Transience

Experience a base jumper's bittersweet relationship with gravity.

 

 

on a good day

 

What do you call it when the world turns against you?

What’s the word for people who can read your mind?

What’s the medical term for a phobia, of phobias?

When I’m awake it’s always one of two things.

It’s either I wish I were dead, or I need a drink.

There’s no middle ground now. No in between.

Ebb or flow, that’s all I know how to do anymore.

 

learning to fly

 

So how do I go from occasional weekend drinker, to bourbon connoisseur, to terminal velocity deadweight?

Where did it really go wrong for me?

See here’s the thing… it’s a little fuzzy.

For a long while it was three to five just to stop shaking.

The first sign of addiction. More to be sober than it took to get drunk.

It was at least seven or eight before I even felt like myself.

Somewhere in there was a small window of time where it felt good.

The rest was getting back there, but of course it was folly.

 

transient

 

Two months after I meet Liam and Travis and Johnny Watterson, two months to the day, we’re in the emergency room waiting for news.

We wait for someone to come out and tell us about Liam’s kid brother Lucas.

In reality, we already know.

They’re not trying to save his life in there.

You don’t take a twelve-hundred foot nosedive into calm water and fight for life in the emergency room later.

This isn’t one of those times where no news is good news.

Right now what they’re doing is prolonging the pain.

Delaying the inevitable.

It’s what we’re all thinking but not saying.

If it’s Melissa or Melanie on my arm at this point I don’t even know.

As I say, it’s all kind of a blur.

Three days later we’re at the kid’s funeral, the whole time avoiding eye contact with Liam’s distraught mother.

She doesn’t understand.

She couldn’t. Not while she’s anchored to Earth.

 

mesh

 

Except for how she’s married to someone else, Anastasia is pretty much a perfect fit.

As a commercial real estate agent, what Anastasia can give me is access to all the tallest skyscrapers.

My friends and I jump bridges, the occasional cliff, a Cessna on slow news days.

Mostly though, we jump in the heart of the city where there’s about a million viable launch options, where you can cut your chute and catch a cab at the bottom.

Not that it’s ever so easy.

 

launch window

 

It’s all about higher ground.

With city jumps you don’t wait so long before throwing the chute.

Some guys will hold onto it until it’s almost too late, but it’s not a competition like that. You only ever challenge yourself.

Lucas held on the whole way down, still clutching the smaller pilot chute with white knuckles when they pulled him out of the river.

Now people are starting to talk.

The circles I travel in, people are saying Lucas didn’t want to hit that water at anything less than a million miles an hour.

It’s not even a month after burying his brother that Liam pulls the same stupid stunt, only this time it’s a crowded city street and cement brakes.

This seems to be a bad run of luck is all.

These are all just minor setbacks in the grand scheme of things.

 

sides

 

Around the time I became a base jumper, I stopped drinking.

If drinking was a long and complicated road to an early grave then base jumping was the express elevator.

The next best thing to suicide. Russian Roulette with more falling.

This far in, it can go either way and you’re happy.

You touch down sometimes and think, how much cooler would that have been if I tangled, if I took out the gunmetal grey Porsche?

I think of my life as occurring in four stages, the length of time each spans telescoping to nothing at the latter end.

These go, Loneliness, Dependency, Freedom, Death.

In that order.

 

death from below

 

Let me just say something right off the bat.

This isn’t one of those stories where someone’s chute fails and someone else uses super aerodynamic powers to catch up and save them seconds before impact.

Life just isn’t like that.

It’s shittier than in movies, but not by much.

And it’s not that there’s no point to it all, it’s just that there’s no common thread.

There are only ever various meaningless tangents, tied together by coincidence and physics.

If this is the story of anything it’s about people choosing to opt out of life for no reason apparent to anyone but them.

 

hot pursuit

 

The police don’t set up a task force until we start advertising for local businesses.

Five hundred dollars will get your banner attached to the illegal base jumper that everyone on the street below is looking up at.

You know the sort of fare.

Eat at Joe’s.

Buy more pants.

Cody is the new guy so he has to try it first.

He folds the plastic banner up inside his parachute and leaps into open space beneath the Amex towers skywalk.

People on the street stop walking, all slowly looking up.

Cody screams with glee. The banner streams out behind his chute as it deploys.

Werrington Brothers Fish Market. Our first paying customer.

Having a task force doesn’t make it any easier to arrest us, but it probably tips the scale.

The last advertising run we do is for Chan’s across the river.

When we go to collect our pay the manager tells us about a detective who was here.

For obvious reasons he can’t do business with us anymore.

At most, it’s an annoyance.

On the way home, I feel like I’m being followed. There are no cars in the rearview, no lurking men in dark glasses. It’s just a feeling.

 

when to give in

 

When you jump in the mountains there’s no point of reference.

You look down and all you see is white, snow on snow.

It helps if you have a buddy at the bottom. You pull the chord when you can make out the details of his face.

In the mountains you don’t deploy right away because the jump is so much higher.

Most of it is freefall.

Six or seven groups of us take a road trip every autumn, this long convoy of cut-price autos motoring up mountain passes.

Here there’s no urge to run away. You get to the bottom and you can take the time to enjoy what’s coursing through you.

Of course, out here there are no elevators either.

I’m talking a whole day climbing for thirty seconds of freefall.

Hardly seems worth it on paper, I know.

The pattern I see is everything in life eroding to s**t, given enough time.

They say this is the way of the world, but I never understood why it has to be.

The first time I try the banner it tangles and I slam back into the building I just left.

This is one of those rare occasions when instead of having to find a window or balcony we manage to get all the way to the roof.

Where I end up is about the thirty-eighth floor, dangling over the terrace of some decadent ultramodern affair.

My reflection slides away to reveal a woman clad shoulders to knees in fine silk.

She says, “What the hell man? You broke my Hibiscus.”

  

Anastasia

 

Her marriage has been on the rocks since their son died more than a year ago.

It wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought Andrew was a bad person, if he was a drunk or cruel to animals, but no such luck.

He’s just some ordinary guy dealt a blow in life and here’s me with insult to injury.

I knew about her husband long before I ever loved Anastasia.

I have no one to blame but myself.

Knowing what I was getting into doesn’t make it any easier, when she says it has to be over.

But I guess I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

timeline

 

Wait, says the officer.

“Before you go and do something you’re going to regret, hear me out.”

So I hear him out.

He says, “I want to buy that gun back off you.”

He says, “You know what I’m going to give you for my gun?”

There’s no currency in this world that I want now.

Officer Molloy, he says, “Your freedom.”

“Think about it,” he tells me. “Think hard.”

All they want are my friends locked up.

“Let’s make a deal,” says the greasy policeman.

Let’s talk about the possibility of my betraying everyone.

I can’t help thinking of Molloy as the evil dog catcher from a children’s story I’ve forgotten everything else about.

His biggest bargaining chip is that he thinks I want to live.

My way out of here is that I’m never coming back.

Get in the cage, I tell Molloy.

“Don’t throw your life away.”

Molloy, the rest of my life will be like a beautiful dream compared to anything you’ve ever known.

The anticipation is what I’m running on now.

I tell him, you’re the one who’s stuck here forever.

This is after the task force gets the jump on me at Rochester and Ewing.

After I’ve been fingerprinted and matched to a database somewhere.

What they want is for me to tell them the names of everyone else.

The police, they don’t want a base jumping problem in this city anymore.

This of course presents us with a conflict of interests.

 

peyote ugly

 

This high up, breathing isn’t unconscious anymore.

As the air thins you grow light-headed. It gets steadily harder to think, let alone climb.

Where we’re going today is different than the last time I was here.

Today we’re climbing so high that we have to camp out overnight, halfway up Mount whatever.

When our tents are pitched someone breaks out the peyote or salvia or ayahuasca. You know, something really mind-bending. Something hallucinogenic enough that it doesn’t feel like you’re grounded here anymore.

It’s more enhancement than escape, really.

But where does anyone draw the line?

The feeling is exactly the same as walking into a room and forgetting why you’re there.

The tea I’m drinking, whatever I just smoked, it’s opening mystical doors all around me.

Moments occur in real time, one after another, distinctly separate but somehow interwoven.

I can see everything, and nothing.

And they are the same.

 

short goodbye

 

The last time I see her is the mall where we used to meet.

Anastasia looks up at Santa’s sleigh, hanging beneath a glass-domed ceiling.

She’s surprised when I embrace her. Rigid.

Right away she turns on me and I can see it in her eyes.

“I thought about it,” she says.

And I walk away.

 

lost in

 

Every roadhouse, every service station, every landmark and convenience store, I almost to call.

I want to hear, “I was wrong.”

“It’s you I want,” imagined Anastasia tells me over and over.

I banter back, “Sorry baby. You were just a phase.”

I’ve put all that behind me now.

My real destiny isn’t anything to do with you.

I’m all on my own, back to where I started.

My eyes are wide open and I couldn’t be happier.

I think.

 

at first

 

It was never the drunk me that caused problems.

It was the sober me.

The weak, pathetic me who couldn’t say no to the first drink.

Every time, I’d promise myself never again.

Then in full control, I walked into a bar. A liquor store. A party.

In full control, I would swallow down that first drink, fanning an unquenchable thirst.

Sober, I was scared of what I might do drunk.

Drunk, I was scared of being sober.

So my problem wasn’t so much the alcoholism.

It’s that I was afraid all of the time.

 

then

 

The first time I watch Johnny Watterson jump that fear gets pushed somewhere deep, and never comes back.

If it’s perspective or distraction I get from this, I don’t even know.

It’s just what works for me, and now I found it.

 

down to earth

 

We watch Mikey’s chute explode out behind him and he swings on it, left, right, spiralling to snowfields below.

Looking over the edge of the world, it’s like glimpsing the implicate order that churns out space and time.

I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense. You’ll have to take my word for it.

For the first time, I can see all that lies ahead.

And I’m so happy right now.

Like every time before, the ground falls away, Earth opens up beneath me.

Suspended here at the edge of life and death for what feels like eternity, I’m closer to whole.

Almost there.

Then someone shouts, “Hey!”

Fading quickly behind me, distant sound on the wind, they say, “Guys.. he’s not wearing a chute.”

 

upbeat music

 

The world begins to swallow, dragging me down, pulling me inside itself with wide-open arms.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, it’s quiet.

Alone at last, without a care in the world.

The rest of my life will be like a beautiful dream.

Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess.

What I’m running on now… pure anticipation.

Author's Note

Ignore short story, what do you think of my pants, etc.

Reviews

[Melanie Jane Boicourt S..]

Wow! That as amazing. I always said that I would parachute before I die. I guess I need to put it up higher on my priorities list. Moments are fleeting and you never know when they will end.
This writing was wonderful. It pulled me in and it had a very unique style. It kept me guessing and related to me personally too.
Very nice job. I enjoyed reading your work. Welcome to the Writers Cafe. Thank you so much for sharing.
Love All, Mejasha