James

1

A massive bang from outside the plane and the sudden roller coaster drop made James gasp as he and Jacob saw a periphery flash through their cabin window. The interior lights flickered once and then cut out, the realization of sudden danger the eerie silence of what was now a gliding bus rapidly losing altitude. A single aisle LED flared bright as though building power before it too blinked and went dark, but not before both boys looked to each other in that short moment in time that James would never forget.

Eyes wide, he gripped his seats arm rests as hard as he could, making eye contact with Jacob and clearly seeing the fear that must surely reflect his own. For the first minute it seemed life had drastically slowed down, the planes near pitch dark interior strobed by moonlit clouds as their plane pitched downward alarmingly.

James faced the open door cockpit but saw nothing but an arm reach across the space within, and withdraw just as quickly. The two pilots urgently relaying their instrument readings to each other as he heard the Captain, Mr. Bergersen, shout ‘…non-responsive!’ and ‘…eep the nose up!’ as the plane shuttered and moaned like no plane should. James expected the thing to break apart any moment the way the sounds of the aircraft under dire stresses seemed to get louder by the second as it fell.

He felt the plane start to bank as the pilots attempted to decrease its speed to reduce the G forces that come with unpowered descents. The plane now a suicidally overweight glider.

No word came from the cockpit to the boys other than a single shouted command. The two pilots obviously facing a bigger concern than wondering if the twins in the back were strapped in and prepared to face perhaps the deadliest moment of their 14 year old lives. It was certainly the scariest. James felt sure Captain Bergersen- he couldn’t remember the other, younger, pilots name- was the kind of man to at least look back into the cabin to make sure his two charges weren’t out of their seats. They were told to fasten their seat-belts as the plane was crossing a high pressure front when late migrating geese destroyed the aircraft’s two engines. Plunging the plane into the snowstorm below. The Captain shouting, “Stay strapped-in back there!” over his left shoulder as though they’d be stupid enough to start moving around as the aircraft all but dropped out beneath them.

Weather in the middle of winter in the Cascades is dangerous, and that is putting it mildly as Washington’s Cascade Range is literally littered with aircraft wreckage throughout the history of aviation, and taking a bird strike into an engine will dampen even the most veteran of pilots optimism of reaching a safe landing area so deep in these mountains that divide the state.

James had no idea if they were able to call for help or even tell someone what was happening as the flight abruptly ended just as the nightmare began, with a crash.

Squeezing his eyes shut as hard as he could, waiting for what surely would be pain entering his body, James was thrown this way and that as the plane was landed as best as could be expected- a testament to the Captains naval training and decades of experience- onto the down slope of a high ridge among thinning spruce and black shale that few Americans had ever laid eyes on, let alone walked. The aircraft rolled once as the planes wings were sheered away and the fuselage angled hard left as it was forcefully hung up by old fallen tree stumps and rocky outcrops. A powerful whistling noise and his own screams of terror filling the voids of metal tearing apart.

Not once did James hear Jacob cry out before utter darkness enveloped his world as he was struck by something heavy. But in that instant before the unknown blow, James felt a rage he had rarely acknowledged overtake the primal fear of what he believed was his and Jacob’s eminent death, and gave even rarer voice too. In that moment he screamed “Fuck you!” at a fate that would rob him of their world.

“I don’t care if that’s what they want, if James can’t come, I’m not going.” Jacob’s clear, take no dissent pronouncement didn’t surprise Alene in the slightest. The boys were always together and the thought that some strangers pronouncement would have any sway on the fact that her two boys were as thick as thieves did bring no small sense of pleasure and pride at there ‘fuck all’ loyalty and love for each other. But she was still uneasy about Jacob missing what could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to Vancouver, Canada and interview for what was surely one of the premier Pan-Pacific institutes for young musical talent, The Hanson Institute. That Jacob was a musical prodigy was not contested, that he may be a composing genius was now the real question.

Her first born twin was something else entirely when he began to compose, without any training, music that evoked powerful, if a somewhat melancholy sound that without a doubt most people recognized as something special. And no one was more prouder of those facts than James, whose own proficiency of the flute helped Jacob to round out many of the pieces he created, often in the middle of the night.

Being invited, which was the same as being told a full scholarship was being offered, to The Hanson Institute was a mothers dream come true as far as Alene was concerned since, as a single mother of twins with a very modest income and who could never afford advanced music lessons or the higher quality instruments fewer and fewer American children took for granted, could never afford to send her sons to private school, let alone an internationally renowned academy that produced some of the worlds finest musicians and composers.

These are the realities the ‘new middle class’ face in the age of corporate welfare and routine public education cuts. In the end though, The Institute, as it was referred to by the staff, recognized that Jacob wasn’t being snobbish nor arrogant about demanding James’s inclusion, but was being self-serving in that he and James lived for each other and to separate one from the other was to hamper, perhaps even kill the drive that made Jacob, Jacob. Hence James being included into the program as a ‘resident guest,’ a term meaning the requirements that a recruited student needed in order to reach their full, perceived potential. In this case, James was that requirement for Jacob. If James made Jacob happy and productive, The Institute was more than happy to bring him out to Vancouver too.

They were told it wasn’t uncommon for a parent or sibling to be living with a prodigy on school grounds. That alone gives an idea of the wealth and seriousness The Institute and staff held for their program and those they believed advanced their endeavor. And that’s how the twins found themselves on the turbo prop making its way from Yakima, Washington to Vancouver, Canada.