The Canyon

Jack looked out off the suite’s balcony, admiring the view. Inevitably, his memory compared the sight with a vista from his youth, the same place, just a different vantage point. The Grand Canyon stretched out before him, testament to the indefatigable constance of Mother Nature. As a child, he’d stood on the rim of the canyon with his father during the penultimate stop on their family road trip across America. Jack’s dad had explained to him that the magnificent gash in the earth’s crust, which exposed the strata of millions of years of geologic history, had been created merely by the movement of water. He told his son that it stood as a testament to what was possible, given enough time and energy.

They’d driven past a car crash that trip, allowing Jack a glimpse of his first dead body after several minutes of creeping in traffic up to the scene. Later he’d asked his father if it was true that your life flashed before your eyes when you died, something he’d heard from cartoons and from kids at school. His dad had said he didn’t think so. He said he figured that all that stuff was like baggage that you’d finally be able to put down, and, if anything, you’d be given a glimpse of the infinite possibilities that could have been.

Jack wished he could call his dad and let him know that he was almost done retracing the path they’d taken three decades earlier, but a small plane crash a year ago had robbed him of that opportunity. The NTSB had listed the official cause of the accident as “pilot error,” which was a bitter pill for Jack to swallow. He’d always regarded his father as infallible, but consoled himself by saying that he’d died doing what he loved and tried not to think about how his mother had screamed as the plane plunged out of the sky.

Adding a layer of complexity to his pain was the fact that Jack was supposed to have been on the flight. It was just a quick trip up to The Cape and back to check out some properties. Life had finally afforded Jack the opportunity to build a vacation home, and he wanted to do so while Mallory and Alex were still in school, with summers free enough to enjoy it. However, the thing with Cyndi, which a couples therapist would later label “an emotional affair,” had just come to light, and he’d decided it wasn’t a good time to leave the house or make any major decisions, so he’d opted out of the trip. His parents, on the other hand, had decided to fly up anyway to get lobster rolls in P-Town.

Jack had convinced himself that only Waylon Jennings could appreciate the certain type of grief this made him feel. Jennings had taken a bus The Day the Music Died, while Jack had stayed home to fight with his wife. It turned everything from “what might have been” to “what should have been” in ways that twisted his insides like a knife. Jennings succumbed to complications from substance abuse at age 64. Jack often wondered what would happen to him, especially on those nights when he chased an Ambien with a shot or two.

The sun was going down, but had not yet reached the rim of the canyon. Jack’s wife, Jill, was down at the pool. Prone to car sickness, she had been tolerating the trip, sitting tight-lipped most of the time, though holding back words or bile, he could not tell. She refused to sit in the backseat for even a mile, and Jack couldn’t help but notice the way her eyes darted to his phone every time there was an alert, as if there was still need to be suspicious.

Gazing across the vastness of the canyon, with the Colorado River gleaming like threads of silver below, Jack noticed something in the sky by the sun. It was too close to the flaming celestial orb to make out, but the silvery black dot could be little other than a small plane he had not, heretofore noticed, due to its proximity to the light. He could hear no engine, and thought that it might be a glider, commonly seen riding updrafts above the deep gorge. Or it could be a drone. At this distance it was impossible to discern the size of the object.

Mallory and Alex were in the room on their phones. Jack’s kids’ lack of engagement on the trip had been a source of simmering frustration for him. This was complicated by the fact that, for the past year, Jill had sided against him every time the issue had come up. Then again, Jack was a corporate lawyer for Omega, the tech company that created and platformed the very smartphone apps he felt his children were addicted to. The situation was an impossible morass in which he found himself able to be either a hypocrite or an enabler.

When Jack’s team had successfully argued, in federal court, that the right to free speech trumped Omega’s ability to police its platforms for content that demonstrably contributed to anorexia in teenage girls, they had all gotten raises. Every time new laws were passed protecting the interests of tech companies, further insulating the mega-corporations from accountability, opening the doors for greater experimentation on how to best exploit their users, they would have a party. The world was full of mixed messages. How can you protect anyone when the calls are coming from inside the house?

Regardless, the kids had agreed to come watch the sunset, and Jack had agreed to wait until the show truly began before summoning them. There was a part of him that needed them to see those pastel shades and hear about how the river had carved the chasm over countless millennia. He was hoping that the conversation would spark some inspiration in them, echoing the way his own father’s words had moved him. He just hoped it didn’t come across as too corny or cringe, as the kids were fond of saying.

Before he could turn back into the room to retrieve his offspring, he noticed that the glider, or whatever it was, had descended a bit. What he could see now was a sort of inky shadow with undefined edges, not unlike an oil slick in the sky. It was too far away to discern any detail, but appeared to be getting closer. As it dipped beneath the rim of the canyon, he felt a bit of fear for the occupants, but this had become a common occurrence for him upon seeing planes in the sky.

The crash had affected Alex as well. Since the boy had first learned to talk, he’d expressed an interest in aviation, a result of early trips on Pop-Pop’s plane. Starting in elementary school, he’d begun responding to the inevitable “What do you want to be when you grow up?” questions with “A pilot!” but things had changed since the loss of his grandparents. Now, when asked about the future, Alex would claim to want to be a content creator, something Jack seemed unable to get his son to elaborate on.

This was one of the reasons he’d wanted to show his children the canyon. He needed them to understand that life didn’t just hand things out, that achieving anything worthwhile required dedication and perseverance, and that a person in motion can accomplish anything, but getting bogged down or settling can lead to stagnation. Every day there were temptations and pitfalls that would seek to divert you from your path, and turn you into a puddle drying up in the sun. Jack just wanted to protect his kids.

The inky blob in the sky was moving slowly, but certainly headed towards the hotel. It was still too far away to clearly make out, but Jack started to think it wasn’t a glider. The way the edges moved seemed too organic to be a plane, though perhaps it was some sort of stealth drone or other secretive craft. There were enough military bases in the Southwest that it wasn’t too terribly far-fetched an idea. He reached for his phone to take a picture, but realized he must have left it in the room.

Averting his eyes from the blob for the first time since he’d spotted it, he noticed that the sun was now touching the rim of the canyon. He dashed into the room to retrieve his kids and phone, but was disappointed to see the space empty. This was slightly annoying, as he had told them to expect him. The television was on, blaring a commercial for diapers for toddlers. “Just pull up!” an encouraging voice repeated as Jack searched the small suite for signs of anyone.

“Just pull up!” triggered Jack the way certain things unexpectedly do in the wake of tragedy. Jill had tried to convince him to not listen to the cockpit voice recording of his parents’ crash, and even the people from the NTSB had advised against it. However, some part of him, perhaps the part that made him a good lawyer, needed to examine all the evidence to fully understand a given situation. “Pull up! Pull up!” were the last words spoken on the tape, delivered in the impassive, yet commanding voice of the ground proximity alarm. It was barely audible over his mother’s shrill shrieking. These sounds playing in his head at night are what had caused Jack to seek out the ambien prescription.

Turning off the television, Jack impulsively grabbed a $21 can of beer from the hotel mini-bar, and stepped back out onto the balcony, resigned to enjoy the sunset by himself, even if his family lacked the desire to appreciate it. As soon as he had this thought, he was reminded of something that had come up in couples’ therapy. When Cyndi had been hired as a paralegal, it was her enthusiasm that caught Jack’s attention. He’d felt distant from his family for quite some time, not yet realizing that he was the one who had created the chasm, choosing work over spending time with them, then expecting them to enthusiastically join him during those rare times he was free.

Jack had maintained for a while that, because nothing physical had ever happened, except for a hug or two that may have lasted too long, he hadn’t crossed any real boundaries. He needed to be shown how long text conversations about how cut off he felt from his family, sent while in bed with his wife, could open a wound in a relationship. To be fair, the situation was not completely one-sided. Jill had undergone some sort of awakening in the year preceding the crash. Perhaps she’d noticed changes in her own children, or their friends, or herself, but she’d adopted an anti-technology bent after doing a digital detox recommended by Oprah.

Jack didn’t know what to say when she’d send him articles about the damages his company was doing, to people, to democracy, to the environment. “What do you think pays for this house, and all these nice things we have???” he’d asked her once, exasperatedly. She’d left him on read.

The sun had slipped past the rim of the canyon, flooding the valley and sky with pastel hues that lit up cotton candy clouds and illuminated the walls of the gorge, putting unfathomable geology on full display. Layers of time, like stained pages of an ancient tome, there to be read by those who had only the blink of an eye, all things considered, to live, laugh, love, and learn as much as they can before their tiny flame snuffs out. Even the sun will die, but not before consuming all the inner planets, including Earth, in a cosmic holocaust.

Jack’s dad had explained this all to him over the years of his childhood. He’d said that the masses of humanity had always, always had to suffer, but that it wasn’t a given. A person could program their own algorithm and escape if they were smart enough or lucky enough. Jack’s dad told him he was both. Years later Jill would point out to him that “Success will always justify itself.” Jack thought Jill would have made for a tremendous lawyer.

The object in the sky seemed to have disappeared, which filled Jack with some measure of relief. The peaches and cream sky and earthy hues of the canyon spread out beyond the balcony. He cracked his beer and took a sip, noticing that it tasted funny at the very second he spotted the blobby thing now floating within the canyon. Closer, now, what could be discerned of the object revealed a black, mirrory surface, not unlike the screen of a turned-off phone. Jack couldn’t tell what the hell it was, but the entirety of his attention was focused on the taste in his mouth, which he finally placed: it was Mountain Dew.

It was a specifically nostalgic flavor. When Jack was eight, he and his dad had gone out for a flight by themselves. This was the first time ever that Jack had been allowed to take over the plane’s controls, though his father’s hands hovered over his own the whole time. He’d chugged a Mountain Dew that trip, and been forced to use the aircraft’s toilet, a Gatorade bottle, in the cramped cockpit. That was long before the jet with the enclosed lavatory, last in a series of increasingly complex and expensive planes.

The sun was sinking fast, speeding beneath the horizon. Jack could see the inky blob now just a few hundred yards from where he stood on the balcony. Its size was still impossible to make out, but the amorphous edges of the object made him afraid in a way he could not place. The thing seemed both technological and organic, alien in a way that made Jack hope it might all be in his head, as the alternative was too terrifying. He noticed, with some annoyance, that the TV was back on in the room. Bee could hear the commercial insisting to “Pull up!” again. He sipped his Mountain Dew and tried to calm down.

There was something about the object that seemed accusatory, the way it stood out in stark contrast to the naturalness of the landscape. Jack wondered if he was developing early onset dementia or looking into the eye of some god. He began to question his decisions, afraid for the first time in his life that the end was near. Time became immaterial as he dwelt for a while that the sun would only illuminate this valley for a finite number of times before finally burning everything up as it assumed the next stage of its evolution. Nothing ever dies, it just changes form, but Jack couldn’t tell if this meant nothing matters or everything does.

Jack realized that the Cyndi thing was just a symptom of how Jill felt about his job, that a wedge had developed between them as she’d come to see their lives as existing on the wrong side of history, and she worried terribly about how that would reflect on their children. She believed that in the future, Omega would be seen as a terrible thing that greedy men had inflicted on the world. He could see how his need to prioritize his employer’s profits had robbed him of time with his children that could never be regained.

As the inky object approached the balcony, Jack could see a familiar scene within it, the passenger cabin of the last plane his father had owned. While the thing’s origin was still uncertain, he knew it now to be a portal or a time machine or a hallucination. As the sun finally disappeared below the canyon’s rim, an earthquake began. Jack’s fears for his family were assuaged by the innate knowledge that they were safe far away. He gripped the can as the thing zoomed closer.

With the balcony shaking beneath his feet, the portal, or black hole, or memory subsumed Jack. He found himself in the cabin of his father’s jet. “Pull up!” insisted the automated voice of the ground proximity warning system as his mother screamed. He took a sip of his Mountain Dew.