Helicopter by Marco Etheridge

I am cursed with my very own personal psyops helicopter, a flying machine that takes me anywhere it wants to go, no matter how much I beg it to leave me be. Matte black, of course, updated constantly—the latest sensors, time travel, you name it. Highly sensitive to excruciating shame, humiliation, and social embarrassment. Fully automated, sentient, and merciless.

My chopper comes equipped with night vision. Goes without saying. Sonofabitch loves darkness of any kind, darkness of the soul, the night, and the past. Especially the past. Doesn’t do happy. If I want happy memories, I gotta walk. But that time the camp counselor made me stand naked in front of the cabin window? Boom, my helicopter’s there, extraction cable down, hook on, midnight express to mortification. Yanked from the edge of sleep, and here I go.

Whop-whop-whop, rotors overhead cutting through present-future-past, me extraordinarily renditioned, and now I’m hovering over the scene: Eight-year-old me, naked as a worm, hands clutched over my hairless worm, tears running down my little cheeks. I must have broken some camp rule, whispered after lights out, or maybe the counselor was just another teenage sadist in training. Who fucking knows?

Oh, that had to hurt, sports fans! Let’s see that again in slow motion.

And that’s just the first stop on tonight’s tour. Helicopter rotors spin like a kaleidoscope, the fragments coming fast and furious. I whip past scene after scene. Taken down a peg or two. Too big for his britches. Automated weapons systems deploy as childhood certainty is blown to smithereens—rumination syndrome delivered by airmobile cavalry.

This LZ’s hot, sir. We’re pinned down and taking heavy casualties. Request air support and dust-off.

Negative. Maintain position, repeat, maintain position.

No survivors, but somehow, I’m back in the night sky, turbines whining, hurtling treetop level to relive the next horror show.

Squeeze your eyes shut if you want, buddy, but it ain’t gonna help.

Can’t look away, can’t block it out. My brain is locked into the helicopter’s instrumentation, a direct feed to my visual cortex, like someone’s cut away my eyelids and fed them to the cat. Every excruciating portrayal larger than life itself. Makes IMAX look like a sixties black-and-white cartoon. And the sound quality, Jesus wept, a thousand demons singing close harmony on a pinhead. Dolby Atmos could only wish for this level of clarity—aural torture on a cosmic scale.

Night after night, my chopper arrives. Never late, doesn’t need fuel, no shutdowns for maintenance. Always ready and waiting to unfold my next humiliating saga. Snatches me from sleep’s embrace just before I sink under.

A flying deus ex machina in reverse. Instead of being rescued from an irresolvable plot twist, I’m submerged in an enforced montage of endings gone wrong. Listen closely, and you can hear the thunder of minor gods rolling the bones.

Poor Sisyphus chapped Zeus’ ass and thus spent his afterlife condemned to push a boulder up a hill. I don’t know which deity I got sideways with, but I am the fucking rock, never quite reaching the crest. Gravity takes over, and down I go, bumpity-bump, over and over.

Cue the whirling rotors and swirling dust. Off I go on the next night’s flight.

Given the opportunity to make things right, I’d jump at the shot. One chance out of ten, that’s all I ask. I know there’s no fixing the past, but neither is there supposed to be a nightly rerun.

C’mon, coach, put me back in the game. I promise I’ll get it right this time.

Barred the means to repair even a single embarrassing episode, I wish only for the respite of sleep. Forget my faithful helicopter. Denied Hypnos, I’d settle for his brother, Thanatos. If not sleep, then oblivion. At least there would be no more mistakes, past, present, or future. I could live with that, and the gods keep their fucking boulder.

What I receive for my wishes and pleas is none of the above. Not nothing, because that would be too much to ask. My hateful helicopter still arrives each night to carry me away. Poor me, I cry, words no one wants to hear. Before you rush to judgment, allow me this small indulgence.

By daylight, I understand that I am a creature forged by my past. I am no longer young, and the passing of many years and mistakes has tempered me somewhat, perhaps for the better in a few small ways. An irony, then, that the reality of my recurring nightmare has made me who I am.

I ponder my curse, alone in the crowd. Do others suffer the same journey, night after night? If I scratch the flesh of the person next to me, would I find the worms of madness writhing just beneath the flesh? I fear to ask because that would be to give myself away, an admission of my own insanity. I cannot bear the thought and remain silent.

And so, I possess a personal helicopter or am possessed by it. I created my flying machine from bits and pieces of myself. Every night, my creation comes for me, lifts me from my bed, rises into the darkness, and carries me away to nowhere I want to be.

I beg my helicopter to leave me in peace, just this once, please. Being nothing more than an imaginary machine, it cannot hear me. Automated and without mercy, it does not heed my plea.

Marco Etheridge

Image: A small grey helicopter flying towards the camera from Pixabay.com