Page 89 of Angels Fall

Carrying a limp Jeff over his shoulder.

The curtain of fire sweltering all around them makes it look like he’s stepping out of the River Styx. I imagine.

“Crash!” shouts Brandon with an urgency I couldn’t imagine his voice having.

Someone comes wheeling a crash cart over and Brandon tosses Jeff’s ragdoll frame onto it as a paramedic cuts open his gear and starts warming up the paddles.

(Jesus. Is this what it was like when they had to come for me? I feel like an asshole. And then I feel like an asshole for thinking about myself right now.)

“What happened?” yells Maddie. “What happened to him?”

Brandon pulls his helmet off. Bends over. He’s drenched with sweat. He takes a hit of oxygen. Then, gulping breaths, he says, “Smoke. And a… Dunno… Beam… Or something… Hit him in the head. He…” He stops saying the most words I’ve ever heard him speak, takes up more oxygen, and the sweat around his eyes creates the illusion that he’s crying. I think it’s an illusion.

And as I look over and see them pull off Jeff’s helmet, I observe the blood that has baked itself onto his baby face.

Maddie is barely holding together. Given everything I just found out this evening, so am I. The parallels are impossible to ignore.

“Pete?” she now coughs out. “What about Pete?”

Brandon shakes his head.

“What does that mean?” she bellows. “He wasn’t there?”

Brandon raises his eyes to meet hers, stands up straight, and shakes his head again. “No… He was.”

And then…

Paroxysms of tears from Maddie. Only word to describe it. Shaking, convulsive paroxysms of tears as she collapses to the ground in a heap.

I start to go to her but I first ask Brandon, “What—?”

But once again, he just shakes his head and eyes me. You don’t want to know, the eyes say.

Fuck. Fuck! FUCK! And he’s right. No. I don’t wanna know.

Time slows in combat. Everybody knows that, even if they’ve never been in combat. It’s the same thing that happens in, say, a car accident. There’s always that moment when shit gets preposterously slow for no good reason, the brain dialing it all down a notch because it can’t hold onto the events in real-time.

As I look toward the smoldering heap that they’re just starting to get under control now that the roof has collapsed, everything about it washes over me in half-time. The people running, the lights flashing, the world burning. It’s kind of… beautiful.

That’s a real oxymoron about fires and explosions and stuff. They’re so destructive, but that destruction brings with it its own kind of poetic beauty. The same way a rose bursting into full bloom just means it’s that much closer to wilting and dying.

The combustible force of life is a wonderful, amazing thing. But it comes at a cost. The comforting thing about that, to me, has always been that then, finally, after the price is paid, and the fire that drives us all forward is extinguished, we finally get to rest.

And, as I watch the cinders rising, turning all that was there into ash, I think of Pete.

Pete Flanagan. My friend. Thanks for everything, man. Go. Go be with her

again. Rest now.

Or maybe it’s what I have to think to put enough of a spin on it to keep from having the glue that’s barely holding me together melted clean away by the heat of everything happening at the moment.

And then…

“Clear!” someone shouts as they put the defibrillator against Jeff’s bare chest.

I glance over at him again and see that his chest is stronger than I would’ve thought. Just because he seems small, I suppose. Even though I suddenly realize he’s not really. But his chest is smooth. Young. I remember the smoothness of his hand when I gave it a shake a few weeks back.

I don’t know why I think of that now.