| Unintended Consequences |
[Aug. 8th, 2009|07:17 pm] |
We fill the world with words every day. In person, over the phone, online. Many words we throw around without guiding them thoroughly. They fall here and there, many ignored, many understood as intended... and some fall astray. Such misguided words give birth to unimaginable complicities.
Remember the last time you wished you had kept your mouth shut?
Bob Knowels, 33, an in-house attorney for a large insurance company, was depressed. Sitting on the side of his bed, 10th floor of a luxury highrise in Midtown Manhattan, at 7AM, Bob Knowels was certainly depressed. Bob looked at the alarm clock with disgust. The little plastic thing was silent because it was much too early for Bob to get up in order to make it to work on time. He cursed and remembered the dreadful mornings when he was awaken by the noise of the alarm clock and hit the snooze button half consciously with images of upcoming work flashing through his groggy mind. The work that brought him comfort.
"Where did the comfort go?" Bob thought.
Bob kept sitting on the side of his bed, unable to sleep yet unwilling to get up, unwilling to face the work day ahead of him. Bob could not stop thinking about the problems at work, caused by the fact that he could not fly anymore. Not literally, Bob's work did not require levitation skills, and he could never fly like any other person. Unlike most of us, Bob could not handle being on board a plane. He used to be just fine, taking flights between New York and London mainly, as his job took him.
Bob was a man who refrained from blaming others when he himself was at fault. Bob knew of no reason to blame himself for the newly acquired fear of aerial transportation. There was one, actually. Bob thought it was a random prank that caused his current condition. A prank it was, yet triggered by Bob's own words. He could not fly anymore because of a few words he mentioned to a person he only met briefly once, Rick Volicki, 29, a flight attendant. Bob had no clue there was a link between his newfound fear and his own words. Bob didn't even remember talking to Rick. In his mind, all of the fault fell with the lunatic who was now in prison for sabotaging a flight from London to New York five months ago, the last flight Bob ever took.
Bob and Rick basically believed in the same thing about terrorists. Terrorists were bad people. Both men were shocked by the footage of the World Trade Center in smoke... with a little difference, to be honest. Bob considered financial implications of the attack, something that never came to Rick's mind. Both men were appalled by the idea that someone somewhere wanted Americans dead, both being Americans. Neither was a jingoist but both supported the War on Terrorism. Bob Knowels maintained his largely generic opinion until the day of his last flight.
Rick had a personal connection to the conflict - James Volicki, Rick's younger brother. A good honest guy, he was an Army First Lieutenant. James was killed in Baghdad by a roadside bomb just two weeks before Bob developed his fear of flying. Bob had no idea James Volicki had ever existed.
Bob actually saw the report about the roadside bombing that took Rick's brother life but didn't pay much attention to it. How many of us stop to think about the people who die every day? Certain events that shock us at first cease to do so if they repeat frequently. People dying in Iraq is one of them. Cutting a pinky while making dinner is more upsetting to us that hearing about fifty people dead in a suicide bombing in a distant country. We analyze quickly the total number, affected more or less depending on how large the number is. We don't think about the lives of people involved, their hopes, their fears, their last thoughts. It is a defense mechanism, we block our emotions from spreading too far and save the most for ourselves and those close to us, at best.
Bob had this mechanism and registered the mere number of casualties after the incident that left Rick without his younger brother. In addition, Bob's work for insurance company inculcated a strong, even if not always conscious, belief that everything in this world had monetary compensation. That's what the insurance industry was for, right? To compensate entities for the losses more or less anticipated. Everything and everyone could be insured. Even James Volicki, whom Bob never knew. Bob liked to think that he was making the world a better place by doing his job. He was a maintenance worker for a machine that restored balance through disbursing funds where losses occurred. Pooled together and diversified, risks lost their threat.
Bob finished his breakfast and turned the TV off.
Altitude - very high, speed - very fast, temperature outside very low; flight XXX London - New York. Rick kept coming back in his mind to the moment he found out that his brother was killed. He was making his morning Saturday coffee when his mother called. He saw once in a movie a shocked character drop his cop of coffee. It was Rick's turn now. His mother's voice trembling, she could not say much. Much to say was not necessary. Rick spent the rest of the day absorbing the information, going back to the times he spent with his brother. He felt as if half of his life was tainted with the pain of loss. He hasn't been much in contact with James except for family holidays in the past few years. This did not make things any easier for Rick.
Bob Knowels was chatting with a man sitting next to him. Nothing interesting, killing time, so to speak. Rick was walking down the isle with a drink cart. Rick overheard Bob saying that "the war in Iraq is a financial waste." Two weeks before, Rick would ignore such comment, maybe even agree. Not this time though. Here was a guy flying in a fancy suit talking about war as a toll on economy. James, lying six feet under, was more than a toll on the U.S. economy.
"I'm not going to argue with you, asshole." Rick thought. He then spent the next half an hour thinking up a plan to kick the man in the business suit out of the comfort zone where wars were distant events made up of numbers with the dollar signs next to them. To give him justice, Rick realized he was being unreasonable and going too far when he took a pen out of his pocket and scrambled the following on a piece of paper: "There is a bomb on the plane."
This was the extent of the unintended conversation between Rick Volicki and Bob Knowels.
Bob could not stop thinking about the note. A wave of fear rolled over him as he read it. He didn't know any people on the plane. Nobody had a reason to play a prank on him. Bob looked at the person sitting next to him, the most likely author of the note. Who else could have placed it under the book he was reading and left on the seat when he went to the lavatory? He was only gone for a few minutes.
The neighbor was now calmly listening to his Ipod. It took some time before Bob mustered enough courage to walk slowly to the front of the plane and show the note to the flight attendants who gathered there. Rick, who was also there, got satisfaction from seeing Bob's pale face but also realized he made a huge mistake. He remained silent though and simply did what he was trained to do when the plane made an emergency landing. The plane made no course alterations because New York was already near. No announcements were made until the landing right before the passengers started jumping down the evacuation slides and running away from the plane in panic, Bob running among them.
Bob Knowels was a man without any pronounced psychological problems before the flight. Now, a mere thought of being on an airplane terrified him. He knew the note was a terrible prank. There was no bomb. The police quickly found out Rick was responsible for the incident. There was no clear motive. Rick kept apologizing after admitting what he did. Nothing terrible had happened, Bob's life was never in danger. Why was Bob Knowels so scared? One thing was different, Bob was forced to look at the value of his own life. How much difference would Bob's life insurance make if he was gone? He already had enough savings to leave a will behind. How much balance would a fund disbursement restore?
The comfort was gone. Bob could die at any moment and no amount of coverage would fix that.
Two year after said events, Bob Knowels, an attorney with the New York Legal Assistance Group, a non-profit law firm, boarded an airplane for the first time after a long break. |
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