At 7 AM on a Saturday in September 2025, I participated in a mass-casualty simulation drill held in the firefighter training area of O’Hare International Airport. Before the exercise began, the other volunteers and I gathered inside a retired hangar to receive our character assignments and our list of injuries. The backstory was that our red-eye from Cancun, operated by the fictional “Urban Moon” airlines, had crash-landed. Some of us had been injured and some of us had died. Others were relatives who were supposed to scream at airport staff and demand information about their loved ones.

I was assigned the character of Tonya Lighthorse at the sign-in table. According to my lanyard, I was a 65-year-old woman with deep lesions on her right leg and a lower-than-average heart rate—satisfyingly dramatic, I thought, though others were disappointed by the mildness of their conditions. They haggled for more wounds from staff and volunteers. One woman pressed a small, intimidated teenager to trade assignments so that she could have her own head done up in blood. Later, in the staging area, the same woman asked the moulage artists if she could have propeller blades stuck into her head.

“We don’t have any, and also, I don’t think that’s very realistic,” said the artist, who was serving as a volunteer from an Irish American service society. “This was a jet engine, not a propeller plane.”

“I’d like them anyway,” the woman said. “Just do what you can.”

The artist complied and inserted a few extra shards of plastic into the red petroleum jelly which she had daubed onto the woman’s cheek. When it was my turn, I rolled up my pant leg to receive my fake blood and copper-colored pigment, though I declined the artist’s request to rip my pants. Covered in special-effects pigment, I ate bagels from the Salvation Army emergency kitchen at a table with other volunteers. The man sitting next to me had a cheerful curled mustache and gaping black and purple wounds painted in the area around his right nipple. He said he worked in sales for an electric car company.

The other person next to me, whose arms had been covered in chemical burns, bragged to the table about her powerful heart, which had been strengthened by multiple super marathons. She told us that she had worked as a substance abuse counselor for formerly incarcerated people but now manned the front desk at a very large and ugly short-term rental apartment building. Before we left for the exercise, she took two Klonopin from a coin purse emblazoned with baby dinosaurs.

The trainee firefighters stood apart from the rest of the volunteers, eating their breakfasts while at the same time responding to commands from their superiors with martial discipline. Few of them were to play victims.

In front of the firefighters’ appointed tour bus, the marathon runner and I spoke about what it is like to work in jail, while two men standing next to us talked about the increasing price of coyotes, one of whom had left one of their uncles stranded in Sonoyta, Mexico. “No one crosses anymore,” said a man wearing a Garfield shirt. “It’s really sad.” Then another bus showed up and drove us onto the airfield, passing by numerous excavators with soiled, checkered flags sticking out from their cabins.

These industrial machines rolled up and down rock piles, made of broken fragments of runway, carrying themselves higher and higher into the air. From the top of their perches, they looked down upon the planes turning off the ramps and onto the taxiways, and from the taxis onto the main drag. A different bus drove past us, labelled Temporary Morgue, which unsettled me considerably. A customer service representative from the airport explained: “People die at the airport all the time. They have heart attacks in the bathrooms, or they die at work. So it makes sense to have a morgue.”

She didn’t know whether the morgue was in active use today or if the bus was just driving to some other hangar to receive repairs. Later she told me that she coped with her job by imagining angry customers as elves wearing funny hats. “Had she ever dealt with a passenger dying?” I asked, and she said she had, on several occasions. “Did you imagine any of them as elves?” I asked, and she smiled, but didn’t laugh. The last thing we talked about was how much she liked the salads at Chick-Fil-A. Her phone background featured a photograph of herself wrapped in white fur.

The drill took place on a disused stretch of runway which had been used to store the ragged hull of an American Airlines plane that’d caught on fire in 2016. When we arrived the airport interfaith chaplain was delivering a sermon near the base of an active drone that was tethered to the earth by a long rope. We listened from afar as rumors spread throughout the crowd that a second Salvation Army truck was serving free McDonald’s McGriddles. The boldest volunteer firefighters and I ran across the exercise site to get them, which we did, though the chief firefighter turned to us and said, “You should be ashamed of yourselves.” Finally, the head of the Chicago Department of Aviation spoke about the necessity of preparedness, congratulating the heads of other agencies for cooperating on these once-every-three-year operations to make today’s drill “a reality.” The ambiguities of this phrase captured the way in which a sense of real-world consequence would drift in and out of my mind during the exercise.

The other volunteers and I were told to congregate inside an inflatable tent to watch a life-size (or “near-life-size”) replica plane—black like the exterior of an aquarium smoker—set on fire. While the plane wasn’t really on fire—rather, gas jets sent huge flames up either side of it—and the fire was also not really put out—rather, a computer turned them off once it had determined that the firefighters sprayed enough water on it—it nonetheless felt apocalyptic, the way many harmless things now do. The black smoke rose very high in the air, surely visible to the drivers on the highway, and the heat and choking grit wafted over to us in waves. As we watched, the man with the curly mustache tried out the same joke on different people, repeatedly: “Do you have any marshmallows?” I thought it was funny, but one disciplined young person didn’t reply, at first. After a moment she instead whispered, “I’m a 64-year-old who doesn’t respond to verbal commands.”

We were hustled out, up and into, then down and out of, a different imitation plane, this one used for practice evacuations, rather than practice fires. The exercise had really begun, and we were really acting then, lying on the ground and pretending to be injured. The woman who had taken the Klonopin lay sideways on the ground with one hand outstretched past her shoulder, like a chalk outline of someone who has jumped off a building. The men who had discussed the coyotes sat a few feet apart with their heads resting on their hands. The propeller woman screamed herself hoarse.

I sat on my side looking at the others, and was rescued within five minutes by a group of young firefighters, who strapped me to a board.

For nearly two minutes I was borne aloft and carried across the airfield to a separate triage tent, a very pleasurable, quasi-erotic experience, which gave a taste of what it might be like to be able to float. The clouds, framed by the undersides of the firefighter’s jaws, passed above the airplanes like flocks of sheep. Other people also floated by, carried to different tents and ambulances, and as we got farther and farther from the crash site, the other injured people looked increasingly spectral. Though I’d not been burdened by anything all morning, being carried in this way did make me feel as if some kind of burden had been lifted—that the weight of existence was not something all that distinct from the weight of my body, or of putting one foot in front of another. Only later did it dawn on me that I had experienced a form of locomotion previously accorded only to princes carried on palanquins.

It might be for the sake of this sensation that so many of the other volunteers—some of whom had done three or four such exercises before, despite having no connection to emergency medicine—had sought out this drill. Americans do strange things in order to be pampered.

When I was finally let down, to be bandaged and prepared for an ambulance, I felt very much at peace. My injuries were mild, and unlike other participants, I felt no obligation to ham it up with groans. The EMT who described what she would do to tend to my imaginary wounds was a good-natured and beautiful woman with a smoker’s laugh, who was momentarily startled because she thought for a second that Zach Galifianakis had participated in the exercise. But it was only the mustached man. He was set into our tent right next to me, followed eventually by the two men discussing the coyote, the substance abuse counselor, and the woman who’d asked for the propeller. At the appearance of each of these familiar faces I had a funny feeling, similar to how I imagine one might feel if you found that some secondary acquaintance, someone you had totally forgotten, had been assigned to live with you in hell.

“Got any marshmallows?”

It seemed fated I would be put in the ambulance with the propeller woman. She and I were loaded in, one after another, on a mechanized set of rollers that allowed us to seamlessly transition from our stretchers to the operating table inside the car. For another half hour we lay under the ceiling’s six yellow lights, with the tech smiling benevolently down on us, asking if we’d had a good time.

I said I had. The other woman said, “I’ve had an OK time. A lot of things happened, really, and in a way, I got to taste death. I think that’s good. But the bad part is I screamed myself hoarse. It took forever for the firefighters to come get me, and now I can hardly speak. I’m sore all over. I wish the plastic boards had a headrest as well.”

Then she jostled her false teeth around, and added, “I’d like to call my daughter, now, if that’s alright. I’m going to talk to her quietly.”

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