“I know how it feels like to fly.”
“I know what flying feels like.” The old man’s lips curled into a smile that quickly erupted into a puff of raspy giggle.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re just a crazy old man, with a banged up leg from war, who’s going blind, you know that? Thought I should remind you.” The old man continued to giggle aimlessly, looking into the smoky air in front of him.
The garage was gray, cold and cluttered with tools that haven’t been touched in ages. They flooded the garage, taking it over with aggression, as if they had the authority to do so because of how old they were. The tools were in total denial of the fact that they have now been deemed useless and obsolete by its owners, like a king’s not giving up his throne much to the displeasure and annoyance of his people, seeing as he, the king, was already past his prime. Honor held a permanent place in the hearts of the tools, which people have long gone overlooked. Even the table the four men sat at was proud and yet blind at how it was too old for its own liking, being on the edge of total dilapidation.
It sat four elderly, balding men, all in their late sixties, except for the extremely old man, who was nearing his eighties. Donald, whom the old man was talking to, dealt the cards around so they could play another game of Texas hold’em. The cards spewed out of his yellow stained fingers and trembling hands. “Bleh,” blurted Donald, coughing up phlegm, looking for a garbage can, and then, not seeing one, swallowing it down with premature resignation. He was too lazy to look or ask around for a can in which to spit out his phlegm; plus, he often lost his breath easily just walking around because he had given almost forty years of his life to smoking, limiting his lung capacity— and had gone bankrupt because of it. Now he lived in his son’s garage, much to his own chagrin and loss of dignity, playing poker with the three other men around the table every Friday night, with nothing else to do. “Crazy, old man … flying … crazy,” murmured Donald, speaking to himself as if he were confirming reality and denying the old man’s flights of fantasy.
Raymond shot Donald an eye of annoyance, saying, “Give it a rest, Donald. Let the man have a go with it. He’s near the end anyhow.” It wasn’t that he was siding with the old man. It wasn’t even that he felt sympathy for him. The old men was simply a nuisance, a pestering, old nag.
“Hey, pass it around, don’t keep hoggin’ it,” added Raymond. He was an obese man wearing a buttoned shirt that looked like the buttons might explode any minute. Many years ago, when he was still married, his wife had bought him that shirt from her department store for Christmas. It used to be a well-fitted button down, forest green shirt with pale, yellow stripes. Raymond insisted on keeping it even after his wife had left him for reasons along the lines of his choosing food over their sex life for the umpteenth time. She was a feisty one, and he didn’t always used to be obese. It was as if he were the one who got bored first, and now he was paying the price in his wifeless corpulence. Charles passed Raymond the rolled up weed and he smoked one good hit. “Ahh, that’s the stuff.” He scratched his large stomach and then, after looking down at it, sucked it in. If only, he thought.
Raymond passed it back to Charles who, like Donald, smoked for most of his life. However, on top of that, he had also married alcohol. Bottles of booze were in every corner of his lonely, small house: under his bed, under his pillow, in his closet, and even in the bathroom cabinets. In fact, next to the chips he had won in poker so far, he had a bottle of beer. Alcohol was his right hand man, and had always been there for him, especially during his divorce with his wife, who couldn’t take his beatings any longer during his drunken nights. Charles gulped down a quarter of his beer and remembered for a split second the night he had slapped his wife for talking back to him. Really, all she had asked was where he had gone that night, but he saw it as a cancerous jealousy of hers. Was there in fact another woman? No, unless alcohol wore breasts.
Charles shifted in his dark gray corduroy pants after leaning over to retrieve the weed from Raymond. He inhaled the rolled up paper, closing his eyes. After a while, he exhaled and immediately gulped down half of his Heineken. Smoke filled the garage like fake smoke filling up a stage, for musicians. Certainly the musicians in this garage were the old men, complaining about their lives in used up voices and tired accents, while they played poker and smoked pot. This was what life came down to, for them.
The old man, shuffled his dealt cards, and coughed. His old, wrinkled arms made their way to Charles’s hands and took the small, rolled up paper. After inhaling, he waited and then exhaled. Giving it back to Charles, he giggled something about flying, until his coughing resumed, escalating in a huge cough that made him bend over the table, the other men patting his back. He took the weed and smoked again, exhaling with an air of finality and relief. His eyes shot wide open and the widest grin monopolized his face.
Looking up at the dangling light at the ceiling, the old man yelped, “I’m flying. Yippy!” The other men ignored him and continued to play with the cards. In his mind, the old man felt his feet leave the floor, his chair knock over. Absolute weightlessness took hold, as he were surrounded by invisible water. Nearing the ceiling, he was no longer limping on his legs, which had always reminded him of his age. While he was relieved from any pain from his legs, much to his surprise, the old man noticed that his vision was blurred; he could no longer read the hands of the grandfather clock, stored in the corner of the garage. His old hands moved to his glasses and he took them off. Suddenly, his blurred vision was solved. Just for good measure he put on and took off his glasses several times quickly to see the contrasts in visions. From up top, his vision seemed to have improved so that he didn’t even need them. He took them off and set them on the table near his now empty seat.
“What are you doing, old man? Put your glasses back on,” said Donald, who grabbed the old man’s glasses. He tried to hand it back to the old man, who, to him and the other men, was still sitting at the table. The old man waved his hand as a child would when resisting vegetables, absolutely refusing to put his glasses back on. With each thrust of his glasses to his face by one of the other men, the old man was ruthlessly brought back to the countless times he went to his eye doctor to get a new pair. In the past, when he was wearing glasses the old man had always felt older and so unlike his youthful self who did not used to wear glasses, at least not until after the war. To the other men sitting at the poker table, the old man was annoyingly and stubbornly refusing their help to put on his glasses, but in the his delusional mind, he was flying near the ceiling, using his arms like fins, swimming through the air.
“Can’t you see that I’m flying? Charles, Ray, Donald, come fly with me,” said the old man holding onto the top of a shelf that carried rusty, outdated tools that were probably as old, if not older, than the old man himself.
“Quit you’re talking about flying. You ain’t flying old man. You’re sitting down. Now shut it!” yelled Charles, who took the old man by the shoulders and shook him.
At the table, the old man’s eyes flew to the back of his head and his mouth opened, displaying his false teeth and releasing the potent stench of too much mary jane – more than he could handle at his age. He bent over the table again, except this time, his head fell and banged the middle of the table causing the poker chips to pop up in the air and clatter as they fell and hit the table as his head just did.
“Raymond, call 9-1-1!” yelled Charles, guilt rising in his face in the form of worried eyebrows. He tried to wake up the old man, pushing him back on his seat, and slapping his face, right smack on his stubbed cheeks. “Come on, come on, old man! It wasn’t me, honest fellas!”
“Look what you and did! The man was just having some fun. You didn’t have to kill him!” yelled Raymond. Perhaps he was sympathetic after all.
The old man, still at the top of the shelf, let go and flew around the room, his mouth gaping in awe at the feeling of flying. Giggles continued to rise from within him like little children being released for recess time from the classroom. He was happy up there, giddy almost.
Raymond heard the ambulance outside and rushed out the door, his stomach jiggling as he breathlessly ran across the lawn, waving his hands like a drowning swimmer. Once the ambulance men were in the house, they rushed immediately to the old man and laid him on the stretcher, skillfully placing a bag valve mask over his mouth.
The ambulance rang across the town and Donald’s car, holding himself, Raymond and Charles followed.
All the while, the old man’s hands held the top of the door frame, his face turned upward toward the starry night sky. Moments later, in his lower peripherals, he made out the white-blanketed earth and sprinkled lights of red, green and yellow.
——————————————————————
Donald, Raymond, and Charles sat in the waiting room. An abyss of guilt overwhelmed Charles. The immense guilt forced him to say aloud, “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t shake’m too hard. The ol’ man was just going out of his mind is all and I wanted to snap him out of it.”
“No, it wasn’t your fault,” said Donald, patting Charles’s shoulder. “Maybe this is his time.” He looked at both Raymond and Charles. Right in the eye.
Raymond, who had bought a pack of mallomars from the vending machine, shook his head violently, causing his cheeks to wobble. “No, no, no, this isn’t his time. You’re just sayin’. It was all your yellin’ at him. It wasn’t Charles’s shakin’ that did it. It was your yellin’ at him.”
Donald’s right hand rounded into a fist, hiding his yellow-stained fingers. “You want to fight, fat fella?”
Just as Raymond started to make a move to the other side of the vending machine for protection, the men heard a doctor call, “Stat, Watson unit!” A simultaneous gasp escaped the mouths of Raymond, Donald and Charles.
Suddenly it didn’t care the cause of the old man’s state.
—————————————————-
The cold air filled his lungs as ice cold lemonade might fill the stomach of a carefree, little girl in the summer. The night was cloudless and naked, save for the stars and the full moon. There was no smoke from factories, or night time flying airplanes. It was pure deep purple and with sparkles of piercing white. The moon was a feminine sun, a welcoming doormat. To what?
An unbridled smile and laugh grew permanent on the old man’s face. They began to define him. He swam through the air, higher, higher, and higher yet. It got to the point where the cars were no longer discernible as separate moving ants. Cities looked grouped together. And then the world itself soon looked like a ball a child might play with.
Surrounded by complete nothingness but the happiness emanating from his blissful soul, he looked to only one place: the moon.
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It was that sound. The one that sings of death in utter indifference. A machine’s voice laughing at the technological accomplishments of man because it was made to hurt the living as it proved someone had died. A dreaded song it was indeed. The cardiac monitor sang its solid, single, sustained tone; it looked like a flat line, as flat as the old man’s body lying on the hospital bed, surrounded by the downward-facing faces of doctors, nurses. Raymond and Charles, a look of disbelief on their faces. Donald just stared at the dead old man.
Out in the night, in the universe, the old man was flying, higher and higher. “I’m coming!” screamed the old man in a raspy, cracked voice as he swam closer and closer to the moon. His knees bent youthfully, his eyes could see as sharp as they were able to when he was sixteen, and he had the energy of a strong horse. In high volume, as loud and dignified as possible, a choir of angels sang the ending of Mozart’s “Lacrimosa,” in his ear as he neared the moon, smiling that smile.
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