Oxygen Masks

“At that point, I never wanted to speak to you again. I genuinely considered what it would be like to kill you, to take you and him, Chris, in a flurry of hate and passion and sorrow, and cut you both down, because you were so damned happy and I was so miserable.”

He was staring across a small room, the room was the same one that they used to sleep together in, she sprawled out across from him in the same spot where used to be the bed where they would make love and then didn’t make love in again. She was wearing clothes he had never seen before, ones that she must have bought after they had left each other, clothes that his replacement would have seen her strip from, peeling off the layers to expose the tender petals that used to be shared with him alone, clothes that he suspected still bore the vestigial scent of her last lover’s sweat.

She noticed his face was thinner that the last time she had seen him, and that the gulf between dark and light in his beard had shifted decidedly in favor of the latter. His hair was thicker than she remembered, strange perhaps considering the advances he’d made in age since then, but it was much more properly kempt now, giving him a more youthful appearance overall.

“I suppose, just like everything I conceive of in this world, my conspiracy to murder met the same fate as all the novels I ever intended to write. I always knew that the disparity between my ideas and my work ethic was one of the most difficult things for you to live with.”

“That wasn’t it, Michael. I told you that before I left for San Francisco. We were never there at the same time. It was like we were two boarders in the same house living a decade apart. When you needed me I was distant. And every time I wanted a companion you preferred a beer to my troubles. You may have this concept of why our relationship didn’t survive, but it had very little to nothing to do with your unwillingness to finish what you started.”

He knew his drinking would enter the conversation as soon as they got into it. He’d dealt with past demons before, and he’d put this one to rest.

“I’m clean now, not that I guess it matters much, considering. Haven’t had a drink since New Years, three years back. And don’t believe I haven’t been tempted.”

“I think we’ve all been tempted lately.” She said this with a particular smidgen of a smile, and the sight of this made his chest loosen a bit.

“I’m glad you didn’t try and kill me. That could have made this a lot more awkward than it already is.” Her attempt at gallows humor seemed out of sorts, not only because it came from her. Michael wondered if she would have ever made such a joke when they lived in this room.

“I guess I realized any murder would be cold comfort. I said the thought had crossed my mind out of jealousy, if you don’t care to make the distinction between it and envy, but I knew that wouldn’t do me any good. Plus I’ve always been a coward, you know that, and the thought of being caught and sent to jail… that didn’t make the crime any more palatable.”

He added more: “And, just so it gets said, you were always a welcome catalyst in my life. I know that I’ve said and I’ve sworn that was the part of you that muffled me the most, but I’ve realized since that it was that push you gave everything I talked about doing that I used to pull myself out of the dark places I was throwing myself into. I resented it then, but I couldn’t have done it with what my parents gave me.”

Angela nodded. She was doing her best to not sink awash into the swirling contexts, the overlapping textures, the Siamese chords of their past lives and their sitting here now. It was everything she could do to focus on the now. She paid rapt attention to Michael forays at poignancy, not once considering this sort of pontification used to drive her mad. Had she considered it, she would have realized she was happy for him to occupy her mind with his words. Their supply seemed infinite. She was happy for the company.

“May I have some of that water?” He reached for the jug to his left, and extended across the room on his knees and with one hand flattened to the concrete, shoved the sloshing plastic through the stale air between them, displacing the specks of dirt and flakes of discarded skin that were hovering in the air illuminated by the sole column of light like diorama stars in an infinitesimally scaled universe.

She takes the cap off of the jug, and as she tilts it towards her mouth: “ It’s funny. I don’t feel like I miss him. I don’t know what that means, but I don’t.” Michael studies the rhythm of her throat as she drinks deeply, her head thrown back as though she was receiving a baptism. He considers the people he’ll never see again and is surprised to feel no surprise that he can’t remember what it feels like to know them as significant.

The light flickers, chirping and casting the room in and out of darkness. Michael moves over to the bulb and flicks the switch off. He pushes his hand up through the waist of his sweater and adjusts the glass, screwing it tighter, the warmth of the bulb dissipating into the wool. As the beam resumes its vigil across the room it shows Angela’s spot now empty.

He feels a quick jolt of panic; he’s alone in the room. She wouldn’t of dared…

Angela reappears through the doorway, “Look what I’ve found”, and tosses a stocking cap at him. Michael picks the hat off of the floor and brushes dust from the dark blue wool: Napa Valley Merchants. He recognizes the souvenir from their trip there, years back. Her head is covered with one of the same design, only crimson.

“I don’t think we’ve got much longer out of this light. The generator’s bound to go out soon.”

“Small favors, then, that these were sitting in the other room. I wouldn’t want us to be cold and in the dark.” She watched as he pulled the cap over his head. He was wearing the same clothes he wore that weekend in California. The jeans had been worn through in the left knee, the same wear pattern shared by all his pants. She wondered if he realized the significance of his clothes. He did. He didn’t mention it.

They sat there for a few minutes in the renewed light without saying anything. All sense of time had left her when he broke the silence: “Would you have liked to changed anything about our days?”

“Besides the obvious?” Angela shifted her legs under her so that she was sitting at attention, her body at a right angle with her hands pushed forward onto her knees. She couldn’t quite see the point in this question. He interrupted her thoughts: “I realize that’s my type of question. Not suited to well for you. Sorry.”

“No, that’s alright.” She had given him an out but could now think of no way to oblige his question. She thought about the warmth of a soft sweater she had left draped across a rocking chair at her parent’s home: the dining room where her family prepared their holiday meals basked in the rich light of ritual: her niece playing with wet fall leaves in the front yard, cascading through piles of tree detritus, dropping in the crisp autumn wind like warm tears cast slowly to the ground by a senile old steward who cannot remember what he is crying about.

“When I try and think about things that could have been different”, she paused for a few itinerant seconds, “I can’t think of any big picture. All I see is my family, my life, everything that I could touch. I can’t think of anything else. Maybe that’s the only connection to this world that proves I ever existed, the soil on my half-acre. I never made anything substantive. No statues to me, no verdicts in my favor, I’ve no poems, no songs, nothing tangible.”

“Angie, I meant about us, you and I.”

“Oh…”

“Well?”

“…No.”

“I see.”

“No. We had our chance. The memories I chose to keep were of the good times. We had our chance. I think that’s all we could ever ask for.”

“Despite what you might expect, I agree with you. There are times that I will always remember as hard, but those edges seemed dulled now, and the pain is so distant that I can’t even empathize with it.”

“I don’t regret any of it.”

“I don’t regret it, either.”

“Did you ever cheat on me?”

“No, never.”

“I wouldn’t hold it against you if you had.”

“I believe you. I would understand if you did.”
“Hold it against you or cheat on you?”

“Both.”

“Thanks.” And then Angela spoke in a way that Michael had never heard her: “It seems like pain is a place, an island, and you wake up on it one day. You explore the dark corners of the place, stay there for a while, and one day you decide to leave. But the water looks so cold and deep, and you can’t see anything but darkness far out on the horizon, and so you don’t think you can make it. So you test the water, and find that it is indeed cold. Frigid. But it’s a sort of bracing chill that makes you feel alive. Pain makes us remember we’re alive. And so the next day, maybe you wade in to your waist, and the next day you’re out nearly to your head, and then one day you’re swimming; the floor has dropped out and you’re staying afloat. And at some point you decide to go for it, and as you splash through the deepest points, and when you think of the possibility of drowning, you look back, and you see how far away the island is. And when you look ahead you can see the sun has cut through the darkness on the horizon, and when you squint you can just see a shore, and you push into the sea and through the waves and the water begins to feel so warm and the clouds break and now the current is enveloping you, carrying you towards the approaching land.”

“Are we off the island?”

“We’re doing the breast stroke and the water is as clear as glass.”

“It’s getting shallower.”

“Yes, it is.”


They continued to talk until the light began to flicker again.

“This is the last of the water; do you want it?” Angela shakes the jug in the air.

“If you don’t mind?”

“Of course.”

Michael takes the plastic jug and empties it into his mouth, the final drop hitting his tongue like an exclamation point. “The light’s almost done for. And I think the heater quit a bit ago,” he says with words splaying through the air, visible in the descending cold now.

Darkness. The room disappears.

“Michael?” Her voice tinged with panic.

“I’m still here. The generator finally died.”

“Could you come over here with me, please? I’m cold. I’m cold and I don’t want to be alone in the dark.”

“Reach out, take my hand so I know where you are.”

“Here.”

Her hand brushes his, and she clasps onto his wrist. Her palm is ice against the warmth of his skin as she tugs at him. He moves across the void, the smoothness of her fingers beckoning him, until his elbow bumps into something soft: her torso. He can feel her breath hot against his face, the smell of her breathing in and out sending rumblings through his diaphragm, ancestral murmurs of promise coursing through his flesh. He remembers this room, he remembers Vancouver, he remembers July 15th, he remembers faded polka-dot sheets never tucked under the mattress, he remembers the contours of her spine and the moles and chicken-pock scars that mark her body like pins on a map of a landscape, he remembers the sea change between the 30th and 31st parallel of the nape of her neck, where straw colored hair met the darker hidden hairs below and dissipated thinner and thinner into a peach plain that distinguished her neck, the edge of her incisors on the moist-tender area of his gums, the irregular beat of her heart, the one she has depended on since she inherited it in its flawed form at birth; he realizes she’d never left.

Her mouth is wet, and coupled with his they don’t need the water.

His hand is between her legs, massaging the wealth of her thigh, her nails are across his back, from the left across the hump of his spine, down to the joy of his hip, and back over the lung that never quite healed, by the liver that weathered the poison, his chest against hers, near the heart that endured the years with her, the one he never meant to tax, the one that was never supposed to last as many years as it had.

She rolls on top of him, reverberations of a shared ritual alive between them, that which had lay dormant reignited in this moment. As he enters her the blackness of the room fades away and the furniture reappears, and they are back in bed, and the bumps on their skin smooth in the warmth of the air and the crisp embrace of polka dot sheets engulfs their spiraling bodies. The heat from their bodies is all encompassing, the chill of the bare room stricken from the air as they tangle, scrape and weave. The windows are uncovered now and the brilliance of a cloudless sky forces the sunrays across the whole of the room, filling the cracks in the walls, blowing the dust into oblivion before settling fully on the figures on the bed, panting and breathing gasps in unison, enraptured by discovery.


When he wakes the room is dark and he feels where the cold concrete has bruised his hip. He’s sitting upright against a wall, Angela between his arms. She’s breathing through her mouth, deep, arrhythmic, labored breaths: the air is getting thinner.

“Michael?” She shifts in his arms.

“Mm?”

“I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too.”

They break out of the folds of each other’s bodies, grasping in the dark for their clothes, pulling them back on without saying a word. When he motions to focus his eyes he can imagine her profile, the friction of the fabric as it pulls across her skin, a faint electric outline in the ink, a ghost of an outline. He can feel the cold again. It licks his arms and face, the goosebumps dancing and rising once again, knowing that she’s feeling the same, now.

He begins to stand: “The air is running out. I don’t imagine it we’ll have much longer.” He says this without discernable a tone, the statement standing apart from him as though it had always been there, and he had only drawn her attention to it’s presence.

“Are you ready?”

“Wait,” her voice commanding, certain, “ do you remember that morning on BC Island? We drove all night. North, through Washington, and we were exhausted when we arrived. The road was treacherous, the fog, and the bends along the cliffs were so winding… when we pulled around that last corner and the road spilled out onto the sky and the beach, the sand was so dark and wet, I thought it looked like the skin of a whale, and we just pulled over into the grass and ran to the beach, so relieved to back on flat ground, under the sun as it appeared again, amongst the trees bowing towards the sand like dancers, and the sublime mix of salty-mist-fresh-air-warmth-of-the-sun…”, she paused for breath,” Do you remember”
“My memories are set; I seem to remember things at their most beautiful.”

“Will you remember me as beautiful?”

“I won’t have to remember.”

“Please, keep this in your head, share it with me, I want us to be on the same page.”

“I will.”

“I’m ready.”

She took his arm under her own, lacing their fingers tight enough to stem the blood circulation. They moved at an even pace towards the hall, through the dark and the past, their opposite hands by their sides, the motor memory of the house guiding them safely down the hall through to the empty living room, across the hollow towards the metal plate that had replaced the front door. He feels for the knob, grips it and twists it, a small –clack- as the latch releases and a pneumatic sigh as the lock surrenders.

“Should we bring the masks?”

“They’d only slow us down.”

The door pushes out onto the outside. The sky is afire with hues wrested from primordial times. Cinders of ash fall delicately like snowflakes in the stillness without wind.

As they step forward they inhale deeply, their lungs rising through their bodies like zeppelins gaining altitude, defying gravity as they soar upward, sky bound.