Arranging Deck Chairs

The water had come up past our waists. ‘Honey, I’m cold’. ‘So am I’. I hadn’t spoken in hours, she talked the whole time, but it was the first I felt like responding. We had to keep going. There was no other way down this mountain. She was a few feet behind me, struggling to push her weight thru the river that seemed like sand.

The current continued trying to shove us off these ladders, smash us on the rocks and bury our bodies in the branches hiding on the bottom below. Tree Limbs floated by attempting to tangle us up and carry us over the falls then under, dragging us out to the sea. ‘Come on, were almost there.’ We were not almost there. ‘Were gonna make it’. We were not gonna make it, not in our current shape our at current pace, but I couldn’t tell her otherwise. Kant might not approve of my lie but would give a small smile at me submitting to the categorical imperative that has me dragging another person along for the sake of simple obligation. I turned back to check on her thru swollen eyes.

The sun snuck quickly like behind the peaks and took its warmth with it. The cold moon had appeared, filled like a wine glass, circling the earth like a hand of a clock. Our breath had become visible, and our skin bumped and paled with each brush of wind. My hand reached out and grabbed a hold of three of her fingers, pulling her with me like a child thru a mall. I made it to the riverbank and yanked her up onto the sandy shore next to me. I laid face down, the sand mixing with the blood from my nose, desperate out of breath, feeling every bone had been dipped in ice and hit with a hammer. My heartbeat sensed in every organ, the tips of my pink toes and fingers no longer responded to requests for motion. She stood up and walked over to find a spot to sit down and take inventory of herself. I crawled over to a rock and threw up from exhaustion. I looked for blood in the mess but saw none. An aura announced a headache and forced me to sit up and break open my eyes. Her voice chased the echoes back to the rocks. My life refused to flash before me.

She yelled ‘Meredith’ my direction. I don’t remember asking, but she must have thought it appropriate. I didn’t respond. We had only met the night before. On a short, cracked runway in a small, dark airport in a one sign town. Four of us piled into the Cessna, choosing a quick, convenient trip over the unkept fields and empty cold mountains. Our 4-seat plane should have just bounced over the peaks and landed us on another broken road, letting us hurry back to our lives. To make appointments, honor responsibilities, to keep up and repeat our regrets, fully formed and demanding commitments we didn’t agree upon or would ever escape, never giving a thought of not making it, continuing to lives we never wanted to visit.

She was the pilot’s new girlfriend; that was the only introduction I was given. We never exchanged names. Quick trips have no need for civilities or considerations. I was too busy, and self-involved to concern myself with her or the like.

I was on my way to a meeting the next morning that couldn’t be put off any longer, the specifics I can’t remember any longer. Fate booking me a seat on this plane. there were two others on the trip, but they didn’t make it. I have no more information I can share. Pity to them.

We floated along; the buzz of the beehive engine hummed me into a deep state. The quiet announced the problem. The propellers turned into the hands of a dead clock. ‘We got a problem here’ my headphones spoke. As the plane hovered down, left falling, like leaves from a tree. I closed my eyes and tried to think of a happy thought. I stood at an empty chalkboard waiting. I did not draw my parents, always loving and too supportive of my exploration into selfishness, of self-obsession, applauding my bad habits.

I did not think of all the lies said as promises I sold every woman that locked into my eyes, whispering that they were my religion, my desert lake. Their hips an x on the map. My tongue the shovel to find the treasure.

Not a wink over the lives I never lived or calendars and lists that had torched, torn up and been thrown away, tossed in the garbage, rotting like banana peels and eggshells.

I was not taken with the temptation of prayer, knowing that nothing I could say would right this plane or interrupt my fate in whatever form it would take on the ground. I would be more insulted If God intervened to save me. No, none of that. Strange and meaningless, I remembered being a boy, about long looks out my childhood bedroom window at little ponds becoming frozen parking lots, the wind pushing a raft of ducks across the top, like ice skaters, not knowing the difference from days before, wondering on their damp dreams of stolen eggs and hoping for little fires that would lead to infernos, burning the world away.

I thought of prose epics starring whales, picturing the world circling the drain, yet never moving an inch, announcing on the most unfriendly of terms the true meaning of mistake. To not keep your feet moving.

If I survived, I asked myself honestly, what must happen to me to make a change? What will it take for to care? My soul separated from my body.

Would I be proud of myself for saving her? this would be my tale of progress to the pilgrims? A story to share with Godot? A moment where I would consider another for the sake of.

If I went on without her, what could be said? We had no connection; I had no responsibility, and she had no appeal to a man like me and was only slowing my breaking body down to a stumble. Her journey might be my last if I don’t speed the pace. She was old and swollen, her face announced her ignorance, even more so from her bright makeup running from the tears, dried like paint, making her resemble a sad, birthday clown. She owned a cracked smile, the bright cherry lipstick making her thin lips full. She had ‘survived a lot of things in her life’ she kept reminding me, so it was no real surprise to the Gods that she ‘walked away’ only looking her age. All the other times she had considered the danger, the abusive boyfriends, the drunken car wrecks, the abortions, she was blessed, she reminded the forest. Oh, sure, one day she would die, but she would not be killed. ‘Slow down’ she had kept shouting at me every hundred yards till I paused, hands on knees waiting for her. each time I stopped it was harder to get going again. Her temper once charming, now off putting. Her lazie faire attitude seemed just lazy now instead of sincere, even inconsiderate, but she admitted to me that she never considered dying in a plane crash. And although at first mention of a crash, she tensed with a normal fear, then quickly became calm, but it slowly was replaced with sorrow, not for her but for us. She knew how she would die, she confessed to me after we had cleared the water and she sat to rest on a dead log near the shore.

She spoke of angels dancing with demons and liquor curing the lines between cave blacks and snow whites. Feelings of mediocrity drowned out by the band and whispers into my ear reminding me my dreams are fads, menial hopes of not being bothered or called upon to raise my voice. To not get along with (my) nature but to conquer it, to name the faceless in the crowds as traitors, as they root for the demise of manners. Threats of love and longings for understanding, even just a piece of it, as most men are just made to/for sacrifice, from romance to politics, we just are born to fodder, dreaming to be extinct.

‘I knew I wouldn’t die… not up there’. ‘I think you mean, down here’ I said only to be mean. She had been talking since we crawled from the wreckage, leaving behind the bodies of the others like luggage. ‘I knew I wouldn’t be out here alone either… wasn’t sure it would be you, but I knew someone else would survive’. I was too tired to take it seriously, and my head pounded like a jazz drummer and my arm hurt too bad to sympathize with a woman whose only signs that she lived thru death was a torn blouse. She sat there pulling the shirt around to look at the tear, a displeased look on her face, turning her eyes to daggers. ‘Damn it’ she squawked ‘I just bought this top for the trip’ pulling it over her head to get a better look at her ruined shirt. I filled with anger at her complete lack of understanding of what we had been thru. I was in pain and things did not feel right inside my body and knew I could barely go on myself and asked, why am I’m dragging along to salvation someone who is concerned with her wardrobe more than my ruptured spleen. I thought of the Sherpa who dragged that rich woman to the top of Everest, in a storm, just so she could say she did it. Of course, the storm killed him, she survived, being bundled and warm going both ways as a man of duty refused to fail. But she got her dinner party story, a real one.

I glanced at her and tried to find her youthful beauty, or a commonality we could claim later at the press conference, but She aged like bad fruit, ripening to quick, I was stunned by her calmness. I begged for a connection to keep me from leaving her behind. A Victorian nude laying across the sand still pulling debris from her hair, I was not yet numb of her annoyance. As my heartbeat like an engine, I glanced over to the now shirtless survivor and saw a yellow bruise shaping her back in the shape of Alaska. Her mouth kept in motion as she mentioned other tragedies she had survived and that others had not. She showed no pain on her face or if she did it was disguised by the rainbow painted down her face. Her voice remained loud, and her tone remained unbothered, sharing each of the traumas that has littered her life. She told me of her fathers severed head during a farming accident as if she was ordering a cup of coffee. Tales of a bloody family history. Stories of poisonings and factory explosion, a true history of the ‘persecution from the universe and if wasn’t not God’s wrath, it was at least his indifference’ she kept repeating. She never glanced back at the wound, she just kept on about the bad luck of those who blood she had inherited. An odd compassion filled me like a tub. My freezing body filled with a bit of warmth I knew I couldn’t leave her out here alone, that the reason she survived all her calamities was that there was always someone there to pull her thru, to drag her aboard the lifeboat, to pull her from a burning house, so stop the bleeding and bring her back. This woman had been lucky each day of her life, not blessed or happy, but a sense of timing that allowed here to be next to the right person all her life. I decided I could not slap fate in the face. That even if I was the many who didn’t make it while making sure she did, I would try. We all must play our parts. I stood up to go over to her and fell forward on my face. She looked over at me as I lifted my chin, our eyes syncing on each other’s, she smiled for a second, softening my spirit and then hoped up to help me to my feet. ‘You ok, soldier? ’Sure, it doesn’t matter, we gotta get you down this hill’. I got to my knees. I knew she would start feeling bad soon, her adrenaline was pushing her thru right now but if we stopped and rested any longer, she’d feel every pound of that plane banging against her organs. licking blood from my lip. I turned around to see how far we had made it from the crash. Smoke puffed like a chimney from the woods behind us.

‘Get up’ I said, rising to my feet, her pace of speech had slowed and wasn’t filling the darkening forest any longer. I could tell she was beginning to fade. We had crashed at the summit of the mountain; I didn’t know where we were going but we would follow gravity to civilization. We headed downhill, hoping for what we were not sure. Help? A hospital? I grabbed her hand and headed south. The moon hung low, tipping like a bowl. I tried not to think of how tired or hurt I was. I started to see things that weren’t there. I thought, how the hell am I still standing?

My feet kept moving. I no longer remember if I was leaning on her, or she was holding onto me. We tripped over rocks and didn’t even bother pushing the tree branches out of our face, letting gravity/or wills to pull us to salvation/somewhere safe. As she was listing the manner of all her boyfriends who met an untimely end, I noticed an echo from her lungs. We needed to hurry. She was filling like a pool in the rain. I ignored my body vibrating and sped up my feet, slaloming our way like Olympic skiers. Moving too fast to shiver, I spotted a single spotlight shooting up the mountain, as I turned to tell her, she fell forward, taking out my legs from behind. We smashed into a white redwood tree in front of us. That was it. I had no more. I went blank and limp. She had finally stopped talking. So if this was it, then fine, so be it, I did what I could for her and for me.

Frozen, motionless, in complete darkness I laid there drunk on pain but happy it was over. As I felt my breath slow and grow shallow, my spirit wanting to separate from my body that feeling went away. A voice told me that I could do better, that I wasn't done just yet. That I wouldn't die on this fucking mountain, with this fucking woman on this fucking day. Time to get up and keep going... and take her with me. We would both earn the right to tell this story. I had plans for tomorrow, but I will make new ones.

Every experience is teaching me how to die. every lesson Is teaching to care a little more. A little less.

I should have taken the train.