License to Be a Hero

   I remember the day we met. It’s as indelibly burned into my memory as 9-11, or the Columbia, or the Challenger. I suppose it’d rank right up with the Kennedy assassination, if I’d been alive back then. Or maybe the A-bomb. That might be the best analogy. A realization that some powerful genie had been let out of the bottle, and couldn’t be put back again.

   It began innocently enough: freshman orientation at Southern Lake Michigan University, where I was going to major in engineering. They paired us up for these trivia/wacky stunt games and I wound up with this Icelandic-looking pre-med named Valerie. Not the kind of gal I would have walked up to in a bar, but something meshed right away; we both felt it. It was as if some power had downloaded a perfect understanding of the meaning of each other’s tiniest movement, so verbal communication became redundant. Or as if we were appendages of a single mind. Between our academic diversity in the trivia half and our intuitive coordination in the stunts, we managed to come in third out of fifty or sixty teams, which–considering we had just met and some pairs had been best friends since grade school–was saying a bit. Since neither of us had gotten around to meeting anyone else on campus, we pretty much spent the rest of the day together. I told her all about the skydiving club I’d been in at my high school (“extreme” sports are a minor obsession in my home town), she described half the human genome and suggested a few dozen places where the population of my town might have “unique genetic factors.”

   By sunset we had found a secluded spot to ourselves and were telling each other our deepest, darkest secrets. I had told her mine, and now she was silent. “Come on,” I prodded. “I told you; now you tell me.”

   She looked at me levelly for a long moment. “I think it would be better if I showed you,” she finally replied.

   She stood up and moved away a few steps. After a “nothing-up-my-sleeves” sort of flourish she leaned forward ninety degrees, stretching her hands out in front of her. She paused for effect, then lifted one leg and extended it straight behind her. Another dramatic pause. Then she lifted her other leg and extended it behind her. And there she remained, at least three feet away from any kind of support.

   I was so utterly taken aback, I honestly can’t tell you if my jaw hit the ground or not. I’m not even sure how long I stood looking at her before I managed to make my legs move. Wordlessly, I walked toward her. She rose above my head, and I walked back and forth beneath her several times, finding nothing but air between her and the ground. I stopped walking and looked at her; she dropped her hover until she was about shoulder height.

   “How?” I finally managed to say.

   She didn’t shrug her shoulders, but the intent was there. “I don’t know. I just do.”

   I approached her again with my hands raised. She held her height as I passed my hands above her–no strings attached. I placed my hands on her back and gradually applied pressure. I had put maybe a third of my weight on her when volitation departed her like a bursting dam.

   She got her hands down fast enough, but she couldn’t tuck her legs under her in time and belly-flopped. I couldn’t get my weight back onto my feet in time and wound up somersaulting over her. I ended up on my backside, staring at the clouds until she picked herself up and looked down at me.

   “Quite a secret,” I managed to say.

   We explored her abilities together in a secluded lake. I remodeled an old parachute harness so I would have something of her to grab on to without pulling hair or tearing clothes. I’d grab the harness and she’d pull me along, and then she’d jump out of the water like a show dolphin. The jumps got longer and longer until we were spending more time over the water than in it. As her ability to carry me in flight grew, we began to understand where I needed to be in relation to her during any given part of her flight.

   As fall moved on into winter our confidence in her ability to fly with me aboard grew to the point where we abandoned our safety lake (it was getting too cold, anyway) and began longer and higher flights.

   We learned that she could push harder against things when she was flying than when she was on the ground. We discovered she had some means of shunting objects in front of her away from her path. We found out a 90-pound hiking pack would put her to the ground in a few furlongs if she was on the ground, but put me and that same 90-pound pack on her back in the air and she could fly for miles without a problem.

   Christmas break came and went. We only had a few flying sessions before it got to be crunch time: major course projects nearing due dates and cumulative exams on the horizon. Since we were in different majors, we didn’t even see much of each other in study sessions.

   We celebrated the end of finals with a picnic on a little-known island we discovered several miles from town and didn’t bother coming back until after dark. The glow from the campus seemed brighter than usual. Then we heard the sirens, punctuated with the deep, throaty horns you only hear on fire engines. As we got closer, we saw that it wasn’t the campus per se, but one of the high-rise apartments adjacent to the campus.

   It was an eight-story brownstone that reminded a lot of people of a medieval castle (at least from the front) on the same side of Becker Drive as the campus, but not campus property. A wide band of trees that the cross-country team liked to train in separated the campus picnic field from the row of apartments facing Becker Drive.

   We landed in the woods between the campus and the high-rise and walked over to the fire. Yellow caution tape had already been strung up, but for some reason, only a few feet beyond the truck apparently serving as the command center. Maybe because most of the looky-looks were watching from the street or the lawn of the next apartment building over; only a handful of college students was gathered along the woods side. However it happened, we were close enough to hear the chief as he radioed instructions to various teams searching the building for trapped tenants. As the fire grew and a third alarm was called, the ladder companies began to come out of the building, some carrying apartment residents to the nearby ambulances, some carrying their own.

   A man rushed up to the command truck with rolls of papers. He didn’t appear to be associated with either the fire or police department, and I wondered why he had been let past the lines. Then the chief started laying the rolls out on the hood of a nearby police car and I realized the newcomer must be some kind of architect or city planner. From what I could see, it looked like floor plans of the building, and they seemed concerned with the lower left-hand corner.

   A cop finally got concerned enough about the growing cluster of college students so close to the fire to shoo us away and move the yellow tapes farther from the trucks. We retreated onto the cross-country trails through the woods (which we knew a lot better than the cop did), and somebody produced a scanner so we could still listen to the exchanges.

   From what we could overhear of the radio chatter, only one man remained in the building.

He was trapped. His own company had been called out of the building, unable to reach him. From what we could gather, he had been on the top floor when he fell through. I thought about the plans the chief had been looking at. I had visited friends in that building and knew a bit about the layout: though there were the same number of apartments on the front and back sides of each floor, the front side apartments were larger (and higher priced, all my friends lived on the backside), mainly because of the extra space created from the turret-like corners on the front of the building. I tried to visualize the plan I had seen: had it been wider on the bottom, or the top?

   A fourth alarm went out. The cop came over to the woods with more yellow tape and a bullhorn and started bellowing at us to move farther away from the building. Most of the students began to grudgingly move onto the picnic field; the rest of us fanned out through the woods along the cross-country running trails. It was the same cop that had shooed us away before. Hearing his voice brought the whole scene into focus; they had been looking at a round corner. That would be the corner here on the campus side, right next to the woods.

   I didn’t know what I was going to do when I started back toward the corner. Flashlight beams bounced about somewhere ahead of me accompanied by snapping twigs and muttered curses. Apparently, the cops were trying to run tape across the woods (good luck with that). I inadvertently stepped off the side of the trail and frantically grabbed for something before I fell in the underbrush and attracted the cops’ wrath. My hand landed on Valerie’s harness.

   I looked at her; she’d already had a long flight today, after not flying at all during finals week. She looked at me; she knew I knew the building, had probably figured out where the trapped fireman was. I felt her back beneath my hand: firm, tense, a coiled spring. We didn’t say anything. Just as when we first met, we knew. We knew we could get to him.

   I vaulted onto her and we charged the corner of the building. I couldn’t hear the shattering of the window over the roar of the flames. I had guessed that the chief would have tried to direct him to the stairwell nearest the turret, where the rest of his company could more easily reach him. We came upon him at the back of the corner apartment, on one of the few patches of floor not already disintegrated. The fireman had made it to the wall of the stairwell, yet ironically, the path to the door was blocked by flaming debris, and its structural integrity, mandated by building codes, had resisted his attempt to axe his way into it.

   “Come on!” I shouted at him.

   He turned to us, surprise turning to incredulity, and stared at us dumbly.

   She dropped down right next to him and I grabbed his hands and pulled them to me. “Grab her harness!” I told him as I guided his hand to the back straps.

   His initial shock was fading as he gripped the straps and tried to pull us toward his tiny patch of relative safety.

   “Just hang on!” I yelled as she started to lift. I tried to find something of him to grab on to and finally managed to get a handful of pants.

   She turned back to our entry window while I did my best to even out her unbalanced load. We got through the window, and she quickly dropped, wanting to dispense of her lopsided load before I dropped him. She didn’t stop when his feet touched the ground, but dropped belly-down to the grass. I heard cops and firemen yelling at me, but whatever they were saying was drowned out by something exploding within the building. I pried the fireman’s hands off her harness and pushed him backwards into his fellow firemen and cops as they ran up.

   My ears were beginning to recover, and I started to pick out bits of what they were saying:

   “...crazy brats. . . ”

   “...blast must have made an updraft. . . ”

   “...someone must have been looking . . . ”

   “...angel . . . fools . . . stupid kids . . . ”

   “...oughta put ’em in jail. . .gettin’ in the way like that . . . ”

   I put my hands on Valerie’s shoulders and squeezed my knees against her and she dashed into the woods. She managed to stay airborne long enough for me to get off her before she dropped again. I half-guided, half-carried her as she staggered, exhausted back to the dorms.

   I’d like to say we got a medal, or a mention in the paper, or even a “thank-you whoever you are” on the ten o’clock news. Truth is: to this day, the fireman we saved, the cops on scene, and the entire fire department believe we were blown out of the building by the explosion and only some divine intervention enabled us to come down as gently as we did. All the campus bulletin boards were posted with a letter from the college president reprimanding the students for “interfering with the duties of the local police and fire departments” and especially those two students (why they were so certain we had to be SLMU students I never did figure out) who “feel the need to engage in a childish hero-fantasy in situations best left to trained professionals.”

   The next day Valerie was admitted to the hospital–apparently enough lactic acid in your system can be life-threatening–and had to explain how she got in that condition. She told them about flying into the fire (but managed to keep me out of it), an explanation which got her transferred to the psych ward. She never flew again. Whether she was burned out from that flight, or the shrinks programmed her to believe that her flying had been some six-month long delusion, I never found out. I was afraid to show too much interest, lest someone figure out who else was there that night. But I did find out that one day she managed to get away from her doctors long enough to stick her head under the wheels of a freight train.

   And me? I changed majors, changed schools, tried to forget. I flew to Daytona on spring break once; looking at the tops of the clouds reminded me of what it had been like flying with her. Thinking about it made me sick. Really. After the third bag, this mother next to me tried to give me some Chinese motion sickness band, and I almost shoved it down her throat. I came back from Daytona by bus.

   Sometimes I think about what might have been, what we could have done differently, who we could have saved if we had been allowed to continue. We had everything we needed, the ability, the skill, the teamwork. Everything but a license to be a hero.