They take their time at the aquarium, admiring the countless fish swimming behind the glass. They do their best to catch a glimmer in the beady eyes set among the scales, to lock watery gazes with the tiny black marbles embedded in the wriggling bodies. But, each time, the fish switch directions as one, darting off to the side or hiding among the seaweed. They’re both fascinated and awed by the unpredictability of the schools of fish and their slow-motion synchronized swimming, their impeccably choreographed moves, like flocks of birds. Every now and then, a big fish breaks ranks and swims toward the glass, and the children get all excited, only for it to do an about-face at the last second. It’s almost like a game, a planned fake-out designed to get a rise out of the visitors and make them think they’re actually communing with the sea creatures. The children spend a few minutes searching vainly for Balou’s distant cousins among the smaller fish.
They line up for the dolphin show and “ooh” and “ahh” at the animals’ prowess. They marvel at the glow of the jellyfish and their languorous underwater movements, before deciding they’ve had enough of all the scales, tropical colours and quivering gills. After a few halfhearted attempts at building sandcastles, they stroll through the pedestrian-only streets until they come across a charming café, where they drop into the aluminum chairs on the patio for a drink. For a short while, they munch on peanuts and mouth-puckeringly salty olives, rolling the pits around under their tongues, before heading back to the hotel where everyone can’t wait to jump in the pool.
WE MIGHT AS WELL FLY
The woman in Valencia leaves a trail of blood behind her as she walks, a line of bright red dots on the wooden deck.
She’s standing at the edge of the roof, relieved of her purse, one wrist sliced open. The powdery taste of the pills lingers in her mouth, burning her throat as they make their way slowly through her insides: One dose, two doses, nine doses penetrate the walls of her stomach and seep into her blood, gumming up her tongue and clouding her brain, short-circuiting her nervous system, turning her arms to mush, and setting her legs, lips and bony fingers trembling.
She lowers herself onto the ledge, legs dangling over the side, vein pulsing, body riddled with poison, no rope to hang herself with, overcome by the need to end it all.
We might as well fly.
On impulse, she lifts her bottom, her death wish now an obsession. She spreads her arms open wide, reflexively, like a newborn baby who’s just been set down.
She’s hoping for a dizzying fall, enough of a vertical drop to kill herself, enough sky to imagine herself gliding, gliding, gliding like a paper airplane, to experience weightlessness for a few seconds. All she wants is a few feet of freedom before hitting the concrete, like a breakaway in a cycling race, that thrilling feeling of slicing through the air.
In the land of the living, to take to the air—to be everything that lives and flies, for once to be everything you’ve always wanted to be, to assume the shape of every creature whose acts of flight you’ve ever watched in amazement: a hummingbird suspended in midair, a falcon soaring on the wind, a butterfly and a firefly, a dragonfly skimming the surface of the water, a ladybug rising from the palm of a child’s hand, a bumblebee filled with nectar hovering over a patch of flowers, a snow goose or a Siberian crane set resolutely on its course, a great blue heron, a tiny chickadee, a gannet, a swarm of insects, a flock of geese, a flying squirrel, or even a flying fish, leaping above the horizon, its fins glimmering brilliantly against a slice of blue amid a shower of light, its body writhing in the air, between sea and sky, suspended, floating, but for gravity.
Before hitting the concrete, to know what it felt like to fall through the air; then, from head to toe, to suddenly and completely shatter, and with a wet thud, to die.
*
It’s both easy and excruciating to imagine a body falling through the void. Something just doesn’t compute; the brain has a hard time seeing the action through to the end, picturing the violent impact with the ground.
Falling from a height is an extremely common dream. We’ve all felt that dizzying sensation, that stomach-churning feeling of the midnight free-fall and the terror of jolting awake just before hitting the ground, as the brain slips back into the driver’s seat, the eyes fly open, and the fall is interrupted just in time. In our imagined scenarios of someone falling or intentionally jumping from a height, the body rarely hits the ground; it stays suspended. In dreams and movies, there’s never an impact.
We can all picture scenes from action movies or old war footage of soldiers rocketing through the sky, spread-eagled, the instant before their parachute deploys. We also remember the morning of September 11, 2001. Claire had been sitting on the edge of the unmade bed, her thigh pressed up against Jean’s (that was before the kids were born), in a dingy postage stamp of an apartment with perma-stained linoleum. Like everyone else that day, she’d stayed glued to the TV, transfixed by the images of the people throwing themselves out the windows of the World Trade Center. We have jumpers, one commentator had said.
It’s hard to forget The Falling Man, that iconic photo of the man, body perfectly vertical, one knee bent, falling head-first against the backdrop of the New York City skyscraper. There are no signs of flames or of the tragedy playing out several floors above; only a perfectly framed slice of architectural purity, a canvas of clean, dark lines captured just moments before the building collapsed, a silhouette suspended in
