Another time I rode a prop plane next to an Arizona prison guard. He looked about 19, slight, crew cut, smallish tattoo of an anchor and a rose above his wrist. He believed in the death penalty and to illustrate its wisdom told me all about X, a death row inmate who'd killed two inmates and vowed to kill a guard. Literally uncontainable, X had sliced his way out of double-thick Plexiglas enclosures countless times and was known to make zip-guns from screws in a matter of seconds. The screw would become the bullet, sharpened on the cement floor, the guard said. He'd kill anyone. It must be because he's claustrophobic, I said. He must be crazy. He must be a genius. The guard had long bony delicate fingers and a little smirk on his mouth, which was also delicate, thin. I imagined him being raped repeatedly, smirking, his uniform pants around his knees. Would you care for my peanuts? I asked him.

An airline pilot passenger who was stuck in the jump-seat took the empty space beside me. He drew me a picture of wind-shear on a yellow legal pad. First a cloud, i.e. weather system, then a series of lines coming down and curving up in all directions to indicate the wily path of the wind. A plane was then placed, in blue ball-point, at the outermost tip of the wind-wave , and the pilot said, That would be it. Although I didn't fully understand, I was not anxious to know more.

My worst moment of flying comes when I picture myself on earth gazing up at a tiny silver plane. That would be me at this moment, I think, light-headed at the image of myself hurtling through space. Being in two places--the place of awe (looking up) and the place of dread (inside the plane)--at the same time.

The woman who tore her love letters into shreds told me a complicated story of a boyfriend who dumped her, but she was crying because her father was dying, not that she got along with her father. He was dying in Boston and gathered at his bedside were his estranged wife, her mother, and a sibling she had never met. She also owned seventeen cats and showed me a photograph of each which she kept in an album in the handbag.

The pilot had Tourette's. He twitched throughout the three-hour flight, knee smacking into his food tray and upsetting Cranapple cocktail, arm jerking out to slap mine at irregular intervals. I read Baudelaire: Folly and Error, Avarice and Vice/Employ our souls and waste our bodies force. Why did you underline "black masses?" asked the pilot, twitching.

The sobbing woman wore a nubby green sweater, low-heeled pumps. The pilot wore a grey suit, top shirt button undone, brown tie untied, cuffs unfastened. The prison guard wore a white tee shirt that had seen many washings, silky black hair on his wrists beneath the tattoo and beneath the knuckles of his long, bony fingers which you could imagine strangling a neck.

The pilot thinks I am a satanist and takes out a tiny new testament over which he crouches, twitching. The sobbing woman, dry-eyed now, recites her employment history: first education, then ed-admin, then corporate, very good at corporate, then moved in with boyfriend, quit corporate, backed boyfriend's recording studio. I have my whole life ahead of me, she said. Clean slate.

The little square plane window holds always, remarkably, the same view: part of a wing, part of a cloud, a section of blue. Always the same though the proportions may vary, wing as foreground, cloud as theme, sky as punctuation. Or vice versa.

The pilot made a list of safe and unsafe planes. He said: Avoid two-engine planes when traveling overseas. I told him about my scariest flight when the pilot announced he had drifted off-course, flight attendants handing out free booze to everyone, regardless of age. Eleven year olds drinking miniature bottles of Scotch in preparation for death.

The criminal called X sliced through the double-sided Plexiglas in a matter of minutes. Although the guards wear bulletproof vests beneath their shirts, the screw-fashioned bullets are able to pierce them. It costs thirty-thousand dollars a year to keep an inmate on death row, the guard informed me in the manner of one who has repeated this sentence thirty-thousand times.

I love to fly. I love the compartmentalized food, I love the window seat, I love the restroom with its murky light and the rules about smoking, flushing, and returning to my seat. I love the seat belts, their fat shiny locks, their durable nylon straps and the way the food trays flip down and rest on my knees and the headphones and the button which causes the seat back to drop exactly two inches. I love the orange oxygen masks with their terrifying apparatuses and the comforting knowledge that the seat cushions can be used as flotation devices. I love Sky West magazine, the white credit card phones and the fact that for x amount of time, my job is to sit here and kill time. I love being between places, and so nowhere, en route— it feels to me like dreaming.

On a flight from London to New York an eighty-year-old Iranian woman begged the pilot to allow her to sit with him in the cockpit. Amazingly, he agreed. The flight attendant escorted her up the aisle, through the plush and redolent first class section and into the utilitarian pilot's quarters where she was strapped into a bucket seat in front of a large, curved windshield. Oh it was so beautiful, she said later. She had been on her way to visit her daughter who lay unconscious in a United States hospital, and she said it was like flying into heaven, into paradise.