by George Wier
Coming down from above on top of the blimp over Longhorn Stadium was like that. Fortunately, the trip was over before it got started good.
I had judged the distance to be about ten or fifteen feet. The blimp was larger than I expected, so the fall was more like thirty or forty feet.
I hit about dead center and bounced. The heels of my feet connected first then bounced up over my head, then my back and shoulders hit and bounced. I flipped backwards over my head, my feet in the sky with the helicopter above perfectly centered for about one hundredth of a second, then I flopped over hard onto my belly. I bounced slightly again then started slowly to slip. The fabric beneath me was smooth. I still had a death grip on the meat hook in my right hand but I didn’t want to do any serious damage to the blimp — yet. I tried digging the fingers of my left hand down into the smooth surface but instead I just slipped faster. In another ten feet I’d be airborne again, and there was only the stadium to stop me after that.
I dug the sharp tip of the hook downward. There was a loud ripping sound as I sliced a continuous straight gash in the fabric.
My descent never even slowed.
I wrapped my left hand around the hook.
I was past the point of no return. I faced the side of the blimp and held on to the hook, vaguely aware that the rope was doing a little dance around my body.
The underside of the blimp hove into view in the next second and the shiny and sleek cabin was coming up fast.
The window directly in front of me was open. There was a person at the window. I instantly recognized that he had a rifle in his hands. In the next instant I recognized that it wasn’t a man, but a woman, blond, muscular, cat-like. And in that briefest of instants, I knew that I had seen her somewhere before.
I descended on her like a bird of prey.
*****
I’m not known for my entrances. Usually it’s my exits that are worthy of note.
I think my sudden appearance, coming down as I was from the sky above the blimp with my arms raised above my head, my mouth wide open in a growing howl and my feet coming up in front me, tensing in anticipation of the coming impact, was too much of a surprise for her. I caught her like a deer in the headlights of a fast-moving truck.
I straightened as well as I could, aiming for the open window and just barely made it.
My feet connected with her chest just above her breasts and she was thrown across the cabin, her rifle flying from her grip.
It went off and there was an upward flash of fire and a loud report. A black hole appeared in the roof of the cabin, even as my lower back slammed hard into the deck.
The woman’s head connected with the wall just below the windows across the cabin.
My own head thunked into the floor, and I saw little balls of light. Again.
*****
Both of us must have come out of it at about the same time.
I was rolling, holding my head even as awareness returned. I saw that the woman was crawling on her hands and knees toward the rifle on the floor of the deck. Somehow, this was a significant develop-ment, but I couldn’t piece it together. She moved as though she’d had one too many vodka screwdrivers or something.
I rolled over, somehow got to my knees. There were little purple spots and pulses of red doing little zig-zags across my vision.
I put one leg up. Put my hands on my knees and pushed upward.
I watched her. She was at the rifle, tugging on it. I could hear it slide on the deck and that sound meant something too but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was.
She looked a little bit like Julie, whoever Julie was. Maybe it was the shape of her head, the way her pony tail curled up and flopped around.
I heard a “snick” sound. The woman had done something to the rifle.
Rifle!
The world swam into focus.
I was on my feet inside of the cabin of a blimp. There was a woman there on the floor with her back up against the pilot’s seat. She had a rifle with a large scope across her lap. The breech was open.
She had one long, shiny bronze bullet between her teeth and another one in her fingers, trying to get it into the breech.
I reached into the waist band of my pants.
My hand wrapped around the handle of the gun I had there.
I pulled it out, thumbed off the safety and pointed at her before she could swing the barrel of the rifle toward me.
I held the .38 steady, at arm’s length. My finger was on the trigger.
Her eyes met mine.
The rifle clattered to the floor and the shell slipped from her fingers and rolled across the floor. The other one tumbled from her mouth.
She used the seat to stand, slowly.
I could see that she was afraid.
“Milo’s dead,” I said.
Her face went white. The skin on her cheeks grew taut.
A flash of insight hit me and I almost reeled from the significance of it. She knew I wasn’t lying.
I had been standing at a bar, a drink in my hand. I’d been looking down at some little lights dancing on the surface of the liquid. There had been this huge puzzle just after that, its pieces revolving around each other, attempting to connect. And for an infinitesimal instant, they had. A puzzle had become a picture and then the picture had vanished.
There had been two people. One always one step ahead and the other following, always one step behind. Between the two they had boxed me in.
“You’re Milo’s lover.”
“Wife,” she said, “you mother fucker.”
“Wife...” I repeated. “Sherry Euban. You used to write poetry.” I wanted to tell her that I hadn’t killed him, that in a way he had set himself up. That he had wanted to be stopped. That when you seek revenge, first dig two graves. I wanted to tell her a lot of things, but there was no way she was going to hear anything anybody had to tell her, at least at the moment. The look in her eyes told me that much. There was grief and loss there, in the sudden glistening at the corners of her eyes, but there was something else as well. Before I could begin to figure it out, it was too late.
She moved, damned fast.
I pulled the trigger.
My hand bucked. The roar was deafening inside the small cabin. The cockpit window behind her exploded outward in a bright shower of glass.
In one step she was back at the yoke, pushing it down.
The floor pitched down in front of me, and I was flying forward.
I slammed hard into her shoulder and my sudden inertia flipped us both over the control panel.
We plunged into the bright gulf toward the waiting ground below.I was airborne, once again.
*****
I was certain this was it. Somehow I grabbed her wrist. At first I thought it was the wind screaming in my ears, then I realized it was two human screams: mine and hers.
We fell about sixty feet before something wrenched me, sharp and hard like a vice around my left calf. Maybe a shark had bitten my leg off.
We jerked to a halt in the air and I almost lost my grip on her. I tightened down and felt one of the bones in her forearm snap.
She screamed. As I looked down at her, her eyes locked on mine. Her face flushed red. Her teeth ground together, biting off the scream. Her eyes flashed and the muscles in her face contorted in pain and rage.
She spat at me: “Let go of me, you bastard!”
Her other hand shot up, slapped me on the face. For an instant all I could see was a dull orange blur of motion and all I could feel was a sheet of pain.
When my eyes opened again she was gone.
I looked down, trying to spot her, but all I could find was fifty thousand faces looking up at me in shocked silence.
I was spinning. I tucked my chin in and looked upward. The rope was uncoiling from my leg. Another three hundred or so degrees around the slowly unwinding circle and I’d be falling right after her.
I tightened my stomach muscles, straining them in a way I�
��d never done before in my life.
And grabbed the rope.
*****
I was slipping. The university was all of a hundred feet below my feet. There was no way I was going to survive the fall.
I had drifted past the stadium and the blimp had settled into a slow, gentle descent.
My knuckles were white and blood dripped down from my hands onto my face and down on the University below.
I was going to die. I was going to find out what it was like. What bothered me about it the most was the proposition that if I was aware afterwards and disconnected from my body, irrevocably, then how would I be able to get anybody’s attention? How would I communicate? I know. It’s an odd question. Some people say that your whole life flashes before your eyes at such moments. For me the moment slipped ever so slowly on by. No pictures of the little girl whose pigtails I’d pulled in the third grade. No great flashes of insight into the human condition. No angel of death hovering close by. I felt cheated.
And then I saw brilliant color.
Gold. There was an angel.
No. It was a statue.
It was Miss Liberty, coming up on me fast from ahead: the spire of the State Capitol Building.
I collided with her, felt her shudder at the impact. The rope was out of my hands and my arms flailed. I wrapped myself around the tail of her stony skirt.
The rope whipped around her sword and arm and I heard the grating shriek of metal on granite.
My legs were airborne again and Miss Liberty with me. We dropped fast. The pillars and windows of the Capitol Dome rose up fast past us.
It was Miss Liberty’s massive weight pulling us down.
We thumped into the grass on the Capitol grounds. Hard. Miss Liberty, God bless her, somehow stayed upright. Overhead I could hear the branches of the pecan trees scraping against the underside of the blimp.
The grass underneath me felt cool and fresh.
I looked up to see a squirrel chewing on a pecan not thirty feet away. Odd, but the squirrel was as white as snow.
Maybe I was dead after all.
INTERLUDE: MILO AND SHERRY - WITH THE ALWAYS
Photographs seen through the filter of time, yesterdays that were and are no longer. Whether pulled from between the crinkled, disintegrating cellophane of old albums or dropped full-blown across the lantern-slide of awareness as in the case with any thought, any memory, any mental image, real or imagined, this is the reality of the past. This reality has its own laws, its own dimension, distance, weight, color and emotion. It is the reality of those dead and gone, frozen forever in a past no one but these two ever knew.
Her name is Sherry. She has close-cropped blond hair. She wears fatigues and a full field pack containing enough rations to survive for weeks in the unforgiving desert.
Her frame is wiry and tough. There are sweat-circles under her arms and a neat line of wetness between her breasts and down to her waist. She is struggling up a stone outcrop to the top of a West Texas mountain.
Behind her is Milo. He’s also wiry, but softer. They are fifteen years apart in age, but that has no bearing on who they are or what they feel for each other.
Milo is out of breath. His face is grim, his lips pursed with the admixture of effort and determination.
She pauses at the summit, letting the wind buffet her face and blow the sweat from her hair. Up here she can see for miles around. Insubstantial billows of white cloud race past, seemingly just out of arm’s reach.
“We made it,” she says over her shoulder.
Milo stops beside her, places a hand on her shoulder for support. His knees very nearly buckle.
She turns to him and reaches an arm beneath his field pack and he leans on her more heavily.
“Watch it,” he says with a sharp exhale, and releases the snap-buckle holding his pack. She moves her arm and the pack falls to the ground.
“Pheww,” he breathes.
“It’s grand up here,” she says. “You can see forever.”
“Yes. It is,” he says. He hasn’t even looked yet, but he already knows how it will be.
“We’ll camp here tonight.”
*****
He smokes a cigarette during the night, gazing across the empty valley below. He shouldn’t be smoking, but what of it?
She comes up beside him.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks.
“No.”
They are silent for a time.
“They are going to hate us,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“They’ll kill us.”
“Maybe.”
“We both know it,” he says.
“I love you,” she says. It is the Always-answer, when there are no other answers.
He nods.
He’s been dead before, his heart offline while a machine pumps his blood for him, filtering, enriching and returning it to his system. Thirty-four minutes, the doctors said. For more than half an hour clinically deceased. Where had he gone? He has no memory except for some dim recollection of light in a dark place. A light just beyond arm’s reach, like the clouds scudding overhead.
He flicks his spent cigarette from the mountain, takes her arm in his, pulls her to him.
*****
They make love in the night. Conditions are cramped, and there is a rock beneath the vinyl floor of the tent just under his shoulder blade. She is on top, the muscles of her arms and thighs ripple like piano cables, and yet she is the softest thing in the entire world.
Afterwards they drowse, wake, whisper.
They plan. It is the Always-plan.
They argue. They fight. They make love again and return to the Always-plan.
When finally she sleeps, he digs his computer from the backpack and pecks away quietly on the file. Notes. His copious notes.
They will have to know why, even in their hate for us, he thinks to himself, and then types those exact words.
He types until fatigue overcomes him, saves the file and shuts the lid. The power is almost gone. Sherry has been hoping his computer will die. She is jealous of it. She hates it, but humors him because it is his only tie to who he once was: Milo Unger, the writer. Milo Unger, the researcher. Milo Unger, the journalist. He should have won the Pulitzer by now. It is the one thing that she can never buy for him, and therefore she hates it, just as he hates everyone and everything but her. Just as she hates her own father, who has been the cause of so much that has gone wrong with both of their worlds.
He lays down beside her, puts his arm around her. Her breathing heightens for a moment, grows short, before again resuming its very soft snore. His hand is on her belly, where she most likes it to be.
He drowses, fights sleep, and then dreams.
They are together here, in the Always.
*****
In the Always it is the first moment they ever laid eyes on each other.
A balcony over the sea. She balances there, perfectly, on a thin, wrought-iron railing, a hundred feet above the waves beneath her head and torso.
He starts when he sees her. Is she trying to get herself killed?
He is twenty-five years old and is she is perhaps eleven. A child. A thin wisp of a blond-headed girl with long tresses streaming into the salt-laden wind.
“Hey,” he says, and she is herself startled. She nearly goes over, but on instinct he steps forward and thrusts her feet back down. The effect is nearly that of a catapult. Her head flies back and he catches her before she impacts the hard floor.
“Uh!” she manages.
“Sorry,” he says. “I thought you were trying to jump off.”
“Uh.” It is all she can say.
“Sorry,” he says again.
Their eyes lock on each other. The moment lasts forever.
“I was just playing,” she says.
“Where are your parents?” he asks her.
“My Pa...” she says.
“Yeah?”
“I live with my Paw Paw. My Momma is dead
.”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“You already said that,” she tells him.
He helps her to her feet.
“I’m Milo,” he says.
“Sherry,” she says, and offers her hand.
He takes it, shakes it as though he is shaking hands with an adult. This is how she strikes him. She is a child, a girl of no more than eleven, but she is the oldest eleven-year-old he’s ever met.
“My Paw Paw is the richest man in the whole world,” she says. A statement of fact, whether or not there is any truth to it. For her it is no matter of faith.
“Really? Who’s your Paw Paw?”
“His name is Trent.” She says. “Trent Sawyer.”
A light goes on behind Milo’s eyes.
“Will you introduce me to him?” he asks her.
“Sure.”
And in that moment, their mutual fates are sealed.
*****
In an Always-alternate he arrives on the hotel balcony in time to see her tumble over into the air, her little sun-dress twisting in the wind and a thin scream like a teakettle coming to boil disappearing into the constant dull roar of the waves crashing into the pilings beneath the hotel.