Air Thieves

We promised to explain why “People stealing our air” was one of the things that we listed in the ‘dislikes’ category. Here goes. A bit of background is needed, so bear with me. (If you have to pee you might want to do it now.)

A while ago (I don’t remember exactly, it was a few months at least) I was sitting upstairs in my room at my grandparents’ house, studying for a Russian test and minding my own business. Next thing I knew, there was a godawful crash from downstairs.

Eighteen years spent in Phoenix trains the ear to that kind of thing. In the Valley of the Sun there are several reasons why a loud, resounding bang might be heard all throughout a (rather large) house, even if you are sitting behind a closed door. Someone might be breaking in, for instance, a serial killer or someone might be banging down the door; a street racer or a man in a getaway car may have miscalculated a turn and planted the nose of their car right on your windowsill; one of the summer sandstorms might have rattled the doorknob enough to send the door flying open and punching a hole in the wall behind it; those sorts of things.

It’s different in Eugene, of course…and it’s much different where I live with my grandparents, out in the country. Anyone who might be breaking through the door would probably be someone who had been lost in the woods for a few days, and would be so emaciated and exhausted that a firm bop on the head with a copy of The Da Vinci Code would be enough to finish them off. I figured a truck wasn’t crashing through the house. There was no wind to bang the door open. So I knew that it probably wasn’t something to worry about; one of my grandparents must have dropped something in the kitchen, or else slammed a door too loudly, what have you. But I haven’t got rid of all the Phoenix in me yet, and after a few seconds’ internal debate decided to at least go to the top of the stairs and listen in on Oma chastising Opa for dropping her great-grandmother’s bread platter.

As soon as I got to the top of the stairs I heard Oma scream my name. I answered her and she appeared in the doorway at the bottom of the flight, and she shouted, “We need help.” Now…we need help suggested to me that the both of them needed help. Maybe a bear or a dog or a buffalo or something had broken through the door in a fit of beastly confusion, and they needed help herding the thing out. I was expecting at least a beast when I ran down the stairs (and it’s hard enough for me to walk down the goddamn things). There was no beast. Oma ran towards the bathroom and I followed her – and there I found Opa face-down and unconscious, his arms at his sides pointed towards his feet. He hadn’t even tried to catch himself. He was pale and completely motionless. Oma pressed her fingers to his neck to check for a pulse, turned to me, and ordered me to call 911. With her fingers still on his artery, I took that to mean that she could not find a heartbeat, and that he was dead.

As soon as I turned for the phone Opa himself called me back. He explained that he had just ‘laid down’ (as the crash I heard from the other end of the house through my closed door had come from his collapse, as he banged the door against the wall as he fell, I highly doubted that such was the case – but how do you argue with a man you believe to be dying?) and that he was okay, he just needed to rest. It was settled. No ambulances. Oma turned to me. “Should we get him to urgent care?” I asked. She turned to Opa and informed him that we were going to the ER. She went into her bedroom to take the curlers out of her hair.

Meanwhile, American Idol was blaring from my grandparents’ bedroom. As I turned it off, the phone rang; it was my aunt Tish. She had called my grandmother to tell her to watch a certain singer, and was now calling to ask how Oma had enjoyed the performance. I handed the phone to Oma (I’m not practiced in how to tell someone that their father is semi-conscious and possibly dying in the next room) and went to stand trembling over Opa as he dozed on the bathroom floor. Oma came back out and told me to bring the car around. We would meet Tish at the hospital.

At the ER they determined that Opa was not having a heart attack; he was either going into renal failure or was having an aortic aneurism. (So difficult to tell the difference.) Tish and I were relegated to the waiting room. That same night, an enormous accident of some kind (I think it involved automobiles but I never did get the details) had happened nearby, and the waiting room was packed with the family members of the victims, waiting to know whether their people had lived or died. Tish and I listened as several families were informed that one of theirs had been pronounced dead. That was when Opa’s nurse came to find us a spot where we wouldn’t have to listen to that.

After a few very long, very terrible hours Tish and I were instructed to go home. They were waiting on tests. (They’d been waiting on tests forever, but never mind.) Tish drove me home. When I got there, the dinner dishes were still out. I put everything away, loaded the dishwasher, fed the cat, and went upstairs to email my professors, telling them not to expect me in the morning. I went back into my bedroom, finding all my Russian things still out, and put those away too. I lay down on my bed and waited out the longest and most horrible night of my life.

A few hours later Oma and Opa were back; Opa was fine, he even chuckled a bit. They never did find out what went wrong. I was finally able to go to sleep (about two hours before I was due to wake up). When I came downstairs a few hours later, Opa was drinking coffee and doing his Sudoku puzzle. “Ready for your Russian test?” he joked. (I was, in fact, not ready, but seeing as he was now perfectly fine and everything was back to how it had been before we had found him on the floor, I decided that I had better take the damn thing.) Oma shooed me out the door and I went to school.

On the bus (I was still relatively catatonic), all I could do was listen to the mindless chatter around me. I probably should have plugged myself into my iPod. Behind me, a girl sat down, called one of her friends, and began a very loud conversation. I could say that I had no choice but to listen, but that’s probably not true. Either way, I heard every word.

She began by calling someone and asking what her work schedule for the next day was. After that she called her friend and asked her how the party had been the night before. (This was a Wednesday morning, mind you.) “Did you get wasted?” was one of the questions. She commented: “I don’t think I’ve ever done that before, you know, drink all day and then all night. I didn’t even know I could drink that much.” Later (after a lot of stories of people puking and whatnot): “Oh, damn, I forgot your bra! Again! And I don’t even wear it!” Later: “Aren’t you proud of me? I’m going to all my classes today. I don’t think I’ve done that since freshman year, and that was like, you know, forever ago.” Later: “I don’t understand why they gave me such a bad grade. I didn’t turn it in all that late.” And so on, and so forth.

So there I sat, listening to this. I began to wonder how it was that these sorts of people managed to live with themselves; what were they doing of consequence? What have they contributed? Yes, I know it’s not good to judge…I’m sure that even though she spent an entire Tuesday getting as drunk as possible, that even though she (evidently) rarely attends her classes, that even though she expects everything to work out in her favor without any effort on her part, I’m sure she’s a shining example of a human being. I bet she’s saved babies from burning buildings and spends her weekends at soup kitchens to make up for the fact that she does nothing but put holes in her liver during the workweek.

Then again, maybe not. Probably not. This was, in all likelihood, a person who does nothing with her time except work at a minimum-wage job so that she can buy her alcohol. Who has (or was given) the opportunity to make something decent out of herself, and refuses to do so. Who spends her time wasting her time. When, I wondered, when in the hell will she learn how to act like an adult? When will she learn how to make her time on the earth worth something?

Of course the ER waiting room was fresh in my mind. I wondered why God or Allah or the Prime Mover or the Omniscient Architect or whoever allows people like that to live and meanwhile steals someone’s daughter from them in a car accident in the middle of the night. All they are good for is wasting air…stealing air from the rest of us, you see? Stealing air and stealing atoms. Those atoms might have been put to good use! And I know that I could use a little extra air.

But no. She came to school just before noon, was going to be leaving by six, and she was complaining about the hangover that she guaranteed herself with the previous day’s stupidity. She was wasting time, air, and atoms that could have, and maybe should have, been given to someone else.

At least she promised her friend to bring her bra back to her the next day.

So, if you’re ever sitting somewhere, innocently doing your work, and you feel the air around you getting thinner and thinner, it’s probably because some good-for-nothing little snit is sitting nearby, gobbling up resources from the rest of us.

I know that I should probably be considered a bad person for thinking these things. If so, I apologize to the world for that. But after nearly losing your grandfather and seeing firsthand families being ruined by happenstance, it’s hard to know that there are people in the world who are doing nothing with their time, and evidently have no intention of doing so. It's kind of a cliché, I know, to learn suddenly that life isn't fair. It's not as though I hadn't learned that lesson before. But this time it was such a knife in the heart that it stuck with me.

On the plus side…my professors and instructors were great about it. Really great. Granted, there was nothing they could do – the university allows students to miss class if they’ve had a crisis – so when I emailed them my problem all they could have done was shake their head and make me bring a note from the hospital. But they responded much more positively than that. Of course, when they saw me it meant that I was still motivated enough to attend class, so that was probably a plus, but they responded with either genuine relief or extremely well-rehearsed relief when they found out that Opa was okay. And, of course, Amanda was perfect about it, and was very sympathetic as it took two weeks for my nerves to recover.

So it’s not as though all people in the world are worthless snits who steal air. We just don’t like the ones who do.

That’s my story.

Have a good day.

~ Mary