sit, I wondered. Even business class seats would barely contain them.

There’s a fortuity in awkward things, I now know. Blessed are those who feel mortification, something might just come in handy. Had I been asked – and I was prepared for this – I had the proud spiel about duty and honour and all that. And tolerance and the right to life options in the twenty first century. I wonder if bears can follow all that? I didn’t get to find out. Fortuity, fate, providence: there must have been a squadron of brave abstractions along with us that night.

Flying is a miracle, one too easily overlooked. It’s a risk to depend too much on miracles in life. The religious among us will of course say there’s not much choice in the matter, we only get to be here in God’s grace, which is the world’s most miraculous thing. There’s a little too much social control tucked under that particular rug for my liking. I get hay fever every time I take a peak. There’s the maleness of God to begin with, and still today.

The philosophers tell us that miracles are ongoing, the stuff of every instant, the breath of God which is the sine qua non of being. It’s hard to argue with that stuff unless you’re an existentialist or an accidentalist. As for me, I’d say my jury’s still out. In fact it’s been in continuous session for many moons now. I have time to work things through.

Miracles, unmiracles. Have a look at the map, a privilege I lack and you’ll see what I’m up against, or what’s around about me. I admit you’ll probably need a very good map to have a fair guess at where I am. But I suppose there are maps which should show every mid-ocean rock in the world, every bit of the earth that stands up higher than high tide. Surely?

Mid-ocean, who knows? All I can say for a certainty is that I am one meal and one crossword and one nap of undisclosed duration vaguely east of Taipei… Maybe more than that. I’d had an extra drink and I’d been to the toilet once and it being an American plane there’d been all that guff on the wall about Authorities warning that smoking was a Federal offence and the FBI would be after you and I remember distinctly thinking to myself, prophetically as it seems now, ‘we’re not in Kansas anymore’. I went back to my seat and, instead of Toto, within a few minutes I was gripping that pack full of quilt, hanging onto it for dear life. I’d put it on the seat next to me, but that, with everything else, was gone. The bag was in my lap and I wasn’t letting go.

Where were we? Where am I? Guam rings a bell. That might be the closest place but I’ve never been there and I’ve never really been one to study maps just for the sake of it, memorising provinces to prove it can be done, so I can say with some confidence that I have absolutely no idea where I am. If you have such a map – one with all the little rocks still poking out at high tide – please take a look around Guam and further afield if necessary. If not I urge you to get one or make one or just come out and look for yourself. The views are stunning. The sky is so big and the stars are so bright you could reach up…

We must have been past Guam though because it was almost day. A fair way east of Guam I’d say. But I really don’t know. I have sometimes seen lights at night passing over the horizon. Of course I’ve seen planes but there’s been no ship come close enough to wave at.

A little background in case this is helpful. We’d left Macao about eight at night, taken off from Taipei again at eleven or maybe it was midnight, but it was still many hours till dawn. Dawn saw me floating on the cushion from what had been my seat, floating until I saw the only rock you can see from here. Just me and the seat and my ridiculous overcoat and my sodden jumpers and the life vest and the first AIDS quilt to come from China, bound to join its cousins in San Francisco, bound it appears never to make the distance.

When you fall you fall for a long time. You have time to think. Now you might devote that time to having your life flash before your eyes. That could in some cases be quite a show and see you nicely through to the curtain call. Still, I’m told you can do that in a split second. In my case I felt the action had to all be ahead of me. So I used the time to kill and the vast yards of cloth at my disposal and I put to use the rope which joined its four corners, the life vest to which I had tied all this while still in my seat mid-air. You’ll say the seat was mid-air anyway, nothing remarkable in that. But I was still buckled in when I had parted ways with the rest of the aircraft. Just me and the seat and the oxygen mask, the heavy coat I still luckily had on. It was colder than I can explain with words. The few parts of me that were showing were a shade of blue I’d never seen before.

There hadn’t been time to worry about removing sharp objects or getting into that big rubber slippery slide or following the fairy lights down the aisle to safety. But the mask had, on cue, fallen down in front of my face, and I had pressed forward into it, secured it behind. That was in another world, in the kind of past you associate with time as it was before a great cataclysm.

It was with the strange blue parts of my anatomy I worked to get the rope connected. It took ages during which I glimpsed in the corner of my eye the fall of other parts of the plane and other passenger anatomies. I seemed to be the only one still seated. Why was this happening?

How had it happened? All I’d heard in the plane’s last moments were what I’d call kung fu sounds and a few low groans from the Cro Magnon men just our side of the cockpit. After that I guess it was with their guns the cabin door had been shot away and well, I can’t know whether things went as planned or awry because I wasn’t in a position to see or hear anything. My guess is that a shot took out the windscreen and pilot or co-pilot or both exited that way. And then, for reasons which remain unknown to me, the plane just fell apart.

The bullets were deafening then the sound of air leaking was deafening and then everything just wasn’t there any more. I hadn’t had much time to think about the cause of the explosions but I had no doubt that we were descending rather too rapidly. Maybe planes just fall apart when that happens. If there were internet access on this rock I’d google and find out.

I was experiencing one of those things that couldn’t be happening and when I opened my eyes again…it was hard to open them… so incredibly cold and the force of the wind was keeping them shut… have you ever tried driving a car with no windscreen? Multiply the speed and the wind velocity and the cold by ten or a hundred, I don’t know and then maybe you’ll have the idea…

When I opened my eyes I could see it all. The sun was getting ready to rise and with my eyelids pinned back, even through the tears, I can say my view of the world has never been so wide before or since. There’s something about freefall, the body poised between life and death, the body in unstoppable motion. Countries and culture don’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter how you’ve got to this point. The funny thing is that in this moment of what you might think of as supreme transcendence, I’d never felt so human, so animal. I was a body falling, all body, just body. The mind was going along with all this.

When the last of my feeble knots was tied, the quilt ballooned up behind me, I was suddenly jerked upward and then it was as if time had ceased altogether. I could have written my memoirs on the way down from then. For a minute I wondered if one or both shoulders had been dislocated but, looking down at the dark expanse of ocean below, that fear quickly gave way to relief at the thought that I wasn’t going to die in the next minute, not unless there was a shark with its jaws ready open to catch me down there.

I suppose it was in quilt fall I’d really started pondering on that great beast I’d taken for granted till now. That cool headed thought train commenced up above you can probably place in this phase of existence. Or that’s where it started. The pterodactyl? Just frail tin really. Tin plus fossil fuel stirred up with miracle. You pay your fare and you just expect it all to go. Something like a miniature of the world economy. It’s not as if there’s anyone who understands how it all works. It all goes by miracles.

What happened in the un-miraculous moment? The moment which ended life for many and stood mine still till now? Probably among my many readers (ah, such is fame – it’s all or nothing!) are those who know the answer. I’m assuming you see that if these words have fallen into any hands that in the end they will probably reach the appropriate authorities (I don’t mean the people in Kansas who make the smoke detector threats) and I assume that the appropriate authorities may have in their possession the black box. You see, I’ve been thinking, with the bits and pieces at my disposal. They’re not much but all the time in the world seems to have washed up with me here.

The black box. It’s not me. But I guess there really is such a thing. Ah, had I only had hold of that black box, had I miraculously caught it falling, then I most likely would have been found. I wonder if it’s really black.

As it is, it’s likely I cast no light on a mystery long since solved, perhaps never a mystery at all, just a tragedy long forgotten save by those inconsolable mourners with whom the media are never concerned.

But where was I? Yes, a long time falling. Somewhere below the threshold of clouds not there. The sun’s rim over the world’s now. The brilliant dazzle of a windless sea. It was so dreamlike to begin with – the quilt fall – I felt almost certain I would wake in the end, that there would be hands to catch me… I didn’t see any black boxes (I don’t even know what one looks like) but I saw plenty of other stuff falling. The sky marshals for instance. One seemed to be crouching on a piece of the wing. It took me a while to work out what he was up to and then I realised that he was surfing or he fancied he was. he was riding that wing all the way down, like the crazed bombardier in Doctor Strangelove. At least it was only his own demise he was seeing to. I saw the other marshal too – the one who still had his gun – he was off in the distance firing at someone but I couldn’t see whom. The only other funny thing was something I heard, didn’t see. A mobile phone ringing. How could there be any coverage here?

I was like Dorothy Gale caught up in that whirlwind between Kansas and the wonderful colourful world of Oz, like Alice falling through that endless rabbit hole. But pretty soon I had to give up on the idea of witches or munchkins. No jaws open at sea level but there was debris to dodge and it’s a pretty decent thud when you arrive there with only a blanket having broken your fall. You go a long way under and, having never done this kind of thing before, you might not have as much air in your lungs as you’d like. The sea was pleasantly warm I remember. That could have been it. Once again. You know that’s the thing with near death experiences, they tend to come in battalions rather than ones and twos. Ask anyone who’s been in a war. You see there was time to think down there too.

I came up gasping, secured myself on a no longer smoking section of the passing slab of the plane’s hull. I made for the rock, the only rock I’d sighted in the last seconds of my descent. I paddled with hands first and then with stuff I found on the way. All kinds of stuff. Toilet seats are less than ideal. A section of overhead locker can be a little unwieldy. But a tray table broken off from the seat at just the right angle – now there is a paddle! Once I could manoeuvre, I began gathering things I thought might be useful. Thinking only of one night’s rest ahead, I gathered as many seat cushions as I could on the way. The scavenging has gone on since.

So I got here. I got to the rock. And then I waited. How has it been down here in the other lifetime since I fell? I’m sure you want to know. At first I thought I’d be something like that pilot in The Little Prince… a different kind of desert admittedly, but many of the same issues to deal with. After a week I suppose I had as much aeroplane gathered around me as he’d had. I didn’t have much hope of flying with a bit of wing and a few broken trays though.

Something mystical had to happen. It didn’t. You’d think there’d be some kind of spirit in a place as forlorn, as desolate. Friendly, malevolent, whatever. After just a day or two I’d have been happy to have had someone to argue with. God of the isle, wind spirit, something primeval from under the waves. No takers, there are no ghosts mid-ocean, which is most of the world when you think about it. Most of the world’s surface is not human space. When you’re stuck on one rock mid-ocean you’re rather aware of land’s world minority status. Perhaps that’s the greatest hope for the world’s ongoing survival. But one mustn’t moralise, especially not when there’s no one to benefit by the precepts imparted… but for you, my reader, my rescuer. I hope you’re getting busy with your preparations now. I hope you’re about to set off and make human, just for a moment, this desert of sea.

Yes, there were desperate moments but I wouldn’t be writing now if I’d succumbed to them. Mind you, lacking the conventional measures, I can’t be too sure I’m not mad. Or haven’t been at stages. Without company you wonder whether you might not be a ghost yourself. I’ve learned a lot about myself since I’ve been here. Am I immodest to claim that’s because I’m the most interesting thing here?

Time has been strange. You think you’d remember how many suns, but you don’t. Not without a serious effort. That’s why in movies they always have the long bearded prisoner scratching the numbers in the wall of his cell. The funny thing is that I only started counting the moons after my periods re-started. I suppose before then I had just assumed that rescue was imminent, that there was nothing to measure. Or that I was having a holiday from all that stuff. Not that gender means much. One is all animal here. But the ticking is deep inside of us humans. Days when the sea is perfectly still, windless days, you hear the heart and know yourself as humanity in this sector. And more: you are the mammal of the place, the permanent above sea more-than-crustacean, crustacean predator. This bodily status counts much more than sentience. You count when enough of the panic wears off for the boredom to get its claws into you. The difference between panic and boredom? How far is it from angst to ennui? When you start measuring you’ve already arrived.

But do you want to rescue a philosopher, one paradoxically claiming mere corporeal status? Of course you want to know the mundane details of how this body has slept, how I’ve weathered storms, what I’ve eaten, what I’ve drunk. I’d paid scant attention to Robinson Crusoe as a kid, I plan to see Castaway if they still have DVDs when I get. Bad luck to say that I guess, I’ll say…if I get back to the main land, any will do.

You want to know where I could find food and fresh water on the last rock in the world which, though head above high water, still lacks a housing estate. You want to know the survivor’s story. Of course you do. Was it salt biscuits from an ancient shipwreck? Are there pyramids just below the surface here, full of some pharaoh’s stash of choice honey? Have I simply been subsisting on airline food all this while, meals so tough they can’t go off? Or have I found what the trawlers have missed in all their centuries of looking – a place so thick with fish you just put your hand in and pull them out ready cooked from the tropical hotpot?

Yes, this might be a letter from a paradise lost. You don’t know, do you? And
I’m not telling. There isn’t the lead in my pencil for that. And I suppose anyway that you need an incentive. If you want to find out you’ll just have to come and see for yourself.
You want to know all about my rock. It’s shape, its size, its unknown declivities, potential strategic implications. It’s good you want to know these things. Let’s see if I can hypnotise you into looking. Without sufficient mystery you might not even come for me…You want to know, so come and find out…

Besides, what would I sell to the magazines, if my story were already told? I don’t suppose much attention will be paid to the owner of intellectual property stuck on a rock in the middle of the sea, and therefore lacking means of litigation.

The only further thing I’m prepared to give away at this point is that this bottle you have in your hand is the only one that – at the time of writing – has come my way. Oceans of styrofoam there’ve been, planks and oars, plenty of plastic. The internal walls of aeroplanes are very handy in making shelter. You’d be amazed at what finds its way here. Barnacled footwear of all shapes and sizes. At any given low tide my rock is ringed with plastic of all description. I’ve considered options for land reclamation. It’s worked for Macao and my need is so much greater. I’ve got a new collection of CD’s, I’ve got a hi-fi too. I’m just looking for the right power adaptor. Even condoms wash up. Credit cards. I’ve yet to find that book you’d choose for your desert island experience though. There’s been precious little to read here. I guess that – sans corked bottle – the written word eventually sinks. Where have all the bottles gone? My pantry back in Macao is full of them. Is, was. Doesn’t anyone lose bottles overboard anymore? But ocean travel is just romantic fantasy these days. Cork has not been plentiful but there’s been sufficient to stop one bottle.

And I’m stopping here now, already you know too much about my rock. My rock!? If only it were hotly disputed, the subject of a territorial dispute! Perhaps then navies would come here to claim it. But there must be no resources here. This has to be a strategic black hole.

I have a little more paper and what’s left of my pencil I’ll keep in case another bottle comes my way. Perhaps I’ve just been unlucky so far?

And look, before you get any bright ideas about replying to me by return bottle I’d have a statistician do the numbers on that one. Remember, I’m writing from nowhere to anywhere, the odds aren’t so good the other way round.

I should be serious now. Know you, I have spoken words over this bottle, that it was a long time in preparation for its voyage, that I have hurled it as my strength allowed and when and where I judged the currents best.

And so it is buoyed with scraps of love, it is a talisman against the inevitable. By incantation I have sent it. I wait for the seas to rise or for a next piece of sky to fall, I cast my words and prayers upon the waves.

I am sincerely yours.