Triumph Over Tragedy: an anthology for the victims of Hurricane Sandy

by R. T. Kaelin

  “Give me a second here, will you?”

  “You have the remainder of your life to rest.”

  “Which is likely to be fifteen minutes if you don’t let me catch my breath.”

  “Less. You don’t have fifteen minutes.” He frowned at me. “Are you really that out of shape?”

  I straightened up and grabbed a double-handful of beer belly. “Everyone gets a little thick around the middle as they get older.”

  The man slapped his own flat stomach. “Only if they don’t have discipline.” He flopped down on his back and tapped a dark triangular hole in the wall. “In through here.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “It will work. Drops to the left halfway through, then up for a while. Don’t go left, go up.” He wriggled his way into it and was gone.

  I walked over to the hole, but couldn’t even hear him scrabbling along. I debated for a second not following and didn’t like the silence. I pulled the headphones on and heard just enough of Dean’s voice to decide the silence was better. I did a quick check for size, realized the Walkman would hang me up, so I left it behind. That didn’t get rid of Dean, though, because in my mind I could hear him some time in the future talking about how they found my Walkman and how he hoped his words of encouragement had given me solace in my final moments.

  I wanted to puke and I was pretty sure it wasn’t because of my concussion.

  The little tunnel was a tight squeeze. I pulled myself along, reaching up with my hands, pushing off as I was able with my feet. Things raked my flanks, tugged at my belt and clawed at my gut. In the pitch black it was easy to imagine them to be the talons of strange creatures, which made me wonder about rats that might be lurking, or snakes or scorpions or black widows. I decided even the tiniest of God’s creatures had sense enough to be leaving the vicinity, but that didn’t stop me from shivering whenever something brushed my face.

  Halfway through my left leg did dangle into space, but things were so cramped I couldn’t look down. I kept on moving, even though without left leg purchase it was harder. My fingers started tingling and hurting from pulling myself along. The fact that I felt air flowing up past me helped me to keep going; aided and abetted by determination that I’d not be found wedged in some cement tube like a hot dog in a fat man’s throat.

  Finally I wiggled my way free, swaying this side and that like one of those time-lapse photography images of a seedling stalk emerging from the earth. I plopped onto my back and lay there for a moment, sweat stinging my eyes. I was breathing hard and had started wheezing a bit. I figured that was from the dust.

  My partner stood over me, looking down disgustedly, his fists planted on his hips. He had that commanding presence, sort of like Rudolf Valentino. Very dramatic, very forceful and clearly not pleased with my performance so far.

  I shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “Sorry for whom? Your wife? Your kids?”

  “No kids. I want them but, my wife, she has her career—she’s a lawyer. She’s probably soon to be my ex-wife, and is probably out dancing on the cemetery plot one of the partners in her firm will make sure will be hers.” I slowly rolled onto my belly, then worked myself up onto my knees. “You got kids?”

  He shook his head. “Bess and I… it’s one of my regrets.”

  I gave him a gentle nod, then sighed. “Sorry I’m not making this getting-out-thing easy.”

  He cracked a smile. “You couldn’t make it easy. Easier, perhaps, but not easy. If it were easy it wouldn’t be worth doing because anyone could do it.”

  “Yeah, but if Dean were trapped in here…”

  The man waved that idea away dismissively. “Better a thousand of you than one of him. C’mon, let’s go. One more ordeal and you’re out of here.”

  I stumbled to my feet and shambled after him. We picked our way along a corridor that had survived the collapse pretty well, which suggested to me that some undetonated explosive lurked nearby. My best guess is that I’d awakened on the second subground parking level and was moving up through the first. Then we rounded a corner and I stopped dead in my tracks.

  A chunk of the mall courtyard had collapsed and dropped down, forming an archipelago of tiled islands linked by twisted threads of rebar. They floated above a black chasm in which dimly burned a couple of emergency lights. The darkness made it hard to judge how far down they were, but they illuminated jagged hunks of broken concrete. No matter how shallow the drop, the landing would be painful.

  My companion walked to the edge of the chasm and squatted down. He pointed off toward a triangular island. “That one is the key. Once you get there, it’s a simple walk out.”

  I closed my eyes for a second, then opened them again, but the islands had not shifted. “Um, getting to that one will be the tough thing. There are those three there, which get smaller and smaller, and a good eight feet up and over to our goal.”

  “Easily done. Watch.” He backed up past me, got a six-foot running start, and then leaped out to the first little island. He landed square in the heart of that oval, skipped high in the air and landed on the next one, six feet along. Another step and his powerful legs launched to the smallest island. He landed in a crouch then shot up and off again, flipping through the air like a gymnast, sticking the landing on the higher island.

  He held his hands up as if waiting for applause, but only the reboant click-clacking of debris falling into the blackened pit echoed through the ruins. He turned slowly, his face lit by a glorious smile, his eyes shining, then he nodded to me.

  “You can do this, Tom. Come on, you can do it.”

  I shook my head slowly. The throbbing pain built until I was pretty sure the top of my skull was going to explode clean off. “I can’t do that.”

  “You can.” His voice hardened. “You must!”

  “I must? Who the hell do you think you are?” With my head pounding, I straightened up to my full height. “It might be that they find me here, or they find me down there, but they find me where I decide I’m going to be. There is no must about this.”

  “But there is, Tom, there is.” He crouched and pointed out toward where I felt certain the rescuers would be waiting. “If you don’t do this, Lancaster Dean wins.”

  “He wins?”

  “Yes, he wins.” The man shook his head. “I’ve seen his kind hundreds of times, thousands. They have no real talent, save for marketing themselves. Now I know something about that, I really do, but when you market something, you have to have something there, something real. He’s done nothing but use the ideas of others forever. If you don’t do this, you know what will happen. He’ll dedicate a performance to you, maybe a tour. You’ll become a friend he lost, a momentary pause in his show when he can’t go on. Your death will be what humbles a great man before his audience, and that will make him greater in their eyes still.

  “Do you want to do that? Do you want to make the man who placed you here into a hero for shedding a crocodile tear in your memory?”

  I growled. “Yeah, so I try and fail and then folks know how horribly I died. I know this media crap, I see it all the time, right? I’m not stupid. How I die will be forgotten fast enough, and he’ll still win. He’s Lancaster Dean. He’s a star. He’s the man who escaped death!”

  “HA!” The man shot to his feet and gave me a glare that drove me back a step. “Don’t tell me you believe that nonsense. He never died. It was a trick.”

  “How do you know that? Were you there?”

  “No, but I know.” His voice grew a bit softer. “When you die, it puts things in perspective. Winning the applause of millions doesn’t matter. You learn what’s important in life. He’s clearly not learned that lesson.”

  I nodded slowly. “Maybe you don’t have to die to get an angle on those things.” Not being a very deep guy, and having been whacked on the head, what was important to me in that moment was some sunshine, a smile from my wife, a cold beer, a barbecued burger and, maybe, just maybe, a chance to poke Lancaster De
an in the nose.

  I backed up to where he’d started his run, then took off. I made the leap to the first island easily, perhaps too easily. I didn’t get as much of a push-off as I wanted, but still made the second island. I got a spare step there, then launched myself at the third. It hung there like a tiny speck of land in a black ocean, but I was on target. All I had to do was crouch there, then spring up again just as he’d done…

  Yeah, then flip through the air like some little girl gymnast…

  That thought, and the impossibility of my duplicating his action, isn’t exactly what doomed me. My friend, being smaller and lighter than me, hadn’t impacted the islands the same way I had. He was a little velociraptor, whereas I was a Jurassic Park Tyrannosaurus Rex, setting everything to shaking and quivering as I bounced along.

  My target shook on my landing, listing hard to the left. A tile crumbled beneath my foot and I went down. I landed on my right hip and started to slide. I could feel my feet flailing in the air, my rump sliding off the edge. I grabbed at the island, tearing the nails off my right hand as I clawed for any hold at all. I still was slipping then, all of a sudden, I jerked to a halt.

  My legs dangled and pain shot up from my left hip. I felt around and found a hooked piece of rebar had caught my belt back by my right cheek. I started to tip forward, but my right foot hit a long piece of rebar below, steadying me. Shivering, I clung to my little piece of rock.

  “You’re okay. You’re okay.” I heard his voice from the triangle, which hung above me. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, hell ya, for someone caught on a rock in the middle of the goddamned air. Sure, I’m just ducky.” I growled again, then looked up. “Don’t even think of coming down here. Even if you could free me, there’s not enough room and you couldn’t get back up. Go on without me.”

  “I’m not leaving you here.” His voice took on the edge again. “You will get free, you must.”

  “No shit, Sherlock, I’m the one dangling here.”

  “You can do it, Tom.”

  “Will you shut up? I need to think here for a moment.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  His voice softened, and I knew he wasn’t going to stop talking. I almost told him to shut up again, but since I couldn’t see him, hearing his voice meant I wasn’t alone. Where I was at the time, not being alone took on a lot of importance in my life—which, all things considered, was looking pretty close to being over at that point.

  “Want to know how he did it, Tom?”

  “Did what?”

  “Faked his death?”

  “Um, sure.” I reached down and began to unlace my left workboot. I hooked my little finger through the laces so it couldn’t fall off as I loosened it. Very carefully I worked it off and brought it up to my island as my companion explained Dean’s trick.

  “It’s a pretty common thing, Tom. Fakirs in India used to do it. You get a hard little ball of rubber and place it up near your armpit. As you squeeze your arm down against your chest, you shut off the flow of blood to the artery there in your wrist. Dean’s friend checked his wrist, found no pulse, and ran off for help.”

  “You don’t say! Why that son of a bitch, been lying all this time.” I smiled and shifted around enough to grab an unseen piece of rebar with my toes and then bring my right foot up to where I could unlace that boot. “I guess that’s why you said he had no real talent.”

  “Part of it, yes. And, Tom, I trust you will keep that secret to yourself.”

  “Dean’s secret?”

  “The secret of the ball. It’s frowned upon to reveal such things.”

  “Your secret is safe with me.” I brought the right boot up on the tile-land by its mate and unlaced both of them, down to the last three eyes on each boot. This gave me a good four feet of doubled-lace between them. Using my teeth and left hand I knotted them together good and tight, giving me two boots linked by over a yard of laces.

  I glanced up at the triangle island and could make out a rebar fringe. “Okay, look, get back from the edge. Hang on to something up there. I have only one choice here and I don’t want it killing the both of us.”

  “Don’t give it a second thought, son, just do what you have to do.”

  “Okay, here goes nothing.” With the boots dangling from my left hand, strung together the way sneaker pairs are when hung from high power lines, I started my small island bouncing. I know that sounds insane, but I really had no other choice. My weight had lowered my island to the point where I couldn’t reach the triangle. Only by using the springiness of the rebar, could I get up high enough.

  The rocking motion did nothing good for my head, other than to sync the throbbing with my movement. As I rose I made the first cast with the boots, but they missed. I rocked more and harder, but bounced the boots off the rebar. I could hear chunks of rock pitching down below, clattering around, and knew the whole network might give way.

  I gave it one last solid heave, and timed it beautifully. The right boot arced over a metal stake and wrapped around twice. With my right hand I jerked my belt buckle back, loosening my belt and letting the rebar that had held me up slip free. The little island did batter my right leg as it descended, then just quivered below, with the shaking rebar webwork angrily chattering at me.

  I stripped my belt off as I hung there, doubled it and hooked it over another piece of rebar. I held on tight, and started to pull myself up. I let go of the laces and grabbed more metal, then shortened my grip on the belt. My left foot found another long strand of rebar and latched on to it with toes.

  “Now just hook your chin on the top here. Handhold to the right.” He stayed on the high side of the triangle, nodding and pointing.

  It was that nod, that acknowledgment that I was on the right track, showing his confidence, that got me up on the triangle. Being able to chin myself like that and haul myself up, I’m sure adrenaline gave me some help there, but his nod told me I’d make it. Not disappointing him seemed somehow as important to me as getting out alive.

  I crawled up onto the triangle, then reached back down for my boots.

  “Leave them, we’ve not much time.”

  “No. They saved my life.” I smiled over my shoulder at him. “Besides, you know how long it takes to break in a good pair of boots?”

  He laughed and nimbly moved to a long strip of tile. Looping my boots around my neck by the laces, I followed carefully and we quickly reached a solid portion of the flooring. I turned to look back and saw the islands bobbing, bits and pieces of them beginning to crumble. From higher up pieces of debris fell cometlike, trailing dust. One large chunk pulverized the island where I’d hung.

  I shivered. “Another minute.”

  “Another minute you don’t have, Tom.” He pointed to a tunnel that sloped up and, at the top, I could see the artificial glare of klieg lights. “Get going.”

  I started to scramble up and got past a tough point. I turned back to give him a hand, but he hadn’t moved. He just stood there at the opening. “C’mon, we’re safe, we made it.”

  “You’re safe, Tom. You’ve made it.” He gave me a salute and a smile. “I have to go back for my mother.”

  At the time those words made no sense to me, mainly because of the thunderous crack of concrete breaking and riding over them. Major chunks of what had remained standing chose that moment to collapse. Situated where I was in the tunnel, well, I was pretty much a BB in the barrel of an air rifle. A heavy gust of dust and air slammed into me, hurling me up and out of the ruins. I arced through the artificially lit night, an ill omen for Lancaster Dean, but feeling very lucky indeed.

  * *** *

  Because of all the media coverage and cameras, I’ve been able to watch my flight many times, from many different angles. The landing is always the best part because there he was, Lancaster Dean, sitting at a makeshift desk, being interviewed, when I came down. He and the anchor had turned toward the building with the crack. The newsie fell one way, Dean another and his toupe
e yet a third, with me smashing Dean through the table.

  The doctors, they told me that I was pretty much out of it because of a concussion and loss of blood. They even had a shrink come in and explain to me that my traveling companion, about whom I kept asking, never existed. “It’s normal, in a time of stress, for some people to imagine another person being there, so they won’t be alone. Don’t worry about it.”

  Sure, don’t worry about it, but take these pills until you stop talking nonsense. I stopped talking nonsense pretty quickly, especially after someone leaked my story to a tabloid and I found myself in print saying an angel had helped me escape. But even though I stopped talking, I knew I wasn’t wrong. I had proof.

  And that little red ball of proof was great for draining the blood from the face of first year medical students taking a pulse—and not finding one.

  Kim, my wife, brought me the ball. My almost being dead helped her reorient what she thought was important in life, too, which meant our paths merged again. She was the one who discovered that the power unit that had shorted, triggering the explosives, had shorted when Lancaster Dean plugged a nose-hair trimmer into an overloaded socket in his trailer.

  And it looked like the settlement would more than cover the cost of the new house we were going to need, being as how the kids would want their own rooms as they grew up. The settlement with the tabloids for misquoting me was what we would get them through college.

  About the time my bruises had healed up enough for me to be photogenic, Lancaster Dean arranged to meet me at the Doubletree Resort for dinner. It was a photo-op, pure and simple. We were being billed as the two men who had cheated death, and the photographers loved it when I suggested they get a shot of Dean taking my pulse.

  The expression on his face when he doesn’t find any is priceless. Pity those shots never get into his publicity packet.

  But it wasn’t until three weeks later, when I was watching one of those tabloid TV shows while working out at the gym, that the last little bit of things put themselves together for me. It was right after the segment where Dean announced he was retiring from performing. They did a little piece on me and my escape, comparing it with the best escapes of famous magicians. And that was when I saw my companion again.