Chapter 2 2

Early Sunday morning, as Joe was driving to Santa Monica, a strange anxiety seized his heart. It made his chest tight and he couldn't breathe. He tried to lift a hand from the steering wheel and found that his fingers were Shaking like an old man with a stroke. He felt as if he had fallen from a very high place, and the Ximei car he was driving seemed to have driven off the road and fell into a bottomless abyss.The road stretched infinitely before his eyes, the tires rubbed against the asphalt, and he couldn't regain his stability.The feeling of falling was so strong and terrifying that he had to let go of the accelerator and slam on the brakes desperately.

The traffic was chaotic all of a sudden, and the sharp sound of tires rubbing the ground due to emergency braking was accompanied by the sound of horns in all directions.The drivers who passed by the car either stared at him viciously, or sweared loudly, and even made obscene gestures.This is Los Angeles in an era of change, full of anxiety while waiting for the end, a slight personal loss, others will repay you with vengeance. The feeling of falling was still unabated, and his stomach continued to churn, as if he was riding down a steep slide on a sled.Although he was alone in the car, he heard the screams of the passengers.It was muffled at first, then grew louder.

It wasn't the jubilant shriek of thrill-seekers in the funfair, but the real panic-stricken exclamation.The sound seemed far away, and Joe heard himself whispering "Don't, don't, don't..." He found a gap in the traffic and got out, drove the car off the road, and parked it on the narrow road shoulder close to the guardrail.The green oleander bushes beside the road sway like waves.Qiao Ye turned off the engine, and he was covered in cold sweat, and he had to take a deep breath to catch his breath. The air in the car was obviously fine, but he smelled a smell of smoke, and he could even taste the pungent smell of burning oil, plastic, resin and metal on the tip of his tongue.When I looked at the dense red flowers and green leaves of oleander squeezed on the car window, they turned into plumes of oily smoke.The windows also become urban rectangular airplane portholes with double glazing.

If it hadn't been for a similar experience in the past year, Joe would definitely think he was crazy.It used to happen once every two weeks, sometimes three times a day, each time lasting ten to thirty minutes.He also saw a therapist, but that kind of counseling was of no help.The doctor also prescribed anxiety medication, but Joe refused to take it.He wanted to feel the pain, that was all he had. Jo closed her eyes, and pressed her face to her cold hands.He tried hard to control his emotions, but scenes of disaster unfolded around him one after another. The feeling of falling became stronger and stronger, the smell of smoke became stronger, and the screams of passengers were like ghosts crying and gods howling. Everything was shaking, and the floor under his feet, the walls of the ship, and the ceiling all made terrifying sounds.

"Please!" pleaded Joe, eyes closed, and he moved his hands away from his face and clenched them into fists at his sides.After a while the startled little hands of the children clasped his, and Joe clasped them too. The children were not in the car, of course, but in their doomed seats on the plane, and Joe was instantly on board Flight 353 that was about to crash.Whenever the symptoms flared up, he would be in two places at the same time: one in a car in the real world, and the other on a National Airlines 747.Michelle sat between the two children, and Chris and Nina held Michelle's hands, not Joe's.

The plane vibrated more and more, and debris flew in all directions: hardcover books, laptops, cutlery, plates, plastic cups, wine bottles, pencils, pens bounced around the cabin. Michelle was coughing and must have choked on the smoke as she urged the children to keep their heads down. "Bow your heads and protect your faces!" Those lovely faces, seven-year-old Chrissy, like her mother, with high cheekbones and clear blue eyes.Joe never forgot the joy on Chrissy's face at ballet class, or the focused, leering look in her Little League game as she walked to home plate to bat.

Nina is only four years old, with a small nose and blue-gray eyes. Whenever she sees a cat or a dog, she will smile and wrinkle her face.When seeing her holding an extremely ugly lizard in her small hands, and looking at the little thing with surprise and love, anyone would think that she is the incarnation of Cupid. "Put your heads down and protect your faces!" The implication is that they will surely escape, but the worst thing can happen is that their faces will be scratched and disfigured by shards of glass. In the growing panic, the angle of the plane's fall became more and more oblique.Joe was crucified in the seat, unable to bend forward and bend down to protect his face.

Perhaps a broken plane caused a system failure that rendered the oxygen masks in every seat unusable.He didn't know if Michelle, Chris, and Nina were still breathing, or if they were suffocating as they struggled pointlessly through the smoke.I saw that the entire passenger ship was covered in thick smoke, and the claustrophobic fear was worse than being in the deepest mine. In a thick black smoke, the flames burned like poisonous snakes.In the panic of the plane stalling and falling, people worried that the fire would not know where to smolder, and they did not know when it would turn into a raging flame that swallowed the entire 747 flight.

When the pressure on the plane is too great to bear, the whole fuselage begins to vibrate.The huge wings hummed as if they were about to fall off.The steel frame of the fuselage was also moaning like a dying beast.The cracking of any weld, the falling of a nail, sounds as sharp as a gunshot.Michelle and the two children thought that the plane was about to disintegrate, and they would be thrown out of the fuselage and go to hell. But the huge 747 is an amazing work of mechanical design. Although the hydraulic system failed for unknown reasons, the wings did not fall off and the fuselage did not disintegrate.I saw its roaring engine, which seemed to be still fighting unremittingly during this final fall.

Michelle knew that they were facing death.The only thing she wanted was to comfort the children. Without hesitation, she hugged Nina tightly and whispered in her ear, "Baby, it's okay, we're all together, I love you, hug mom. I love you, You are the best little girl." Michelle's voice was full of emotion, but there was no pain at all.Of course she didn't forget Chris, "It's going to be okay, honey, I'm with you. Hold my hand, I love you, we'll be together forever and ever." The voice that Joe hears from Michelle in the car seems to come from his memory. When Michelle is comforting the children, he seems to be with her.He believes that children can have the same courage as their mothers.He wanted to know that the last words they heard in this world were Michelle telling them how precious and cute they were. The passenger plane crashed violently on the open grassland in Colorado, and the crash could be heard twenty miles away.Startled a flock of nighthawks, and frightened the early peasants.

Joe let out a muffled groan in the car, as if he had been struck by lightning in the chest. The tragedy of the impact was unbearable.The plane exploded after hitting the ground, rolling over the prairie, the fuselage shattered into dozens of charred and twisted pieces.The orange-red fuel sprayed out also set the nearby woods ablaze.All 330 passengers and crew on board died instantly. The knowledge of love and compassion that Michelle had instilled in Joe on a daily basis also vanished in that tragic moment.Chrissy, a seven-year-old ballet dancer and Little League player, would no longer be able to pirouette gracefully on tiptoe or run straight for the bases.And if the animals were aware, if they could sense the words in Nina's heart, then on that bleak night in Colorado, the small animals on the prairie and in the forest would also weep and weep in their burrows. Joe became the only survivor, and he was not on flight 353 with his family.Everyone on board had been shattered to pieces, and if he was one of them, he would probably be identified only by his dental records or the fingerprints of a finger or two. He shuttles between reality and the situation of the plane collision, not relying on memories, but the result of extreme fantasy, usually appearing in dreams, sometimes like today, he will suddenly feel a burst of anxiety.Joe felt a sense of guilt that he had not been able to go to hell with his wimpy darlings.So he tortured himself with it, hoping to share in the horror they had gone through.But this kind of fantasy of his does not help to heal the wound and relieve the pain at all. It will only increase the trauma of his soul every time he dreams back at midnight. Joe opened his eyes and looked at the cars whizzing by in front of him.If he really wanted to die in time, he could have opened his car door, walked out onto the highway, and been hit by a truck.But he stayed in the car safely, not because he was afraid of death, but because of some reasons that he couldn't figure out.At least for now he felt that he should punish himself more in his lifetime. The gusts of wind from passing vehicles kept blowing the dense oleander bushes, and the green leaves against the window rubbed against the glass to make a strange sound, like a whisper of loss and despair. Joe no longer trembled, and the cold sweat on his face was dried by the cold wind from the dashboard. He no longer had the feeling of falling, and he had returned to reality. The light smoke from passing vehicles is as hazy as a mirage under the heat wave of August.Looking to the west, the cool sea trembles in this haze.Joe waited for the traffic to stop for a while, took a break, and drove towards the other end of the mainland again.