Black Box Cassette 6: LAX to SEA, SEA to YUL, YUL to MSY

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## Black Box Cassette 6: LAX to SEA, SEA to YUL, YUL to MSY

### Air Date

21/06/19

> *"The unfitness of us is exciting for a moment then it gets... I don't know. Awkward? Exhausting? I love this flight though."*
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This cassette is the recording of the Pilot's flights from Los Angeles to Seattle, Seattle to Montreal, and then Montreal to New Orleans in the early 1980s, done by the automatic black box recording system.

The Pilot's first musings consist of their thoughts on LA, where they don't feel they belong. At first, the city seems thrilling, but that 'unfitness' soon becomes uninviting and exhausting, and they inevitably enjoy the city much less after the first day. However, they do enjoy the flight along the coast to Seattle and the transition of the landscape as they come into the Pacific Northwest. They muse that everywhere on earth was once one place, but then it all still is, or it's always been lots of little places, before giving up and asking themself why they're still talking like they've got a passenger.

Later, they mention that they hate flying in the rain most, out of all kinds of weather, even though their navigation equipment makes it safe and relatively easy to do. After another question to themself about their needless out-loud rambling, they say that they're still looking for "you" (meaning Hester) even though they don't believe they'll find her.

On the flight out of Montreal, the Pilot exclaims that something ridiculous always happens when they're in the city. Once, when they used to smoke, they stood alone out on the street at 1AM and watched a bear pass by in (what they remember to be) total silence. Another time in Montreal, they lost their wallet, only to find it six months later when they stopped in at a bar they'd never been to, and the bartender recognised their face from their licence. He said someone had turned it in after finding it abandoned on a table, and they had no idea how it got there. Everything that had been in the wallet, including their wedding ring, was still there.

This time in Montreal, the wild thing that happened was running into an associate of Coleen's, who they hadn't seen in twenty years or more. They chatted with the woman, catching up, and she implied that she was working in journalism but wouldn't be pressed for any details, although the government was potentially involved in her work. She told them that a few years ago, she had run up against a strange agency that *acted* like they could be government, but had no official ties to it, and they "might as well be children playing dress up, for all the real authority they had." She said that she had observed over the last few weeks that the agency seemed to be looking for someone, coordinating their efforts into leaving a misleading trail of flyers. The agency knew that this person they were looking for was a woman, and which ride she hitched out of Atlanta, spent time in Birmingham, and then was in Jackson, before finding someone to take her to New Orleans.

The Pilot confesses that they were meant to be heading to Kansas City, but managed to swap that job out with a friend so that they could fly to Louisiana and try to track down Hester before anyone else did.