Jacob Webster felt the thrill of anticipation approaching like the nighttime glow of city lights on a fast horizon. Waiting on the empty tarmac, he watched as George Monzo brought his small Cessna around for one more low pass, banked quickly, and then gracefully touched down on the skid marked runway. The whirring propeller cackled, spat, and finally ceased. George, rotund and cherub, stepped out of the pilot’s side of the plane, grinning broadly and throwing his stubby hand up in a wave.

“You found it!” he yelled as he moved with surprising alacrity towards Jacob, his stout legs churning quickly beneath his khakis. Growing damp spots were visible beneath his shoulders. It is warm, Jacob thought. And without his realizing it, the day had grown quite warm for the end of April, and he felt his own underarms begin to spritz in the newly acknowledged heat.

“Yeah,” Jacob replied, beginning to walk towards George. “No real problems.”

“Good, good,” George said as he drew close, pulling Jacob tightly against his barreled midsection, slapping him on the back with his sweaty palm. “Let’s say we get up in the air and do a little flyin’?”

Jacob smiled, and felt the lugubrious haze of his morning lifted, his being once again swelled with the oscillations of life and friendship and the untouched open sky he was about to enter. The morning doldrums had, for a moment, been pushed back into waiting. He followed George swiftly across the tarmac and climbed into the plane. It was smaller than he’d expected, with only two seats in front and two in the back; no bigger than a decent sized car, perhaps an Accord. George handed him a pair of headphones, and with a rush of electricity, the control panel sprang to life and the propeller, slowly, insistently began to rotate, picking up momentum and - sputtering, spattering, coughing - finally found its voice and hummed with the rhythmic machinations of movement.

They began to roll down the runway, almost imperceptibly at first, but then they quickly gathered speed, and with a sudden, breathtaking jolt, they were catapulted backwards in their seats. They were skyward, the horizon disappearing in front of them into a borderless blue. In the passenger seat, Jacob felt as imminent as the cumulous sky, like a deep exhale after love. His body relaxed, and felt itself being pulled upward against gravity.

~

Jacob had woken moments after dawn. The first hymns of early morning life were hanging outside his window; new light (though, he thought, it was really years old) was just starting in the west, over the Ashburn’s garage and the little league field. Next to him, his wife snored quietly, pregnant and showing the first signs of new life.

He made coffee with the lights off, standing in the dimly lit kitchen, looking out at his back yard, watching mist slowly rise off the grass. The air was cold, and sharp, and standing naked, he began to shiver. Still, he stood a while longer, watching the world wake, stretch its legs, and begin. Birds chirped, and a breeze lifted the mist away.

He felt uncertain, and muddled. It was a way he had felt for a long time. His wife was pregnant again; his oldest child was not yet to fourth grade. He tried to look forward, at his life, and found himself terrified to only see theirs. And yet, he should have been grateful. He felt a considerable lack of gratitude. Each night, sitting at the dinner table, he felt as if something were wrong because he regretted, or lamented, that his life, his once frenetic hopes and ambitions, were now contained around a small wooden table, finishing their broccoli. He had wanted to be a writer, once. He had written a great story once, about a woman he had loved for far too short a time. And yet, there he was, at that table. He should have felt grateful, he thought. But he didn’t. He felt wizened.

He showered, and dressed. The sun came up, and the morning was beautiful. In front of his house, the azaleas were beginning to bud, and the lilac had come to bloom. He picked a cluster of them and placed them in a vase for his wife. Then, he walked out the front door and drove north.
He was intensely, almost singularly pensive. His mind, clouded and insistent, felt muddled in the miasmas and cattails of a dense bog. He thought widely and quickly, but each new revelation seemed to coalesce around the others until one was indiscernible from another and he felt stagnant. It was the type of mood that, when he was younger and not yet married, would have allowed him to sit down with a cup of coffee, maybe a cigarette, and begin to slowly wade through the muck and grime, gently excavating one thing from another and putting them onto a page. Now, many years after he’d written his last serious page, it set him into movement and flight, away from his wife, his children.

Feeling needy, he stopped at a Wawa far outside of town for a pack of Camels. Waiting in line, he watched as a woman of maybe thirty walked in and poured a cup of coffee. She wore a black and white sundress with flowers like monochrome sunflowers, and had a white sweater over her shoulders, unbuttoned around her chest. He watched, and thought that it was something Jacqueline would have worn, perhaps to a baseball game or maybe just for a light dinner at some street corner café. He’d first noticed that about her: how she dressed casually yet indulgently, and how one subtle garment accentuated the strengths of another. It was a telling trait, he thought, and imagined for a time picking up with this woman the way he had with Jacqueline: meeting after class for a quick jaunt in her dorm room; lying naked on the tweed rug in his apartment, smoking cigarettes and rubbing thighs, backs, necks. Of course, they were both too old for that, he and this sun-dressed woman. And married. He sighed. It seemed to him that this injustice, being unable to meet with this woman after class, further shrank his narrowed being. He felt, in fact, that with each passing day things narrowed around him, and his once broad spectrum was petering to a thin strip of memory.

Outside, he found himself wanting to call Jacqueline, something he had not done in at least a year. He had an overwhelming desire to call and ask what it was she was wearing at that moment. He checked his cell phone, but knew she wouldn’t answer if she saw it was him. He found a pay phone around the corner of the store, behind a dumpster and kiddy corner to the bathrooms. He dialed. He hoped her husband wouldn’t answer, which had happened the last time he called her phone (he hung up).

No one answered. Her voice mail rattled on monotonously (she had a way of lowering her pitch and talking so serenely, so calmly, when life got serious). Finally, it beeped. He hesitated, almost hung up.

“Hi,” Jacob finally said. “It’s me. I know we, uh, left on strange terms the other day, and I know I never call. I don’t know what you feel about me right now. But I guess, well, I guess I wanted to say that there are times when I miss you a lot. And right now, clearly, is one of them.” He waited for a long time. “So I hope you’re ok. I hope you’re doing well and are happy. Ok. I know you won’t call back.” Then he hung up.

He walked back to his car and lit a cigarette, headed for the airport.

~

He and Jacqueline’s flirtation, or relationship, or whatever it had been, had lasted little more than a month. They had met in a British Lit class the spring of their senior year. She had been engaged, to a nice man Jacob met years later at an alumni gathering, and he was extricating himself from a relationship that had gone on far too long. They became friends, and would meet before and after class for coffee, and eventually lunch, and then near the end of the spring, dinners. They would talk for hours on end about things that, at the time, seemed important: finding the right person to spend a life time with; questions of identity and happiness; the root of desire, how to control it and appreciate it; literature of Central America; literature of the mid 20th century; modernism; and, as the days grew longer and warmer, their growing attraction to one another.

For one beautiful month, May of his final year of college, he and Jacqueline fell into a brief, passionate unfurling of themselves into the other. He felt at the time, and still did, that he gave her more of himself in those four weeks than he’d given any woman in his life - even those that he spent years with, his wife included.

He remembered, above all, a beautiful Sunday afternoon before Memorial Day when they spent the day walking through Fairmount Park. They had followed a trail for some length, past bikers and other walkers, and eventually found themselves around a bend in the Wissahickon. The forest, for a brief, bizarre interval, recoiled from the water, creating a small clearing of open grass that led to an old stone bridge over the river. They stood at the edge of the bridge for a long while, barefoot in the grass, his arms on her hips, and kissed. He’d never felt so full of the possibilities that had been placed in front of him. His life seemed to unfurl before him, vast and rich in color, full of such moments of limitless existence, and passion. Clarity, he thought to himself. It was a sense of clarity that he had never before been afforded. The world opened, and was vibrant: bugs gnawed at the bare skin on the backs of his heels, and grass pricked the crevices between his toes. He could feel the finite hairs on Jacqueline’s hip bone, and taste the remnants of the previous night’s hummus on her breath. The creek flushed insistently onwards, and in the distance, humanity streamed onward, too, noisily on Lincoln Drive. He was aware of the pulsing of his own veins.

That night, as she slept across the room, Jacob sat at his desk, working by the glow of the computer screen, and wrote into the morning. It was a story about her, and the creek, and of limitations being lifted: in language and life. He finished by nine, before she woke up. He considered it then the first, and only, piece of art he’d created. When she awoke, she turned to him at his desk, her face bleary, and told him, for the only time, that she loved him.

On the second day of June, Jacqueline called him shortly after eleven in the morning and told him she couldn’t see him anymore. She announced that, after briefly banishing herself to the couch, and taking off her engagement ring, she’d begun sleeping in bed with David again. Jacob assumed this meant she had begun wearing the ring again, too. She explained she had to clarify what it was she wanted from her own life, and her own love. She was torn, and that was no way to love (though, Jacob suspected, it is the way most of us love). They would stay in touch, she hoped, and if by some chance the engagement ended up permanently broken, she felt they owed it to themselves to see if their entanglement had any real staying power in the long term (he sensed she had decided it did not, thus her move back to the bedroom; he felt differently). So with that, May had been completely closed, and the vista of his own possibility that had been forming in Jacob’s mind, shrank back to more a more realistic, fuzzy scale.

They did stay in touch, and for a while remained honest friends. But the conversation never regained the passion, or depth of the days leading into May, and the infiniteness Jacob had once felt in her presence never quite mustered the same strength, and eventually died out completely. Eventually, all he had left of her was a story.

~

Jacqueline had called him about ten days before he went flying. It was the way things went; she always called him, and never answered or returned any of his calls.

“I’m going to be in Philadelphia this weekend,” she had said. “Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Would you want to get coffee?” she’d asked.

“Yeah. I’d like that.”

“Ok,” she’d said, drawing out the k nervously. “Where do you want to meet?”

“There’s this little place on Tenth, just off Spruce. It’s a couple of blocks from my old place. How about we meet there at four?”

“All right. Saturday?”

“I’ll see you then,” he’d said, and then she hung up the phone.

He told his wife he was visiting an old friend from college, and arrived at two. Around two thirty, she walked up to him on the sidewalk, carrying a small bag and smiling uncertainly. He looked up from his book and took her in. She was skinnier, gaunt as a sapling. Her hair had grayed at its fringes, and she no longer wore glasses. He smiled, and felt his limbs go lax, as if he were suddenly exhausted.

“Hi,” she said.

He mustered the strength to stand, and almost fell into her because his legs were so weak. They hugged. “It’s nice out,” he said. “You want to walk for a bit?”

“Sure.”

They walked south, towards his old apartment on Pine Street. They talked, stiltedly at first, but with a growing loquaciousness. She was a librarian, and her second daughter was turning three in two weeks. He was teaching English, and was expecting a third child - his second son - in the fall.

“I feel so old sometimes,” she said on an alleyway between Twelfth and Eleventh Streets.

“I know what you mean.”

“And I’m not quite sure when it happened. All of a sudden, my life kind of congealed into these immovable parts without my realizing it. It’s like, I woke up one day and looked around and realized, Jesus Christ, I’m fucking old. Look at me! I’m going grey even!”

Jacob laughed. “At least you’re not bald,” he said, pointing to his own thinning head.

She laughed.

“No, I know what you mean. It’s funny, because I remember being young and always feeling like I was older. But now that I’m actually old, I don’t quite feel it. Except, I guess, like you said about immovable pieces. That I feel. It’s like everything is set and can’t change anymore.”

“Which I don’t think is a terrible thing,” she said. “Just an old thing.”

“Maybe it’s not terrible,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“What? You think it is terrible?”

He looked at her eyes, which were green and yellow and brown all in one, and marveled at how a human’s eyes never changed, even as the body around them wrinkled and sagged and died. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I guess I’d just like some surprises once in a while. You know me.”

She smiled.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “You’re funny. That’s all.”

They walked for a while more, stopping at his old apartment and trying to look in through the front window. They couldn’t see anything.

“You remember how you didn’t have curtains?“ she said. “So that everyone could see everything as they walked by?“

He laughed. “Of course.“

“Well, this person is smarter than you.”

He laughed, and missed her.

They walked up to Broad Street, and then turned around and walked back to the coffee shop. She paid for their coffee, and they sat outside on the sidewalk and talked. She asked him about teaching, and his wife. He asked her about her kids, and what good books she had read recently. They both admitted that they had stopped writing long before, a fact which caused them to sit momentarily in a mournful silence, smiling with regret at one another.

“You remember how we used to talk about running away and meeting in Montreal?” she asked near the end of her cup.

He smiled. “Yes. I do.”

She forced a smile, and looked as if she wanted to say more, but instead grew silent. Her face turned thoughtful and grave, her lips pursing together and her eyes gaining a sense of looking far off, trying to focus on something too distant to know. It was a look that had not changed. He had seen it many times in his youth, lying across from her in bed.

“What’s up?” he asked. “You’re pensive.”

She stayed silent.

“Come on. Out with it.”

She took a big breath. “It’s just that sometimes I miss you. And not just nostalgia, but really, really miss you. I wonder what my life might be like with you.”

Jacob looked down at his milky cup of coffee, picking up his spoon and stirring it. He kicked back slightly in his chair.

“I don’t want you to think I’m here to run off with you, or that I even want to have an affair,” she said. She clasped her hands, rubbing her thumbs together apprehensively, and Jacob remembered standing beside her on a graveyard bluff over the Schuylkill when they were twenty one. They’d walked amongst the mausoleums, clasping hands, and together felt some strong tug of the unknown drawing them together.

“I know that,” Jacob said. Then, he paused again.

“I should probably get going.”

“I’ll walk you back to your hotel,” Jacob said. “It’s nice outside.”

She forced a smile. “Ok.”

They walked mostly in silence through the winding back alleys of Philadelphia. The afternoon had stayed bright and clear, engulfing the cobble stones and flowered trees in an ethereal golden hue. The city felt dreamlike in the way it could only on a warm spring night.

A few blocks from the hotel, Jacqueline reached out and took his hand. She did not squeeze it, or hold it tightly. Instead, she gently interlaced her fingers with his. They walked the last half mile in tandem. Outside the lobby of the hotel, they hugged, and Jacob kissed her on the cheek. Then, she walked through the big, glass revolving doors and into the crowd inside. As he turned to walk away, Jacob felt as if the last opportunity of his life was closing.

~

Jacob watched Bucks County unfold three thousand feet beneath him. From the air, the colors of the earth were more vibrant: the greens were more verdant, the browns of a forest more ominous. Shifts in landscape were more readily apparent: the earth, from above, seemed cordoned off into little sections. Boundaries were far more pronounced than on the ground, where one thing shifted to another with a kind of seamlessness that, Jacob supposed, made life possible.

They flew south, towards the city, and the open land began to give way to subdivisions. Neighborhoods grew from the farmland like roots, their streets snaking and curving their way through the country, black roofed homes sprouting from them. Occasionally, there was a glistening pool in a back yard. They flew over baseball fields and ponds, shopping malls and high schools. They flew, the gentle hum of the motor the only sound, and Jacob realized with what ease such seemingly permanent things as place, and home, could have been different, and yet the stream of his life very likely would have been the same.

Suddenly, there was a sputtering, and then silence. The engine had stopped. Jacob turned to George, who stared at the control panel, looking completely flummoxed and terrified. “Damn,” George said. He banged on the controls, flicked two switches. “Well, goddamn.”

They hovered along in a straight line for a few moments more before the nose of the plane started to dip. George banked sharply back to the north. Incredibly, neither man said anything. George worked frantically in silence, trying to start the engine. Finally, he gave out a mayday call.

Meanwhile, Jacob looked out the window. The spindly subdivisions and neighborhoods grew closer, but soon the world opened up before them, a vast stretch of brown and green, uninhabited. They fell slowly at first, but were beginning to pick up speed.

We’re going down fast now, Jacob thought. The small plane started to bump and quiver beneath them. Things began to come into focus: a cluster of pine trees, a wheat field just beyond it, and a field of green in between the two. The world seemed to narrow to this very stretch of earth. Yet to Jacob, this narrowing, this closing, seemed so contrary to the ubiquitous shrinking of his life. This closing, he thought, sharpened his sense of existence.

As the almost universal, verdant green approached, Jacob didn’t feel a flickering of memories or a rush of history. He felt unaccountable calm, a tingling warmth and stillness creeping up his extremities, and a blunt immediacy: the blue horizon meeting the green earth; the pull of gravity and push back of matter as it falls; the rush of air over the windshield; a flock of geese at the edge of the pine forest, impervious and entirely unaware of their fall.

They hit the ground and bounced like a ball, once, then collapsed into the earth, sinking and grinding along the top soil for what seemed like minutes but couldn’t have been more than fifty feet. The left wing ripped off. The floor crumpled like tin foil. The windshield cracked. Dirt clouded around them, engulfing their world. The propeller was lopped clean off.

With a jolt, they came to rest in the upper corner of a clearing, maybe one hundred feet from a cluster of budding maples, oaks, and elms. Black smoke seeped into the cockpit, and the smell of burning wafted in, too, the smoldering of wires the only sound.

Jacob felt blood creeping down his forehead. His left shoulder hung limply at his side. He wasn’t in pain. George looked at him. Jacob noticed that his friend’s hand looked crooked on the mangled controls. Jacob lifted his legs and kicked out the windshield. He used his right arm and hoisted himself up before tumbling through broken glass down to the distended earth. He stood, and moved away from the burning plane. His legs felt sturdy as timber. The late afternoon air was still and cool. Across the field, the flock of geese soundlessly grazed. Jacob looked as far as his eyes could go, until the brown earth curved and disappeared into the oncoming grey of a rising thunderhead. His own scale was once more sharpened and lessened, and he stood looking far away, feeling the pricks of cold air on his bare arms, hearing nothing but the still clarity of the world meeting his body.