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Crash and Drift
I died in a plane crash yesterday. I had considered the possibility beforehand, of course. I don't imagine that such contemplation is all that unusual--but you never truly know how you're going to react. I'd always said that I would be calm, that I would accept what I could not change and plummet into darkness stiff-faced. Beneath my proud and stoic facade, though, I had always believed I would go mad, shriek like a little girl and clutch for transparent straws. But there was a third option I hadn't considered--that I wouldn't have time for either.
I was stretched out rudely in my cramped airplane seat (my knee and shoulder well protruding into the aisle), sipping smuggled gin and decompressing after visiting my ex-wife, Caroline, in San Francisco. Caroline and I had married young--still in college--but despite our precocious commitment, six years had passed without any undesirable scars. But then we lost the baby.
I honestly believe that that single event bears sole responsibility for our downfall. Friends, family, even irresponsible psychologists have tried to convince me that the baby was just the final straw, that our youthful passions had failed to account for significant compatibility problems. I don't believe any of them. And frankly, I think I should know my own relationship better than any of them do.
After the incident, Caroline broke into fits on a regular basis, and with most of the wine glasses broken and no one but me to assault, I became to her the root cause of all evil. That's my view of it, of course. If you asked her, she would claim I withdrew into myself, that I no longer took any interest in her, that I wasn't supportive. I was never quite sure what the physical manifestation of "being supportive" was, but it's hard to be supportive when someone is calling you "self-absorbed" for building retaining walls in the backyard. Those walls were for both of us. We could have planted flowers on our new terraces. We could have had a copper fire pit and sat around the warmth together. But it seemed she wanted it all sloped, just like before.Ê She wanted it all just like before. Anyway, it's irrelevant now. I really tried, and I know she did, too.
Flying to see her in San Francisco was one of those spontaneous trips that probably wouldn't have happened had I thought about it much, so I'm glad I didnÕ't.Ê There were no awkward moments or arguments--not like years ago, after the baby--we just ate fresh papayas from the market and talked about whale hunting. When I left, we pressed each other in a goodbye hug, though not with cinematic, nostalgic longing--just in affirmation that here we were, two people who had helped to shape each other's lives, and that we both were better for it.
But back to the crash: I was ignorantly and pleasantly content in my aisle seat, feeling as if a part of my life had been settled, and I set to guzzling my gin. Then an engine exploded on the right side of the plane. A horrendous shriek spit across the speakers, and I'm sure that as I disappeared, I had a dumb look on my face.
But the good thing was that I didn't immediately have to go, or disappear, or do whatever you do when that kind of thing happens--death, I mean. I was able to stay for a little while. When I first realized that reprieve, I remember thinking it was a great idea, but then I was talking to Caroline again and she wouldn't let me get close. She was waving to me from across a river, a big river with a family of grizzlies chasing salmon that were jumping out of the water, but the salmon had these strange humanlike heads on them, and the grizzlies wouldn't eat them.Ê They just batted them down. I kept raising my voice but Caroline couldn't hear. Someone else was on the other side with her. And I think it was a man.
Then I found myself talking to my mother. We were in her dining room, trying to enjoy a pesto dinner, and I remember having to tell her that yes, I had been on that plane, that we had crashed into some Colorado mountain. It was a wretched place to die; I would rather have died at Caroline's in the bathroom, or in a corner CVS in some city that would swallow me before the ink was dry on my obituary. I didn't want to be a lookout point in a state forest or an interesting fact some slug would tell a promiscuous waif in a backseat of a Mercedes. But there I was anyway, dead.
My mom didn't believe me.
"Yes, Mom, I'm dead."
She thought I had pulled a horrible trick on her. She banged her hand on her oak dining room table and yelled.
"No you're not," she insisted. "You stop saying that."
"I'm really sorry, Mom. I really am. But I am dead."
So initially I thought this reprieve was a good idea, but sitting there with my hand on my mother's shoulder, her not even able to look at me as she cried, I was beginning to wonder. And then I got scared.
You would think that the fear would have been immediate, but truthfully, it took a while to come. Suddenly, I knew that I didn't have much more time. My body became so electric that I couldn't control its movement. I couldn't tell if the sensation was pain or pleasure, but it was overwhelming. Take the tingling, dropping sensation of love or love loss, multiply that by the sum of hope and dread, and there you had me, beginning to float into space.
Father was in space, too, which was really a collage of blurred images that came in and out of focus. For some reason this woman I always saw on my drive to work was there with my father; they were sitting on a cedar bench below a lamppost in a park, and they seemed to be fondling one another. That was perfectly fine with me, for my dad was smiling, the same way he used to smile when he was trying to tell a joke. Dad could never keep from laughing before he got to the punch line. Sometimes he tried to sneak a joke into a normal conversation, but he could never catch you off guard. He would always begin laughing.
Smiling was how I'd always remembered him, so it was good to see him that way.
But then they disappeared, too, and now I'm in a forest of cypresses on a soundless creek, which is catching the rays of sun and spreading them into a full spectrum of colors. The bottoms of the trees protrude from the water and look like monks, hunched before the display of light.
I know I came in here for something, that there was some task to which I had promised myself. But I'm not sure what it was, and it doesn't seem so important anymore. The earth and sky are melting into one; the beams of light are blending back into gold, and the air is electric.
Ivan Fehrenbach's recent book, That Time Cannot Be Forgotten: A Correspondence on the Holocaust, was published by Indiana University Press. Both his creative and non-fiction work has also appeared or is forthcoming in several national magazines as well as in The Daily Press, one of the largest newspapers in Virginia, and another of his book-length manuscripts, A Pistol at His Chest: Memoir of a World War II Soldier, is forthcoming. He teaches writing at a local college and was recently admitted to the Stonecoast M.F.A. program in fiction. .(February 2006).
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