The Abyss

Meursault opened his eyes. The sky above was hollow, its infinite blue stained only by the sun. His body was numb, the heat of the desert throbbed below him. He closed his right hand into a fist, gripping the hot, fluid sand that made his bed. His mind was fogged; he couldn’t understand why or where he was. As the minutes passed, his sluggish consciousness attempted to make sense of it all.

He could hear the raging fire. The smell of kerosene fumes masked that of charred meat. It annoyed him, how unsurprising this all seemed to him. The acid taste of this inferno laced his mouth, finally forcing him to sit up.

In front of him lay the mangled carcass of the Airbus A330, alight in a triangular inferno. Trailing the fuselage was a long and straight trench, the result of the airplane’s journey as it hit the ground. It was alight throughout, the kerosene trail a blazing scar in the desert landscape. Smoke billowed from the scene, a top-heavy tower of black leaning with the breeze.  

    

Meursault slowly stood up, his bare feet swallowed by the sand. “Where are my shoes?” he asked himself, shifting his feet in and out of the ground. He remembered taking them off before take-off. The man beside him had praised their brand, said they were ‘durable’. He cursed his luck in losing the shoes, his eyes unblinking at the fire ahead.

Then it hit him.

That man! What happened to him? What about the other passengers?! He looked around, his eyes frantically scanning his surroundings. His stiff legs cycled as he tried to run through the sand, circling the fuselage. His heart was racing and continued to do so when he completed a lap and realised, to his horror, that he was alone.

The adrenaline seared through his body. He began to piece together the events leading to this nightmare. He was overwhelmed. Where? How? Why?!

His flight had taken-off. He had placed his shoes under the seat in front of him. He was watching ’Singin’ in the Rain’. The movie had just begun, and was interrupted when the captain’s voice was suddenly broadcast within the cabin; a high pitched, panicked voice instructing everyone to ‘adopt crash positions’. Without warning the airplane plummeted from a height of 30,000 feet. The movie continued to play.

How long did this descent last? Meursault stared into the line of burning kerosene cut through the dunes. It had felt like an hour, like he was in suspended animation. Gravity had ceased to exist. Passengers were planted to their seats by seatbelts, their arms flailing in the air, snatching at the swinging oxygen masks. Screams drowned out the occasional sob and the rattling chassis responded with creaks and groans, the engines roaring. The man next to Meursault was still. His eyes were clamped shut and his hands gripped the armrests, his knuckles white. He was reciting a prayer to himself. The lady behind him shrieked with every rattle, lamenting the premature end to it all.

As for Meursault, he was silent. He couldn’t explain this lackadaisical sense of apathy. It was almost like he didn’t care for his approaching death. The more he tried to search for some form of emotion, or feeling, he was greeted with emptiness. He looked at the horrified faces of the other passengers, hoping to empathise but without success. He felt there was a void, an abyss which he was standing on the edge of. It felt familiar, like he was balancing on this very precipice his whole life. He would have never dreamt of making the leap before. Now it seemed like the most natural thing to do. Why had such a convoluted sense of liberty appeared now? Why had he accepted his potential non-existence with such ease?

He realised he was a coward. He had lived his whole life in perpetual despair, unsure of his value in the world. He felt like his life was without purpose; a sequence of irrelevant days at the office, the culmination of poor choices. It was an absurd and meaningless existence, yet he persevered. He always hoped life would adopt him for what he was meant to be. This impending doom had suddenly made the choice for him, and as things stood in his life he didn’t seem to mind.   

Meursault’s thoughts were interrupted by a laugh. In amongst the chaos, he had not paid attention to the lady sitting across the aisle from him. She was middle aged, brown haired and wore a smart grey suit. She held a hand over her face, partially covering a smile. She wore headphones and was concentrating on the screen in front of her. She was also watching ‘Singin in the Rain’, and giggled for a second time. It was a dainty laugh, one that would have been infectious in a different setting.

The man next to her was hysterical but she didn’t flinch. Meursault couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The woman must have felt his eyes on her because she slowly turned around and looked at him, a remnant of her laugh still traced on her face. Their eyes locked, and he saw in the infinite darkness of her pupils that very same abyss. His surroundings dissolved around him. It was just the two of them, floating in silent darkness.

Slowly, her smile expanded, her white teeth showing. To Meursault’s horror, she began to laugh. It was a syllabic laugh, each intonation a note in a tremulous cadence. Her dimples were contoured with wrinkles, her eyes gleaming with fire. Terror gripped his heart, and he wanted nothing more than to get away from it all.

The last thing Meursault remembered was that he had unbuckled his seatbelt. He guessed that this was probably what had saved him from the crash and thrown him safely away from the inferno. Was he grateful that he survived? He couldn’t tell. He felt that fate had pulled him out of the abyss and back onto the precipice again. Will he ever have that freedom from responsibility, humanity and most importantly life itself to face his mortality again?   

Mersault was answered by the distant sound of a helicopter. He looked up and saw its incoming silhouette on the horizon. It looked like a fly, floating on a mirage. He felt a tear roll down his cheek as he realised he was to be saved. His irrelevant past washed away, its absurdity replaced with hope for a justified, fruitful future.  Life in its inevitability would always give him a chance, whilst death was a journey of no return. He shuddered at the thought of the laughing woman who had chosen the latter. He walked towards his future, leaving the precipice behind with the memory of that laughter burning in the fuselage.