Lucky
by Ethan Naegele
It was the fourth consecutive day of Robert’s somnambulism. At least that’s what he preferred to call it. What a euphemism, he often thought. He believed that all his problems stemmed from these happenings, and there may have been some truth to it. Ever since that December night he never truly thought or acted the same. Ever since then Robert grew accustomed to spending his days in a lethargic fog while at night wandering in a restless state. These wanderings, however, did not have to be physical. He could wander mentally, for whenever he tried to go to sleep it seemed to evade him at all costs. There would be moments in time when he would be on the cusp of sleep; the subconscious thoughts would start to seep through; there would be flashes of dreams and noises that only existed in the subconscious mind. However, on this particular night with Robert in bed he snapped back to full consciousness when a sudden uncontrolled jerk from his left leg prevented any more those subconscious thoughts from entering his brain and conquering the conscious. At this moment, he knew sleep would escape him for yet another night. Robert looked at the clock behind him. The time neared 3 AM. Even on a June night like tonight, there won’t be any daylight until at least 3 or so hours from now, thought Robert. At this point he got dressed and he sallied out of his house to go for a walk.
He stood at reasonably tall stature, 6 feet in height with an average but slowly fattening body as of recently. His light brown hair that he once neatly combed over to one side now dispersed in every direction. He stopped combing it since the beginning of the first somnambulism; it seemed as if he had forgotten that it was even a thing that people do. In fact, he had forgotten a lot of things since the start of it all. These events did not simply date back four days, but four years.
On his walk over a nearby bridge he recalled the events as they happened. It was abnormal for him to go back to this moment. They often made his heart race and made him extremely uncomfortable, but not tonight. He strolled on with a sort of apathy as he recalled the night clearly. His wife Gloria smiled at him on the passenger side of his Mercedes.
“Geez, Robert, all your talking is making my head hurt. Come on, what’s gone on with you, love?” She giggled. “You don’t want to speak to me anymore?”
Robert stayed silent for a moment, as if he got lost in thought. Gloria now looked directly at him, her head slightly tilted, pressing on with her eyes, waiting for a response. Finally Robert said, “Aww, you know how it is at work. The days are long, and they drain me out… especially when you have the worst job in the world.”
“Except you didn’t ask for it, genius,” she said giggling. “You knew exactly what you were getting into.”
Robert looked at his wife with a sort of accepting smile. The smile was faint but genuine. Gloria found herself in one of those jocular moods that was common for her; he was often rather solemn but even he had to smile when she smiled. She had a sort of wide smile she gave that made you smile back at it simply because it is abnormal for someone to smile that wide. That smile of hers made Robert feel exulted.
It was at this moment when a young man no older than 20 approached the parked car in front of their house. He was tall and slender with a ski mask concealing his face. One could understand why; the snow outside blew right in your face incessantly; however, the young man relished in the other benefits of wearing such a mask. He raised the gun from his side and fired it three times. The rounds shattered the glass of the passenger window. One hit Robert in the head, and the two others hit his wife in the head and chest. While the wife instantly died, Robert only looked dead while blood poured from the wound in his head as he keeled over in his seat. The man dragged Robert’s wife from the passenger’s seat and then dragged Robert out from the driver’s seat, and then he drove off leaving Robert to die on the cold road. But he didn’t die. Of course firing a gun would warrant the authorities, especially in a neighborhood like Robert’s, but it was only by incredible luck that he did not die by the time the ambulance had arrived.
The circumstances of this were certainly curious because a gunshot wound to the head almost always denotes death, but it is not always the case. There will be rare occasions in which the bullet will enter the head at a certain angle that does not guarantee death. This was the case with Robert. As for the wife, she was shot somewhere between the eyes which left her no chance. However, the man shot Robert somewhere in the side of his head so that the major parts of his brain indispensable for life were spared; however, ever since the gunshot wound, Robert’s mind hadn’t worked the same way since. Simply put, he couldn’t sleep. He could go days without sleeping, and it took no great effort from him to do so. As for his job, he had work during the weekdays from 9:00 to 5:00. He had a steady, boring job, and he despised it. He worked for a life insurance company, and his job was to filter through potential clients. He literally determined which clients would be too likely to die early, usually through some sort of mathematical reasoning, so he could decline them. Clients such as those would be declined because he worked at an insurance company, not a charity.
Robert stood on the bridge just a few blocks from his house in the dead of night. The moon shined bright that night like a pearl, and all the stars out on that cloudless night sparkled like little beads to supplement the moonlight against the sea of infinite black. At one point Robert stopped walking across the bridge. He found himself halfway across. Under it was a river that ran through the city. The bridge measured some 60 or so feet high. Coming out of his reverie, Robert noticed his initial apathy had subsided and he was in tears. They came slow and steady across his face and then all at once. And his face… he was only 34 years old but he aged tremendously due to the lack of sleep, the mental strain, and the overall poor physiological condition he found himself in. Robert’s face had wrinkled and loosened over a short period of time. The decline of his overall health started much more recently. The aging started about 2 years ago whereas the heavier body weight and mild hallucinations and hair loss started only about 3 months ago.
He put his left hand on the guardrail of the bridge, then his left foot over, then his right. He stood on the few inches of bridge that stood out from the other side of the rail, leaving nothing between him and the blackness of the water below with the moonlight reflection. He mused at how the water and the sky, two things so opposite, could represent the same thing. No life existed up there, just emptiness. He also found emptiness in the water below. The only thing that prevented it from being totally dark was the reflection of the moonlight. If Robert stared at a certain spot in the water and really focused on it, he would see the same thing that he could see if he looked up, with the exception of the stars. And what of those stars? Those stars are harder to see because of the pollution, anyway. Those stars are millions of light years away, and they’ve been long dead, just like we’ll be long dead when the stars that are shining at this very moment finally cast their small bead of light upon the Earth’s eye. So to hell with those stars. Indeed, he found that same infinite profundity all around him, existing in a magnitude that made him feel infinitesimal.
If Robert closed his eyes, he would see the same thing. If he died, he surmised, he’d see the same thing still, and Robert continued: even THAT would be the same thing that you saw before you were ever born; you saw nothing because you did not have eyes that could see. Certainly a curious thought. He reasoned that when you die it is the same as if you were never born. You do not remember experiencing anything before you were born and if you haven’t a working brain to experience anything after death, you will not experience it. The thought was rather inviting. It seemed as if the abyss was finally staring back at him; this was the forbidden idea that the world had been keeping from him all this time. He once more went back to that night in the car with his wife. He wished he could’ve been killed at that moment. He wished he could’ve died happy. He once more mused at how blissful it could’ve been to die with a smile on his face at 30 years old. It was as if God himself – if Robert still believed there was one – singled him out and told him THERE IS NO SOLACE TO BE FOUND HERE. Instead, he thought, he’d die in a river where in all likelihood no one would find him until some days later when his body would release gases that would make him float to the surface. In that case, he would have the grotesque appearance of a defeated, bloated, blue man: old and wrinkled at the ripe old age of 34.
This thought obliterated all his doubts.
He was unhappy, but he did not truly wish to be dead. If I happen to die, then so be it, if it is out of my control. But I will not commit suicide, concluded Robert. It was against human instinct to WISH to be dead. Species would go extinct if it was normal for individuals to wish to die. No matter what, there has to be some sort of valiant battle. This can be observed with what a terminally ill patient will not do. The patient will not commit suicide. That person will probably spend their final days doing whatever they truly wish. The patient will tell their loved ones that they love them. The patient will say goodbye to all their friends, that person will hold onto life for as long as possible, but he or she will not commit suicide. Robert recoiled from the edge of the bridge.
Robert went to work. He took a look at his watch. It read 7:19. Although it was still quite early, Robert had no car – though it wasn’t as if he didn’t have the money – and he’d have to walk the roughly two miles before 9:00. He predicted a long and slow day.
The day was Friday: the last day before he would use up his 2 weeks of vacation. Robert thought of Hawaii, or maybe some place far away but still in the state. He could go to plenty of places. He could go someplace cooler if he wanted to. That’s just what I’ll do, Robert concluded as he sat in his office, listless. He couldn’t wait until the workday ended so that he could get far away from the wretched place. What made the place even more detestable for him was the fact that he absolutely depended on it. For every time Robert showed his mathematical and logical prowess, he showed his social incompetence and lack of understanding towards other human beings. Robert thrived in a job in which he could sit alone in an office all day and analyze and scrutinize. He simply wouldn’t be able to compete in a world where social skills were an indispensable attribute.
By the end of the workday, Robert settled on Canada. Just the previous week he saw an ad online that caught his attention about a stay in Calgary. He learned about a national park near the city that he found himself drawn to. Something about the stillness of the water in the foreground of the picture and the serenity of the verdure had caught his attention. He would do anything if it meant he could get away from home for just a little while.
Robert started packing as soon as he got home. He wasted no time. Among all the clothing, toiletries, and other necessities, he packed a picture of his wife. It was of course true that – although Robert never said the words to her – he felt as if he didn’t deserve to have a wife like her. She was too good for him, he thought; she was outgoing and had a sort of childish innocence and purity that he had never seen – nor ever would see again – in his entire life. When she was alive he did depend on her verily. Now that isn’t to say this was a one-way street; he loved her dearly and she the same toward him. And there was no doubt that he thought of the feeling of her love toward him every day still. It felt like a sort of ineffable aura in his head: a feeling of some mysterious bliss mixed with sadness. He always first thought of how fortunate he was to end up with her, and then invariably with it came the soul-crushing realization that he could never look into her eyes again.
Although he no longer had interest in suicide, he felt clueless as to what he would do next. He would get to Canada, and then what? He would come home from Canada, and then what else? He would work at a job that killed him, he would spend his nights wide-awake… what else then? Robert examined the conundrum as he sat in his room.
“I suppose I should just take this one day at a time… I’ll be all right. Really. I’m okay,” said Robert. Maybe he didn’t believe it enough to have the thought only exist in the mind.
Robert finished packing and sallied out to catch the next flight into Calgary. As he got on the plane the fog in his head seemed to have thickened. Everything became condensed in his skull; it was as if a vise had just gotten hold of either side of his head and the pressure on the sides grew dreadful, and the greater tragedy in all this being that at the same time he felt so tired yet unable to sleep. It would require all the focus in his mind to get into a half-conscious state. He could hold it for some time, and just as he was nearing sleep, he would wake invariably; however, being in the half-conscious state for only twenty minutes or so would offer a temporary treatment to his mental fatigue, and then he would not be able to have rest of any sort for some hours or days. It still did not substitute sleep. He still found himself in constant lethargy during the day, and his mind would still buzz incessantly through the night.
Robert surmised that through travel he could physically leave his troubles behind. This was his reason for being on the plane in the first place. He had heard stories of people that had left their old doleful lives behind and resided in an entirely new place, whether it was some remote village in Mongolia or elsewhere. Robert didn’t necessarily want to abandon his old life entirely. He had a house and money and other nice things that he had grown accustomed to. He just hoped he could get away from his troubles long enough in a carefree state of mind so that he could reset himself in a sort of rebirth.
In this train of thought, Robert recognized the folly of his attempt, and it could be argued that at that point he gave it all away and accepted failure whereas before that thought, he did have a chance, for when you accept something as bound to fail it will be so as soon as your thought is produced. He thought it foolish to assume that he could simply leave his past through physical means; he knew the past, his past, existed in his own head. He tried to keep optimism, but the single thought of doubt surpassed all subsequent thoughts of positivity. Deep down Robert knew this. The thought that he had already spoiled the reason for his travels troubled him. He shifted uneasily next to a balding man with a massive stomach who reeked of body odor. Robert’s initial disgust for the man passed since he got into his seat about 2 hours before, but he still found it an incredibly unpleasant experience.
At this time the plane underwent some turbulence. Although only minor turbulence, it was now that time of day in which Robert’s mind raced at every given opportunity, so Robert could not help but imagine the worst. Some time passed after the turbulence, and everything was back to normal.
But it wasn’t turbulence that had crashed the plane.
Just like with nearly anything else that is powerful on this Earth, peril reveals itself gradually and then rushes forth all at once. An ominous ticking and clicking came from outside the plane, and after a few minutes it subsided. At first Robert thought he was the only one on the plane who could hear it, but in fact the crew was well aware of the ticking, and eventually the rest of the passengers shifted in their seats one by one. They were unable to explain it or even pinpoint it. Nearly ten minutes later, it returned. Robert sat up attentively. The adjacent man had his face pointed up and slightly to the side and snored obnoxiously.
Robert heard a boisterous clang to his right. The right engine failed entirely. A strange sensation fell over the passengers as the plane was no longer flying but instead beginning a free-fall. The plane tilted over starboard. Then went the cabin pressurization. The yellow emergency apparatus dropped in front of all the passengers. The rotund man then snapped wide-awake, and anyone else who was asleep had gotten the rudest awakening of his or her life. Everyone else panicked while Robert’s heart slowed a bit. The thuds were slower but harder. If this plane was to be his metal coffin then he accepted it. He no longer had a choice between life or death. He felt a little worried at first, but then a wave of calm passed over. He felt the sensation that someone else controlled the situation for him so he no longer had to worry; he could take a backseat.
Meanwhile a man on the opposite aisle of Robert used the emergency phone on the plane to make one last phone call to his wife before he equipped the emergency mask. He spoke quickly as if he had a thought he needed to get out into the world before his fate brought him to everlasting silence.
“Leslie, every time I’ve ever had to fly I’d pray that I’d never have to make this call. Something’s wrong on the plane and we’re going down. The engine failed and the only thing around us is forest. I hope we all make it out okay but if we don’t I want you to know that I love you and every day that I got to spend with you and the kids was a gift. Tell Lisa and Tommy I love them more than anything in the world. No matter what happens, I want you to stay strong for me, okay? I love you.”
From the speech he gave, you could never tell that this man neglected his wife and kids. You could never tell that he spent the last several weeks distant from them because he spent those weeks gambling his money away, and when he did speak to her, he made cruel comments that mentally damaged her, and he couldn’t go a day without speaking to her with a condescending tone. You couldn’t tell from his speech that Leslie had just filed for divorce the previous night, and the two fought over it on the phone for hours. You couldn’t tell that he threatened to beat her when he came home.
No, all you could tell was that in the face of death, the final words he professed to his neglected wife were, “I love you.”
Robert looked to his left indifferent to the tumult and away from the man on the phone with repugnance. He could see the lands below him as they were emblazoned by the 8 PM June sun as it made its final impressions on the earth.
If this is the last thing I see, maybe it won’t be so bad, thought Robert.
For the past several years, Robert had great difficulty in seeing the beauty in the light because everything he saw became corrupted with a hint of concrete gray – mark how your mood can influence the way your eyes perceive the world around you – so it was curious that in that particular moment, the images that met his eyes were unblemished by his mind. The plane headed toward the ground fast, and then all was black.
The last few moments were unknown. People scrambled out of seats. Prayers to God. A deafening crash.
When Robert opened his eyes, he only ever wanted them to be closed again.
Everyone in sight was dead.
The plane crashed in a vast wilderness, and the aircraft plowed through massive trees, and the impact from it left the metal convoluted. All was quiet. To his amazement, he could move his limbs. He looked for any possible survivors. He saw one couple impaled by some stray mangled metal, another killed from the impact, and another crushed. And as for the crew, the front of the plane seemed to disappear after the crash, so their fate was what you could imagine.
Robert cried. He cried because he found himself in a mass grave. He cried because he felt he didn’t deserve to be the one to survive out of all the others. He cried because death came to him once more, and he once more he got to look in its cold, beady eyes before it disappeared as suddenly as it appeared.
Some time passed. Just as Robert seemed to have gotten ahold of himself something remarkable happened; he started to howl with laughter. It started as a grin, and then a slight chuckle, and then the urge to erupt with laughter was unstoppable. He hadn’t so much as chuckled in years, let alone genuinely laugh, but he couldn’t help it. As psychopathic as it may at first sound, try to empathize: among all the dead, he lived. He saw the other side of the same coin. The worst injury he had was a bruise on his knee. He knew he’d never be the same after that. Who would be?
He was the lone survivor of a plane crash somewhere in the wilderness of Montana, in a metal mass grave with its wings clipped and its metal tube split in two, and Robert was given the awful inconvenience of a bruised knee. Robert calmed himself. He had to climb out of the wreckage because the place where the plane had separated hung slightly over the edge of a cliff, so he could not exit from there. Robert had to look for some other way to exit. There was a place near the fourth window from the front on the left side of the plane that left a small hole which was just large enough for the gradually oversizing Robert to squeeze through, it just so happened. Robert noticed this and prepared to make his egress. Then he remembered his bag. He grabbed it from the luggage. He looked inside and gazed at the picture of his wife. His face shriveled a little. He put the picture in the bag, picked up the bag, and dropped it down the hole.
Exiting proved difficult; Robert had to fit himself through and subsequently find the optimal way to land so as not to injure himself on the way down – the plane tilted in a way that the bottom really faced out to his left. Robert squeezed through the hole with a great struggle. The hole had a tight wrap around his stomach, and he had to force himself through gradually. Robert inched through with awful discomfort. He continued on, little by little, and after some time he readied his body for the drop. When only Robert’s arms were encompassed by the hole and he dangled, he let go. One could almost see Robert’s past get left behind in that plane. It was as if a duck had emerged from a pond, with the water slipping off the coat coolly, and the coat looking like it had never been wet at all.
He arrived home a day and a half later. He never got to have his vacation, but after the crash, it was of no importance to him. Robert opened the door of his house and entered. He lived alone for four years, but the house never felt as vacant to him as it did at that very moment. He was far away from home for a long time. He plopped on his bed and sat for a moment, and he realized he felt sleepy. Robert dozed. He went into a deep slumber – a dreamless sleep for about 13 hours – and upon his awakening, he felt like his mind was finally… clearer.
Robert found great difficulty in talking about the event from that point on. Being the only survivor of 86 in a plane crash struck the chords of his heart. He began to gather that such circumstances were infinitely portentous somehow, as if he was meant to live on for some unknown reason. Such a thought was certainly unsettling. Robert imagined himself taking the place of the great Atlas. How could such a weight be placed upon the shoulders of a mortal man, especially one that used to be so insignificant and underwhelming before? Robert sat in his office on the weekdays and during the nights he would wander like a stray puppy. This was his life before the crash, so how could such a man continue? How could it even be that a man could survive a gunshot to the head and in the same lifetime, let alone the same decade, be the lone survivor of a plane crash? Nevertheless, Robert knew he had to persevere. Thoughts of unhappiness and feelings of apathy toward death no longer plagued him.
As Robert contemplated all the circumstances of the past few weeks, he noted some of the changes in himself as he stared at his bathroom mirror. He no longer gained weight anymore. He instead began to thin out. Robert no longer had an unkempt head of hair. He started shaving regularly again: something he hadn’t done since his wife died. He opened his eyes wide and stared into the profundity of the pupils. 6 AM in a t-shirt and boxers in the bathroom was probably not the best time for introspection, but he realized he could see inside himself. It no longer seemed like looking down a hallway of infinite convoluted mirrors. What Robert saw instead unsettled him with its simplicity. There was no longer a whirlwind of different emotions and thoughts – just simply an idea of how he needed to proceed. Robert realized he needed to quit his job. He set out a goal that within one week he would find a replacement. And it was certainly curious, too, because Robert couldn’t remember the last time he set an actual goal. The only goal he used to have would be trying to make it into the bathroom at work before he soiled himself from all the coffee he drank as a result of his caffeine addiction (not that it helped him). And the idea of starting anew set a spark. The thought of abandoning the job he so loathed left Robert feeling excited, and then he got flashbacks of his youth when he was 18 and sanguine, as he used to say because at the time, he was heading into college with the world at his fingertips, young and ambitious.
Robert thought about where he could possibly be now if he had kept up with the same ambition instead of settling for a job he hated. It’s a powerful idea, Robert thought. It’s like I don’t feel like the skin on my bones fits me, and I need to get out. But immediately after, Robert concluded that it was useless hanging onto what DID happen because he had control over what WILL happen. Besides, I can’t just look at my life as a series of losses and gains. Even through the worst situations there IS a way out.
Robert’s life improved simply because he said it would. That morning, he didn’t show up to work at the insurance company, nor did he show up the morning after. Within a week he found a new job – with his qualifications it wasn’t hard – and he achieved his goal. The job was some sinecure for a wealthy corporation in which he could keep to himself with a contented smile. The excess money paid little importance to Robert; he felt he no longer needed whatever wealth he had. Two weeks later when he received his first paycheck, he gave most of it away, as he would then do in the months to come.
In those coming months, Robert steadily became more social. Social interaction always seemed to pain him, even before Gloria’s death, but the antisocial and perhaps mildly misanthropic personality of Robert died in the plane. He still had a slight preference for solitude, but he did enjoy the company of others. He had no detestation for his new coworkers as he did at the insurance company. There was no reason for it, Robert opined, because he worked for a check that he would give away, and what the other folks did was of no real importance to him.
Maybe the others did have self-centered motives, but what of it? He could not persuade the modern American adult to make less money, and they could not see what Robert saw, but what of it?
And perhaps the most profound of all was the fact that Robert could sleep again. No longer did Robert suffer from the sleepwalking, no more dichotomy of how his mind acted during the day versus at night, and no more wanderings. It seemed peculiar to him that this happened because he first believed that the particular region of the brain that regulated his sleep patterns had been damaged by the gunshot, but then he realized that his mind was not destroyed physically. The figurative destruction, however, could be and had been repaired. The abnormality of the thing was that a great trauma initiated his despair while a greater one ended it. Normally you may hear stories about people that experience a trauma and they eventually turn their life around for the better as they live like every day is their last. Others may become fractured by their trauma and can never truly live afterward. From the life-altering vicissitude they may live their life as an outsider looking in, and their spirit is therefore crushed.
With Robert, both happened; there came first a fracturing and then a repairing. The fracturing dismantled him, giving him depression and sleep problems and morbidity. The repairing altered his philosophy and his attitude, and his mood was changed forever. But of course he still did miss his wife. Every day, Robert thought about her and how much he missed her light brown eyes that always seemed to glisten, along with her perpetual sanguinity that acted as a cloud on which Robert stood, and it allowed him to levitate and surpass his daily struggles, for her happiness was his. Even after the crash, even after she was long dead, it was that sanguinity that Robert would strive to emulate in remembrance of her. Even in death, she told him that happiness is a state of mind, and he listened.
Four months after the crash, Robert found himself walking toward the bridge from which he nearly jumped. The September air felt cool and fresh, and it was late at night, just as before. On this night, however, the clouds blocked the moon out as you may often find to be the case during those nights in the heart of autumn. Once again, no cars were around in the dead of night. Robert wore a sweater zipped all the way up. He walked with his hands in his pockets partly because of the chill and partly because he experienced a slight uneasy pensiveness regarding what he intended to do. He brought with him a journal and pen. In it, he wrote:
As I approach the bridge where I once contemplated suicide, and very nearly committed it, I am amazed by how little things have changed. The world is still very much the same, but MY world has transformed in its entirety. How can these everyday men and women go on about their lives, complain about the most trifling of issues, live in loveless relationships, work at jobs they loathe, or engage in conversations where all talk is cant? And I see drug addicts, these people who shoot themselves up with needles in their free time, and I’m troubled by it. I even saw one on the way here. Do know that I cry for you, man. You drill holes in yourself. You must not have been even 30 years old, and you spend your life trying to ease the pain incessantly because your life is too great a tragedy to move on, or so you believe, so you spend your entire life motionless. I say all this, but it is not as if I have ascended to the heavens in an apotheosis, no. I am still very much a mortal man. I walk the same grounds and breathe the same air as anyone. Twice have I seen death unfold in front of me. Twice have I somehow, by some miracle, been able to escape it. Maybe it does mean something. Maybe the forces of this universe want to keep me alive to make me understand something grand that I can’t quite put to words. But I don’t know if I believe it. Maybe I’m looking at some arbitrary explanation where there is none; maybe I’m trying to establish some sort of purpose for my existence. But nonetheless, how could I not see this before? How could it be that I lived my whole life with eyes seeing but not noticing? Even after what I’ve experienced, there is still life, and that’s a precious thing. Every day I wake up and I pay homage to the lives lost: the lives that could have easily been me. Every day I wake up and I think about how great it is to be here, and I realize that this is what she wanted. She never wanted me to be some braindead fool. And I wish that I could teach others what I have learned – that if you are here, you are lucky – and believe me, I’ve tried. These people never take the time to notice. You always have somewhere to be, work in the morning, kids at home, your wife is at work too. You walk fast in the city streets because you’re building the stairway to heaven and you don’t have time to be standing around with your hammer in your hand unless you’re building. My only wish is that they could see it, too.
Robert closed the journal and stared once again at the night sky and mused. You aren’t insignificant simply because you’re smaller than the universe around you. The entire universe exists in your head: what you see, what you hear, what you touch. You are the universe if you wish to believe it. You are lucky, too.
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