by Pat Connid
The nurse smiles at me, parts her arms in a theatrical way as if to emote the word surprise and in a sing-song voice says, “Hospital.” She then adds, dialing the phone: “The whole ‘feel better’ thing is what keeps the lights on.”
AS I AWOKE, MY shoulders were killing me, but I realized this only ranked second in the sensory overload department.
The smell. Damn, the smell. That’s what made me wake up, I was sure of it.
I started gagging, a clot of phlegm had been brewing in my throat, and my eyes began to water.
Spitting it out, the mucus was gray-black.
My eyes hadn't focused yet. I was still very, very groggy. Tired.
I could hear, and this was odd, what sounded like… waves. Or the ocean. Actually, it sounded like one long wave.
No breakers, just a roar of one long wave, like maybe the seconds before a tsunami hits.
Incredibly, it just went on and on and on…
Trying to shake the thick film from my mind, I sucked in another breath of rotten-egg air and opened my eyes wider, which stung a little in the hazy sun and… something in the air.
That’s when I snapped fully awake. I realized what was in the air.
Me.
My arms raised, bloodless hands Velcroed into steering toggles, I was falling from the sky in a frigging parachute. The sound was not a tsunami but instead the Earth’s atmosphere-- the wind-- screaming past my skull.
And speaking of screaming, a moment later, I was doing that, too.
Blinking, blinking, and trying to focus on the ground below, but there was still such a thick, heavy fog in my head.
I looked up to the straps and instinctively tried to pull my hands free.
This drew both straps down.
My descent suddenly slowed, and I arched up then nearly fell backward, and—in one of the longest moments of my entire life—I just hung in the air and watched in horror as the parachute above me began to wither and collapse, as if deflating at its edges.
Quickly, hands back up.
For a few seconds, I felt like the Coyote in those old cartoons-- impossibly suspended in the air, moments before crashing to the ground in a fat ring of dust.
If I'd had a sign that read Help!, yes, I would have held it up.
Slowly, the roar picked back up. Louder, then louder still.
My brain seemed unclear what to do with the images of my parachute failing above me, so the moment just played back in a loop for a few seconds.
But, as my head began to clear, I realized that I might have only imagined the parachute crinkling at its edges.
Imagined?
No. It’d been more colorful, like a hallucination.
So-- drugged.
Again, I was coming out of some sort of drugged state.
Falling quickly now, I could feel my heart start beating again, as if some translucent EMT on butterfly wings had given me a blast with its defibrillator.
A tug left, a tug right and my parachute changed direction each time: left, then right.
I thought: My parachute?
How did I even..?
Ah, sure. The midnight ninja again.
This time, I had no idea what he wanted me to do. Not that I’d really known last time. But, at least, in a van trapped underwater it's clear what's at the top of your To Do list.
Trying to remember what he’d said just before the golf club hit me—and for a fleeting instant, I wondered why my cheek didn’t hurt more—I was having a hard time with my recall.
Sure, I’ve got near perfect audio retention, but whatever he'd given me had been powerful stuff and was hard to shake.
Once again, I didn't know where I was.
Once again, I'd lost complete control.
But I think the thing that scared me the most, the thing that was really messing with my mind, was looking down past my feet and seeing all that lava.
Chapter Five
I took in another gulp of air, trying to get my thoughts straight.
They weren't having it.
"Lava?"
Hanging in the air, even this high up, the anticipated pain of final contact felt very real because I was dropping like a stone.
Still, I guessed (and I could only guess), I had about a minute before becoming a dumpling in lava soup.
The chute had been opened for me. I wasn’t sure if it had been pulled as I left some aircraft or not.
Looking down at my chest, I saw a large gauge with numbers and it seemed reasonable that this was some sort of altimeter set to release the parachute at a predetermined point.
I stared at the gauge strapped to my chest and wondered that, if I died here and my charred body was discovered, if there'd be an initial celebrity death report lamenting the tragic yet bewildering passing of Flava Flav.
Focus!
Below me, the molten earth appeared to stretch for miles in every direction. Like something out of an old Heinlein novel, a planet of fire.
Not all of it was bubbling, molten lava—some of it was black but even that was steaming. Ultimately, I couldn’t be sure by the color alone of which areas would be safe and which would not.
A quick scan of the horizon for anything that didn’t look like it’d been created by the lava flow—a rock, building, anything—turned up zilch.
I was falling down in an easterly direction. At least, I thought it was east. The sun was arching behind me and looked like a late day sun, so east it was.
Just to the north was a river of fire. I know as much about volcanoes and lava flow as the next guy. Which was to say, absolutely nothing.
My breathing was labored and my eyes watered constantly because of the fumes. And it was getting worse from moment to moment, as I got closer to its source.
Before me was an expanse of smoldering black-- it looked like a giant insect's mottled shell. Cutting through it were rivulets of churning, red lava which all fed to a thick river of fire directly below me.
Clearly there was nowhere to land.
Pulling down to my right, I moved right. I wanted to get as far away from the lava flow as I could.
The air around me cooled, which I was grateful for, but strangely the roar in my ears got louder. Was I going faster?
The emotional response will be a problem. Your instinct… you’ll have to fight that because that would be your downfall.
I didn't know if the Midnight Ninja had a proclivity for puns but… I realized that my downward fall had sped up.
Dammit! Is that what he was talking about?
My instinct was to get away from the lava flow, head south from here. Was north the right route? Was the tar-black field shorter on that side?
Looking south, I couldn’t see its edge. And there was no telling from here if another flow was just out of sight. The haze around me was getting thicker and my eyes began to water more.
I was closing the gap between me and the lava flow too quickly.
You know Newton’s second law of motion, his most powerful, and it will allow you to perform necessary quantitative calculations of dynamics.
Admittedly, I’d always been good at math. Just something that came easy to me.
I was told-- but did not remember-- I’d taken freshman physics while in college. One of the advisors who I'd met with afterward told me that I’d even toyed with the idea of making it my major.
But that part was gone to me and had been for years. Lost somewhere in my mind. And now, this guy wanted me to pull out the laws of motion from that black hole? From six years earlier?
I yelled at the top of my lungs, gripping the straps tight, my arms shaking. “What do you want from me?”
That moment was my first bit of luck, it seemed. While yelling, I'd inadvertently pulled a bit on the straps-- not too hard-- and my descent had slowed some.
I could buy a little more time by holding the straps taut.
You understand the Archimedes' principle, and you’ll need that if you are to survive.
Here'
s what confused me: he believed he knew what I would know.
How?
Here's what terrified me: he was wrong!
I didn't have that knowledge anymore. Those were parts of the "blank index cards" I'd told Pavan about.
My eyes fell closed for a moment, and I exhaled slowly.
His question about the baker. My midnight visitor knew about my audio recall ability. Again, how?
He said that I knew Archimedes. Understood Newton. For whatever reason, he was aware of my ability to remember what I’d heard. But, I couldn’t recall Archimedes. I couldn't recall Newton's laws, or anything I’d learned in college. That was all gone!
I looked up at my hands in the parachute’s steering toggles, then down at the molten earth rushing up toward me. The thick river of lava getting wider now, staring into it, I could feel its heat on the skin of my face.
Falling.
Falling.
My eyes were too quickly trading open sky for the angry black and red flow.
Mr. Jepson had been my physics professor. I'd also had him for Chem the following year as a sophomore. This much I'd learned from my own transcripts; however, my personal recollections had been stolen the night of my crash. Still, maybe, I knew his voice, somewhere.
It was getting hotter.
He's in my head somewhere! I just have to… find him.
I'd only had hints, flashes of those days. Never anything tangible. For those black-void years, the ones leading up to the accident, I just had fragments of people, places, sounds, voices.
But, if I could remember the sound of his voice…
Sometimes, when I had to recall something that had happened before my ability kicked in, one way to get at it was to concentrate its source—remembering the tonality, timbre, cadence.
I could never quite bring images up like those with so-called “photographic memory,” but by concentrating on a sound-- or the source of a sound-- I could create a patchwork of image echoes and cobble together an image from that.
What about, maybe, then… in reverse?
Images to induce sound?
Photos from my college yearbooks-- the only real records I had from those missing years-- those were easy to remember because in the hospital I'd poured over them for hours.
My eyes still closed, I recalled his image. Jepson looked like someone out of a fifties, black and white personal hygiene film.
Bony arms dripping out of a short-sleeve dress shirt, goatee like a first baseman, and prescription safety glasses that Mr. Jepson always wore, even outside a lab.
My thoughts were interrupted by a hissing.
Or perhaps, sizzling.
This sound was from outside, not from within.
I had to ignore it, ignore the fire below me.
Only… Jepson’s image, color, texture, the cigarette-stained smile--
There!
An audio artifact! Like a sun flare's burst picked up by shortwave radio, I had one. A small fragment. A piece, a small piece of his voice.
That was enough, and the rest came as shimmer turns to ripple, ripple turns to wave.
“—killed by a soldier even though the Roman general said to not harm him. So valuable, even his enemy wanted him alive. ‘Course, this was the man who discovered Pi, for gosh sakes.”
I could see Jepson now, leaning against the chalkboard as he spoke. By the end of the day, the white dust caked to his shoulders. Holding a piece of chalk but never really writing anything down.
Then, clearer, his voice filling my head: “…. of his theorems, the Archimedes Principal which states: an object immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force that is equal in magnitude to the force of gravity on the displaced fluid.”
I thought, how does this—
“What we’ll do, though, is apply it to gas, not liquid—because it’s more fun. And because it’s an excuse for you all to go ballooning and have the university foot the bill.”
I had it.
The old, familiar slap to the back of my eyes jarred me when I opened them-- as I moved from "filing system" back to "data collection."
I steered the parachute north, turning directly into the thickest haze billowing up at me.
My visitor had said: You know Newton’s second law of motion, his most powerful, and it will allow you to perform necessary quantitative calculations of dynamics.
Now I understood exactly what my late night golf pro meant by "fighting instincts."
Gripping the steering handles, I swallowed hard and headed back toward the red-hot lava flow.
I estimated there was about seven hundred feet until splash down. At best, the rest of my life would amount to about ninety seconds. But, at least now I had a plan.
It might not be a good one, but I had one. And sometimes that's enough.
Essentially, Archimedes was dealing with buoyancy and Newton said, hey if you want to be buoyant you’ll need to have more force below than above.
In my case, that meant staying directly over the lava flow-- the hot gas creating a higher pressure zone below me. Then, I should be lifted like a hot air balloon as that high pressure rushes upward toward the low, taking my chute (and me) with it.
Now, if it didn’t work, Archimedes and Newton would soon get word that a new arrival in the afterlife was looking to kick both their asses.
Steering farther into the blazing updraft, the angry sighs of the dragon below me coming now from deeper and deeper breaths, my well-developed fear response began hammering away at my fledgling, new-found confidence.
The acid haze sucked water from my eyes and dirty tears dripped down both cheeks. Trying to control the flex response of my throat, fighting off a coughing spasm, I drew shallow breaths but could still taste grit and ash on my tongue and teeth.
Every second, it was getting hotter, and moments later I was dry as desert bone. The instant a bead of sweat would burst to the surface of my skin, the blistering air would lap it up.
Four hundred feet up maybe, and I wasn’t yet slowing.
I yanked down, both hands on the steering handles; braking as much as I could and I started to pitch forward slightly. Looking down, I could see black pustules and lesions mar the surface of the lava flow, now a fat, bubbling vein below me.
Panic gripped my heart, but the muscle just pounded between its fingers. Adrenaline was rippling through my arms, my legs, and now the glow of the river of fire stained the insteps of my shoes.
Despite my commitment, I felt for the first time in my life that I was about to die.
“Oh my God,” I croaked, my mouth covered with a thick paste, and this was what I feared. That I had to rely on myself to get it right, rely on working it out and I’d fuck it up and be wrong, wrong, wrong!
All-in now, no choice, I fought the urge to yank hard and steer away. On either side of the lava flow— just beneath the giant fields of black scab-- was a sight that stole my breath: white-hot embers waited just below the dark surface.
If I were going to live, even for a few seconds longer, I had to find the hottest air I could.
About two hundred feet to go, hotter by degrees every inch of the way, my parachute was now center-line above the boiling river. If this were my last ride, I had indeed just turned down the highway to hell.
The bottoms of my legs were on fire, burning, I knew it, but this was how it was going to be to the end. My skin felt like it was bubbling and blistering inside my jeans. My stomach churned, empty, and the acid within it felt as though it had begun to boil.
Had to hold on, had to keep it slow, so I lifted myself up toward the parachute with both hands yanking on the straps like the fattest Olympic athlete to ever take on the rings.
One hundred and fifty feet, I sped up—racing now. Racing!
But, not down… I was moving forward.
Sure, I was still falling but falling slower. And, I was rocketing forward, racing the seething red vipers below me.
My exhausted forearms were ready to quit, but it was wor
king, I had to hold on!
I blinked away more tears, trying to see ahead but every time they’d clear, more smoke, more ash would fill them.
Looking down, I could keep my eyes open for a few seconds longer but down there was only molten earth, and that did not convince me I'd made the right choice.
I was terrified.
I'd never been so terrified.
I’m not an adventurer, not a thrill-seeker.
My chest felt like it was about to split down the center as some creature inside banged away with its stone axe trying to get out, trying to get away from the fire bath below me.
I’d made my choice, and I would have to live—or die—with it. That was all there was to it.
At least I had a good story to tell: I was rocket-sailing down a river of fire.
Still, the fear boiling in my stomach was threatening to bubble out my throat, so to keep it down, I yelled as loud as I could.
"Aaaaaaaaa!"
I yelled at the top of my lungs…
"Wuhaaaaaaaaa!"
And, inexplicably, dazed from exhaustion and fear and fumes…
"Auhhhllllll…"
I started-- of all things-- to sing.
"Auhhll GO HOME TO MY PARENTS AND CONFESS WHAT I'VE DONNNE!"
Singing, of course, the only songs I know any lyrics to…
"ANNNN I'LL ASK THEM TO PARDON THEEERRRRRRRRR PRO-DI-GAL SONNN!"
Irish drinking songs.
"AND WHEN THEY'VE CARESSED ME, AS OFT TIMES BEE-FORRR."
I howled, my eyes twisted shut, and I felt myself moving fast and faster.
Sweat glands began to outpace the arid haze, salt water oozing from my pores and dripping below— my body’s futile attempt to extinguish the devil's tongue beneath me.
"I NEVER WILL PLAYYYYYY…"
Cracking an eye open, I saw only white.
A wall of white.
Water!
An impossible upward flow of water!
"THE WILD ROVERRRR…"
Not water.
Clouds?
But I wasn’t that high up.
And, it being as hot as it was, I knew I hadn’t died yet and moved on.
Well, being this hot, I hoped I hadn’t died.
"NO MORRRRE!"
My heels felt like they’d been dipped in hot lead, and I jerked my head down to see that they’d entered the lava, my shoes boiled away.
