Krish Dhar scrunched into his window seat on the cramped Air Canada jet. His business required travel from Southern California to Phoenix eight times a year. The return flight took roughly seventy-five minutes. Easy most trips. A good chance to stare into space and mull over things.

Krish watched attractive women board the plane and manage the slim passageway. A brief juncture of hope, of possibility. For whatever reason, they were never ticketed next to him. No, he consistently endured giant, long-legged fellows as neighbors, or sweaty, glandular men who needed the auxiliary seat belt strap to secure them from careening about the cabin. If a woman ever sat next to Krish, it was a besieged mother wrestling with a mewling infant who smelled of soiled diapers and Gerber’s baby food.

As expected, this October day, an expansive man took the adjoining seat. He immediately spread into Krish’s private area. Rules of travel were unspoken but clear. The armrest that separated two people into their tiny seats signaled the boundary line—that extended, invisibly, down to the ground. Not only did this passenger let his pale, hairy leg sprouting from khaki shorts extend over the divide, to even graze Krish, but he laid a doughy arm flat onto the armrest, hand dangling toward Krish. One jolt of turbulence away from palming his crotch.

“You’re not a, uh, are you?” the neighbor asked. “I mean, these days I like to know who I’m flying with.”

“These days? It’s 2019, not—”

“Yeah, but still…”

“My father is from India,” Krish said, “but no, I’m not religious at all.”

The man’s mouth curled. “I love chicken curry, you know?” He leaned closer. “What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t, but it’s Krish.” He gazed out his window, hoping the conversation had run its course.

“Chris? That’s an American name.”

“I am American, but it’s Krish.”

“Like that religious cult?” The man laughed, pushing the hair atop his forehead back over the pink scalp behind. “Hare Krishna, Hare, Hare,” he sang. “You married?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Arranged?”

“No. I was born here, not India. My mother is from Florida.”

“Call me Fred. Since we got an hour to kill, what’s your story?”

Krish felt claustrophobic, his body pressed uncomfortably against the jet’s curved wall. “I just came back from a family funeral, I’m getting downsized, and my wife wants a divorce…”

“Seriously?”

Of course not. “I’d rather not talk, or I might cry.” Krish knew that even if neighbor Fred didn’t swallow his lies, a man could not watch another male stranger weep without becoming uneasy and eventually switching seats. Krish hoisted the plastic shade on his window. The vast expanse of nothingness west of Phoenix spread out below him.

Hollywood movies featured the barren geography of Arizona to depict Mars, or any uninhabitable desert planet. Decades ago, they used Utah, like in Planet of the Apes, but viewers had grown more sophisticated, recognized the signature buttes from western films, from family trips, and car commercials.

Occasionally Krish saw a silver glimmer, the outline of a house plunked down, far from civilization, miles from a paved road. The slight imprint of a dirt tread could be discerned too. Setting up a residence in a moonscape with the temperature of a blast furnace was really getting off the grid. The inhabitants never considered the distance to a Trader Joe’s or a supermarket, their essential concerns being water, power, and staving off the heat.

Not even a microscopic glint of green below. Nothing growing, no moisture, no shade. Krish couldn’t imagine they received cable television. And streaming, from where? What Internet provider would cater to the descendants of old silver and uranium prospectors?

The carpet of sand and dry dirt was only broken by dung-colored mountains rising up. Their hue so dark that Krish guessed they must be volcanic.

“Can you see the Grand Canyon?” Fred craned his basketball-sized head over near Krish and squinted.

“No, that’s a good 200 miles north.”

“Jeez, you’re smart. That’s why you’re stealing all our jobs.” Fred nodded, smirking. “What’s your line?”

“I design targeting mechanisms, for rockets and missiles.” Krish couldn’t reveal much. “How about you?”

“Waste Management.” Fred stared at Krish. “Every time you see a portable toilet outside a construction site… That’s me.”

Below, the mountains sprouted in jagged ranges that resembled spines of gigantic reptiles. Dinosaurs flung from distant planets, then crashed down on Earth as flaming meteors, leaving their burned husks impacted into the shallow ponds of sand. Now they floated, charred fossils in the desert ocean, a desert which had once been an ocean—too long ago to think about. The rucked, desolate moonscape reminded Krish of his job, guidance systems for weapons of destruction, and of atomic bomb tests in the Southwestern deserts during the 1940s and 1950s.

Fred continued jabbering. “Take a plane, go to a concert, attend an outdoor fair, and you’ll thank God for the invention of chemical toilets.”

Krish pictured the residents of those scattered tiny houses as artists who slept through the days of soul-crushing oppressive heat, then rose at sunset to build metal sculptures of giant dragonflies or float-like vehicles to parade at Burning Man. Or they wrote stream-of-consciousness novels—elaborate manifestos plucked from the depths of their fevered dreams. Perhaps they composed orchestral overtures to be performed in canyons using nature’s elements as their instruments. When those fantasies died away, Krish felt saddened to think that maybe they were just ignorant people who spent their days sweating and staring at the walls, retired not only from work, but from inner consciousness altogether. Folks who roused from their damp stupors at nightfall, to find sustenance in food, for lonely masturbation without reason—beyond filling the long, slow hours of nothingness.

“If you meet an attractive lady, marry her right away,” Fred said. “Don’t live with them first. We want mystery, not all the details and flaws.”

“Did that help you?”

“Not in the first two. But I’m hoping the third time’s the charm.” Fred reclined.

Krish felt the child kicking his seat-back and tried to meditate. This too will pass.

“Would you like a beverage?” a flight attendant asked them both.

“Bloody Mary,” Fred announced. “Thank you, Marci.”

She smiled when their hands accidentally touched, and Fred guzzled the drink down the moment the plastic cup reached his grip.

“Just water, no ice,” Krish said.

“It’s room temperature.” She frowned. “Warm water.”

“That’s good for digestion.”

“Really? Have some pretzels.” Marci tossed a generic airline package onto his tray-table.

“I do not want pretzels.” Krish gave them back.

“Why not, they’re free?” she said. “No charge.”

“What’s wrong with you, Krishna?” Fred asked, rousing. “Listen to the pretty lady.”

“I don’t like pretzels, okay?”

“Then have an American Airlines chocolate biscotti,” Marci said. “No one refuses these.”

“Please, no.”

Both Fred and the attendant studied him for a tense moment, then continued with their flight flirtation. “So I was playing golf in Palm Springs and got me a double bogey…”

“My ex played golf until the second heart-attack.” Marci eyed Fred, appraising him.

“Phoenix? The heat can be murder.” Fred asked for another Bloody Mary and handed her his business card. She grinned.

Marci had dark wavy hair with auburn highlights. Painted doll pretty. Krish couldn’t imagine what lay beneath the red lipstick, eyebrows, long fake eyelashes, foundation and blush, or without her hair dye. Whether she had features at all. He did guess she was pushing forty. While Fred, for all his failings, looked the marriage type. Maybe Marci had calculated a transactional relationship: sex twice a year on Christmas and his birthday, in exchange for a house, a shared reality, the vague sense of belonging to something, to being shrouded in societal normalcy. Riding cramped jets with recycled air held only boredom, claustrophobia, and dehydration for her present and future.

Krish dozed off after drinking the water, but woke to a tuneless voice. “My umbrella, umbrella.” His neighbor wore earbuds connected to a device and sang along with Rihanna. Fred’s arm lay crooked on the armrest, so his elbow jabbed into Krish’s rib-cage. He didn’t want to lose his temper. The flight would be over in thirty minutes, the annoying fool to be forgotten like a morning piss.

Krish had learned from an ex-girlfriend that in times of stress, Buddhist chanting would calm him and slow an accelerated heartbeat. “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” he repeated with eyes closed. When Krish finally opened his eyes, Fred had recoiled away in his seat, and Marci the attendant loomed above with a stern expression.

“Sir,” she said. “You’re making the passengers very nervous with your Muslim chanting. If you could just stop until we land and you reach your mosque, that would be…great.”

“It’s not Muslim, that’s Buddhist.”

“You believe in Buddha?” Fred asked.

“As a man, yes,” Krish replied. “He’s not like your Santa Claus.” Marci looked offended. “We don’t chant or pray on planes in America,” Fred said. “Unless it’s going down.”

Another passenger across the aisle became agitated. “What?” she asked, hand to ear.

“The plane is not going down,” Fred said. “Just telling Hare Krishna here to stop freaking us all out.” His voice slurred and his meaty right leg rubbed against Krish’s leg.

“I’m done.” Krish stared back out his window.

An elderly, white-haired man walked up and down the aisle, stretching, squatting, extending limbs into yoga poses.

“I guess that’s a good way to prevent blood-clots,” Fred offered, when Marci finally moved away.

“On a short flight?”

“When you get past your seventies, you’re basically a walking blood-clot.”

The jet flew over the Sierra Mountains—colored the dull green of dry brush sprouting from their rocky terrain. The high jagged range a boundary between the expansive nothingness of the desert and the packed sprawl of the Los Angeles Basin.

Was it such civilization, the constant stream of too much information on wars, diseases, mass shootings, Hollywood romances, political buffoons, and human cruelty, that drove people east across this Great Divide? And their reward, an empty landscape of harsh light and blistering heat, but no neighbors or exterior problems. Survival their only concern.

Once the plane passed the Sierra Range, Southern California lay obscured beneath a solid carpet of dense clouds. It reminded Krish of the Netflix documentary on Antarctica: blinding white for miles in every direction, upthrusts of clouds resembling polar ice mountains. He lost all sense of direction. Were they flying west toward Hawaii, or slowly veering north toward Santa Barbara?

After fifteen minutes coasting above, the jet slowly dipped into the cloud banks. Instead of a gray cottony area, they cruised through a hollowed-out world, a puffy ceiling above and another dense layer hundreds of feet below. Long stalagmites of cloudy vapor stretched down from the top to bottom, a surreal land of odd soft shapes as the aircraft rattled and shuddered.

For a moment, Krish wondered if he had died? If this was some liminal space, a journey to the next place, the astral plane. Up from the sky, he thought and laughed inside. It was absurd yet made sense. Neighboring passengers stared out their windows in search of the planet’s surface. For known things. For logic.

Even the flight attendants seemed disoriented. Marci announced that people should take their seats immediately and fasten seat belts, while another said, “Please don’t leave your seats.” The jet turned this way and that, descending but not penetrating the void—the cloud limbo. Seats and tray tables began to vibrate, overhead storage bins popping open.

Fred gripped the flimsy arm rests with tensed hands, bluish veins bulging up through flesh. Somewhere behind them, a baby cried.

Just as the tension grew to where Krish expected screams, an orange-red light suffused the bottom layer. A slight tear showed in the gauzy sky fabric and a radiant sunset peaked through. The jet dropped out of the cloud sandwich just above Santa Barbara. Gazing upward, the cumulus bank appeared charcoal gray with descending tendrils as in a storm, and yet no rain came, just wind and changes in air pressure felt inside Krish’s ears.

The plane circled twice, the sunset permeating the cabin from every angle.

Fred clutched at the seat pocket in front of him, rooting around for something not there, then jackknifed forward and vomited into the fabric pouch.

Krish turned away from the second coming of Bloody Marys and pretzels.

Finally, the pilots guided them down to a bumpy landing, the craft ratcheting and jerking.

Momentary tensions dissipated. The passengers who had bonded in fear, now laughed nervously as the jet coasted while braking. Soon they were texting and making calls, isolated in their own selfish worlds again, the communal experience of danger already remote and forgotten.

Fred slapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a good one, Krishna.” His breath reeked of stomach acids. When Marci walked by, he smiled at her, unaware of the reddish liquid on his chin or of his pale greenish complexion.

Krish had heard of women’s ability to change their mind in a nanosecond, and for the first time he believed he’d witnessed it, watching Marci’s face fall before a grim march to the front.

As soon as the seat belt light switched off, the outsized Fred rose and bullied his way up the aisle, not waiting for other passengers ahead to stand and deplane first.

Krish had exaggerated before, not lied. Starcraft Design were downsizing their work force, and he suspected he’d be let go in the new year. Photos of his wife appeared on a popular online dating site. When Krish confronted her, Sarah insisted someone copied her images from Facebook or Instagram and set up a fake profile. Later, she asked him how he would have known, unless he was roaming the site in search of something? Their separation was imminent.

His business involved managing destruction. Even with precise targeting and the most accurate guidance systems, a little collateral damage should be expected. At least he’d survived the flight.

– Max Talley

Author’s Note: I wrote “Up From The Sky” to upend what I consider a cliche story: the traveler on a plane or train who thinks about their troubled marriage/relationship and makes some resolution by the end on how to proceed. Instead, I wanted to focus on people cramped together on a tiny jet with shrinking seats and legroom in the just pre-Covid era of late 2019. When the plane encounters turbulence and slips into a strange cloud bank, I wished the travelers as well as their world to go topsy-turvy, so that likable characters reveal flaws, while a tiny bit of sympathy, or pity, might be extended to obnoxious characters. The readers will be the judge if I succeeded at this.