Drt (3 page)

“Yeah,” I tensed a bit, waiting for it.

“That’s amazing. So this plane always crashes, you always spit out your teeth, and you’re always wearing one shoe. So the only thing different is me and the rest of the people on the plane.”
 

“That’s right.”

“So why are you tensing? Why do you still look scared?”

“Because it hurts.”

“But it sounds like you have been through this before. You already know what’s going to happen.”

“It hurts when it happens.”

“But you’re closing your eyes, Greg. You know that something amazing is about to happen but you’re closing your eyes. You are about to witness an event that few people ever live to see and you’re gonna miss it just because it hurts. Can I ask you a question, Greg?”

“Who are you?”

“See? You tensed again when you asked that.”

“It’s any second now.”

“I was wondering, are you sure that this plane is always full? Are you sure that you’re always wearing one shoe? I pointed these things out to you but I have never been sitting next to you before in this dream. Isn’t it possible that you don’t notice things until someone pointed them out to you?”

“You’re just going to have to take my word for it.”

“Still tensing. Look at you. I like you, Greg, you’re always preparing. You’re like a Boy Scout. You’re always ready for the second this plane drops out of the sky.”

“But I don’t know how it’s going to happen. Sometimes it’s a cabin pressure failure. Sometimes there is a fire in the cabin. Sometimes we drop from ice on the wings.”

“Seriously, Greg, how does that matter? The end result is the same, but it’s the details that are exciting. You’re closing your eyes for the best part and you get the same lousy result in the end.”

“You have a point.”

“But I still see you tensing. You just said that with your teeth gritted. I’m not making much impact here. It looks pretty hopeless to me.”

He leaned back into his chair, closed his eyes, and slowly exhaled. The front of the cabin exploded. The fire roasted several screaming passengers in the first few rows ahead of us, their clothes and skin bubbled. Yellow oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling and hung like yo-yos for a second before they were sucked out of the gaping hole in the front of the cabin.
 

The plane rocketed upward into the starry clear sky as the front fell away. The seats we were strapped to soared up. The front of the plane was wide open, offering no hope for survival, as if the plane intended to show us exactly what it looked like to fall 4,000 feet to our deaths. Finally it stopped going up and hung, achieving zero gravity for a few moments.
 

Then we fell. The metal tube scorched toward the ground, turning as it went, before finally falling upside down. Passengers still alive screamed until their lungs ran out of air. They inhaled and screamed again. I heard some loud prayers and crying confessions of sins. A few rows ahead, a man’s burned black flesh flapped from the wind of the decent. There was a smell of fuel fire and shit as passengers bodies fully prepared for the death that awaited them at the end of the endless, icy fall.
 

The man in the leather jacket next to me was gone.
 

Another small explosion and I was ejected from the plane. Now I was falling in the cold air, still a long way to go before impact. I was surrounded by passengers, still strapped in their seats but naked. They had been stripped by the cold air rushing around them, their screams endless. A few lost their voices, gasping in laddered shuddery breaths in between shrieks. The screams sounded like squeals now, their vocal cords shredded beyond anything recognizable.
 

I hit the ground and every bone in my body shattered. My skin was punctured in several places, my lungs tried to take a desperate breath. I lifted my head somehow and saw many of the other passengers, lying in a grassy field lit by the light of the moon. A woman had been cut in half by her seatbelt when the chair hit the ground. A man dragged his paralyzed body by an arm that still worked, his jaw shattered in several places, his tongue and mouth flapped like a wet towel in the space below his nose. I heard one more labored scream escape me and my head dropped back down from the agony.
 

I woke up with my heart thundering. The afternoon sun blazed through the slats of my blinds. I pushed my face back into the bedspread and felt moistness pressing against my cheek. The TV at the end of the room was still on, promoting the fact that Arch Campbell was up next to discuss the latest movie about something or other. The beautiful woman on TV said there were other things coming up as well.
 

I turned my back to the TV and curled myself into a ball. I thought about the meeting that was still going to come today. I took a rattling breath and tried not to think about it. I hoped that I would take it like a man, whatever the outcome of the meeting, but above all I was really hoping not to be fired.

4

I parked my car and opened the door. The heat rushed in as if propelled by a blast furnace. I could still smell the sweet air conditioned air as it rushed out of the car and cascaded onto the concrete below like a waterfall.

The parking garage was equally oppressive. In the summer, DC reminds its residents and visitors why it used to be a swamp. Today was no different. I walked out of the structure and got in line to pay the machine.
 
I pushed a few bills into the blue and orange contraption and it thanked me in a robotic voice.
 

The office was located in a thatch of tightly connected buildings in Silver Spring, Maryland. The plaza in front of the building was usually deserted when I got to work. The sight several hours early was disorienting and crowded. The business clothed professionals leaned back and forth on their feet, engaged in conversation. Some smoked, others read worn paperbacks on wood benches. Several lunched on sandwiches clapped between slices of wheat bread while globs of mayonnaise drooled out of the middle and stained their slacks. The people wore smiles and hairstyles and college degrees. I walked among them, and on that day I felt like a dead man. Surrounded by this forest of contented and secure faces, by people who knew what the coming days and weeks amounted to, I was a small dying thing among the confident and carefree collection of business people.

There were women wandering into my building in formal wear with varied degrees of professionalism. Their skin was slightly brown and dry looking, like a banana lying on a counter for two weeks. They chatted with men who had meandered in the heat dressed in suits with incomprehensible wool jackets, their red foreheads sparkling with sweat.
 

I was sweating too. The beads pushing out on my scalp would roll from under my hat and down my cheek but I had more pressing matters than my shirt becoming pit stained. I could be walking into this familiar building front for the last time.
 

I pushed the revolving door and walked through the lobby. The floor to ceiling marble shined and looked like a geode in the daylight. I grabbed my wallet from my pocket and waved it in front of the piece of plastic on the desk. It beeped and blinked green. The security guards stood like cattle, chewing chunks of sandwich so large it puffed their cheeks out past their ears, unaware that anyone was even there.

I got onto the elevator and pushed 15. A tall blond woman got on right after me and I pushed my back to the side of the elevator to politely give her space. She pushed the button for her floor and the doors curtained closed. She moved closer to the shiny metal of the doors and started arranging her hair. She smoothed her shirt and pants. She leaned in extra close and pulled her lips apart, looking closely at her teeth, then rubbed them with her bare finger before smiling into the door. There was a ding as the door opened, the preening stopped, and she was gone, oblivious to the other thinking, breathing human being that she shared the last 45 seconds of her life with.
 

I walked through a series of doors and down the hall. As I approached Bob's office, I started to feel lightheaded. All of the pep talks that I shouted in my head for the previous ten hours flew out like papers blown away by a box fan. I walked to the open door of Bob’s office and stood there awkwardly, an imagined barrier prevented me from going any further.
 

Bob sat behind his desk, leaned back, overweight and wearing a tie. His hair hung white curtains with a part down the middle. Bob was smiling widely while talking to a female coworker. He made eye contact with me and the smile slid off his face.
 

“Come in Greg.”

The woman sitting in the chair across from his desk got up. She hurried down the hall without as much as a glance in my direction despite having to squeeze past my still frozen frame just outside the door. I tried to smile as I entered the office, the sides of my face felt like gathered hunks of flesh. There wasn’t anything sincere about me in this moment. I was furiously trying to swallow the frog in my throat.

Bob motioned toward a chair with his hand. “Have a seat and close that.”
 

I lowered myself onto the chair. Bob hadn’t made eye contact since he saw me standing outside the door. His gaze was fixed on the wall behind me and he wore a look of disgust. His breath whistled through his nose as the silence drew on.

“What happened here last night isn't going to work, Greg. The radio station was livid. We can't have that. They are our biggest and most important client, and they know it. You need to do better.”

“Better?” my anxiety turned to confusion. “But it’s been years-”

“Well it doesn’t matter if it’s been years or every night for the past month,” said Bob. “Either way, I can’t have this.”
 

I decided to protest, “Bob-”

Bob silenced me with a flick of his hand. “We are going to have a pleasant conversation today.”
 

I felt relief at the word pleasant. Pleasant conversations don’t end with termination notices.

“But Greg I am going to be honest with you. I don't need this. I have too many other people here,” he said, shaking his head at me. The curtains of hair moved left and right on his forehead. “I can't get involved with you. I can't be thinking about you. I have too many things going on. I don't have time to think about you!”

This is what passes for a pep talk in radio.
 

“Greg, if I have to think about you…if I have to think about you again, we are going to have a problem, okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“Great,” Bob said. He then turned in his chair, looking around for something. He found it. He grabbed a stack of copy paper as tall as a fist. “I need you to fill out this form.” The stack of papers clapped flat against his desk. “This just says that we had this conversation. I need you to fill it out and then sign and date it.”
 

I leaned forward to fill out the papers.
 

Bob returned to looking at the wall and leaned back in his chair. “Also, while I have you in here, I need to go over a couple of things. You need to make sure that you are updating all of the outer markets during your shift. We got a complaint call yesterday. Apparently there was an overturned tanker in the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel at seven last night and we knew nothing about it. The tunnel was closed for two hours.”

“But I don’t start work until nine.”
 

“So I need you to make sure you are doing that. Make double sure and I need you to make sure that you are calling the police in each market. I know a lot of people think it’s enough to simply look in the computer, or make up things, but Greg I need you to know this is wrong.”

“I have never done that,” I said, as I pushed the button on the top of the pen and sat up. I was done with the unread, but signed, paper work.
 

Bob dropped another series of forms in front of me. “Also, please make sure you get all the construction into the computer. I know that there are plenty of people who just read the information on the air. This is wrong. You need to make sure that all of the information is in the computer and I need this stuff to be accurate.” Bob drifted off for a second. I finished up the second stack of forms.
 

Finally done, I was looking up at him for signs that the conversation was coming to a close. Bob handed me a bulging manilla folder. “Fill these out and make sure you get them back to me tomorrow.”

“What are all these?”

“This is the formal way of saying you have two strikes against you.”
 

I started to ask Bob a question.
 

“That's all,” said Bob.

“Bob, I just wanted to say-,”
 

“No need.” Bob held his hand in the direction of the door.
 

I opened my mouth to speak again but Bob put on a pair of headphones and closed his eyes. At least the not knowing was over and that gave me some comfort.
 

I got up and walked out of the office. I stood alone in the hallway for a moment looking for someone to talk to but gave up after a few minutes and walked down the hall, back to the elevator.

Outside, the congregation of suits and skirts had dissipated. I could still see the backs of some of them as they made their escape from downtown. They carried bags or dragged luggage behind them.
 

I walked through the plaza and toward the Silver Spring Metro stop. There were hipsters and skaters and yuppies and homeless. All of them walked through, parading their stories on faces. I started thinking that I overreacted last night.
 

On the other side of the Metro station was a Starbucks, a Caribou Coffee and an Einstein Bagel perfectly placed to gouge the desperately late commuter set. Across the street was the NOAA, you could always hear their fountains.

As I neared the fountains I saw a woman in her early twenties pitched over, hysterical. She was crying, her screams cut and echoed off the tall buildings surrounding us. She screamed, “Please someone help me! My baby is drowning!”