Falling

(For a newer draft of this story, click here.)

It was as though someone hit the reset button on Erik Winters. He awoke high in the air. He was in the stratosphere. Erik was so high up that when he looked at the ground beneath him, he could not tell he was falling. The patches of greens stayed the same size; the meandering ribbons of brown appeared unchanged for what felt like hours. His stomach told him he was falling and forced Erik out of his confused malaise.

He remembered that he was an astronaut. He remembered that he was in the cabin of a space shuttle. The sundry lights, dials, and instruments were all functioning as though nothing had changed. Constrained by a harness and pushed firmly against the back of his seat, he struggled to glance at the rest of the crew in his peripheral vision. They were all still. Everything was still in Erik's world, except his stomach.

He called out to the seven others by name, but received no response. The sound he made sounded muffled to him, like someone had stuffed cotton balls in his ears while he was sleeping. Erik looked back out of the windows to find the landscape barely altered. All was green and brown. He chose to focus on a tiny speck that flickered with light. He noted the charcoal grey trail that slithered and dispersed from it. When he realized it was a fire, he began to panic. "I'm upside down," he thought.

Something about the fire set Erik off. The distant danger awakened him to the present one. His fingers immediately began to fumble with the central clasp on his restraint harness. He pulled halfway up on the releasing mechanism when he realized the futility of escaping. There was no parachute that could save him. There was no joystick he could reach for with which to steer himself to safety. His thoughts expanded outward and he realized the futility of doing anything. Goals are luxuries for people with time. Erik had at most a minute longer, and that did not suffice for time at all.

His mind shot off images and half-formed thoughts in quick succession. He felt dizzy. He felt something warm drip onto his neck. He wanted something to drink. He wanted to have a conversation. Then his mind fixated upon the impending collision. Erik thought it strange how he could now sympathize with all the men and women before him who had been executed and wondered what they saw moments before they stopped seeing. He knew no one had seen his approaching murder through more than two and a half inches of glass.

Erik had never considered his own death before. Death was always something in the offing, something nebulous. It was even slightly agreeable to him while it remained theoretical. He assumed it would come to him when he was withered and prepared for it. It would quiet his arthritic pains he thought. Now, death was plunging up towards him. Death was in the green specs of the trees and the scant taupe patches of dirt. It would be so quick when it struck. Everyone dies in an instant--breathes one second and not the next. It made him feel small and he imagined what his ship looked like to the creatures living where he would crash. Could they make it out now? Would they bother to disperse or would they soon be breathing their lasts, too?

Erik felt the icy pall of isolation. More than being able to free himself from his demise, he wanted to free himself from solitude. A man can freely choose to be alone, and we commend him for being introverted. But when a man is forced into it--we call him a prisoner. Erik hated his powerlessness in a concentrated way. His ears burned with boiling over frustration. For all of his painstakingly accumulated strength, the world would not bend to his will. Despite his share of human dignity, he would be ended as swiftly as a worm underfoot. The greatest insult, however, was that he had no one near him. He wanted to speak and let someone know he was scared, that he resented having so much unfinished business. He wanted to be coddled and reassured by a soothing whisper. Instead, the muffled whistle of wind was all he heard.

He focused again on his situation. He pictured himself as a baby, swaddled by Mother Earth, tucked away into his place of submission. He was wrapped in a blanket of disorientation. What was this surreal truth that his life had become? Why was it his uniquely to suffer? Why would his body shortly be rearranged into fragments scattered at the bottom of a crater? How different this was than any cause of death he could have fathomed earlier! Yet, how similar the end was even if the denouement was original! One last exhalation.

He snickered to himself at the absurdity of it all. We don't know now, we hardly know backwards, and we don't know forwards in the slightest. He laughed at people's feeble attempts at foresight. He pictured a weatherman midway through a prognostication being struck dead by a falling light from the rafters above. Never saw it coming. That's the way it goes. We spend our time predicting the wrong sort of events. The only beliefs we can hold about the future with any sort of justification are the contents of our hopes. All else is vain or otherwise misguided conjecture. And what did I hope for all this time? I was living it no more than fifteen minutes ago. Erik then became distracted by a sensation of moisture pooling on his clavicle.

The patches of green became splotches and the hazy textures came into focus. Erik had begun making out the shapes of individual trees when he started thinking about who he was. If no one else is to know who I am, it is all the more crucial that I die knowing. His mind raced across the most obvious indicators: man, 32 years old, astronaut, doctoral candidate. None seemed to hold water. He thought about what he had been before: a punk, a rebel, a philanderer, a repentant, a humanist--mistaken. Erik thought that human identity is like a liquid that becomes more viscous with age. For all our attempts at improvement, at maturation, at becoming something we can be proud of--we always pour ourselves into molds that are porous. An astronaut? An astronaut! I'll seep right out of that before I turn 50. What can hold us? What definition has no holes? "We slip through everything until we're caught by the impermeable sac of nothingness." He looked upwards to avoid discerning individual branches. Tears welled in his eyes.

Erik, who had closed his eyes a moment before, exhaled and died.