John Kenney - Talk to Me

Ted Grayson had been pushed out of an airplane.

He had been pushed because at the last moment he was frozen with fear and unable to jump. Now he was falling at 120 miles per hour and the feeling was an odd combination of terror and relief. The speed of the fall when he exited the plane took his breath away. His goggles sucked to his face; his eyes felt as if they were being pulled back into his head, the pressure tremendous. Ted fell and he fell and he fell and he felt that he would never stop falling. It had been exactly two point five seconds so far.

It was a Thursday. He knew that. A Thursday in mid-April. Or was it late April? He wasn’t sure. Strange to not know the date. It was late morning. He was fairly sure of that. The small plane had climbed from the airfield on eastern Long Island into clear blue skies. As the plane banked left, Ted could see the ocean below. He sat in his jumpsuit, in the cramped quarters of the plane, Raymond next to him.

It had been cold on the plane. Colder still when Raymond slid the door open. The sound of the wind. The momentary panic-fear of what he was about to do. So Raymond had given him a little nudge. Fine. He’d pushed him, full on. He’d had to do that a fair amount in this job. People got excited and brave on the ground. Quite another thing to stare down from ten thousand feet with nothing between you and God’s green earth but the thin silk on your back.

Ted fell.

He thought he might throw up. He thought he might pass out. He thought he might already be dead. It was happening so fast. He lay flat on his belly, just as they had practiced, Ted and Raymond, arms out, staring straight down. How he’d arrived in this position he wasn’t sure. He raised his head and saw Raymond, smiling, two fat thumbs up, just another day at the office, as if they were sitting across from each other at a Starbucks enjoying Pumpkin Spice Lattes. Raymond tapped his oversized outdoorsman watch. It was time. Indeed, it was, thought Ted.

Raymond, the former army sergeant, who said he hadn’t been planning on going up today. Raymond, who at first didn’t recognize Ted. Raymond, who had to call in his pilot, Alvin, from out in Greenport. Raymond wore a GoPro camera on his helmet. Filmed the whole thing. “Hell, we even send you a little movie of it,” he told Ted. “Email it to you before you’re back in Manhattan.”

The three of them had boarded the small plane, a 1982 Cessna T303 Crusader, according to Raymond. Miracle it still flew, he said, cackling, as Alvin pulled the stick back and launched them up over the airstrip, banked left, out over the ocean, the empty beaches of the Hamptons, climbing, higher, the noise of the engine drowning out Raymond’s incessant talking, Ted seeing the ocean, a distant boat, and remembering Franny’s words from the story.

Raymond held up three beefy fingers and pointed to them with his other hand, the agreed-upon sign. He folded one down. Two fingers now. Time slowed down for Ted. It was taking an eternity. Raymond folded another down. One finger. They’d gone over this on the ground, again and again. “I like repeat customers,” Raymond had said. “That’s why we wear two chutes. Both chutes fail, well, the good Lord has other plans for you…”

Here’s what else went through Ted’s mind.

Screw Ted Grayson. This speck of a man falling from the sky. The world had handed him a microphone and asked him to tell them a story. Engage me, they’d said. Inform me. Thrill me. Enlighten me. And what had he done? Bore them.

The memory of the time he tailgated a person because of a bad mood, because he was in a rush. Honking, flashing his lights, jumping out of his car at the stoplight and pulling from the backseat a wood-handled Bancroft tennis racket, waving it like John McEnroe, only to find an eighty-year-old handicapped woman at the wheel.

Also the time a diminutive homeless man reached out to touch him as he stepped out of a limousine, Ted surprised and frightened by the man, a contorted face shouting, “Fuck off, bum!”

And the time—fine, times—he’d been unfaithful to Claire. The years of distance, of ignoring her, of assuming she’d always be there.

And the time, recently, after the incident, he’d ignored the pleas of the network’s lawyers and PR department and left the house, only to find a photo of himself on the cover of the following day’s New York Post , disheveled, unshaven, having forgotten to zip his fly all the way up yet again, making what appeared to be a Nazi salute, when, in fact, it was simply a harmless attempt to hail a cab and escape the paparazzi.

Mostly, he thought of Franny. And the words she had used in the story. The world would see that she was lost to him. He couldn’t reach her. His own daughter. He couldn’t protect her now. And if you can’t protect your child, what’s the point of protecting yourself?

He went back to the hundreds of other images. Tiny, searing film clips that ran through his mind as he watched himself fall to Earth. The amount of callous, unthinking, uncaring asininity he’d committed in his life. The waste. A few years ago, a friend of Claire’s died. A good man, a family man, a volunteer and coach. Overflowing church. Unfair, people said. But for Ted, who would show? No one would utter the word “unfair.” The few who showed would wonder if they’d hit traffic after the service and what to make for dinner.

The decision was not spontaneous, he realized. It had been there all day. It had been there for weeks, in fact, during the whole nightmare. Now, falling, the image of it all so clear. Here was the answer to all that had happened. Ted had no intention of opening his chute.

He was tired of the shame. Tired of the deep sadness for the loss of his life. Of everything that had once seemed to make sense and now didn’t. He was tired of being afraid of what would happen next, of what other public embarrassment would come his way. He had lost something vital to the living process that he was unable to name.

He heard the lead-in in his head. Ted Grayson, the longtime anchor of the evening news, died today in an embarrassing skydiving accident on eastern Long Island. Sources say the disgraced former newsman may have taken his own life. He was fifty-nine. (brief pause) When we come back: peanuts. Are they the new superfood?

No fingers now. Raymond made the motion to pull the chute. Raymond nodded. Ted nodded. Except then Ted did the one thing Raymond told him never to do. He pulled his arms in, aimed his head down, and suddenly he was Superman, heading toward the surface of the earth so fast he couldn’t take it in. He had no control over his body so he began to roll. “Roll” is the wrong word. It was, instead, what Raymond had called a “death spin.”

He was falling, in thin air . This line echoed in a distant place in his mind.

He could no longer move his arms and legs. He was going to pass out in a matter of seconds. He did not feel at all well. The fear and regret, a primal scream inside that he needed to give voice to. But nothing came out. How perfect. How fitting, he thought. America’s anchorman, in his dying moments, unable to make a sound.

It’s all there, on the GoPro. Ted’s life, on video. Looking into the camera, asking, what happens next? What’s the story?