Some have begun to wear parachutes when they sleep, for fear they’ll join the falling people. Others carry benzodiazepine spray to shoot up their nostrils. Whether that would even work as they reach terminal velocity is at best uncertain. Most just hope they stay hardbound to the earth. There are, of course, those who don’t believe it’s happening at all, that the "world government" is trying to deceive them. There have always been people like that.
I know for certain it’s real because my wife was among the fallen. Sometimes, people say they wish a hole would open up in the ground and swallow them. And in a way, that’s precisely what happens except that it reopens somewhere different, a mile or two above the ground.
My wife Sandra and I were walking down the North Circular Road, keeping enough distance so our hands would never brush.
“What time’ll you be home this evening?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I replied.
“It wasn’t a difficult question.”
“You know this is a busy time for me.”
“Like always, Matthew. Just like always.”
“I’ll get a bite in the office if that’s what you’re asking; don’t worry about making me dinner.”
I knew she suspected I had another woman. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I was on the verge of losing my copywriting job and it was hard to be around her. I had myself braced, ready for the next bitter word. But six or seven paces later and there was only the sound of traffic. I looked to the place where she should have been, fearful she was crying. She was nowhere. It was just around the spot where we parted each weekday morning, often amidst an argument, right at the junction with the Rathdown Road. I began to turn in a slow circle. Perplexed.
“Sandra?” I said. Where had she gotten to?
A line of cars stutter-stepped by on the North Circular Road as I cast about for a glimpse of her light green rain-jacket and red hair. There was a double-decker bus a hundred yards ahead of me and I wondered if she jumped aboard without me seeing. When I looked closer though, I could see that its rear sign read "out of service."
I stepped out into the centre of the Rathdown Road peering down through the canyon of linden trees, a robin ever-so-soft-chittering on a branch above me. A Prius taxi prowled around the corner behind me, its horn startling.
“What the fook are you at, you clown?” the cab driver roared through the open window, his cigarette dropping ash to the patchwork road surface.
“I’m sorry,” I said, though he was gone too quick to hear me.
It never occurred to me that Sandra was, at that moment, tumbling at a velocity of perhaps two hundred and forty kilometres per hour towards a canal-side street in the Castlefield area of Manchester. Just as she thumped the ground, a car veered to avoid her, and crashed into a black cast-iron bollard.
The driver was a woman called Amanda Gilchrist. Her nose was streaming blood after she was hit by the airbag of her Volkswagen Golf. She stepped out from the vehicle and saw what remained of Sandra before leaning over and vomiting, so that it ran like liquid in the grooves between the crooked cobblestones.
One thousand, four hundred, and seventy-seven people have fallen so far on every continent except Antarctica. The smart people of the world have been unable to find a pattern. The less smart claim they have right up until the point that they are proven wrong.
A man vanishes in Canberra and falls in Sacramento. An eight-year-old child disappears from a street outside Gare Montparnasse and comes down three Métro stops away in Denfert-Rochereau. Sandra? She was reconfigured in the sky, 166 miles, more or less, as a herring gull might fly eastward from Dublin. Manchester was a city she never visited. Was that of some significance to her down falling? The questions we ask expecting answers.
Several times on the day we parted, I keyed out messages on my iPhone only to delete them without sending. I’d no reason to suspect anything had happened to her; there were fewer than a hundred fallen people at that time. It was only when I got home from work that I began to think something might be amiss. I wondered if I should call her sister Barbara or her mam Anne, but I didn’t want to scare them. And if it was that Sandra had finally left me, she’d hardly want to speak with me.
I was drinking a long glass of Baileys, brim-full with ice, the only liquor Sandra allowed in the house, when the doorbell rang. Was I surprised to see two uniformed police officers? Frightened, yes. Surprised, I’m not so sure.
“Are you Mr. O’Sullivan?” the female garda asked. “Mr. Matthew O’Sullivan.”
“Yes.”
“Would it be OK if we came in for a minute?”
I’m not sure if they could have handled the situation any better and I wondered if some officers were chosen for this duty because of their manner and sensitivity. I couldn’t think of anything to ask because I knew they had no solutions.
They told me a close family member would have to travel to Manchester to identify that which was left. I was never one for airplanes but nothing two milligrams of Valium would not solve. The idea right then though, of ascending into the sky, crossing the water suspended high above the clouds, this profound fear I might fall, or worse again, see someone falling, I nearly shook.
“You’re going to take the boat?” the policewoman asked when I explained my plans.
“I have a fear of flying.”
The two officers looked at one another.
As I shut my front door, I could not shake the feeling that handcuffs might yet be produced, that I would be bowing my head as I was ushered into the back seat of their unmarked car, hoping the neighbours were not watching. When a woman dies in odd circumstances, who is usually to blame? When that couple’s relationship is frayed like an old dried-out elastic band; case closed, one might say. But how could you ever close a case that was beyond comprehension?
Early the next morning, I boarded the ferry that would take me to the port of Holyhead before the long train journey to Victoria Station. I tried a few times to read but could not concentrate. Mostly, I looked at the sea, thinking of how many times I wished Sandra was gone, but never like this. It’s strange how years can pass, and relationships get so difficult to disentangle. A joint mortgage, an arthritic red setter, three expensive paintings, and a much-loved Chesterfield couch.
I remember sitting in the waiting room of the hospital mortuary. It had been tastefully decorated with comfortable sofas and ersatz impressionist pictures, but the clinical undertones could not be painted over. A victim support officer sat at the other end of the couch, sneaking occasional glances at me, renewing that nagging feeling like I was under observation. A medical orderly came through swing doors, approached the officer and whispered to her.
“Are you ready, Mr. O’Sullivan?” she said, softening even further her gentle Mancunian voice.
“I think so.”
“It’s a formality,” she said. “And they have done their best to make things easier.”
On the mortuary slab, Sandra lay, everything but her face enclosed in the body bag. It made me think of the Wicklow Mountains, and a night spent camping up there when we used to love each other. Curled up in our sleeping bags, I found it next-to-impossible to sleep, could feel every bump in the ground beneath me. We never did it again; turns out I was a four-star hotel-kind of person.
“Mr. O’Sullivan; can you confirm that this is your wife, Sandra Murray?” the coroner said.
“Yes,” I said.
I don’t know why I expected some interrogation, or why the idea of sudden arrest kept leaping into my mind.
“Thank you, Mr. O’Sullivan,” said the coroner. “Would you like to spend some time alone with Sandra?”
“Yes,” I said.
But I knew I had nothing to say. I moved my lips as if in prayer, but all I did was count to one hundred and one. That felt like it was enough time before I could leave the dead room. There was nobody waiting for me outside and I was grateful for that. Sandra’s father had passed, and her mum Anne had suffered a stroke the previous year—my sister-in-law Barbara stayed home to mind her.
Walking back out of the hospital, it was impossible to shake the oddness of being stuck in a place you did not want to be and with nothing to do. I had booked the ferry for the following morning, thinking my gloomy business would take all day. The very idea of going for food, or something to drink, seemed a dishonour to Sandra’s memory. I thought a moment of going back to my hotel to sleep but I knew I’d be examining the ceiling.
There was a bus passing headed towards the city centre, so I jumped aboard and tossed a two-pound coin into the fare machine. I got off near Piccadilly Station and walked along the canal. It was a warm Friday afternoon, and the streets of the Gay Village were already abuzz beneath the rainbow bunting. I so envied the crowd’s ease, the frivolity of beer, cocktails, cigarette smoke, perfume and aftershave, a thousand laughs, and the evening’s infinite potential.
I kept walking along the towpath, past the old Hacienda and up by Deansgate. The place where Sandra died was nearby—somewhere in between the industrial braid of rusting viaducts and decaying brick bridges—and I could have easily found it if I’d wanted. But I had this dread like I might come across a lost fragment of bone or a tooth that had been missed by the street cleaners. I just kept going and came at last to the Lowry, where I sat worn out on the quay as a single scull rowboat glided by a coupling of swans in the still water.
Sandra came home in the hold of an Aer Lingus plane as my ferry sailed past the twin tower chimneys of Poolbeg. There was a removal. A funeral mass. A burial. Sandwiches, tea, beer, cider, and whiskey in the Castleknock Hotel. So many people shook my hand and too many mourners put their arms around me. I dutifully did what I was supposed to, anxiously awaiting the day when people would just leave me alone. For the first time, it gladdened me that we didn’t have children, couldn’t have had children.
In the weeks after, panic took a grip on me and metastasised until there was scarcely a bodily or mental function that was untouched. Acid rose in my throat from a gurgling stomach beneath tension headaches that made my skull feel as if it was cinched in a corset. It was impossible to sleep at night and hard to stay awake by day. Each time I stood up from the couch, my head whirled so that I’d have to lean against the wall to regain my equilibrium.
I became so sensitised to noise that when a door slammed, or a hammer sounded, I would fully expect to see a broken body nearby. Worse still was any sudden movement, a bird swooping into my eyeline or a helicopter overhead, so that I was certain another person was falling to earth. I found my eyes drawn towards the clouds. I wasn’t the only one and so many others began to look to the sky instead of the screens of their mobile devices.
All this talk of multiverses, a tear in space-time, quantum entanglement, string theory, and relativity. I understood none of it, and I don’t want to understand. The only thing we know is it’s happening more often. Is the growth exponential? If it happens ten times a day now, will it be a hundred next week, a thousand by next month?
Then came a day that rattled me out of my inertia, when dashcam footage of Sandra’s disappearance was leaked to a newspaper and uploaded to the web. The police had already asked me if I wanted to see it, but I couldn’t bear to. Watching it loop on Twitter, how innocuous it was, like an amateur filmmaker had been experimenting with jump cuts. I let it play back and forth, to scrutinise the moment she passed from sight. But there was only the before and then the after, no dissolution or disintegration, just a cheap sleight of hand. Now you see her, now you don’t.
And I began to think maybe it was not such a bad way to glide out from this life, especially if you knew that it was happening. There would be that moment of realisation, the terror, the free fall, and an unquestionably quick death. Was it any worse than lying in a hospice bed with a morphine drip attached to your collapsing veins?
My life began to decomplicate. The mortgage of our semi-detached house just off Blackhorse Avenue was cleared. Sandra had far more savings than I’d known, runaway money perhaps, and who could blame her? The boss who weeks before seemed about to fire me was now overly sympathetic, saying I should take a couple of months of bereavement leave.
“You don’t need to come back until you are right and ready,” he said in his grating public school English accent.
I pretended to be mulling over what he said.
“Maybe coming to work’d keep my mind occupied,” I said.
“Well, I would like you to take at least a fortnight. And then you see how you feel. No pressure.”
Walking out the door of the voguish office on the Burlington Road, knowing I would never walk back in, I felt liberated. I packed a suitcase and, steeled by Diazepam, took a flight to Istanbul, travelling by train back across Europe to London. It took me two months. I had in mind to write that unpublishable novel I’d long thought about but got no further than the third page.
All around the world, people kept on falling but I paid little heed to TV, radio, newspapers, or social media. When I arrived in England, I took a short-term let on an apartment in Kennington—unsure if I would ever return to Dublin.
“And that I suppose is how I find myself here,” I said as I looked around a small parish hall in South London.
“Matthew, thank you so much for your honesty,” said Rebecca, the chair of that evening’s session of the support group for the family, friends, witnesses, and victims of the Falling People.
“I can’t lie to myself anymore,” I said.
“This is a good step to take.” The heads of the other participants nodded like the hands of a lucky cat in a Chinese restaurant.
“I’m sorry for talking for so long.”
“Not at all,” Rebecca said. “We can only let go when we open ourselves.”
I closed my eyes a moment. And when I opened them, Rebecca’s seat was empty.
Ken Foxe is a writer and transparency activist in Ireland. He is the author of two non-fiction books based on his journalism and likes to write short stories of horror, fantasy, SF, and speculative fiction.
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