According to an article in the Edmonton Journal, “Dr. Graham Hubbard, a Denver Psychiatrist, who has made an exhaustive study of skyjackers, says...the average hijacker is trying to redeem a life of bitter failure and is not averse to shooting it out in a crowded jetliner.”1 And who else in history but Odysseus better represents the idea of a perpetual redeemer, always ready to “shoot it out” -- a John Wayne of the ancients? Indeed, Homer’s Odyssey is recapitulated in a spat of airline hijackings spanning the late 50s to early 60s, an island-hopping adventure that ends in May 1961 with (what might as well be) Odysseus himself wildly waving a gun around the cockpit, demanding a trip to Cuba -- because he needs to see his wife. Think of a bedraggled Harrison Ford playing the hero’s part, or Mel Gibson in an old man’s skin, in need of a drink. “We have to go back to the island,”2 he says through a patchy beard, yelling into the night.
But take a breath: like the ancient text, this plot follows a chiastic (or ring) structure, moving outward from an obscure and oceanic center, the beginning mirroring the end. The story commences amidst the fetid throes of battle in the lush Cuban spring of 1958. Che and Castro are cavorting in the Sierra Maestra mountains, smoking cigars and making tents. Their revolution against General Batista is at full tilt, which is fitting, for it is only out of war that Odysseys can begin. Our hero wants to return to his wife, Penelope (or the fading idea he has of her), but General Batista’s hold on the island is not unlike Calypso’s grip on Ogygia, the tiny way-point holding Odysseus in the sea. That is, both Batista and Calypso promise freedom, but only on the other side of a strangled love, a dangerous affection manifested in curfews and boundaries, limits on time and space, the very things that any women’s magazine would tell you a man cannot abide. Myths endure, however, and who are we to flout such thoroughly researched lifestyle columns in the face of human cruelty? “Police cars and military vehicles prowl the streets.”3
Yes, imagine yourself as the hero, sitting on the island, surrounded by Guerrillas and cobalt mines and smoke and the others. You spend your days on the shore “searching the horizon for a sail that never came, sick with longing.”4 Here, unfortunately, you are not a sailor but a pilot. You see the constellations moving overhead, bright lights arcing and blinking across the sky, leaving vapor trails in the dawn. These are new constellations, no more than 50 years old, and they’re made of metal. Flying machines. Where are they going so quickly and what do they mean? The god’s are restless now and jittery. They have “drawn lots for their share of the universe.”5 They can’t sit still, and neither can you. You feel domesticated and afraid. This island, this war, this beach and this sand -- they’re just cramping your style. A man cannot live this way, braying in an empty stall. Screw Calypso and Batista, it’s time to go. You will take what is yours and make it yours. Appeal to the gods, and steal an airplane. But how? By flying, obviously -- but not on preordained lines, only on those trajectories which you choose, at will or at random. Can it be called flying any other way? It doesn’t matter. This is what it means to be a man, you think. Ah, mobility. It feels good. The flight is yours. Everywhere is available to you, but you pick The United States, where Penelope dwells.
Drifting over the dark water, there is a silence between the landings, and you settle into that quiet, wondering what will happen to you. You may question the whole endeavor -- your hubris, your narcissism. Perhaps now you will finally notice the engines that drive the operation, or the group of people huddled in the passenger section, whimpering and shaking, but don’t worry -- the American public accepts you like an old aunt, pinching your cheek and giving you money, lauding you as a hero and crusader of freedom. You are forgiven because you have defeated the Cubans and defeated yourself. You have “escaped the hot breath of the Cuban air force draft.”6 Everything feels wonderful, until you learn that “25 Cuban planes had been ‘sky jacked’ to the U.S. by Cubans fleeing their homeland,”7 and that you are not the first. Rather, you join “Miami’s growing colony of Cuban pilots in exile today.”8 That’s right: the suitors are already here and they are just like you. There will be no battle to see who is best, no arrows to shoot with precision -- for your aims are all the same, and equally as pure. Just accept your fate and relax.
The search for Penelope is aided by political asylum -- and ultimately hindered by an unwelcoming economy and language barrier. After a series of odd jobs and shitty apartments, youdecide you must have been mistaken. What you are looking for, what you have been promised, is not here in America at all. These women, one after another, have not been Penelope, neither in name nor in spirit. It’s “not Penny’s boat.”9 That you too may not have been Odysseus is a possibility you don’t entertain. You are not someone else. No, you think, I am here, and she is there, in Cuba. You have to go back to the island. “On May 1, 1961, a man with a gun took over a National Airlines Convair 440 plane bound for Miami and ordered it flown to Cuba.”10 This act will be condemned by the American people and remembered as the nation’s first domestic airline hijacking, all symmetries unrecognized. They will insist you escaped Cuba for emancipation and glory -- but absconded from the US for mayhem and terror. You are not fleeing but looting. In America, after all, what might you possibly escape from -- or to for that matter? Within a year, laws will be effected for the first time regarding piracy in the air. You were a hero, but now you’re a murderer, the progenitor of “the most terrifying era in aviation history.”11
Yet, like all heroes, you’ve always been a murderer. It’s your job -- which is not an affirmation of murderers but a denigration of heroes. Before you land your stolen plane, before it leaves you on the runway, “effected at San Antonio de Los Banos at aproximately 4:30 p.m.,”12 you will pass over the ocean in the darkness -- not the dark of night obviously, but something else -- as you have so often in the past. You will fly “through restricted military areas between Miami and Key West and at abnormal altitudes,” taking “a zig zag course,”13 but why are you stalling? Why don’t you just get there already? Is it because you’re trying to “alert the authorities”? Because you can’t go through with it? No -- it’s because in that silence you will briefly admit to yourself what it is that you want: not the United States and not Cuba, but the place above the water, between the islands, before arrivals. In the sea, there are protozoa that live in other protozoa, called to one another by a seductive secretion, fluid chemical attractants expanding in space. How can you become that gaseous release? You think of tides coming in and out, their perpetual return, and it gives you a cold, impersonal chill to realize you desire, not Penelope or anything of yourself, but only this unoccupiable space between the two. The only way to be here is to be going somewhere else. You will make this trip at least 85 times before 1972 because you want to be the arrow as it passes through the center. And you want to be the center passed through by the arrow. But you’re just a man, like every other man, flying a stolen plane -- and there’s no way to give it back.
Dolan Morgan is a writer whose fiction and poetry can be found in venues such as Armchair/Shotgun and The Believer (upcoming).
2, 8. Cuse, Carlton and Lindelof, Damon. "Through the Looking Glass." Lost. Season 3, Episode 22. 2007.
3-4. Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Grand Central Publishing: New York. 1942.
5, 7. “3 Cuban Pilots Hijack Plane for Trip to Exile.” The Times-News. April 14, 1958.
6, 9. Cavanaugh, Jack. “First Hijacking Dates Back to 1961.” The Leader Post. March 13, 1972.
7. See 5.
8. See 2.
9-10. See 6.
11-12. Lawrence, David. “Piracy in the Air.” The Portsmouth Review. June 14, 1961.
But take a breath: like the ancient text, this plot follows a chiastic (or ring) structure, moving outward from an obscure and oceanic center, the beginning mirroring the end. The story commences amidst the fetid throes of battle in the lush Cuban spring of 1958. Che and Castro are cavorting in the Sierra Maestra mountains, smoking cigars and making tents. Their revolution against General Batista is at full tilt, which is fitting, for it is only out of war that Odysseys can begin. Our hero wants to return to his wife, Penelope (or the fading idea he has of her), but General Batista’s hold on the island is not unlike Calypso’s grip on Ogygia, the tiny way-point holding Odysseus in the sea. That is, both Batista and Calypso promise freedom, but only on the other side of a strangled love, a dangerous affection manifested in curfews and boundaries, limits on time and space, the very things that any women’s magazine would tell you a man cannot abide. Myths endure, however, and who are we to flout such thoroughly researched lifestyle columns in the face of human cruelty? “Police cars and military vehicles prowl the streets.”3
Yes, imagine yourself as the hero, sitting on the island, surrounded by Guerrillas and cobalt mines and smoke and the others. You spend your days on the shore “searching the horizon for a sail that never came, sick with longing.”4 Here, unfortunately, you are not a sailor but a pilot. You see the constellations moving overhead, bright lights arcing and blinking across the sky, leaving vapor trails in the dawn. These are new constellations, no more than 50 years old, and they’re made of metal. Flying machines. Where are they going so quickly and what do they mean? The god’s are restless now and jittery. They have “drawn lots for their share of the universe.”5 They can’t sit still, and neither can you. You feel domesticated and afraid. This island, this war, this beach and this sand -- they’re just cramping your style. A man cannot live this way, braying in an empty stall. Screw Calypso and Batista, it’s time to go. You will take what is yours and make it yours. Appeal to the gods, and steal an airplane. But how? By flying, obviously -- but not on preordained lines, only on those trajectories which you choose, at will or at random. Can it be called flying any other way? It doesn’t matter. This is what it means to be a man, you think. Ah, mobility. It feels good. The flight is yours. Everywhere is available to you, but you pick The United States, where Penelope dwells.
Drifting over the dark water, there is a silence between the landings, and you settle into that quiet, wondering what will happen to you. You may question the whole endeavor -- your hubris, your narcissism. Perhaps now you will finally notice the engines that drive the operation, or the group of people huddled in the passenger section, whimpering and shaking, but don’t worry -- the American public accepts you like an old aunt, pinching your cheek and giving you money, lauding you as a hero and crusader of freedom. You are forgiven because you have defeated the Cubans and defeated yourself. You have “escaped the hot breath of the Cuban air force draft.”6 Everything feels wonderful, until you learn that “25 Cuban planes had been ‘sky jacked’ to the U.S. by Cubans fleeing their homeland,”7 and that you are not the first. Rather, you join “Miami’s growing colony of Cuban pilots in exile today.”8 That’s right: the suitors are already here and they are just like you. There will be no battle to see who is best, no arrows to shoot with precision -- for your aims are all the same, and equally as pure. Just accept your fate and relax.
The search for Penelope is aided by political asylum -- and ultimately hindered by an unwelcoming economy and language barrier. After a series of odd jobs and shitty apartments, youdecide you must have been mistaken. What you are looking for, what you have been promised, is not here in America at all. These women, one after another, have not been Penelope, neither in name nor in spirit. It’s “not Penny’s boat.”9 That you too may not have been Odysseus is a possibility you don’t entertain. You are not someone else. No, you think, I am here, and she is there, in Cuba. You have to go back to the island. “On May 1, 1961, a man with a gun took over a National Airlines Convair 440 plane bound for Miami and ordered it flown to Cuba.”10 This act will be condemned by the American people and remembered as the nation’s first domestic airline hijacking, all symmetries unrecognized. They will insist you escaped Cuba for emancipation and glory -- but absconded from the US for mayhem and terror. You are not fleeing but looting. In America, after all, what might you possibly escape from -- or to for that matter? Within a year, laws will be effected for the first time regarding piracy in the air. You were a hero, but now you’re a murderer, the progenitor of “the most terrifying era in aviation history.”11
Yet, like all heroes, you’ve always been a murderer. It’s your job -- which is not an affirmation of murderers but a denigration of heroes. Before you land your stolen plane, before it leaves you on the runway, “effected at San Antonio de Los Banos at aproximately 4:30 p.m.,”12 you will pass over the ocean in the darkness -- not the dark of night obviously, but something else -- as you have so often in the past. You will fly “through restricted military areas between Miami and Key West and at abnormal altitudes,” taking “a zig zag course,”13 but why are you stalling? Why don’t you just get there already? Is it because you’re trying to “alert the authorities”? Because you can’t go through with it? No -- it’s because in that silence you will briefly admit to yourself what it is that you want: not the United States and not Cuba, but the place above the water, between the islands, before arrivals. In the sea, there are protozoa that live in other protozoa, called to one another by a seductive secretion, fluid chemical attractants expanding in space. How can you become that gaseous release? You think of tides coming in and out, their perpetual return, and it gives you a cold, impersonal chill to realize you desire, not Penelope or anything of yourself, but only this unoccupiable space between the two. The only way to be here is to be going somewhere else. You will make this trip at least 85 times before 1972 because you want to be the arrow as it passes through the center. And you want to be the center passed through by the arrow. But you’re just a man, like every other man, flying a stolen plane -- and there’s no way to give it back.
Dolan Morgan is a writer whose fiction and poetry can be found in venues such as Armchair/Shotgun and The Believer (upcoming).
***
REFERENCE NOTES
1. “U.S. Airlines to Enter New Era of Terror.” Edmonton Journal. April 19, 1972.2, 8. Cuse, Carlton and Lindelof, Damon. "Through the Looking Glass." Lost. Season 3, Episode 22. 2007.
3-4. Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Grand Central Publishing: New York. 1942.
5, 7. “3 Cuban Pilots Hijack Plane for Trip to Exile.” The Times-News. April 14, 1958.
6, 9. Cavanaugh, Jack. “First Hijacking Dates Back to 1961.” The Leader Post. March 13, 1972.
7. See 5.
8. See 2.
9-10. See 6.
11-12. Lawrence, David. “Piracy in the Air.” The Portsmouth Review. June 14, 1961.