jump

As I approach the small prop plane, I see Svetlana, my date, watching me.  She looks ready for anything, in the same pink and black skydiving suit featured in her online photo.

Previously, I explained to Toby that if the health of a prospective relationship hinges on my willingness to leave planet Earth, we may have a problem.  You see, I can’t fly.  No wings.  None.  And I don’t see the logic in letting a man-made device over which I have absolutely no control hoist me miles into the sky and trusting it to bring me back in one piece.

Svetlana said it is not necessary to rely on the plane to bring me back.

I told her.  I told her I had reservations about accepting her invitation to a date at fifteen-hundred feet.  I mean, this is just date-one.  Skydiving is something a jaded couple does months or years into a relationship when they are looking for something to rekindle the old flame.  Or snuff it out completely.  She LOL’d and SMH’d.  She said our efforts were for a greater cause.

“Greater cause?” I repeated to Toby.  “Do you think she’s talking about two coffees and an in-person conversation without acronyms?”

He shrugged.  But he also thought this could be good for me.  Something new.  Something different.  And, more importantly, it could be a good test to gauge the progress of my latest stress-management efforts. 

“Wouldn’t it be easier to manage my stress by not putting myself in stressful situations?”

He shook his head.  I should go with the flow, he quoted himself.

At some point in our online messaging, Svetlana started throwing out these cryptic phrases:

The two will become as one.

Donkeys and elephants will lay down together.

Everyone will drink the same lemonade.

“Meow?”  Now I was quoting Toby! 

I don’t do crazy.  And watching Svetlana’s side of the conversation devolve into nonsense, I was ready to bail on the conversation and jump to the next profile.  In fact, Toby did bail, running across the keyboard and messaging a rather scientific-looking expression in his wake:

C6 H8 O 

At once, Svetlana followed this with a line of hearts.

Now that made sense.  I was hooked. 

Which leads to now.

“Do you have it?” Svetlana asks by way of greeting.

“Are you referring to my courage?  The written excuse to stay on the ground?”  I pat down the jumpsuit I was given when I arrived.  “It’s in here somewhere.”

She laughs.  “Nice suit.”

Like those striped shoes you rent at the bowling alley, you can’t be too choosy when you don’t bring your own gear to a jump.  “It’s the right height, but a little baggy, more of a suit-built-for-two.  How did you get one so….not baggy?”  Svetlana’s jump suit fits her like a colorful second skin.

“This is not my first jump.” 

I learn that another couple will be jumping with us.  Their experience shows.  Like Svetlana’s, their suits fit.

I don my mask as the four of us pile into the plane.  I buckle up and put a hand over my stomach to keep it in place.  “Am I the only one wearing Depends?”  I laugh alone.   

The engine starts.  It revs the propeller.  It chatters in my bones.  I watch out the window as the ground races past.  Slowly, it retreats.

“Don’t look so nervous,” Svetlana says to me. 

“I used to have this recurring dream in which I was falling out of the sky.  It was terrifying.  But I would always wake up before I hit.  Now I’m living the dream.”

Svetlana taps my knee affectionately and says, “The difference today…if you hit, you die.”

Very reassuring.

I am wearing the rental chute pack on my back.  The man and woman jumping with us have their chute packs on.  I sort of wish Svetlana would do the same. 

“We should be at the drop zone soon,” she says.

“This would probably be a good time to put on your chute.”

She waves this off with a smile. 

“We will be remembered for this,” the woman of the couple says out of the blue.

“As heroes,” the guy with her says.

Svetlana nods.  “Heroes.”

Everyone is suddenly looking at me.  “Yeah.  Sure.  Memory is a funny thing.  I guess we could be remembered as heroes, or maybe just four people who jumped out of a plane.”

A bit of unwarranted laughter ensues.

Then, for the second time today, Svetlana asks, “Did you bring it?”

It. 

It could be anything. 

It is clearly something important to her.  Important enough to ask about twice.

I put my hand over my chest pocket.  “I’ve got something in here.  I think it’s the former lump in my throat, making its way south.”

“No games,” Svetlana says dramatically.  “Angelica is right.  We will be remembered after this day as heroes.  We will change history with it.  A simple vial.”

It is a vial? 

“So, Svetlana, what is in it?” I probe.  “What is in the vial?”

“The variant,” she says with a mix of glee and indignation.

Still not on the same page with her, I ask, “Variant of what?  And don’t give me another it.”

“The virus,” she says, like it is not something I should have to be reminded of.  “When we release the next variant of the virus at the landing site, everyone will take it back to their cities, to their friends and loved ones.  The contagion will spread and we will be ready to lead a revolution.”

“A revolution of what?  Sick people?”

Like a person reading from a script, my date plows on.  “Its infection will change minds on a molecular level.  It will make everyone to see as we see, as Democrats.  It will homogenize the country and make us all of like mind, so maybe congress can pass something for a change.”

I tell her, “I don’t know that there is much of a correlation between biology and ideology.”

I turn to the other couple for back-up and discover them rolling one hand over the other rather diabolically.

Svetlana opens the door to the first three-mile step.   

“No more games.”  She turns back around and aims a gun at me.

The pilot looks back at my nose-diving first date and says, “You said not like last time.”

“This isn’t the first?” I cry.  But now I understand they are all in on it, this one-sided revolution.

“Give me the vial,” she says.

“Svetlana, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Her expression suggests she is considering the real possibility that she has stepped into an alternate air-trip less radical than the one she packed for.  “I set up the profile as I was advised.  Liberal for Life.  I mentioned the donkey and elephant.  The lemonade we would all drink.  And YOU responded with the formulaic equation for the virus.”

“Hey, I’m just a single guy looking for someone who likes coffee.  A liberal lifer would be preferable, but I’m not ruling out a laid-back elephant.”

“Noooo,” the little revolutionary starts to come undone.  In what is possibly a last-ditch effort to make this day go her way, Svetlana chooses not to believe me and says, “I don’t believe you.”

I shrug.  “Sorry.  That’s all I got.”  But again, she doesn’t believe.

She puts the gun in my face while she pinches the dongle on my chest pocket zipper.  She pulls the vertical zipper down fast.  At once, like everyone’s favorite Alien preemie, Toby pops his head out of the pocket.

Svetlana screams.  “WHAT IS….IT?”

“IT is a cat.”

“I don’t do cats,” she cries. 

“That’s okay.  Toby’s not the one looking for a relationship.”

“What!  Is he a carrier of the variant?”  She tries valiantly to force things to go her way.  “Is this your way of disguising the virus?”

“No’oh.”  Toby shakes his head with me.  “This is the little guy I brought along for moral support.  Plus, I think he wanted make certain I actually follow through with the jump.”

“Who brings a cat to a jump?” Angelica asks rhetorically.

“Sweetheart,” her male half says.  “He’s sitting right beside you.”

Meanwhile, Svetlana’s face reflects the agonizing process of almost losing it and—at last—to  getting it.

“You really have no idea?” she asks me.

“Sure, I have an idea.  NOW.  But I don’t have a secret laboratory in my basement.”

She puts her hand on the side of the open door and holds the back of her other hand against her brow.  “I have failed.”

“Listen, we’re just forty minutes into this date.  Anything could happen.”

“We would have been remembered,” she says to the other couple.

“We can still be remembered,” I insist.  “Let’s land this party and pose with Toby for a few selfies.  We upload them—Badda-bing badda-boom—we go viral and no one forgets us.”

“God help me,” my date says and lets herself fall out.

“Svetlana!” the other man cries.  “She’s not wearing her chute.”  

I’m pretty certain, at this point, that a second date is out of the question. 

“Well?” the pilot calls out for somebody to do something.  Aside from a certain someone’s trick of pretending everything is okay, my mind is a blank.

The other couple does their best to distance themselves from me and the open door.

I go to the door.  I hold onto a strap and lean just enough to look beyond the plane for any sign of my date.  And I can just see this cute dot dropping into the fluff of clouds.  Toby reminds me that I am wearing a chute and the lovely nut who just bailed on us is not.

We both know what this means.

Toby pulls the pocket zipper up to his neck and gives me a cat nod.  Unlike in the dream version where I am shanghaied in, I boldly step into the sky.    

This high up, the wind howls. 

At once, the flow begins. 

Down.

I try to harness my natural Pollyanna impulse—that everything is and will be okay—and will Toby and me back onto the plane.  But we continue to fall.  I am utterly powerless, without footing or leverage.  We are simply a guy and cat and there is not one thing I can do.

Badda-bing badda boom! 
At once, something comes over me.  Or out of me.  By recognizing I have forfeited all my power—and that the plane is probably not going to circle back and catch me on the wing—my cup of stress is emptied. 

I am like a blade of grass on the wind.  A petal on water.

“Hey,” I shout to Toby.  “I did it.  I just did the petal trick.”

Toby is pleased.  But, he points out, we are still falling.  And we are not the only ones.

He’s right. 

I reach like Superman and turn falling unto flying.  I see something cute ahead.  We race with the flow until a speck of Svetlana grows in proximity until she is close enough to touch.

“You!” she cries and backstrokes away from me.

“Excuse me!  Someone forgot to put on their parachute before they jumped out of the plane.  Let me hook you up to my harness.  We can finish this, in tandem.”

“I ask for virus and you bring me cat!”

“I bring you a way to survive the landing so you can change voters’ minds the old-fashion way.  A TikTok video with a cute liberal dance.”  I swim a little closer.

She shakes her head.  “I don’t do cats.”  And she swims further back.

There is only one way to do this.  Toby and I both know it.  In one swift move, he unzips his travel-pocket and leaps into the sky, sailing over Svetlana’s head, leading her to pivot toward him and put her back to me.  While she is distracted by the animal she doesn’t do, I tack in fast and put my arm around her and hook her harness up to mine.

“Games,” she cries into the blue.  “You are all games.”

Toby and I look at each other for a quick are-we-really-doing-this? reality check.  “Svetlana, just hush and tell me how to deploy the chute.”  She groans to be so bothered.

I watch as Toby tiptoes on wisps of clouds.  The rushing air pushes up his fur to follow his lips, making him one big furry smile.    

It is just the cutest most surreal sight until the chute deploys.  A force pulls at the straps around my thighs as we air-brake in a bank of clouds.  All I can see is white.

“TOBY!” I call out.

I hear a faint meow.

“Cats!” Svetlana cries with exasperation.

The clouds pass and still no sign of Toby.

“TOBY?”

“Me-yow?” he says. 

I look up to find him standing upside down on the belly of our brightly colored canopy.  My first thought is to tell him to get down from there.  He does this same thing at the house and leaves a trail of paw prints on the ceiling that are almost impossible to get off.  But this time, I tell him to dig in and hang on.

Now, with a couple minutes to kill, I try to start an air-to-ground conversation about the best place to get a coffee after a jump.  That’s when we hear a rip.  Svetlana and I look above us where the chute is tearing outward from the insertion of each of Toby’s claws.  Svetlana laughs fatalistically.  “It is coming undone,” she says.  “We will hit the ground and we will die.”

“You know, for a Democrat, you really are a downer.” 

I reach with one hand, but Toby is too far.  He looks at me.  His face tells me it’s been swell, and then he rolls selflessly onto his back and slides across the chute into the wide open.

My heart tears outward from the place wherein the little guy has had a place so long.

“There,” Svetlana says, satisfied.  “No cats.”

And then I see him.  Falling into view, legs out to maximize wind drag.

“What?” Svetlana cries.

My reserve heart deploys at once and I am buoyed up.

I motion to Toby to make his way closer so I can reach him.  He shakes his head, looking from me to my date.   

He keeps his distance, pirouetting and somersaulting in a real air ballet.

“Get over here!” I yell.  “The ground is coming up fast.”

“Ten seconds,” Svetlana estimates.  “Nine,” she updates her assessment.

I glare at our furry hero. 

“Eight.”

I shout at him that the whole nine-lives thing is likely a myth.  “In any case, let’s not test it today.”

“Seven,” Svetlana says inevitably.  Then “Six.”

Toby smiles at me and gives me a thumbs-up.  He looks down at himself and fiddles with something on his chest.  All at once, the orange and yellow on his body slips off and up, ripples briefly overhead and billows out into a furry coat-chute.

“My god!” Svetlana says.

“No,” I tell her.  “My cat!  And what a cat!”

Five, four, three and two have passed without announcement.  But zero hits me like a ton of Svetlana.  I hit the ground.  Svetlana hits me.  We roll a few times before she releases her harness and rolls to safety. 

Despite being able to get to my feet, I’m certain I’ve broken every bone in my body.  I probably just can’t feel it yet for all the adrenaline.  I spot Toby nearby, tucking in his coat. 

Svetlana looks at me in a posture of reassessment.

“Despite your choice of pet, you exhibit good character and courage.  We could use that in our efforts.”

“Your effort to infect the brains of conservatives and bend them to your will?”  I shake my head.  “I’m all about getting the leaders I want into office, but I’m more about protecting the process that makes it possible.  As crazy as it sounds, a real Democracy needs more than one side.  Conservatives need liberals and liberals sort of need conservatives.  They act off of each other, like checks and balances.  Otherwise, what you have is a zombie republic.”

“That is an interesting idea,” she says and removes her helmet to push back her hair.  She narrows her eyes and purses her lips.  It is a move, I know, to undermine my reason, to infect me with will-bending longing.  “Maybe we talk about it over coffee.”

“Sorry,” I tell her, “but this independent cat-lover doesn’t do Svetlana.”

Toby and I walk toward a large parking area where Liberals and Conservatives in jumpsuits from around the country are arriving in droves to participate in the overhead games.  We look back and see Svetlana watching our side exit.  But when we look forward again, there she is watching us out of the rolled-down window of a dark sedan.  Toby and I do a quick double-take, back to the Svetlana we just left, and forward again to the Svetlana in front of us.  The latter motions with her finger for us to approach.

“Hurry,” she says.  “Get in.”

Leaving the drop zone together.