The Dive
Written & Narrated By: Noah James
The Mountainous Faces Narrated By: Owen Virgin and Seann Madl
A man obsessed with routine becomes stuck on a never-ending plane ride into eternity, and must come to terms with the meaning of his life as one by one, passengers decide to dive out of the emergency door to end the endless.
Collection Two: “A Traveler’s Guide”: Stories about Space, Time & Other Worlds
Episode #: Seven
Release Date: Tuesday, August 6th
Est. Runtime: » 37 Min
Standout Lines:
"One thing was abundantly clear to Harvey. They weren’t falling. But they weren’t flying either. They were sort of just… stuck, in the middle of the sky, between empty blue on one side and fluffy white clouds on the other."
"He didn’t think it would be so hard to keep track of the days, but when you’re not needing to eat, and the sun never moved, and you sleep in fits and starts, day 5 could be day 7, day 7 could be day 5 or 9, and a few weeks could really be months, years even, never-ending eternity maybe."
“No. Don’t say it. If it’s my time, it’s my time,” he turned his empty cigarette case upside down, then clicked it shut, “...and it’s my time.”
From the Author:
Over the last few years, I’ve traveled more and more and more for both work and fun, and I have to say: my anxiety around flying has only increased the more that I’ve done it. I don’t know why. I can’t pack until the morning of, I’m in a major state of agitation the night before, and I always have this slight nagging feeling that... I really could die today.
But it’s nothing major! I generally shrug it off about 2 minutes after takeoff (somewhere I heard that most accidents happen right at the beginning or right at the end of a flight). And then I just sit there, mostly. Which is also pretty ridiculous, because for the entire history of human civilization, launching off into the sky would be an absolutely mind-bending miracle.
I think about this kind of thing often. Transport a person from a thousand years ago (or even a few hundred) to the modern age, and the sheer volume of things that would seem totally batshit crazy to them would be incomprehensible. What would Mozart think listening to his music through airpods? (How did it get in there?) What would Genghis Khan make of our unlimited supply of metal horses that barrel down the 405 at 80 miles an hour? (not even mentioning the fact that we all drive according to painted lines...That’s what’s keeping us “in our lanes”? Way too much faith in most drivers... but anyway!)
You would think a prompt circling around “other worlds” would take us away from our own, but I wanted to shrink the idea down to something simple, and less of a where than a when. I decided to place my story almost entirely in an airplane, just after we had put a man on the moon (mind-bending miracle), with someone who could experience flight for the first time. Truly, another world for him. The only problem is, he doesn’t have any idea just how much of another world he’s being launched into, but I’ll leave that for the story.
My inspiration for ‘The Dive’ came from my flight anxiety, from trying to view it from the outside, and that strange feeling when you take off in an airplane that your entire life is definitely out of your control... but here eat some tiny pretzels, put on your seatbelt, go to war over your armrest, and please turn your devices on airplane mode.
Because God forbid you leave your cell service on?? Or multiple people do?? and then the plane can’t -- what? Function? If that’s an actual problem while we all fly wherever we do around the world, then maybe things are a bit closer to the edge than we realize whenever we lift off the ground.
Safe travels!
— Noah
