Vacation

My boss calls me into his office on the last day of finals. “You were out for eight days this year,” he says. “Your contract gives you one week’s vacation. That’s five days.”

“I was in the hospital. You can dock me for those three extra days if you want. It’s like two hundred bucks.”

“You’re fired. Finish grading the exams and we’ll give you your last month’s paycheck.”

“What about my summer pay?” I ask. Then, “Oh. That’s why you’re firing me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he says. “Get out of my office.”

All of my students get A’s, and they tell me the check is in the mail. I get home around four, and there’s a message on the machine.

“Hi Clay, this is Adam.” He’s the collection officer that got assigned to me to make sure I paid my hospital bill. “Did you get the birthday card Suze sent? She says she hopes you’re feeling better, and the next time I come by she’ll send some brownies for you. Anyways, Clay, you were a bit late last month, I just wanted to make sure you remembered to send in your check on time this time. It’s three fifty-six forty. Just so you remember. Take care now.”

I pour myself a shot of Beam and take Remy out for a walk, come home and pour myself a glass and start looking for the hospital bill. Three fifty-six forty every month for twenty-eight months, because I got drunk at a Christmas party, fell down the stairs, broke a rib and punctured a lung. My insurance wouldn’t pay up, because I was obviously intoxicated on arrival, and I didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer.

Underneath the bill is a letter from the Army. I’m due to report to Fort Bragg on the first day of September, because I made the mistake of enlisting to pay for college. In 1998, it seemed like a good idea.

Death or prison—the price you pay for an education and healthcare. I pour myself another glass, this time with ice.

Katie comes home around eight and starts throwing clothes around. “Baby, have you seen my black dress?”

“You have six.”

“Yeah, but I want the black dress. Mark is taking me to D’Orsay.” Mark is the guy she’s dating.

“Ooh la la.” I pour myself another glass. When she kisses me on the way out I can taste the vodka on her breath.

*

“Katie?”

“Hnnh.”

“Baby.”

“Go to sleep.”

“Katie, I’m leaving.”

She wakes up like flipping a switch. “Leaving to where? With what money?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. Okay. Go back to sleep.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again. Five hundred years from now, maybe I’ll lie down and catch a nap.”

“I have to work in the morning. Go to sleep.”

Maybe when I don’t see on the backs of my eyelids the cement shells of bombed-out buildings. When I don’t have to worry about jail or the Army. When I don’t hear Katie offering in undertones the only thing I want to some guy she’s just met at a party. Possibly, when I am old and my debts are paid and a foreign sun has burned away the memories of how it is to try to live here. But for now I can’t sleep—not even when I’m asleep. That's what I tell myself before I fall back asleep.

In the morning I wait for her to dress and leave. A red dress, one I gave her when I believed it was possible to profit from my labor. Red, the color I’ll remember her by. The color of her nails the day she first dug them into my chest, the color of her hands when she pulled them out.
She leaves without waking me, and I don’t blame her for not believing, or even remembering, last night’s announcement. I’ve said it a half dozen times before, and never stayed away for more than a week. So this time, to make sure, I buy the ticket first. I told myself that when I finally decided to kill myself, I’d try moving to Africa first. I decide to start with Egypt, and the stones the slaves piled for the glory of their king-god.

I pile the things I’m taking onto the bed. Ten t-shirts, a pair of jeans, a pair of shorts and a bathing suit. Sneakers, sandals and sunglasses. Sunscreen. A towel. Socks and underwear. Another towel. A toothbrush and toothpaste, toilet paper. Everything I need and want will fit into my backpack from high school.

At the airport, I take a three-thousand dollar cash advance from my Visa card, another three from MasterCard, and five from American Express. With the kind of debt I’m in, I find it surprising that cops don’t just fly right out of the cash slot, but apparently they think a middle-class white kid with a college education will just keep working and paying, working and paying. They’re probably right—most of the time, at least.

With my newfound wealth I go to an airport bar and drink bloody marys and look at a glossy photos of anorexics on the beach. I draw glasses on movie stars and pentagrams on photos of their children. In the mirror behind the bar I see a ghost, pale, blandly handsome, easy to overlook. He has thin, stooped shoulders, too-white skin and a coin-operated smile. A face you’d expect to pay its debts, maybe even one likely to succeed in some small way. It’s a useful disguise, one I’ve worn so long that aspects of it have comingled with my real face, the one I wear underneath, with its wrinkles and scars and half a cheekbone burned away.

By the time I make it to my seat on the plane, I’m upholstery. I’m so relaxed, in fact, that it doesn’t bother me when, a few hours in and five or six rows to the front of me, a man on his way to the lavatory takes a glass shank out from under his belt and shoves it into another passenger’s throat. After a certain number of drinks, I’m pretty much cool with anything. I watch the blood trickle down the glass to the killer’s starched white cuff, watch it spurting, purple, almost black, into the aisle when he wrenches loose the shank. I wonder what kind of heart pumps black blood. All of them, I suppose. I press the drink button, just in case it’s not too late to get another.

“Please remain calm,” the man says. He’s got white skin, no beard, an English accent, and a pistol he took from the dead man’s armpit. “We are in command of the plane now.” There are two men standing in the front of the plane, also in nice suits, but darker-skinned and with beards, and they’re stuffing manila envelopes with dirt. No, fertilizer. Fertilizer and cotton balls, and the liquid they’re squirting from contact lens solution bottles fills the plane with panic and the smell of diesel. I used to make fertilizer bombs in middle school. For me, it’s a nostalgic smell. I press the drink button again.

The white one with the bloody hand starts speaking in a soft, almost apologetic tone. He talks about oil and occupation, and I jab at the drink button. He talks about god and economics, about medicine that he can't afford. Cars for the corrupt, death for the rest. He talks about the war with western culture, and how their young are trading glitz for god. How two George Bushes bombed his university two separate times, and how he ended up trading his textbooks for a Kalashnikov.

He wants to prick the thumb of power. To live his life free from the demands of Exxon-Mobil and Hollywood, to lie down in a valley greener than dollars and to sleep in the sun without being shot at by his government or mine. He wants tetanus shots and running water. It occurs to me that I have more in common with him than I do with my own people, and I start to think that I would make a fine jihadist.

I get up to join them. Trip. Get up, lurch and fall forward again. From one knee, I see one of the black-bearded, linen-suited men trying to strike a match. He's missing the flint entirely, and seems to be frightened of me. The soft-voiced leader laughs a healthy laugh. “Okay, you’re right,” he says. “No point in trying to convince you of the justness of our cause before we blow you all up.”

The striking of a match. A brief hiss. No one screams, and no one resists. The striking of another match. The hijackers press their fertilizer bombs between their bodies and the steel eggshell, the bombs burning in their beards, and the Englishman kneels and prays in Arabic.

A woman in the front row stares into me, her eyes pleading and scorching by turns. “What did you do? What have you done?” I tell her I don’t know. I go back to my seat, buckle in, and return my tray table to its upright position.
A dull thud, then another. Wind, noise. The front of the plane flips up like the top of a Pez dispenser and is gone. Two shredded bodies flap like ruined flags. They fly away.

Blood on the walls, blood on the ceiling. The soft-voiced man closes his eyes, and flies away. Wind and noise. I tighten my seatbelt and hold on to my last bottle, the one I had saved in case the stewardess cut me off. The woman sitting next to me shrieks until she faints. I’m kind of embarrassed for her.

The front of the plane plunges and my ears pop six times. No pressure. The tail must be off. It feels like a dream of my mother. No weight. The front of the plane is a flaming circle filled with silver clouds streaked with orange, and yellow in cream.

Nobody has put on their oxygen mask. I do. Breathing from it tastes like scraping ice off my windshield at six am—metallic.

A screech, bolts ripped out of the floor, then a subtle thunk, like something being sucked into a vacuum cleaner. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Then it's my turn.

Thunk.

This is absolute freedom. It’s not an aisle with a hundred kinds of breakfast cereals, or cursing your president in an empty room, or the right to choose the terms of your enslavement. It’s alone, being completely alone, with no one to depend on and no one depending on you. No debts, no future and no fear, because the worst has already happened, and the thing you worry most about—yourself—is streaking towards death so quickly that it might as well be dead already. True freedom is terrifying. That’s why no one really wants it.

Fortunately, freefalling is nothing like regular falling. There the first push of acceleration—nine point eight meters per second every second until you hit terminal velocity; I learned that from my hundred thousand dollar education—but the ground stays put, or that the only way you know you’re moving is that your cheeks clap against your gums like children at a circus. And once my guts go back to their proper places, I feel good. Better than good. I’m all quaky-cool with adrenaline and oxygen deprivation.

I open my last bottle and shake out some bourbon. I stay still, it falls up. I am a Russian cosmonaut running a latenight experiment in a space station everyone's forgotten. I unbuckle my seatbelt, draw up my legs and kick off from my chair. Seat 24-A rises. I salute it, in honor of a life lived in accord with its design. In many ways, 24-A is a better man than I have been.

Inside the clouds the sunlight stretched through vapor ignites the thin gray with scattered rainbows. Cool, sharp air and the damp light fill me with a cottony consciousness, and I recall the prism my mother had hanging in the kitchen window, how every sunny day in the late afternoon it would split the sun, and the walls would be littered with rainbows. How I grew up surrounded by rainbows.

A shriek grows down on me. I roll onto my back and see a brown skirt flipped over red lace panties, and the thighs of the woman in 24-B flapping. As she passes, I see her face is clenched and quivering. "Look!" I shout above the wind. "Rainbows!" She looks me in the eye, and then begins to shriek. "Don't worry!" I yell after her. "We'll be alright!"

Something else I learned at school: striking water at a high speed is no different from striking pavement. I’m going to end in a crimson mist. I'll revert to water. Or whisky and water, at least. But that’s alright. I’d rather spend the rest of my life falling from the sky than trying to resist the invasion of western culture.

I’ll miss Katie. We drank too much, and destroyed things when we fought, and one times she told me she hated my neck, and the bump on my nose. That impressed me so much that I stayed with her for another six months. But she was strong in ways I hardly even recognized, and I was proud of her. I’ll miss the dog. We picked him up off the beach in Mexico and named him Remy because he was the color of cognac. He used to put his head in my lap and sigh like he'd just gotten home from work. I’ll miss my students. They were ignorant and cruel, but how could they have expected to survive otherwise? In that way, they were smarter than me.

I forgive the man with the soft voice who was just doing what he thought was right. That’s better than I can say for myself. When did I ever count? Why didn’t I strap a bomb to my chest and go to visit my insurance company or my boss or the Army recruiter who said he could offer me a better future?

Seat 24-A catches up with me, then passes me. The empty bottle passes me. My debts and my fears pass me. Now I am the one rising.

The war passes me. The children eaten by bombs are all sleeping.

Plummeting people strapped into their chairs scream by, and I float like a dandelion tuft.

Beneath the clouds it is already night, and it is raining. Raining for bombs, the dollars and the dead. It rains Allah and Economics, rains lies, truths and truths omitted. It rains a drop for every devil and every angel among us, and for the sad, desperate men with a love so fierce it turns to hate. It rains for the poor who die manufacturing the rich, for the people who trade away their lives or have them stolen. It rains a drop for every dollar squandered or robbed or minted by war. For the soft-voiced man who could have been my father. A drop falls for every child taught to hate and to kill. A drop for me, a drop for Katie and one for Remy, who was the best of us. A drop to the ocean falls for us all.