The
sun struck, on steel, on bronze, on stone, on glass, on the grey water far
beneath them, on the turret tops and the flashing windshields of crawling cars,
on the incredible highways, stretching and snarling and turning for mile upon
mile, on the houses, square and high, low and gabled, and on their howling
antennae, on the sparse, weak trees, and on those towers, in the distance, of
the city of New York.
The plane titled,
dropped and rose, and the whole earth slanted, now leaning against the windows
of the plane, now dropping out of sight.
The sky was a hot, blank blue, and the static light invested in everything
with its own lack of motion. Only things
could be seen from here, the work of people’s hands: but people did not
exist. The plane rose up, up, as though
loath to descend from this high tranquillity; titled, and Yves looked down,
hoping to see the Statue of Liberty, though he had been warned that it could
not be seen from here; then the plane began, like a stone, to drop, the water
rushed up at them, the motors groaned, the wings trembled, resisting the awful,
downward pull.
Then, when the water was
at their feet, the white strip of the landing flashed into place beneath
them. The wheels struck the ground with
a brief and heavy thud, and wires and light and towers went screaming by. The hostess’ voice came over the speaker,
congratulating them on their journey, and hoping to see them again soon. The hostess was very pretty. He had
intermittently flirted with her all night, delighted to discover how easy this
was. He was drunk and terribly weary,
and filled with an excitement which was close to panic; in fact, he had burned
his way to the outer edge of drunkenness and weariness, into a diamond-hard
sobriety. With the voice of the hostess,
the people of this planet sprang out of the ground, pushing trucks and waving
arms and crossing roads and vanishing into, or erupting out of buildings. The voice of the hostess asked the passengers
please to remain seated until the aircraft had come to a complete halt.
Quotation from: Another Country by James Baldwin, Penguin Books 2001