As Luck Would Have It (35 page)

*****

It was more than
four
months since the plane crash and though I felt more
e
nthusiastic being at work, physically I tired frequently
,
and found it difficult to put in the hours that I could have easily accomplished before, had I made even the slightest effort.  What an irony if you can believe it; now I actually was interested in working but found it hard to summon up the energy despite the motivation.  The tests were all normal and from a medical perspective, I had had fully recovered, but I knew that the changes I had experienced over the past
few months
would never show on any CAT scan or lab report; no, the inexplicable and mysterious symptoms could not be diagnosed by any specialist no matter how impressive his or her credentials, be they from the Mayo Clinic, Stanford, or even Johns Hopkins.

In addition to the not so subtle alterations to my perceptions of people and places, I was beginning to feel my age as well.  Now I knew the typical 60 year-old experience; the aching back, the fatigue at the end of the day, the memory lapses, the difficulty in reasoning complex problems, eve
n
some noticeable changes to my eyesight which after all these years required me to visit the optometrist for eyeglasses to correct my
vision
that had always been 20/20 before.
  All of this was quite new to me, since prior to last December, I felt more or less the same as I had 30 years before.  So this was how middle age went, the softening belly despite all the sit-ups and crunches, the effort it took to concentrate on previously easy tasks, forgetting where you left things and whether you watered the plants or not; my mind and body following what for anyone else would have been considered a normal course, even an excellent one for many people, better than average certainly.  I could still hit a baseball if I wanted to; still jog
two
miles without too much problem, but clearly even these things would begin to slip away gradually now that luck had turned its back and left me alone.  I had even come down with a case of the flu, the first serious bout I'd had with a nasty virus since I was
about ten
years old, when my father had stayed up in my room all night until the fever broke.  Auto accidents, flu bugs, back aches; now I was going to have to learn to deal with such annoyances just like you or anyone else.

But I wasn't like everyone else, or was I?  And it was strange to consider how I would cope wit
h
this new life of mine; it felt like I'd have to swim and swim until I figured out how to float, everything seemed almost normal on the one hand, yet turned inside out at the same time.  When I looked in the mirror I saw my own face, but also someone else's, like a twin brother staring back at me with a puzzled look, wondering where have you been, what brings you here now, a knock on the head made you finally appear?

These were serious questions without answers, which in itself was nothing new in my experience.  That much had not changed; my good luck had always baffled me, but now there was another layer added to this perplexity, another aspect to the mystery to consider.  Which was real, what actually existed, what tricks had my mind been playing, or had it been playing any at all?  Was Tim really the useless buffoon, or was he a competent leader?  Was that a new Armani suit he had on the other day, or something he got off the sales rack at Sears?  Would I have to live the rest of my life not knowing the difference between something real and something imagined, trying to go back and sort things out in order to understand my life as it really was?  How can I reconstruct history so that it makes some degree of sense now?  You can't live life in reverse; I would not be able to rewind the tape so to speak and see how it plays again.

I was also forced to consider what others perceived in me; did I seem unusual now to them as well?  They didn't seem to be treating me differently, but how could they not notice?  Had I been sleeping through life, dreaming this stuff up more or less as I went along, until awakened by the airplane crash and brought back to reality?  Or maybe something happened to me in the fiery car crash on my 14
th
birthday that sent me to some
place like
Oz, only to be sent back home later, not in a hot air balloon exactly, but in an unlikely airplane mishap.

Maybe I can just forget about it now and move on, not worry about the before and after; enjoy my job, my friends and my new life, which in some ways was better than the old one.  For there was a certain tranquility and contentment now that seemed new to me as well, an acceptance of what it meant to be an adult confronted by time and circumstances, possibilities both good and bad, decisions made based on the reasonable consequences they presented, not just relying on luck to cover for me.

Yes, I'd have to be more cautious now, someone might run that red light and I better pay attention; I could get cancer if I keep smoking, but wait, I don't even want a cigarette anymore, how can that be?  Who just wakes up after sleeping for a couple of days and quits cold turkey after 35 years with a habit more addictive than morphine?  Maybe I should light up just one Lucky Strike and see how it feels; would it be enjoyable, or would I cough and gag like the first time I tried a Winston when Joseph swiped a pack from his Aunt Betty who was visiting from Milwaukee when we were thirteen?  And what about Joseph; why did he appear completely the same as before, and did he notice the changes that I saw in myself?  Was it possible that he had somehow come along with me on some remarkable magic carpet ride through life, only to be dropped off at just the right moment and get far enough away to avoi
d the catastrophe that signaled the end for 158 mostly innocent people?

Wouldn't you know
it;
the phone rang just then to interrupt
my
somewhat scattered thoughts.  It was him; how was I feeling, did I want to go for drinks tonight?  If I was too tired we could do it another time.  What other time could there be; I might wake up tomorrow and find myself in another century where non-believers were tortured, or maybe their hair was used for mattress stuffing or their skin stretched into lamp shades.  Of course I wanted to go, tired or not
tired;
I had the rest of my life to figure out
what
to do with.  OK, I wouldn't light up that cigarette after all, but yes, drinks tonight sounded fine, Scotch preferably, let's go to our favorite pub.

Amidst all this confusion and uncertainty, there was Joseph, ordered and predictable.  How was it that he had survived exactly?  You as the reader must still be wondering
about
this since luck had only been guarding me and had not promised any special favors for my friends.  When we last contemplated this question, my memory of where he was that day had been wiped clean like a squeegeed window.  But recollection had slowly made its way back in as my bruised brain would see fit
to allow.  No, it wasn't some terrible argument at all that was responsible for his fortunate absence.  I could not take credit in any way for saving him, nor could my luck I don't think.  It was nothing more than just ordinary circumstance, the happenings we all have experienced ma
n
y times.  He had been summoned to an important meeting in
Los Angeles
the day before we were to leave for St. Petersburg; no problem at all according to Joseph.  I'd fly down as planned and he would meet up with me in Fort Lauderdale three days later, in plenty of time to embark on the cruise, which left port on December 13
th
as scheduled, but without at least two of its intended passengers, one
just
back home from
California,
and one
whose memory had now been at least partially
restored, and quite possibly without several others who may have missed out on the warm Caribbean breezes, resting at the bottom of the freezing lake instead.

It is at least in part this remembrance of those who died that helps me through my confusion now.  I try to imagine each one of them and how their lives must have been before they were lost, fanciful of course because I had only the slightest recollections of them, nothing more than an image here and there; a young couple possibly heading for their honeymoon, and elderly grandmother type who wound up sitting in the wrong row and had to change her seat, the teenage boy fidgeting nervously in the middle seat next to me; hadn't he asked if he could read the sports page that someone had left
i
n the seat pocket near me?  Yes, he did
;
I can remember him, we joked
about the Bear's awful defense that year, where was Dick Butkus
when we needed him?
  I could only
imagine
where the boy was now and how his family was
supposed to be
able
to go on without him.

It made me think of Mr. Casslemond and his wife and how they were forced to manage their way through a life without their beautiful daughter, Allison, taken from them at such an early age.  On the night before I left for college in the fall of 1979, Mr. Casslemond had told me that her death had ripped such a huge hole through him that he had never recovered from it, even then, some 42 years later, the grief refused to leave him be.  He said it was because of what happened to Allison that he had been so determined to connect with me after the accident, that he ignored plenty of well-intentioned people who thought it was a bad idea, nearly everyone that is except for Mr. Casslemond's wife who understood all too well what it meant to him.

I was able to reconnect in a sense with some of the passengers on our flight.  In the weeks following the accident, I
received literally
hundreds of cards, letters and even phone calls from well wishers, quite a few of which came from the family members themselves.  Of course for them it was not enough to just extend their thoughts and prayers; they were seeking answers as well, and there was no one alive but for me who might actually provide some.  At first I felt conflicted and put off by the calls, but soon I realized that it
didn't matter
what I told them or didn't tell them; they were just reaching out for something, for anything really that might ease their pain.  Better to conjure up some response to their questions; maybe it would help them in some way, who could know.

Mostly I just talked to them on the phone; they usually wanted to know if I thought their loved ones had suffered much, were they at peace at the end, things like that.  Every last one of them described their family members in great detail, including what they were wearing, what their carry on bag looked like, anything that might jar my memory; had I met them or been sitting near them?  Yes, I think so, you're brother sounds so familiar to me; no, I think they passed quite peacefully, it seemed to me that way, no one screaming
or crying
at the end, it was very quiet and calm.  I had no idea if I had seen their relative or not, and even less about their suffering, but what better lies were there to be told then these?

That is, until the parents of the boy in the middle seat actually showed up at my apartment out of the blue, the day before I was to return to work. It seems that they were somehow able to get a copy of the flight manifest from the airline and figured out that I was seated in the same row as their son.  The anguish showed on their faces as if it had been painted on, the pain of it so fresh from the recent events.  As they tried to describe their son, Henry, a 16
-
year
-
old only child, the woman sobbed repeatedly. 
Her husband
did his best to comfort her, doing remarkably well I thought at containing his own emotions, while I went to bring the coffee pot and some mugs from the kitchen.

There were to be no lies today; I could not look at these people and make anything up, as close as I was to their suffering, and having been through a similar disaster of my own many years before.  I poured them coffee hoping that it would help settle the woman down, as well as calm my own nerves, for I was quite shaken by now but wanted to remain as stoic as possible.  As they talked about Henry, I remembered more and more details about him and the conversation we had before the plane started in on some dreadful noises that frightened us into
stillness
.  I recalled now that he was a musician and played trombone in his high school band; his parents mentioned that he was an A student, which conformed to my impressions of him
as a
n
intelligent young man.  He had asked probing questions about my career and where I was going for my vacation.

Now my memory was beginning to work like evolution intended for it to and things were suddenly much clearer to me.  I remembered how terrified he was while the plane was falling, his cries of panic, how terribly he was shaking when I held onto to him, trying to steady him or provide some minuscule degree of comfort if possible; for we both knew what was going to happen.  We looked straight into each other's eyes, understanding completely that the plane could not be saved, we were tumbling down too fast, spiraling now together to a virtually certain death.  I could hear his sobs again, more distinct in my mind than they were on the
flight
itself.  I remembered the sounds of the passengers nearby as well; please God, help us, dear Jesus forgive me, people grasping on to one another for their last chance at a human touch, too terrified to scream until the water itself brought
them to near silence.