Ian Mackenzie Jeffers The Grey (2 page)

We’re all belted in, blathering and bluffing and bullshitting and playing cards, with our bags and our laptops and game-boys and phones and shit to read and Playboys and packed lunches and extra long underwear and almost teary eyes on some of us, and would-you-fuck-her looks at the company flight-attendants on others, yes, we have flight-attendants, and another-four-fucking-weeks, and we’re off, as much as the wind is letting us.  It’s slapping us up and down for thinking we could, right now, and the wings are bucking, worse.  But we’re men of the north, we’re better than any fucking wind.  The plane hoists, shoves this way and that, humps and bumps but gets up there. We get up over it, like they said we would. 

Out of Anchorage a little, not dark yet but I see all the orange lights crawling away below, like stars upside down, we leave it behind and sooner or later we’re over dark snow.  I watch it pass under us, as it gets darker mile by mile, snow and ice, on and on, forever, it looks like, everything leaks out of it, all the white, the little black lakes get harder to see, until there’s nothing to see at all.  If you wanted the world gone you could fold it up and bury it here under the snow and never see it again.

We fly on, smooth as sleep.  I tick by like the clock, last one awake, time slipping under me, same as when I was little.  “You’re a night animal,” my father said.  “You’d rather watch than sleep.”  But I close my eyes, eventually, and I see the motel room, the cinderblocks, the dresser, the mirror.  Four weeks in a motel, you’ll start to hate the mirror, at least the guy looking out of it.  I see the clock on the nightstand, the picture I propped on it, half-crumpled, my wife, when she knew me, our boy, when he knew me.  I stare at it, in the half-sleep, like I did in the room, their faces, the brightness in them, gone from me or not, the brightest thing in the world. 
As bright as aurora.
  I fall asleep, finally, don’t know how long, and as I fall I think I’m dreaming something, great giant dark rolling into great giant dark, slipping, weightless, I guess, but that’s all, then I think nothing, maybe engine hum, but nothing else.  It’s a fine state, if you’re awake enough to feel it without waking up, a fine forever, as long as it goes.

Then something hits me, or takes me and smashes me into something, slams me down like a shot-glass in my sleep, snaps my head awake, I blink, blurry, some kind of metal banging sound’s going through me, the bones at the back of my spine feel it bang again then dropping, the plane does a kind of belly-sick slide-and-drop and then it feels like it smashes into the air and catches itself, and we all jerk in our seats.  Everybody’s awake now.  It slips off the air again, drops again, smash-lurches, drops again.  Bump and thump. 

“What the fuck was that?”  Henrick is looking at me. 

The plane bangs again, drops again, and everybody grabs their arm-rests, holds on to their asses, look at each other, a long quiet second,
waiting
. 

Then it’s banging again, for real, harder, firecracker-finale banging, and the tube of the plane is twisting and buckling, your insides buckling with it, it’s like hitting rocks, smacking mountain but then we’re still going somehow after that.  It drops again, we’re going faster, we tilt over on the right wing, way over, we’re strapped in hanging sideways in the air, turning, upside down, even faster, metal banging again like it’s dying, thumping and tearing and none of us has a clue except that we died already, hit a mountain and kept going.  Tables drop and lockers pop open and bags and coats and phones and Playboys fly this way and that and more ripping and crumpling and laptops and boots and books and pieces of crap shoot by and somebody’s keys smack me in the face and it all slams sideways and drops again, not long, but we start going faster than before, and a flight-attendant flies by my face, skirt-up, something smacks me over the eye, I think the heel of her one shoe, her other shoe was off, I think, but I see her face as she flies away down the aisle, she looks at me, girl in a tornado.

Then we really hit something.  Somewhere as you’re dying there’s more death, and whatever I thought we hit before, possibly, this we hit.  My brain shocks and my teeth buzz and everything gets punched and shaken at once between the balls and the belly and my spine, my shoulders drive up past my head, my throat drops into my ribs, my neck’s up in my mouth broken inside out and the top of my head slams the bottom of my jaw, seats fly by, we fall and then fall further, hit something else, again, harder, louder than before, we slam and crack and I’m smashed in the face again, the lights out except here and there, a head flies by and the plane splits, it looks like, or cracks, a dark gap, jagged line across the fuselage where it shouldn’t be, and arms and legs and blood and the head shoot by again, or another head, a bowling ball, this time I see his face.  I’m trying to think of his name as he flies away from me and I’m thrown back the other way, away, thinking, because thinking is slower than everything else right now, that I should get to him and help him, and as I’m flying backwards I have to fight this pretty hard by telling myself there’s not much I can do to help a head.

The side of us hits something, we seem to bounce.  Lights come back on, explode, glass pops, whatever the windows are made of.  Everything goes darker than it was, we’re cracking open, sliding,
I
feel cold shooting in.  We’re still slamming and sliding but I think I’m cold or bleeding, and I feel pressure, pulling on my belly and feet and the side of my head as we’re still sliding and bouncing and slamming down something at a horrible speed and I may be getting ripped apart but I see when I can look down, I think, my head has not come off, or my arms or legs.  A flood of snow is slamming in.  Everything changes to snow and cold ripping air, we’re still going but then we spin and crack open wider, spinning, there’s a body on me, or part of one, sweater in my mouth and drool or blood or worse, I can’t push it off because we’re spinning then it flies off me anyway, then more bang-sliding, more snow shooting into my mouth, my nose, my eyes, through the lids no matter how tight I’m squeezing shut.  We’ve filled with snow.   Everything stops.  So do
I
.

I’m buried.  I can’t
breathe,
nothing.  Not a fucking molecule, or I can’t work my lungs, suck all I want, and something feels broken, whatever is there, ribs, and then I feel the snow in my mouth and nose, packed, I snort and spit and cough my best but there is not much air still, it’s snow, mostly, but it seems I’m partly breathing something, I think, but brain’s not to be trusted, eyes either, nothing else either, I still feel like I’m still spinning, maybe still falling, I’ve stopped but I’m still flying through the air, it’s spinning past me, maybe.  Maybe I’m falling.  Maybe I’m headless, or legless. 

I dig and push to get one hand pushed against my chest up under my chin and wriggle and shove my fingers up around my mouth to make a space so I’m not drowning, a little space around my mouth to breathe, an inch, two, and try to dig snow out of my mouth,  blow it out of my nose.  I’m still buried but I have these two inches, and I keep clawing it but I can’t move much of my arm.  I shove and push like crazy, then hunch and wriggle back, after more air, and I get more of my arm free and I dig out and pull my hand back and shove and suddenly I can twist and get my other arm out and I start pulling and clambering, in total dark.  I’m trying to see and there’s nothing. 

I push up and I hit a seat perched over me like a roof and I’m afraid I might be trapped under that and I shove with my legs as hard as I can until the seat and all the junk on top flips aside, and then air hits me, freezing cold, and I am breathing, buckets, sucking it in.  It hurts at the top of every breath, something’s cracked, or thumped, in my chest or ribs or back or somewhere, all of it.  There’s a patch of light below, though debris piled around me, looks like snow, and I flop and fall towards it, then there’s more light, or sort of light, pale, and more cold air, and I tumble down a slope of something and hit some hard stuff but none of it badly and come to a stop again, sitting in the snow, but I barely know what’s down and what’s sideways, I’m still spinning, blood’s washing through my ears, booming.  I breathe, hold on to the snow.  

I can’t see where I am at first, but I know I’m outside the plane.   Everything’s outside the plane.  The plane is pieces of shell, scattered.  I slowly understand cold, dark, moon, snow, pieces of plane, loose seats, bags, bodies, snow falling, dark lines of trees, far away, maybe mountains in the dark past those, maybe, maybe we hit them and bounced this far.  Everything’s buzzing, spinning in my ears still, loud,
buzzing
silence.  I think I stand up a second, hard to tell, but I fall back down, not meaning to, the ground smacks up at me, buzzing.  The wind isn’t blowing, which spooks me, because it’s always blowing, in my head, anyway.  If it isn’t blowing now, I’m dead, and this is the aftermath.

I hold on, sit another minute to stop drunk-spinning, looking at pieces, stretching back, a black dotted trail of pieces of metal and I guess oil or somehow burn marks on the snow, if that’s possible, it’s hard to see, and more little dark clumps of bags or bodies or pieces of bodies or seats or people’s clothes, all across this white clearing, a ring of trees around us like the shore of a sea we’re on, with dead in the middle.  I shake my head, work my jaw, thinking the buzzing changing to whining changing to ringing might pop out and stop if I do, but it doesn’t, it just clunks like a car-door off its hinge.  It’s done that after fights, I got it popped out once, sometimes it pops out again.  Behind the trail of stuff, far back I can see trees, flattened and ripped, I think, where I guess we came through.

I look the other way.  I see a guy ahead now, pretty far. He stands up and flops right over again, like I did.  Further off, past him, I see somebody else moving, but he’s just crawling along, and he stops, goes flat against the snow, but then I see him trying to get up again.  I see more pieces of broken shell, what’s left of the plane, spread over what looks like a mile.  It can’t be a mile.

I consider standing up again. Blood’s still washing through my ears, over the buzzing, in what sounds like a more and more determined way.   My chest hurts more the more I breathe, but I still want to get more air in.  I try to get up and I wobble but I take a step, ass-high in snow, I have to pull my leg up high, but I move.  I think I’d know if anything was broken, and I don’t think anything is, much, and I think if I’m breathing at all I didn’t break ribs.  I just got a talking-to.

I half-slide the rest of the way down the drift I’m in, land face-first, get up again, and I’m on my feet, and suddenly feeling the cold twice as much.  I head for the guy who can’t stay up.  The other guy moves, again, lying on the snow, feeling around looking lost, dizzy, like me. But he’s further away. 

I walk and walk and start to see they’re further away than they looked.  I keep on, across the snow.  I pass more seats, more dead, each in their own craters, pocked into the snow, some half-sitting, some freezing, stiffening already, or looking like it, others flattened across the harder snow, worse on ice, some just pieces.  And bags, clothes, toothbrushes, razors, loose shoes, pieces of metal everywhere, more dead, as far as I can see, the better my eyes work the further out I see them. 

As I’m making my way the wind picks up.  It’s not a blast but it’s more than it was, and it feels like there could be more behind it, before long.  It starts picking up snow, getting a little louder.  I stop a couple of times and check the bodies I can get to, but nobody I check is alive, the guys ahead of me are the only things moving.  I keep making for them.  I can’t check them all.

I get up near the first guy, finally.  He’s up again and trying to walk, in his boxers, and socks, half-bloody from something.  He looks all broken, but it might just be the way he’s standing, or trying to stand.  He’s hopping, or bobbing, one arm and one leg sticking out crooked, trying to hoist his boxers up better, then he slips and flops back, lands on his hand, screams in pain, or pissed off, or both.  When I get up close to him he’s crying.

“I lost my fucking pants,” he says.  It’s Ojeira.  He’s a tool-pusher.  I look around, no blankets, nothing, some bent seats a way off.  I pull my sweater off, lay it on him.

“Can you move?” I ask him. 

“Not this fucking leg, much.  I think I could hop or something, in a minute.  I’m going to sit a minute,” he says.  “It hurts like a fucker. 
Fucking shit.”
  He’s mad at the plane for crashing, or the fucked condition of his bones.  It has to hurt him, what I see of it. 

“Fucking fuck—
“ he’s
groaning, and wincing, and getting too pissed off.  He’s barely remembering to breathe.  The wind's starting up on us, more.  He’s freezing.  So am I.

“It’s good it hurts,” I say.  “That’s good.”  I look at him to see if he understands.

“Oh yeah?
  Good,” he says. “I’m fucking terrific, then.”

“What’s bleeding?”  I ask.