Falling Man
By Brian Kerg
August 2021
Adam watched the man die, then hit replay and watched him die again.
As the C-17 took off from the Kabul airfield, the man hanging onto the plane lost his grip, tumbled through the air, and shattered on the ground.
Adam felt a punch to his gut every time the man struck the earth. His legs shook, but he was already sitting down. He pushed himself away from the desk, looked away from his laptop, and stared at the carpet. He felt suddenly chilled and nauseous. Goosebumps rose across his skin.
“I might be sick,” he said. No one was in his hotel room to hear him.
He looked up again.
“Don’t,” he told himself.
He hit replay, watched the man die once more.
“Jesus.”
A wild thought struck him. He opened up his phone, did a quick search, and brought up a series of photos from nearly twenty years before, photos that propelled him to enlist in the first place.
They showed a man falling from the World Trade Center.
Adam scrolled through the photos, one after the other, like a flipbook.
“Falling men,” Adam muttered.
He scrolled backward through the photos, creating the illusion that the man wasn’t falling, but was flying up, back to whatever window he’d leapt from, or been forced from by the heat of flames.
Adam held up the phone next to his laptop, scrolled through the photos as the video replayed, watching both men fall and die together.
“Maybe I can save them,” Adam whispered. “If I go back fast enough.”
He dragged the cursor on the video, rewinding it, as he also scrolled back through the photos on his phone. In quick jerks, staccato clips like machine gun fire, the men rose up through the sky, floating back to safety.
“Absurd,” Adam said. He started to laugh, then gasped. He slammed the laptop shut, slapped his phone on the desk, then clasped both hands over his mouth, ashamed and terrified. Hot tears fell down his cheeks.
He stood, turned from the desk, and staggered toward the open hotel window. The curtains blew in the wind. He stepped toward it, and the curtains whipped around his body. He glanced at himself in the mirror. His face was gaunt and white.
“I’m a ghost,” he said.
He stepped toward the balcony.
Gripping the rail with one hand, he looked down the ten stories. Indianapolis sprawled out below. Cars and people moved up and down the streets, unperturbed by the end of the war that had defined Adam’s life. His eyes followed a car as it travelled up Meridian street, leaving downtown. He knew if it went far enough, the car could take Illinois Street all the way to Crown Hill Cemetery, where Adam had helped bury three Marines.
“Maybe,” he muttered, leaning over the rail a bit, testing its weight, “The cars will stop if I fall, too.” He reached into his pocket, felt the quarter there, started to pull it out of his pocket.
A church bell rang in the distance, sent three chimes echoing across the city.
“But there’s the wedding,” Adam said. He let the quarter go, pulled his hand from his pocket. “Toby’s wedding.”
He leaned back from the railing. “I’d be a real asshole to ruin Toby’s wedding.”
And Holly might be there, he thought. The idea crashed across his mind before he knew it was even coming, a shooting star. She might be in this hotel, in one of the rooms blocked for everyone invited to the wedding.
Stumbling away, he looked at the bed, where he’d laid out his dress blues. His uniform was covered in medals, ribbons, and bright insignia, punctuation marks for milestones in his career.
“Trinkets,” he said. He laughed again, and tears welled up once more, but this time he wiped them away before they fell from his eyes.
He put his uniform on and left for the wedding.
***
The ceremony was on the outdoor plaza on the fifth floor of Regions Tower, with a commanding view of the city. The weather was mercifully cool, and Toby and Kristen were married just as the sun began to set. Dinner was quick, and drinking and dancing commenced with vigor.
Adam made a conspicuous figure in his dress blues, the only uniformed service-member at the wedding. He didn’t want to wear his uniform – he preferred to be incognito when he was on leave - but Kristen had asked, through Toby.
“I’ve been out for years and couldn’t fit in my uniform if I wanted to,” Toby had said, slapping at his growing waistline. “But Kristen and I started dating right before you and I deployed, so it would mean a lot to her if somebody could wear their blues.”
So Adam had obliged. It proved a convenient beacon every time he wore his dress uniform to social events. He didn’t have to mingle. He only stood in place like an art exhibit, and with time, someone would come over, drink in hand, and have a look. But there were several reoccurring stock characters who appeared in these circumstances. They treated Adam like a priest.
Most were supplicants making the usual genuflections: “Thank you for your service,” and its many variations. When Adam was a young Marine, he’d enjoyed these verbal tithes.
Sometime later, he’d grown bitter and begrudged them. Now, equal parts tempered and tired, he was neutral, not faulting people for doing what they’d been taught to do, even if they didn’t know why they did it.
There was the occasional ‘drunk uncle,’ offering prayers of hollow ardor. These men were over-generous with half-baked ideas about “what this country really needed.” Sharing these views with Adam was an appeal to a stand-in for Uncle Sam. Sometimes the positions were silly, sometimes they were offensive, though once in a while they made at least a little sense. At weddings, Adam refused to make a scene. He smiled politely and nodded a lot, saying nothing.
Once in a while Adam received a penitent, who confessed that “they almost enlisted, but,” followed by any number of plausible reasons why someone did not or should not have joined the military. For reasons Adam couldn’t fathom, these poor souls were racked with guilt over having never served in uniform. Adam imagined them beginning these sessions like a proper Catholic confession, “Bless me father, for I have sinned.” Adam nodded, understanding, and agreed that he would never have enlisted under the same circumstances – a form of absolution, whereupon the penitent would excuse themselves, now with a clean soul and a happy heart.
And then there was Holly.
Adam’s heart fluttered. He wished it hadn’t.
“Glad you could make it,” she said, smiling and true.
I’ve missed you so, so much, he thought.
“Me too,” he said instead.
They spoke, caught up on the years missing between them as the moon rose, and watched Toby and Kristen dance. Their hearts brimming with memory and their heads abuzz with liquor, Holly finally asked the question Adam had asked himself almost every day for ten years.
“Why did you keep pushing me away?”
Adam didn’t answer right away, running his finger on the lip of his whiskey glass instead.
“If there’s any time to be completely honest with each other, it’s now,” Holly said – not a push, Adam noted, but an observation.
He tapped his glass, nervous.
“It sounds so stupid, when you say it loud,” he said.
“Consider me an amnesty box,” she said. “Just drop the rounds in, and you get a free pass. No judgments.”
“That was my line,” he said, risking a grin.
“You’re stalling,” she said, grinning back.
He looked ahead, watching the wedding party dance, then past them at the roof of the building across the street.
There, he saw the ghost of a man falling to his death.
“I think the war made me crazy. And you don’t deserve a crazy person tied around your neck. Especially one who’s never around.”
She looked at him but said nothing, knowing that if she waited he’d go on. He did.
“The towers came down when I turned 18. I enlisted right away. I was young and dumb, thought I’d save the world from terrorism, like almost everyone else who joined up then. And I know that was naïve, now.” He ran a hand over his face and sighed.
“But I kept doubling down. Deploying again. Gave my whole life to this. I always believed we’d win, eventually. And that people would care enough to win. But we didn’t. And they don’t.”
Holly looked at him, nodding. “I get that. But that’s not your fault. That’s out of your control.”
Looking at another tower, he saw the man again, falling to his death.
“That’s just it. I can’t control it.”
“What do you mean?”
Amnesty box, he thought.
“It’s all I think about, Holly. It’s all I see. It’s all I am.”
“That’s not true,” she said. “You’re more than that. We all are.”
Adam shook his head. “I buried three of my best friends at Crown Hill, but I still see them sometimes. And the men I killed, too. Not like a memory. I see them just like I’m seeing you.”
Holly put her hand to her mouth, forced her hand back down.
“I’m haunted,” Adam said. “And now I can’t stop seeing the falling men.”
“The falling men?” Holly asked.
“The man who fell from the Twin Towers. And the man from the plane, when Kabul fell. Over and over again. I can see them now. Right now.”
He nodded at Toby and Kristen, laughing together at someone’s joke. Their faces made Adam smile.
“That’s what you deserve, Holly. Roots. A home. Family and friends around you. Someone who’s there.”
He thought of all the moves from duty station to duty station, the constant deployments, the endless nights trying to sleep on foreign soil, staring up at strange constellations, aching for the touch of someone’s skin.
“I could never give you that,” he said. “Because I’m never here. And I’m haunted, or crazy, or both.”
He looked down at his glass, turned it, making the last drops of whiskey swirl about. He looked up.
Adam was alone. Holly was gone.
He looked around, first confused, then afraid.
Was she even here at all? He thought. Was I talking to myself?
He broke out in a cold sweat, stood up and stumbled back. The whiskey glass fell from
his hand. No one seemed to notice.
Adam staggered away.
***
Standing once more on his hotel room balcony, he took another pull from the whiskey bottle and gazed across the city.
“They look so different at night,” he said.
The men fell from buildings and from unseen planes in the sky, reappearing faster now, as if on a loop.
The wind picked up, and the curtains lashed around Adam, like a billowing white cloak.
He set down the whiskey, unbuttoned his dress blue jacket, and let it fall to the ground. His medals clinked together in golden protest.
“Maybe if I catch one on the way down,” he muttered. “Maybe I can save them.”
He reached into his pocket, felt the quarter. Stepping up to the rail, he pulled the quarter from his pocket and held it up so he could see the image of Washington.
“What do you say, George?” Adam said, slurring his words. “Heads, I go find myself a shrink. tails, I try to catch myself a falling man. Deal?”
George Washington did not respond. Adam shook the coin up and down a few times,
making it nod in agreement.
“That’s a deal, then,” he said.
Adam set the coin on his thumb, prepared to flip it – then hesitated.
Sharp knocking at the door startled him. He jerked. The coin slipped from his hand. He reached out to catch it, missed, and slipped over the rail with a cry.
Falling, he reached out and caught the guard rail. His body slammed into the side of the building, knocking the wind out of him, but his grip held. He dangled over the city of Indianapolis.
He heard a voice from the other side of the door.
“Adam? Are you in there? It’s Holly.”
Adam held tight as a gust of wind buffeted against him.
Are you really there? Adam thought. Are you just in my head, too?
“Adam, if you’re there, can you let me in?” Holly asked, raising her voice to be heard through the door. “Kristen’s uncle is a psychiatrist. He’s here with me now. I think you should talk to him. I think he can help you.”
Adam pulled slightly, wasn’t sure if he could pull himself back up over the rail if he wanted to. He wasn’t sure if Holly could find a way to open the door in time if he called for help. He wasn’t sure if Holly was there at all.
He laughed as hot tears filled his eyes.
Beside him, a man fell through the sky.
****
Brian Kerg a writer and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. His fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Line of Advance, The Deadly Writer’s Patrol, CIMSEC, Proceedings, and in the short-story collection Our Best War Stories. His non-fiction has appeared in War on the Rocks, The Marine Corps Gazette, Proceedings, CIMSEC, SIGNAL Magazine, and The Strategy Bridge. He is currently stationed in Okinawa, Japan. Follow or contact him on Twitter @BrianKerg.