I write what will turn out to be my final email, to my mother. In it I describe how I would often bring people together in my home to play jazz and the blues together, stealing riffs from a pair of old books. When I am done, I realize that I hope she and my sisters will some day share this with my young son.
It is then that I understand that the flight I am about to take is the one that had crashed with no survivors. Don’t ask why we’re re-flying it. All I know is that I am meant to be on that flight, so I feel honor-bound to get back on it. I hug my mother, then walk to my destiny.
The plane is small. I open the hatch to the cabin and see the rest of the passengers, strapped in, waiting. There is a pile of cash on the floor near the one remaining empty seat. My mind is racing, trying to figure out how I will explain my continued existence after the plane goes down without me on it. I can think of no ruse, and am emotionally preparing to fly to my death. I look at the money, scoop most of it up, and walk back up the small white concourse away from the plane, looking to donate the handful of bills to some good cause so that it does not burn up, wasted, when we inevitably crash.
Walking back from the desk where I left the money, I am still torn about whether to go through with it and get on the plane that I had been meant to die on, or somehow escape my fate. For some reason the death seems noble.
I choose not to die.
I find myself elsewhere. Possibly the other passengers are there, too–or at least some of them. It is a clinic of some kind, in a technologically advanced near future. In this future, going through procedures to genetically modify oneself is the norm. I’m not that interested in changing, despite the slightly manipulative voice being beamed into the room I’m passing through, suggesting that the only way any citizen of the future can ever catch the eye of a gorgeous genetically modified movie star is by also being genetically modified to be perfect.
I get to the front desk. Everyone’s clothing is odd: hand-me downs and burlap sacks, everything with neck holes rough cut into them regardless of how they’d been originally tailored. Someone who works there and who is guiding me hands me a pair of sheers, and one to the woman who came in next to me so we can cut the collars off of our own shirts and then cut a notch down the front from the neck, like some medieval tunic. It occurs to me that this way they can launder everyone’s clothes and then not worry about who gets which shirt the next time.
As I struggle through cutting the fabric of my shirt with the dull scissors, do I want to contribute a nickel? I drop a nickel into the plastic container being shaken in front of me. Something about being “nickeled and dimed” runs through my head, but leaps out of reach before I can fully resolve it. I continue to cut. This place seems oddly money-oriented, for what it is. Whatever it is.
Eventually I have my makeshift pullover tunic made. I struggle to pull it over my head; maybe the hole isn’t cut right? The alarm going off confuses me: so strange to be simultaneously getting dressed while also struggling with whether to even wake up.
I wake up, still wondering how I will escape, and how I will explain to my loved ones and to the authorities that I was unable to go through with my planned, appropriate, noble death.
(And no, I did not make up a word of this.)