Some take solace and motivation from this realization. Significant hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, flooding, ice storms, tsunamis, all that nature throws at us and the slew of human-created disasters as well, teach victims the hard way that their lives are fragile and temporally insignificant. I won’t insult the people who’ve also endured these life-changing events and their slow, painful aftermath by referring to the good that can come of them, but there’s no doubt that they result in profound destabilization of forms, physical and otherwise, both in a positive and negative sense. I have a lot of experience, both professionally and personally, with disasters. In that piece (the hub of my first collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism) and the other individual pieces in that book, a terrible airliner disaster, Flight 389, became a touchstone. The worst of these dreams-and the worst of my adulthood-I had late in the process of writing what would become “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” ( bit.ly/3gn2BlB). Airports and airplanes have throughout my life figured into my dreams-usually in an ominous if not disastrous sense. This sequence haunted me for decades and, of course, was horribly echoed on September 11th, 2001. I was just in time to watch the lead character, played by Richard Burton, bring a jet airliner down into a city skyline simply by staring at it. When I was a boy, I caught part of a horror/disaster film called The Medusa Touch at my grandmother’s house. The idea of an airline disaster goes back to old dreams and nightmares. Although it’s not particularly similar, this story reminds me of the Richard Matheson story “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Was this or the subsequent Twilight Zone adaptation inspiration, or did something else inspire the story?Īny similarity to that story (and the famous, subsequent adaptations) is a coincidence, though the setup is almost identical (a man with a fear of flying is on an airliner), so there may well be some unconscious borrowing going on.

The secret of ventriloquism