Decortication of an Airplane

In Suzhou, China, in a small massage parlor, in a head-shaped hole in a stuffed vinyl table, parallel to a bamboo floor, a little tourist’s face became red and hot. This would be revealed only some minutes later when she would sit up, but now, face down on the table, as the turn from white to red happened in an instant, her little face was cast in shadow; it was a low-lit room with a smoke stratum settling on the bottom. The clear and illuminated upper portion of air sat warm and yellow on top of the smoke, a wet layer of grey fat. Mucus bubbled in her nose, choked under soft palate, as she undertook the focused task of not crying, not letting a single tear fall into the smoke, but running sticky down her face, in combination with sweat and snot, onto her hanging hair. Blonde stalactites shot through the table hole, translucent and disgusting. 

The girl was extremely thin, ribs moonlighting emergency exit rows from her spine to around her front, small so the masseuse’s lotioned hands covered a large portion of her back, kneading scented oil into her pores, street lamp yellow, the tiny holes in smooth young skin filling with sebum, plugging dry moon craters with lard, pressing it deep into the dusty concretion of her back, layers so deep no shower could ever unclog the tegument holes, changing the essential nature of the base material. Holes in a child’s back skin are invisible to the naked eye, but everyone knows that is not a reliable measure of impermeability. (Clouds appear dense and solid in the sky, but airplanes pass through them a hundred thousand times a day). The masseuse was bound to consider this at some point. As she moved up and down the little girl’s back, she thought about how nice it was to massage unblemished skin. She also thought about how when she was a girl, she collected scrap metal to earn her place at the dinner table, back when this room was the only travel agency for hundreds of miles, and she would walk by in tan cotton trousers, cursing it, a curse on every family too rich to take the bus to Shanghai and on every man arranging a business trip. Her own skin had never been this soft. The air in the scrap field was cold and dry. Furthermore, her work did not allow for slippery skin. Her back was never anointed. 

Four bolts was all it took to hold the aircraft’s skin onto the body. The best bolts in the industry- both military and commercial- pure iron- and it only took four to fasten ten square feet of tin shell to the torso of an airplane. One on each corner. One of these iron bolts was smallcompared to the entire plane, but still the size of a woman’s dry hand, wrist to fingertips. All that was needed to perform the operation was a trunk with a false bottom. Wheeled out with the rest of the luggage onto the runway, and then out you pop, just at the right moment, air traffic control never seeing you, the luggage men not noticing, up the conveyor ramp, but not into the luggage cabin. Anybody can learn to hang onto the short legs of an airplane’s wheels, and slip inside the painted tin pocket into which they are retracted (the “wheel-well”), invisible to the naked eye but large enough for you to crouch inside while you palm the wrench in your tan trouser pocket, and then, just like that, four twists is all it takes. Make sure nobody saw you, pocket the bolt, and bolt from the pocket. The wind will catch on the underbelly right over the village scrap yard; it is perfect. The plane will shed a plate of its skin nearly every time it comes to this airport and flies precisely in this direction, which is maybe once every two months or so, for years, before anybody notices the exposed muscle, bones, the spine and the ribs of the thing, when one of the luggage men finally looks up, searching for moon in smog. When that happens, when he sees the decortication, you will have to do it again, another plane, another set of bolts. But it will be years until then, and it will be raining money in the meantime. 

The masseuse felt violated when the girl sat up. She never wanted to hurt anybody, and more importantly, she never agreed to. The little tourist sniffed back into her bubbling face and hugged a towel to her chest, facing the wall. Her back was shiny and buttered and her hair stuck to it. She wished her skin would shed off. She prayed a promise to nobody that she would do anything to be dusty and dry like before. She imagined flattening herself on the bamboo floor, covering herself with sunken smoke that would dry her up. 

Another day. On a thirteen hour flight, dirty, fingerprinted, dark with snoring and engine hum, an oily little girl tries not to touch anything. She is small and bony and stifling tears. Ungrateful. Her hands, five wires dipped in rich white wax, hover above jeaned knees, afraid of tainting them, moving the bacteria, moving the fat, the oil, the slime. Her hair is brushed back into a ponytail where it cannot transfer cells or substances to her skin. She sits too upright, her back not touching the dry blue seat, even though it appears to be smooth and free of bodily fluids, because even as a little girl, she knows that alone is not an accurate measure of impermeability.

The lights go down before the plane takes off. It rolls, on tiny wheels, over flat concrete. A rover on a moon with the potholes filled in. The sky is smokey, grey, meaty, even though once there were white clouds, too thick to move through. The girl tightens her stomach to resist touching her back to the seat, leaning forward as the machine gains speed. She curses herself for being oily and warm and disgusting. The wheels’ rumblework is done, the body is pulled upwards into the sky, but only for a few seconds. 

A shriek- a twist of the eardrum- wakes everyone at once. The concrete, so smooth, reliable, dry, is cut up, dragged over by the topmost layer of the aircraft’s underbelly. From the moon, it looks like the metal is trailing like the train of a wedding gown, silent and graceful and fluid. From air traffic control, it looks like the ground is unzipping. White sheets of tin and steel, slicing open the runway, melting it, red, street lamp yellow, bubbling. It screams underneath the cabin, like violins, or violence, heating everything. The sound of folding shell was high and crying, but the sound of ripping runway was so low that it was felt deep in the chest (a toothy drumroll). Nearly everyone felt the first pain when their seatbelts cut across their laps, but it hurt the girl the most when everything flipped over, tumbling, because the seatbelt had been too contaminated with human touch to use. But first, for a moment, as straps and buckles knifed through the meat of tourist thighs and hips and groins and stomachs, she was touching nothing at all. Flying, falling, hovering, in the aisle, by the ceiling, zero gravity, before she hit the overhead bin; before the first suitcase would strike her, flames disinfected her back, and she was dry, and she was clean, with nothing touching her.

Ry Book Suraski (he/him) is a Jewish and trans writer living in Brooklyn. His fiction explores gender, trauma, and magic.