Falling from the Sky

I

For six days now, I have woken up at the moment of impact—drenched in sweat, but with every bone intact. I have dreams of falling from the sky. On a sweltering summer day, I coast on a breeze high above the sea, dipping and curling like a swallow. Yet in the moment I taste my freedom, a sudden tempest strikes from the clouds, and I fall to earth like Icarus. I wake before collision, but with an instant of phantom pain.

“You’d better not be having visions,” I mutter to myself, still shaken from this morning’s rude awakening. It’s gotten harder not to wonder if there’s anything behind them as the date on my ticket approached. I will repeat the longest flight of my life in a few hours: a plane from New York City to Ulan-Ude, Russia. I will be in the air for twenty-two hours, followed by a ten-hour taxi ride to Olkhon Island. My mother does not expect my arrival.

After my fall to earth this morning, I dressed frantically and hauled my suitcase onto my porch just as the taxi arrived. I am now in line for boarding at JFK airport, squinting under white fluorescent lights. For a 4 am boarding time, I expected the airport to be nearly deserted, but I am both unsettled and relieved to find that the New York City crowds persist even in the dead of night. I am jostled and shouldered just as much as ever, but for once I am grateful—I nearly forget how alone I am.

As I show the attendant my boarding pass, I’m sure my smile looks unhinged, because a flicker of recognition passes across her face: a Problem Passenger. She points me toward my seat and takes care to indicate the airsick bag. My face flushes slightly as I slide into my window seat without another word. This part does not scare me however, and nor does the take-off. It’s the long stretch of time in between where my mind runs wild. Friends often suggest that I sleep through it, but I know that I can’t. Instead, I’ve brought three years’ worth of journals where I tried to make sense of my mother. I wanted to reread them before leaving, but I feared the bitterness would change my mind.

Even now in my seat, I’m not quite sure that I’m ready. But I read the first line: "I have never loved and hated anyone as much as you." Yes, that sounds about right. Snapping it closed, I turn to watch the other passengers straggle on, no more awake than myself. My desperate wish is for a row to myself—no one to observe my various stages of panic—but an old man in a tweed suit plunks into the seat beside me, ramming into my knee with his large briefcase. He glances over at me in irritation, as if I were the rude one, and does not apologize. For a few moments, I can’t bring myself to take the journal back out. I feel him look me over again.

“Are you going home?” he asks brusquely. I stare, confused. “I mean, Ши хаанахиинбши?” My face is speaking for me, it seems; I am recognized as a “foreigner” almost every day. But being addressed in my native language by an old white man is a first, and I do not want to be baited into further conversation. I decide to feign ignorance.

“English, please.” He turns away wordlessly, indifferent again, but now I am the curious one. He has to be an anthropologist, or a linguist. With only 330,000 speakers mostly confined to indigenous peoples in Russia, Mongolia, and China, Buryat is not a language that many outsiders take the time to learn. It’s not even a language that many know exists. A notion of doubt flicks across my mind—should I have taken the chance to use it again? I haven’t spoken Buryat out loud in four years, and even then I was never fluent. But this man does not seem like the first person I want to speak it with, either. Something just seems wrong about him, I reflect for a moment, turning away as well.

II

Whatever discomfort he caused must have made the journals more appealing, because this time I have no trouble returning to them. "My mother can do anything, and I can do nothing," the next page begins. "She lives in a mound of black Moleskine journals and yellow Ticonderoga pencils. I never see her sleep, but I see her study like she needs it to breath. Languages, maps, and audio files where I must be very, very quiet. And I am her greatest artifact, a child born and partially raised on the island of her fascination. The only proof she once set aside work long enough to love someone. Unfortunately, it was not me." Here, I sigh. I’ve tried to refute that feeling many times, but it always comes back.

My mother has carved out a very specific niche in her field. Her research question lies somewhere in between anthropology and archaeology, with a side of water sports: “How do frequent shipwrecks impact the folklore of coastal populations?” Not only does she dive for wrecks around the world, but she immerses herself deeply in the cultures and languages to learn their lore about the sea. Lake Baikal was her greatest fascination—a place of monstrous storms more dangerous than those of the ocean, and in the center, the coastal villages on Olkhon Island. In October of 1901, the Sarma winds sunk all but one of a caravan of ships, hammering frozen human bodies into the rugged cliffs at a height of twenty meters. Any sane person would look away; she became obsessed with diving for the wrecks. But she never found them.

Instead, she immersed herself into the Buryat culture, had a child with one of the islanders, and eventually gave up when I was about eight. We flew to New York that month, and in the midst of wild turbulence with twenty hours to go, my fear of flights was born. For a few more years, she forced me to fly to her research locations. We lived in coastal villages in Nova Scotia, Norway, and North Carolina before I put my foot down at thirteen: move somewhere we did not need to fly, or fly there without me next time. She chose the second, and soon was congratulating me for my good sense. If I were to go to boarding school, she could focus fully on her research and complete the projects more efficiently. When I was sixteen, however, my grandmother chastised her into staying with me full time, at least until college.

So, there were a couple years that things felt stable enough for me to love my mother. She was there, and she seemed to be trying. We did homework together after school. She redoubled her efforts to improve my Buryat, despite how strangely the words formed in her mouth. But the moment that I enrolled in college, she listed our apartment. I found a fury I never knew I had, that day. I flip to the journal entry: "Why can’t we ever be normal? No one thinks I am your child when we stand next to each other, and sometimes I don’t believe I am either. I will live without a home again—no bedroom, no holidays. You say I am free to visit, as if you didn’t choose a shipwreck across the globe over your only daughter." In person, I was even less generous: I told her that I would never see her, or Olkhon, again. I broke my phone on the tile floor instead of saying goodbye. I thought that I won a decade-long battle of who could care less.

But then came the sense of loss, much like a death, when I found that she had been there in more ways than I realized. Though her calls had always been short, they had been regular. Her tutoring was distracted, but she could spark interest within me far better than any teacher. Her hugs weren’t quite tight enough, but they pulled me out of my anxious thoughts. Once she was truly estranged, I realized that I loved her enough to forgive her self-absorption, if I could just see joy on her face, and perhaps some remorse, when I found her again. It was a startling discovery, but it brought me here.

III

My neighbor proves to be even more obnoxious than I first thought—harassing the stewardess, bitterly complaining about the cost of on-flight WiFi, and then purchasing it anyway for a string of loud-mouthed phone calls. For a while, I am successful at ignoring him, but I eventually begin to look over his shoulder at the contents of his briefcase, which he is rifling through while giving instructions to an assistant of some kind. Just as I recognize a sketch of Lake Baikal, I am startled to hear him greet a second caller in Buryat. I tune in.

< What’s going on? >

< She doesn’t suspect us. >

< Good. As long as we submit this proposal before her, she’ll look like the fraud. >

< What was in her desk? >

< Everything. Maps, coordinates, and the proposal. No one else knows where these ships are yet, but she needs the funding to excavate. >

< How much will we get? >

< $20,000. Twice what we need. >

I nearly jump in my seat. Could it be…? But if there was any room for doubt, the shifting papers revealed a black Moleskine journal identical to my own. A label affixed to the cover read, in my mother’s diligent handwriting, “Proposal to the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage.” All major wrecks over one hundred years old are protected by UNESCO; my mother had long dreamed of securing funding from them. It had to be her work in his briefcase.

I long believed the day my mother sold our apartment would be the greatest anger I ever felt, but that was before this deafening pounding of blood in my ears as I struggle to restrain myself from snatching the journal. As much as I have always resented my mother’s work, I find that I would do anything to protect it. I wrack my brain for a solution, and all I can think is that if I pretend to be asleep, he might let his guard down and sleep as well. With twenty hours ahead of us, I can’t afford to act too soon.

How I actually fall asleep in this moment, I will never understand. But I wake to screaming. The old man is on the floor of the walkway, a stewardess pounding away at his chest to get a heartbeat. A middle-aged woman turns around in her seat to whisper to me that he’s having a stroke. I close my eyes and cover my ears; I feel the plane is falling when I hear the screams. But in twenty minutes, the quiet is even worse. The staff strap him back into his seat and cover his body with a sheet. An emergency landing was impossible; we will carry him to our destination. I strangely feel, in that moment, that he has died in my place.

Once the lights are off, I do not hesitate; I switch the Olkhon journal with my own. When I see my mother with proposal in hand, I will never know if she feels greater happiness at the return of her work or of her daughter. But the answer to that question is not as important to me as it once was. I think I can be satisfied to share in her happiness, somehow. And the only things standing between us—and her $20,000 grant—are an eighteen-hour plane ride, a ten-hour taxi, and an overdue apology.