By Matt Steel
01 August 2021
For JP
Last month, an office building collapsed, plummeting past its roofline into a sinkhole. Only one man survived. After a three-week coma, he’s awake and ready to tell his story. Savannah Guthrie has the report.
Can you walk us through the events of that morning? Tell us what you recall.
Well, it began like any other partner meeting.
“Can I pray for us?” offers the chairman
as he sits with kingly sprawl.
We bow our heads as one,
as if pushed, faces hidden, silent.
Business as usual.
I know something is off
when he turns on the screen,
and the day’s topic
looms in sixty-point Arial:
Business Partnership, or Marriage
without Sex: a Roundtable.
“Justice, why don’t you kick us off?”
He asks, rhetorical.
Justice stands, blinks,
climbs on the table, screams
wordless, guttural. He has no mouth,
only an expanse of skin
writhing as he works his jaws.
Next is Dignity.
I hear a low growl
from the corner by the fax machine.
She crouches there, caged,
covered in matted hair.
She quivers, rages, tears at the bars.
She burns.
Smell is death: wrong: danger: get out.
Pain – in shock.
She lies on the floor, hiding
under the table, fetal, shaking, silent.
Her color – gone.
Fear runs in circles around the room,
stabbing everyone in the kidneys, leaping away
before they can recoil.
He jabbers – Latin, Aramaic, nonsense.
Skitters across the ceiling. He is
Legion.
Beauty balances
on the windowsill. Breeze blows.
He jumps.
Joy – a ground-up mass
of flesh and bone.
I turn
back to the chairman and notice
he wears Joy’s teeth as a necklace.
His grin – priestly rapture.
Peace? Nowhere.
Went on sabbatical three years ago.
Told no one
when she’ll return.
Shame douses himself in gasoline.
Pulls a box of matches from his chest.
Vomits acid, bile.
Ignites.
Anger – bellowing.
Bound to the wall.
Eyes taped open.
Arcs his back, wall cracks,
building begins to crumble.
And where are you during all of this?
Designing an eject button.
I punch it in just as the floor buckles, heaves.
Lift off, quicker than expected.
Roof ruptures, trees part, metal screams, twists.
Sky –
blue, untroubled, clean.
Light blinds me, covers all.
Earth opens its jaws.
Mouth, a wound.
Swallows everything:
building, fire, flesh,
Powerpoint, chairman, prayer.
I rocket up, up through atmosphere.
Quiet here.
Enter the blackening fringe.
Space. See the patience
of stars.
I slow, drift, weightless,
half a second. Drop
like a hammer, lightning, Lucifer.
Darkness. Then –
wake up here.
No idea what broke my fall.
Shouldn’t be alive.
Don’t know
why I was spared.
Business as usual.