"What will happen when he dies?"

A half hour before its arrival in Oakland, the plane hit several bad patches of turbulence, the first of which was so bad and so unexpected that one of the passengers who happened at the time to not have his seat belt buckled was thrown upwards with alarming violence. He suffered a minor head wound against the cabin ceiling, nothing more than a superficial cut, but the sight of blood caused the elderly woman sitting across from him to scream. Rumors and panic spread throughout all of the passengers quickly, and as the plane shook with several more bouts of turbulence, the atmosphere of the cabin became morose and filled with quiet, terrified groaning. Everyone aboard the plane was so caught up with what felt to be a near-death experience, including the flight attendants, who were distracted from their prior-to-descent responsibilities by the constant, hysteric service requests from the many terrified passengers. As a result, it was not until after the plane had landed that the flight attendants discovered the tiny, perfectly intact corpse of a child that had been locked in one of the plane bathrooms.

The last passengers were filing enthusiastically off the plane when Carol, the flight attendant who found the body, came running, screaming the entire way up the aisle. The elder flight attendant, Michael, attempted to control the problem, silencing Carol and trying to assuage the  curiosity and terror that her display had caused among the remaining passengers.

"No one dies while flying," he told the passengers with a chuckle. "Due to the high saturation of oxygen, it's physically impossible to suffocate. However, some people, particularly young people, can suffer adverse reactions to the high saturation of oxygen. In some cases, people have been known to fall into a deep sleep. I'm sure once we transport the young person in the bathroom outside, he'll wake up, fully refreshed!" It was an outright lie. In fact, Michael had witnessed three deaths in the air, all but one of which was of natural causes. Michael quickly instructed the flight attendants to follow the passengers outside and try to ensure that only the appropriate rumors were spread. He then hurried into the bathroom and found, in fact, the child was very much dead and had likely been so for three or four hours.

They transported the body out of the plane on a stretcher, attaching breathing tubes to the boy's mouth and taping an IV to his arm in order to give the appearance of life, however in peril it might appear. Once they were inside of the ambulance, the corpse was taken to the local morgue, where it was determined that the child was not living due to unknown causes. They could not find a match of the child's fingerprints, DNA or dental records. The small, custom-made suit that the child wore was without labels, and there was nothing in any of the young boy's pockets that could provide any indication of how he came to be in the airplane bathroom. There was not only no ticket in his pocket, or anywhere on his body, but there was no record of any young, unattended child supposed to be anywhere on the plane. All of the parents whom had been on the flight with children where subtly contacted, and all of them could account for their children. When finally a single piece of information was turned up, it was hardly worth finding at all: sewn on the inside sleeve of the young boy's jacket was a white piece of cloth with a quote neatly embroidered on it:

   "Nothing more than this."

The investigators joked darkly that it would have been better to not have found the embroidered quote at all. It seemed now that they were being toyed with. They started to comb blindly through all the federal case files of missing children in hopes of finding evidence of the corpse's identity. This took several weeks, and the body was stored in the morgue in the meantime. After a full month and a half of working diligently, when the investigators had not turned up any useful information, they went back to see the body and decide what to do with it. When they removed it from its frozen sarcophagus, they noticed immediately that its hair had grown several inches and, after examining it with growing astonishment and alarm, the investigators found that the corpse had grown almost a full inch and a half taller in the month and a half since it had been found... approximately in keeping with the normal rate of growth expected of a young boy of the corpse's apparent age.

Countless tests were performed and nothing was proven except that the corpse was continuing to grow. Over the next fifty-five years, government scientists marveled over the corpse of a child that became a young man and then a middle aged man. It wasn't until the corpse reached the approximate age of 60 that a young scientists named Lieberman intoned the question that would eventually predominate every scientists' mind while observing the corpse:

"What will happen when he dies?"

Several Hours North of Here

Before the real tragedies of our lives occurred, to propel us into that deadening, solitary time of existence and finally into the cold, firm fullness  of our adult lives, I and five other young people took one weekend in the summer to camp out on a beach several hours north of here. On a lonely strand of land next to a boiling cold ocean, we lay under the hot summer air naked and oppressed almost comfortably by a midnight heat completely out of season for that region.

It occurred that Michael and Rachel wanted to go out camping. Mitchell and Mia were interested, and I agreed to go. My girlfriend Kiera couldn't go, wouldn't go because she didn't think she could miss work on such short notice. But then Rachel's friend Toni was going, so I wouldn't be the only person unaccompanied. Kiera wasn't happy about the situation, but the trip promised to be fun and I refused to not go.

The Friday we were planning to leave there was last minute panic. The campsite that we were planning to camp at had been shut down due to a nearby forest fire. It was a summer of incredible heat. Determined to go somewhere and not cancel the trip, Michael decided to take us up north, to the Lost Coast. It was a much longer ride than we had planned on, but it was an adventure and at that point it was more important to say yes to adventure than to follow the plan.

We flew up the Interstate and by midday we had entered the lush, alien-esque Redwood forests. The freeway became four lane, then two lane and then stopped north of Legget, crawling with tourists and logging trucks. I kept offering to drive.

"I'm on a roll!" Michael would yell.

"Okay, dude!" I'd yell back. We went back and forth like that several times.

Toni and Rachel talked. Toni was slender and pretty, her dark complexion shinning with a recent tan. She had just come back from a year in Costa Rica, where she had been engaged to marry a man she had meet when he was an exchange student in the states. It had ended badly, and she was back, shining powerfully with captured sunlight and wild instability. I kept joining in the conversation with jokes and enthusiastic comments, and gradually the conversation became between Toni and I. It was easier for the two of us to talk than for Rachel to twist around in her seat to talk. And Michael was getting restless, and kept trying to get Rachel's attention. So Toni and I talked. Immediately I liked her, and as we spoke I began to notice all the little details about her. She had wide blue eyes and thick, full eyebrows that almost drew together in a unibrow. Later she would pluck this officiously and never let even the slightest hint through that once upon a time there had been a unibrow, but at the time she had let her plucking lapse and the alluring unibrow was nearly visible. She had big, reddish brown lips and five piercings in each ear. Her long, tangled hair was tied up in several knots that she had not, having suffered a mysterious heartbreak just one month prior.

We got to the beach and it was too hot to do anything but swim. We stripped down and jumped into the water. It was too hot to eat anything, all we wanted to do was drink our beers and lay out nearly naked in the hot, wet air. It went on like that for hours...drinking, laying in the sand, dragging our heavy bodies to the icy cool water and jumping in for a few seconds at a time and then rolling out, envigorated, to drink away that burst of energy. Toni lay next to me, covering her wet, slim body in sand that stuck to her. She asked me what sort of line of work I was involved in and then immediately asked me if I thought that she was doomed to be miserable. I laughed, and told her that her question was stupid.

I married her, we had a child together and then divorced this winter. So for the past few months I've been writing her letters trying to explain why everything that happened did happen. I try to convince myself that there is some sort of order to everything, that it had to happen the way it did. Regardless of that and many other failures, I continue on unwillingly, courageously into the cold, firm fullness of what I tentatively call my adult life. 

the tattoo

I was walking downtown last Sunday when I decided impulsively to get a tattoo. It's a maguey plant with the flower in bloom.  I'm not sure why, and I regret it now to some extent. I suppose I may be trying to justify the tattoo to myself, to convince myself that I want it, after having committed myself in such a hurried way.

I dislike Sundays. Friday evenings always seem so promising, and Saturdays have that insulation of a full 24 hours between you and the working week. But then its 23, and then its 22. Sunday always begins for me languidly, almost beautiful, and then it sours with odd, distracted thoughts of the week. I spend the Sundays walking in parts of town that are foreign to the person who spends his weeks inside the shell of his occupation.

I got the tattoo on the right side of my back. Afterwards, I realized that, if I wore a white shirt to work, people would be able to see its shape and color through the fabric. I suppose I'll have to buy more colored shirts then.

Too much volume to know for certain what happened

Sharky Beagle knew he wanted to be a hot-dogger by the time he was five. At least that's what he told the people who asked that ubiquitous question later, at the surfing competitions and shit like that.

His mom was a Pilates instructor in Irvine and his dad sold lightweight drainpipes for homes and businesses all over the greater Orange County area. He was the only child of that particular marriage, but in total he had eight half-brothers and two half-sisters.

From the time he was twelve he was on the beach whenever he could make it out. At that time you could get meth, coke, pills...whatever you wanted. At least Sharky and his buddies could. Older brothers would hook it up, or older dudes at the beach. You could get totally fucked up for just a couple dollars. Sharky had long, dirty blond hair he never washed, totally bleached out by the sun and growing down to like his butt cheeks. Lil' Shark, the older dudes called him. He could surf better than anyone.

When he turned 18, his buddy Weez got him into some competition in Huntington Beach. There was a few old timers there who came out to test their mettle against the young guys. It didn't take long for him to get noticed. Before you knew it, he got a sponsorship from Babe Cream Tanning Oil, and we partied so fucking hard.

And we kept going, because he was, like, the greatest around. He never talked all that much when he was a kid, probably because, as a 15-year-old, he didn't have much to say to all those older guys. That quiet attitude carried over to his famous years as well. People would be laughing and joking all around him, but he'd always have this stoic thing going on. It ended up being a part of his image. The stoic surf god, surveying his domain...which was, of course, anything he laid his big blue eyes on.

Then he fell off his board at a competition in Half Moon Bay. That hadn't happened ever before. Instead of getting back on, he dragged himself out of the water, laughing in this awful, high-pitched voice. Everyone was screaming at him to get back in the water, and Sharky got really upset and crazy. He started screaming back and getting agro. That was the worst.

Anyhow, he moved up to Santa Cruz, where he managed to scrap together enough money somehow to buy a house. He turned a certain corner. He started talking a lot. It turned out that he had only the worst things to say. He was angry all the time. He was always making fun of people. The only ones who hung out with him then were the ones who were there for the drugs.

They moved into his house. It was a shitty little beach bungalow near Seabright Beach, some fallen in old stuccoed concrete box. He decorated his home with garbage and drug addicts, aquariums full of dead fish and posters that rotted on the wall due to the sweltering heat. He kept the place locked up all year round, and sat in his chair watching movies, smoking.

Then, when he was 26 years old he overdosed one night and ended up in the emergency room, where they amputated one of his legs. He was broke at this point, so his half-brother Henry came up to pay the bill, and to finally take him home.

Yorrel's Rotten Luck

For several months the year previous, Yorrel had been terrified that artificial intelligence had given his kitchen appliances cruel intentions. Everyday he opened up the paper expecting to read about rogue supercomputers usurping control of the world's supply of weapons of mass destruction. At times he became defiantly scheming, and would invent manually operated weapons of mass destruction, which would be out of reach of the rogue supercomputers. Most of the time, however, he was convinced that the supercomputers could read his mind and he turned to sniveling, pandering and submissive thoughts in an attempt to assuage the digital, and utterly imaginary, wrath.

At the beginning of the next year, having lost interest in supercomputers, Yorrel began to become extremely suspicious of life on other planets. How soon before scientists, in their blind haste to explore the cosmos, stumbled over sentient life and thereby opened our world to an alien one...which would very possibly be hostile! As usual, Yorrel turned to writing letters with the ferocity of the only sane man in a land of loonies.

After all, how could anyone be happy or content in a world faced with such momentous threats, without being insane?

One afternoon, like typical, Yorrel finished his breakfast of boiled eggs, and he headed down to the Berkeley Public Library main branch to read all the day's news. On his way there he noticed a streak of purple in the sky. Had he imagined it? He leaned over his steering wheel, trying to get a better look at what was very possibly a phenomenon happening right there before his eyes, and he smashed into a pedestrian.

Horrified, he let out a shrill squawk of surprise and jumped out of the car. His first instinct was too run, but he was so adversely affected by the terror of having hit someone that his entire body went limp and he feared that he was about to lose consciousness. In a daze, he decided that he better lay down and do some breathing exercises, so as not to injure himself by collapsing onto the hard concrete. Single-mindedly looking to find an appropriate place to lay down, Yorrel went over to the very thin woman whom he had run over and lay down next to her. She was writhing in pain, though she did not appear to have sustained any cuts or obvious fractures from the collision, and she was muttering in a language that sounded like Gaelic. As soon as he lay his head down, Yorrel passed into unconsciousness.

And then the paramedics were loading Yorrel along with the woman into the ambulance. Rushed to the hospital, Yorrel lay quietly as the paramedics examined him. He was diagnosed as intact, having miraculously survived the crash, but, the doctor informed him heavily, his wife had passed away on her way to the hospital.

"My wife?" Yorrel croaked, his throat raw with apprehension. "You mean the young woman whom I lay next to on the ground? There must be some mistake-"

"I'm afraid not, Mr. Timurtleanickshoe," the doctor cried out sorrowfully. "Your wife, Mrs. Timurtleanickshoe has passed on!" And with that, the doctor handed Yorrel a bag belonging to the woman he had struck with his car and apparently killed. Shocked beyond the realm of rational thought, Yorrel dizzily concluded that the doctor was trying to trick him, so he said nothing. Going through the woman's belongings, he found her wallet and discovered that what the doctor had told him was, at least in part, true. He and the woman had the exact same last name! What were the odds?

After some time spent gathering his nerves, Yorrel quietly exited the hospital. He returned home and spent the next few days nervously trying to decide whether or not he should venture out into the world ever again. On the third day home from the hospital, Yorrel was contacted by the police.

"Can you describe the person driving the car?" The policeman asked.

Yorrel hesitantly gave the officer a description of the man who had been driving the car. "Small, short, he wore very, very thick glasses. He had an enormous hooked nose and wide, protruding lips that are always chapped. He has no chin, is 5 foot 3 inches, has enormous hands with a mole on his left palm that is always aching. He has sparse, gray hair and is 35 and five months old. He is exceptionally good looking."

"Well, whoever this bastard is, he certainly knew how to cover his tracks. He must have never been inside that car without ski gloves on, because there wasn't a fingerprint anywhere in there. And the car wasn't registered under any name." The officer sighed. "Well, thanks for your help. We'll keep you updated."

With that the officer hung up the phone. The receiver in his hand, still warm with nervous sweat from his palms, it finally resonated with Yorrel that he was not going to face any consequence in any respect for killing a woman with his car. And he fell into a dismal despair, because he hated his life and if vehicular manslaughter was not enough to change it, what was?