In Silence We Go
The last image he remembered was the neon green basket - well neon green spray paint masking a black basket - on his golden (both originally golden and spray painted golden) Polish bicycle. "It was probably stolen from Holland, actually..." might have been his last thought. Hopefully it wasn't. Maybe the last thought was her thought. His last thought was hers; it was theirs. That would be better.
Prior to the last everything, his memory flashed with rain, with broken cement sidewalks on which he fought for enough free space between all the sallow faced pedestrians, pedestrians who openly ignored the polite warning of the bell on his bike. "It must be the rain," he rationalized. "The bell loses all sincerity once it gets wet." But really, that was just an excuse. The same excuse he used when he was disappointed in himself for only managing a weak smile - not even eye contact - as an attempt to communicate when language wasn't an option[1]. "If I spoke Polish it'd be different." To him learning Polish was like the rain - the barrier between reality and what he imagined should be happening. The problem was that the rain wasn’t stopping.
But at this point, he realized that he'd never really know the reality of speaking Polish. That isolation had just been isolation, rain or not. But it hadn't been complete isolation. She had been there. She had validated his life. Given him proof of his existence. Being unable to speak with his bicycle bell had instilled in him the biologically existential fear of surviving without existing. But she heard him. Mere survival had been averted. Life was ok.
Somewhere in the flashes - external and internal at this point...or right before this point, right before everything ended - everything got dark. Not death dark. Just dark like when the lights are quickly shut off at night and there is a single moment when light refuses to reflect off of any object at a wave frequency that either your rods or cones agree to acknowledge. But you know something will appear. Something is there. "God that's a stupid evolutionary flaw," he thought. "Shouldn't we have a way to protect ourselves against temporary blindness?" He had forgotten that evolution takes much longer than the time since Edison invented the light bulb. But fire…no, still too recent. Out of the darkness, shapes were beginning to form. An outline. A room. A tunnel? A bunker? Bodies, heads. Sitting, facing something.... All of a sudden, out of the dark, from a distant pedestal, a speech began. With unearthly clicks and pops, the heads started cocking, straining to listen.
"We are survivalists," the orator began. There was a strange buzz to the voice. "Survival comes in many forms, but one truth that spans the definitions is continuation. To survive is to continue. But to continue what?" This hypothetical rhetorical tool generated an incomprehensible murmur from the heads...heads? No, bodies? Heads, heads. Or were they...? The voice continued before he could get his eyes to answer his brain's questions. "The individual? The family? The society? The species? Where do our lines get drawn? I wish I could give you an answer - an answer that I carefully considered, of which I weighed the positives and negatives and came to the most logical conclusion. But sometimes our choices are made for us. And thus are our answers too." Murmur, murmur, murmur. Wait, they must be heads. Bodies don't murmur. But the heads, if in fact that's what they were, appeared to be attached to each other. In threes.... "We have been given the signal. The signal from above. A signal that ensures survival. But just as fire sweeps over the desert twice a year, ravaging the plants only to redistribute their resources back into the earth, our survival comes with sacrifice. The signal has shown you that your work is important - so important, so necessary, that you are given no other option. Leave, abandon us...what will you do if you try another route? You will still perish, childless, with nothing accomplished. You are barren for a reason! We are barren! Greater than logic is the power of the bio-chemical! The bio-chemical has spoken!!!! Sustain the greater life! The life of the SPECIES! And you, the warrior does this not through birth…but through DEATH!" His eyes had adjusted enough to see the speaker was wearing a sort of patent leather body suit. Odd. "I received the same biochemical signals at birth as you. Today, together we will go out and most of us will not return. But let it be known, nothing will be lost, only gained. We are the barren barriers between death and fertility! As fertility is not for us, our role is…suicide you may call it, but I call it survival. Each of your sacrifices means more lives continued. So let us not commit suicide! Let us survive!" The cheers from the audience brought him fully adjusted to the dim light. The audience? No, that's not right. He was being unfairly anthropocentric. Well, he could be excused due to the grogginess. But the grogginess subsided long enough for him to realize this was not a normal audience. The heads were bodies. And heads. For every two bodies there was one head. No. That's not right. One head, one body. Definitely not human. They were ants. He was surrounded by ants.
With an explosion of contrast, saturation and other photo-editing tools, the lights flickered than blared, blinding him the other way. The white way. "I wonder if I left my bicycle light on?" He realized the uselessness of the thought as he remembered the rear light on his bicycle had been smashed by drunks, or kids, or drunk kids the night when he left his bike parked at the tram until 6am, when he returned on the first morning tram drunk, so drunk that upon finding his mutilated bicycle, bent into a right angle lying on its side, all he could manage was unlocking the poor corpse and carrying it home on his shoulder like a dead soldier in WWII, thinking, "all I need is some sad violin music," he recalled. As the light burned away and permitted darkness a few lines, the shape of a woman began to appear. It was the shape of her. At first, all he could make out were the lines of her hair, draped partly over her forehead and spilling down her neck like the Cheerios they ate each morning. But it was just an outline, like burnt sticks on sand. "Which her are you?" He asked, luckily too quiet for her to hear, otherwise he'd have managed one last fight before everything ended. "Oh," he answered his own question.
Hi.
Hi.
What are you, uh, what's going on?
I just back home. There were some horrible news on the radio at work. A plane crashed.
Oh, really? Wait, didn't that already happen? Like we already heard about this, didn't we?
I'm going to make some dinner. Makaron?
Um, no, thanks, I'm not hungry. But, this plane. The mourning, last week. The country stopped remember?
I can't believe. Another plane in one month. Assholes.
Another plane?
Yea but his was from Warsaw. This was from Munich.
His? But I was...All the planes were screwed up, because of the volcano. My flight from Warsaw was cancelled. I had to fly back to Germany, and then...
Hold on, I have another phone call. Hello?
What?
The phone dropped. Rather, she just released her grip on it. He hadn't seen the phone at first. But now it was breaking on the floor into a thousand pieces, as if any contact each piece made with any other piece sent it into a hysterical panic. She just sat there. Looked straight at him - straight through him. And then tears. Tiny rivers streamed down her face, and as each path of water began, it left behind a trail of empty space. The tears were erasing her, line by line.
The balding biologist with the briefcase had gone through security as fast as he had squished the ant on his sleeve a moment earlier. "He died for the cause! Onward my fellow sterile sentries!" The rhythmic buzz tickled the biologist’s arm. But he didn't have time to focus his scratch, the plane was boarding and the airport was chaotic due to the lingering ash of the volcano. "Like ants who have been flooded by a kid with a hose," he thought. Meanwhile, on his sleeve, the rest of the ants continued safely on their march, for now. A march intended for what? A march on a moving vessel, taking the martyrs over mountains of fabric and oceans of sweat unfathomable to their grain-of-sand-and-water-molecule-processing-brains. "Onward!!!!!" This time the biologist's scratch hit its mark, at least temporarily, as a few fallen soldiers crashed down to the linoleum floor. If the fall didn't kill them, the stampede of humanity would soon enough. Sweat had started to accumulate in shiny rhinestones on the nervous man’s inconsistent hairline, reminding him that nothing was easy. An overstatement of his memory, as he should have been generous enough to agree that today what he had planned was by no means easy. Necessary. Right. But not easy. He was sort of a fanatic in that way. Walking past kiosks of airport modernism with overpriced croissants, the biologist was sure that he had made the right decision. Well, he hadn't made any decision. It was the barrenness of the lazy, disconnected, isolated, solitary, delusional humanity walking with heads down, vacantly staring into digital realities that had made his decision for him. The formality of human interaction had reached a new shell of emptiness. "I mean, a week of institutionalized mourning in all of Poland for the hundred dead?! Where was the room for human variability?" It needed to be cracked. "Onward!!!!" The remaining exoskeletal soldiers ducked into the corners of darkness provided by the biologist's sweat drenched white-collared (but slowly yellowing) short sleeve button-down shirt. The biologist and his unknown companions ducked into the dark tunnel beneath the LCD sign reading: "LH 3427: St. Petersburg." The convoluted argument for martyrdom to save the species had begun.
The biologist took his seat. And so did he. He would notice the sweaty middle-aged scientist later. For now, he was elsewhere.
He was staring at her. The other her. An other her. The last her. The her that only became her once he realized that his fantasies to explore other hers was about to be cut short. He used to reassure himself that it was just talk, that other hers weren't necessary (as exemplified by the other hers that had not been fantasies and certainly didn't become fantasies after their her actualization), but the her in front of him was the type of her that he could never fantasize about. She was too real for the mind to be able to invent. When the stewardess had passed out chocolate wafers and drinks, he had declined the chocolate and ordered a whiskey straight up to see if this her (and inadvertently the somewhat attractive stewardess) might take notice of his seriousness. After all, he was on a business trip to Russia.
And then the worst of all possible fears on any given airplane started to play out. But for a second time. As if he had already seen them. "Oh, right," he remembered. "This is my life flashing before my eyes."
For a second time he saw the sweaty, balding man who had already used the toilet at least three times in 2 hours, stand up. For a second time, he thought to himself about the empty expression on the face just below the thinning hair. For a second time he saw something that couldn't be anything other than a bad contraption, gleaming with sweat that had run down the older man's shoulders, down his hairy arms, over the black undulating skin (wait, not skin. Small black insects covering his arms like an infested fabric…ants...thousands of ants...this he saw for the first time, causing him to temporarily recall the statistics that the weight of ant biomass on the planet equaled that of human biomass...was this a human made up of ant biomass? and how had ants been so good at survival to reach that incomprehensible statistic...there must be something like 1 billion ants to one human...it's not like they have no enemies or are really good at fighting.....) the sweat continued - disregarding the extensive inner monologue of our nearly deceased - onto the biologist's hands and finally over the gleaming contraption made once more to look quite dangerous.
For a second time the stewardess failed to get the man to take his seat. Blood flowed from her nose after he backhanded her for a second time.
For a second time some brave male passengers considered rushing the bloated ant covered terrorist, but quickly reconsidered at the feeling of acid melting their skin. The liquid now being showered over the entirety of the plane.
He ducked under his seat. In the commotion he looked up and realized, for the second time, the warm breath and frightened inhales were not from his skin melting away, but from her. That her. The her on whom he would test out his last sense of himself. She was under the same row of seats-cum-shields.
For a second time the plane was rapidly melting away. Holes began to let riptides of industrial powered vacuum air in from the outside. The cold pierced her eyes as he stared into them.
Kiss me. Kiss me.
Her lips shined, swollen with fear, protected with saliva. Her dark eyes opened into caves of the need to be held. Her neck smoothly smelled of every moment that he had ever held a girl's hand in his life, but especially when he was fourteen. When she moved close to him the quick decrease of altitude felt like floating.
Time became one again. This could not have been anything but the first time.
Their kiss lasted for 37 seconds. The 38th second was rudely interrupted by the left wing clipping a telephone pole somewhere along the Baltic coast - Estonia. At the 38.6th second, the nose of the plane touched ground and began to accordion backwards, first through the cockpit, and then the front lavatories, followed by first class. The plane exploded before the nose receded any further. At the 41st second, the increase in heat caused his skull to fuse onto hers. The chin and jaws being drawn together first, peaking at the point just below the lips that 4 seconds ago had been softly held together, fusing up the center of their faces to the eyebrows, allowing the foreheads to slightly curve away. In short, their skulls fused into would look like later, first to one Estonian police officer and then to the eagerly distraught public, a three-dimensional model of a child’s drawing of a heart.
Their fused skulls were then catapulted 1.36km from the crash at the second fuselage's explosion. Before being removed from the glistening Baltic coastline by the forensics team, 17 newspapers, 6 magazines and a combination of 26 news, entertainment and fashion blogs had already photographed and coined the symbolic tragedy, "The Immortal Lovers."
Nina new that he had never said he loved her. She believed that he had, despite never hearing the words. Actually, by believing this, she thought she might drown her thoughts of doubt. He had no reason not to love her. He had no reason to tell her either, right? He had no reason to be like the women before her had told her he was, which was closed off, emotionally distant, afraid. He had loved her. She knew that it was of course that was true without any reason otherwise to be unsure of what she knew to be the truth that he loved her. And the newspaper headlines, magazine covers, billboards, non-profit organization icons, clothing brands and multi-city parades saturating her consciousness with "The Immortal Lovers" image was the sign that it wasn't only those beautiful martyrs on that plane who had loved each other with all of their souls, but she and he had as well. The plane had crashed with the proof of his unspoken love to her. She only wished she could have given his skull something to fuse onto, so he didn’t have to die alone.
[1] At a red light for bicycles and humans occurs one such attempt to communicate. Cars and trams have the green go. A younger (19?) girl with dyed black hair, a silver stud of a nose ring, and equally jet black shirt and shoes only contrasted by a tight pair of long denim shorts. She carries a large (500ml?) stainless steel coffee mug with a stripe of rubber for grip oddly mirroring her denim-striped thighs. A rare sight in the land of espressos and outdoor cafes. She runs right to him, stuck at the same light, he on bicycle, she on foot.
He looks at her in silence. Makes the above mental note.
“That’s awfully American of you,” he mumbles but feels like he screams.
She looks over in silence, a question on her face.
“The, uh, the coffee cup…”
“…”
Forget it. The light is green. He bikes off, defeated. Oh yea, but he imagines this. In reality, they just wait for the green light in silence.