Nerves and G-Forces

I got to the aviation lab at 11:40 on a Tuesday night because that was the only slot the college had open, and I was already in a mood about it. I'm Mavis, twenty-eight, a Black woman and a commercial pilot, and I'll probably still be doing recertifications in buildings like this one. The place smelled like old carpet and the vending machine in the corner hummed like it was offended by something.

The problem was that the lights were already on and two guys were already arguing at the simulator.

"This is my booked time," I said, holding up the printout. "Eleven forty to two. It says so right there."

The older guy, heavyset, keys on a lanyard, looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. "You're Mavis, right? I'm Monty, I run the sim." He gestured at the other one. "This is Niko. He teaches physics here. He's, uh, he's been making a case."

"Making a case for what?" I asked.

"That the machine doesn't need a real pilot's schedule," Niko said. He was tall, pale, dark-haired, Greek-American by the name on his faculty badge, thirty-one maybe, sleeves rolled up like he'd been about to fix something. "I booked it for a demonstration. My students need the aerodynamics demo Monday morning."

"Then book Monday morning," I said. "I have a recertification deadline. The FAA does not care about your aerodynamics demo."

"The FAA doesn't care about anything, that's my point about aviation generally," he said, and I swear he smiled while he said it.

Monty sighed the sigh of a man who had been listening to this for twenty minutes before I arrived. "Look. The session's glitchy anyway. Half the panels are running old firmware. I'll set you both up, Mavis flies her profiles, Niko watches, nobody touches anybody's throttles. I'll sit here and drink my coffee."

"That's not the arrangement I agreed to," Niko said.

"Tough," Monty said.

I dropped my bag in the chair and got to work while they finished pretending to negotiate. The sim was one of those fixed-base jobs, no motion platform, just a wide screen and a cockpit that had seen better decades. Monty poked at the load screen twice before it took.

"She's going to drop frames on the ILS," he warned me. "If the glideslope needle does something insane, that's us, not you."

"Great. Recertifying on a broken toy," I said.

"Welcome to community college aviation," Monty said, and settled into his rolling chair with his coffee.

I ran the first profile cold and clean because I'm good at this and I was determined to be seen being good at it, which I will admit even now. On the third one I felt a presence at my shoulder and there was Niko, leaning in, arms crossed, watching my instruments like he was grading a midterm.

"Your descent rate's drifting," he said.

"I know my descent rate."

"You're a hundred feet per minute fast on the approach and you keep correcting late. You correct, overshoot, correct again. It's a control loop problem. Damping. Very basic."

"Very basic," I repeated. "You've flown an approach, have you?"

"I've simulated thousands," he said. "On this exact machine. And in theory, which is where the actual answer lives."

"Theory," I said. "Right. Theory doesn't have crosswinds."

"Theory has everything, that's the point of it."

"Okay, Professor, fly the missed approach segment in your theory and tell me how the theory feels when the wind shoves you sideways at four hundred feet."

He leaned closer, and his hand came down on the back of my seat, not touching me, just close enough that I could feel the warmth off his sleeve. "You're hunting the localizer again. Right now. Look at it."

I looked. I was hunting the localizer. I flattened it out with maybe two hundred yards of concrete left and hated him completely.

"Better," he said.

"Get away from my shoulder."

"It's a public lab."

"It's my booked session."

Monty got up, which I noticed only because the chair squeaked. "I'm going out for a cigarette. Ten minutes. Don't break anything, the parts take six weeks." He pointed at both of us like we were children. "Both of you. Six weeks."

The door swung shut behind him and the lab got very quiet, just the vending machine and the soft fake engine noise.

"Your instructor is afraid of us," Niko said.

"He's afraid of paperwork. It's different." I reset the scenario and started the next approach. Niko didn't move from behind my seat.

"Say something or go away," I told him.

"You fly like someone who learned to win arguments," he said. "You push the airplane around instead of asking it."

"Oh my god. Do you practice this? Is there a book of stuff to say to pilots that makes pilots want to hit you?"

"Does it make you want to hit me?"

I turned in the seat and looked up at him and he was already looking at me, and that was the moment I should have gone back to my approach. Instead I said, "You are the most annoying man I have ever been locked in a building with."

"The building's not locked. Monty's outside."

"Then leave."

"You first."

Neither of us left. The approach timer ran out and the screen went red and reset itself and I didn't touch the controls.

"You've been looking at my mouth for about a minute," he said.

"I've been looking at the clock behind your head."

"I'm standing in front of the clock."

"You are, actually. You did that on purpose."

"I did that on purpose," he agreed. He didn't lean down. He waited, which was somehow more irritating than leaning down would have been, because it put the move on me. "Well?"

"This is a terrible idea," I said. "I'm here to work. You're here to be wrong about aviation."

"Is that a no?"

"It's not a no," I said, because I am honest to a fault and also because he had forearms and I had been single for a while and the lab was dark except for the glow of a fake runway. "But if you tell anyone I kissed you in a flight simulator I will deny it and also I know your students."

"Kiss me, then," he said. "Since you're the one with all the control."

I reached up, grabbed a fistful of that rolled-up sleeve, and pulled him down. It was not a nice kiss. It was fast and bitter, all teeth on the first pass, and he made a surprised sound against my mouth and then his hand came up to my jaw and it got slower and worse, in the good sense of worse. I tasted coffee on him. His other hand landed on the armrest beside my thigh and gripped it, and I heard the vinyl squeak.

"You correct late," he muttered into my mouth.

"You talk during kissing," I muttered back. "Shut up."

He shut up. For about ten seconds. Then he pulled back an inch, breathing hard, and said, "So the localizer. When you chase it late, the fix is actually..."

I grabbed his collar and dragged him back in.

That was where it stood, his knee against the side of my seat, my hand in his shirt, when the door opened and Monty's voice came in ahead of him.

"Smoke break's getting longer every year, huh," I said, already turned back to the screen, hands in my lap like a church lady.

Monty looked at us. He looked at Niko, who was somehow both standing upright and visibly disheveled, and at me, and at the sim screen, which was sitting on the menu because I'd forgotten the approach entirely.

"Firmware's not the only glitchy thing in here," Monty said, and sat back down in his squeaky chair, and turned his coffee around like it needed reorganizing.

Niko cleared his throat. "I was explaining damping."

"Sure," Monty said. "Damping."

I put my hands on the yoke and stared at the menu and my face was on fire. The next profile loaded and I flew the worst approach of my professional career, and I could feel Niko grinning at the back of my head the whole way down, and I could not decide yet whether I was going to kill him or climb into his lap, and the vending machine hummed on like it had seen all of this before and would see it again.

He waited until 12:40. I know because I was watching the clock, because my recertification block ran until 2 and because watching the clock was easier than watching him. Monty finished his coffee around 12:30, started putting his things away, and said, "Listen, I'm gonna head out. You know how to kill it, hit the master, don't touch the breaker, don't be a hero."

"I know," I said.

"And the alarm's touchy. Don't lean on the panel."

"Got it, Monty."

He gathered his keys off the hook, and at the door he turned around