Feedback

Seconds were the enemy.

He had to get out of his seat.

Lee pushed himself back against the cushion, relieving pressure on the belt. He twisted the release as gently as though he were sitting in the cockpit on the tarmac back in Incheon, having just finished his shift.

Deep inside the steel lock he felt something click and give. Pushing off gently with his feet, he drifted out of the harness. Lee reached out with his hands, pulling himself through the sinking wreckage.

The side cargo door was submerged, but open. His lungs were burning. He kicked toward the door, pushing off the bulkhead and reaching for the opening, but his boots were heavy, his helmet was bulky, and his clothes weighed him down.

Lee fought to clear the wreckage as the Sea King slipped into the depths. He managed to get his helmet off. His ears stung with the pressure of the water weighing down on him, telling him he had to be at least twenty feet below the surface already. He tried to equalize his ears by stretching his jaw out into a forced yawn, but the pressure of the water around him was changing too quickly as the chopper slipped into the depths.

In the darkness, Lee had no way of knowing how deep he’d been dragged beneath the waves. Feeling with his hands, he tugged at the drawstring on his life vest. Immediately, a tiny gas cylinder inflated his vest, propelling him toward the surface.

His ascent seemed never ending.

Lee convulsed.

He couldn’t stop himself. He was suffocating, dying. He had to breathe. The urge was primal, instinctive, overwhelming. His lungs demanded air. They would be deprived no longer. A reflex reaction took over and he inhaled, coughing on a mouthful of sea water.

In those final few seconds, with his brain starved of oxygen, Lee’s mind drifted. Memories flashed before him in muted scenes. Far from seeing his life in miniature, Lee saw only one image, that of a young girl terrified of leaving him. Her arms were outstretched. She was frozen in time, etched in his mind. Bereaved of her entire family in a single night, and now forcibly taken from her rescuers. Her eyes begged for compassion, for understanding, for respite, but the past could not be undone.

The surface never came.

Darkness washed over him.

Chapter 02: Present Day New York

Jason loved New York. He sat at an old wooden desk overlooking the intersection of Columbus and West 67th, barely a block from Central Park. His rundown apartment was small—a single room with a kitchenette and a bathroom/shower barely larger than a closet. The carpet was worn and paint peeled off the walls, but it was home.

From the second floor, he looked out across the street at an Italian deli on the far corner. He could hear an old woman singing some archaic, operatic song as she set up a wooden stall outside the deli, loading it with bagels and freshly baked sourdough bread. Her voice carried on the wind, drifting above the cars and trucks speeding by. She was irrepressible, and he loved the sense of character she brought to the neighborhood.

The smell of coffee drifted up from an independent coffee shop on the ground floor below his apartment. Originally, the shop had been a Starbucks and the smells had been predictable, but there were so many other independent stores and restaurants in the area that they could encourage consumers to boycott big name chain brands. It was Jason’s claim to fame. That he lived above a failed Starbucks. Thankfully, the 7-11 across the street had fared better or he would have had a three block walk to the nearest grocery store.

The new owners of the coffee shop were Moroccan. Hints of cinnamon, cloves and cardamon floated on the breeze. The allure of freshly roasted Arabica coffee beans brought customers in from miles around. The line for a morning cup of coffee stretched around the corner. Jason smiled. Although it was the smell of the dark coffees, the espressos and cappuccinos that brought people in, most customers left with a latte or some other weaker coffee. For him, the smell was enough to get his synapses firing. He sipped at his generic brand instant coffee, smelling the Moroccan coffee wafting through the open window, trying to fool his taste buds.

Jason looked at his phone: 7:10am and already 85 degrees. It was going to be another scorcher.

Jason was a first generation Korean-American. His parents adopted him from an orphanage in Seoul. He was too young to remember anything other than their warm, smiling faces, but on coming to America they never let him forget that they regularly endured humid summer temperatures of 100 degrees without air conditioning. In Jason’s family, you weren’t allowed to complain about how hot it was until you’d baked under a ceramic tile roof on the Korean peninsula.

He was doodling when his cellphone rang. Jason was absentmindedly drawing symbols and equations on a scrap of paper. He put down his pen and picked up the phone. Before he could say anything a deep, husky voice said, “Hey, baby.”