The Man We Left in Cleveland

My copy of Frankenstein sits on my lap, the old pages glad to finally be read. I began it at the end of eighth grade, and yet I am only a few chapters in now. A six hour plane ride seemed like the perfect time to spend with Victor and his monster. About four hours into the trip from LA to Boston, passing over Ohio at the moment, innocent Justine Moritz is being convicted for the daemon’s crime between silent episodes of Friends, that I have nearly memorized. A flight attendant races down the aisle, my dad’s laptop shoved askew on his tray table. Behind me, another flight attendant is sobbing into her hands, and a panicked haze pervades the plane when the PA system cries, 

Is there a doctor on board?

A heart attack, my dad tells me. An older gentleman at the front of our flight. I see children in the middle of the aisle, crying. 

A doctor, a nurse, any medical professionals?

A few people who seem to know what they’re doing hurry back and forth between the seats. One of them has a panic attack. We land in Cleveland, the closest major airport. There’s a ticking, beeping to the beat at which you perform CPR. It keeps going. An ambulance comes, and they take the man away.

I think about how I’ll never know if he made it.

There’s a family with three little kids in the seats behind us — two brothers and a youngest sister, like my family. Their mother marches them back and forth down the aisle, and once they’re settled we hear them arguing over the video game. Their childish bickering is filled with life, recalling memories of me and my own brothers, taking this same flight every year since we were born. The sound effects from their game replace the beeping of the CPR app, and the oblivious joy of these three kids pull me out of jet-lagged fear for a stranger’s life.

I think about how my brothers and I will never return to that level of innocence, stuck on a constant trajectory of painful knowledge that comes with being human.

Please make sure your seat backs and tray tables are up. We are preparing for takeoff.

We take off for the second time in one flight and I return to Geneva, where Victor Frankenstein’s story continues. 

Justine shook her head mournfully. “I do not fear to die,” she said; “that pang is past. God raises my weakness, and gives me courage to endure the worst. I leave a sad and bitter world…”

I fall asleep on my dad’s shoulder and we touchdown in Boston at 3:00 am. We arrive home, in Vermont, at 5:00. As I fall asleep in my bed, my bags unpacked, my clothes strewn on the floor, I think of the man we left in Cleveland, whose fate I will never learn. I think of my great-uncle we visited in LA, who is turning 101 at the end of the month. He just got his drivers license renewed.

I think of Mary Shelley,  her famed story of horror born of a whim of Lord Byron’s. I think of poor Justine Moritz, killed for a killing she did not commit. And Frankenstein’s creation, forced to live a life of exile and fear because of the way he was thoughtlessly created. 

All these people, these lives, pass through my mind, unable to connect in the sleep deprived state of my brain. But I look out at the stars outside my window, clearer than they’d been in the night skies of LA, and I have some muddled profound thoughts about the nature of being, about the meaning of life. They’ve probably been thought before, by livers much more experienced than myself. But that morning my disorganized philosophizing means something to me. And when I wake later that day, at 1:00 pm, I will remember the intercom and the beeping and the family. But those thoughts will be gone, left in Cleveland, lost in the stars outside my bedroom. Like Justine’s mournful words preceding her execution, I knew they would not live to see tomorrow.

I just hope that man in Cleveland does.