Duel ex Machina

Harrison saw the crash before it happened, but he knew it was going to happen. The small commuter plane descended lower than the trees, and at an angle that spoke of trouble. Then he heard the sound of rending metal and soul-wincing impacts; no one could survive that, he thought. He didn’t want to go to the crash site, but he felt that it was his duty, despite not being a big fan of humanity.

He had walked, climbed, jumped, sidestepped, crept, and slid for a good three miles before he came upon the small commuter plane. Gashes gaped in the sides, appearing as if they were screaming in pain. Harrison didn’t like that image, nor did he like the ponderous silence that accompanied the scene. No birds were chirping, no squirrels chattering away – nothing. Even the wind had taken a breather.

Harrison approached the cockpit slowly, bracing himself for a gruesome sight. He dearly hoped that the pilot had not been decapitated or mangled into an unrecognizable mass of blood, bone, and torn tissue. His situation was dire enough as it was, and seeing a dead and twisted body wouldn’t make it any better. He was already regretting his actions when he heard a low moan.

He jumped back at the sound. Damn! The man was probably alive, and he was probably just barely hanging on. Harrison found this to be worse than discovering that the pilot was dead. He would now have to try to comfort the reckless son of a bitch in his final moments. Double damn!

To Harrison’s amazement and (somewhat) to his relief, the door was kicked open and a man who did not seem to be on the brink of death was emerging. The man had blood on his face and a dazed look about him, but that wasn’t the part that caused Harrison to gasp. He knew this man. Triple damn!

The injured man, unaware that Harrison was just a few feet away, wiped his face with his jacket sleeve and abruptly sat down. The adrenaline was deserting his bloodstream, leaving him weak of knee and sour of stomach. He wanted to throw up, so he did. Better. He looked around and spotted Harrison a mere ten feet away, to his left. He gasped. Damn!

“The hell are you doin’ here, Harrison?” The man said with a belligerence that seemed unsuited for the situation. The pilot peered at Harrison through narrowed eyes. Harrison shuffled his feet and remained silent, for any answer that he gave would seem unequal to the task required of it.

“Hello Wiley,” Harrison finally said. He could think of nothing better to say to a man who considered him a mortal enemy but was in as dire a predicament as himself. Which is why, he reflected, I do what I do for a living and not what Wiley does for a living.

“Why are you here?” Wiley’s question was more cogent than it should be for a man who had just crashed his plane and escaped an ugly and premature death.

“Vacation,” Harrison said. He wondered whether or not he should approach Wiley and see if he could help him. Though he seemed fine, he could be in shock and wouldn’t realize that he needed aid. Then again, Wiley was a man of unpredictable emotions, like most of his kind. Maybe he should just stay where he was.

“Mm. Never took you for the outdoorsy type.”

“Thanks for presuming to know so much about me,” Harrison said, a bit miffed.

Wiley gave him a sour look before standing up, trying not to wince in front of Harrison. He looked around briefly before nodding to himself and deciding on a plan of action. He started turning over piles of leaves a few yards away, much to Harrison’s surprise.

“What are you doing there? Looking for something?”

Wiley turned to Harrison and glared; the pain and the shock of being around a man he despised brought about this look, and he wasn’t going to hide it from Harrison. The man deserved more than a glare from him.

“Need to start a fire. Gonna get chilly tonight,” he said, scooping up armfuls of dry leaves and setting them down in a clearing.

“Everything’s too wet to burn,” Harrison commented.

“The top layers of leaf piles are wet, but the ones underneath are dry. They can serve as kindling.”

Harrison nodded before speaking again.

“Why don’t we just find a road?”

Wiley looked at him and shook his head pityingly. Harrison didn’t want Wiley to know that he was lost but Wiley knew it; the man could navigate New York City like a pro, but out here he was just a victim waiting to happen.

“You know where a road is?”

Harrison thought about it for a moment. He had no idea where he was. He had been lost for several hours when he saw the plane crash; nothing looked the same when he turned to go back to the main trail. He had walked in circles, frustrated, and with a fear that increased as the hours passed.

“Well. No. I suppose I’m lost.”

Wiley nodded. He knew that, but maybe he’d let that pass for the moment. He could see that the man was scared, and though he didn’t like him, he didn’t want to see him suffer more than necessary. He would save that for when they returned to civilization, where that sort of behavior belonged.

“You got gear?”

Harrison blinked in confusion, and then he understood. Gear. Supplies.

“Yes, but I left my backpack a couple of miles back that way,” he pointed behind him, “to come and see if I could help whoever was here.”

“I don’t like you, Harrison, and that’s a well-established fact, but I thank you for your actions. You’re a stand-up guy when the chips are down.”

Harrison didn’t know what to say. An unusual circumstance. He was a man who, in his professional life, had plenty to say – most of it not too complimentary. He was lionized for this by the public, but just as castigated by a select few who felt the sting of his words.

“Go get your gear. We’ll most likely need it,” Wiley said, but without any real enthusiasm. Knowing Harrison, he probably brought along all the stuff needed to weigh down a backpack, none of it particularly useful.

“Um, well, I don’t think I know exactly where to go. Fact is, I’m not sure where it is.”

Wiley gave him another glare and then shrugged his shoulders. It was no more than he expected so why get mad at the man? He sighed, knowing what he had to do.

“Come over here. Gather up some logs about as thick as your leg and thicker. Strip the bark off with this knife,” Wiley instructed Harrison. Harrison blinked several times before doing as he was told. Soon, he had a nice pile of wood that, bereft of bark, was dry and burnable.

Wiley had put a long stick into the fire that had erupted from the plane. Soon, it was burning well (as was the plane) and ready to start a fire for the stranded men. Wiley lit the kindling after arranging the wood in a way that would promote a good, long-lasting fire. Harrison watched him with growing admiration.

“You certainly know your way around the outdoors don’t you?”

Wiley nodded curtly.

“Uh, about my gear…”

“I’ll go get it,” Wiley said with short, clipped syllables.

“But you don’t know…”

“Yes I do. I’ll follow your trail.”

“You can do that?”

Wiley looked at him and smiled, albeit grimly. Harrison felt small at this moment; here Wiley was, injured and in considerable pain, yet he was the one keeping them alive.

“Sure. I’m good at understanding signs that others have left for me,” he smirked.

“Touché,” Harrison muttered with ill grace. A shot across the bow about Harrison’s competence in his profession. Petty, he thought, and beneath the dignity of an author of Wiley’s caliber.

Harrison sat before the fire and whiled away the time thinking of his relationship with authors. They didn’t like his acerbic observations. They didn’t like how he belittled their work, whether in part or in whole. But, he rationalized, they certainly liked the boost in sales when he critiqued their novels. No matter how badly he raked them over the literary coals, sales for those books increased dramatically.

He wanted to be a kinder, gentler critic; he really did. But the demand for nice literary critics was small, and the pay was laughably miniscule. The big bucks came from scathing reviews of good novels because the public loved the reviews. Damned Philistines, Harrison thought. Try writing a review that illuminates theme, motif, symbolism, and style and see what you get, he ruminated bitterly. Crickets. And a pink slip.

Wiley returned four hours later, his face ashen and his steps unsteady. He dropped the backpack and practically fainted as he made his way to the ground. Harrison rushed over in a panic. He didn’t know what to do, how to help. Water! Give him water. Maybe some beef sticks.

It worked. Wiley took the water in his mouth greedily and ate three beef sticks as if he were starving. The boost in energy was akin to raising a dead man, Harrison thought. Wiley sat up and warmed himself by the fire. It was chilly; they were almost three thousand feet up. The Carolina countryside, though warm and inviting in May, was not so warm when night fell.

Harrison woke up first the next morning; Wiley was not looking good, and his breathing was ragged and shallow. He had a fever. He did wake up finally, blinking at the sun’s rays and yawning mightily.

“I suppose I should have told you earlier, Harrison. I have broken ribs on both sides. Didn’t want to scare you any more than you were already. I’m gonna need your help out of here.” Wiley sat up, then got himself up. He wasn’t going to let Harrison see how much pain he was in. He was a sunuvabitch. A sunuvabitch that was needed at this time, unfortunately. Wiley hated this predicament, and not because he might die.

Harrison was alarmed, as he should have been. He had no wilderness skills, and a badly injured Wiley may not be much help, expert though he was in these matters. He arose also, and the two men started looking for help.

“Where?” Harrison asked, simply and with a good deal of wariness. The place seemed impenetrable.

Wiley pointed to the southwest.

“OK. Why?” It was an apt question. Harrison knew that they would both die out here in a matter of days if they didn’t find help. He didn’t want to die yet; there were plenty of books out there that he wanted to criticize.

“Downhill. We go downhill wherever we can. It will eventually lead to water, and that’s where we’ll find someone to help us.”

Harrison whistled in admiration.

“That’s good thinking, Wiley. I guess I should know that as well, right? All civilizations begin near water. Mesopotamia, the Egyptians, the Greeks…”

“Sure, Harrison, sure. Let’s go,” Wiley said. He had a stout stick that he used to aid him in walking. Harrison would help him over rough terrain and dry creek beds occasionally, for the man didn’t have the strength nor the balance to do it unaided. Wiley would send Harrison up a steep rise to see what was on the other side. If the land sloped down, Wiley would find a way around the rise to get to the other side.

The pair traveled until almost sunset before making camp again. Their water supply had been augmented by Wiley; he found some small caves and, along with them, water dripping from the ceilings. Harrison marveled at how the man found something that he didn’t see. He told Wiley as much.

“That’s what we do, Harrison. Authors, I mean. We find what’s hidden and show it to everyone.”

Harrison nodded.

“Like the wood last night. And the leaves.”

Wiley sat down by the fire and tried not to yell out in pain. His ribs were getting the better of him, sapping his strength and leaving him breathless no matter how he moved.

“Yes. Wet on the outside but dry underneath. And you would have just not made a fire because everything was too wet.”

“Are…are you talking figuratively or literally?” Harrison asked.

“Both. You ripped my last book to shreds because you didn’t turn the leaves over and look at them. It was a decent book and you said – what was it? – ‘It had the feel of a poorly-written YA novel and insights more suited to pre-teen girls than to readers of serious works.’ Yeah, that was a good one.”

“Yet it sold three million copies,” Harrison countered.

“That kind of validates the work, don’t you think?”

“No. I think my review made people want to read a trashy novel by an author that rivals Larry McMurtry as the pre-eminent Texas writer. I sold millions of copies for you.”

“Yeah, I think you did, but I still despise you,” Wiley said tiredly.

“Fine. Despise me. But authors need critics and critics need authors. It’s symbiotic.”

“Go to hell, Harrison. Not yet, though.”

Wiley leaned back and moaned, his body just too tired for further arguments with Harrison. He didn’t think he was going to live through this, despite Harrison’s help. He was fading fast and they still hadn’t found a river. They had to be fairly near, he thought, for he had spotted a river before his plane’s engine catastrophically failed.

Wiley was right – and wrong. He would not have lived had not a passing helicopter spotted them and called the U.S. Forestry Service. Within a few hours, Wiley was transported by helicopter to a nearby hospital and Harrison was taken to a Ranger station and given some much-needed sustenance.

After a cursory check and a not-so-cursory questioning session on how they wound up in such a predicament, he was taken to the hospital where Wiley was taken.

Wiley was sitting up in his bed, looking much livelier than he had when strapped down to a board and taken away. Piles of Jell-O cups festooned a bedside table, along with several empty cans of Coca-Cola. He asked Harrison for a cigarette, but Harrison didn’t smoke. Well, you should start right now so we can smoke together, Wiley said. He grinned.

“I see the sass is back in Wiley Sherwood,” Harrison said, smiling back at him.

“And I see that Harrison Blumenthal is still a prig who won’t even get me a cigarette,” Wiley laughed.

Both men sat in silence for a few minutes. Harrison was under no illusion about their relationship; Wiley was too stubborn to let go of his ire concerning Harrison’s critiques. Likewise, Harrison didn’t care for the temperamental and talented author. If you asked him, Harrison mused, Wiley would say that he had never written a boring sentence in his life.

“What do you think it all means?” Harrison asked suddenly. He looked at Wiley inquisitively. Wiley, the author. Wiley, the survivor. Surely the man would be able to summarize the traumatic event with some sort of pithy comment or trenchant observation. The man lived for this shit.

“What? Do you mean our adventure, and the fact that you were lost on the ground, as per your usual style of critiquing, while I was trying not to crash and burn, as per my usual mood when writing? And that we were saved from above, like a Deux ex machina tale? Yeah, nothing comes to mind, Harrison. Nothing at all,” Wiley smiled faintly before grabbing a nurse’s arm and begging her for a cigarette. She smiled at him and walked away.

Harrison went back to his hotel room, ruminating on the events of the past few days. He sat down with a glass of port and a book to critique. But he didn’t read it; he had it open at the flyleaf and never went past this point. He thought of other leaves, and of things hidden beneath the surface. Maybe Wiley was right. Maybe he needed to see more of what was underneath.

Wiley was a sunuvabitch, but he was the right kind of sunuvabitch, Harrison decided. But he’d still rip him a new one when he reviewed Wiley’s next book.

Balance must be maintained.