Sandwiched between a placid azure sky and the fading redness of a near evening ocean, the setting sun cast a final peep from the threshold of the Pacific horizon. This was met by the eyes of the pilot, who eased his plane along the crests of maddened winds cutting against each other.
The pilot was truly an old hand at this, knowing very well that as long as the controller in his hands worked, there was little that could bring him down. He ranked among the foremost of fighter pilots in the country, and his coat was weighed down by the collective weight of the medals that clung to its chest. Much to the dislike of his squadron-mates, he never forgot to wear them whenever he took off. You never know when it’s your last flight, he would say with a wink.
The Japanese had been kept at bay ever since he was stationed at Hawaii
His keen eyes caught the spark just as it arose from the rim of the sun’s arc. A lump of dread formed in his throat, for he had sent his squadron members homeward, and would have done so himself in a while. He cursed his luck.
Surprisingly, the other plane too, was alone. It was not that he wasn’t skilled enough to handle more than one enemy, he had once tackled three and gotten away with it. But he had heard word that the war wouldn’t last much longer, and all he could wish for now was to haul his medals, laurels, and himself safely home. The lesser the risks at this stage, the better. He watched with bated breath, but no other plane joined the lone one. The Japanese too, seemed to be scrutinizing just what he was, and after a while, they both raced towards each other.
As he drew closer, he felt the same surge of blood that he had felt in his very first dogfight. It seemed eons ago now, the span of more than a year of battle, and he felt very old. That was what war did to a man, he mused. He felt deeply senile, from his fingers right down to his bones, with his twenty seventh birthday just a week away.
The Japanese loomed up like a hideous black bat in the distance, and he swerved this way and that, in a furtive struggle to get the bright red dot of the aiming apparatus in line with the winged monster, which didn’t fire, but got craftily out of the way, in zigzagging maneuvers until it was swiftly ascending to a strategic point behind him. He turned around in tandem, but somehow or the other, the plane always swung out of reach. The pilot realized, much to his horror, that it was simply a better, faster model than the battered tin-box he was flying. In reality, it was nowhere near that bad, and the Japanese was only a slightly better machine. But it meant all the world to the hapless American. It simply meant that he was going to die.
His nerves faltered more than his plane. He forgot that he was the man who had once shut down three biters alone, whirling round gallantly from one to the other and setting them aflame.
He kept up the chase rather nonchalantly, half-hoping to scare the Japanese by sticking to his tail. But that happened only in stories, he knew, and he resigned himself to the fact that soon enough, his opponent would be on his tail, and vanquish him with impunity. It was getting darker, and he began to wish it was over.
The shock that followed knocked him back to his senses. Within seconds, the enemy aircraft actually executed a kind of acrobatic barrel roll, with an artistic grace not expected from machines, and twisted round to face him, spraying a deadly torrent of incendiary ammunition into his poor bird. His eardrums were assailed by a metallic cacophony of clangs and creaks, ending in a sighing exhalation of flames, which soon licked its way around from the fuel lines to the wings, glutting the cockpit with smothering billows of noxious smoke. He groped around for that green button amidst all those knobs and dials and controls. He had seen it almost as many times as he had put on an army suit, but never thought he would have to use it someday, no one did. And just when he had to, he couldn’t find it.
He was certain his lungs would explode if this went on a minute longer. A bullet must have ripped past his left arm, grazed him, so to say. But it felt like a white hot iron rod had been pressed against it, and a familiar sticky wetness meandered all over his hand, that of blood.
He began madly pressing and turning and bashing anything on the control panel that he could lay his hands on, and in a giddy nightmare, was suddenly shot out of the plane, feeling free and cool. When his senses seeped back in, a world of mighty wind sped past him, and still more layers of wind rushed up to meet him with a force that made the air seem solid. He was falling. In fact, his fall was nearly complete. He could make out the water below with fearsome clarity. The situation dawned upon him in a flash with mind shattering anguish. He pulled with all the strength he could muster at the parachute cord. Nothing happened! In a paroxysm of fear beyond fear, he only kept tugging at the cord to no avail, repeatedly as if in prayerful, beseeching movements. His stomach worked itself up into knots of organic fear, and his heart pounded away at his sanity till it all went black.
A wind blew in slow undulations of harmony, carrying the man in its girdling embrace, bearing him with a loving, symphonic hold over to where his feet touched land. It didn’t feel like the sort of land he remembered treading back in a life he had lived sometime. A wretched kind of life which was only a lurid half-memory. It used to be quite a struggle moving about back there, by placing each step solidly on the ground in order to move forward. Walking, maybe, was what it was called. He shuddered at the thought of a thing like that. He much preferred flowing along with the hospitable soil on this newfound island. The very fabric of the ground, for it seemed a silken shade of dull silver, was his friend. Movement was as smooth as a paintbrush making love to its canvas, a matter of genuine joy.
Up ahead, he could make out a wall of small hills of uniform, splendid green, with a narrow pass in between, which he walked into. It led him down a serpentine path, with nameless trees laden with dazzling constellations of fruits and flowers, each pulsating with otherworldly candescence. It met a starfish-like crossroad leading to four other ways, of which he took the second. He reached a winding path where a light breeze perturbed the forests into mournful rustles, and gradually rose to a point where he abruptly found himself trundling between many sepulchral barrows. They were each of hideous aspect, and housed, it seemed, chagrined souls in reluctant slumber. Here the path ended, and vanished from sight like a small stream drying up. He was alone with the mounds, which stirred to animation, and closed in from all sides in tidal heaves of the black earth, threatening to crush him. Though beset by fear, he stole warily through the gaps between the unwieldy dunes, which widened as they moved. After thus struggling from one end of the deadened landscape to the other, the spectacle of a mountain of blinding whiteness burst in upon him. He had emerged from moonless midnight to find a sudden sun held right in his face. It was an empyreal column bridging the earth and the unblemished firmament that he climbed up. A wondrous mingling of mellifluous litanies and enthralling music engulfed him, growing unbearably beautiful as he came upon a door in the mountain.
Brilliantine shafts of white light formed a forbidding portcullis to the egregious entrance, and behind it, he perceived amorphous, dream-beings, floating around in inscrutable strobes of astral, many-hued laughter. He ran, overcome by a sudden desire to be lost among them. They that lived in the very nucleus of all worlds, beyond all the spoliations of time, deathless entities of pure, careless truth.
But the barrier didn’t dissipate to let him pass, as he had hoped, resulting in a forceful collision. An abrupt, clamorous discord cleaved the prevailing music in the air, and he was rent into shreds of colourless ether as the vision ebbed out of existence.
He woke up to a suffocating blackness, which was shortly joined by soaring pain. The pilot realized he was domed in by the parachute, which had unfurled at the last, semi-conscious tug. It was now entrapping him in sinister folds, as he floated helplessly on frigid Pacific waters. He tried to struggle, but found something strange. There was a sickeningly awkward emptiness under him. One of his legs had forsaken him, and a pair of humongous jaws was making a meal of the other.
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