Shards and Ashes

swinging his legs out from under him. They dangle through the open shaft, and he grips the open metal edge that much more tightly.

The lights below him blur. He rubs his eyes.

Don’t be afraid.

It’s too late to be afraid.

Everything seems important in the air.

No. It’s not that.

It’s me.

I am important in the air.

Being above something, becoming larger, makes everything smaller. But it’s an illusion; Rama knows this. It’s optics. Perspective.

I am as small as that, he thinks. I am a scattered light on the ground. I am one of many.

Why should this one drop mean more than any other? Why should one life be different?

Why should mine?

“Ready?”

The pilot shouts back to him. Rama only nods. He’s ready to jump. He’s been planning this jump for months. Nothing about this night is a surprise. But that’s not the question.

Is he ready?

Is it worth it?

To live, and to die?

This jump is expensive. They don’t call it getting high for no reason, and he’s at least a thousand feet higher than he planned.

The chopper lunges in the opposite direction.

“Goupi!” the pilot curses. “No offense, kid. If you’re gonna jump, you gotta go now.”

Rama reaches into the pocket of his orange jumpsuit, pulling out an envelope. Paper, like in the old days. The time before now, when there were things like minutes and hours and days and weeks and years.

The luxurious, indifferent time of time. The era of eras. The epoch of epochs. When life was quantitative, not qualitative. Something to be measured, not judged.

Not dropped.

Not bartered.

Not sold.

Back then, Rama thinks, I would still have my whole life ahead of me. How old would I be? Seventeen? Eighteen? In man years?

Rama sighs and turns back to the pilot. “Can you give this to—my xinfeng—to whoever? Whoever comes for me?” Rama stumbles over the words, because he isn’t sure.

Who will be left? Who will come?

Who will care enough to waste a precious tear, a millimeter of water in an economy of small waters, on him?

Probably Jai. Jai will come.

He hopes she will, for her as much as him.

The pilot nods, without even turning back to look. “Stick it in the box with the others.”

Rama looks behind him, where a metal postbox sits welded to the chopper floor. He flips open the lid marked XINFENG to see a hundred letters, no different from his own.

Nothing is different for anyone, not anymore. Not now.

I am different, thinks Rama.

I am ready.

It is finished.

I was here, and I will be here no longer. But as I drop, I will have that. I will have the rush, and the pounding, and the burst of adrenaline in my blood. And I will know that before I died, I was really alive.

I lived.

Even I could afford that.

Then, as deliberate as a last gesture can be, he folds a photograph of a girl into the paper, and drops it into the box.

“You want a parachute? I know it’s kind of pointless, but it makes some people feel better. On the way down.”

The pilot turns to look at Rama, but he isn’t there.

He’s slipping through the darkness, searching for the end of his story, feetfirst and falling.

He’s a hundred yards down before the pilot can even turn the chopper around, back toward the base.

Wondering, as he does every night, how long it will be until he’ll be making that last drop for himself.

The pilot shivers and heads for home. He has a wife and a child and a love for meat and beer.

It is nearly enough, while he has it.

To keep the drops and his thoughts away.

2. J A I

There it is.

I hold Rama’s letter in my hand.

The cat looks up at me expectantly. Purring. Perhaps she has missed him, too.

Mao is a stupid cat.

I have been waiting, watching for it, ever since he left for the Mojave Desert last week. I could see it in his eyes. He hadn’t told me his count, but I wasn’t a fool. I knew how he’d been living. I’d added up the late nights, the motorcycle trips, the sudden interest in mountain climbing. The thick rolls of tobacco leaves, bound in rice paper. The cheap Mexicali beer.

Rama was burning through beads like nobody’s business. Like he wanted it that way. Like he wanted to go.

It was my business, though. I have learned this through experience. It is always our business, the ones left behind. The business of the dead belongs to the living.

I slice open the folded paper, smiling to myself. Paper. Of course, paper. Old paper, from trees, not rice. Rama would have liked that. He would have combed the off-market shops and dealers until he found some.

Our mother was like that as well. Before she dropped. There was something about dropping that made everyone anachronistic. We looked for what was old about our lives, what came before. What things endured.

Because we could not.

Words, the few we could remember.

Bread, when we had it.

Babies, when they surprised us, finding their way to life in spite of every modern manner of escaping them.

The sun and the dirt and the sky, though the thick brown layer of toxins in the air made it difficult to see, sometimes. The Yanwu never clears over the Southlands, that’s what they say. It only turns our brown skin browner, our lungs blacker.

The old things matter more, when you’re dropping.

That’s what I’ve been told. That’s what it seems like, to me. I have no one to ask, now that Rama’s gone.

He was the last of my family to go. His necklace used to be as long as mine, as full of teardrops. We wept