JohnLocke
05-29-2009, 12:51 AM
“Sparks Fly Upward”
Berlin, Germany, 1989.
A droplet of rain trickled slowly down a gray slab of painted wood. Here and there, it rolled fleetingly over a menagerie of harsh black curves and lines, leading ominously closer to the ground. After an eternity, it completed its winding, finally dripping subtly to the ground. Though subtlety, it seems, is merely a relative concept: the insects below drowned in a unceasing torrent of tsunami-sized waves.
Arthur Fitzpatrick sluggishly altered his gaze from the growing brown puddle to its penultimate source: the gray wooden slab, with its vibrant black squiggles. It was a sign. In English, Russian, French, and German, it loudly and undeservedly declared:
“YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.”
Of course he was. Leaving and going back home, as Arthur had done plenty of times before. This time however, it was permanent: the wall had come down only a week ago, and the entirety of the Soviet complex was sure to fall as well. After the undetermined ticking of innumerable minute hands, this failure would reach fruition. An unwarranted fifty-two years had passed (many of which Arthur had not even lived through), and the Cold War was coming to a close. The platitudes of the situation escaped him.
He was a passenger of his own flight, in his own plane. For over fifteen years, he had piloted the ever reliant SR-71 Blackbird. Its nose was a sharp, ash-colored dagger, suited more to an assassin than to an aircraft. Its security was more reliable than anything the Soviet’s could muster: but security, to Arthur, lied only in appearance. The jet was an overwhelmingly daunting piece of American eye candy, and Arthur reckoned that more than words would escape him had he been a Soviet in the face of a behemoth like this. That’s not to say that any Soviet should see the Blackbird. Its entire purpose was concealment and reconnaissance, and as long as Arthur was situated comfortably in the cockpit, with his compatriots back home, it would stay that way. How sweet irony is, however, that even friends become enemies in its presence. Everyone contains threatening potentialities; every country can be hypocritical. The Cold War ended, but war, suffering, even the threat of nuclear destruction, reorganized and continued. Cyclical realities like these would soon become commonplace to Arthur. Perhaps they always were.
New Mexico Air Space, 1989.
Arthur Fitzpatrick looked eagerly out his cockpit window. He observed the gray skyline with quaint objectivity, while looking fitfully upon the buildings below him. The people were invisible to him now, like so many insects. He was less than an hour away from the Groom Lake Military Facility in southern Nevada; his second to last stop before home. Before his wife and children. Before his own bed. He was apathetic toward the Berlin Wall’s destruction, toward the East German people’s newly found liberty. He knew that he shouldn’t have been, but his freedom was a granted and passive existence. He couldn’t even remember if he really had any independence anyway. He pulled out his Polaroid instant camera, the one he carried with him whenever he flew. Arthur always took pictures of the landscapes he flew over for his family. As he absentmindedly clicked the camera and shook the photos, he continued thinking to himself.
Amidst the serenity of these pitiless ruminations of home, family, and the world, the Blackbird took a nosedive. Swearing abruptly to himself, Arthur threw the camera into his bag, and pulled the throttle upward in a somewhat abrasive manner. It wasn’t nearly quick enough. He was through the clouds now, a weak pincushion encased in a temporary house of iron and steel, completely paralyzed against the relentless needle of gravity.
Only four seconds later, and the Blackbird’s wings were torn away from it. Hurdling side by side by side, the aircraft and its now defunct wings fell helplessly toward the unsympathetic New Mexican desert. His ejector seat jammed; any hope that remained was in vain.
They say that when you approach death, your life flashes before for your eyes: that you accept God and whisper a prayer. No prayer came to Arthur’s lips, nor did God appeal to him. All he could see was a single raindrop, falling slowly down a bleak, gray sign. It tumbled repeatedly over black curves and lines: now on the sign, now onto the dry floor of the New Mexican landscape. The flightless bird and its black wings rolled gently passed one another. The raindrop neared its end. Arthur Fitzpatrick held his breath; held onto anything he had left. The water droplet cohesively struggled against freefall, all without the slightest knowledge of its current situation. Both let go. One awoke.
Roswell, New Mexico, 1947.
Arthur Fitzpatrick was roused by the din of a foreign, luminous thunder. Hesitantly, he opened his eyes, only to realize that it made no noticeable difference. Was he dead? Dreaming? He tried to move. In retrospect, Arthur thought this to be the biggest mistake he ever made: he did just come to after a plane crash. He screamed in agony. The end of what he thought to be every nerve in his body flared up as if pierced by a white-hot iron, and his screaming only exacerbated the unbearable pain. He again lost consciousness.
“Over here! Right here, yeah. There could have been someone in this thing!” yelled an unknown voice.
“What the hell is this? Is it a ship or something?” asked another, equally tense obscurity.
As he faded in and out of an unconscious stupor, Arthur picked up only portions of the muddled conversation. Whenever he was awake, he wished to scream out for help: this instinct was repressed in light of the unbearable pain it brought him. Any attempt at moving was likewise stymied by the nuisance of his agony. With nothing less uncomfortable to do, he listened to what he could hear.
“Maybe it’s a Sovi…”
“… think that’s what it could…”
“… do you know for su…”
Again the voices became muddled, as if they were receding into a distant plane. For three minutes he waited: three unrelenting minutes, so terribly long that each of them separately felt like an hour. Finally they ended.
“… need to report back, its getting dark.”
“… uess you’re right, let’s…”
Any instance of aid would soon depart from him, unless he could temporarily bear a single scream. He breathed deeply for a couple of seconds, and then let out the largest yell his body could presently tolerate. Its sound waves reverberated within his iron chamber: his ears now hurt, as well as his body.
“… hear that?”
“Yeah, where’d it come from?”
“I think the ship. Shine the flashlight here.”
“Is that… is that an arm?!”
“Oh Christ, it is! Sir, sir, can you hear me? Can you hear me?”
Arthur mumbled a tepid response.
“He can hear us… We’ll get you out of there immediately, you got that?”
Before he could respond, the effects of the his previous scream caught up with him. Again he faded to black.
Arthur awoke on a hospital stretcher, a fact not to be learned until a day from now. He could currently see very little: his puffy eyelids consumed his eyes and left his vision bleak. Delusion and fear equally contributed to his now strange behavior, and he imagined himself in a German hospital, not even three weeks ago. Despite his temporarily irrational thought processes, even a fully recovered Arthur Fitzpatrick would be hard-pressed with the realization that his experience in a German hospital wouldn’t really occur for another forty-two years.
“Can you hear me?” asked an old doctor draped in a pristine lab coat.
“Ich kann nicht das Gefühl, mein Körper,” replied a weary and still clearly confused Arthur.
A young, astonished MP glared warily into Arthur’s eyes.
“Aw hell, doc, he’s a Krout!” said the soldier, with a strange combination of glee and irritation in his voice.
“Relax, kid,” replied the doctor. “Don’t act like you know what you’re talking about. We all know you were only overseas for three weeks! Besides, Jeff, the damn war was already over by the time you got there!”
Some surrounding men laughed and the doctor shot a generous grin, as if to say he was just poking fun at the poor kid. The laughter provoked something within Arthur’s mind. He cleared his throat, ready to greet his aid.
“I’m not German,” he said.
“Whoa, whoa,” replied the doctor. “It doesn’t matter, boy, we’ll fix you up! At least we’ll try, anyway.”
“No, no, you misunderstand. I’m an American Air Force pilot, I swear. I only know German as a second language.”
The next natural thought entered Arthur’s mind.
“Wait… which war were you just talking about?”
“You kiddin’ me?” retorted the sassy, young MP.
“He’s prolly just a little, you know, incapacitated… or something,” interjected another MP with a southern drawl. “Idn’t that right, doc?”
“Yeah, that’s a big possibility right now,” replied the doctor. “What war do you think we’re talking about, boy?”
“Well,” said Arthur, completely forgetting the implications of the MP’s earlier racist quip, “I don’t know. He looks pretty young. Maybe Vietnam or something?”
The emotion of the room changed drastically, until the tension was broken by the southern MP.
“Ah, well, guess that jus’ means he ain’t all there yet.”
“Right, yeah,” said the doctor. Out of a pure sense of curiosity for the details of this strange delusion, the doctor kindly interrogated Arthur. “So, what about Vietnam?”
The question obviously baffled Arthur. How could they not know about Vietnam? The average American knew about the whole thing, and these were all men of military status. This had to be a hallucination.
“Well,” reiterated the doctor, “what about Vietnam?”
“What do you mean ’what about Vietnam?’” replied Arthur with a growing tone of frustration. “How do you not know anything about the Vietnam War?”
“Could you describe it to me?”
“What’s there to describe?!”
“Well, who is it between, for example?”
This last statement began to enrage Arthur. This was simply unbelievable. This couldn’t be real.
“Who was it between?! Are you serious? I… I have to be dreaming or something. This is ridiculous!”
“Just calm down… um…” at this point, the doctor realized he didn’t have Arthur’s name. “… well, just what is your name, boy?”
“My name?” Arthur had to lie. This situation was too suspicious. He unwillingly spit out the first name that came to his mind. “My name is Isaac Blair.”
The name belonged to the victim of a cold case file Arthur had been researching while at the Groom Lake Military Base. It was particularly staggering, as there was no body to be found, and therefore no substantial evidence. The only indication that a murder had even occurred was a hastily taken, blurred photograph of a gray wall, which had the words “Isaac Blair was killed in this place” written on it. It was inscribed with an ashy gray substance, and a small river of blood streamed across it. The situation was so difficult to deconstruct, it seemed that it could have been anything. Maybe even a prank. Arthur didn’t know. He didn’t care, either. He had simply stumbled upon the picture accidentally, as it was uncaringly stuffed between two concrete bricks in one of the labs at Groom Lake. So, he was curious. Arthur deserved some mystery now and again. The monotonous fear of the Cold War gave everyone an excuse for the occasional positive distraction. At least that’s how Arthur saw it.
“Isaac Blair, is it? A good name, boy. So, who was this war between?”
“This is nearly profane,” said Arthur. “How can you even call yourselves Americans?!”
“He is clearly still in a state of delusion,” said the doctor to his surrounding ensemble.
“Seriously though, how can a group of soldiers not know about the Vietnam War? It ended in ‘75 for God‘s sake! It was only fourteen years ago!”
The quiet emotion returned once more, and this time, not even the best comedian on earth could crack the awkwardly pervasive silence.
“19...89?” asked the doctor hesitantly, after some quick math. “You think its 1989? Hmm, that’s pretty clever, Isaac. You really are out of it!”
The MP’s laughed once more, and the silence was ended.
“I am not out of it!” shouted Arthur. “It is 1989, the Berlin Wall just fell, and I was on my way back home to Nevada! I was on my way back to my family! What the hell is going on?”
“Berlin Wall? Boy, they can barely build a scarecrow in Berlin right now!” shouted the doctor in a jubilant manner.
“No, no, no! The Berlin Wall! The wall the Soviets had built!”
“You need some sleep, as soon as possible,” said the doctor, ignoring what he thought to be the irrational claims of the frightened Arthur. Then, after some quick thought, the doctor saw fit to reveal to him his present location. “Oh, and by the way, you’re in Nevada right now. Your exotic little gizmo crashed over in Roswell. We took you across the border ’bout an hour ago.”
“Yeah, I forgot about that doc! What was that thing you were flyin‘, Isaac?” asked the southern MP.
“Thing I was… oh, you mean the Blackbird? Sorry, I uh, I mean the SR-71 Blackbird?”
“Blackbird?” replied another MP in the room, who, until now, had not spoken a word. “Now, I’ve been studying aviation for nearly all my life, and I’ve never hear of a ’Blackbird.’ You sure that’s what its called?”
“Am I sure? Well, I’ve been flying it for almost sixteen years now, so I sure damn hope so!”
“Well, I’ve never heard of it-”
“Alright, alright, lets give Isaac some time to himself,” interrupted the doctor calmly. “He clearly needs sleep. The plane crash obviously shook him up pretty well.”
Arthur was wheeled into a nearby room, and the lights were dimmed. He slept.
Fourteen hours later, Arthur slowly awoke.
“Sleep well, Isaac?” It was the doctor, and this time, he was alone.
“Yeah, I suppose. How bad are my injuries?”
“Well, you’ve broken both your legs, three ribs, and you have a hairline fracture on your skull - but its O.K. - we’ve done what surgery we can, and you really just need to rest for a good amount of time. However, there is one other thing you might find very important.”
“Alright, doctor, what is it?”
“Brace yourself, Isaac.” The Doctor handed Arthur a mirror. “We couldn’t do anything about it. I‘m sorry.”
Arthur’s jaw opened slightly, and he licked his lips in disbelief. He couldn’t even recognize his own face. His eyes were still puffy, and his head seemed nearly doubled in size.
“The swelling may go down in a day or so, but the scarring… well, that’s staying with you.”
He hadn’t even seen the scarring, even though it really was the most prominent and noticeable injury he had. Multiple jagged lines disfigured his once frail face. They crossed his eyes, curved down his cheeks, and ended at his neck. He was no longer Arthur Fitzpatrick. He was an old, worn, rag doll.
“Isaac, I need to ask you something.”
Arthur pulled his glued eyes away from the mirror’s image.
“What… what is it?” he asked hesitantly, still transfixed by the foreign face he just viewed.
“We had some of our scientists examine your plane, your uh-”
“Blackbird.”
“Right, right, Blackbird. Well, they looked it over nearly a hundred times, and… they’ve uh… they’ve never seen anything like it. Where did you get it, Isaac?”
“From the USAF, or the U.S. government, I suppose.”
“Well, we… I mean they, the scientists that is, they’ve never seen anything as complicated as your plane. Not even the Soviets could have technology that advanced without us knowing about it.”
“Listen,” said Arthur. “What year do you think this is?”
“What year do I think this is? Let me remind you that you are the airplane crash survivor here, not me - not my coworkers. It is, definitively and most assuredly, 1947.”
Arthur froze and ceded his incredulity to a growing sense of trust in the doctor. Regardless of this bond, nothing really made sense anymore. He was so close to home. So close to his American Sector.
“…I… I don’t understand… this doesn’t make any sense… I… don’t…” Arthur’s line trailed off into an incoherent stutter.
“Isaac, who do you think the president is right now?” asked the doctor, in order to further test if the irrationality had worn off.
“The president? The president’s George Bush. I just don’t… I don’t understand how you guys don’t know that. Why don’t you know that?”
“Uh… I… I think you need to talk to one of our scientists. This area of expertise kind of escapes me… hold on one minute.”
The doctor shuffled quickly out of the room. Arthur sat with a blank look on his face. This wasn’t possible, in any sense of the term. Was this a game? Some improbably elaborate stunt? A short man in a white lab coat crept slowly into the room. He was followed by the young, abrasive MP from earlier: the southern MP and the aviation expert were in the other room, conversing quietly with the doctor.
“Isaac?” asked the man.
“Yes?”
“My name is Dr. Bertrand Strauss. I’m a scientist here.”
“Where is here, doctor?”
“They haven’t told you?”
“They told me I was in Nevada. They didn’t specify any further. Where are we?”
“You are at a research facility at Groom Lake. You’ve been here for about a day now.”
Arthur’s mouth went agape in an image of astonishment, which, based on what his grimace had already provided, wasn’t much of a change. His eyes went blank, and he stared right through the scientist.
“What… what did you say?”
“You are at a research facility at Groom Lake, and you’ve been here for almost a day.”
He was at his home away from home, his old place of work: and his friends had become enemies, even though they hadn’t been born. This was no ploy, and no one was acting. Nobody had known that he worked at Groom Lake; not even his family knew of its location or existence. This was too realistic to be illusory, yet too unrealistic to be believed.
“Groom… Lake…”
“Yes, Isaac. Why does this place baffle you so much?”
Arthur ignored the last question.
“You work on experimental aircraft here, don’t you?” asked Arthur.
“How… how did you know that?”
“He’s a Commie spy,” interjected the young MP.
“Settle down, Jeffrey. I will not tolerate any political nonsense from you,” responded the scientist in an abrupt manner. His demeanor then changed entirely, and a foreboding sense of urgency left his voice cold and shaky. He added briefly, in the aforementioned tone: “Not now, anyway.”
Why not now? Arthur pondered the ominous nature of this last statement. Why was Dr. Strauss so adamantly against a statement of intolerance like this? This question was soon answered.
“Not now, doc? Not now? Then when? We all know the Soviets are getting closer and closer everyday to building a bomb of their own! When are we gonna stand up to people like him?”
“No, no, I’m no Communist,” replied Arthur quickly.
“You’re no Communist? How the hell do you know about this Berlin Wall you mentioned earlier, then? Huh? There ain’t a wall built out anywhere in Germany, which means you know something’s planned. You’re a spy or something.”
“NO! I’m no spy! I… I’m American, I swear! Please, you have to believe me! There’s been some mistake, something’s wrong!”
“Isaac,” said Dr. Strauss in the calmest manner possible, “We need you to relax. Nothing’s going to happen, O.K.? You’re going to be fine. I promise. Jeffrey here is going to roll you into the mess hall for some food, and then outside for some fresh air. This place can feel a little cramped sometimes.”
The scientist paused, then went on.
“Oh and Isaac, we found your bag. Give it to him, Jeffrey.”
“We haven’t even looked in it yet, doc! It could have Soviet information, or even worse - our information!”
“For God’s sake, Jeffrey, does it look like he’s going anywhere? Just give him his bag!”
The MP threw the bag on Arthur’s lap, and began to wheel him out. Arthur was secretly anxious, but realized that he could do nothing to help himself. He couldn’t even walk. He was headed, whether he liked it or not, to the Groom Lake Military Facility mess hall.
“You know, I don’t trust you. I’m not a sap like the others. I know a Commie when I see one, and I ain’t lettin’ you get away with anything. You got that, comrade?” asked the MP stoutly.
“For the last time, I am not a Communist! I’m not a Soviet. I don’t even know Russian!”
“Well you knew German pretty well, so I’m not trustin’ a word that comes out of your mouth!”
As the argument ended, they passed the mess hall.
“Isn’t that the cafeteria?”
“We’re not going there yet, comrade. I got something special for you… something American.”
Arthur was no longer paralyzed in a purely physical sense: fear gripped him everywhere. What could possibly be happening?
“We’re here.”
The MP had wheeled Arthur into a freshly built laboratory; a new addition to the facilities.
“What… uh… what were you going to show me?” asked Arthur, with obvious quivers in his voice.
“Hold on, I gotta go get it first. You wait right here, comrade,” said the MP, a jitter of excitement in his voice. He quickly left the room, and closed the door behind him.
It was obvious to Arthur now. He was going to be killed, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. This couldn’t be a game. Who would take a sick joke like this to the limit of murder? With a dire sense of trembling, Arthur swung over the railing of his hospital stretcher, cutting his fingers on its metal frame. With his arms, the only unbroken extremities that his frantically shaking body could offer, he crawled on the floor towards the door. Locked, of course. Why would any assassin leave his victim with a means of escape? Arthur lofted his arm over the side of the stretcher, which now dwarfed his helpless body. He grabbed his bag, and brought it down with a loud thud.
He began crawling again, now toward a laboratory table, stocked freshly with various chemicals. With his bloody hands, he happened upon a freshly lit Bunsen burner. It had just been used in a recent experiment, but its use was now more apt for Arthur. He fumbled around, finally grasping a small pile of fine ash next to the burner: it was the result of some recently burned geological substance. Gently, he dipped his weak fingers in the powder.
Arthur then made his proverbial last stand. With one hand - the other was occupied by the ash it carried - he dragged himself over to a small corner of the brick laboratory wall. Very quickly, and with a rush of adrenaline to boot, he used the ash as an impromptu source of granite. The ash mixed with his cuts from earlier, a new synthesis of unfamiliar chemicals that this lab would never again witness. On the gray wall, with his blood covered, ashy hands, he smeared the words:
“ISAAC BLAIR WAS KILLED IN THIS PLACE.”
Knowing full well that his murderer could easily wash away his death cry, he yanked the Polaroid from his bag, snapped a photo, and crammed it between two undeserving bricks in the wall. He fully understood the temporal implications of his writing. He was the cause of his old murder mystery. And yet, in a state of primal fear and a simultaneous hope for survival, he inscribed these words: not so that he could find them later, but so someone else could, someone who was around while the racist MP remained in these facilities. From a perspective unblemished by panic, these hopes were in vain. The young MP entered.
“How did you get on the ground, comrade?” he sarcastically asked. “Don’t respond, I know you tried to escape. You really think I would risk you gettin’ back to the Kremlin? There is something coming, Isaac, something your countrymen and my countrymen will be a big part of. Maybe a war, maybe something else. We can all feel it coming, but what it is… well, I can’t say just yet. But as for now, I will do anything to protect my country from Communists like you. Anything. Here is my little surprise, comrade. A Colt M1911, American made. Just like they should be.”
The MP smiled a devious grin.
“Burn in hell, you Soviet bastard!”
The gun fired, and its smoke rose high. The young MP walked slowly over to the blood stained message. He observed as a droplet of blood trickled slowly down the gray, brick wall. Here and there, it rolled fleetingly over a menagerie of harsh black curves and lines, leading ominously closer to the ground. After an eternity, it completed its winding, finally sliding subtly to the ground. One innocent man was killed. Ten insects drowned in his blood. On this day, the Cold War began. At least that’s how Arthur saw it.
************************************************** ****************************************
After word.
On July 7, 1947, an unidentified flying object crash landed on the outskirts of Roswell, New Mexico. This much is true. Poetic license willing, this object was the SR-71 Blackbird of Arthur Fitzpatrick. The 509th Bomb Group intercepted this survivor, an unwilling participant in inexplicable time-travel. They took him to the Groom Lake military facility, which is known to those true-believers as Area 51. The remnants of his plane were studied meticulously, and, through reverse engineering, the first SR-71 Blackbird successfully flew off the run way of Area 51 on April 25, 1962. This much, again, is true. The entire Roswell incident is officially labeled as a weather balloon crash.
Berlin, Germany, 1989.
A droplet of rain trickled slowly down a gray slab of painted wood. Here and there, it rolled fleetingly over a menagerie of harsh black curves and lines, leading ominously closer to the ground. After an eternity, it completed its winding, finally dripping subtly to the ground. Though subtlety, it seems, is merely a relative concept: the insects below drowned in a unceasing torrent of tsunami-sized waves.
Arthur Fitzpatrick sluggishly altered his gaze from the growing brown puddle to its penultimate source: the gray wooden slab, with its vibrant black squiggles. It was a sign. In English, Russian, French, and German, it loudly and undeservedly declared:
“YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.”
Of course he was. Leaving and going back home, as Arthur had done plenty of times before. This time however, it was permanent: the wall had come down only a week ago, and the entirety of the Soviet complex was sure to fall as well. After the undetermined ticking of innumerable minute hands, this failure would reach fruition. An unwarranted fifty-two years had passed (many of which Arthur had not even lived through), and the Cold War was coming to a close. The platitudes of the situation escaped him.
He was a passenger of his own flight, in his own plane. For over fifteen years, he had piloted the ever reliant SR-71 Blackbird. Its nose was a sharp, ash-colored dagger, suited more to an assassin than to an aircraft. Its security was more reliable than anything the Soviet’s could muster: but security, to Arthur, lied only in appearance. The jet was an overwhelmingly daunting piece of American eye candy, and Arthur reckoned that more than words would escape him had he been a Soviet in the face of a behemoth like this. That’s not to say that any Soviet should see the Blackbird. Its entire purpose was concealment and reconnaissance, and as long as Arthur was situated comfortably in the cockpit, with his compatriots back home, it would stay that way. How sweet irony is, however, that even friends become enemies in its presence. Everyone contains threatening potentialities; every country can be hypocritical. The Cold War ended, but war, suffering, even the threat of nuclear destruction, reorganized and continued. Cyclical realities like these would soon become commonplace to Arthur. Perhaps they always were.
New Mexico Air Space, 1989.
Arthur Fitzpatrick looked eagerly out his cockpit window. He observed the gray skyline with quaint objectivity, while looking fitfully upon the buildings below him. The people were invisible to him now, like so many insects. He was less than an hour away from the Groom Lake Military Facility in southern Nevada; his second to last stop before home. Before his wife and children. Before his own bed. He was apathetic toward the Berlin Wall’s destruction, toward the East German people’s newly found liberty. He knew that he shouldn’t have been, but his freedom was a granted and passive existence. He couldn’t even remember if he really had any independence anyway. He pulled out his Polaroid instant camera, the one he carried with him whenever he flew. Arthur always took pictures of the landscapes he flew over for his family. As he absentmindedly clicked the camera and shook the photos, he continued thinking to himself.
Amidst the serenity of these pitiless ruminations of home, family, and the world, the Blackbird took a nosedive. Swearing abruptly to himself, Arthur threw the camera into his bag, and pulled the throttle upward in a somewhat abrasive manner. It wasn’t nearly quick enough. He was through the clouds now, a weak pincushion encased in a temporary house of iron and steel, completely paralyzed against the relentless needle of gravity.
Only four seconds later, and the Blackbird’s wings were torn away from it. Hurdling side by side by side, the aircraft and its now defunct wings fell helplessly toward the unsympathetic New Mexican desert. His ejector seat jammed; any hope that remained was in vain.
They say that when you approach death, your life flashes before for your eyes: that you accept God and whisper a prayer. No prayer came to Arthur’s lips, nor did God appeal to him. All he could see was a single raindrop, falling slowly down a bleak, gray sign. It tumbled repeatedly over black curves and lines: now on the sign, now onto the dry floor of the New Mexican landscape. The flightless bird and its black wings rolled gently passed one another. The raindrop neared its end. Arthur Fitzpatrick held his breath; held onto anything he had left. The water droplet cohesively struggled against freefall, all without the slightest knowledge of its current situation. Both let go. One awoke.
Roswell, New Mexico, 1947.
Arthur Fitzpatrick was roused by the din of a foreign, luminous thunder. Hesitantly, he opened his eyes, only to realize that it made no noticeable difference. Was he dead? Dreaming? He tried to move. In retrospect, Arthur thought this to be the biggest mistake he ever made: he did just come to after a plane crash. He screamed in agony. The end of what he thought to be every nerve in his body flared up as if pierced by a white-hot iron, and his screaming only exacerbated the unbearable pain. He again lost consciousness.
“Over here! Right here, yeah. There could have been someone in this thing!” yelled an unknown voice.
“What the hell is this? Is it a ship or something?” asked another, equally tense obscurity.
As he faded in and out of an unconscious stupor, Arthur picked up only portions of the muddled conversation. Whenever he was awake, he wished to scream out for help: this instinct was repressed in light of the unbearable pain it brought him. Any attempt at moving was likewise stymied by the nuisance of his agony. With nothing less uncomfortable to do, he listened to what he could hear.
“Maybe it’s a Sovi…”
“… think that’s what it could…”
“… do you know for su…”
Again the voices became muddled, as if they were receding into a distant plane. For three minutes he waited: three unrelenting minutes, so terribly long that each of them separately felt like an hour. Finally they ended.
“… need to report back, its getting dark.”
“… uess you’re right, let’s…”
Any instance of aid would soon depart from him, unless he could temporarily bear a single scream. He breathed deeply for a couple of seconds, and then let out the largest yell his body could presently tolerate. Its sound waves reverberated within his iron chamber: his ears now hurt, as well as his body.
“… hear that?”
“Yeah, where’d it come from?”
“I think the ship. Shine the flashlight here.”
“Is that… is that an arm?!”
“Oh Christ, it is! Sir, sir, can you hear me? Can you hear me?”
Arthur mumbled a tepid response.
“He can hear us… We’ll get you out of there immediately, you got that?”
Before he could respond, the effects of the his previous scream caught up with him. Again he faded to black.
Arthur awoke on a hospital stretcher, a fact not to be learned until a day from now. He could currently see very little: his puffy eyelids consumed his eyes and left his vision bleak. Delusion and fear equally contributed to his now strange behavior, and he imagined himself in a German hospital, not even three weeks ago. Despite his temporarily irrational thought processes, even a fully recovered Arthur Fitzpatrick would be hard-pressed with the realization that his experience in a German hospital wouldn’t really occur for another forty-two years.
“Can you hear me?” asked an old doctor draped in a pristine lab coat.
“Ich kann nicht das Gefühl, mein Körper,” replied a weary and still clearly confused Arthur.
A young, astonished MP glared warily into Arthur’s eyes.
“Aw hell, doc, he’s a Krout!” said the soldier, with a strange combination of glee and irritation in his voice.
“Relax, kid,” replied the doctor. “Don’t act like you know what you’re talking about. We all know you were only overseas for three weeks! Besides, Jeff, the damn war was already over by the time you got there!”
Some surrounding men laughed and the doctor shot a generous grin, as if to say he was just poking fun at the poor kid. The laughter provoked something within Arthur’s mind. He cleared his throat, ready to greet his aid.
“I’m not German,” he said.
“Whoa, whoa,” replied the doctor. “It doesn’t matter, boy, we’ll fix you up! At least we’ll try, anyway.”
“No, no, you misunderstand. I’m an American Air Force pilot, I swear. I only know German as a second language.”
The next natural thought entered Arthur’s mind.
“Wait… which war were you just talking about?”
“You kiddin’ me?” retorted the sassy, young MP.
“He’s prolly just a little, you know, incapacitated… or something,” interjected another MP with a southern drawl. “Idn’t that right, doc?”
“Yeah, that’s a big possibility right now,” replied the doctor. “What war do you think we’re talking about, boy?”
“Well,” said Arthur, completely forgetting the implications of the MP’s earlier racist quip, “I don’t know. He looks pretty young. Maybe Vietnam or something?”
The emotion of the room changed drastically, until the tension was broken by the southern MP.
“Ah, well, guess that jus’ means he ain’t all there yet.”
“Right, yeah,” said the doctor. Out of a pure sense of curiosity for the details of this strange delusion, the doctor kindly interrogated Arthur. “So, what about Vietnam?”
The question obviously baffled Arthur. How could they not know about Vietnam? The average American knew about the whole thing, and these were all men of military status. This had to be a hallucination.
“Well,” reiterated the doctor, “what about Vietnam?”
“What do you mean ’what about Vietnam?’” replied Arthur with a growing tone of frustration. “How do you not know anything about the Vietnam War?”
“Could you describe it to me?”
“What’s there to describe?!”
“Well, who is it between, for example?”
This last statement began to enrage Arthur. This was simply unbelievable. This couldn’t be real.
“Who was it between?! Are you serious? I… I have to be dreaming or something. This is ridiculous!”
“Just calm down… um…” at this point, the doctor realized he didn’t have Arthur’s name. “… well, just what is your name, boy?”
“My name?” Arthur had to lie. This situation was too suspicious. He unwillingly spit out the first name that came to his mind. “My name is Isaac Blair.”
The name belonged to the victim of a cold case file Arthur had been researching while at the Groom Lake Military Base. It was particularly staggering, as there was no body to be found, and therefore no substantial evidence. The only indication that a murder had even occurred was a hastily taken, blurred photograph of a gray wall, which had the words “Isaac Blair was killed in this place” written on it. It was inscribed with an ashy gray substance, and a small river of blood streamed across it. The situation was so difficult to deconstruct, it seemed that it could have been anything. Maybe even a prank. Arthur didn’t know. He didn’t care, either. He had simply stumbled upon the picture accidentally, as it was uncaringly stuffed between two concrete bricks in one of the labs at Groom Lake. So, he was curious. Arthur deserved some mystery now and again. The monotonous fear of the Cold War gave everyone an excuse for the occasional positive distraction. At least that’s how Arthur saw it.
“Isaac Blair, is it? A good name, boy. So, who was this war between?”
“This is nearly profane,” said Arthur. “How can you even call yourselves Americans?!”
“He is clearly still in a state of delusion,” said the doctor to his surrounding ensemble.
“Seriously though, how can a group of soldiers not know about the Vietnam War? It ended in ‘75 for God‘s sake! It was only fourteen years ago!”
The quiet emotion returned once more, and this time, not even the best comedian on earth could crack the awkwardly pervasive silence.
“19...89?” asked the doctor hesitantly, after some quick math. “You think its 1989? Hmm, that’s pretty clever, Isaac. You really are out of it!”
The MP’s laughed once more, and the silence was ended.
“I am not out of it!” shouted Arthur. “It is 1989, the Berlin Wall just fell, and I was on my way back home to Nevada! I was on my way back to my family! What the hell is going on?”
“Berlin Wall? Boy, they can barely build a scarecrow in Berlin right now!” shouted the doctor in a jubilant manner.
“No, no, no! The Berlin Wall! The wall the Soviets had built!”
“You need some sleep, as soon as possible,” said the doctor, ignoring what he thought to be the irrational claims of the frightened Arthur. Then, after some quick thought, the doctor saw fit to reveal to him his present location. “Oh, and by the way, you’re in Nevada right now. Your exotic little gizmo crashed over in Roswell. We took you across the border ’bout an hour ago.”
“Yeah, I forgot about that doc! What was that thing you were flyin‘, Isaac?” asked the southern MP.
“Thing I was… oh, you mean the Blackbird? Sorry, I uh, I mean the SR-71 Blackbird?”
“Blackbird?” replied another MP in the room, who, until now, had not spoken a word. “Now, I’ve been studying aviation for nearly all my life, and I’ve never hear of a ’Blackbird.’ You sure that’s what its called?”
“Am I sure? Well, I’ve been flying it for almost sixteen years now, so I sure damn hope so!”
“Well, I’ve never heard of it-”
“Alright, alright, lets give Isaac some time to himself,” interrupted the doctor calmly. “He clearly needs sleep. The plane crash obviously shook him up pretty well.”
Arthur was wheeled into a nearby room, and the lights were dimmed. He slept.
Fourteen hours later, Arthur slowly awoke.
“Sleep well, Isaac?” It was the doctor, and this time, he was alone.
“Yeah, I suppose. How bad are my injuries?”
“Well, you’ve broken both your legs, three ribs, and you have a hairline fracture on your skull - but its O.K. - we’ve done what surgery we can, and you really just need to rest for a good amount of time. However, there is one other thing you might find very important.”
“Alright, doctor, what is it?”
“Brace yourself, Isaac.” The Doctor handed Arthur a mirror. “We couldn’t do anything about it. I‘m sorry.”
Arthur’s jaw opened slightly, and he licked his lips in disbelief. He couldn’t even recognize his own face. His eyes were still puffy, and his head seemed nearly doubled in size.
“The swelling may go down in a day or so, but the scarring… well, that’s staying with you.”
He hadn’t even seen the scarring, even though it really was the most prominent and noticeable injury he had. Multiple jagged lines disfigured his once frail face. They crossed his eyes, curved down his cheeks, and ended at his neck. He was no longer Arthur Fitzpatrick. He was an old, worn, rag doll.
“Isaac, I need to ask you something.”
Arthur pulled his glued eyes away from the mirror’s image.
“What… what is it?” he asked hesitantly, still transfixed by the foreign face he just viewed.
“We had some of our scientists examine your plane, your uh-”
“Blackbird.”
“Right, right, Blackbird. Well, they looked it over nearly a hundred times, and… they’ve uh… they’ve never seen anything like it. Where did you get it, Isaac?”
“From the USAF, or the U.S. government, I suppose.”
“Well, we… I mean they, the scientists that is, they’ve never seen anything as complicated as your plane. Not even the Soviets could have technology that advanced without us knowing about it.”
“Listen,” said Arthur. “What year do you think this is?”
“What year do I think this is? Let me remind you that you are the airplane crash survivor here, not me - not my coworkers. It is, definitively and most assuredly, 1947.”
Arthur froze and ceded his incredulity to a growing sense of trust in the doctor. Regardless of this bond, nothing really made sense anymore. He was so close to home. So close to his American Sector.
“…I… I don’t understand… this doesn’t make any sense… I… don’t…” Arthur’s line trailed off into an incoherent stutter.
“Isaac, who do you think the president is right now?” asked the doctor, in order to further test if the irrationality had worn off.
“The president? The president’s George Bush. I just don’t… I don’t understand how you guys don’t know that. Why don’t you know that?”
“Uh… I… I think you need to talk to one of our scientists. This area of expertise kind of escapes me… hold on one minute.”
The doctor shuffled quickly out of the room. Arthur sat with a blank look on his face. This wasn’t possible, in any sense of the term. Was this a game? Some improbably elaborate stunt? A short man in a white lab coat crept slowly into the room. He was followed by the young, abrasive MP from earlier: the southern MP and the aviation expert were in the other room, conversing quietly with the doctor.
“Isaac?” asked the man.
“Yes?”
“My name is Dr. Bertrand Strauss. I’m a scientist here.”
“Where is here, doctor?”
“They haven’t told you?”
“They told me I was in Nevada. They didn’t specify any further. Where are we?”
“You are at a research facility at Groom Lake. You’ve been here for about a day now.”
Arthur’s mouth went agape in an image of astonishment, which, based on what his grimace had already provided, wasn’t much of a change. His eyes went blank, and he stared right through the scientist.
“What… what did you say?”
“You are at a research facility at Groom Lake, and you’ve been here for almost a day.”
He was at his home away from home, his old place of work: and his friends had become enemies, even though they hadn’t been born. This was no ploy, and no one was acting. Nobody had known that he worked at Groom Lake; not even his family knew of its location or existence. This was too realistic to be illusory, yet too unrealistic to be believed.
“Groom… Lake…”
“Yes, Isaac. Why does this place baffle you so much?”
Arthur ignored the last question.
“You work on experimental aircraft here, don’t you?” asked Arthur.
“How… how did you know that?”
“He’s a Commie spy,” interjected the young MP.
“Settle down, Jeffrey. I will not tolerate any political nonsense from you,” responded the scientist in an abrupt manner. His demeanor then changed entirely, and a foreboding sense of urgency left his voice cold and shaky. He added briefly, in the aforementioned tone: “Not now, anyway.”
Why not now? Arthur pondered the ominous nature of this last statement. Why was Dr. Strauss so adamantly against a statement of intolerance like this? This question was soon answered.
“Not now, doc? Not now? Then when? We all know the Soviets are getting closer and closer everyday to building a bomb of their own! When are we gonna stand up to people like him?”
“No, no, I’m no Communist,” replied Arthur quickly.
“You’re no Communist? How the hell do you know about this Berlin Wall you mentioned earlier, then? Huh? There ain’t a wall built out anywhere in Germany, which means you know something’s planned. You’re a spy or something.”
“NO! I’m no spy! I… I’m American, I swear! Please, you have to believe me! There’s been some mistake, something’s wrong!”
“Isaac,” said Dr. Strauss in the calmest manner possible, “We need you to relax. Nothing’s going to happen, O.K.? You’re going to be fine. I promise. Jeffrey here is going to roll you into the mess hall for some food, and then outside for some fresh air. This place can feel a little cramped sometimes.”
The scientist paused, then went on.
“Oh and Isaac, we found your bag. Give it to him, Jeffrey.”
“We haven’t even looked in it yet, doc! It could have Soviet information, or even worse - our information!”
“For God’s sake, Jeffrey, does it look like he’s going anywhere? Just give him his bag!”
The MP threw the bag on Arthur’s lap, and began to wheel him out. Arthur was secretly anxious, but realized that he could do nothing to help himself. He couldn’t even walk. He was headed, whether he liked it or not, to the Groom Lake Military Facility mess hall.
“You know, I don’t trust you. I’m not a sap like the others. I know a Commie when I see one, and I ain’t lettin’ you get away with anything. You got that, comrade?” asked the MP stoutly.
“For the last time, I am not a Communist! I’m not a Soviet. I don’t even know Russian!”
“Well you knew German pretty well, so I’m not trustin’ a word that comes out of your mouth!”
As the argument ended, they passed the mess hall.
“Isn’t that the cafeteria?”
“We’re not going there yet, comrade. I got something special for you… something American.”
Arthur was no longer paralyzed in a purely physical sense: fear gripped him everywhere. What could possibly be happening?
“We’re here.”
The MP had wheeled Arthur into a freshly built laboratory; a new addition to the facilities.
“What… uh… what were you going to show me?” asked Arthur, with obvious quivers in his voice.
“Hold on, I gotta go get it first. You wait right here, comrade,” said the MP, a jitter of excitement in his voice. He quickly left the room, and closed the door behind him.
It was obvious to Arthur now. He was going to be killed, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. This couldn’t be a game. Who would take a sick joke like this to the limit of murder? With a dire sense of trembling, Arthur swung over the railing of his hospital stretcher, cutting his fingers on its metal frame. With his arms, the only unbroken extremities that his frantically shaking body could offer, he crawled on the floor towards the door. Locked, of course. Why would any assassin leave his victim with a means of escape? Arthur lofted his arm over the side of the stretcher, which now dwarfed his helpless body. He grabbed his bag, and brought it down with a loud thud.
He began crawling again, now toward a laboratory table, stocked freshly with various chemicals. With his bloody hands, he happened upon a freshly lit Bunsen burner. It had just been used in a recent experiment, but its use was now more apt for Arthur. He fumbled around, finally grasping a small pile of fine ash next to the burner: it was the result of some recently burned geological substance. Gently, he dipped his weak fingers in the powder.
Arthur then made his proverbial last stand. With one hand - the other was occupied by the ash it carried - he dragged himself over to a small corner of the brick laboratory wall. Very quickly, and with a rush of adrenaline to boot, he used the ash as an impromptu source of granite. The ash mixed with his cuts from earlier, a new synthesis of unfamiliar chemicals that this lab would never again witness. On the gray wall, with his blood covered, ashy hands, he smeared the words:
“ISAAC BLAIR WAS KILLED IN THIS PLACE.”
Knowing full well that his murderer could easily wash away his death cry, he yanked the Polaroid from his bag, snapped a photo, and crammed it between two undeserving bricks in the wall. He fully understood the temporal implications of his writing. He was the cause of his old murder mystery. And yet, in a state of primal fear and a simultaneous hope for survival, he inscribed these words: not so that he could find them later, but so someone else could, someone who was around while the racist MP remained in these facilities. From a perspective unblemished by panic, these hopes were in vain. The young MP entered.
“How did you get on the ground, comrade?” he sarcastically asked. “Don’t respond, I know you tried to escape. You really think I would risk you gettin’ back to the Kremlin? There is something coming, Isaac, something your countrymen and my countrymen will be a big part of. Maybe a war, maybe something else. We can all feel it coming, but what it is… well, I can’t say just yet. But as for now, I will do anything to protect my country from Communists like you. Anything. Here is my little surprise, comrade. A Colt M1911, American made. Just like they should be.”
The MP smiled a devious grin.
“Burn in hell, you Soviet bastard!”
The gun fired, and its smoke rose high. The young MP walked slowly over to the blood stained message. He observed as a droplet of blood trickled slowly down the gray, brick wall. Here and there, it rolled fleetingly over a menagerie of harsh black curves and lines, leading ominously closer to the ground. After an eternity, it completed its winding, finally sliding subtly to the ground. One innocent man was killed. Ten insects drowned in his blood. On this day, the Cold War began. At least that’s how Arthur saw it.
************************************************** ****************************************
After word.
On July 7, 1947, an unidentified flying object crash landed on the outskirts of Roswell, New Mexico. This much is true. Poetic license willing, this object was the SR-71 Blackbird of Arthur Fitzpatrick. The 509th Bomb Group intercepted this survivor, an unwilling participant in inexplicable time-travel. They took him to the Groom Lake military facility, which is known to those true-believers as Area 51. The remnants of his plane were studied meticulously, and, through reverse engineering, the first SR-71 Blackbird successfully flew off the run way of Area 51 on April 25, 1962. This much, again, is true. The entire Roswell incident is officially labeled as a weather balloon crash.