Will just cald to tell me about an accident at Chicago Midway yesterday: while trying to land during a snowstorm, a Boeing 737 slid off the runway into traffic and killed a kid. No one on the plane was seriously hurt.
He then asks me if I remember the story of Jessica Dubroff, the seven-year-old aviatrix who died when her single-engine Cessna, piloted by her flight instructor, crashed during takeoff in a Wyoming thunderstorm on 11 April 1996. Will remembers reading about it in Newsweek in Texas, at the house on Chicago Avenue. Surely he means more recently, right? No way could he recall something from when he was only twenty-two months old.
“I swear I was the same age as her,” he says. “That’s why it was so upsetting.”
“No, I’m the same age as her. Just a year older.”
“Well then I’m suppost to be the same age as you, too. I think I hit a time warp.”
Plane wrecks and time warps—is this Donnie Darko?! In September he’d brung up not remembering 9/11, which happend when he was seven, but he had heard about a crash in Pennsylvania. I thought he meant Flight 93, but no, he went and found it: USAir Flight 427, originating from Chicago O’Hare, which crashed on approach to Pittsburgh (Will adds the “h”), 8 September 1994—the year I was seven.
“Remember our Texas address? Nine-twelve Chicago Avenue.”
There’s a darkening outside, a giant swirling storm brewing far above us, an incursion into our world of an unfathomably huge cosmic cyclone. A great disturbance in the aether, twisting and choking and terrorizing us here at the turn of the millennium on this continent of broken & scared souls. I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but I do think it’s that serious. The planet is heating up. Everyone is on high alert. It’s Threat Level Orange, all the time.
And this gigantic gust of interstellar wind has pluckt my nephew from the life he knew, a simple life with mom & dad in a little house on the urban prairie, and thrown him east into a screwd-up version of things seven years ahead of where he was—1998 to 2005—tho he hasn’t aged. He’s recalling stuff that happend to him a couple of years ago. It’s why he doesn’t remember 9/11, or Columbine, or anything. Those events were part of the storm, as well.
Who was the kid I knew during all that missing time? Some doppelgänger child? William the Pretender—a placeholder until the real deal came along—
Incidentally, there was another deadly crash in Nashville in January of 1996: a Navy jet exploded when it hit a house near the airport, killing three people inside & two occupants of the jet. Pretty close to where we were living at the time in Woodbine. I remember my dad, a hobbyist with a pilot’s license in the years before my birth, being very somber about it. I put it to Will: he doesn’t remember that. But it’s more evidence, to me, of the gathering tempest.