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When Jacob was a fresh stevedore, he nearly died.
This period of time was before fighting rings and bets, before his ego grew and grew like some sort of bloated corpse. Back when he was still Jacob, sporting fresh bruises from after-work fights and handling cargo from the massive machines that still confuse the sciences. Back when Jacob was just a man who grew up from a family of fishermen and sailors, when he was just Jacob Lash and nothing else.
Airships were already dangerous, even with occult magic and practices implemented to make sure no one got hurt. Machines designed to balance the low oxygen and high pressure of the vast sky, suits to prevent the biting wind digging into skin; it didn’t stop the occasional poor bastard slipping from the envelope exterior or falling off the airship deck. It was a job not for many, that required an understanding of risk for reward; Air sailors got paid well at the risk of not having a body to recover.
When Jacob was a fresh stevedore, he nearly died.
There was a loose rope that had come undone from its anchor point and pooled into a near-perfect circle. He hadn’t been paying attention to his footing, because why would he? Sailors and dockworkers knew the routines of unloading and loading. They knew how to tie their knots, how to ensure a boat or ship won’t go loose and depart away. Jacob trusted in his superiors in rank, his superiors in time; there was no reason, that day, for him to be worried about an accident of any kind.
The sun was starting to rise over the skyline, a cloudless red haze warming his skin. Jacob gave a thumbs-up and a whistle to the dockmaster and stood, hands on his hips, at the work he had completed. He was getting good at his work, with the strength to match. Once or twice the dockmaster had asked him why he wouldn’t work on an airship– to which, he would respond, “I’m not really a heights guy.” Which was true: he wasn’t terrified of them, but Jacob liked having his feet on the ground. His mother used to joke with his cousins that if he didn’t keep his feet on the ground, they’d never get him back down from the air.
When Jacob was a fresh stevedore, he nearly died.
Dockworkers don’t tend to hang around for the departure of an air vessel, not bothering for it to pass building height before clocking out. Jacob was different: he enjoyed the stillness of an early morning as the ship departs. Seabird calls echo over the water, blending in with the early morning traffic and the honk of trains, allowing him a single moment where he feels like he’s truly on top of the world. He takes a breath once, twice, no sense of urgency to leave. A faint urge for a cigarette clawed at his fingers and throat, but he had burned through his last pack by sharing with his fellow workers.
(In retrospect, maybe he should have just left. Maybe Jacob should have left the dock, that morning, to his shitty apartment and to rest. Maybe, maybe, maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe)
When Jacob was a fresh stevedore, he nearly died.
One moment he’s standing and content to watch the airship hover up and slowly leave. He doesn’t register the rope slowly tightening around his boot like a snake circling its prey. No one else is on the docks with him: Jacob is alone when he screams, lifted upside down, and into the sky. “Help!” he cries, uselessly flailing about. “Help!”
Blood rushes to his temples, the rope coiled tight around his ankle; Jacob can hear his heartbeat in his ears, feels the blood drain from his toes into his stomach and towards his skull. He can’t swing himself up to free himself, the water of the Hudson and the docks slowly shrinking and fading as the clouds break in. The wind starts to become stronger, swinging him and spinning his vision into perfect circles. He continuously attempts to free himself, panicked pleas and begs to a god he didn’t believe in only adding to his fear.
Are people seeing him, dangling from the airship like a piece of forgotten junk? Are civilians gawking and staring, or are they blissfully unaware to his predicament, despite his screams?
“Stop!” he screams out. “Stop the aircraft!”
Jacob can feel his lungs tighten from the pressure, frost starting to prick and dig on his skin and hair. The rope is snared, almost indecipherably far from where it’s connected to the envelope of the airship. Wind starts to bite at his ears and nose, and his teeth feel like sheetmetal in his mouth. Jacob wants to tear them out, but he can’t even orient himself. He knows he’s upside down, the rope is almost strangling his ankle through the leather boots he wears, but he feels no sense of direction. He feels nothing but the wind, the sky, emptiness. He can’t tell which way the ship is flying; if the rope comes undone, his body could hit anything. It could land on fifth ave and splatter across the pavement or it could hit the Atlantic like a boulder. He doesn’t know.
When Jacob was a fresh stevedore, he nearly died.
He gives up when the vertigo finally, finally gets to him. There’s pressure tight in his head, like a balloon about to burst, and he can’t feel his leg anymore. The vessel continues to fly onwards, uncaring for the unwanted haul it carries under its belly. His fingers have gone numb from the cold and he’s fairly certain he’s going to pass out, but he doesn’t. Jacob thinks he should have, by now. Why hasn’t he?
The whistling wind is the only thing that answers him. Clouds continue to pass by around him, beginning to leave him wet from condensation. His clothes feel heavier and denser, less like cotton and more like lead. Jacob thinks he might be dying; he can’t hear his heart beat but he can feel it in his chest, banging like a drum in his ribcage. Ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum. It feels like it might explode out of his body.
The sun is almost blinding, if Jacob could tell which way it’s facing. Through the haze of clouds and mist it shines on him like a headlight, and he feels his arms– heavy, like waterlogged wood planks– lazily dangle to his sides as he attempts to lift them and cover his eyes. His fingers are both blister-hot and freezing, throbbing from the blood flow seeping into the tips (his body is nothing now it’s nothing an empty shell). The rope is tight, tightening ever-so, a testament to its maker that it holds his weight– or, perhaps, the edging of a guillotine blade waiting. He doesn’t care. Jacob feels the last bit of care slip through his fingers like grains of sand on a cold beach.
When Jacob was a fresh stevedore, he nearly died.
The snap of twine and yarn echoes like a gunshot. His body is suddenly upright, possibly, and it heaves one way and another in the freefall: Jacob feels everything. The wind is biting into a damp, frozen body, whistling so loud to the point his ears are ringing alongside it. There’s no differentiating the two, almost merging into a sensation that runs through his body and mind. The blood is moving everywhere and nowhere and it’s mixing with the biting wind, the whistling, the vast emptiness of the bright blue sky and a directionless sun. He might have died already. Jacob wishes he died already.
He doesn’t realize that his screams have gone silent against the empty expanse; the clouds continue to leave their misty trail around him, stuck in a never-ending freefall above New York City. He can’t see the city, he can’t see the airship; sky blue is burning into his retinas and all Jacob can do is squint and clench his eyes in a feeble attempt of control. Nothing matters to Jacob anymore; his life is void in this moment, this daylight hell he has been dragged upwards into. Up and up to down and then back up again.
How long has he been up here, he thinks in a spare moment of clarity. How long has Jacob been pointlessly falling?
He takes a long, heavy breath. It doesn’t end, his lungs filling with oxygen like the envelope of an airship; his attempt to exhale is met with more oxygen. It feels like cotton in his mouth and it brings the chill into him. Jacob doesn’t know if he’s even breathing anymore, eyes squeezed shut and thinking about the things he’s done and missed. A bloodline of sailors and fishermen, gone, gone with the clouds in the sky. His mother who used to say, to all of his cousins—
What did she used to say? Did it matter, anymore? His body wasn’t his, inside and out. It belonged to the sky, the vast open blue, the great big atmosphere in which the stars and planets rested. It belonged to the wind and to nothing.
And Jacob crashes down, down, sinking, down into water.
It fills his body as he drops into the cold depths, swayed by the current of the waters. The faint gleam of sunshine ripples through the surface, enough for him to see how dark and expansive it is. He knows, a rational part of him, that the Hudson is not this big. It is not this deep, nor are there corpses to be spotted on the bay floor. It doesn’t matter (but doesn’t it?) to him anymore.
There’s nothing around. It is as empty as possible. (It shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t be this way). Jacob tries to swim, kicking and paddling like his dad (who was dead in the dirt and gone and it didn’t matter) had taught him to. The oxygen that had been endlessly filling his lungs deflates out of him with each bubble past his lips. His fingers are growing colder and heavier and he thinks his stomach is full of seawater. His heart is beating bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum and he can only hear the deafening silence of the great deep.
He doesn’t know if he’s moving anymore. He was shifting, tumbling freely, lost in the clouds and then became stilled by the ocean waves; his sense of direction is gone and his identity is lost. Who he was, once, is pointless. No God has protected him as his name declared, no superiors or citizen to fish him from these endless tides. (He wants to live he needs to swim he wants to live) and then he takes a kick, two, three down deeper. The sunshine is almost gone, murky green refractions fading into dark emptiness, only for his body to be sent back upwards and then pulled back down (you need to swim Jacob you need to swim.) His body is anchored to nothing and yet it is tugged around.
Is he still under the ocean waves, or is he in the sky again? Did it become night- no, there are no stars out here. There is no bright spot to guide him and there’s nothing– nothing but Jacob Lash in an expansive unknowing.
Jacob Lash. Jacob Lash. Lash. Lash, lash out, lash out, Jacob Lash, stevedore, son, sailor. Words and synonyms floated to his mind, yet the identity didn’t connect with him. The conundrum stirs in him like a whirlpool, nauseating and wringing his insides into a mess of unknown rope knots. His legs kick uselessly (his mother once said he’d never come back down to Earth if his feet left the ground) and his arms hang like deadweight.
Suddenly in his vision is a long, tarred rope. It swaying gently in the current, like it’s caressed by a sea breeze and not the ocean’s depths. It is the only thing Jacob can see, just out of arms reach. Taunting (like his cousins, family, for his delusions of grandeur) him. He pushes– forces his legs into a swim. He doesn’t want to die (today), he doesn’t plan on dying (tonight), he will not die (ever again). Each push through water is ever-slow (and slowing him down and down and sink back down). Once his hands have a grab on the rope, he hauls. He drags his body up and up and up like he has nothing left to lose. Each pull is met with equal push (and the tug of war begins and ends and begins) but Jacob Lash will not be deterred. Jacob– Lash will not– can not die here. He has to live (he has to live), he has to prove himself (that he’s deserving of life). Lash can not die.
When his head breaches the water, the first thing Lash does is laugh. It caws out of him brokenly, scratchy, a flock of gulls frightened away (like his classmates when he came in with a black eye and a sling) and flying into the dark inky night. There’s the sounds of the waves hitting the distant shore nearby, only to be drowned out by a loud horn. His vision burns bright and, he thinks he’s back in the sky: the meaningless, empty sky, where he was truly nothing. One minute part, the sadistic twisted beast he’s tried to keep down, wishes he was back in the great blue expanse. The louder part lashes out and beats it down, down, down into the depths with an inch of its life.
“We found him!” a voice calls out; it’s a searchlight, not the bright white sun (even if he thinks it should have been). The coastguard pull him from the waters and sit him on a crate with a heavy wool blanket. Lash finds it itchy against his skin, but it’s keeping the midnight chill out of his system.
“What the hell happened to you, son?” One of the officers asks, handing him a warmed cup of coffee. He sounds far away; Lash doesn’t care. “Your boss called in when you never clocked out; we’ve been out here searching for you for hours. Thought there would’ve been a body to bury.”
Lash can’t help but laugh. The idea of him dying feels so far away, now. How could someone like him die? “Nah, buddy,” he sighs, eyes closed as he looks up into the starless sky.
When Jacob was a fresh stevedore, he almost died. (Maybe he did, that day. Maybe Jacob died in the sky, or somewhere under the waves. He doesn’t know.)
“I’m Lash.”