Taking Off (7 page)

In one of my grandfather's old, yellowing issues of
Impractical Craftsman
 …

… I came upon an article titled “Motorcycles of the Air.”

I asked Margot and Martha Glynn to help, not so much because they were mechanically adept or interested in aviation but because they had listened tolerantly and often to my story of the seaplane ride and because it would be a treat to have them on the crew, a pleasure to watch them working in the tiny short-shorts they were wearing that year.

“Hmmm,” said Margot. “This is not quite the sort of thing we enjoy doing, Peter.”

“We're likely to get dirty doing this,” said Martha.

“Yes,” I said, “but you would look so good doing it.”

“He has a point,” said Martha.

“He does,” said Margot, “but then we look good at almost everything we do, and this is just not for us. Sorry, Peter.”

I asked Rose O'Grady, known as Spike.

“Wow,” she said, looking at the article. “You're going to have to learn welding.”

“I am?” I said. I hadn't counted on that.

“Sure,” she said, giving me a friendly punch on the shoulder. “How else are you going to get all these steel tubes that form the support framework for the engine to stay together—wishful thinking?”

“Well—” I said noncomittally. (I had thought, if I could be said to have thought about it at all, that glue might work pretty well.)

A wistful expression came over Spike's face, a distant look into her eyes. “I always wanted to learn welding,” she said.

“Now's your chance,” I said.

“Yeah. Count me in.” She gave me another punch. “Thanks, Pete.”

I asked Marvin Jones.

He looked at the drawings and diagrams that accompanied the article. He looked at the drawings and diagrams that I had made. He brought his eyebrows together, furrowing the skin between them, and frowned.

“Anything the matter?” I asked.

“Was this designed by a trained aeronautical engineer?” he asked.

“Um—I don't know.”

“And these pencil drawings, who did these?”

“I did,” I said with what I thought was justified pride.

“I don't know much about aeronautics myself,” he said, “but I think I know enough to say that this is not likely to get off the ground. If it does, it's going to be almost impossible to handle.”

“Oh.”

“You need a bigger tail surface, for one thing.” He began reworking my sketch. “With a larger rudder—and ailerons—”

“So you'll help?” I said.

“Somebody's got to try to keep you from going down in flames,” he said. “It might as well be me.”

I asked Matthew Barber.

“Um—well—” he said. He fidgeted. He thrust his hands in his pockets. He frowned. He seemed to be stalling. He seemed embarrassed.

“Is there anything wrong?” I asked.

“Wrong? Of course not. What makes you ask that?”

“You're not answering me. You're stalling. You seem embarrassed.”

“I—it's just that—I—”

“You don't want to help.”

“I'll help.”

“What is it, then?”

“Oh—it's just that—there's something I have to tell you. The guidance counseler—Mrs. Kippwagen—told me about a summer institute in math and physics—out in New Mexico—and she gave me a brochure about it—and I read through it and I said to myself, ‘Peter would really enjoy this'—but I never told you about it—and I applied for it—and I got in—so I'm going to be going to New Mexico and studying advanced math and physics under the blazing sun—but I'm feeling completely miserable about it because I should have told you—”

“Hey, forget it,” I said chivalrously. “I'll go see Mrs. Kippwagen and get an application—”

“It's too late,” he said, and to his credit he hung his head in shame when he said it. “The deadline's passed.”

Chapter 13

The QT-909, from QT Flying Machines

“IT'S AN AMAZING THING to say, an amazing thing to realize, but all of this makes me feel an almost overwhelming nostalgia—”

“You're sure you mean nostalgia?”

“I think so. I mean a yearning to return to an earlier experience, to experience again the sensations that I felt then, the springtime fervor and confidence I felt when I decided to build that plane, to see and hear again the responses of my friends, to stand once more on the sand floor in the family garage, even to listen again to Matthew's spluttering admission of his treachery—all of it.”

“Nostalgia, you know, was originally perceived as a disease.”

“I knew that.”

“Of course you did.”

“Wasn't it a disease of Belgian conscripts who were posted far from home and so fervently yearned to be back that they languished and died?”

“Something like that. It was originally identified by a Swiss physician, late in the seventeenth century.”

“I bet you know who that Swiss physician was, don't you?”

“I'm afraid I do.”

“Give, my sweet.”

“He was Johannes Hofer, and he found evidence of the disease in Swiss living abroad who would rather not have been living abroad—young girls sent away to serve as domestics, for example, or soldiers fighting in foreign lands. They all felt the pain that accompanies intense and prolonged homesickness, a painful and debilitating desire to be back home again, and that is what Hofer called nostalgia, coining the term by combining the Greek
nostos,
meaning ‘a return home,' and
algos,
meaning ‘pain.'”

“You've got to cut back on those crossword puzzles.”

“I'm thoroughly addicted. It's gone too far. There's nothing I can do about it now. So. Are you sure you're feeling nostalgic?”

“Maybe not, but I am feeling earthbound and ponderous. I'd like to take off.”

“Shall we play hooky for the day?”

“It's more than that,” I said, pouring coffee for me and tea for her. “This morning I am facing a workday full of annoying tasks that won't bring me any reward at all, not even the reward of feeling that I've done a job, because the job won't be done when the day is done. I'm going to have to work right through the weekend, and when the job is eventually done, in the small hours of Monday morning, I will not be satisfied with what I have done. All I will be is tired.”

“I'm sorry for you,” she said loyally.

“I know you are, and I am sorry for myself, very sorry for myself, and I know that that is immature and ignoble, but—”

“Yes?”

“Al, I really would like to have that aerocycle. My thoughts soar, but I am rooted here, earthbound and ponderous. You and I would get aboard, and we would fly away. We'd need an aerocycle built for two, of course.”

“I should hope so.”

“Al! Why don't we go? We could retrace my route to New Mexico.”

“Well, (a) we don't have an aerocycle—”

“I could build one. Another one.”

“Wait a minute. Are you serious?”

“I've been looking around the Web. Quite a few companies offer airplane kits for the home builder.”

“Am I dreaming?”

“Just consider this one,” I said, producing a printout that I had earlier kept concealed in the folds of the newspaper. “The QT-909.”

“It looks like a coffin,” she said. After a moment's further inspection, she added, “With wings,” but not with the eagerness of one who hopes to climb aboard and soar above the quotidian cares of the workaday world.

“According to the people at QT Flying Machines, the kit is so complete and the directions are so clear that even a rank novice can assemble a 909 with ease—and I'm not a rank novice.”

“How much does it cost?”

“The average QT-909 builder can be flying in less than two hundred eighty hours.”

“‘Can be.' How much does it cost?”

“The kit includes virtually everything one needs to build a 909.”

“‘Virtually.'”

“Well, everything except a few parts that you can find in almost any hardware store.”

“‘Almost.'”

“One of the remarkable things about the 909 is the fact that you can hitch it behind a car and tow it to the airport.”

“Currently, the budget will not support the purchase of a car.”

“The wings fold back against the sides of the fuselage—”

“Not while you're in the air, right?”

“Rarely, I'm sure.”

“Why am I reminded of something made out of feathers and wax?”

“Mostly plywood, actually. Glued together with epoxy.”

“You want to take your honey into the clouds in a plywood plane?”

“The 909 needs barely a hundred feet of takeoff roll before she slips the surly bonds.”

“Impressive. How much does this plywood kit cost?”

“No more than that used roadster with the
FOR SALE
sign that you sigh over when you walk past it every morning.”

“I suggest that you confine your flying to the realm of the science of imaginary solutions.”

*   *   *

BALZAC WAS A MASTER of the science of imaginary solutions. In
Louis Lambert,
Balzac wrote, “Whenever I like, I can draw a veil over my eyes. Suddenly I go back into myself, and there I find a dark room, a
camera obscura,
in which all the accidents of nature reproduce themselves in a form far purer than the form in which they appeared to my external senses.”

I sometimes draw that veil. I am not so adept that I can draw it whenever I like, but I can draw it at times. The place where I find the pure reproductions of the accidents of nature, my equivalent of Balzac's “dark room,” is memory, of course, and even a painful memory is a refuge from a painful present. Perhaps, reader, you feel, as I do, that much of the present is not what you wish it were, not only your personal present but the present of our contentious, bullying species. Sometimes, I just want to fly away, to take flight, take off, make my getaway.

Flight! The word itself makes my thoughts soar, and saying it, softly, to myself, in a time of troubles, makes me feel a bit of its lift. Balzac has the young Louis Lambert say,

Often have I made the most delightful voyage, floating on a word down the abyss of the past, like an insect embarked on a blade of grass tossing on the ripples of a stream.… What a fine book might be written of the life and adventures of a word! It has, of course, received various stamps from the occasions on which it has served its purpose; it has conveyed different ideas in different places; but is it not still grander to think of it under the three aspects of soul, body, and motion? Merely to regard it in the abstract, apart from its functions, its effects, and its influence, is enough to cast one into an ocean of meditations. Are not most words colored by the idea they represent? Then, to whose genius are they due?

… Is it to this time-honored spirit that we owe the mysteries lying buried in every human word? In the word
true
do we not discern a certain imaginary rectitude? Does not the compact brevity of its sound suggest a vague image of chaste nudity and the simplicity of truth in all things? The syllable seems to me singularly crisp and fresh.

… I chose the formula of an abstract idea on purpose, not wishing to illustrate the case by a word which should make it too obvious to the apprehension, as the word
flight
for instance, which is a direct appeal to the senses.

Perhaps you sometimes have, as I do, so strong a desire for flight, so strong a yearning to leave your present circumstances, that you are willing to trust your fate to feathers and wax. At such times, if I am able to, I draw a veil.

Chapter 14

No Laughing Matter

I AM ASTONISHED to realize how deeply I felt the sting of Matthew's treachery, and how deeply I feel it even now, so many years after the first stab. At the time it was like a sudden cramp, or the deep, sharp pain of a broken tooth, or a broken bone. Matthew was right in thinking that I would have wanted to go to the summer institute in math and physics. I wanted to go even after he had told me that going was impossible. Perhaps because I wasn't quite convinced that the deadline had passed, or perhaps because some perverse impulse to increase the pain of missing out compelled me, I visited Mrs. Kippwagen and asked to see the brochure that had lured Matthew to the program.