Short Fiction

Survivor by David Boyne ©1997 All rights reserved

"Ma'am. You do understand, that you've been in an accident?"

The woman was my daughter's age. I wondered what she had studied at University. I nodded. I said, "A plane crash."

"An accident," she said, "Such as this, can produce shock..." She hesitated, glanced at the papers in her hands.

"How many survivors were there?" I asked.

She looked around the small room. I did too; but we were the only two there. "Many came through it all right. Like you."

"Did the plane come apart?" I asked.

She smoothed a wrinkle in her blue suit. She must have worn it all of yesterday, then put it back on when the phone call came in the middle of her sleep. She made eye contact with me and said, "Shock is a natural response of the body."

"And mind."

"Well, yes. It's a protective response."

"Of course." I tried to smile. I don't think my face muscles worked properly.

"You're going to be fine." She touched her hand to the rough wool blanket covering me. Under the blanket, I was wearing a blue suit, very much like my interviewer's, only mine had been melted in patches, was caked with dried blood, very little of it my own, and was wet through, by what substance or how it had been wet through, I didn't know. It didn't smell like any sort of fuel.

"We'll need to get you into dry clothes, ma'am."

"Thank you." I felt tiny sound waves from my speech pressuring my ear drums.

"We'll get you into some nice warm, dry clothes in a jiffy."

I was put on a small shuttle bus, still in my soaked and scorched clothes. The bus drove slowly through black streets, to a hospital. Very awake, determined people at the hospital took charge. A man in a suit with a telephone head set but no phone that I could see, led me through the entrance doors. He mumbled something.

"Excuse me?" I said.

"Nothing, ma'am." He tapped the ear piece of the headset. "Talking to someone on the phone."

"Someone from the airline?" I asked.

"I'm from the airline," he said. "Is there something you need that I can get for you?"

"Dry clothes. Please." I said.

"Yes. Of course. We'll do that right away. As soon as you're assigned a room."

I sat in the reception room a long time. A nurse came up to me, knelt beside my chair. "Honey, we could wait all night for a wheelchair. What do you say we walk? Are you up to it?"

"I'm fine," I said. "I didn't know I was waiting for a wheel chair. I would have said something."

She lead me to an elevator, putting her hand under the wool blanket I had shawled around me to hold my arm.

"I'm all right," I said.

She guided me to an empty room with six beds, all empty.

"Here we are," she said. Then she went away.

On each bed was a hospital gown. I stripped my wet clothes, put on the gown, turned the wool blanket so the dry side was against me, and sat on the bed, waiting, watching the open doorway as people passed quietly in the hall.

A different nurse came into the room.

"You from the plane?"

"Yes."

"Really? What's your name, darling?"

I told her. "The word 'darling' made pleasant vibrations in my ear, like a leaf falling on pond water.

"Spell that, would you?"

I spelled my name. She left.

I was looking for a telephone, when a thin, old man pushed a wheelchair into the room. "Here we go."

"Me?"

"Yes, you." He grinned.

"I can walk. I'm fine."

"I believe you, ma'am. But hospital rules, you know."

I thought I could see the words puff out from his mouth, small bursts of black powder instantly absorbed by the air.

"Where?" I asked.

"Got a taxi for you. You get a free hotel stay. Courtesy of the airline."

I sat in the chair. It made me feel feeble. He pushed the chair fast, but carefully, then put it against a wall and went to talk to a nurse at the main reception desk. Each time the doors of the hospital slid open I felt a whisper of chill air. Finally, he pushed the chair onto the sidewalk. In the sky above the buildings I saw splinters of orange and red in the black sky.

A man with a clipboard smiled down at me. His sport coat was buttoned, but his shirt was open. A gold chain hung in the mat of his black and grey chest hair. He leaned over me and said my name.

"Yes?"

"This is your taxi."

"I haven't seen a doctor yet," I said.

"A doctor?" The man frowned, leafed through his clipboard papers. "You must be in fine shape then."

"I have reservations at the Roger Sherman," I said.

"The airline is taking care of everything," he said, tapping a finger on the receiver in his ear. "Can you stand?"

"Yes."

"Let me help you."

I let him help me.

As I sat in the taxi the man passed his clipboard to the driver. The driver took a long time to make his signature. Something about his labored writing made me remember being a schoolgirl, and how the Sisters made us work so hard at penmanship.

The speedometer showed fifty miles an hour, yet we seemed to be driving in slow motion. The dark facades of buildings took a long time to pass from the front of the cab to the back as I watched out my window.

We drove into a tunnel.

"I have reservations at the Roger Sherman. It's on--"

"Airline said the Skyliner Hotel.

"Where--"

"Newark. You know the city at all? It's just cross the river, the Hudson river. That's what this tunnel is under. We're driving under the river right now."

I said nothing. It seemed only a moment before the driver parked.

"The Skyline Hotel."

"My purse. It's in the plane."

"All paid for."

"I'm in a hospital gown."

"I noticed. It's okay. You got that blanket. Nobody'll say nothing."

"Where is this hotel?"

He looked at me as if I were a child. "Newark. In Newark."

"Is there a phone?"

"Oh yeah sure. Sure. This ain't a bad hotel or nothing."

"I have no money."

"The airline's picking up the tab. Make all the calls you want."

He opened my door, pointed to the glass doors to the bright lobby. "There you go."

The doors looked heavy. I pulled too hard and hit my knee with the door, making the glass shiver. I turned to the taxi but it was pulling away; the noise of its acceleration hurt my ears.

The desk clerk watched me. He lifted a phone as I pushed open the second glass doors.

"I think you have a room for me."

"No. I think we do not."

I told him my name.

"We don't have a reservation for you."

"But you do."

"I think not. We're full."

"The airline is paying for it."

"What airline?"

I told him the name of the airline. "I was in a plane crash."

"You'll have to leave." He pointed at the doors. "There you go. Now."

"I was in a plane crash."

"I think not."

"Please call the airline. Please."

"What number?" He lifted a pen.

"I don't know."

"That makes two of us."

"Please. Call my home. My husband will pay for the call."

I told him my phone number.

He dropped the pen. "That is not a phone number."

"It's an international number. I live in France."

"No doubt. Do all French people have an American accent like yours? You'll have to leave."

"I can't."

"Fine then." He picked up the phone as if it were a gun.

I went and sat on a sofa in the lobby, the light hurting my eyes, shivering but sweating at the same time.

The police came, a woman and a man. The male officer dropped into a seat across from me, sighing, smiling indifferently. He looked very tired. The female officer sat on the sofa next to me.

"Hello."

She was as small as me, but made bulky from the bulletproof vest and belt and gun and thick-soled shoes.

"I was told to come here. The airline reserved a room for me. They put me in a taxi."

"What's your name?"

I told her. The male officer stretched his legs and sighed again.

"And where do you live?"

"Paris. Rue--"

I stopped when I saw her expression.

"This is a long way from Paris."

"I'm a survivor," I said.

"I'll bet you are. Now listen, we can take you to the shelter. I think you should let us. Where'd you get your hair wet like that? It's hasn't rained all night."

I remembered the flight, remembered looking down from the plane at the glistening airport we skimmed above just before the black wall hit me.

"The plane crashed," I said.

The desk clerk came over to us.

"There's been a misunderstanding," he said. "This woman does have a reservation." He did not look at me. "It's all right. We have a room."

They did not give me a key to the room. When the desk clerk left, I turned off all the lights he had turned on except the lamp near the telephone.

I must have lifted the receiver without thinking. My ear filled with a man's voice. "You want to make a call?"

"Yes."

"I'll dial it for you."

"Thank you."

"So what number did you want?"

I said my number. The air beyond the lamplight seemed made of an ocean of black dots, as if I could see the colorless atoms of matter swirling into the shapes of this world.

I heard the familiar ring of my phone in Paris. My husband answered. I said his name. I began sobbing.

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