Having willed the airplane to crash–as he had warned the man who “always [sat] in business class” he was going to do–he was nevertheless distraught to find that while he had failed to meet his own demise, he had inadvertently destroyed everybody else on board. Now stuck, as he was, on an uninhabited island somewhere between where he had been and where he was going (metaphor?), he reasoned that the best thing to do would be to solicit rescue, board an airplane, will it to crash again, and die properly this time.
So he began creating sprawling messages in the sand with his feet–large enough, maybe, to be seen by a low-flying plane. But help failed to come, and he sank into dementia. As his mind turned against itself, his messages in the sand became more complex. Gone were pleas for rescue. Now he wrote drawn out apologies for some misdeed addressed to nobody you know.
Once a plane flew high overhead and he–clearly insane–imagined that the intended recipient of his messages had been a passenger and, even better, had seen his sand-written mea culpa. So he wrote another and waited for the next plane to appear in the sky.
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