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 Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 9:26 pm
Part 2
The stairwell was filled with smoke, the thick, greasy, choking kind that filled your lungs and stayed there, no matter how hard you tried to exhale it. Aaron’s eyes stung and watered, welling over and spilling down his face like tears, leaving smeared rivulets in the soot that coated his face. He dashed up the steps blindly, each leap a prayer that the stair would be there when his foot landed.
His shoulder crashed into the wall on the landing, and he threw up his left hand to feel out where the next flight began. Through the thick smoke, he saw a dull gold gleam on his hand – a wedding ring, a simple gold band around his ring finger.
A wedding ring? He wasn’t married.
The dark outline of a door appeared in front of him, and his lungs bursting with a need for oxygen, fumbled with the knob until it finally turned.
He fell inside, onto the hardwood floor of the entryway, his still dripping eyes level with David’s leather flipflops.
“Aaron? Did you drop something?”
Aaron was quiet for a second, taking deep breaths of clean, cool air, staring at a small spider scampering over David’s shoes. What was happening to him?
“Just a book, Dad, that’s all.”
He climbed slowly to his feet, then looked out into the stairwell. It was brightly lit, with not a trace of the smoke that had filled the chamber just minutes before.
---
He didn’t sleep a wink that night, which while allowing him to escape whatever nightmares might come left the boy zombie-like at breakfast the next day.
After he’d missed his mouth and stabbed himself in the cheek with his fork for the third time, David peered over the top of his newspaper at his son.
“Aaron, what have I told you about staying up past your bedtime? You’re going to fall asleep in class today, and I’m going to get another angry call from your teacher.”
The last teacher call that David had received was in regards to the “trap” Aaron had set up inside his desk: another student had gotten his hand trapped inside while trying to steal Aaron’s Lunchables one day, and David had had to leave work to convince Aaron to let the other child go. The school had placed Aaron into a class for children with behavioural problems for half the day from there on out, which David had at first protested until he realized that the teacher was so occupied with the troublemaking students that Aaron was left alone to independently study more complex subjects than his grade handled. In all, it wasn’t a terrible situation, but it meant that Aaron had to go to a counseling meeting once a week during what would otherwise be his recess.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he mumbled around a mouthful of toast, closing his eyes in exhaustion.
“Oh honey, not again – did you take your sleeping aids?” David’s voice was suddenly a lot more feminine.
Aaron’s eyes snapped open.
Across the delicately tableclothed table from him sat a beautiful woman with curly light brown hair. She was sipping a glass of milk, looking at him with concern in her bright blue eyes. The sun filtered in through a large bay window to his left, a sparkling crystal window charm casting rainbows across the walls.
“I couldn’t find them,” Aaron said, surprised not only by the truth he sensed in his statement, though he did not remember looking for medication of any sort, but by the deep timbre of his voice.
“Maybe you shouldn’t go to work today; you look half dead. Driving into the city might be enough to knock you out and cause an accident.”
Aaron shook his head, eating the rest of his toast, then standing up.
“I have an important meeting today with my boss. Numbers have been going awry somewhere in the department and he asked me specifically to figure out why. Not to mention, if I take any sick days now, I might risk not getting enough days off for your sister’s wedding.”
“Well, you can’t go in looking like that! Take your big travel mug of coffee, and splash some cold water in your face before you meet with him.” She stood also and kissed him on the cheek. “Don’t forget about my reception tonight – we need to leave here by 6, so come home a little early if at all possible.”
“All right, I’ll see what I can do.” Aaron kissed her gently on the lips, an entirely foreign and icky feeling to him, then bent over to pick up his briefcase.
When he straightened again, a Transformers lunch box was dangling in front of his nose, and the woman was replaced by David with one eyebrow raised.
“Chin up kiddo, no calls from school today, okay?”
Aaron stared in horror at him, frozen with confusion, before grabbing his lunchbox and stumbling backwards out the door. David rolled his eyes at his son’s melodrama and followed his bobbing black head as Aaron boarded the bus at the corner below.
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Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 8:23 pm
Part 3
By the time Aaron got to school that morning, he was fully convinced that he was crazy. Every other few minutes or so, he was living moments from what seemed like some other life. Was he psychic? Was he seeing the future, his life fifteen, twenty years down the road? The more he saw of what seemed to be a single morning, the more he desperately prayed that this was not his future.
The bus ride was mixed with scenes of a long drive into a big city that he only recognized as "New York" by the two tall towers he'd seen on the newspaper front the night before. Waiting in class for the teacher to arrive was waiting in an elevator, interminably long and stuffy, crammed in the back corner between briefcases and cold steel walls. Being a generally quiet boy in class, and his alter-ego not being the most talkative man in the world, he was able to endure the changes in private, gritting his teeth and bearing the dizzying switches in silence. That is how he survived the morning. Math, usually one of his favourite courses, blurred on the chalkboard before his eyes, and he gave up trying to read and listen, and instead, focused on trying to determine when exactly this other man was living. After all, past, present, and future were three entirely different things.
When the bell rang for lunch, Aaron elected to stay in the classroom to "stay in the air conditioning" as his classmates ran outside excitedly. The teacher's aide buried herself within a trashy romance novel, ignoring the little boy munching quietly on his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Unbeknownst to her, Aaron was squinting his eyes shut and focusing very hard, trying to teleport himself back to wherever he was going during his episodes. He hadn't had one in about half an hour, and gradually he was becoming intrigued by them, forgetting the fear of the stairwell the night before. After all, everything that had happened today was pretty safe and mundane.
Still, he didn't seem to have any control over what or when his episodes occurred, except that they seemed to be vaguely related to whatever he was doing in the present. Maybe, he thought, doing something new would trigger one.
Reading a book didn't work; he had had an episode while reading his math book earlier, his counterpart instead sipping coffee and flipping through a stack of printed pages. Eating seemed to have been used up at breakfast. Standing, Aaron began to wander around the room, picking up and looking at different things, to no avail. Finally, he wandered over to the classroom window, only to find himself staring down hundreds of feet to roofs far below. More importantly, he watched a giant jetliner slam into the building below him, the sonic waves created throwing him from his feet to the floor behind him, his arm banging painfully into the conference room's heavy table.
"DID YOU SEE THAT? MARK, A PLANE JUST HIT OUR BUILDING!"
"Aaron? Aaron, you shouldn't joke about that." The aide looked over her Fabio-fronted book with a stern look, only to soften when she saw him sitting on the floor in disarray. "Are you all right?"
"M'fine, just tripped." Aaron was struggling to contain the sheer panic he'd just experienced.
"Okay..." The aide did not seem convinced, but she turned her focus back to her book. "Just no more 9-11 jokes, okay?" She yawned, and then took a swig of her Coke, oblivious to the look of fierce recognition on Aaron's small face.
9/11.
"911? MARK, a PLANE just hit our building! I don't think a 911 call is NECESSARY!" He yelled, shaking his coworker unnecessarily hard. His boss cowered under the end of the table along with several other men. "What IS necessary is getting out of here!" With that, he tried the door. Stuck. The building must have shifted with the impact. That wasn't a good sign. He looked over at the man that Aaron assumed was Mark. The man's eyes were bright and fearful, but he nodded, and the two of them threw their shoulders into the door simultaneously, popping it outward.
Immediately, Aaron's lungs burned with the same fire that had ripped at them last night, smoke billowing from the same staircase, its door sitting ajar.
"We have to go down," Mark hissed, nervously grabbing at the wall.
"Are you nuts?" Aaron asked incredulously. "We can't go down! What part of A PLANE JUST EXPLODED DOWNSTAIRS do you not get?"
Aaron nodded, the sense of his own words clear to him, as he leaned his face against the cool window, watching his classmates play outside. Why was this happening to him? 9/11 was eight years ago. Thousands of people died. Were going to die. Was he going to die too? Would he die if this other man died? Was there anything he could do? Though the room was at a rather comfortable temperature, Aaron wrapped his arms around himself, insulating himself with his feathers, and wishing it was David hugging him instead.
He sat that way for a little while, until he saw that the other children were beginning to trickle in. Again not wanting to experience any more episodes, he wanted to stay exactly where he was, but out of necessity, stood up.
And up they had gone, clearly, as they stood on the roof, thick clouds of smoke surrounding them. Aaron could barely see Mark and another man and woman standing near him. The feelings rushing down his body were overwhelming and sudden. Guilt, for bringing Mark here in futile hopes of air rescue. Sadness, love, loneliness, knowing that his wife might not even know what had happened yet. Regret, for not showing her how much he loved her in every moment of their life together. Anger, that his cell phone could not punch through the cloud of disconnection that swirled around them. Frustration that there was no escape, as the other man and woman had tried without luck to go down before meeting them on their way to the roof.
And then intense fright, as the second plane slammed into the building next door.
Aaron screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
Opening his eyes again to his teacher's shocked face and those of the students coming in the door, he dashed past them without a word, heading straight for the bathroom.
He ran as fast as he could, then at the last minute stopped. He couldn't do it. Sobbing in frustration, he sat down on the ledge. His sobs turned into hacks, and blood spattered against his shirt sleeve. The second tower was down. This one would go too. He couldn't do it. He couldn't do either.
Standing again in a raw rage of nerves, he stalked to the middle of the roof again. Trying his phone one last time, it surprisingly rang. He snorted in shock and morbid amusement...less people were making calls from the WTC, as a side effect of being dead.
"Hello? Is that you?"
"Yes, yes, I l-" The connection was lost. Battery was low. The smoke swirled in again, thick with ash and dust and debris and spirits. Aaron in a flash of rage threw his phone as hard as he could towards the edge of the building. Then, before he could change his mind, ran as fast as he could towards the edge and into the air.
And he fell. A gutwrenching, throat-peeling, unbreathable fall, as the ground and buildings and sky span around him and he could do nothing but pray. For himself, for his wife, that this wouldn't count as suicide, and that maybe, just maybe, his wife was pregnant and just didn't know it yet.
Aaron sobbed, his feathered arms wet with his tears as he lay curled up on the floor of the bathroom. He never, ever, ever wanted to fall like that again. He couldn't shake the feeling that this time was an "again".
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