Langur Haust

 Synopsis: Falling is only dangerous when it comes to an end. 

           

Simon Christopher Joseph Cooper has been falling for three days straight. That’s almost enough time for him to figure out all the thousands of words he can spell using the letters from his unusually long name. But his mind has been on other things. He’s thirsty, he’s hungry, he’s tired, he’s worried about where he’ll land. There’s no time for anagrams and Scrabble.

 S.C.J. Cooper, or Simon, as I’ll call him, fell down a hole the other day when trying to climb around a precipice. He liked doing things with no practical purpose, like we all do, simply for the feeling he got doing them. Putting himself in danger was a common practice that made Simon feel alive. Now he isn’t sure how he feels.

            Here he is, falling endlessly. The cliff he was climbing was a daunting landform that had been mostly untouched by the people of his town. Simon is known around town as a big talker and a difficult person to like. He has his qualities, but they reside mostly in his wardrobe and his penetrating stare that women call alluring and men call alarmingly psychopathic, like two vacant orbs staring into the world with bad intent. That daunting cliff sat right outside of town, overlooking a gaping pit thought to be a cave. A cave no one bothered to explore.

            The cave, as Simon found, is a pit that goes on forever. What’s really something is that this pit isn’t pitch black like you’d expect. The sunlight seems to bounce off the walls so freely that it bounces all the way down into the cave during the day, and it never gets any darker no matter how far down you go. Or at least, as far as Simon has gone so far. When the sun is out, Simon sees the rocky walls of the pit speed by him at dangerous speeds, and sometimes he reaches out to them, hoping he can grab a ledge or a sharp surface and cut his limbs so he can bleed to death instead of awaiting some impact that might never come.

            Although it’s lit all the way down, Simon can’t see the bottom. It looks like this pit just keeps on going. As he’s been falling, he’s had some time to think.

            “A Mexican once said it’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. What no one has said is where dying on your head, or your back, or in mid-air falls on the scale of desirability.”

            Initially, when Simon first fell from the cliff, he waved his arms and screamed and his heart seemed to freeze into a painful ball in his chest. He turned his head away from the ground, afraid to watch the earth race toward his face. But when he noticed he’d been falling for almost a minute, he looked down to see he was descending down a long hole. There was a noisy warble in his ears as the wind blew past.

            In 1960, a US Air Force Captain by the name of Joseph Kittinger walked off of a helium balloon floating 102,800 feet in the sky. He set the record for the world’s longest skydive. At terminal velocity, Joseph was falling 275 meters per second, or 902 feet per second. That’s pretty close to the speed of sound.

            Simon didn’t know any of this, but he knew skydiving was a thing he wanted to one day try. He also knew what terminal velocity was. He knows he’s probably reached it. He’s been falling at 902 feet per second for three days. What he doesn’t know is that this means he has been falling for about 259,200 seconds, and has traveled about 44,280 miles. The diameter of the Earth is only about 7,900 miles, depending on what points you look at. So Simon has fallen the distance of almost six Earths.

            Of course this sounds outlandish. You notice a paradox right away. If he’s fallen so far, then he can’t be on (or in) Earth anymore. And if he’s not on Earth, where’s that gravitational force coming from that’s pulling him down, down, down? I don’t know. Simon doesn’t know, either. He doesn’t know how far he has fallen, although he can gauge that his speed is something incredible. Something else you might find paradoxical in this descent is that, if he is somehow on or within Earth, he ought to be getting closer to the center of the planet by now. That means the magnitude of the gravitational force should change with his depth. And once he falls past the center of the Earth, he’ll in effect be falling upward, which should at some point come to a stop, only to turn around and throw him back down the long trip inside the planet. This hasn’t happened yet. And if it was going to, it would have happened by now.

            The first few hours of Simon’s fall were uneventful. He tried swimming through the air, and found it was actually possible, but very hard when so much of it is pushing up against you at such a high speed. It’s like swimming through the blast from a fire hose. Or a waterfall, if that waterfall is upside down. After air-swimming drained his energy, Simon closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The wind constantly punching him in the face and rippling across his flesh was painful and made sleep impossible at first. But he kept his eyes closed, because they were dry as the Sahara after being pummeled with incessant bullets of air. He also kept his mouth closed, finding that the air dried him out pretty fast. Eyes closed, falling freely, he let go of his worries. He thought about that girl back home who used to ask him if he had seen the latest commercials. It was always a funny commercial. She thought so, anyway. Simon never laughed at commercials, and he talked bad about people who watched TV, considering himself above it.

            “Have you seen the commercial where the…” she started.

            He never saw them. Now he never would. Unless…

            “What if I land in a cold pool of water?”

            Simon didn’t know that if you land in water at 902 feet per second, you’ll end up the same way you would if you hit rocks. Dead and destroyed.

            While Simon hoped for water he tore off his shirt, which had been chaffing him ever since he started his fall. It disappeared up, up and away out of his reach, and he immediately regretted it, because high speed winds are cold.

            Speaking of water, it’s good Simon brought a bottle of water with him on his climb. He’d been drinking pretty steadily while on the cliff. Where his water bottle went off to when he fell he wasn’t sure. It isn’t with him now. Because he drank a lot, he was hydrated by the time he fell, and that meant he could stave off thirst for a while. But after only a few more hours of falling, his bladder was full. Seeing no alternative, he unzipped his pants against all the force of wind and, with a bit of a struggle and some air-swimming and maneuvering, he aimed the front of his body upward, and peed freely into the air above him. His stream of practically clear pee zoomed away above him, out of sight. Zipping his pants was as much of a chore as unzipping them had been, but he did it, and let his body relax. He kept his eyes closed for the rest of the day in hopes they would stop burning.

            The girl would ask him about things besides commercials, like his thoughts on premarital sex. He used to be against it, but after graduating high school and getting a job as a tow-truck driver premarital sex became his hobby. He never had premarital sex with her. She was too much of a thinker. Simon was a doer. He pointed out this difference between the two of them from time to time to persuade her they weren’t compatible.

            “You’re a thinker, I’m a doer. You sit all day thinking about commercials and whether or not sex is alright. I’m a doer. I do things I want because I’m a man of action. I don’t sit around in my turquoise bedroom thinking about boys, or hoping things go my way, or contemplating doing something, wondering if it’s worth it, wondering if it’s acceptable. I just do it. That’s why I’ll do this.” He put his tongue in her mouth, just like that. No warning, no questions, just straight for the tonsils. “But that’s as far as it goes. No sex with you. No relationship. I’ve got a date tonight. There’s going to be premarital sex. You can sit at home thinking. I’ll be out doing. Doing a stranger.”

            As Simon fell, he found himself for the first time in a situation in which the only thing he could do was think. He began to think he regretted being a doer and not much of a thinker. There has to be some kind of a balance between the two.

            The first night he slept a solid three hours. It’s not the first time someone has slept in freefall, since astronauts do it all the time. But it was the first time anyone has ever slept in an actual high speed descent against air, with earth rushing past them, being fully aware of his own velocity, with no food or drink or shelter. The second day was much like the first, with Simon wondering if he would soon hit the bottom and die painlessly. He was hungry and thirsty and tired. Sharp pains had appeared in his head and neck, and his stomach felt like it was digesting itself. He was too weak to try air-swimming. By now he understood the futility of such an endeavor. He spread his arms and legs, kept his eyes and mouth closed as tightly as he could, and regretted his decision to climb a cliff no one had climbed before. Throughout the second day, Simon slept on and off, coming in and out of consciousness against his will, like he was a lab experiment in a sleep-depriving torture chamber. This lasted well into the third day. It’s been driving him mad.

            He’s still falling, his eyes are still closed. He opens them from time to time when he hopes the bottom of the pit is within sight, but it never is. And his eyes always burn and are far too dry and blurred over for him to see anything. He’s become dehydrated, going on three days without water. He knows if some mach 1 impact doesn’t kill him soon, his body will kill itself from lack of water. And if the dehydration magically goes on too long, starvation will do the trick.

            The little and big thoughts that trickle through Simon’s neural branches have started to twirl into something that looks like a single thought. He can’t make out individual ideas, anymore. Three days of hearing nothing but the deafening sound of air blowing into his ears has turned his brain into pulp. He entertains whimsical philosophies and bizarre notions of unreality as he falls, having concluded that all of life was an illusion, and this fall is his only reality. He envisions s a new religion that he says he’s always belonged to. It’s a religion full of materialistic gods and hateful deities that only exist to torment humankind. But on more careful consideration, Simon decides humankind doesn’t exist. There is only him. He is all there has ever been. Starvation hasn’t quite kicked in, since the body is capable of going a few days without food. But without water, the body just shuts down. His body has gone into the stages one goes into when fasting.

Simon had once read that fasting for a certain time could give one psychic abilities. He’d tried to fast for a day, but when he noticed no improvement in his mental powers, he gave up and ate hamburgers all night. He’d also heard that eating only plants could put one in tune with the spirit world, making one more sensitive to the colorful psychic openness of nature. He became a vegetarian for a week and felt nothing but loathing for all life. Again, he ate hamburgers all night.

Even though he doesn’t notice it, and he has far more important things to worry about, fasting is having a positive effect on some parts of Simon’s body. His natural autophagy has improved, meaning that the cells in his body are repairing themselves and recycling waste material faster than ever. His levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein important for neurogenesis, have increased. This means his neurons are healthy. If we told Simon this it’s unlikely it would offer him much satisfaction.

Thirst is his biggest problem. Now that ideas are falling in on themselves into one massive hive of ideation, Simon is coming up with novel solutions to his predicament. He used to have a dehumidifier in his basement to keep all his conspiracy theory books from molding over. He’s been a long time believer that the moon landing was a hoax, that contrails in the sky are actually chemtrails left by insidious agencies trying to control humankind, and that certain American presidents were part of the Illuminati. Books on these topics were important to him. The dehumidifier kept them pristine. When the dehumidifier’s tank was full, Simon would empty the water into the sink. This happened about twice a day. After some time, though, he thought it wasteful and started drinking the water pulled from the air. He didn’t know that’s not good for a man, as there are an assortment of biological agents in the water not suitable for human consumption. But for a little over a week Simon drank nothing but dehumidifier water. When he came down with a mean stomach virus, he never linked it to this.

Now that he’s dehydrated and stuck in a never-ending tube of cold air, Simon has decided to try to suck the moisture from the air around him. This hole isn’t far from his house. And he lives in a humid area. Even though he’s traveled over 44,000 miles by now, a fact he’s still unaware of, he thinks he’s close to home. He’s gaping his mouth open, sticking out his tongue, and imagining the tiny droplets of water in the air grabbing onto the buds of his tongue. What’s really happening is the air is drying out what little moisture is left inside him. He’s swallowing more air than he’s breathing.

It seems all is lost for dear Simon Christopher Joseph Cooper. One long fall has drained him of everything in a very slow way. But something unexpected has happened. The narrow pit he’s been falling down for three days, no more than twenty feet in width, has opened into some enormous space, like a huge cave.

He opens his eyes to see a dark red cave floor some thousands of feet below. It’s coming up at him fast. There’s a big lake, a slew of stalagmites reaching up from the ground, and, to his surprise, trees, a flowing river, and a waterfall tying it all together. It’s beautiful. Green, blue, brown, red, a wash of bright white light floods everything through a light mist.

“Here’s the end,” Simon is by now ready for death.

For the first time in three days Simon feels a force other than air against his body. It’s as though he’s slowly regaining the weight he once had. His fall is slowing. He’s getting closer to the ground, but it’s not rushing up at him at such a heart pounding speed. He lands with a crack against the flat red rock floor of the cave. Not at 902 feet per second, but a comfortable 3 feet per second, which still hurts when landing on the stomach and face. He lies motionless for minutes. He’s breathing heavy. The sound of rushing wind has ceased, and the constant force against his skin, always pulling his flesh away from his bones, has disappeared. He just wants to sleep.

He crawls to the river that flows into the lake. He scoops water into his mouth, splashes it on his face, and rubs it over his chest. He sticks his head in the water and screams. He rolls away from the water and lies facing up. The cave’s ceiling is thousands of feet high, making it larger than any cave Simon has ever heard of. He can see the hole he fell out of. It looks like it goes on forever.

Simon closes his eyes for some time but he doesn’t sleep. It’s so quiet. While he watches the mist float through the cave he learns, in some sibylline way, that he’s fallen 44,000 miles. It isn’t clear how this knowledge comes to him, but it has something to do with the particles in the mist, the vibrations of the cave floor, the far away white noise of the waterfall, the trickle of the river, his increased levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor feeding his neurons. He just knows. And this knowledge terrifies him. He can’t be on Earth. He can’t be inside it, beside it, above it, below it, or anywhere close to it. Holding strong to the conviction that no man has ever set foot on Earth’s moon, Simon wonders if he will be the first man on it. Perhaps he’s on it already. He doesn’t know the moon is much further than 44,000 miles from Earth. Where he is is much more inexplicable than he knows.

“If it’s not the moon,” he ponders, “it’s the stomach of a great dragon the size of the Sun. I’ve been falling down its throat for days.”

This pondering about stomachs reminds Simon he’s starving to death. His stomach is probably imploding and half digested. The harder he thinks about where he is, the less he wants to live. Soon he’ll cave in on himself. It’s been a long fall. The ground cracks under him as he comes to his feet. He has more strength than he thought. In half an hour he’s explored the whole area, with a slow limp, and a light head. The lake leads all the way to another cliff, where it becomes a waterfall. Simon can’t see the bottom. The sound of the falling water echoes into a spooky infinity that suggests it’s all contained within this massive cave. Beyond the cliff it’s impossible to see anything because of the thick mist. There’s white light from above, and darkness down below. The water is cool when he jumps in the lake. No fish are swimming in it, much to Simon’s displeasure, as he’s hoping to eat something.  But a swim through water feels better than a swim through air.

While Simon waits for more knowledge to slowly materialize inside his brain from an unknown source, the staggering urge to swim to the edge of the lake and fall down the waterfall takes him over. He has a feeling it will be another long fall. But he’s in such bad shape there’s no chance he’ll make it to the bottom. There might not even be a bottom. He also considers drowning himself, but that morbid curiosity soon transforms into the happy realization that if he falls with the water, he won’t have to worry about dehydration. What little he knows of the human body tells him he’ll be fine without food so long as he has water. Having found no way out of the cavern into which he fell, Simon has given up hope of returning home. The knowledge of his 44,000 mile trip seems to have been a fluke, a singular incident that will not repeat. No more mysterious knowledge is coming. That’s how he knows it’s time to go. He doesn’t swim, he only drifts, letting the slow current of the lake pull him toward the edge.

Simon anticipates the fall, but before he notices how far he’s floated, he’s over the edge, falling once more, plunging into infinite depths as the wind screams by, as fear once more excites his senses. Water surrounds him, it’s all he sees. It becomes darker as he falls further, unlike last time. He still can’t hear the sound of the water hitting bottom. Down he goes, accelerating 32 feet per second-squared, soon to reach a terminal velocity of 902 feet per second. He will never be found.