He wakes naked upon the floor, his nightshirt and bedclothes flung into the far corner of the room. He knows that Jesus knows his dreams, but still the talking.
Skunk:
Oh Christ. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus Jesus Christ
pushing
the heels of both palms hard into his temples.
Skunk:
I’m sitting, I was sitting in the, I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to get on
the plane. I was terrified of it, and eh... so eh, they had this place where
they would put people who didn’t who didn’t... It was something like it would
be okay if you didn’t see what was happening outside. So I got into this, it
was like a hallway, a darkened hallway or a hold or something like that in the
plane, and em, we had that thing taking off, and eh in this in this area there
was, I could see a woman who was kind of squatting down and she was rocking
backward and forward and crying and crying and in my heart I wanted to
say to her “It will be okay. It will be okay.” but I didn’t want her to talk to
me because I thought her terror would be, it would infect me, and it was
contagious or I would be I would be, it would make me worse so... I sat
on my own, just quietly in the dark and ehm, and the plane took off and
everything and once we’d got over the initial, the climb and the banking and we
were, the trajectory was set I felt I felt uh
His
voice breaks on the tiny bleating sounds concordant with his tears.
Skunk:
I felt like we would be okay, like everything would be okay and we would make
it, all all the way, there would be no problems, so, you know, because we’re
just floating, that’s all, we’re propelled and we’re, you know, it’s... Ohh
Jesus oh Jesus.
His
body spasms with the recall, with the sudden full remembrance of where he is
and why and he crosses the room for the muss of sheets and bedwear.
Skunk
(walking a circle round and round across the wooden floor, a trail of fabrics
in his wake): Anyway eh, we’re travelling along and there was some turbulence
and we had to hold onto these panels, these... handles on the on the walls in
this dark room and... I eh, I was starting to panic I thought “oh God oh God”
and what it felt like the pilot had eh, had started to climb almost as if there
was a physical obstruction in the air, but it was just air and it felt like he
had started to climb to to try and fly over this thing but it got to the point
where the plane, no, when he... he brought the nose down after after he’d gone
over the obstruction we could I could feel it I could feel it, I could really,
it was steep, the plane tipped back really steeply and then we were coming down
on the other side of it and eh, it seemed like he dipped the nose too far and
he couldn’t get it back up and the whole thing went to hell that, I felt like
eh, like there were these kind of, we were just dropping down through these white
bubbles that were breaking across my face and on my eyes, these white bubbles
over and over pff pff pff
flashing
his fingers in front of his eyes
Skunk:
and then I, as we drop, we dropped just so damn fast and I felt as if, it was
as if somebody had reached into the top of my skull all the way down into my
guts and grabbed a handful of whatever, you know, the first thing their hands
just grabbed a hold of, and that was my stomach or something and they just
making
a violent ripping motion with his right hand
Skunk:
wrenched it right out the top of my head.
Finally
he sits down upon the bed, the crumpled sheets and nightshirt bundled in his
lap. He looks back and again to the hipflask, the bottle of Jack Daniel’s there
on the desk. He is exactly halfway through his time in Ontario, and he knows
that if he survives the flight home he will never, ever, board another
plane in what remains of his life.
