It occurs again in the afternoon, this time at a Stop & Shop in Great Neck, as Julie places a Styrofoam package of chop meat into her shopping cart. The sensation begins as it always does, with a heaviness in her head, like sinus pressure, then a dull fog that spreads to the eyes, clouding vision and making the world feel suddenly unreal. Finally, an acute weakness in her legs takes hold amid a grim certainty that there is no longer ground beneath her feet – the checkered tiles of the aisles now a void – and one step forward will pitch her downward, somersaulting through dead space, alone. It will only last a minute, maybe even half of one, Julie reminds herself, squeezing both hands on the plastic cart handle for balance. Knuckles whiten. A song pipes through overhead speakers – “Here Comes the Sun,” one of her mother’s favorites. If she bites a cheek or swallows hard, the dizziness will fade and the world will return in sharp focus. Grounded, like the beef in her cart. Just one minute more. Julie’s vertigo began nearly a year after the event that should have killed her, and she often wonders if the two are correlated. Partly, she assumes the spells would have started straight away had there been lasting injury to the brain, but this is really a question for Dr. Anapurn. She stopped seeing him months ago after he continued to call these disorienting events “dizzy spells.” It seemed to go against everything she believed in, paying a male doctor to treat her like a witch in colonial Salem. She hated more that she’d started using the term herself. Another spell. To anyone else, the symptoms would be worrying – cause for neurologists and MRIs – but after what happened last March, Julie wonders if she was ever on solid footing to begin with and is only now navigating the shaky path she’d been walking all her life.
In March of last year, two months after her divorce from Patrick, Julie decided to redeem the helicopter tour of lower Manhattan her uncle had given them as a wedding present. The tickets were set to expire in April. Funny, she thought, sitting on a plastic chair in a New Jersey hanger for safety training, the gift had a longer expiration date than the marriage. “Very important,” a mustached instructor said from a rickety podium. He seemed ready to audition as an extra in Top Gun. “If we have to make an emergency aquatic landing, the helicopter has inflatable reservoir tanks to keep it afloat. Each harness comes equipped with a knife along the shoulder strap.” He pointed to an orange holster. “Pull it out to cut yourself free.” Instead of focusing on the knife against her heart, Julie grinned at the term “aquatic landing,” how magical it sounded, like a mermaid splashing down from her perch, instead of a helicopter slamming onto a polluted river. She glanced around, to the other passengers, all in their early twenties – at an age when the pre-frontal context hadn’t developed enough to deem this a bad idea –either texting or fiddling with the bulky headphones they’d been supplied. Of the five – a couple from Texas and two frat bros from Albany State - Julie was the only one who had come alone. She wiped at her nose and continued listening. The entire hanger smelled like that enamel paint in the halls of their apartment complex in Queens, and she suddenly imagined Patrick’s reaction to talk of an aquatic landing – the wide eyes and fidgeting hands. If Uncle Ralph had known Patrick better, he would have selected a different wedding gift, maybe a tea set. The few who were close with her ex-husband were well aware that he would never step onto a helicopter, not even if it were the last flight off a sinking ship. Then again, Julie thought, he wouldn’t have gotten on a boat, either. There were days he could barely sit up in bed.
When Patrick and Julie first started dating, she frequently skimmed articles touting the perks of marrying your best friend. True connection. Deeper intimacy. Everlasting understanding. The shallow online “think pieces” never explored what a friend offers that a lover cannot. Freedom. Your friend doesn’t come home with you. Within days of marrying Patrick – while getting accustomed to the apartment they settled on since neither agreed to move into the other’s – Julie realized the depth of her mistake. His anxiety, his need for control, his catastrophizing every change in medication… they were issues she could talk through with him as a friend. Over the phone. In another zip code. But living with it – day after day after day – was something else. The frenzied eyes, the unkempt hair, the constant pushing and pushing away. Only when trapped in that shared space could Julie recognize the selfishness, the narcissism, of his specific psychiatric issues that seemed to suck in the very paintings and picture frames of their second-floor walkup. And she knew, one day soon, that she would be next. Into the void. Days to weeks, to months. She waited until Patrick was on solid ground before leaving him, when he was eating regularly and sleeping normal hours. What cured Patrick was uncertain; it usually took a change in medication, but not always. Maybe the phases of the moon, or the song of a January robin, or an increase in the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor dosage. It would be temporary. It always was. In some ways, separating while he was on an upswing felt cruel, but he couldn’t have handled it during those weeks and months in the hole. No, that would have been worse. Cruelty can be measured in degrees, she supposed. On the night she shared her decision, Julie left the keys on the hook above the crackling radiator, got in her car and drove south, top on the convertible down, a frigid January air tangling her flowing hair. That was the last time she saw Patrick, a final image standing in the kitchen, the lights dim, one of his hands braced against the marble.
The mustached instructor seemed surprised by Julie’s raised arm, as though no one had ever asked a question during his training. “Why are we tethered to the helicopter? It seems unsafe that the only way out is to cut ourselves free.” One of the frat bros – the shorter one in the blue button-down – turned and looked her up and down. “Miss, this is an open-door ride.” The instructor articulated the words as though she were seven years old, hearing them for the first time. “Your feet will be dangling out the side. Better to be strapped in than fall out of a helicopter twenty-two hundred feet over skyscrapers. Wouldn’t you agree?” He seemed to pause for laughter. There was none. A clear of the throat. “Any other questions?” The frat bro grinned, turned back, and tapped his friend on the knee. Julie imagined the answer would have been different had either of them asked about the harness. The sound of rubber on pavement beckoned from behind: a golf cart pulled up to drive the group to their destination, a concrete helipad across the parking lot. They climbed in and rolled across vacant space, the sharp smell of salt from off the Jersey Shore biting at her nostrils. When they reached the site of departure, the couple from Texas asked Julie to photograph them in front of the helicopter. This image of them smiling – his hand around her waist, her hand on one hip – is branded into Julie’s memory. She sees it when falling asleep, even now, flashed like lightning strikes. The instructor clipped their phones to harnesses and strapped the passengers in one at a time. Julie watched each hook and knot: just a mess of bungee cords and carabiner clips as she sat in one of the chairs, reminded how and when to swing her legs out the side for the coveted “shoe selfie.” Patrick would have died. As the motors whirred to life, Julie repositioned her headset, which mostly blocked out the noise, muting all but muffled chatter of the pilot, who turned out to be – to Julie’s alarm – the very same mustached safety instructor. The rotations continued, around and around and around, until they were suddenly up – just like that – floating through space, heading east toward a skyline, as sharp as the knife at her breast. Far below, cars and trucks crawled along the Jersey Turnpike like ants.
Julie was reminded of her drive to Atlantic City on the night she left Patrick. She felt so alive in her convertible, sparkling with energy and life. She booked a room on the boardwalk for the weekend and spent nights awake, playing high-stakes roulette, placing colored chips all over green felt. Cheers were drowned out by jingles of slot machines and rhythmic percussions of a live band. Julie loved roulette, ever since that fifth-grade activity on probability from a stuffy schoolhouse in Maine so many years ago. The class – fifteen girls and seventeen boys – were asked to divide into pairs, which meant one cross-gender couple. Julie knew the other girls didn’t like her and that she’d again end up stuck with Harold, the Julie of the boys. Unlike Julie, who was pulled out of class weekly for advanced science coursework, Harold had been left behind in third grade and was frequently held after school for injuring the other boys in increasingly violent ways. That December, Scott had needed stitches. Harold rolled his bulging eyes when their teacher, Miss Cerrito, had Julie slide her desk over. On the board were instructions for their assignment, improperly labeled a “lab,” and Miss Cerrito paced the room, handing one quarter to each pairing from an old shoebox. When Julie picked up the tarnished coin, Harold yanked it from her hands. For the lab, one student would be the “flipper,” the other the “scribe.” The flipper would toss the coin fifty times while the scribe tallied the results. At the end, Miss Cerrito would combine the pairs’ results into a massive chart of eight hundred tosses. For the first flip, Harold flung the coin with such impressive force that it hit the asbestos ceiling tiles and landed on their classmate’s desk with a reverberating clang. Miss Cerrito scolded Harold and ordered him to be the scribe. “Let’s at least make it interesting,” he said to Julie, twirling his pencil. “I bet you there will be more heads than tails.” Julie nodded – “fine, I’ll bet tails” – and she tossed the coin into the air. A conservative height. It landed in her palm, which she flipped onto the back of her left hand. Tails. A scratch on Harold’s loose leaf and a victory for her. Another toss. Tails. Another scratch. Another victory. Tails. Scratch. Tails. Scratch. Tails. Tails. Tails. “You’re cheating!” On the fiftieth toss, Harold watched the forty-nine tallies on one side of his column. Zero on the other. A few of their classmates looked on in surprise. The final toss. A flip. That tarnished eagle revealed, forever outstretched. The class read off their tallies as Miss Cerrito charted them on the blackboard – 24 to 26; 31 to 19; 27 to 23; 22 to 28 – and Julie stared at Harold’s worksheet: 0 to 50. She won. Every time. Their tally was circled on the board. The class learned the word “outlier.” That’s what she was, Julie thought, an outlier. She cashed in her chips at the end of the weekend and watched the sunrise from the boardwalk alone.
Julie doesn’t use the word “stunning” often, but it was the word that came to mind when she let her feet dangle out the side of the helicopter. Winds flew in like ghosts. The other passengers lifted their feet and posed – a flurry of legs and tethers and selfies. A thumbs up from the pilot. Smiles everywhere. How many of these buildings had Patrick and she toured when apartment hunting, before finally settling on Queens? Too many to count. Stairs and freight elevators and cramped quarters. They were no longer over the city when the passengers’ grins faded. A fumbling from the pilot, flips of switches, and a few startling bumps, one stronger than the others. Then, an unmistakable descent. Julie recalls a beeping, constant, but less urgent than it should have been – like an old alarm clock instead of a blaring carbon monoxide detector. The frat bros pretended everything was fine – a hand over a mouth, some glances – while the couple from Texas appeared increasingly anxious – taps on shoulders, wide eyes, whispered pointing. Julie simply observed. Down and down. It wasn’t immediately clear that their helicopter was going to crash into the East River. In fact, Julie didn’t fully recognize what was happening until the pilot turned back as if to say “brace yourselves” as the water became monstrously large and close, so close that Julie lifted her feet to avoid it. They slammed down then, tumbling, water pouring through the open cabin as one solid object. It felt like being struck with a freezing-cold billiards table, dark and icy. Then blackness. This is the last moment Julie can remember, the rest wiped away by the force of the water on her body. She knows the beginning of the story and the end: the river coming in, the coast guard covering her with towel after towel, towel after towel, rubbing her in his hairy arms as she tried to push him off. The middle is lost. It was at the hospital she learned that the others had drowned, all of them, including the pilot who was knocked unconscious at turnover. The nurse didn’t tell Julie outright that they were dead, she only repeated that Julie was a “sole survivor” until a connection was made. On brave nights, Julie skims news articles about the crash. Terms like “autorotative speed,” “pressurized gas cylinder gauge,” and “lower turnbuckles” are seen but not comprehended. What Julie understands instead is how the tether of the frat bro in the button-down shirt snagged beneath the pilot’s fuel cutoff lever, and as he leaned out to take a picture of the skyscrapers, the line pulled taut and shut power to the engine. The tether meant to save them killed them. The pilot was unable to diagnose the cause of the failure in the limited moments he had to try and maneuver an aquatic landing in choppy March waters, and the failure of the left float forced the helicopter to flip onto its side and fill with forty-degree water in under eleven seconds. On braver nights, Julie watches the cell phone footage online and sees the turnover, viewed from a jogger just outside Astoria Park. Gasps and expletives from onlookers. On her bravest nights, Julie reads the National Transportation Safety Board’s recent report, which details the truth she confided in closed-door interviews, that she was not the sole survivor – the outlier – thanks to luck or divine intervention. No, Julie was alive because she unhooked all her tethering clips shortly after takeoff, distrustful of the pilot and his rude answers. While the others stared out at the skyline and readied their phones, Julie undid her cable lines and carabiner clips, feeling her anxiety lessen as her range of movement expanded. As the others struggled to break free of their harnesses, Julie was thrown out the side and floated upward. In many ways, her survival was not unlike the coin tosses in Miss Cerrito’s homeroom. Nobody had proven her hidden agenda. But, after the first flip of the coin, the first win against Harold, Julie tried to mimic the exact movement again and again and again, placing the quarter heads up on her fingernail, delivering a conservative, measured flick of her thumb – just the right height with several clean rotations – and turned it over onto her wrist. An eagle revealed. Over and over and over. She never tried to replicate the coin toss since. Maybe it was impossible to influence a quarter’s spin. Or maybe she was an outlier by design. A survivor.
Little darlin', it seems like years since it's been clear… The music is deafening, and Julie’s grip tightens on the shopping cart. Her vision slowly clears and the shaking subsides. She counts to six. A butcher stares from behind white counter space. “You okay?” She nods. “Just checking, ma’am. Looked like you were suddenly someplace else,” he says. She doesn’t reply and heads toward the checkout line. Where was she? Someplace else. Miles away, in a river, underwater. In middle of the story. With a couple from Texas – Sofia Velasquez and Pedro Herrera – with two frat bros from Albany State – Roger Knox and Taylor Wyatt – with a mustached pilot and safety instructor – Russel Underwood – all sinking, forever dropping into the frigid temperatures of the East River. And Julie’s eyes stayed open, stinging from the cold water, watching them disappear into the depths, out of sight – Patrick, right there with them, hand forever on the marble – before she swam up, broke the surface, and inhaled.
-- Matt Paczkowski's work can be found in Portland Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Fiction Southeast, Welter, Riprap Journal, Talking River Review, and other literary journals. He was selected winner of the EcoTheo Review Short Fiction Contest and Hofstra University's Eugene Schneider Prose Competition, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in fiction and the Best of the Net award in creative nonfiction. He works for the City University of New York and holds an MFA degree in English.