Funeral Dinner

October 14th

           Dear diary, I am going to die. Well, obviously. That sounds pretty existential, so let me clarify: I am going to die in the very near future. There are a number of ways it could happen now and none of them are very appealing. Every trip I’ve ever taken has involved some sort of disaster: arriving at the bus terminal late, lost luggage, flight cancellations. But I’d never experienced a plane crash before.

           I was going to Paris. I told my wife it was a business trip but, here’s the kicker, I was going to see my son. I don’t mean the one she just gave birth to a month and three days ago. The one she doesn’t know about. The one I helped in the conception of fifteen years ago when I went there on an actual business trip at the beginning of my career, before I ever even met my wife. I got a call later, long distance, nine months to the fucking day, telling me I was a daddy. She said she intended to raise him on her own and that I had no responsibilities; she just wanted me to know he was a real, living, breathing, screaming and crying baby. Well, I guess recently he’s been asking questions about who I am.
           I suppose that explains how I got to the airport with round-trip tickets to France. I don’t know what happened to make the plane crash though. It was a long flight so I was sleeping, as amazing as that sounds… going to meet my illegitimate son for the first time and I actually fell asleep. Something about being above the clouds puts me at ease, I guess. Anyway, I woke up to a deafening shriek outside my window right as the oxygen masks dropped and the stewardess tumbled backwards with the contents of the beverage cart crashing and spilling against her. The woman next to me grabbing my wrist with white knuckles and clenched jaw and eyes shut tight while the young pilot wept openly over the intercom, “We’re going down,” and “I don’t know what I did wrong,” and “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

           I think a lot of people died on impact or sank with the wreckage, unconscious in their seats. All I know is that all the doors blew off from the force of the crash and the cabin immediately began to flood and sink nose first. The woman who sat next to me was already halfway up the incline to the back of the cabin to one of the emergency exits and I followed as soon as I could tear my seatbelt off. I kept my eyes on her back but despite my efforts, my periphery was filled with shattered limbs and agonized faces. I didn’t even think about helping anyone escape but myself; I thought it was going under faster than it really was, but I see now that there was time. There was so much time. I heard a baby crying somewhere at the front of the cabin, where all the water was; I could only think of my own son back home and the one I should still be on my way to see. I am the most horrible man on the face of the Earth. There are no words to describe my self-loathing.

           I don’t want to fucking write anymore but I need to put this down to paper. I have to. I don’t know why but something tells me I just need to.

           Me and the woman, Colleen, got out with a small inflatable craft. I must have instinctively grabbed my backpack because I don’t remember picking it up but, lo and behold, here it is. All I had in it was an extra pair of pants and underwear, both soaked, and a ruined cassette player. Oh, also this notebook which I let dry and some pens that still worked. Lucky me.

           About an hour after all this, we found an older man named Bob floating on a bunch of seat cushions lashed together with a seatbelt. He had hurt his leg and was tugging a large, and apparently watertight, plastic container behind him. He said it was bottles of water. We pulled him into the raft as carefully as we could without straining him any more than necessary; it didn’t look or feel broken but he moaned about how extremely painful it was and I’m no fucking doctor so I wrapped it tight with the seatbelt to the best of my ability. He said it felt better, so whatever.
We pulled up the plastic box and cracked it open and it was filled with alcohol. Bottles of fucking Jack Daniels. At least Bob can dull his pain a little.

           It’s getting dark now. I wish I knew what time it was; none of us have a watch.

~

October 15th

           It’s only been about one day since the crash but it feels like we’ve been out here forever. Colleen’s been huddled in a ball and crying since sunrise and Bob isn’t doing much of anything, staring out at the horizon and blinking occasionally. I guess his leg isn’t bothering him too much but he’s gone through a bottle of Jack already so that probably helps. I’m beginning to get seasick with all this incessant sloshing around. The last time I was on any body of water was when I was fourteen years old with my father on his sailboat out in the Pacific. I guess my son in Paris is around fourteen now. He deserves a father to go sailing with.

           The sound of the water splashing against the sides of our raft is horrid. This sort of thing used to be soothing; when I was younger my parents used to take me to the beach and I always fell asleep under our big umbrella, lulled to sleep by the tranquil sputter of sea foam frothing up on the shore and the seagulls’ selfish caw. Now I’m floating in the slavering maw of hell and its every breath is a snake’s hiss slowed to a demonic roar.

           There’s not a cloud in the sky. That’s one good thing.

~

October 16th

           Last night was much colder than the last so we had to huddle near each other for warmth. I let Colleen wear my extra pants since they were finally dry. As we we’re now all physically acquainted, introductions felt necessary in the morning. Colleen is a 32 year old fitness trainer from Boston; she was finally going to see the world because she had never even been outside the city in her entire life. She had taken many, many courses at a community college on British and European literature, history, culture, et cetera to prepare herself for the trip. She had even learned to speak French, Italian, and some German, all of which she demonstrated between sob hiccups. Bob’s story is equally ironic; he is a 63 year old WWII veteran from Springfield, Illinois who just wanted to go see Europe again without being shot at. He had been drafted into the Army two months after his 18th birthday and it pretty much ruined his whole life plan of going to college to get his PhD in psychology and marrying Betty Anne, his high school sweetheart and friend since childhood. By the time he got back from the war, she had moved across the country to Oregon because of a new boy she had met while he was gone. It was silent for a long time before I finally asked him what happened after that but he just took a long drink from his bottle and said, “The sea divides everything,” before turning to look back out at the waters. I’m starting to think Bob had known that box had nothing but alcohol in it the whole time.

           It was back to silence again until sometime in the early afternoon. We started to see large shapes and dorsal fins moving in the water around us and Colleen immediately jumped to the idea of sharks but Bob leaned over the side of the raft and told us they were dolphins. They must have made note of us observing them and started playing all around us. Can dolphins even know that sort of thing? Regardless, me, Colleen, and Bob all took turns drinking whiskey and laughing at each trick the dolphins pulled; every jump was a little higher, every splash a little more graceful. One even jumped over our raft. It was fantastic. We may die of dehydration out here, but at least we’ll have smiles on our faces and be too drunk to give a shit.

~

October 17th

           I knew we were all feeling the effects of having no food or water in our systems for the past few days but I had no idea it could have gone this wrong. The sun had been up for awhile but Colleen was still asleep and Bob was just staring out at the horizon again like he always did until I noticed him slumping over more than usual. Then he fell back and started shaking, making the whole raft bounce. This woke Colleen and when she saw Bob, her eyes just got real wide. She said she’d seen this happen one time in one of her aerobics classes when one of her trainees with type 2 diabetes had been there all day. Colleen said the girl was aware of her body’s insulin resistance but hadn’t eaten or drank anything since early that morning and her pancreas finally gave out. Bob was a goddamn diabetic and he never said anything about it. She said they saved her by giving her an insulin shot and making her rest in the hospital for the rest of the day. Bob probably thought the sugar in the whiskey would help keep him stable but there's no sugar in Jack so it did nothing but dehydrate the shit out of him. So Colleen and me just sat there and held Bob’s hand while his seizure slowed and his tired heart eventually stopped. There was nothing we could do. You have to understand. We couldn’t fucking do anything.

           I rolled his eyelids shut and stared down at his face for a long while afterwards. Colleen just started crying again. We were both hungry. I had read survival stories like this and contemplated eating him for about a second before dismissing it. There was no practical way we could have gone about doing this; I only knew him for a short while but I still felt closer to him than I did to my own grandfather. There was no way I was going to desecrate his body like that. Besides, we didn’t have any tools to cut or cook him with. And all that blood would just attract sharks. God, I am a disgusting human being.
           We eventually agreed to give Bob a burial at sea, makeshift as it would be. We took all the alcohol bottles out of the crate and the seatbelt from his leg, tying one end of it around his waist and the other end to the crate’s handle. Then we put it in the water and I held it as it filled up. Colleen latched it shut and we pushed Bob over, watching as both body and box drifted down silently in the ocean’s current. We both opened a bottle of Jack and drank deep; this was a funeral dinner, in Bob’s honor.
           I think Colleen muttered a prayer. I prayed that my death would be equally as quick and painless as I’d like to think Bob’s was.

~

October 18th

           I had sex with Colleen last night. I was cold, colder than the previous night, and we were desperate for warmth and still suffering from extreme emotional overload with Bob’s death and she’s got that tight trainer’s body and one thing lead to another and it happened. I already have one illegitimate son in this world; I did not need to set myself up for another. But it was either that or to freeze slowly, wet and lost and terrified. I know she’s regretting it; she hasn’t looked in my direction since. I am a disgrace to the human race.
           I think she’s been drinking sea water while I was sleeping. She threw up twice this morning but she hasn’t had any whiskey since we sank Bob, over twenty four hours ago; I counted the number of bottles since yesterday and they’re all still sealed.

           The skies are clear though. I am amazed at our luck with the weather.

~

October 19th

           Colleen’s dead. She’s fucking dead. She just got up this morning and started screaming about how everything was pointless and that we were going to die anyway just like Bob and she couldn’t take it anymore. Then she grabbed two of the bottles, smashed them together, and slit her left arm from palm to bicep and threw herself into the water. I tried to get her back in, God I tried everything except diving in after her. I even got a hold of her leg but she kicked at me until I couldn’t hold on any more.
           It didn’t take long for the sharks to show up. They came fast and dragged her under the raft; I could feel them constantly bumping against the bottom, knocking me back and forth. The water around me has been a red froth for what feels like hours now. Every time I look up over the sides, I see dorsal fins inches from my face. I can hear them scrape against the outside sometimes. God help me. How long until this raft deflates and I’m next? Oh God, Colleen. She didn’t even scre-

           A military plane just flew over.

~ ~

October 24th

           I didn’t have to wait long for a helicopter to find me after that plane flew by. I spent the next three days huddled on a bunk in the barracks of an Aircraft Carrier. They immediately gave me a full meal and as much water as I could drink before I started throwing it up again. Then they asked me if I was on the flight that disappeared a week ago and if there’d been any other survivors, but I couldn’t talk. I could barely move on my own. I was carried down to that bed and I ate and drank and slept until we reached a port somewhere and answered all the questions they had asked before about what happened and was finally flown home.

           I told my wife everything, about what I’d done with Colleen and about my other son. She stared at me for a long time and said that I looked healthy for having been stuck in a raft for a week and that she had to leave with our son and stay at a friend’s house for the night. “To think everything over,” is what she said carefully, hesitantly. Before she closed the door behind her, she told me I wasn’t the wretched human being I believed myself to be. So then why do I still feel like shit? How does that phrase go? “Always a pallbearer, never a corpse,”? I think that about sums up how I feel right now.
           I’ve spent the rest of the night tracking down and calling the families of Colleen and Bob to let them know what happened in more detail than whoever was “officially” calling them could say. Bob’s son and daughter in law weren’t thrilled knowing that his body was gone forever but were happy that me and Colleen had at least buried him with some dignity. Colleen’s mother hung up on me as soon as I said her name.

           I don’t know if my wife is coming back to me or not but I really can’t blame her if she doesn’t. I’m drinking Jack Daniels and watching television and writing this entry and realizing the hardest thing I’ve done in my life was not killing myself out there. It’s put things in a nightmarish perspective on the progression of my life, or lack of, and I think I’m starting to understand what Bob said back in the raft.
           I just wanted to see my son. To maybe gain something by telling him who I was. Instead, I’ve potentially lost everything. The sea divides everything.