Empire of Light (37 page)

As the plane tumbles out of the sky, flipping upside down and then righting itself, I lose track of what is up and down. At one moment I feel like I’m floating in space and the very next I’m pressed down into my seat, my chest crushed as if an elephant is sitting on me.

Christ. Not like this.

WHOOP! WHOOP! PULL UP! WHOOP! WHOOP! PULL UP!

The plane finally rights itself, almost level, but I can feel the pilots struggling to not let her flip again. She teeters dangerously to the left and everybody on the plane instinctively leans right, as if shifting our weight could actually counter an 800,000 pound jumbo jet screaming towards the earth.

I pray to Christ again and ask him to not let it flip anymore. My answer is a loud
crack
and a violent shutter followed by a steep nose-dive as the plane rolls over onto her back and stays there. The frame of the airliner seems to shriek in pain as the g-forces attempt to rip her apart.

BOOM!

An explosion from the back of the plane deafens me. I feel a massive rush of air at the back of my head and a howling wind, as if the plane has been split in two.

I sense that the first class cabin and the cockpit are all that’s left, the explosion sending us spinning wildly through the air like a top.

I again pray to Christ, asking him to not let me go out like this.

His reply to me is blackness as the lights go dark.

There is no more man-made noise.

The engines are gone.

The people with me are either too terrified to scream, passed out, or dead.

There’s nothing but the sound of the wind rushing through the shell of the cabin as we silently spin violently through the night sky.

I have no idea how far from the ground we are. Anticipating the impact is torture!

“Come on!”

“So the prodigal son returns.” I picture my dad meeting me at the airport the last time I flew into Cleveland. I think about my parents having to bury me, if they can find my body, and I feel so sorry.

I think about Dani and—

CRASH!

My head punches the window on impact. Water sprays into the cabin and we catch air again. We seem to skip across the water’s surface like a smooth stone before finally nose-diving to a stop.

PHOOM!

I’m thrown from my seat up against the cockpit; the bones in my leg shattering and collapsing like an accordion against the wall.

The freezing water of the Atlantic surges around me, my body too busted to do anything about it, the pajamas offering absolutely no protection from the cold.

I scream like I used to when I was five years old.

My broken right leg hooks onto a piece of the wreckage.

It pulls me down towards the bottom of the ocean.

The larger section of the plane sinks below me, illuminating the ocean with a fantastic electric blue and white glow. Bodies float in their seats. One man seems to be staring back at me as the plane tows him down to the depths before me. He looks like he’s begging me to get us out of this.

One more time I ask Christ, 
Please, don’t let me go out like this
.

My last breath explodes from my lungs and then I inhale deeply, spilling pints of ice-cold ocean water into my lungs. I aggressively vomit it back out, but my body instinctively inhales the ocean again. My stomach heaves in sadistic convulsions. The electrical system of the wreckage below me begins to short. Flashes of light and blackness.

I spot my vintage 1930 Brownie camera as it floats into my view, inches from my face, slowly spinning in the water.

Wow.

The mafia guy kept his word.

My camera was on the plane after all. How ‘bout that?

I reach out for it.

I’m fading.

The ocean’s current spins the camera farther from my grasp.

The water begins to extinguish the sparks of the plane’s electronics. In the final glow, I can see the camera’s door has been knocked open.

It’s empty. I knew it. Goddamn Edgerton.

The camera slowly spins to a stop, the lens facing me.

The glow from the plane dies.

In the cold blackness of the ocean, I want to try talking to Jesus one last time, but instead of asking him for help, this time I just want to thank him.

Thank you.

Thank you, God, for absolutely everything.

FLASH!

25 

Cut! I Love it! It’s Perfect! Let’s Do One More...

HEY, JUST HOW LONG 
does it take a guy to die anyway?

I’ve been floating in the dark for I don’t know how long, just waiting to go out.

There’s some light bleeding through my eyelids. Maybe I should try something unconventional, like, oh, I don’t know, opening my eyes.

There is light, lots of it, but everything is blurry. I can only see enough to know that I’m in a white room, seemingly lit by florescent lights.

This is either Heaven or
Walgreens
.

“Well, well, well. The prodigal son returns.”

Pop.

I hear him laughing.

I feel him gripping my hand.

I try to make out the image of a face hanging over me, but I can’t focus.

“Of course you’re alive, boy!”

Okay, I don’t remember asking if I was. That can’t be good.

I try to focus my eyes, but now I’m crying like a moron.

“You’re okay,” my dad repeats over and over again.

He wipes my tears away with his handkerchief, a little too roughly as usual. When I was a kid, I’d fall down and he’d manhandle/comfort me, wiping my face as if I were made of steel.

“Yeah, your mom is here. She just stepped out for a second. She’ll be right back.”

Okay, I don’t remember asking that either. There’s obviously a disconnect here.

“He’s awake!” I hear Mom exclaim as she enters the room.

“Yeah that lazy turkey finally just woke up!”

Oh, please, let my vision clear up. I really need to see these people. Stop crying, you idiot.

“I was just sittin’ here, watchin’ the game. And all of sudden he starts mumblin’, ‘Dani.’ The little bastard. Tell Dani to pay your damn medical bills.”

Don’t make me laugh yet, Pop. It hurts!

“Love…you…Mom.” For the first time I hear my own weak voice. It sounds like I haven’t spoken in weeks.

“I love you, too,” she says to me.

This is killing me.

“Where is Dani?” she asks my dad as she lays her hand on my head.

“I told her to go get some sleep. That girl has been here all day and night. I had a taxi take her back to our house so she could rest. This knucklehead ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

Dani’s here?

“We should call her,” Mom says.

“I’m dialing now.”

I’m fading. Can’t keep my eyes open…Are you kidding m—

***

Hey!

How long was I out?

I struggle to open my eyes.

The light is nicer.

Warmer.

Suddenly, everything goes black again as a warm wash cloth gently wipes my eyes.

Oh, yeah. That’s the stuff.

The hand compresses the flat warm cloth against my eyes and gently presses down upon it. Warm water spills from it and streaks down my cheek. The gentle hand slowly sops up the wayward drops before removing the cloth from my face.

I blink my eyes open.

I can see as clearly as the day I was born.

“
Amore,
” Dani says, the first face I’ve seen since the crash.

I wonder if my voice works yet?

“
Ti amo, Dani.”

“I love you, too.”

Wow, she said 
I love you
. All it took was me crashing into the Atlantic Ocean.

What is she doing?

No. She can’t kiss me.

I haven’t brushed my teeth since that morning I boarded my plane. I try to yank my head back.

“
Tranquillo,”
she says before grabbing me by my chin and kissing me.

It’s your funeral, lady.

Boys, if your girlfriend ever kisses you after days of comatose open mouth breathing, don’t let her go. You’ve just found gold.

“Why don’t you two get a room,” says a disembodied male voice.

“Giacomo?” I ask.

Sure enough, standing at my other side, shaking his head as if to say,
what the hell have you gotten yourself into now?

“Do you like the lamps? The lighting in this room was for shit. It looked like a goddamn hospital room,” he says.

I look around and see floor lamps from my parents’ home.

“It
is 
a hospital room,” I say smiling.

“I put a dimmer on the nightstand table lamp. The floor lamp bulb was too hot so I hit it with some Streaks n' Tips.” Giacomo babbles on about his set-up, nervously. I guess too scared to think about me almost dying, maybe. After he’s finished with his goddamn lightning seminar, the two of them begin to fill in the blanks for me.

Mom and Dad are at home sleeping. Giacomo and Dani are the night shift.

“You were the only survivor,” Dani says sorrowfully before explaining how the hell I got out of that mess alive.

The only reason they found me was because something exploded underneath me, illuminating my silhouette in a phosphorus glow. We had actually ditched into Lake Erie, the lake that never gives up its dead, and not the Atlantic.

It’s the same lake where the Cinematographer’s meteor still lies.

The Coast Guard, out of old Cleveland Harbor, dispatched helicopters before the plane even crashed, based on our pilot’s mayday broadcast. The crew was nails, broadcasting our position as long as they could before ditching. The helicopters rushed to the coordinates, the mysterious glow guiding them the entire way. The light illuminated the waters around me like a massive underwater spotlight until I was safely pulled from the drink.

“Hey, and the FAA just released your personal shit to your parents. Your camera and everything in your messenger bag was perfect. Man, I have to get one of those bags—”

“Wait,” I interrupt. “My camera? You mean my Kodak point n’ shoot?”

“No, bro,” Giacomo says, shaking his head. “They got the Brownie. The same antique Brownie you let get stolen in Naples.”

“This guy,” Dani laughs. “This guy! Uffa! Not two minutes in Napoli and this guy gets jacked.”

Ah, friends. Is there no situation too dire to stop them from busting my balls? Apparently not, ‘cause these two buffoons are guffawing over my body as if I just slipped on a banana skin.

“I can’t believe they found it. Out of all that wreckage…How?”

“Well, they didn’t exactly have to search for it,” says Giacomo smirking.

Apparently I had a death grip on that thing.

Literally.

The poor diver had to manhandle me into the rescue basket with the camera glued to my fingers.

“You beaned him in the temple with it!” laughs Giacomo. “That AFI dude, Edgerton has it.”

“What? Edgerton? How did he get it?”

Good ol’ Edge.

The man had flown to Cleveland the moment he heard my plane ditched. Dani tells me how he made a point of wearing his best suit, an Armani,when he met my parents as a representative of AFI.

He was here at the hospital when everybody found out I was going to pull through. While others hugged and shook hands, Edgerton sat off by himself and lit up a stogie.

And the hospital let him do it, too. ‘Cause he’s that damn cool.

“He didn’t stick around?”

“No. When the FAA released your shit, he saw the camera and asked your parents if he could hold on to it. The next plane out of Cleveland, he was ghost,” says Giacomo.

“Really?” I say a bit surprised.

Edgerton came for the camera, not for me.

Ugh. Can’t blame him, though. The dejection hits me fast, and now I just want to check out and be alone. After what seems like an eternity of lying here with a fake smile glued to my face, the nurse finally enters the room and puts me out of my misery.

“Okay. Everybody out. This young man needs his sleep.”

She injects something into my I.V. bag.