Everybody feels better now.
* * *
Martin is not finished. He says, “The onward moments, the flowing moments. People have to keep telling themselves that they’re still alive.”
Jim Kripps listens to himself breathe. Then he touches the bandage on his forehead, just checking, confirming that it’s still there.
Two of the others are barely awake, Tessa and Max. Diane understands that she is here to listen to her former student as he had once listened to her.
“When we’re finished with all this, it may be time for me to embrace a free death. Freitod,” he says. “But am I serious about this or simply begging attention? And the situation we are in. Shouldn’t I be home, alone, in my room? Isn’t this what the circumstances warrant? No word from anyone, anywhere. Time to sit and be still.”
He touches the edges of his chair, confirming the fact that he is seated.
“Or am I being a little too self-important?” he says, slowly, drawing out the question, hands stiffening, gaze seeming to recede as he begins to enter the trancelike state that she has seen before and that she thinks of as metaphysical.
“All my life I’ve been waiting for this without knowing it,” he says.
* * *
Diane Lucas decides to say something, although she has no idea what might come spouting out.
“Staring into space. Losing track of time. Going to bed. Getting out of bed. Months and years and decades of teaching. Students tend to listen. All those different backgrounds. The faces dark, light, medium. What is happening in the public squares across Europe, the places where I’ve walked and looked and listened? I feel so simpleminded. A college professor who quit too soon. A would-be inspiration to my students, one of whom sits next to me here and now. The end-of-the-world movie. People stranded in a room. But we’re not stranded. We can leave anytime. I try to imagine the vast sense of confusion out there. My husband does not want to describe what he has seen but I am guessing bedlam in the streets and why am I so reluctant to get up and walk to the window and simply look? But didn’t this have to happen? Isn’t that what some of us are thinking? We were headed in this direction. No more wonder, no more curiosity. Totally impaired orientation. Too much of everything from too narrow a source code. And am I saying all this because it’s way past midnight and I haven’t slept and have barely eaten and the people here with me are barely listening to what I’m saying? Tell me I’m wrong, someone, but of course no one speaks. I want to resume teaching and return to my classroom and speak to my students about the principles of physics. The physics of this, the physics of that. The physics of time. Absolute time. Time’s arrow. Time and space. Before I shut up I will quote a stray line from Finnegans Wake, a book I’ve been reading on and off, here and there, for what seems like forever. The line has stayed secure in the proper mind slot, the word preserve. Ere the sockson locked at the dure. Just one more thing to say. To myself this time. Shut up, Diane.”
* * *
Jim Kripps is stooped low in his chair, looking down, speaking into the carpet, long hands dangling.
“So there we were, seated, half-asleep, waiting for a snack before we landed. Then the trouble began. Our plane was jumping around and making loud banging noises. I don’t think we were anywhere near the airport, the landing strip. Bang bang bang. I looked out the window, seeing nothing, waiting for some reassurance from the pilot. Here is Tessa seated next to me, just as she was then. I don’t think I looked at her because I didn’t want to see the look on her face. The plane was wobbling badly. Then voices on the intercom, totally unreassuring. This is how it begins, this is how it feels, all those many thousands of passengers before us who have experienced this and then were silenced forever. Did this occur to me, those many thousands, or am I making this up as I ramble along? It seems a dozen years ago but this was today, more or less, just hours ago, how many hours, pilot speaking French, our seatbelts, our snack before landing, where was our fucking snack. Tessa speaks French. Did she translate for me? I don’t think so and she was probably doing me a favor. Sorry to be going on like this and then the crash landing, a huge sort of rocketing noise and the impact that felt like God’s own voice, forgive me, and my head hit the window, I was tossed sideways into the window, someone shouting fire, was a wing on fire, and I felt the blood running into my eye and reached for Tessa’s hand, she’s here, she’s saying something, and someone across the aisle half-choking, half-shouting. No no no. Well, anyway, to make a short story even shorter, we came down hard and skipped and skidded for a while and of course I had no way until later to connect this event with the total collapse of all systems and my hand was on Tessa’s wrist and she was looking at the blood on my face. This is the first chance I’ve had to really think about it, to remember it. Before this, the van, the clinic, the woman talking talking talking, the man in the baseball cap bandaging my head. Into the street. A young woman jogging.”
* * *
Max Stenner is trying to look bored. He sits in his chair, the armchair, eyes barely open.
“The stairs. Coming back from the crowds in the streets. Here and now. Counting the stairs. I used to do this when I was a kid. Seventeen steps to count. But sometimes the number changed, or seemed to. Did I miscount? Was the world shrinking or expanding? This was back then. People today tell me that they can’t imagine me as a kid. Was I called Max? Growing up in a small town. Another thing they can’t imagine. Mother, brother, sister. No angry crowds, no tall buildings. Seventeen steps. We were tenants, second floor of somebody’s two-story house. Nine steps alongside the garage, then eight more to our apartment. A kid named Max. And suddenly here I am, a father, a man whose job takes him into luxury towers to inspect basements, stairways, rooftops, looking and finding violations of the building code. I love the violations. It justifies all my feelings about just about everything. Here and now, these crucial hours, I dodged and elbowed my way back to this street and this building and found my house key and unlocked the front door and did not have to remind myself, it’s not even worth saying, that the elevators are not working, and I started slowly up the stairs, looking down at each step as I climbed, flight by flight, and I realized at some point that my hand was on the handrail and I decided that I didn’t want it there and just climbed and counted, step by step, flight by flight. I’d like to say that I was reliving those earlier years but my mind was more or less blank. Just the stairs and the numbers, third floor, fourth floor, fifth floor, up and up and up, and then finally pushing through the door to the hallway and lifting the apartment key out from under the crumpled snotty handkerchief in my pocket, and now that I’m here I don’t think I have to apologize for this long dumb description of climbing eight flights of stairs because the current situation tells us that there’s nothing else to say except what comes into our heads, which none of us will remember anyway.”
* * *
Tessa Berens studies the backs of her hands as if confirming the color, her color, and wondering why she is here and not somewhere else in the world, speaking French or a kind of splintered Haitian Creole.