Find The Black Box

By Kim Farleigh

He lived under the flight path, often witnessing passenger airliners cruising out of cloud banks, depressing always watching them land safely.

Then one lived up to his dreams – it crashed.

He was standing at the same old window he had been standing at for years, when two aircraft, one pursuing the other, passed over; their silver-cream fuselages were without windows; they looked eerily pearly in night’s blackness.  The first one nose-dived.  Orange stars sparkled in mushrooming mist as the aircraft struck terra firma.  Latin is essential in a hunt for glory.

Through double glazing, the impact sounded like a gorgeously sonorous, but repressed, thud.

The chance to examine wreckage had at last arrived.

Yellow lights illuminated the streets.  The houses, like bastions against weird challenges, were set back from wide footpaths.

He reached the area where the plane had come down; but there was no sign of a disaster.

He drove with his head out the window.  Cackling chortling yielded black-haired, guffawing heads, like laughing sultanas, in a party in a back-garden’s vast box.

“Did you hear the crash?” he kept on asking.

“No,” was the constant reply.  “What crash?”

A woman was against hanging bed sheets.  Men’s adoring eyes filled with vacant with lust because of her succulence.  Her locks surrounded blue eyes that stared, with arcane introspection, as if some unresolved mystery was swirling, like hissing reeds, in her head.  He felt she knew something about the crash, something intangible, but profound: he felt that she had an innate knowledge as to why such crashes occur.

“You’re here,” she asked, “to find out about a crash?”

“Affirmative,” he replied.

His steely distance was exciting.

“A gate crash,” she said, “to find out about an air crash?”

“Crass,” he replied, “but true.”

Her lips curled.

“I’m interested in this crash, too,” she said.

“Good,” he replied.  “That unconscious force that creates illusions of truth tells me that I need your support.”

For her, the crash’s significance was metaphysical, its details less significant than its implications.  She was absorbed by him being gripped by revolutionary concepts – entangled in truth’s hidden roots.  And he had very nice eyes as well.

They got into his car.

“Maybe,” he speculated, “it fell into a black hole?  Or maybe into a giant ditch?  Are there any black holes or huge ditches nearby?”

“Only the sewer,” she replied.

“Of course,” he said, slapping the steering wheel, “the sewer!  How stupid of me!”

She was delighted by this fiery focusing upon a relevant fact.

Palm trees resembled Rastafarians’ heads along the road.  Sure enough, the plane was in a turd sea, its wreckage glowing like Roman-army candles at night.

Upon Wellington-boot stilts they waded over to the cockpit.  The deceased, hirsute, Greek pilot looked sensitive in a pink cocktail dress.  Red seats were floating in the “Sea of Shite”.

“Beautiful,” the wreckage hunter mumbled, “so, so beautiful.  A fuselage jigsaw puzzle in a shite sea.”

The woman studied his fascinated face; she imagined him gliding over the sea’s surface like Jesus Scheiss.  She deposited her tongue down his throat.  The cockpit’s walls revealed works of art.  She got him down on the cockpit’s floor.  A plant snaked up a wall.  Prism chandeliers created rushing-water music.  She bounced on his penis.

“Your intellectual, aesthetic consciousness,” she said, “has awakened my sexuality.”

He lay still, not arguing.

“I plan to have you flat on your back like this,” she groaned, “until such time as this mystery has been resolved.”

You do that, he thought.

“The orgasm,” she pronounced, “leads to mystery resolution.”

If you say so, he contemplated; then he thought: What a night!  An air crash and I get laid!  But I wonder where that black box is?  I can’t rest until I find the black box.

“You can have me on my back as much as you like,” he said, “but first I need to find the black box.”

“Of course,” she replied.

She was thrilled to be linked to such a pertinent adventure.

They searched for the black box.  The pilot was slumped over the control sticks.

“It was Plato,” the black-box hunter remarked, “who first said: ‘Never let an emotionally unstable, gay transvestite fly a DC-26.’”

“That,” she said, “is the basis of ethics.  And what is ethics but common sense for the common good?”

“Your pronouncements,” he said, “make my erect dick sing like Pavarotti.  And you have a face like an orgasm.”

They found the black box under the pilot’s seat.  The pilot’s cute booty had been keeping it warm.

“There has got to be an office,” she said, “where unclaimed black boxes can be taken to.  There are two predominant tendencies that reflect the ceaseless engine of human compulsion: one: finding new ways for human beings to compete against each other; and two: adding to the already intricate web of government departments.”

They located the Unclaimed Black Box Office.  A bald man, wearing thick glasses, was behind the counter.

“You know that DC-26 that plummeted into the local sewer,” he heard his next customer say, “well, here’s its black box.”

“JESUS!!” the public servant cried, pinching a handkerchief over his nose.

The public servant’s eyes had the colorful vastness of mineral sections under microscopes.

“Sorry,” the customer said, “I should have cleaned it first.”

“No,” the public servant explained, ‘this is the black box that I wanted to see!  Let’s have a listen.”

They heard a story of unrequited love.  The pilot had committed suicide; he had adored the pilot of the second aircraft; but the second pilot had “fallen in love with the Egyptologist who wears the red spades on his forehead.”  The second pilot had pursued the first to try to save his life.

“Can I ask you a question?” the public servant asked.

“All questions, like all species,” the customer replied, “have a purpose.  I am a dartboard for your pinpoint enquiries.  Fire away.”

The woman’s face, cleansed by the moral beauty of this observation, resembled one of the hanging bed sheets that she had been standing in front of at the party.  She didn’t know why, but she felt like a cleansed, hanging bed sheet.  He made her feel that way.

“Why do you want to go down in history as the first man ever to have found the black box of an aircraft whose transvestite pilot committed suicide by flying into a sewer?” the public servant asked.

“The urge for greatness,” the customer replied, “is, of course, a sublime impulse, but on this occasion that obsessive drive is mixed with the need to create a psychological fluidity where nothing remains trapped or despairingly fixated.”

“Fascinating,” the public servant said, ripping his glasses off.  “Do you realize that I’ve always wanted to be the first ever government employee to report the finding of the first ever black box to have been picked up from the wreckage of the first ever DC-26 to have crashed as a result of its jilted pilot committing suicide by plunging into a sewer, and that I’ve had this dream for precisely the same reasons as those that motivated you to perform your remarkable deed?”

“Extraordinary,” the customer replied.  “We should become friends.”

“I agree,” the public servant said.  “And you,” he continued, addressing the woman.  “What’s your motive in all this?”

Her dyed blonde hair was striking against her dark glasses and her black, leather jacket.  She was a Mati Hari of glamorous intrigue, her lips big and red.

“I,” she replied, “need to resolve the mystery of the discoverer of the first ever black box ever to have been found aboard an aircraft that had been crashed into a sewer by a gay, jilted, Grecian, transvestite pilot.  And there’s more.”

“What is it?” the public servant asked.

His leant forward, his bulbous eyes like bags of curiosity.

“I plan,” she replied, with noble sadism, “to keep the rest a secret until the day I drop dead.”

“Oh, how bitchy,” the public servant smiled, shaking his head, his face aglow with wondrous appreciation.  “How deliciously bitchy!  Just to drive victory’s corkscrew into the soft membranes of your competitors’ fragile self-perceptions!  What dick-raising, penis-attracting bitchiness!”

“It’s a titillating thrill – pardon the verb – to have privileged access to prime knowledge,” she replied.  “You can call it advanced investigative journalism if you like: orgasmic pleasure with riveting information, the two emboldened by the knowledge that all opponents have been crushed by the iron heel of real feminine power.  I destroy pretenders.”

Mata’s lips expanded with vain, red satisfaction as the public servant’s face melted into canvas concupiscence.

“You are made,” the public servant said, “to annihilate all opposition.  I suppose you believe in equal rights,” he added, ironically.

“Ha!” she smirked.  “I intend to extend and extend and extend the boundaries of the promised land of my natural privileges.  I am a woman.  Equal rights do not exist.”

The public servant collapsed backwards, dropped by the volcanic, sensuous, passionate depravity of this guiltless assertion.  His dreams had come true.  He had always felt that the successful hunter of the first ever black box to have been picked up from the wreckage of the first ever DC-26 to have been intentionally destroyed by a suicidal, gay, transvestite, pink-cocktail-wearing, Greek pilot would have a woman like this.  He just knew it!

The delighted public servant quivered on the ground, the inflamed membrane of his penis shining like neon.  The thing that he knew he could never have had put him on the floor, the walls bathed in fluorescent crimson.

Mata put a foot on the public servant’s chest and said: “Sign this.”

The certificate confirming the find flapped in the public servant’s face.  Luscious beads of sweat slid down the public servant’s forehead.  His hand shook as he signed.  Mata increased the pressure on the public servant’s chest.  The public servant mumbled: “Your power emphasizes the puerility of my pathetic existence.”

Satisfied with this acknowledgement of the scheme of things, Mata and The Hunter left, Mata clutching the black box to her chest, as if that cube of revealing information was offspring being protected by its mother, that box the child of a ground-breaking, metaphysical union.

 

 

Having a taste for the exotic, Kim Farleigh has worked for aid agencies in three conflicts: Kosovo, Iraq and Palestine.  He takes risks to get the experience required for writing.  His stories have appeared, or are about to appear, in Whiskey Island, Southerly, Island, Haggard & Halloo, Sleet, Mudjob, Feathertale, The Red Fez, Negative Suck, Red Ochre Lit, Down in the Dirt, The Camel Saloon and Write From Wrong.