Final Destination (published Nov07)

Turbulence. Every flyer’s hidden fear. Well, not exactly. The real fear flyers have is falling out of the sky and not being able to do anything about it. In other words, the fear of meeting one’s abrupt, untimely demise. On a recent trip to Costa Rica via Miami on holiday with friends, Deji and Afua are forced to confront their fear of flying head on, on a flight which may well be their final one....

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters depicted and real people or similarities between the events that transpire and real life events are purely coincidental…

Deji scrambled out of bed at the sound of his alarm. He had barely gotten two hours of sleep but he was very alert – he knew that he had a plane to catch. After aimlessly throwing clothes in and out of his suitcase, he called for a cab to pick him up and before long he was on his way to Dami’s house, where his friends were meeting up to make their way to the airport.
“Hi Dami, its Deji here.”
“Where are you? Don’t you realise that we need to be at Heathrow by 7am?”
“I know, I know. I’m already on my way. How about Afua and Samuel, are they ready?”
“Yes, don’t worry about them, just get your butt over here already.”
“Chill out okay, I’ll be there in 15 minutes”
“Don’t tell me to chill out, everyone is ready and our taxi will be here in 10 minutes! If you’re not here on time we will...”
‘That Deji guy can be real annoying sometimes,’ Dami thought, ’How dare he just hang up on me like that!’. She got over it very quickly and went back about her business of making sure everyone else was ready and everything was set.
As soon as Deji arrived, they hurled his luggage into their taxi and set off for the airport. On the way they recounted the events of the night before:
“Afua, G Factor was fantastic, you guys did a great job,” Samuel said.
“Yes,” Deji agreed, “your team did a good job, though I really think that Chidinma should have won!”
“Well, I think Wanda really deserved to win,” Dami interjected, “but I wish that guy had won, he was so hot!”
Afua was a leader in their single’s ministry at Christ’s Chapel. She had just successfully organised their first ever gospel talent show the previous evening. She used to be a well known glamour model on the London scene, so it caused quite a storm when she converted and decided to cut short her promising modelling career. She now worked for a charity dedicated to providing for needy children in Africa but it seemed like everything she touched in church turned to gold. Many a guy had come to church because of her and ended up finding Christ instead! Most of these guys decided to move on when she started dating Deji a few months back.
They arrived at the airport soon enough. It was while they were at the gate waiting to board the plane that Afua raised her fears about flying.
“Guys, can we say a short prayer before we board the plane? I haven’t been on a plane in four years and I’m a bit nervous about it...”
“Okay,” Deji said reluctantly. He felt that it wasn’t the time to start voicing fears about flying. “Do you want to lead us in prayer?”
“Fine, can we join hands? Lord our heavenly Father, we thank you that we are alive today;You have the whole world in your hands. You keep the planes in the sky. We pray for journey mercies...”
On she went for a couple of minutes. And then suddenly it happened.
“Ba ka ra shey ma ti fah rah ka la, rah ta ka rah ta ka rah ta ka...”
Deji looked up with raised eyebrows. Everyone else had their eyes firmly shut and focused on the prayer. He remained calm until she finished but determined to ask her privately about the exuberance of her prayer before they boarded.
“I thought that you didn’t have any issues with speaking in tongues?”
“Yes I know, but do you have to do it so loudly in public?” he responded, almost whispering.
“Why not? Is it something that we should be ashamed about?”
“Okay, I know it isn’t, but you shouldn’t start scaring other passengers about to board.”
“Why are you being so insensitive about this?”
“I’m not. Besides, it is just a plane. People fly everyday. It’s unreasonable for you to think that something will happen to the one plane you’re getting on!”
Deji used to be quite blunt, brash and insensitive. Though he had been delivered from this, he still had some momentary relapses. Besides, he reckoned that despite being a Christian he needed to retain the ruthless streak that helped him snap up a job as a high-flying city trader with Goldman Sachs. And even though he didn’t mind hyper-spiritual, tongue-speaking Christians, he just felt that wasn’t for him. He was much too logical for that!
Nevertheless, this particular relapse cost him his seat next to her on the flight. She opted to sit with Dami, leaving him next to Samuel..
As they took their seats in the middle section of the plane, a gentleman already seated in front of them was flicking through the Sunday Times magazine. Deji was quick to notice one particular page, which had the title “Speaking in Different Tongues” spread across in bold letters. As much as he tried to dismiss this obvious coincidence, he couldn’t help pondering upon what the article said and he spent the early part of the flight wondering if it would be rude to lean over and ask for the magazine once the gentleman was done.
“So what do you do you do for a living?” he said, turning to Samuel.
“Well, I’m into photography,” Samuel replied. “I do mostly freelance stuff. In fact I knew Afua from her modelling days, which is how she ended up drafting me into G Factor to help with the photo shoots.”
“Yeah, she tells me that you’re our Spanish meal ticket when we get to Costa Rica. How did you learn the language?”
“My father is actually from Equatorial Guinea. I spent a few years there before moving with my mum to Nigeria.”
“They speak Spanish over there?”
“Yes. Actually it’s the only African country where Spanish is spoken....”
As Deji’s Afro-Spanish education continued, Afua tried to calm her frazzled nerves. She had given up trying to make conversation with Dami, who was deeply engrossed in her copy of the Financial Times, so she passed the time listening to her iPod and flicking through the movies on the in-flight entertainment. The flight was relatively uneventful until they ran into turbulence about an hour before arriving in Miami, their first stop-off point.
The plane began to jolt up and down violently, and Afua clutched onto her seat tightly. She started getting that horrible sinking feeling that she used to get whenever she was on a roller coaster. She looked over at Dami but her friend seemed more concerned about the financial stock listings.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t unusual,” Dami said with barely a glance in Afua’s direction. “I’m always flying with work, after a while you get used to these minor bouts of turbulence.”
Further ahead in the cabin Deji noticed that the onset of the turbulence coincided with their passage over the Bermuda Islands and this brought to his mind the urban myths about disappearing ships and planes in the Bermuda triangle. All of a sudden his hard-as-nails macho front was tested to its limit. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the intensity of the turbulence began to increase, and their trays started vibrating like they were in an earthquake quickly growing in ferocity. When their cups and plates started sliding unto the floor, Deji and Samuel looked at each other and just laughed. That was all they felt they could do, not that anything was actually funny.
After about half an hour, the captain eventually came on over the loudspeakers.
“Apologies for the slight turbulence we’re experiencing at the moment. At 38,000 feet we’re just on top of the clouds and flying through some air pockets. We’re going to reduce our altitude to 30,000 feet and from then on it should be plain sailing.”
As reassuring as the captain tried to sound, Deji knew that their situation was direr than he was letting on. He had been on enough flights to know that this was out of the ordinary. As he contemplated his helplessness, he remembered the article he had caught a glimpse of in the Sunday Times and realised that now was a good time as ever to find out what it said about speaking in tongues. A surprised Samuel looked on as he leaned forward to have a few words with the man in front of him, and before long he was hurriedly fumbling through the magazine as if the words of that article would have some kind redemptive power to save them from any harm. To his dismay, he had to read a full three page spread about Bruce Springsteen before he could find any relevance to the title which had caught his attention in the first place. The final sentence of the piece read, “And a line from his upcoming single Radio Nowhere reads ‘I want a million different voices speaking in tongues!’”
On the opposite page he found a review of a song, “Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet” by Gavin Bryars, and after reading and meditating on this for a few minutes, he began to pray silently. He soon realised he could not find the words to express himself. “Sha ka sha ka sha ka...” he continued under his breath, making sure that even Samuel would not hear him!
‘Okay, I’ve learnt my lesson,’ he thought, as he continued his prayer. ‘I’d better apologise properly to Afua when this plane lands safely!’
Though the last thing she could remember was trying to fall asleep as the turbulence began Afua was now feeling more nauseated with each second that passed. She pulled the sick bag out of the pouch in front of her in readiness to hurl back the tikka masala meal she had just been served. There was a thunderous clap and the plane dropped what must have been about 5,000 feet within a second! Everyone started screaming hysterically as the airbags popped out from above their seats. Afua hurriedly grabbed hers and as she fumbled it on she wished she had paid more attention to the safety video at the start of the flight. As sirens started going off and red and white lights started flashing, she looked over to Dami, who calmly fitted her own airbag over her face and went back to her broadsheet like nothing was wrong!
“This is your captain. We’ve been hit by a bolt of lightning. The right wing is badly damaged and we’re losing altitude very quickly. We’re going to attempt to land the plane safely as we’re only a few minutes away from the Florida coastline. Please assume the crash landing position!”
The captain’s words were in vain, and as the plane began to nosedive towards the ocean, Afua couldn’t help but feeling that that which she had greatly feared was about to come upon her. She let out a piercing scream which she was sure would be her last and then shut her eyes tightly in acceptance of their impending fate. Suddenly, she felt Dami tap her strongly on the shoulder and when she opened her eyes, the plane wasn’t freefalling into the sea. And it seemed like every passenger in the cabin was staring in her direction. You could literally hear a pin drop.
“Are you OK?” Dami asked. “You were asleep then you suddenly started screaming!”
She had only been dreaming. She wanted the ground to open up, or at least the emergency exit next to her so she could just disappear into the clouds! Still, though she was quite embarrassed, her overriding emotion was relief that they were still cruising at 30,000 feet.
A safe landing in Miami and a few uncompromisingly difficult US immigrations and customs officers later, they were met at the airport by friends from another church, Trinity House, who were also in Miami on holiday. As they recounted their experiences from the flight, Afua spoke about her bad dream. When she asked Deji how his flight was, he merely said, “It was cool, I told you there was nothing to worry about!” The apology failed to materialise.
The next morning, as they prepared to catch their flight to Costa Rica, their final destination, Deji and Samuel turned on their hotel room TV and the local weather forecast made for frightening reading. “Heavy rains in downtown Miami and tropical storms in the Florida Keys area are making both road and air travel very dangerous at the moment. Gale force winds exceeding 60mph means that we have a category one storm on our hands. Our advice is, if you don’t need to go out anywhere today, stay at home!”
“Next time,” Samuel muttered with dripping sarcasm, “it would be wise for us not to schedule a Caribbean holiday bang in the middle of the hurricane season!”
Deji agreed, and as they headed to the airport he wondered whether this flight would be their final one, and he prayed for a sign – anything – that would give them good reason not to board the plane to Costa Rica!