"Green Light Go" by SH Ong
Photo Credit: Jason Chen, obtained and licensed through Unsplash
Content Warning: Some sexist / homophobic thoughts from the narrator.
Green Light Go
The process is transparent, time-honoured, tried-and-tested. That’s why it’s safe. A sequence of nine jump commands ensures positive control. The drop-zone is pre-determined. We drag the parachute behind us, causing the upward-rushing wind to force open and inflate the canopy within seconds. We’re trained to maintain the correct, stable body position throughout deployment.
They don’t let anyone do this. They give us medicals, tests, interviews. The red beret at the end says everything you don’t say about yourself. It doesn’t feel like it matters when you’re rigging explosives or rappelling down walls. But it does. Of course, it does. In every way.
*
Theme parks are so pretty at sunset. Less manufactured and dystopian. Even the crowds feel snug like a safety blanket. Everyone with their maps peeking out and graphic-print backpacks. Matthew and Leah are still wearing the antlers she made them pay twenty quid each for. He protested for the perfect amount of time but gave in after a perfect amount of badgering. He was always going to. My brother knows how these things go.
As we weave through throngs of small screaming people, Leah keeps ribbing me about my love life. Or more accurately, the travesty of why a freshman in Columbia isn’t getting it while it’s good. We gotta get a girl for you before you turn twenty-one, look at you waiting for a nice little Christian girl to wife up, what even is your type? I just shake my head and smile, watching her and Matthew split chicken drumsticks and spill soda over each other.
She’s kidding, really. I don’t have a problem. Never have, and they know it. It takes almost nothing to conjure someone beside me: a fellow government scholar, maybe even in the military programme like me. Christian, of course. Fit and pretty but without a propensity to wear too much make-up, post bikini pictures, or aggressively toggle her Instagram between private and public modes. From a good university. A graduate of one of the top high schools back home. Loves kids. Wants to go part-time at work eventually.
We stop at the line for candy cane. The sky is reddening, now. A very intense blend of pink and orange with wisps of cloud peeking through. With the smell of vanilla bean and cream, the whole place is earnest, slow, dreamy. At once I feel both homesick and glad to be so far from home. A group of girls my age walks by, and I hear a slightly guttural voice. I turn around to see a dry-fit tee and shoulder-length bob of auburn hair turn a bend. It looks like Claudia, but I can’t be sure. I stop back in my tracks. Claudia.
*
I miss Claudia. We’d first met at fifteen as co-organisers of a self-congratulatory student leader conference which involved sitting in dusty meeting rooms and writing unnecessary proposals for unnecessary events. Two years later, we were both accepted into an elective programme for the country’s top humanities students. I can’t untangle her from my memory of the programme’s overseas trips – on paper, we were learning about religious conflict and adapting community service models to cultural localities, but any of that was buried deep under tropically themed five-star hotels, safari visits, whale-watching at dawn.
I can still see us on the boat by the fierce beams of white, watching the austere ball of daylight unveil itself from the shoreline. As dawn swept the shoreline, Claudia and I tied our jackets together to make a spontaneous hammock. Her baby hairs, the ones she said were there since she was a little girl, flew all over her round face and glistened like red wine. The wind was strong and kept tipping her toward my chest.
She cared, with post-it notes and late-night texts that dispelled all cynicism, about the events we organised and the people involved in them. When she helped me with college application essays I kept thinking, this girl is good, so good, so much better than me.
The next day, we led everyone down the winding Knuckles ranges to hot ginger tea and homemade biscuits by villages whose names we forgot by the time we got back onto the bus. I still keep the Polaroids we took at the bottom of my chunky blue rucksack – mud-stained sneakers, caps, and dry-fit tees, arms around each other, posing in unnameable configurations. During our A-Levels, the Polaroids sat at the left corner of my table, beside my basketball medals and student council certificates. To my mind’s eye, they went together. I needed the days where Claudia and I sat together on the metro back to our hotel in Saint Germain or in the little vans that carted us along the jagged Sri Lankan coast. How she’d turn to me, one arm along the window ledge, and say, it’s okay not to have it figured out even if everyone thinks you do, trust me, they say the same things about me.
Once, someone made a cartoon sketch of our goals as a cohort, and in the corner, they added a little stick figure captioned ‘bring down the patriarchy, AKA Luke’. Claudia nudged me, laughed and laughed, and I was glad she was there. She cared, with post-it notes and late-night texts that dispelled all cynicism, about the events we organised and the people involved in them. When she helped me with college application essays I kept thinking, this girl is good, so good, so much better than me.
She wasn’t pretty in the conventional sense of the word. Once she went to Stanford and I started my military service, we lost touch. But I hear she isn’t quite as nice anymore.
I get the urge to run after her – it’s incredulous that we’re both here. This city, this day, this hour. But I can’t see them anymore.
*
At twenty minutes, Jump Masters receive the first notification from the aircrew. They unbuckle their seatbelts and stand up. We are some of the first responders to a potential crisis if called upon by the government. Readiness is critical.
*
Leah pulls Matthew onto the spinny teacups adorned with sparkles and pastel swirls, and I become the designated photographer. I’m still thinking about Claudia. The jingle ends, and on some faraway ride Landslide comes on. Christ, Landslide. Geraldine and I used to play it together between seminars. It rattles me. All these not-yet-distant not-quite tendrils of my life colliding, making themselves manifest.
We were in that same arts elective together, but people knew us, really knew us, for being the two best guitarists in our school, maybe even in our town. Quickly it became obvious that we looked and sounded a certain way playing together. I remember her ear studs. Her signature cracked leather jackets. The thick-as-encyclopaedia files for academic Olympiad teams. Tirades at other girls for subpar project work till they didn’t know where to look.
On stage, she was all of that condensed, amplified, elevated. Every one wanted to fuck her; her short hairdo turbocharging fantasies that she’d want to be gagged and whipped behind closed doors. Well, every one of the boys at my seminars who wouldn’t be disqualified from our church and army for social and psychological issues – the ones with actual social and psychological issues including a maniacal fondness of Mongolian throat singing and citing quotes from the writings and declarations of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Once, after we’d been jamming, Geraldine and I found a chipped tile behind our classroom door. She handed it to me with a blink-and-you’d-miss-it wink, saying doesn’t it look like the Frankenstrat? At that moment, the sun-scorched mid-afternoon humidity became unbearably dense. Surely she found my humour too amateurish, too jockishly clumsy. Over the next few weeks, I wondered if she was a lesbian, maybe a soft butch. And the next time I saw her yell and scream I decided that everyone was right – she’d fuck off to Harvard or Yale, become a thousand-an-hour lawyer for ominous organisations, only fuck rich white men.
Brian Johnson yells out that boy he don't know how to lose, and I think about how Geraldine never did any of those things. She went to Cambridge, interned at a pro-bono outfit, organised fundraisers to save trees. She put on floral dresses, cooked, and showed the internet. She stopped yelling and screaming. She dated Asian men.
Shaker he's a breaker he's a maker he's a landslide. Deep down, I think I always knew. Leah makes me take a photo of her kissing Matthew’s cheek against the bubble-gum pink backdrop, and I ask myself why didn’t I want to know, what else do I know and not know, why, why, why.
Deirdre was so normal. Normal in a way Geraldine never quite was and Claudia, at the time, would have never deigned to be. Sparklingly normal.
*
At ten minutes, Jump Masters hook themselves to the inboard anchor line cable, move to the rear of the AC near the jump door and transfer control of their static line to the safety.
They announce, SAFETY CONTROL MY STATIC LINE.
Safety responds, I HAVE CONTROL.
Control. We are all in control. Smooth, coordinated, precisely executed.
*
We slot into the snakey queue for the tower that’s plastered all over the ads for this place. The last time any park tried something like this a teenager’s legs were snapped off. That hasn’t stopped anyone. Everyone here just knows they’re going to be fine. They have to be. Leah and Matthew are just the right amount of saccharine, so well-adjusted in each other’s company, sweet like seventeen-year-olds without the acne and neuroses.
Seventeen. I try to stave it away, but it’s futile. There Deirdre is sharp and resplendent in all her pastel-pink girl-next-door prettiness that could make anyone feel that they were coming home, that home would be warm and soft and bright. She was a dancer, slim and tan, mixed-blooded with large almond eyes. We’d met at one of those heteronormative pair-bonding orientation camps organised without dissonance by the very people who gave us assemblies titled ABC – A for Abstinence! After that camp, our socials were choked silly with posts captioned never thought this would happen, when it was clear to everyone, most of all the stars of said pictures, that it would. It was inane, skin-crawling. But whenever Deirdre would swish her pleated miniskirt about and lift her leg above her head it was impossible not to be seventeen, not at seventeen.
There she was at all the final year basketball matches after my foot fracture and the languor of drawn-out rehab, through the B-grade self-help spiels I was spewing in an attempt to believe it. The night we tore through the semis my legs were so heavy. When we won my eyes found her in the stands and I thought, God really does answer prayers. Deirdre was so normal. Normal in a way Geraldine never quite was and Claudia, at the time, would have never deigned to be. Sparklingly normal. Beset against the girls duck-walking into my lecture theatres in the afternoon tedium. There the few pretty well-adjusted ones were off getting hickeys in swimming pools and the rest were off treating their own gossip like some ongoing ethnography, citing Bertrand Russell and Ayn Rand at the mention of religion. And they looked exactly like the sort of girls who’d do just that: girls you’d never bring to your commissioning ball.
At a place like this Deirdre would have nuzzled her head into your arm as the queue inched forward and turned a bend. She’d let you tell her she didn’t have anything to fear. But in the end, I never figured it out. Even after all those late-night calls where I kept the line on in case she woke up. Even after the teasing that seemed like a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Was I just a stopgap source of attention, even a 4chan incel? Or just a person beholden to the whipsaws of personhood? That brain-dead brick wall she started shagging wouldn’t even have made it into our school if our second-rate egg-catching team wasn’t recruiting. I thought about that a lot during conscription. At the end of seventy-two kilometers, I decided, fuck her, fuck that small-mouth syphilis cunt and her downie gay-ass block of wood. And when a shrew I’d whacked to death lay in my hands, I wasn’t proud of it, but I thought about how I’d trade that bitch for a cigarette or a packet of Nongshim noodles in a heartbeat.
*
The onslaught of commands come, one after the other. It’s here where I feel most blunt and scatter-brained, fearfully rather than wonderfully made.
GET READY.
OUTBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP.
INBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP.
I go over the emergency procedures, the hours of ground training. I have to land right, distribute all impact throughout my whole body. In a bad landing, forces are concentrated at a singular point. It means severe injury.
*
We’re almost at the front of the line. My mouth tastes bitter, and acid is hurtling up my stomach every few seconds. Truthfully, I don’t want to go on. It’s ridiculous, of course, probably because of the stale, deep-fried junk I’ve been nibbling on all day. I keep looking left and right, then left again. Like I’m fascinated by the sight of parents in plaid shirts carting their children-people about. These varyingly gorgeous not-yet-people with all the time in the world to get wherever they wanted to go.
We get onto the lift that takes us to the top of the tower, where the ride starts. It’s dark and cramped. Uncooperatively, my gut flips again. Every apprehension I’ve ever staved off is slamming into me all at once. Maybe I want to be afraid.
I’ve felt this way only once in my life. Once, at that place with flashing martini glasses by the heavy blue velvet door. I’d just gotten home from machine guns behind coloured smoke in the Taiwanese mountains. On our last day there, everyone took the free condoms and got fucked up while I sat in the room Skyping my grandparents. Throughout the plane ride back, my brain felt like it was shaking against my skull, about to pop or slosh, and I knew I’d amassed enough cosmic goodwill to get wasted at a nightclub named after a fruit.
Things sat pretty in the closet behind the bathroom. Things I would lose my scholarship over. Things that found their way into my body. The ground kept slanting at thirty-degree angles. The condensation on the ridged glasses brimming with some molecular rendition of infinite, eternal truth. When Laura walked into my field of vision, for a moment there, I was so sure I was at church. The booming Japanese pop and neon fractals cascading over her taut midriff were just part of some megachurch’s latest brand of salvation.
Before me in Madonna’s prayer, when all that God had given her hung bare in Egypt’s nakedness, I felt charges of wretched pity for myself, then a perverse overwhelming gratitude for the lifeblood of whiskey. Reverse cowgirl wasn’t just about the girl bouncing up and down like in the videos - the salve lay in the circular grinding motion. I closed my eyes. Every time I saw Laura at church I looked everywhere but; we never spoke, not when she told everyone about her new interior decorating project, not at the party in the too-bright rented hall with balloons and all our parents. Then she got a boyfriend. Then he posted an Instagram story strumming on some crummy Walmart wood to a Top 50 tune with her on his lap. Then I replayed it over and over like a refrain in a hymn or a horror movie. Then I went to the toilet and threw up.
The lift shimmies and stops at the top of the tower. We pack into the boarding area. The sun is almost down, and it’s getting chilly. Behind us are two glamorous couples chatting in French and taking panoramic videos with their iPhones. They are glamorous in the way people never are back home. The women are taller than me. I feel like I’m a side character in three different movies all at once, and it makes me think I’m going to be sick. But, as if by reflex, I volunteer to go at the front where nobody wants to sit, and we slide in a little line of three.
Of course, Leah says, grinning at me. I want to pull her and Matthew into a clumsy huddle and talk about every doomsday scenario that could happen on these thin red loopy tracks. Instead, I click the seatbelt into place, zip up my windbreaker, and clutch the cold metal bar. People are filing into the seats behind us. I look straight, face my front. The waiting is the worst bit. That I know.
The moon looks implausibly textured, like a blue flame or a silvery plague. If Josie were here, she’d say something snarky about the colour palette personality quiz. Maybe talk about rendering the moon into a brooch with an accompanying poem.
*
The Jump Master forms a hook with both index fingers. He forms fists with the remaining fingers and thumb of each hand. As he gives the verbal command, he moves his arms down and up in a pumping motion.
HOOK UP.
Soon I will be in the air. My mind will narrow, become concentrated on controlling my canopy and landing safely in the designated landing area. Aim for the grass, skip the tarmac.
*
A high-pitched whistle blows. We chug slowly toward the first plunge. The kids behind are lulled into a sense of security, laughing and ribbing each other in a pantomime of macho bravado. That’s the thing about kids. They don’t see what’s coming.
We’re high enough to see beyond the perimeter of the park, illuminated by the colourful neon alphabet signs and the glare of white, beam lights. It strikes me how arresting everything is. How intricate and strange. This manmade playground is nestled within an endless web of ravines and gullies. On the ground, people are indistinguishable from vehicles. All no more than bit-parts of dust. Not even its quintessence.
We slow down even more. We’re almost at the top. The moon looks implausibly textured, like a blue flame or a silvery plague. If Josie were here, she’d say something snarky about the colour palette personality quiz. Maybe talk about rendering the moon into a brooch with an accompanying poem. I think about Josie now and again – sometimes nearly every day, sometimes not at all. I don’t even know her last name. But it feels impossible to describe my Columbia, my New York, without Josie. The tableau of her deep purple hair sashaying toward the bar feels emblematic of something. Maybe bits of everything.
We’d met barely weeks into freshman year. When it started to become uncomfortably apparent that all my friends were Asian. If they didn’t sound like me they looked indistinguishable. I didn’t plan it. I just didn’t fight it. That was why it caught me off guard, or maybe why it didn’t, that she happened in a dive bar with free hot dogs, where everyone wore hats with varying degrees of irony and seemed to know each other.
Josie was five-foot-ten, maybe more. Cajun, but she passed for white. I don’t know if she noticed me, or if we just shared a space at the same time, only that I turned around, and there she was in a low-cut tank with deep blue astrological tattoos running up her arm. I bought us White Claws and we watched scruffy men play pool at the chipped mahogany tables. As she ran her fingers along my shoulder blade, I thought about what the boys used to bemoan about between their deep amusement about Mao making Khrushchev wear floaties. It was that one aspiration we couldn’t shake. Effortless for the girls but well-nigh impossible for us – all of us smart enough to know about colonial legacies and problematic narratives of racial worth, young and dumb enough to be beholden to them anyway.
I couldn’t stop staring at Josie’s hair. Waves like ripples in a purple infinity pool tinted electric blue at its ends. So ethereal but earthy against the huge Seattle Seahawks banner and seventies plagues inspired by the sunset strip. She said that she was an ethical non-monogamist exploring edging and knife play. Her voice was steady, gentle. I didn’t know what to say; I’d never felt less like a rock star. She rubbed my shoulders, put her palm over mine like a lattice. We did an eighty-question quiz. The Myers-Briggs for kink.
In our cab, I stared out at the faraway dotted white lights. An implausibly tiny street café glowing like something out of a Hemmingway short story. I wanted so badly to just be young in New York City. Nothing much happened. We just kissed and fondled for a bit. Sex wasn’t the point, an orgasm even less so. Every part of my body tingled like a sparkler, like I was about to be swallowed whole by something.
For weeks after Josie, I couldn’t be alone. I spent every day with friends I knew from home because we travelled nine thousand miles and went to the same schools anyway. We bought red velvet lattes from art-gallery-open-space-all-organic-cafes. We let the girls take photos of them. We propped up laptops and typed paragraphs about democratic history against the beige arch windows of St Agnes library. In the evenings, I sat alone in the reading spaces bathed in the floods of last light until one day, finally, I felt like myself again.
There’s always a pause before the plunge, but we’ve been here ten seconds. Ten seconds, seventy-degrees steep. If I tilt my head back ever so slightly everyone looks like they’re falling off a cliff.
*
The Jump Master receives the all okay. He regains control of the static line from the safety, turns towards the aircraft skin, and assumes the number one position. He waits for slow-down procedures to conduct a strict sequence of door and outside air safety checks. Direction of flight. Overhead. Rear. Straight down. To the front.
Someday soon, that job will be mine.
ONE MINUTE.
THIRTY SECONDS.
STAND BY.
GREEN LIGHT GO.
Each jumper exits the aircraft within seconds. There are no questions, no interruptions. Before my turn, I say a quick breathy prayer. I say the same things every time. I pray for luck, for strength of mind and body. For every nail and screw in a beautiful system that’s never failed me.
*
We’re not moving. Why aren’t we moving? There’s always a pause before the plunge, but we’ve been here ten seconds. Ten seconds, seventy-degrees steep. If I tilt my head back ever so slightly everyone looks like they’re falling off a cliff.
Far back on the track, something grunts like a giant in a children’s book. Fuck, what’s happening? Leah murmurs.
I hear a small human far behind burst into tears, and that does it. I’m going to die. I’m going to die, layers of bare irony caked on thick, nine-hundred feet above ground, in this country full of idiotic obese racist fucks. I’m going to die. I’m going to be shattered to smithereens my brother’s going to smash all his bones into a tree. Leah’s gonna crash her skull into one of those sociopathic teacup things. We’re all going to die. I know it. I know it. I knew it. I tried to tell me why the fuck didn’t I stop it?
We jolt forward. We stop again. The ride music stops. We can’t pretend anymore.
Fuck, Matthew says. He and Leah turn to each other. Either they’re speaking softly or my senses are breaking down, but I can’t make out anything they’re saying. I’m glad for that. I don’t even look at them. I’m all alone. We all are, and I rather not pretend otherwise right now. The park manager’s voice comes through the speakers – unexpected malfunction, hang tight, working on it. Some last-ditch safety protocol. I close my eyes. It’s better to just get on autopilot, sink into it.
It never stops feeling like present tense, no matter how much time passes.
*
I don’t want my mind to go back there, but it does anyway. It does, every time before I fly home or before a big exam, when I open the drug testing emails from my scholarship manager.
It never stops feeling like present tense, no matter how much time passes.
I’m at the last concert I ever performed at before college. Two acts in a surprisingly packed auditorium. A proper gig. Geraldine is beside me, adjusting her in-ear monitor. She’s in a black dress attached to a leather jacket. From some angles, she resembles Marianne Faithfull in Girl On A Motorcycle. In the silent seconds, before the music comes on, I think about the times the Mongolian singing boys invited me to drink Jack Daniels and eat fried dough cakes. The times I’d say yes until I realised she wasn’t going to be there and felt the appeal of the invitation dissipate so quickly that I suspected it was never there at all.
The bright white rod lights snap off all at once. It’s loud and warm. Grand Funk Railroad starts surging through the amps.
Out on the road for forty days
Last night in Little Rock put me in a haze
Sweet, sweet Connie, doin' her act
She had the whole show and that's a natural fact
Claudia catches my eye in the sea of half-lit, nameless faces. I wonder what she’s thinking, seeing my fingers move to induce these breathless, rapid-fire sounds. That morning on the Sri Lankan mountains she was dewy and glowing, charged with a beauty that belongs only to youth in high places. Deirdre’s here too, at the front toward the right. She will trot up to me afterward and babble on about how good I was. I will want to tell her to stick a dildo up her ass.
I scan the auditorium, landing on my friends from my arts elective. God, I love them, in a way I don’t love the people from church or basketball. I love the two lads who made me think teen love had anything near a shot. My best friend so god-awful at football that the opposing team would pass him the ball on purpose. My Dostoevsky-loving desk-mate whom I missed so terribly during his medical leave that I bought a pet cactus and put it on his chair. I want to hold on to and never let go of nights we spent at dingy karaoke outfits gorging ourselves on free-flow chicken nuggets, napping in classrooms, playing with each other’s hair, and saying no homo.
Right there on stage it both tickles and cracks me open with an intensity I don’t expect, that in less than ten years, they’ll be helping oil conglomerates sue laypeople, on the other side of trades that drive teenagers to suicide. That on the other hand, some of the girls, for all their brilliant blazing model-essay lyricisms, would give anything to be like Deirdre. And that by the time they grow into some measure of prettiness and start liking reality television they’ll no longer be ambivalent about being far more compatible with boys who grew up on Richard Linklater trilogies than with anyone who jumped out of planes. Glory, if not honour, for men it will mean something different at twenty-five than at seventeen.
Though fuck knows if any of that’s true. I go back to nights in Brunei that blur into one another like scenes in a Terrence Malick film. Nights where I realised that the things people talk about when nursing ligament tears from climbing through knee-high barbed wire swaps are no different from what you say when five of you are bent over one statistics problem in miserable conformity to the defining stereotype of smart people who study arts. Somewhere someday, the same something always unspools. Spin class or Salome, Wayne Rooney or Wittgenstein, we’re so achingly alike in overheated pre-dawn silences where nobody expects anything from us, so horny and hungry and heartbroken.
There’s a pop, a screech. I’m back in this hell-hole.
I knew everything back then. Or I thought I did, and that’s the same thing. I knew me. I knew everything to my name. I was on track to become a General, then a minister in our single party technocracy stacked with Ivy League educated Chinese Christian family men who look and think and sound and fuck the same way. I could head a public company someday, with the three stars on my sleeve rendering me as they say, the best man for the job. I wouldn’t be famous, not even almost, but I would have that inscrutable thing. Our country’s equivalent of whatever made Lori Lightning and Bebe Buell fall to their knees at the sight of a guitar and a record deal. When it became impossible to separate men and art, I would swap Van Halen for Hillsong once and for all.
*
All I know is, for one night on stage, I was a motherfucking rock star.
Before every jump, I pull my line as taut as I can, preventing any slack. Any excess line will sweep across my body and neck, in the worst-case trapping me in what resembles a noose. Static line interference, we call it.
Somewhere sometimes, someone always lets a little too much through. May I never lose focus. May I never have a second thought at the edge of the ramp. Legs locked tight, may I always break my fall.
*
We jolt left to right, but nothing dislodges. The car lunges forward. I can’t tell if the ride’s working again and we’ll be rolling right out onto the warm loving ground in a matter of minutes, laughing and crying, or if we’re in purgatory hurtling straight to hell. An arrow of blazing yellow light comes straight for me. I can’t see anything. Pink noise hits my ear. The static is deafening. I don’t know where I am or what is happening. I don’t know anything, I never have. All I know is, for one night on stage, I was a motherfucking rock star.
Up all night with Freddie King
I got to tell you, poker's his thing
Booze and ladies, keep me right
As long as we can make it to the show tonight
SH Ong is a new writer from Singapore and based in London. Her work can be found in The Manchester Review, Oyster River Pages and Cathexis Northwest Press.