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  “I’m gonna say something, you’re gonna do something, then I’m gonna do another thing.”

  “Sounds like Simon Says,” the copilot says.

  The captain shifts in his seat and squints at his partner. She still hasn’t seen the captain’s face. He’s gray at the ears. He’s got the kind of hair around his cap that could mean he’s bald or not—it’s tough to say.

  “Hon,” the captain says, “we’re actually pretty busy right now.”

  “Oh, right, of course,” Suzy says. She’s building toward the voice she was using in the bathroom mirror at the airport. “I don’t want to bother you. But listen, just to this one thing.…”

  She doesn’t even take a breath. It just goes.

  “There’s a bomb on the plane. There are twelve members of the American Institute for Social Justice aboard. Twelve men and women. Twelve identical briefcases. One of them is equipped with a bomb that will take this plane out of the air. Don’t try to figure out who they are—they’re not sitting there in rags with dirty faces and dreadlocks. You’ll never be able to ID all twelve. The minute you make a move for one, the member with the bomb will detonate. Even if you knew who was who, and planned something simultaneous, there are only two pilots and eight stews, seven excluding me. Point is: it’ll never work.”

  “Gimme a fucking break,” the captain says. “Stop screwing around and wasting our time.”

  “There’s a bomb on the plane and you’ll be discharged if you don’t take this information seriously. You don’t have a choice.”

  “You’re full of shit and I don’t have to listen to it. I’m sick to fucking death of you people. Don’t you realize nobody does this anymore? Don’t you know it’s over?”

  “Welp, one more time, I guess,” Suzy says, turning to the copilot. “Lemme talk to you, then.”

  “What do you want?” he says, dumb in the face for having been charmed a minute ago. “What’s the demand?”

  “It’s pretty straightforward. Don’t want money. Don’t want prisoners. Don’t want Cuba. Just three very simple things.”

  “Okay,” the copilot says.

  “One: you don’t let anyone on the plane know. If passengers are made aware, the bomb’s going off. If stewardesses are made aware, the bomb’s going off.”

  She hears the captain’s voice cut in: “I don’t have to fucki—”

  “Two: you don’t radio about what’s going on until I say so.”

  “If you want this bullshit to be taken seriously,” the captain says, “we’re radioing now.”

  “No, you’re not,” Suzy says, her voice growing gravelly. She sounds like Lauren Bacall. She likes it.

  “What else?” the copilot says.

  “I’m flying the rest of the way.”

  “Give me a goddamned break!” the captain says. “You’ll fucking kill us, you crazy cunt.”

  “Jeez,” Suzy says, “you’re pretty miserable. What’s wrong, hon?”

  “I’m not doing another one of these.”

  “Well, we’re only talking one more. I’m gonna make this so easy. You don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to call anyone. And you won’t need to deal with frantic passengers so long as you keep shut the fuck up.”

  “You’ll drop us in the middle of the ocean. You have no idea what it takes to fly an airplane. You put in a couple years or whatever handing out vodka and orange juice, cleaning up vomit and shit in the bathrooms, and you think you can fly an airplane?”

  “I don’t like him,” Suzy says to the copilot. “He’s gonna get three hundred sixty innocent people killed if he doesn’t shape up his attitude. Can you straighten him out?”

  “I’m just…this is my first.…”

  “Good answer, kid.”

  “Listen, boys, I’ll give you this: we’re not going to San Francisco, we’re turning around. If you want to turn it around yourselves, if that’ll make you feel better, then go for it. But now is the moment to start. We’re talking ASAP, because we need the fuel.”

  “You really are a dumb cunt, aren’t you? If we turn around right now, every person out there will know something’s wrong with—”

  It happens so fast it takes even Suzy by surprise. The sound is comical, cartoonish. The sound of an empty beer bottle bouncing off a bar. The sound of a quarter colliding with a flagpole. The sound of a half-full fire extinguisher cracking an airplane captain’s skull.

  His body gives up in the instant. He slumps there like a napping child in a car seat. Hands slipping off the controls and falling to his sides, body propped up by the seat belt alone. The copilot screams. It’s a squeaky scream. Then, when Suzy moves to unclip the captain, he shouts, “Hey!”

  “I need you to start taking this seriously,” she says. “And I need you to turn this plane, gradually, so as not to attract attention, in a large arc until we’re facing the other direction.”

  “I can’t…I refuse.”

  “Dude,” Suzy says, “put your fucking hands on the yoke and start turning around, or we’re blowing up the plane. This is so easy for you. You have nothing to gain from fighting me on this.”

  She gets the captain’s seat belt undone, but there is so much blood. Way more than she could’ve expected, and most of it’s coming from his right nostril. She checks to make sure he’s still breathing, hears him murmur: You dumb fucking cunt. Or at least that’s what she hears passing through his lips, even though it’s just faint breath. You dumb fucking cunt. Janice, you dumb, slot-mouthed fucking cunt. She begins to slide him off of the seat. He’s incredibly heavy, much heavier than he looks.

  “New plan,” Suzy says. “You get him out of that seat, and you sit over there.”

  “Where am I supposed to put him?”

  “We come in here all the time and find plenty of room back there,” she says. “Squat there in heels and a skirt. You can certainly find a way to lay him down in that space.”

  “You told me to turn, I started to turn.”

  “I’ll get in your seat. Chinese fire drill.”

  He obeys and pulls the captain out of his seat, and Suzy takes the yoke in her hands. Kicks her heels off beneath the display and places her feet on the rudder and brake pedals, tests out the feel. Her eyes are distracted by the instrumentation—the radar, nav control, systems information displays, artificial horizon. She’s distracted enough to not notice how much trouble he’s having with the captain.

  “He’s bleeding a lot. There’s gonna be blood running back into his throat if I lay him down.”

  “Then prop him against the door. Sit him up so that the blood drains right. Just make sure he’s not gonna die on us.”

  They’re turning just the right amount, a big, sweeping, undetectable right turn, a lasso of a turn.

  “Do you really know what you’re doing with that thing?” he says, still looking after the pilot.

  “I do,” she says.

  “Okay, well, at least let me know if something’s not right.”

  In another couple minutes the captain’s positioned upright on the floor. The copilot climbs into the captain’s seat and checks the instrumentation. They’re flying due south for a moment.

  “You ever sat on the left side?” Suzy says.

  He juts out a lower lip and shakes his head.

  “So that’s cool,” she says.

  “Where are you going with this? I’m not gonna cause problems, I just need to know in order to make sure we don’t run out of fuel. There are only so many places we can get.”

  “I appreciate that. But I know fuel’s not gonna be a problem. I know that we’re good to go.”

  “That’s just not—I need to know in order to—”

  “Don’t ask again.”

  He stares ahead and pulls the turn a little tighter.

  “How old are you?” she says.

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Did you fly in the war?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you got up front with the airline
pretty quick.”

  He nods.

  “I’d love to fly bigger planes someday,” she says.

  He nods again.

  “We’ll see, right?”

  Three minutes of silence and they’ve completed the long one-eighty. That’s about as far as she’s got it for certain in her mind.

  “Now what?” the copilot says, and Suzy shrugs.

  They sit on bearing back to Honolulu, but Suzy doesn’t much think that’ll take care of what she needs.

  There’s a knock at the door.

  “You boys good?” It’s the crew leader, Flo. Checking on Suzy, no doubt.

  Suzy nods at the copilot to answer.

  “We’re good, thanks a lot,” he says.

  “You betcha,” Flo says, and Suzy hears her pad away.

  This is pretty much it, right? She’s brought it this far and still doesn’t have it figured out all the way. Wayne Edith Grace Mike Dave Billy Honeywell. WayneEdithGraceMikeDaveBillyHoneywell—the prayer returning like a vestigial heartbeat. Each compromised by a proximity to Suzy, Suzy compromised by her proximity to each of them. Suzy at the center of all that static, the one all the bad business seems to stick to.

  “You know what?” Suzy says. “I’m good for a little while.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think I don’t need you here for a little bit.”

  “Okay…”

  “Here’s what I think you should do: Head out like you need to use the bathroom. Stay in there for a little while and then come back. The key, though, is that none of the other stews can know anything’s wrong. None of the stews, none of the passengers. The others out there are watching closely. If they detect anything’s up, that you guys are plotting, that the stews are even aware there’s anything to plot, then: Boom. Ya know?”

  “Okay. Bathroom, then.”

  “Great,” Suzy says.

  He unclicks his belt and moves the captain aside so that he can open the door. He gets it open just a crack and steps over the captain’s legs. The door clicks behind him.

  There’s a risk he’ll freak out and tell Flo. But Suzy’s feeling like he might lie on her behalf, just to play it safe. A bomb’s a bomb.

  She slides out of her seat and stands in the cockpit. She marvels at the plane as it flies itself on the current bearing. She checks the captain’s pulse. He’s still breathing, too, so that’s good. She locks the cockpit door.

  She moves to the left side, sits in the captain’s seat. She checks the instrumentation, feels the airplane humming beneath her, the autopilot pulling the plane as if by rope through the air. It’s like the ski lifts in the Adirondacks, the lifts of her youth, little Suzy tailing Wayne to the summits of those mountains.

  She pulls out the map book, and before opening it to pages with zoomed-in quadrants, she recognizes it to be a skipped step and stares instead at the cover. Just everywhere there is, pretty much.

  She runs her eyes along the Pacific coast—the left edge of the Pacific, the right edge of places she’s never been, places she’s not even ever thought much about. She imagines, in a dreamy flash, the hundreds of planes in the air at this very moment, the millions of planes before that, the little lines they leave behind in the sky, contrails and carvings through space. She imagines those lines stacking up like the lines on the maps of the airline publicity materials and the walls of travel agents, those lines stretching from all points, an inexhaustible cloud-colored yarn wrapping up a life-size globe, all flights ever run, so many that the edges begin to touch, the lines begin to layer—every flight path, every vector, every pilot, passenger, and pretty young stew making contact at the edges, no difference, from the view up here, between yesterday and today and tomorrow or her or him or you or me. Just one simple, interconnected, overlapping, infinite, human-history-size idea in forward motion.

  She places her feet on the brake and the rudder. She lowers her hands, both hands, to the yoke. She feels the low vibration in her calluses, a bass string ringing out in perpetuity. She levels up, marvels at the true blue horizon.

  She thinks of Wayne, the pilot that never was. The way all this might look through his living, breathing eyes. She thinks of Edith. She thinks of Grace. But she thinks of Wayne, mostly—she thinks of Wayne, she thinks of Wayne, she thinks of Wayne.

  There’s a hand at the door latch, and when the door fails to open, there’s a quiet knock and a soft voice.

  “Hey,” it says. And then a light knuckle rap again. “Hey, lemme back in.”

  Suzy carving. Suzy rolling the board with the arches of her feet, all heels to all toes, way out wide and again across the middle. Suzy skimming the yellow centerline and snapping back at the curb, hard rubber and asphalt pinging like a typewriter. Suzy upright but curved, like parentheses, shifting open and closed, tracing even switchbacks, leveling the grade.

  “Hey!” He’s at the door. They’re all at the door. “Hey, lemme in!”

  Suzy knows it’s time to make the call, the time to make the call is right now. And so she toggles the autopilot to the off position and points the airplane away from everything at her back. Away from every force that’s squeezed her into this fateful, tailor-made, Suzy-shaped present. A present that is already past now, that is ancient history, history to be justified one day in the future: see it like Suzy sees it, make it make sense. Well?

  She begins to hum to herself, a nursery-rhyme cadence. It’s not much like anything she’s ever done before. Out the window there is sky and there is water and there is a zipper, absolute in its horizontal, running edge to edge and holding together heaven and Earth. The humming keeps coming, but she’s finally worked up to parting her lips and placing words in the slipstream of the sound.

  Su-zy, Su-zy, Su-zy, so…

  she whispers with a swelling breath and all the curiosity in the

  world

  …where is it you wanna go?

  Acknowledgments

  Not many kids get to grow up in the shadow of the flight path or amidst a sorority of former stewardesses, but I had the great good fortune of being raised with both advantages. That’s where this book begins—countless days and nights watching planes take off over the water, like Suzy does on the Fourth of July, and countless days and nights with women like Ethel Pattison, founding director of the Flight Path Learning Center at LAX, a museum off the edge of Runway 7R-25L devoted to the history of flight in Southern California. It was there that I first flipped through the poster-size airline advertisements, interviewed volunteers (and former stews) about the glamorous days they seemed to recall as faultless, and—perhaps most significantly—ran my fingers across the bright wool sleeve of a uniform that once belonged to a Suzy or a Grace who’d flown in the early seventies. Fly Me began with that uniform, and I owe a disproportionate amount to Ethel and the Flight Path Center for that fact. It’s right off Imperial—go there if you get a chance.

  This book does not exist without the sure-handed guidance, support, availability, and straight-up rightness of Kirby Kim and Joshua Kendall. I am perpetually blown away by the generosity and care of all book agents and editors, but especially these two. It should’ve surprised me not at all that they come with terrific colleagues: Thanks to everyone at Janklow & Nesbit and Little, Brown, especially Brenna English-Loeb, Nicky Guerreiro, Ben Allen, Maggie Southard, Erica Stahler, and Reagan Arthur.

  To the GQ folks. Too many of you to name, past and present, but especially: Jim Nelson, Devin Friedman, Brendan Vaughan, Andy Ward, Joel Lovell, Lauren Bans, Fred Woodward, Mike Benoist, Geoff Gagnon, Jon Wilde, Catherine Gundersen, Devin Gordon, Mark Byrne, Mark Anthony Green, Benjy Hansen-Bundy, Michael Hainey, Sean Flynn, Michael Paterniti, and John Jeremiah Sullivan.

  To old friends on both coasts, especially the originals from the real-deal Sela del Mar.

  To English teachers who are forced to read an unfathomable tonnage of bad writing, and yet still encourage students who want to be writers to “keep going.”

  To extra-special
readers: Sarah Ball, Dan Goldstein, Sarah Goldstein, Alice Gregory, Jeff Hobbs, and Charlie Waln.

  To Alyssa Reichardt, best brah and first reader. Without you there’s not much Fly Me, because without AZR there’s not much SW.

  To all the Rileys and Patons and Pattisons. Some families fuck you up so badly that you write about them. You’ve made it so good that I’ll never have to.

  To Sarah Goulet. You’re it, man. Wanna do this?

  To Neil Riley. You taught me most things. I miss you every day. I hope you got a good seat—how’s the view?

  To Patti, Penny, Peggy, and June Paton. Gran, in 1946, you left upstate New York, caught a steamer to Hawaii for a teaching gig, and then stopped short on your way home in a town you’d never heard of called Manhattan Beach, California. You had three daughters with alliterative names—one who was twenty-two in 1972, one who died in a plane crash in Hawaii, and one who wound up living her whole life at the beach with her husband and son. This book belongs to you four, because your lives gave it all the life it asked for. Thank you, Gran, for moving to California, and thank you, Mom, for never leaving.

  About the Author

  Daniel Riley is a senior editor at GQ magazine. He grew up in Manhattan Beach, California, and lives in New York City. This is his first novel.

  Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital.

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