We’re half-running across the tarmac, slipping and sliding, some stopping as long as they can stand it, loved ones saying goodbyes, I-love-you’s. You see family guys, worried faces, what-might-happen, four weeks away in the terrible place, and I hope all is well while we’re apart. God knows what happens in an instant, when you’re away, when your back’s turned. And it does. Look up at a flock of birds, the one you love is under a bus, go to make her a cup of tea, she’s died when you’re in the kitchen. I see that in their faces, some of them, as I’m trotting my bones, stiff as cold boards, past the goodbyes and kisses, and I feel sorry for them. Which is comical.
I haul up the stairs to the plane. I’ve been outside forty seconds and my legs are numb, my face too. On board, families behind us, the heaters hit us, the guys who know each other say their hellos, another fucking four weeks missing their families, bored to death, only each other to look at. I stay out of this too, though I know a lot of them, who they are, anyway. Some of them getting on nod at me, most don’t. Half of them think I’m a paroled murderer, somebody made a joke I’d been killed in a hunting accident, somehow it got turned into that. I hear the idiots, others too in the food hall, the bar, calling me ‘Oddway,’ more laughing. I don’t run around correcting people.
I buckle in, look at the tarmac, watching the snow blow across, waiting to go. This is the shift when night is going to move in up there and sit down like a dog and refuse to leave. Six months of dark, after the first few days when every day gets shorter by an hour until the last one’s down to minutes, then dark, day and night, and permanent fluorescents, shift after shift, through spring, if you haven’t gone crazy by then and jumped in a rat-hole to drown.
There was a night I went out on the snow with my rifle, got a wire tied around my boot and the other end around the trigger, got the muzzle into my mouth, and I sat there, wind blowing, and I stared into the snow in as final a mood as that, getting myself set to yank my boot down on the wire, three deep breaths, and ready, looking at the snow, my last seconds, I think. And out of the snow comes a big bear, white, head swaying, left to right, sniffing for the dumpsters, or me, and when he sees me he rears up high, all of him, black eyes, black nose, three black pennies aimed at me, and a little line of black gums, I thought I saw, a little snarl. I look at him, with my gun in my mouth, and I get it out and get it turned on him, if you can find any sense in that. I don’t think he was afraid of me, so I didn’t see him getting angry, but things can surprise you. Maybe he never made me out in the snow at all beyond a whiff of something, but I sat there pointing my gun until he dropped on his fours again, turned sideways, back into snow. I was afraid of him, certainly. Some of us hate it, but it’s the job at the end of the world. In all the dark you see purple winking in the sky sometimes, red, green-gold, aurora, that night I did, anyway, sitting on the snow, like a fool and a coward, after the bear left. A great green-gold curtain dancing, and it glowed and rippled over me all the way back to camp carrying my rifle, and the wire in my pocket, for later use, maybe. At a time to be determined. They’re the only colors you’ll see for months, but you’ve never seen anything like them, on earth. They look impossible, like a lot of things.
I see Henrick getting on the plane. He comes up the aisle, climbs into the seat next to me. He’s one of Lewenden’s friends, of the idiot-crew, I see him with them, up there. But he’s alright, as much as any of us is. Smarter, maybe. He belts in, nods at me, to say ‘You might be the psycho we’re all afraid of, but I don’t have a beef with you.’ He knows not to bother talking to me, and he doesn’t seem to mind. This is what I like about him, partly. The other heroes of the idiot-crew file on, Lewenden, Bengt, the others. They look at Henrick sideways, for sitting in a row with me, I suppose. But Henrick’s the one who’ll thump them to shut up when they’re laughing their way past a funeral. I should like him less for spending his shift with these fools, but I like that he sticks to his friends, backwards or not. And they stick to him, so they’re not nothing, I suppose. None of us is, I suppose, whatever we think. Whatever the signs to the contrary.
We’re all belted in, blathering and bluffing and bullshitting and playing cards, with our bags and our laptops and game-boys and phones and shit to read and Playboys and packed lunches and extra long underwear and almost teary eyes on some of us, and would-you-fuck-her looks at the company flight-attendants on others, yes, we have flight-attendants, and another-four-fucking-weeks, and we’re off, as much as the wind is letting us. It’s slapping us up and down for thinking we could, right now, and the wings are bucking, worse. But we’re men of the north, we’re better than any fucking wind. The plane hoists, shoves this way and that, humps and bumps but gets up there. We get up over it, like they said we would.
Out of Anchorage a little, not dark yet but I see all the orange lights crawling away below, like stars upside down, we leave it behind and sooner or later we’re over dark snow. I watch it pass under us, as it gets darker mile by mile, snow and ice, on and on, forever, it looks like, everything leaks out of it, all the white, the little black lakes get harder to see, until there’s nothing to see at all. If you wanted the world gone you could fold it up and bury it here under the snow and never see it again.
We fly on, smooth as sleep. I tick by like the clock, last one awake, time slipping under me, same as when I was little. “You’re a night animal,” my father said. “You’d rather watch than sleep.” But I close my eyes, eventually, and I see the motel room, the cinderblocks, the dresser, the mirror. Four weeks in a motel, you’ll start to hate the mirror, at least the guy looking out of it. I see the clock on the nightstand, the picture I propped on it, half-crumpled, my wife, when she knew me, our boy, when he knew me. I stare at it, in the half-sleep, like I did in the room, their faces, the brightness in them, gone from me or not, the brightest thing in the world. As bright as aurora. I fall asleep, finally, don’t know how long, and as I fall I think I’m dreaming something, great giant dark rolling into great giant dark, slipping, weightless, I guess, but that’s all, then I think nothing, maybe engine hum, but nothing else. It’s a fine state, if you’re awake enough to feel it without waking up, a fine forever, as long as it goes.
Then something hits me, or takes me and smashes me into something, slams me down like a shot-glass in my sleep, snaps my head awake, I blink, blurry, some kind of metal banging sound’s going through me, the bones at the back of my spine feel it bang again then dropping, the plane does a kind of belly-sick slide-and-drop and then it feels like it smashes into the air and catches itself, and we all jerk in our seats. Everybody’s awake now. It slips off the air again, drops again, smash-lurches, drops again. Bump and thump.
“What the fuck was that?” Henrick is looking at me.
The plane bangs again, drops again, and everybody grabs their arm-rests, holds on to their asses, look at each other, a long quiet second, waiting.
Then it’s banging again, for real, harder, firecracker-finale banging, and the tube of the plane is twisting and buckling, your insides buckling with it, it’s like hitting rocks, smacking mountain but then we’re still going somehow after that. It drops again, we’re going faster, we tilt over on the right wing, way over, we’re strapped in hanging sideways in the air, turning, upside down, even faster, metal banging again like it’s dying, thumping and tearing and none of us has a clue except that we died already, hit a mountain and kept going. Tables drop and lockers pop open and bags and coats and phones and Playboys fly this way and that and more ripping and crumpling and laptops and boots and books and pieces of crap shoot by and somebody’s keys smack me in the face and it all slams sideways and drops again, not long, but we start going faster than before, and a flight-attendant flies by my face, skirt-up, something smacks me over the eye, I think the heel of her one shoe, her other shoe was off, I think, but I see her face as she flies away down the aisle, she looks at me, girl in a tornado.
Then we really hit something. Somewhere as you’re dying there’s more death, and whatever I thought we hit before, possibly, this we hit. My brain shocks and my teeth buzz and everything gets punched and shaken at once between the balls and the belly and my spine, my shoulders drive up past my head, my throat drops into my ribs, my neck’s up in my mouth broken inside out and the top of my head slams the bottom of my jaw, seats fly by, we fall and then fall further, hit something else, again, harder, louder than before, we slam and crack and I’m smashed
