Michael Pershan
Tandem Jump
I only signed up on the insistence of my therapist who felt I needed, at the age of fifty-three, to confront what he called “terminal stubbornness.” In other words, he wanted me to do something awful to prove that I could. In other other words, he bet that I wouldn’t, even wagering the cost of three additional sessions. Ethically questionable, but it worked. Now I was taking off in a coffin with wings, a Cessna 182 with a goddam propeller, breathing steadily while harnessed to Travis, my tandem instructor.
This whole situation: I wanted it over quickly, with limited incident, so I could collect my winnings and make Dr. Jacobs listen to stories about my elderly father.
We reached twelve thousand feet. Diving time, someone said.
Hooray.
I opened my eyes and caught a glimpse of the sky. I admit I was impressed: blue beyond blue, in vast magnitude, draping a delicately curved world. I’m not a religious man, but it prompted thoughts of how much I mattered in this great scheme. Not much, was the answer. If the chute didn’t open, if I went splat, I’d be the one who mourned the most, in the brief moments before impact. The rest of this magnificent planet wouldn’t even blink.
Maybe thanks to these pleasant thoughts, I had a burst of courage. Now or never; if we must. But Travis, my instructor, wouldn’t budge. It took me a moment to realize that this was not routine, that Travis should have budged. It was, of course, the looks of the people around me that clued me in, including from Julian, a repeat jumper who spoke endlessly on our ascent and was giving a “this isn’t how it’s done” stare. The doorman (whose name I did not know) was motioning for Travis to make his move.
Because he was behind me—I was strapped to him—it took me a few minutes to realize the problem. It was that Travis, my instructor, was crying. I heard his sobs. I felt his hot tears roll down my neck.
“We’re all sad,” finally said the doorman, a twenty-something SkyLife employee. He had to shout this over the wind and the plane’s engine. He was talking to Travis. “It’s not just you.”
“What’s the issue?” I asked.
“His good pal Domino died,” said the employee. He looked at Travis. “Our good pal.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I love you Domino,” Travis said, almost in my ear. He choked back tears, each sob shaking my body. “I know you can hear me, wherever you are. You loved blue skies, and we’ve got a beauty today. Just know that we’re sending love, buddy. We’ll see each other someday real soon…real soon, I know…”
“Real soon?” I wondered aloud.
But nobody heard me, because at that exact moment Travis made his decision and dropped us into the sky.
~
I still struggle to describe what happened next. It lasted about sixty seconds. As best I can tell, existence unraveled into chaos and glorious madness. I lost the ability to put one thought beside the next, as if my capacity for language was a complex machine that had been set on fire with a match and gas. In other words, the dial in my head was set to static and the volume turned up. I saw only blue. The wind was in my cheeks. I was dissolving in air, drowning in sky.
Then, at last, Travis and I were plucked out of freefall by the tug of our chute.
For the first time I looked down, I mean really looked, and my mind registered simultaneously the danger and my safety from it—not very reassuring, unfortunately. A panic settled into my chest as I considered how my life depended on the man I was tethered to, who was again sobbing, speaking the word “Domino” over and over again.
“Domino, Domino,” he said.
“At least he’s in a better place now,” I said, turning back to speak.
“What?” said Travis. “You’ve got to be louder.”
“At least he’s in a better place!”
“Thanks,” Travis said, gathering himself. “I’m sorry for what happened up there. You paid SkyLife for a transformative experience and that’s what you deserve, no matter what I happened to be dealing with.”
“Not a problem!” I shouted back.
“Pretty great view,” he said. “Right? And if you look over there you can see the edge of Lake Washington.”
We fell on in silence. The ground was remarkably far below. I didn’t want to vomit but wondered if I would.
“You know,” said Travis, “My mind can’t believe it, even if my brain knows he’s gone. Want to know the first thing I did when I got the news? I texted Dom. Three texts in a row, boom boom boom. I just said I loved him, three separate times. Kept waiting for him to respond.”
“Did he?” I asked, like a dumbass.
“No,” he said. “But I keep checking.”
Travis pulled on something and we veered to the right, slicing through the wind.
“Look at this” he said, pushing his wrist close to my face. “You like the bracelet?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“If you can believe it, Domino made it. Dude was self-taught. A lot of the guys used to think that was funny, Dom skipping drinks to weave leather bracelets. But I’ll let you be the judge. He had some talent, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Definitely,” I said. My fear came roaring back. “What happened to Dom…was it an accident?”
“Overdose,” said Travis. “I always said, he should sell his bracelets. He said he wasn’t good enough to sell to strangers. He wanted to get good at magnetic clasps first. But I don’t think he really wanted to get good at clasps. He liked doing rough work. Not that he was clumsy, I mean look at the craft on this fucker.” He showed me his wrist again. “But Dom loved the moments before things happened. I don’t even think he liked jumping out of planes. What he liked most was sitting on the edge, if that makes sense. He liked bumpy rides in that rickety Cessna.”
“Shit,” Travis said after a moment. “I shouldn’t have said ‘rickety.’”
At this point, the ground was racing at us. Down below, in a grassy field, Julian and his instructor were untangling themselves from their gear. They high-fived and began loading things into a SkyLife van parked nearby.
When we hit land, I lifted my legs like they’d taught so they didn’t shatter on impact. Travis dug his boots into the dirt and brought us to a halt. Julian applauded in my direction and grinned. “You’ll always remember your first time,” he said and winked.
I nodded and imagined throwing Julian out of a plane.
Moments later, the doorman himself came gliding down. He went over to the woman who drove the van. I caught them laughing at Travis, who had gone off on his own in the field, wandering around a small radius, kicking dirt.
The van woman told us all—me, Julian, his instructor, the doorman, Travis—to pose for a photo. Travis had to be dragged back by the elbow by the doorman, who rolled his eyes at Travis and mouthed the word “Domino” to the van woman. She smiled.
“Big smiles and thumbs up, on three!” she said.
Once we got in the van and hit the road, Julian turned to me. “If they’d let me, I’d do it again right now,” he said. The guys in the van laughed, each in turn agreeing that there was nothing quite like the feeling one got floating above the world—that, if there were a way to do so, they would spend their entire lives in freefall. Above this world, everything below looking frozen and tiny. It was a spiritual experience, they said.
I was stuck next to Julian. Travis sat at the back of the van—behind me again, I thought.
I turned to Travis, but he had his hand in his pocket, fiddling with something, staring out the van’s window into empty passing fields. He was pale and freckled, with a patchy red beard and tired blue eyes. Right, I thought. That’s what he looks like.
“You put your arms out like this and tuck in like that, and the wind just takes you,” the doorman was telling Julian. This was how you could somersault through the air if you jumped on your own.
We pulled up in front of the SkyLife office. I saw my car. I imagined driving back home to my apartment. I thought about the interesting statuettes I’d filled it with. I thought about my sister. I thought about the string of therapists I had burned through. I thought about a nice guy at work, handsome enough, who had asked me to dinner, and how I’d laughed and told him that I didn’t do dates.
I got out of the van and saw Travis walking ahead of me. I jogged up beside him.
“Hey,” I said, and reached out for his arm. I thought I’d thank him. Wish him luck. Offer consolations.
He walked straight past me. I felt like an idiot.
An hour later I was back home. I took a shower and cooked a bisque. As I stirred, I thought about Travis. I had tried, hadn’t I? How rude he’d been, in the end—would it have killed him to acknowledge my existence? Rude, not to mention wildly unprofessional. Some people, it occurred to me, were like that. Transactional. Wrapped up in their own concerns.
A fly buzzed above my bisque, flying through the steam. I swiped it away. It landed on the window by the stove, and without thinking I slammed my hand against the window, squashing the fly. Its body was pressed into the glass. Behind its still-fluttering wings and broken body the sky turned purple with dusk. An airplane, a big one, passed into view. I imagined everyone in the airplane jumping out of it—bankers, federal agents, fathers, mothers, little babies—tumbling through the sky. And—why had I hit that fly? What had it done? I couldn’t help myself. It was instinct. Just how I was wired, I suppose.
Oh god, I realized—I missed Travis. I turned away from the bisque and began to cry.
Michael Pershan is a writer and math teacher whose work can be found in HAD, BULL, hex literary, and other places. His website is michaelpershan.com.
