What You Become in Flight by Ellen O'Connell Whittet

Author:Ellen O'Connell Whittet [Whittet, Ellen O'Connell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

10

My first semester of graduate school, I saw a woman lying dead on the pavement somewhere on Sixth Avenue, somewhere between Broome and Vandam. A police officer squatted over her, playing with his phone while he waited for backup. People passed by as though it was not at all strange or shocking that she was lying there, reminding us of our own mortality, right in the midst of a Saturday afternoon. When I caught sight of her, she was on my left-hand side, and I looked away so quickly that I have always doubted my own memory. Her lying there, the pavement under her cold and as gray as the sky above her.

It felt like an undignified ending to have New Yorkers step around you, barely glancing down. At least that’s how I remember it as a twenty-two-year-old away from home. Seeing a person freshly gone filled me with a dread so profound it hung over me for days once the shock had worn off, and I never felt the same way about Soho again. It is a clever trick of the mind that I forgot where this was, exactly, because I never avoided a street corner so much as I did a memory of a ghost, conjured even now each time I smell a pretzel cart or see a lovely Christmas display in a store window.

I had been on my way to a Spanish grocery store to buy some smoked paprika for my mother, who told me she had started using it when she cooked. Somehow, I thought if I could find it and send it to her, I could bridge the gap between us, between the discoveries we were making without each other. So I kept walking to the store, determined to keep living.

I imagined the final moments of the woman in an office building stories above—the smooth plastic of a wooden-looking desk beneath her feet before she jumped. She could have spread her palms over the panes of glass, which trapped the December air outside the room. She would have stood for just a moment, looking out over the city of New York, full of people looking askance at each other as they passed through the veins of boulevards. Maybe she stood on her desk as though the figurehead on a great ship, with all the sound turned down to a peaceful lull. Papers stacked on her desk, her potted plant watered. This all began years before, perhaps with an isolated incident, or perhaps with a slow-spreading disease that began in her aching temples and worked its way down to the arches of her feet. So she did the only thing she could think of. She found the latch of the window and opened it. Her hands were not shaking; that would have passed long before.

And just as easily as a dropped napkin or a scattered dandelion in a wind gust, the woman jumped. Or at least that is what I imagine happened in order to give myself a story to cling onto rather than a lifeless body to puzzle over.

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