You were on a secret journey, a pilgrimage to find your true self by abandoning the comforts of home, by throwing over who you were supposed to be. When you were sick—amoebic dysentery, malaria—you lay in bed in faraway youth hostels, fasting, dizzy with fever, listening to the ocean and the voices in Arabic or Hindi or some language you’d never heard before drifting up to your window. When you were in Nepal, you trekked into the Himalayas without knowing where you were going, searching for epiphany, and then almost froze in your epiphany at eighteen thousand feet. When you read a book about the medicinal benefits of drinking your own urine, you drank your pee every day for eight months because—well, you sound like a madman now—because you thought it would make you whole, make you strong, give you back some essence of yourself that you’d somehow squandered for so many years.
But what were you looking for out there in the world, anyway? What did you want? One thing: to match your words with your deeds. That was it: Marry the thought, the word, and the action. Make it one single reflex based on good intention. In this big world of hurt, you thought you could make a difference. Be one pure, unalloyed thing. A place of refuge. Shelter. Like, Give me your tired and poor and huddled masses. Give them to me, man.
So here you go, hombre. Welcome to the Sudan, to civil war, to these naked kids crawling in the dirt at your feet, covered in flies, too spent to swat them away. Welcome to sleeping beneath trees, the ground so hot at midnight your T-shirt is soaked, then waking to twenty hovering faces, more Dinka kids touching your hair. And here’s to shitting in shallow holes, no running water, and never-ending days in the brutal sun. Here’s to wondering if that distant thunder happens to be bombs from government Antonovs or if those nightly gunshots—what you will come to call “a little night music”—mean it’s time to get up and run.
No, this wasn’t some Sally Struthers late-night commercial, this was the real thing. This was one rebel group killing people at a food drop and spilling their blood over sacks of sorghum. This was coworkers getting shot and killed, land-mined and kidnapped. This was guinea worm and Ebola and sleeping sickness and about five other nameless diseases that could liquidate you instantly. And this finally was eight, nine, ten thousand dying people at an airdrop, standing right smack on the big white X, and you, Jason Matus, trying to clear them before the cargo plane appeared, before it released fifteen tons of maize or high-energy biscuits from eight hundred feet, just slid it down rollers on pallets and let it waterfall out the back hatch of the plane. The Dinka—and other tribes in the south, the Nuer and Luo—seemed only to half understand the danger of getting pancaked by a pallet loaded with 110-pound bags of maize. They held their hands out, mimicking a bird, smiling at you. Didn’t they understand that one mishandled toggle would send fifteen tons down on their heads? That thought drove you through the crowd like a lunatic, shoving and yelling and then looking up at the sky for some sign of the plane. Jetki rot! Move! Get back! Did you hear me? Pick up and get back!
And then later, soaked with sweat, taking refuge in the shade of a tamarind tree, you watched the glory of that first food drop, helped command it with the radio in your hand. “Whiskey Whiskey to UN Foxtrot 12, clear to drop.” A powerful thing, to see that dolphin-nosed aircraft marked WFP—World Food Programme—appearing out of nowhere, roaring from Kenya across the great nothingness of southern Sudan. Like the cavalry riding in. Its contrail like an umbilical cord. The hatch lowering and then the food—just awesome the way it poured out into all that light and space and sky, like the loaves and the fishes. Beautiful, the way the sacks speckled the air, each one full of good Kansas corn, and hit the ground with a thud and then, as if they were full of living bodies, turned somersaults. On this afternoon, there seemed to be nothing but big peace and three hundred somersaulting sacks of maize!
Still, you knew nothing yet. You came across that field, a magic man with hairy arms who’d perhaps conjured a big bird to feed the Dinka. Yes, for a few of them, you were the prophet fulfilling the prophecy. When the porters had removed nearly all the food and stacked it neatly beneath a tree, you went into the field to inspect, to make sure all the maize from the broken bags had been scooped up. The sun was in your eyes, and you didn’t notice the ten thousand people lining the edge of the field. You didn’t notice the first wave of them, or the second, or the third, until it was too late. They were stampeding toward you—sprinting, yelling, rioting. Hunchbacks and women with shriveled breasts; clubfoots and bloated children waving empty gourd bowls. Their faces twisted in pain, their eyes bloodshot and wild. Like some kind of nightmare. They came for you, but then they didn’t even touch you. They dove into the dirt at your feet; people were scrounging against one another for the few leftover kernels of maize, clawing the earth with their fingernails, bickering and breathing as one mass. So thin you could see the underworkings of their bodies, see right to their beating hearts.
And you—you just stood there, frozen, the hairs on the back of your neck straight up. You watched their fingers work the dirt, the curled-over kids gobbling raw kernels, hair yellowed from the Hunger. Even today, five years later, after five years in the Sudan, at the wise age of thirty, you still remember towering over them, holding yourself in until you couldn’t anymore, until you thought you might be losing it. No, my brother, you didn’t know anything until that moment, knew nothing at all about your place in this world until you—Jason Matus, American—stood among the people and were rendered completely invisible.
So wake now in Lorton, Virginia, invisible. Wake in this forty-five-year-old body with a walrus mustache, your waist thickening, skin loosening, the whole fleshy ornament of you beginning to schlump earthward. Rise in this cramped, brick two-bedroom among other cemented-together brick houses in a perfectly bland brick subdivision on a busy thoroughfare. Feel your way down the dark halls of your cramped brick house, past the photographs of your family—your wife, the teacher’s aide; your teenage son with the blinding fastball—to the kitchen with flowered wallpaper and linoleum floor. Drink coffee at the oak table you refinished yourself, sitting in a pool of one-hundred-watt light, and then head out the door for the one-hour bus ride to Washington, D.C., to the old Annex II building and your job in the Congressional Budget Office. Like every day. Like every day before and every day after.
This is the grind, your nine–to–five-thirty as a low-level government bureaucrat. Your life of put-on-the-same-old-clothes and take-the-same-bus and drink-the-same-bad-coffee and unjam-the-same-damn-Xerox-machine. Like, Do we have enough Bic pens around here? See, you’re nobody. Or you’re everybody—but either way, you’re invisible. Just another guy. The anonymous Joe up in the grandstand, hot dog in mouth, proudly watching his son pitch goose eggs into the seventh inning. Invisible—which is why sometimes January 13, 1982, feels like a dream, as if it all happened to another Lenny Skutnik who wasn’t you, who wasn’t twenty-nine then, with a newborn baby. That day, like every day, you woke, rose, and stumbled down the dark hall. You drank coffee. On the radio, clouds, some snow in the forecast. You were thinking: Snow? C’mon, this is D.C. You carpooled with your father, Marty, and some coworkers. At the office, you did the usual. Checked the copy machines, delivered the mail. Ate lunch in the cafeteria, a club sandwich, and every once in a while stole a look out the window.
By early afternoon, the snow was so thick it seemed as if the moon itself had blown up, was coming down in woolly clumps. Everything falling out of the sky but car fenders. Seemed impossible, but all federal workers were let out early. And suddenly you were heading back to the brick subdivision to shovel the walk. Some warm soup and television on the couch. Home sweet home.
But no. The interstate was snarled, a bumper-to-bumper crawl. Took one hour to get one mile. High drifts on the ground. Then, around 4:00 P.M., just as the light began to drain from the sky, you came to a full stop before the Fourteenth Street Bridge, just off the main runway of National Airport. There was a commotion; people were out of their cars, looking over the gua
rdrail at the frozen Potomac. People began working their way down the embankment by the bridge, slipping and sliding—something urgent—and you followed them in that silver light, with bits of the moon falling on your head. You weren’t sure why, but you followed them down with your father and the other guys in your car. Your understanding of this came retroactively—all these people in the snow, running—as if you were speed-reading a story.
In the river were six people—splashing, fighting for air, trying to hang on to the tail of Air Florida flight 90, scheduled from Washington to Tampa. The plane had lumbered slowly down the tarmac on takeoff, banked hard left, and just couldn’t raise itself up in the air, fighting all that icy downfall. Skimmed the Fourteenth Street Bridge, took off several car roofs, decapitated a few drivers, knocked over a truck, then crashed through the ice and vanished. About seventy people were already on the river bottom, buckled fast to their seats. Never had a chance, those people. Never got the flight magazine out of the seat pocket or moved on to the peanuts-and-soft-drinks portion of this beautiful, sad life. Swallowed whole by the Potomac.
You saw this big gash in the ice, smelled the sickening smell of jet fuel, and you—you, Lenny Skutnik, government clerk—could see bodies floating around, human hands and legs trying to hang on to the wrecked tail of the plane like toddlers without water wings, one moment hurtling down a runway, then suddenly thrown tumbling into this slushy water. It didn’t compute: your life, then these bodies. A bystander, a sheet-metal worker, was already down by the water’s edge, and people were trying to tie a makeshift line around him. One woman was taking off her nylons to add to some jumper cables—her naked legs gooseflesh in that silver light. The sheet-metal worker had his coat and boots still on, and he began to wade into the river, thirty-three-degree water, sucked in hard, walked up to his knees, thighs, waist, walking as if he’d suddenly become the Tin Man, but that’s as far as he got before a helicopter appeared and you all pulled him back in.
Now everything moved in horrible slow motion. More people were slipping and sliding down the embankment, maybe fifty on the shore, watching the helicopter hover over the dazed, iced bodies in the river. Up on the bridge, there were more people, throwing rope to yet another survivor, who was trapped beneath the ice, trying to punch up through it. Over the open water, near the plane’s tail, the helicopter dangled a lifeline with an open-noosed strap. There were three men and three women there. One of the men just seemed to disappear beneath the surface—gone. Another struggled to shore, and then another made it, too. But one of the women—you could tell she was in trouble. Somewhere on the river’s bottom were her husband and her newborn baby, and somehow she had popped up on the surface, completely lost and pale, with a broken leg and some dim understanding that she needed to keep her mouth above the waterline, though the rest of her, that broken body of hers, just seemed to want to sink back down to her family.
The helicopter lowered itself, blowing everything sideways, bossing everything silver. Rotor blades shot wind under the skin of the wreckage and flipped the woman over with a piece of metal from the tail, flicked her like an insect. Flailing in that open water, wearing red, she reached for the lifeline, grabbed it, but then didn’t have the strength to hold on when the helicopter rose. Again and again, same thing. The pale woman somehow struggled up onto a slab of ice, wobbling, and the lifeline came down, and you saw her grabbing it in slow motion, excruciating, and her whole body dragged back in the water, her lame leg dragged behind her. But then she couldn’t hold on, let go with one hand, then two, and fell back in the water, in one pathetic, stonelike splash, washed under by the deafening sound of the chopper, which itself had become some kind of demented bird in this slow torture.
And suddenly, impossibly, out of nowhere—you! Her head underwater, fifty people gawking from shore, fixed in place, the sky spitting moon, and you just went. Like, outta here! Boots off! Reached down and yanked them off and tore off the puff jacket, just ripped loose of that thing, down to short sleeves—the same shirt as other days—and just leaped from the bank. Didn’t think, didn’t care. Just out of nowhere, roaring, skipping minutes, slicing between them, speeding time in order to get to this woman before she vanished, too. Out of nowhere, you, in the drink, in that slushie, windmilling like a sicko, a slashing fury of strokes. A blur. Fifty people standing there, and you, like, That’s it! Enough! She’s coming with me.
You powered to her, six ferocious strokes through electro-cutingly cold water, got to her at the give-up point, the sayonara-this-life split second, her eyes rolling back in her head. She was gone, unconscious and sinking, and you just grabbed her. You didn’t feel anything. Not cold—nothing. Claimed her, took her back from the river. Pulled her head up, then pushed her to shore, like water polo. Handed her off to a fireman who’d waded in. Dragged yourself to shore on your own. Stood up, soaking wet, breathing—yes, breathing!—looked back at the wreckage, and, once you knew everyone would get out, started up the embankment, picking up your puff jacket, looking around for your carpool, thinking: Time to go home. Let’s go.
But then some cops corralled you. Led you to an ambulance. You said, Is this gonna cost me anything? I don’t make no money. Free, they said. Someone put a hand on your back, and you got in. Noticed for the first time that your feet were cold. Missing your watch and a pack of cigarettes.
That’s when it began, that’s when the other Lenny Skutnik was born, when you realized what you’d actually done. Then found out it had been captured by a camera crew on the bank. At the hospital, they gave you a warm bath and some food, and as you were getting ready to go, they asked if you would answer some questions from the reporters. The story was out, the lead already written: In the nation’s capital today, a blizzard and a plane crash. Seventy-eight dead. A gaping hole in the ice, and debris floating in the water. Helicopters circling, looking for survivors. Rescue crews waiting on the shore to rush the victims to the hospital. The media already had that part down, had their victim, too: Priscilla Tirado, the woman in the water. Now they needed their hero.
So you answered a few questions: Why’d you do it? Something just told me, Go in after her. Would you do it again? Yes, I’d do it again. Simple stuff. Obvious. Time to get home.
But no one would let you go. There was just this great, gaping need for you—not the Lenny you, the brick-subdivision guy, the government functionary; no, they wanted the hero you, the part of you in them that they most needed to see and touch and believe in. The part of them that went diving into that icy water with you. On Nightline, Ted Koppel told you, It’s not only courage—there has to be a certain kind of magnificent insanity about it all. You said, Something just told me to go in after her.
The morning shows, newspapers, magazines paraded into your living room. They made you into a soap opera star. Lenny and Priscilla, Priscilla and Lenny. Hero and victim, victim and hero. They hauled Priscilla’s father-in-law, father of her dead husband, into your living room and tried to film him crying in front of you. You said, Wait a minute! Wait! Took him away from that camera, back into the bedroom. You wanted to beat the hell out of that network guy.
When people heard you lost your watch, you were offered a hundred new ones—then trips to Hawaii, Canada, Puerto Rico. President Ronald Reagan invited you to his State of the Union address, seated you and your wife up there in the balcony with his elegant wife, Nancy—nice, nice woman. President went drifting off on some yabble about American heroes, suddenly mentioned your name, and the whole place erupted. Democrats and Republicans leaped to their feet. Hear, hear! Lenny!
You got two thousand letters, some running deep with emotion. People wrote and said they were jumping up and down in their living rooms in front of their televisions, crying, screaming, watching that girl drown, saying, Do something! Do something! Some told you they had always been terrified to express their true feelings about anything in their real lives. Then suddenly they were jumping up and down in their living rooms, screaming, blubbering at the tel
evision. You came out of nowhere, dove into that dark river for them, pulled them out, too.
So that was it—you became public property, a character in your own life. Without wanting any of it, you were shot from a cannon, along the Icarus arc of American hero-hood. Didn’t matter that every day, today even, there are people out there pulling bodies from some wreckage. That there’s someone taking a bullet right now on some school playground. Seventy-eight people died in that crash. Hard to think of heroes when an image plays in your mind of that one survivor who surfaced in the wrong place, couldn’t break through; people on the bridge saw his face pressed against that ice, alive, guppy-mouthed. And then he was gone.
No, the sweetest thing about that day wasn’t the name they gave you—no, that seemed more like a joke—but when the day actually ended, when you got back to Lorton at about 2:00 A.M. Nearly seventeen years later, you remember it as if it were last night. Awesome tired. A little stiff. Everything in your brick subdivision was absolutely still and glittering with ice, strung yet with some Christmas lights, just solidly, beautifully there, and you started up the walk. Shoes crunching on the snow.
Never forget that: the clean smell of winter, the mysterious dark in all of those houses, and, inside, these men and women, your neighbors, drawn together, wrapped in each other, in their bedrooms sleeping—these mothers and fathers having begotten children who would one day beget their own children, and all of you wrapped together. Cemented together like these brick buildings. A light was on in your brick house, you remember that. A woman in the kitchen and a newborn kid. Your family, Lenny Skutnik. And the moon—it just kept falling, kept swirling down on you. It was suddenly as if you were drawn by a fast-moving current, reaching for a lifeline, moving toward some deeper place. And then you were up the steps, through the door, lost in that hundred-watt light. Home.
Love and Other Ways of Dying Page 24