Abby Hillinger
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It was hard to imagine anybody else here having his thoughts. These were carefree people. He could tell by the way they laughed, the way their heads actually tossed back and mouths kissed the sky. They made him feel old. While they were at some party the night before, he was awake in his bed thinking about death. Like the period he went through when he was obsessed with people existing only because of sex, now he was infatuated - maybe morbidly - with this probability of everybody dying. Him, his friends, his classmates, the guy who rear-ended his car last winter. Nobody was exempt. Nobody had a get-out-of-jail-free card that they could wave and say, oh, well, sorry - I can’t die, I’ve got this nifty little thing. And worse, nobody could tell him differently. Nobody could tell him, with honesty and sincerity, that he and everybody who mattered wouldn’t die.
He hated how these thoughts - which went from nocturnal to all the time - interfered with his life. He’d always been fascinated by death - Is that it? You die and just stay dead? - but until 9/11 happened last fall, he hadn’t cultivated it into an obsession. Seeing the planes go one, two, into the Twin Towers while he sat on his couch, waiting for his coffee in the kitchen to brew, shocked him into a reality he wasn’t ready for. He’d the usual self-involved thoughts - What if that was me, could that happen to me, will I die today? And again, nobody could tell him differently because nobody warned these people when they got into their planes that this was it. How many of them had spent their lives waiting for the next step - graduating college, getting the right job, having the perfect family? How many loved their lives as they were, didn’t want to die, and didn’t think they had to think about it yet? Gabriel, paralysed into a horror he didn’t know could go so deep, had stared at the television until his bladder was ready to explode.
“We’re going to die,” he said to his girlfriend Alex days later. They were sitting on his father’s old recliner, Alex cradled in his lap, legs crossed over the side. The recliner was defective, forever tilted to one side.
“I know.” She flipped through a magazine, eyes furrowed. He glanced toward the page and saw the caption, Friend or Boyfriend? Take this Quiz to Find Out!
He pushed the magazine down, concentrating on her face, seeing how she took in what he was saying. “Seriously. We’re going to die, Alex. One day, we’re not going to be here anymore. The world will keep going on and we won’t be a part of it. We’ll mean nothing.”
“I know, Gabe.” She reclaimed the magazine and cocked her head at a side angle, her thinking pose. Her brown hair, stretching past her torso, spilled across his chest. It smelled like a split-open coconut.
“So? Don’t you care? Doesn’t that freak you out?”
“No.” She saw his expression and hugged the magazine, head tilted even lower. “We’re going to die. Nobody ever said otherwise. The best we can do is enjoy life while we have it, right?”
Because they were a fresh item at the time, maybe three or four weeks old, Gabriel attributed her cavalier attitude to discomfort with the topic. It was something she could broach with somebody she felt closer to. But now, almost a year later, she wasn’t any less casual. When she’d spend the night and he couldn’t sleep, he’d lie and tell her he’d drunk too much coffee. While she slept, he’d be awake, watching her chest rise and fall, imagining the beating heart underneath. He’d want to wake her up and ask her if there was a loophole, that maybe they wouldn’t really die, but it didn’t work that way. He was looking for some way to make it all a bad dream, and she couldn’t give that to him.