‘A Near Impossibility’

Austin Farber is a writer and photographer from Kansas. Austin is the author of the short story collection He Called Me Albert. Austin's photos have been accepted in Montana Mouthful, Constellation, About Place Journal, Great Lakes Review, Levitate, and Periphery. Austin currently resides in Denver and is working on a novel.

A Near Impossibility

The cylindrical fuselage rattled and echoed with the propellors. Through the round-corner window, a little wider than my head, I started at the backside of the engine, attached to the slick and glinting wing. The propellor blades spun fast enough to vanish. The plane jerked, and Rick’s body pressed against my back. Our jumpsuits ruffled like cheap windbreakers. When I looked down, the back-up chute blocked the view of my feet. My hands gripped the straps. The band of skin on my ring finger looked smooth.

The light above the door changed from red to green. I heard Rick turn his head. I looked toward the cockpit, and a hand and an upright thumb appeared in the doorway. Rick patted my shoulder. The door opened. The engine’s roar leaped in volume, joined by rushing air. Now, I could see more of the wing. I felt my feet slide closer to the edge, where the body of the plane curled downward and empty air waited. My hands tightened even more around the straps. Rick’s hands reached past me and slapped onto the plane’s exterior. We inched closer.

“Ya ready?” Rick said, yelling into my ear, and then: “Here we go!” He pulled. The rushing air pulled. In the next moment, we broke free of the plane. In the next, we dropped. We fell. We tumbled. A dynamic expressionist painting of greens, blues, and whites streaked across my vision in random directions. My throat tightened with a scream I couldn’t hear.

After a few seconds, we settled belly down. My arms and legs spread on their own. I rasped out of breath. Below me, the ground appeared as a solid green expanse. I lifted my head and saw the curvature of the horizon, where the green expanse collided with a ribbon of dark blue, which faded to a lighter a shade and then darkened again. My rasping morphed into a chuckle and then a laugh. Air sliced and buffeted my ears, creating a constant noise. Still, I heard Rick laughing.

After a few more seconds, Rick reached around me, grasped the pullcord’s handle, and with a sharp, sudden tug, extended the pullcord to arm’s length. Nothing happened. His arm relaxed and pulled the cord again. Nothing happened. He tried a couple more times.

“No biggie,” he said. “That’s why we have the emergency, backup chute.” He released the main cord, which fluttered like a dead thing, and grasped the cord leading to the bundle attached to my stomach. Nothing happened. He tried the cord a couple more times. When he released it, it also fluttered.

“Well, that’s a biggie.”

“What do we do?” I said but couldn’t hear. “What do we do?” I repeated but louder. “What do we do?” I repeated even louder.

“Not much we can do.” Rick’s hands slid about the harness, undoing clasps and snapping straps loose. The harness slackened. I felt myself separate from Rick as he pulled the harness over my head, and I spun from him until we came face to face. He prodded the main chute with a couple fingers. He rotated the harness in various ways before displaying it for me.

“Both chutes are missing,” he said. “What are the odds? Of course, every chute and harness goes through rigorous checks and redundancies before each jump. One chute failing has become a negligible statistic. Both chutes failing is a statistical anomaly. Both chutes missing! Now that’s a near impossibility. Then again, intellectual eggheads with the basic knowledge of quantum mechanics like to say nothing is impossible.” He swept the harness to the side, where it matched our speed and appeared to stay suspended like us. “Not much use for this.”

Rick shrugged. He sighed and shook his head. I looked down. The ground remained green, but I could work out the texture of trees encircling the field. I closed my eyes, counted a few seconds, and then opened my eyes. Nothing changed. The blue sky stretched above me, a full three-sixty degrees, reaching the world’s curvature, which followed my swiveling vision, which cause a taste of stomach acid to bubble up the back of my throat.

“What do we do?” I said after burping down the offending flavor.

“Not much to do other than stretch out and relax.”

“Do we just keep falling faster and faster to our deaths?”

“Of course not.” Rick spun his knees under himself, turning into a seating position. He propped an ankle on the other knee and laid his chin on raised knuckles. “We’re not going to go any faster.”

“What?” I shook my head and experienced a bout of dizziness. I closed my eyes until it subsided. I swallowed more stomach acid. “What do you mean? Aren’t we falling, I mean, accelerating because of gravity? Something like nine-point-eight meters per second-square?”

“Or thirty-two feet per second-square, if you want to use imperial standards.”

“Exactly. So, we went from nine-point-eight meters for the first second, and then nineteen-point-eight in the next second, and then twenty-nine-point-seven.”

“On paper, yes,” he nodded a few times, “but you are forgetting about terminal velocity. Variables such as air resistance and atmospheric pressure affect the final speed, or terminal velocity, a body reaches while in freefall.” He nodded then widened his eyes and lifted a finger. “For the purposes of the explanation, a body refers to an object with shape, mass, and density affected by gravity. In the case of us, it does refer to our bodies.”

“All right. What’s our terminal velocity?”

“It differs from person to person due to body shape, but those cause negligible differences in measurements. The average is one-hundred, twenty miles per hour.” He rolled his hand at the wrist and rolled his eyes. “Or two-hundred kilometers per hour if you want to maintain metric standards.”

“Okay,” I looked down. The ground kept growing larger like those optical illusions where lines spiraling in different directions around a focal point. I returned my attention to Rick, who now laid on his side, with his head supported on his right hand. “Do we just keep plummeting at one-twenty miles per hour to our deaths?”

“Of course not.” He waved his other hand in a dismissive motion.

“Thank goodness.” I sighed and, by dipping my upper body, drifted closer to him. “You’ve got a plan? What is it?”

“Nope.” Maintaining the reclined position, he shrugged.

“Then what do we do? We’re going to hit the ground and die.”

“We’re not going to die.”

“No, we are. I’m pretty sure a body falling from an airplane gathers a large amount of kinetic energy. Inertia’s not going to be kind to us once all of our kinetic energy suddenly comes to a stop. Not to rehash a tired cliché, but it’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop at the end.” I looked down again at the same writhing optical illusion. “I’m going to explode in a cloud of vaporized blood and gore. The bits that avoid vaporization will radiate from the center of impact. Forensic scientists will be able to calculate how hard I hit by how far my remains spread.”

“We’re not going to die because we aren’t going to hit the ground.” Rick nodded a few times.

“Uh, well, I mean, yes we are. At this point it is an inevitability. By the property of gravity our centers of mass are being drawn to other centers of mass. Since gravity is the weakest of the four natural forces, it takes a massive body to pull in a comparatively miniscule body. Thus, we are falling toward the Earth’s center of mass, and the ground is in our way, nor do I believe the ground will move out of the way.”

Rick spun into the sitting position again before saying, “We’re not going to hit the ground because we’ll never reach the ground. Are you familiar with Zeno’s paradox?”

“I don’t believe so. I may have heard the term before and even received an explanation, but I cannot recall at the moment. Our current predicament may have clouded my intellect.”

“I won’t delve too deep into the subject,” he swatted at nothing, “but, to summarize, there exists between us and the ground an infinite amount of distances. One meter can be divided in half. A half meter can be divided in half. A quarter meter. So on and so on.” He made a circular motion with the last few words. “Before we reach the ground, there is an increasing number of ultimately infinite distances through which we must first pass. Since the number is infinite, we’ll never reach the ground.”

“Okay. That makes sense, by which I mean it sounds reasonable. I understand what you mean. However, if what you said is true, Edmund wouldn’t have climbed Everest and Edmundson wouldn’t have reached Antarctica. As hypothetical as numbers can be, distance, speed, and direction are actual.”

“Except I have additional evidence to support my thesis.” He pointed upward. The sky bowled above us. The center looked darker than the edges. Rick continued: “How long do you think we’ve been falling?”

“Hard to say. Sure, we have to account for relativity. We would experience time differently than a person on the ground. However, I know the difference would once again be microscopic to the point of not being a significant factor. Still, I personally have difficulty estimating time. I tend to rely on vague quantifiers like a few or some.” I took a deep breath and pursed my lips. “If I had to give a number, I’d still be noncommittal and give the range of one to two minutes.”

“As long as the number is above thirty seconds, my side of this argument is the stronger.” He lifted his right hand and held his left leveled to his hip with the palm up. He lowered his right hand, having it land in the other. “Falling at terminal velocity, starting from a height of ten-thousand feet, it should and would take about thirty seconds, and that outcome hasn’t happened.” He separated his hands. “It means we are not going to reach the ground.”

“Okay.”

“For further discussion, time is iffy. There’s a difference in time between you thinking words and you speaking words. You probably think faster than you act. Not to mention all the different ways time can stretch or compress when it comes to recitation, such as through prose, where a second can stretch for lines which take the reader minutes to read, or where years can pass in a few words, taking a moment to read.”

“Okay.” I shrugged with my hands, after which my arms pulled outward. “As long as I don’t end up as vapor.”

After a few seconds, I sighed. My head dropped with the actions, and I rotated clockwise from Rick. I pitched my yaw and increased my speed for the rest of the revolution. When I returned to facing him, he had re-adopted the lying position. I chuckled through a grin. Rick had his eyes closed and his hands behind his head. The air rushed around us. The far distance, as far as I could see, stayed as stationary scenery.

“Wait,” I said after a minute or two, “if we never land, doesn’t that mean we’ll eventually starve. Being free from the constraints of space doesn’t make us free from the constraints of time.” I gestured about me. “If we survive the three hours of exposure, we’ll succumb to the three days without water.”

“Three days is plenty of time.”

“Also, while we fall indefinitely through an infinitude, the world is spinning below us. Especially since we’re stuck in this paradox, our intended destination will leave us behind.” My heart pounded. I brought both hands before my face to see them quake. I showed the palms to Rick. He shrugged. I studied my palms once more.

“Three days is plenty of time,” Rick said. “I’m sure they’ll come up with a plan. If it were me, I’d ready and refuel the plane, rig it with a makeshift catching device, like a rope ladder secured to the door, and approach us from a downward angle. That way the speed differential won’t be enough to cause a fatal change in the inertia. Whiplash, they call it.” Whistling, he swung his hand in a parabola. At the end of the arc, he closed his fingers and whistled a higher noter. “As for the change of our coordinates relative to the surface, that is easy to compensate. Even without calculations, they need only to travel east, opposite the Earth’s rotation.” He wiggled his hand. “Eastish.”

“Okay,” I said with a sigh. Hand to my chest, I felt my heartbeat slow, relax, ease. “What do we do until then?”

“Nothing passes the time better than a good conversation.” He swam a couple strokes closer. “You can tell me more about yourself. Why did you decide to skydive? Most people do it for their birthday or high school graduation. I say most people, but I’m making a gross assumption based off my personal experience rather than any collated, quantifiable, empirical data. Digression aside, what is your reason?”

“You want my backstory at this point of our little adventure? Shouldn’t this be a question you ask at the beginning, by which I mean when I showed up to the airfield, before the instructional session? Or, maybe, on the ascent to jumping altitude? Seems to me those moments would be more appropriate moments for you, who doesn’t know me, to get to know me, to establish me, if you will.”

“Timing doesn’t matter.” He shrugged. “Would my knowing more intimate information about your backstory have affected our current predicament? I don’t think so. In the course of this day, finding yourself in this situation seems more immediate, the most immediate. Before takeoff, it may have been interesting to know that our pilot Michelle shortens her name to Chelle and came out as gay to her parents when she was nineteen, by way of a message left on their answering machine or to know that I was sexually abused by a teacher when I was in the seventh grade and spent years in therapy because my peers couldn’t sympathize, joking that I should be honored for sleeping with such a hot, older lady. Interesting information, which has no bearing on the course of action leading to you stuck in this situation. Now, in this slower moment, if you will, knowing more about your background might help to pass the time, in a sense.”

“Maybe having such information ahead of time would’ve given us something more exceptional to discuss. Maybe it would have given you implicit knowledge which would have changed your emotional reaction to this situation. Maybe you would have thought the situation ironic instead of simply unfortunate or deeply thematic instead of thought provokingly conceptual.”

“Maybe. Though, I have a feeling I may not have clued into such abstract conflict. I may have kept the two sets of data separate. The information may have provided a reason for your jump, but I would argue a bit of mystery is more intriguing, especially when explored at the right moment.” He crossed him arms. “At this point, though, I am curious about why you don’t think your life is more exceptional than a hypothetical topic. Your life, especially to yourself, should be the most exceptional. And I’m not merely relying on solipsism.”

I took a deep breath and held it, staring off to the right, off to the bent and no longer horizontal horizon, contemplating how the blue sky gradated through hues. I clenched my hands. I released my breath, closed my eyes, and kept them close until I oriented toward the jumping instructor. I locked the center of my vision between his brown eyes and brown eyebrows.

“I went through a nasty divorce,” I said. “We were teenage sweethearts. Our parents opposed our relationship for obvious reasons. But, despite it, we stuck together. Except, now I believe we stuck together out of spite, to spite our parents and show them they were wrong, maybe out of a divergence of teenage rebellion, rebelling without a cause against everything solely because those things exist and predated us and we believed the future to be the exclusive domain of the perpetual new.

“We had our ups and downs, but I thought we’d make it. Until, one morning, I awoke to find a manila envelope on the pillow beside me. Inside the envelope, divorce papers written in indecipherable legalese. Later the same day, I received a call from a lawyer inviting me to a meeting with said lawyer, who would explain the process. I showed up, and the lawyer did explain. Apparently animosity builds and leads spouses to find succor with strangers, and these new interaction shine a new light on previous definitions of love, which reveals love to have a different definition previously unexperienced. Now this wayward spouse needs to experience the definition and the world anew.

“This divorce hindered my quirky but reasonable occupation as assistant executive director of public relations for a small but growing Malaysian company which produced a number of everyday items, including but not limited to Velcro straps for products other than shoes. I’ve been put on a temporary administrative leave. With nothing to do, I thought skydiving, an activity I had wanted to try since I was nine or ten but never did since I’ve had acrophobia since I was seven or eight, would fill some intangible void. I decided to conquer my fear, try something new, and gain a refreshed perspective on my personal philosophy.

“It was a success. Now I believe—

Bennett Durkan's fiction has appeared in Still Here, Crow Name, and October Hill. His poetry has appeared in Divot, Willard & Maple, and Ikleftiko. His nonfiction has appeared in Nomandartx, Lit Mag News, and WritingBad.