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Vomit On A Plane: A Lesson in Perspective
My family and I recently traveled back to Central Oregon after an extended stay in New England. We had just boarded the plane for the second leg of our three-plane trip — the one that would take us from Newark, New Jersey to Denver, Colorado.
It had been an exhausting visit: I had just completed my final 10-day residency to earn my MFA from the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program in Maine, and my husband and kids had made the trip across country to witness my graduation. It was the first time we’d seen my mother-in-law since my father-in-law’s funeral, so it was an emotionally charged celebration.
We took our seats and promptly fell asleep as the other passengers shuffled their way down the narrow aisle. I don’t know how long I’d been dozing, but from the outer perimeter of my consciousness, I heard a flight attendant say, “We’ve called the paramedics; they’ll be here shortly.”
— Which pulled me right from my dream-state and into the reality of the 25th row. Two flight attendants hovered in the aisle by the row behind us, leaning in to attend to the gentleman sitting behind me. He wasn’t well — not well at all.
“Here, sir, have some water. Are you having any trouble breathing?”
I sat up and looked across the aisle at my husband, who was also starting to wake from the activity behind us. Gav, I mouthed and pointed toward the row behind me. Someone’s sick.
Of course, by sick, I was thinking something life-threatening, like a heart attack, which, given the recent events in our family, was not what my children needed to see. PleaseGodpleaseGodpleaseGod, please do NOT let this guy have a heart attack.
“Sir? The paramedics are coming, but our boarding is complete and we will need to make a quick decision about whether you’re okay to fly. Are you feeling any better?”
The man spoke in broken English: yes, is better with water.
“Do you think you will be able to go, or do you think you’ll need to get off the plane?”
No, he said, we go.
— And not 15 seconds later, I heard the splash of the contents of his stomach hitting the back of my seat. Then again. And again.
Oh, he said, sorry.
Now, at this point, everyone is awake and alert and has passed the motion sickness bags from their own seat pockets toward him. I tossed some baby wipes in his vicinity, but kept the vomit bags to myself in anticipation of the domino-effect to which I expected my children might succumb. But this is not the point of my story.
The point of my story is this: After the vomit in seat 25-E, after the man then ran to the back of the plane and got sick again in the bathroom that 250 other passengers were supposed to use during the 4-hour flight to Denver, after he and his travel partner were escorted from the plane by the paramedics and the ground crew spent an hour *sanitizing* the area while we all sat buckled into our seats, trying to distract ourselves with iPhones, iPods, and the sudoku puzzle in the back of Hemisphere magazine — after all that, the poor woman who had been sitting next to him when he erupted had to return to her seat so we could finally take off. It was a sold-out flight. There were no other seats available. Nobody could have imagined an unluckier scenario.
Except that about an hour into the flight, while this woman sat as close to the edge of her aisle seat as her arm rest would allow (probably wondering what might have splattered onto her purse stuffed beneath the seat), a different man walked up from the back of the plane and asked if he could sit in one of the vacant seats in her row.
At first she was silent, probably as stunned as the rest of us were. But then she said, “Uh, yeah, I guess, but you know what happened here, right?”
“Oh, yeah, I know. That’s okay.”
“I mean they sanitized it, but…”
“Yeah, I know. That’s okay. It’s still better than my seat.”
— Which made me wonder: what in God’s name was happening in the back of the plane where he had been sitting that would prompt him to knowingly nestle into the H1N1 row behind me? Whatever it was, it must’ve been brutal, because he slid in and grabbed the seatbelt that was probably still wet from the de-con…
Nearly a week after the trip, I still can’t shake my curiosity about the details of this guy’s circumstances. I want to know about his story. What was so bad about his situation? Did he not understand the medical drama that had played out in the seat directly behind me? Or was I, perhaps, overstating the risk of sitting in that seat because I had heard the splash, smelled the smell, seen the floor…
Regardless, being the literary geek that I am, I can’t help but see a lesson in the Vomit On A Plane episode: that all characters have their own motivations. And that these motivations are best understood with some insight about their perspectives.
I had made an assumption when I said that nobody could have imagined an unluckier scenario than being that woman who sat in the contaminated 25th row. Because obviously, somebody did. And now the story seems incomplete, unbalanced without a little exploration of that perspective.
—Which is exactly what I’m thinking I need to do as I revisit some of my own work: explore my characters’ perspectives. Try to understand why they’ve done the crazy things they’ve done. Perhaps I’ll learn a little more about them. Perhaps I’ll learn a little more about me.
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