As high as I’ll go.
Step by step, I followed the chubby two-year-old legs up the loft ladder. Her father belayed her climb clutching her firmly, as we tested how far she’d go, how high up fear waited for her. She’d spent the better part of an hour circling back to the foot of the ladder to plant her black sparkly shoes on its first rung as her parents took turns peeling the rest of her off of it. The ladder wasn’t perfectly stable, it creaked, the steps were widely spread, but she climbed. One, two, three, four, five sweetly awkward knee raises. As her big owl eyes passed over each platform, she could see the ground push further away, until fear rushed passed her to us instead and we brought her down.
There is no record of my first fear. I don’t know if it was on a ladder, or too far into the deep end, or perhaps in a crowded store without sight of my mother. But it certainly gripped me at some point, somewhere for the first time, and each time it’s returned, it’s both familiar and fresh. I hate how it always leaves a little oil stain behind, a phantom to remind me that it was there and cannot be removed. The little girl on the ladder remains stainless (is that where “nerves of steel” comes from?), and I can’t help but wish I’d been able to follow her lead to the top.
By now, I know too well that fear is the breaking wave of what I perceive is happening into the perilous stillness of some terrible thing that could be happening. I’ve learned to surf it. Sometimes I catch a line, putting it to work for a high. Other times, the wave is too big and it owns me because I am unskilled to face it or unbalanced at the moment or both. I don’t believe fear can ever be artificial. It can be falsely summoned with a horror film, haunted house, or cruel prank, but however it grips, it is real, present and honored. Discovering mechanisms to incite it is merely a way of predicting it, not controlling it. That little girl will know this some day too.
I am comforted to know I am immune from some fears. Poor Kim Kardashian, I’ve never thought but think now. She must have been terrified to be bound and gagged in a hotel bathtub, expecting to be raped, pleading for her life as her diamonds were stolen from her. Some people quibble over whether her robbery really happened, or whether it was another brilliantly staged cross between reality and her life. It doesn’t matter to me if she actually trembled in a robe. Whether she told or sold this story, she knew this debilitating degree of fear because she’d either felt or anticipated feeling it. I will never be afraid of my security detail being outsmarted in a major jewel heist. It can never happen to me.
I am less enthralled that there are some inescapable, universal fears. On September 11, 2016, the plane shook me out of my hypnagogia with a thunderous boom. The right engine a few feet from my bobbling head in seat 35E blew at 15,000 feet above the ground or so. “Oh, SHIT,” my usual pacifier of a husband said. The flight attendant in my line of sight bit her lips, passed curt instructions, and squeezed her knees together. No one screamed, but several women began weeping. The pilot delivered a measured message through that subtle but distinct airplane static and assured us we’d be making an emergency landing—back to where we started. He said it would be protocol for the fire department to greet us before we could continue to the gate. In the air, in fear, the plane swayed as if taking deep breaths through sharp turns. For fifteen to twenty minutes I was suspended with many others in a pocket of potential nothingness. We couldn’t land quickly enough, but we didn’t want it to be all that quick either.
We in fact landed safely, but we were not where we started. The hustle of the terminal I’d left earlier now seemed staged. The lights were brighter, people’s mannerisms were more exaggerated. I walked to the bookstore because I go to books to feel safe, transferable from wherever I am to somewhere I want to be. But I couldn’t bring myself to lift a single one. I worried that I would pick up a prop, an empty cardboard box, with no pages, no story, no escape.
I suspect the airline limited our chit chatting time with passengers of other flights to avoid spreading our cancerous fear. They directed us to a nearby gate and published a takeoff time within 30 minutes on the board behind nonchalantly keyboard-pecking gate agents. They wheeled around a cart of snacks and beverages, and told us we’d shimmy our way to the very same seats aboard the very same type of plane that we’d sit in for the very same flight time using the very same boarding same passes, to land in New York, which was still the same different place we were trying to reach earlier. They were trying to quell the fear by confusing it, into thinking it never existed in the first place. Some passengers and flight attendants were so shaken, they declined to ascend again.
I sat in 35E next to an engine I hoped would not blow. Of course, I’d always had this hope, so in that sense, things were the same, but now I was aware of that hope, brutally and forcefully aware. The woman in 35C confirmed for the neighborhood that this was in fact a different plane because her armrest was broken on the broken flight, but this one was fully functional. On this flight, the two pilots who’d flown the busted plane to its non-event conclusion were not in the cockpit, as they replaced a young Indian family with an Indonesian nanny in the row behind me—the very last row on the plane. Nothing was the same at all.
In many ways, the fear I felt on that plane was palatable because it was a universal truth. It surrendered me and everyone else who felt it to all that is bigger than the frailty of life. I wasn’t going to grow wings, the plane was not going to regrow a new engine. If it landed normally, I would pick up from there. If it did not, I wouldn’t. It was a simple predicament of everything or nothing, without room for disagreement or interpretation.
As it turns out, however, commercial planes fly with two engines, though one is generally sufficient. It was statistically improbable to lose the second engine during our u-turn. Sometimes a plane’s engine will blow during a transatlantic flight and an emergency landing is not an option. In those cases, the flight will continue over the ocean until it can reach a safe landing point. In our case, we weren’t far from safety but the pilots couldn’t land the plane with the same amount of fuel. The plane was too heavy. They had to drop the fuel and make way through the rest of the air traffic.
I’ve taken several flights since then, but I don’t have to be on a plane to fall back into that fear, which demands to know what is real, where are you and where will you be the next moment. This particular stain has left me unable to answer those questions with the degree of confidence I could before. Have I come back to the same place? Did I want to?
Other fears are not as clear or valid. There was the time I hid under my bed when the fire department pounded and threatened to break down my door to investigate a leak, but I was too shocked by their aggression to move. There was also the time I panicked over Hurricane Irene and made my family stand the mattresses against the windows rather than sleep on them. In neither of these situations was my fear justified, healthy, or fruitful.
Of course, there are the fears in between these scenarios, somewhere between a plane crash and someone banging too loudly at your door. I once saw a schizophrenic man off of his medication become violent to my sister-in-law. In another instance, I rode in the backseat of a car in Egypt thrown into reverse when it came upon a roadblock set up by thieves.
One evening at about 11:30 p.m., I floated by each darkened window of the restaurants and shops that line Hoboken’s spine on the last third of my walk home from the train station. As I came to the Sixth Street intersection, I noticed a man wearing sinister-looking red leather pants and a matching tattered red and black leather jacket loitering. He snapped his fingers and darted around the wide sidewalk. He asked a group of three for a cigarette and a light. They obliged, but he smoked alone. As I approached him, the others dissipated. He noticed me and followed me across the street. I felt him keep my pace. His gait was part shuffle and part stomp. It was the slurring of steps.
I feared for more than my purse. I’m not particularly equipped to defend myself physically, and I don’t carry pepper spray or some other device to compensate for my short wingspan. I was holding my breath, my knees shook with fear. I felt chased. He was a threat to my body, my autonomy to walk home at whatever time I pleased.
I turned left a block early because Seventh Street is well lit. I realized two steps in that it is also less populated because it has none of Eighth Street’s restaurants or quick eat joints. I also regretted not knowing this street better. I had only a vague idea of where the alleys are hidden, doors to nowhere, gates with no locks. He continued to follow me. I rummaged for my phone, but I couldn’t focus. I felt a phantom hand land on my shoulder, a tug on my purse and walked faster.
I scanned and re-scanned the street until I noticed the taillights of a car parking slightly ahead, and made my way towards it. The driver and his companion popped open the trunk and seemed to stretch with relief after a long ride. I was relieved too and I slowed down when I was sure they’d seen me. I stopped near them, as casually as I could, and resumed the search for my phone. Soon, they began walking down the street and, without regard to the direction they were walking in, I followed them. The leather man did not.
In moments like that, fear is clarifying, making my vision and judgment crisp. I’m grateful for it.
The little girl on the ladder doesn’t know any of these fears, not one. She’s never fallen off a ladder or out of the sky, and doesn’t know yet that she doesn’t want to. Luckily, I haven’t either, but I wish I could have followed her all the way up that ladder, stainless as steel.