Suffocation

I couldn’t breathe. No matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn’t force the air to go far down enough into my lungs to support my life – and I wanted to live! Until very recently, I had taken air for granted. But, now, I couldn't. Its absence made my head and chest feel like they were going to explode, so I jumped out of bed to save myself from what felt like suffocation.

Where was the air?

As I sprang up, choking and gasping, I knew that the air was no longer a mutually sustaining force - the relationship between it and my lungs had been severed.

My wife glared at me and turned to face the wall, breathed her own air – an air to which I no longer belonged. I was cut off from my life support system. Pushed out of the airlock, I was Dr. Frank Poole from Kubrick's 2001, my lungs on the verge of exploding in the vacancy of space, bereft of the warmth and security of my bed, damaged by my companion’s lack of touch. The complete and final severance from her had already begun, and my flaccid and sick body was being pulled away at what my hallucinating mind informed me was the speed of light.

My certain and inevitable suffocation, however, was seemingly only a temporary phenomenon, because once I had sprung up from the bed, I had found the air again. But this air was no longer the air of mutuality; rather, it was an air that had found me, that had saved me. The action of my legs made air return to me as a friend who’d gladly sink into my lungs and provide me with strength enough to lean against the bedroom door. Even though I was relieved and grateful for the attentiveness, I knew from experience that its salvation was a temporary respite, just as I knew the loneliness of my solitary lean.

An unwilling Poole, I’d rediscovered air on this night, the night of my twenty-eighth birthday, three days after the NYC towers had fallen in ashen heaps of fiery vacuums. I leaned against the door with just enough life in me to wheeze, regain my breath, and hallucinate again.

Darkness had impossibly overcome the brightly lit offices and cubicles, the parents, children, brothers, and sisters hiding underneath their desks. The lack of air in the towers had caused some chokers to jump out of skyscraper windows rather than face another moment without air. I saw all of them fall, all of them land on the New York sidewalk, burning in fiery heaps.

Their lack of air was so unbearable that they’d made their decisions to jump – some of them holding hands as they went – after they’d called a last loved one, a satellite or phone line serving as one final attempt to re-create the air that both breathed daily as a matter of course. The air vanished forever with a final click, but the shared words were not a glare but a spoken and remembered reminder of the mutuality of breathing.

I could only imagine the fatigue of the people who jumped and the people who had no choice but to go down in the burning steel of the collapse. And there I was in my hallucinating, crippled and fatigued, not having slept in days, leaning against the bedroom door and drifting off to sleep (or was it death?). And then sliding, falling, regaining consciousness, and hating my wife for her glare and for the simple fact that she could sleep so peacefully while I suffered in my frantic pursuit of air – and the USA was already gearing up to have its revenge on the oil-endowed people who, it assumed, were behind the fall of the towers. And, my crazed brain told me that my wife, in her sleep, was already dreaming up ways to have her revenge on me.

The college kids next door had a synthesizer, whose angry metallic noise pulses zapped my brain as I collapsed to the floor, near tears as I started to suffocate again. The problem, I know now, was that my heart was failing and that my own fluids were filling my lungs faster than I could leap up to prevent myself from choking on them.

My wife slept peacefully, and the harsh red numbers on the digital clock that lay on the window ledge, told me that it was past midnight. Despite being officially one year older, I wasn’t any smarter. I had no idea what was wrong with me and why the formerly easy process of breathing had suddenly become the most difficult of tasks, a Boston Marathon of exhausting endurance that had paradoxically made sleep impossible.

I entered the book-filled office to the right of the bedroom. Somehow twenty five minutes had passed. I knew that I’d passed out during my 9/11 reverie. But I couldn’t remember sleeping, dreaming, or being any place, for that matter.

I managed to reach the big blue reading chair, my Discovery One in the vacuum of space through which I was struggling. Gasping and overcoming the weakness brought on by my fatigue, I pulled myself in. And, suddenly, I could breathe. I gratefully breathed freely, but also realized that the fickle air could and probably would decide to forsake me in the near future.

Wanting to prevent this impending desertion, I tried to forge an alliance between the air and the exhaustion by reading a book - a normal activity that required normal breathing. I picked up Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life and read that Sonic Youth’s song “‘Schizophrenia’ referred to a Philip K. Dick story and, ultimately, to the author himself, whose mental health began to fail in his later years.” Dick’s health began to fail, mentally and physically, just like mine . . . and he wrote of the vacuum of space better than anyone since Clarke and Kubrick...