Everyone is cramming into the cockpit, asking what to do, and Abram is shouting that there’s nothing we can do, we’re going down hard, sit down and buckle up and secure your own before helping others, all a soft, slow slur in the back of my awareness.
Julie was good at this. Granting life to inanimate objects. She turned a Mercedes into Mercey. What would she call a 747?
I topple across the aisle as Abram overcorrects the bank, trying to take some weight off the wounded wing.
David.
I smile to myself, falling into a chair next to Julie. “David Boeing,” I tell her, barely able to contain my pleasure.
“What?” she shrieks.
“I’m naming the plane. It’s David Boeing.”
She looks at me with total incomprehension, but I’m still smiling. It’s good. Maybe I can do this too.
“R,” she says, and I suddenly realize that I misread her face. It’s not incomprehension but the opposite. It’s the grim understanding from which I’m hiding.
“R, if we—”
“Please don’t,” I blurt.
She chokes it back. She jumps out of her seat and braces against the cockpit doorway as the plane bucks and shakes. “I’m sorry,” she says, turning her watery eyes from Abram to Sprout. “I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t care,” Abram says through his teeth as he battles the wild controls.
Julie pulls herself away from Sprout’s panicked gaze and stumbles back down the aisle.
“Buckle up, Jules!” Nora shouts, one hand on M’s shoulder as he clings to his seat with rigor mortis stiffness, his face ashen, eyes wide, looking more corpselike than I’ve ever seen him. He stayed relatively composed for our first crash landing, but that one was soft. This one will be hard, if it’s a landing at all. This one may call for screams.
Julie grabs my hand and pulls me to the back of the plane where her mother sits on the floor, clinging to her cable for an anchor while the plane rocks and bounces.
“Hold on, Mom,” Julie says. “Please hold on.”
She slips into the last remaining row of seats and takes a deep, slow breath, then looks at me with sudden calm. “Sit with me?”
I sit with her. The oxygen masks dangle in front of us but we don’t bother. We look out the window at the rapidly approaching shore of what my basement memories call East Atlantic Beach. Beyond that, JFK International Airport, and everywhere around it . . .
Madness. Monsters. A city full of death. Even if we survive this plunge, it’s hard to see a future.
“Stop it,” Julie says, watching the side of my face as the runway approaches at a wild angle. “Be with me.”
I look into her glistening eyes and the roaring around me goes quiet. Strange, how complications melt away in the face of disaster. How all the fear and shame and tangled knots of logic suddenly dissolve in the heat, leaving only a core of love that cares nothing for the noise in our heads, that dismisses our arguments and ignores our hesitations. A love that simply is.
In this moment, however brief it might be, everything is clear. Julie kisses me and I kiss her back, ordering myself not to pull away, ever, because whatever might be ending today, this is how I want it to end.
My eyes are closed, all senses focused on her, so there is no terrible buildup to the impact. I am kissing Julie, I am kissing Julie, I am—
WE
THERE ARE MANY EARTHS inside the earth. The outermost is the busiest, with its oceans and forests and cities, its buzzing, hissing, chirping, grunting, roaring, speaking, and singing. This is the surface, the present, the game board on which life plays. Beneath the surface is the hidden world of holes and tunnels, where creatures creep and slither and hold secret meetings in the strata of eons past. And at the center is the fire that forged it all, Earth’s raging, spinning heart, full of endless momentum, always ready to quake and erupt, forever growling change.
The earth likes change. It grows bored with balance; rest makes it restless. The moment its inhabitants think they know the rules, it shakes the board clear and moves on to the next game.
Next epoch. Next era. Next evolution.
We swim up through the mantle and into the bedrock, through Paleocene and Pliocene and Holocene, through our own bones and shells from species to species, generation to generation, each piece of us recognizing its remains as we float past them, indulging in brief bursts of nostalgia.
This is something we do. We remember and observe, and in the Higher levels where such things are possible, we hope.
One thing we do not do is act. We are books, not authors. There are times—like this present age of soft lines and translucent barriers and power vacuums filling with poison—when we wish we could be more. But the world belongs to the living, and they have not yet asked for our help.