The Fall

- So I guess this is how it ends. I wonder if this is how he felt when it happened...

He was feeling faint, and had been forced to come to a stop. Now even with his sunglasses on, the light was blinding. A prematurely yellow leaf fallen on the asphalt trail was beginning to turn bright white, as was the sun-bleached grass nearby. In sharp contrast, the trail was a featureless black. The scene was quite remarkable- even stunning- despite the busy freeway in the distance. Was this the bright light they talked about just before the End?

“Please. You don’t believe in that bullshit!”

Blown highlights, and loss of shadow detail, he mused, thinking of times when he had tried to capture a high-contrast scene on his camera. The result never quite turned out like the Ansel Adams photograph he had hoped for. Instead, like many others, it was consigned to the simulacrum of a trashcan at the bottom of the screen.

A few months ago, he had taken an urgent trip to see a family member who had suddenly taken ill. He reached there a few days after the events transpired, and upon his arrival, he had been single-handedly responsible for (or guilty of) casting a sullen pragmatism over the pall that already existed. It was touch-and-go for several weeks after he left, and he didn’t know if the cloud ever lifted. He knew that he had probably alienated many people with his dire projections, and probably several more with his bluntness. After all, this was what he did; his niche, and he didn’t feel the need to apologize for honesty. He had studied about this exact situation, practiced it, taught it, used it in his daily decisions, used it to discuss prognosis with family members. On the flight over, he had read and re-read reams of papers about the dismal statistics, the evidence, the prognosis, and the outcomes.

He had noticed that bench every time he rode past it. It had been conveniently placed there in the shade of those birch trees, but it was far from any trailhead or park. He had often wondered who would want to sit there- it wasn’t a particularly pretty part of the trail. He figured they had probably put it there for that very reason. He imagined the view from it- most likely the freeway with its never-ending blur of vehicles. The occasional occupant was usually a solitary homeless man. He could tell by the sun-scorched, drawn face, worldly possessions all contained in a tattered backpack, spirit visibly missing. But now his head was swimming. He just had to sit down.

He carefully dismounted, making sure he didn’t hit the ground doing it. After all, the ignominy of being found sprawled face-down in those god-awful tights was worse than the very real possibility that he would have to call for help. He couldn’t imagine the fuss that would ensue- he was at least a mile away from any exit point. God, he hated a fuss… He hoped that when they placed him on the gurney, they would appreciate the fact that he didn’t look like a moving advertisement for a sportswear company. He had always joked that he looked like an ugly hooker in those clothes- especially when he had to dismount and walk in those goddamn stiff-soled shoes. There was apparently even an acronym for it- ‘M.A.M.I.L- middle-aged man in Lycra’. Mercifully today instead of the garish stuff, he had put on a newly acquired jersey- mostly black and advertising one of his favorite single-malt whiskeys, no less.

“Dammit, stop being a drama-queen!”

He sat down, and instinctively placed two fingers on the opposite wrist. He couldn’t feel anything. He tried again, moving his fingers around. It hurt like hell, but he couldn't feel anything there. Then he tried the other wrist- nothing but the searing pain. His training kicked in, and he remembered that if he couldn’t feel the radial pulse, his blood pressure was probably less than 80. He ran his hands over his chest, and that hurt like hell too. It was very hard to breathe. Had he broken some ribs? Punctured his lung? Contused his chest? He could only think of the possibilities, but had no way to confirm or refute any of his theories. Knowing too much was a curse, especially when little could be done about it. He took a few minutes, methodically analyzed all this, and felt relieved by the fact that at least his brain was still getting what it needed.

“Are you kidding yourself? You’re thinking about heaven, and seeing bright lights, and you can barely stand, let alone ride. You think your brain is really getting perfused?”

He had called her about an hour ago, and told her about what had happened. It had taken only a few seconds to occur, but he went down pretty hard. She had asked if she should come pick him up, but he didn’t want to scare her, and so he said no. That would have been the biggest kick in the nuts, to have to be bailed out. Plus, at the time, he felt it was more insult than injury, and he wanted to keep pushing on. After all, the morning had started on a high note, and so far, he had done more than he ever thought possible. He had also serendipitously met a kindred soul on the trail. They had discussed photography, immigration, politics, and even the ever-persistent proselytization that was a fact of life in this place. Hell, how many times in this country did one ever do that after meeting someone for the fifth time, let alone the first?

His mind raced back to the trip. He had half-expected to tonsure his head before he returned. It was just something that his people did in such situations, and had probably done for generations. He was after all, a descendant of priests. Even though he had no use for the rituals surrounding it, he decided that if the situation arose, he would do it of his own volition- if for no other reason than to efface his own ego. And then, slowly, the man woke up, and quite literally walked out of it all. While he was relieved to have been wrong, he was also conflicted about the uncertainty of his craft. 

What was the cliché? – ‘Sometimes it's more about the Art, and less about the Science…’ 

A few days ago, there had been a long distance phone call. On the other end was a startlingly normal voice... 

He threw his head back on the bench, his strength drained. He even considered lying down and taking a short nap. But he remembered those scenes from the old war movies, those ones where the ‘eternal sleep’ overcame people in shock who laid down to take a nap, and so he resisted. He gulped down some water, then a little more, until nothing remained. He wished he had taken a few more bottles. 

“Please stop with the self-pity and doubt, and give yourself a few minutes. You are not going to die!”

By the time he came to, several minutes had probably passed by, and the dazzling light had begun to fade. The scene had started to lose its high-contrast. He started to perceive the detail in the asphalt, even noticing some of the smaller cracks. He suddenly became aware that music was still playing in his earphones. He had probably not turned it off earlier. It was that Swedish ambient group whose music he liked, especially this song, a deeply meditative piece. He was always intrigued by the song’s title- Betula pendula- the botanical name of the silver birch tree. It invariably made him deeply introspective, and it soothed him whenever he was stuck in rush-hour traffic. He looked around and at the trail again. The leaf had now blown away.

He restarted the song and turned up the volume to take his mind off the painful ride ahead. Getting back on the saddle, he started to pedal tentatively. Everything hurt. After what seemed like an eternity, he reached the car. He eased himself into the seat, pulled his phone out of his pocket, and looked at the stats.

43. 

A personal best...

But he was shaken from the fall, and he knew something was broken. He just couldn’t tell what...

Scenes from a beach

- “Hotter than Satan’s arse”, he said to no one in particular as they stepped off the flight.

- And perhaps just as humid, he thought to himself, as he surveyed the tropical foliage. His brief musing was interrupted by the sound of the children screaming their entreaties of going to the beach.

He had come of age in a city by the sea, and longed for the water all the more now that he lived in a high desert environment. There, in his adoptive home, the nearby lake sometimes experienced enough evaporation to become as salty as the Dead Sea itself. But the limpid expanse now stretched out in front of him was very different from those other water bodies. Admittedly, the aquamarine ocean was a far more breathtaking sight than the muddy brown waters of his childhood, but regardless of hue, the sight of water stirred something primordial in him, perhaps a desire to return to it following a long absence. In some ways, he identified with other exiles who experienced a sense of belonging as well as profound alienation, no matter where they lived. Inspired by Camus, he ordered an absinthe-based cocktail and imagined that he was lounging on a beach in Oran. Not surprisingly, like his literary idol, he had a generally grim view of the world. He liked to call it his existential dilemma, this delicate balancing act of Optimism and Absurdism. She ascribed it to his inherent grumpiness. He took a gulp of his drink, savoring the anise flavor over all the other competing ones. He had not thought it previously possible, but his spirits seemed to lift as the cool liquid coursed through his veins.

There they were, the locals; their faces a beautiful pastiche of indigenous features and European complexions. They were a proud people, once subjugated by disease and tyranny, now perhaps experiencing their long overdue resurgence, if only in this instance by servicing the hospitality industry. He was still conflicted about the legacy of imperialism, military and economic, contemporary and historical, having grown up in a former European colony himself. As he looked at the locals, he half expected them to speak to him in the Queen’s language, knowing that his features were different from theirs. He found it altogether strange when one of them spoke to him in a Romance language familiar to him from the country where he lived- for they assumed he was one of them. In his adoptive country, this was the second most commonly spoken language. Yet, for reasons both cosmetic and political, many people still considered it a “foreign” language and imbued it, as well as its native speakers with a distinct sense of otherness. In another time and place, a similar exoticism may have been labeled ‘Orientalism’. But here he was, unambiguously an alien, yet strangely at home, much like back ‘home’, where even rank strangers would inevitably ask him where he was ‘really from’.

She had remarked earlier that the beach was a great place for “people watching”, and he had only half-heartedly agreed. He thought it instead to be a great social experiment, replete with opportunities to observe and comment on human behavior. But this was their way, her un-fussiness contrasted against his pretensions to philosophical grandeur, both usually conveying the same idea, his invariably the more verbose. As he looked around and listened, he was able to discern several different strains of conversation. In them, he could easily tell apart his ‘countrymen’. They were usually the loudest and most self-assured among the lot. One could almost imagine them with their bravado, standing in a foreign land with combat fatigues, masters of all they surveyed. Here, their commands were directed at the local wait-staff, asking to be served a chilled beverage or food. Usually this involved adding extra accents aigu and tildes to the local language, hyper-foreignisms that did not exist, in an attempt to sound more authentic. Looking around, he saw some well-scrubbed teenagers, younger compatriots by the sound of their accents, running towards the water excitedly, yet with a certain practiced restraint. Like the older generation, the youth were endowed with some of the same cool self-confidence. He looked further, and saw a handsome man trying, with little success, to embrace his youngest daughter whilst getting the mother to take a photograph for posterity. He then looked at his own young ones, deeply catatonic as they stared into their electronic devices, only occasionally rising out of this state, when the vagaries of the sea breeze interrupted the certainty of their connectivity to the invisible web of information. The younger one looked at him for an instant with a flicker of recognition, and then quickly back at the screen, where an imaginary purple dinosaur with an unfailingly cheery disposition held her undivided attention. Inwardly, he smiled.

It was, the locals said, an unusual summer. There was an unprecedented amount of Sargassum in the water, and this was being deposited on the beach like berms. The local authorities had resorted to cleaning off piles of the seaweed to ‘beautify’ the beach for the tourists, and every morning, he saw a group of locals (almost certainly being paid less than the local minimum wage) picking up and carting away wheelbarrows of the stuff. This was, in his mind, a Sisyphean endeavor, as the next morning, there were more berms, and more cleaning to accomplish. As he looked around in what seemed to be a beehive of activity, he saw them, the woman with the alabaster skin, and her much older male partner, both bathers, meticulously picking up seaweed from the water and depositing it on the beach. She was young, beautiful, slender, and seemed wedded to the task with a certain air of resignation. He, on the other hand, seemed to assume a more supervisory role, picking up a clump every now and then, with a certain delicacy to his movements. It was obvious they were lovers, and he looked old enough to be her father, but he held his chest up with the pride of a man cavorting with a much younger woman. A few clumps later, perhaps having achieved a certain sense of accomplishment, they stood still, facing the water. He surveyed them, and mused about the absurdity of it all- the woman, the seaweed, the old man, and the sea.

            His eyes continued to scan the water, out to the distant horizon. There, high-rise buildings on the nearby island appeared and disappeared in the blue haze, like mirages in the desert. On the sea in front, an oil tanker; gigantic, utilitarian, and covered with rust, the sea in front of it usurped in turn by a speeding white yacht. Closer at hand, on the beach, obsequious locals responded to the beck-and-call of moneyed tourists. He was certain that they were secretly thankful for the favorable exchange rate of the currency of their nearest neighbor to the north, political invectives notwithstanding. A study in contrasts, he thought to himself.

            The bathers converged on the beach despite the sweltering heat. They looked like seals of different sizes, all beached to take in the life-giving light. ‘Skin cancer’- he thought, as he quietly retreated to the shade of a beach umbrella. His pathos stemmed from the realization that dark skin was no protection against painful sunburns. He thought about this as he looked at his own arms. A travel brochure touting a beach destination might have well described his tan as copper or bronze, but to him, the reality was much more mundane- he looked like the color of burnt toast. Oh well…

His eyes scanned the beach again. In the far distance, a group of people played beach volleyball. Closer, a woman with a Mohawk haircut sat among three other people and was engaged in an animated conversation with them. With the passage of time, she nonchalantly whipped off her bikini top, baring her breasts to the group, and by extension, to the world beyond. Whether this was a profound philosophical statement or merely the desire to tan evenly was unclear to him, but the four-way conversation seemed to proceed without obvious pause, or even a furtive glance by the others in the direction of her chest. He looked around, averting his gaze guiltily. In front of the conversationalists, a dark skinned man in beach shorts juggled what appeared to be three very sharp sword-like objects. As he looked at this triptych, he tried to determine who, if anyone was most out of place at the beach.

His observing session was pleasantly interrupted by her and the children asking him to join them in the water. He looked at her, beautiful and tan in her gold bathing costume, straight out of a French Art-Deco travel poster in the style of Broders. She looked radiant, like the day he had first seen her. The children jumped around happily in the waves, skin glinting from sunscreen lotion. He pushed up his sunglasses and waved back at her, miming that he preferred to rest in the shade. He laid his head back down on the deck chair and took another sip of his cocktail. “This is the life”, he thought to himself, as he lapsed into a deep, languorous slumber.