TRANSPORT

 

TRANSPORT

 

     The skies of their childhood were uniformly a florescent gray. A blue sky with clouds sailing over would always be a vision to them.  Jed had memories of a lightening storm that had passed over Los Angeles when he was a teen-ager. The sheets of incandescent light had burnt afterimages of Venetian blinds and palm fronds on his retinas.  It came at a time when Eros was charging the elements in his body.  It was night. He saw himself in the large mirror on the dining room wall, and he saw his luminous ghost among the other afterimages, thunder rolling on the horizon. Other than this one intervention, during his childhood omens had been erased from the sky. 

     They were their parents' children, their grand parents' grand children, stretching back to European shadow and offal, but the historical anomaly of being born in Los Angeles had the final hand in their shaping.  They had to weather boredom spoiling into nihilism.    

     Mark adapts to the broad shallowness of L.A. better than Jed.  At some point during adolescence he abandons introspection. He has always had a physical genius based on his singularities.  He is outlandishly limber, without ever having done a stretching exercise.  He can stand on either leg and touch the other to the top of a doorframe, doing a vertical split. The elasticity does something to his tempo.  He tends towards rag-dollish dangling.  But, it gives him some room for negotiation.  He would need extensive tailoring to fit the academic expectations of his family. He is simply too protean to be slatted for anything. If his sense of individuality is undeveloped, still his uniqueness is pre-destined. 

     Mark takes up the trampoline, a fad at the time. His eccentric body, coordinating anarchy or entropy, found parole in punctuated weightlessness.  His body’s wayward tempo left its scaffolding in place on his mind, making his body’s mechanics legible to him, as if he had been given an owner's manual. He had that kind of alienation, that schism that comes from being off a beat-the overt part of it, anyway, reachable through logic if he ignored his inheritance of phobias-and he must have been pleased by the trampoline's exalted slapstick, pratfalls and belly flops in Excellus.  Picking his self up by the bootstraps.

     Jed is not clumsy; he has some of that California athletic versatility, but he is squirrelly quick, nervous quick, possibly the result of verbal shamming, dodging and cutting the angles, but he pretty much gets clobbered at conventional sports that come down to pitting solid mass against solid mass, character included.  Source of shame and fantasy, he feels a bit alien in California, lacking the goods for integration. Jed depends on Mark to be an example of heroic typicality. He brought "bitchin" to Jed, a skeleton key to adolescent arcana, kind of pig Latin, nasty and sexual and rebellious.  It was lingo. Jed could sound the native.

     Mark invented the skateboard, or was the first to import it to L.A. or at least devised it with out past examples.  The real history is probably an evolution from scooters, and therefore his Neanderthal offshoot, a pie pan on a roller skate, was born and died without legacy in one day in the middle fifties.  They were small enough to sit their butts down in those pans which puts an approximate date on their experiment, the time of knee high cuffs and belts punched with as many extra holes as an alto clarinet. The plan called for moving forward with a reverse frog kick, sledding their skinny butts through elongated shadows fallen across a bright sidewalk. Insanely fast traffic whizzed by on Crescent Heights Boulevard seeming to draw steel wheels and teetering balance into its jet stream. To their backs, the dark porch of Mark's bungalow with its ponderous wooden pillars and beyond that its dark interior with its own suction, but the boys need only one skate each, the metal wheeled kind that clamp to a shoe with the turn of a key, to break away with no plans to return.

     July or August on Muscle Beach, Mark has grandfathered Jed onto the high school gym team and this is where the gymnasts gather, near the flying rings. Getting shoehorned onto the team does not make him a gymnast. It is a sport of esoteric obsessions.  One of its key elements is form. What you look like winning is how you win. Boys tell boys to point their toes, as finicky as Emily Post. The sport is loaded with ambiguous symbolism and with snobbery, teenagers in white cotton pants wearing little slippers attending to prissy detail, so the rope climbers become the team’s whipping boys, and Jed climbs ropes. He is like the relative chained in the attic.  

     Ripe summer. Sunshine dazzle congeals, clogging space. If you were there you had to figure in the sun’s residency, hot-footing it across the sand, sticking to white lines on the tarmac. Your skin seemed galvanized, scaly. The light was like ash. You could limber this coat in the water.  The sand buffed glassy by the spooling of the froth, relief to the soles, and then the boil about your ankles with an undertow to it, the rug slipping out from underfoot, a sense confirmed at the first weightless hoist by a round backed comber that you had entered a separate vault of the elements.  The border between was chaotic.  You were tossed back tumbling. Neither walking nor swimming quite worked, you floundered and persisted, until finally you were admitted. The tows and rips abated and you were cosseted in the bosomy heave, warmed by your struggle so it seemed you had been converted to a seal, and the combers slipped by beneath and then past you stretching the surface taut on their oxen shoulders as they rolled shoreward.

     Costless bravery.  Jed got away with things out there, he was a delinquent, an expert too, a heroic youth, classically molded. The cold, the struggle, inflated his muscles and cast them in metal; grand to walk out of the sea with its waters streaming off you, steaming off you, all the tresses of the mermaids tugging you back.  To slog your way out of the sinewy brine with the hairs on your leg black and waxy, a virile pelt, your chest broad and sound as a barrel but hardly able to hold your heart or breath, and aged or revealed, mythologized, walking with some deliberate clumsiness, having not lost your sea legs yet, walking between the landlubbers torpid on their towels, a possibility of adolescence gaiting your steps, not just self-consciousness and narcissism, but a new sire, the bearded sea.

     Some bravado out there, where the thunder was, and all your snotty daring in the face of the old gods, your immortality, you could yell it out.  Stand pat as the froth was swept up by the gathering breaker, pound the boil with your fist, slap it with your palm, the wave heaving up concave, bottle green and polished as glacial granite, and when the top turned to spew, insult it and dare it as it tipped over and began its roll, and wait to the last fraction of a second to bow under.  And there was mounting it, too, the best, bitchin’, although it wasn't the most bitchin’ thing at Muscle Beach, in fact, because body surfing was not really surfing, just a timid rendition. It was the counter culture of acrobats who off handedly wore the laurels, risking their necks in the same spellbound, vanishing second as the board surfers.  Mark was one of them.  A nearly surreal photo exists of him, mid-air at the cast off for a triple flyaway from the rings.  It looks as if he is being whisked away into the sky; he is stretched out flat at a steep angle, feet above; he looks at the camera, his hair is blown back by his speed.  It couldn't have been that way for him, these things are all about conservation and exploitation of angular momentum.  He could not always have that endless moment, that near out of body experience before being recaptured-the gymnasts are blind during these acrobatics, they can see the ground on a back flip but only for fractured tenths of a second. It’s all concentration up there, a mathematician’s labor-not like for Jed at the top of the ridden wave, the beach spread out below him, toddlers piddling about with plastic pails, scattering like plovers at the approach of the hissing suds, white sand, sun bathers, line of food stands, all in foreshortened perspective, a diorama just before he begins his slide, the second true to its suspended self. But this photo of Mark shows it the way the landlocked believe it, the rapture frozen forever as he is thrown off the face of the earth by breaking all laws of gravity, both physical and spiritual. 

     At the end of the day, rather than returning home the short way, Mark drove them back through Malibu Canyon in his dad's convertible.  . 

     Scale, proportion, slumber, elasticity; what's it all about, this L.A. driving?  Sweet drift for sure.  This place will never gel into a city; the only way to experience it is sleeping or driving.  The unreeling drift-driving is the opposite of driven; an empty headed recovery and exemption from the physical, the frustrated spirit released into a detached, meditative state.

     Malibu Canyon. See the hills, do not discount that Jed and Mark were born and raised here, that they crawled on all fours on the yellow-gold, desert dust of L.A., and dug into moist black loam turning up Jerusalem beetles, sow bugs, and scattering ants with duffel bag eggs, an ancient stratum that soaked in through their senses that were not yet talked out of a natural pantheism. So the hills of the canyon opening to let them pass are virtually pregnant with old slumbers. Both boys have, and could again, or do again during this drive, sleep in the aura of their smelly warmth. Even when the vistas fan out into the free light over the sea as they drive north, Jed never loses the honeyed weight of brine and sand, and the iodine whiff of kelp.

     Malibu Canyon, they're breaking out.  A minute from the coast and the clock is back twenty years, two lane black top, yellow hills without a structure on them, no car ahead or behind, Mark already climbing the gears to fourth and the wind sluicing through with the top down. And now the car can shine.  Hugs the road through long sensuous curves and tight mercurial hitches, engine in powerful, tenor voice, Mark in his element, too, where the physics works excellently.  Yes, it's a glory way, way, way out there, way, way in there; wind cuffing, hills glowing, and the force of speed pushing them back against the seat, an alternative planetary gravity with its own radical liberation from time and space.  And the prize? Certainly this other place where the sky is staked down, the actual place where the canopy touches down and he's in the house of wind and sunlight, the basilica dome of it, a prize, but...the real prize for Jed is this escape velocity at launching, the touchdowns that are now possible including the chance to return through a feeling barely coalesced to...Paradise.              

     For almost three decades Jed had lived in New York. Because of this chasm of time, his memories of L.A., pocked somewhat by two week visits with his parents, were from childhood and his teens, and they superimposed themselves weirdly over current experience.  If he were asked, Jed would have said the important part of his life was back east, and his visits to L.A. were marginal, but it was the mutually exclusive existences of these two places and the prisming effect each of them had on the other which would make his fortune.  Thank the jet for telescoping time and space and juxtaposing them as immediately as they might be in the mind.  How New York and the decades he had spent there would immediately be collapsed into a jumble of associations as cryptic, random, and fleeting as those of early childhood as soon as he stepped onto the plane, and how solid stone and full seasons might be dissolved in inner light, eventually led to his writing movie scripts.  Sense fragments joined in light seemed closer to the medium of memory than prose, at least memory made in L.A. from the photoplay of travel through landscape.    

     Three of his screenplays have been produced, they are the only ones he wrote or ever intended to write, and he has retired. They were mined from those permanent dreams whose ores are embedded in spectrums of light and musical octaves. He is wealthy beyond his fantasies, his reality turned inside out and tacked onto movies.  He is returned to L.A. with a concept, details to follow, of making life, as he now knows it-the stuff dreams are made of-imitate art as he now knows it-the stuff life is made of-and going gently into that good dawn.

     "Mark, tis Jedidiah, fortune's fool, if ever there was one.”

     “Oh, brother, here it comes.”

     “Come on, Mark, you’ve got to listen, I got money now.”

     “Oh, I’m listening, I just don’t won’t to BS you into thinking I believe any of your BS.”

     “I’m not asking for outright belief, just suspension of disbelief. Me with bucks, what’s believable about that?”

     “Give me a second. I’m going to make myself comfortable, this sounds like it’s going to be a major hot air storm.”

     “You ready?”

     “Yep.  I’m in an easy chair, it’s good for about three g’s worth of blow.”

     “You will remember, the winter of the big rains.  Monolithic gray skies, people actually buried alive by mud slides. We got a break in February between storms.  You could see the Angeles crest, snow down to three thousand feet, and one afternoon we saw the ocean from Pacific Palisades and it was slate colored under a leaden sky. And that lava flow of cloud, a lid on us, at the horizon was tipped up by this pure, otherworldly, electromagnetic light. And, we could see Catalina, which to me was near miraculous.  When I was a kid it took too much patience to wait for clear days and I hardly believed in it, or it was kind of a secular religion, the place that you earn, whatever, but you remember we saw it and this change in the sky.  I asked you to fly me to Catalina because it had revealed the first principle of flight to me: the transformation of empty space into theater. Before that, it had been a limbo for human souls. O.K., getting to the point.”

     “Don’t let that cramp you.”

     “Let me remind you of the flight, your umpteenth, but my first.  We're driving out from your place to the Santa Monica Airport. Completely without drama, everything flat and closed, nothing to grab for an omen.  My mind is cringing; it's trying to find itself outside the window, something waiting for its RSVP. Well, I asked for this, and here I am hedging my bets, it’s too everyday to posit air castles, kingdom comes, so I’d make do with a little fantasy, a sky hook for example.  I'm looking up through the windshield, trying to climb the blue and I'm falling back with a plop, and it's a squalid plop, greasy and nervous. The commercial airports insulate you, the food stands like a mall, the waiting rooms with little TV's, crowding, public toilets, all the frazzle of daily piss-off, anything but sheer dread.  But, the Santa Monica Airport is a little perch before drop off into sheer travel.  The tip of the diving board, the plank, next step is outside your self and into the naked element with its tacit metaphysic. Agnostics will not be cajoled.

     So, we get there and head to the plane rental office. It was different than say renting a car, no glib courtesy or memorized lines.  But, I had expected more-camaraderie, or appraisal, something to note the coming leap. Nope, just show pilot’s license and sign an invoice for payment. And we leave with the key and a notebook it’s attached to.   

     We take radio headsets and life preservers out of the trunk and head into the lot where the planes are.  Because they’re staked down with chains they seem restive, but the Cessna looks tinny, and jerry-rigged. Trust this contraption?  I try talking terse and mechanical, I don't know, like showing confidence before you mount a horse. Isn’t this extended boyhood, I’m thinking as I try these mental genuflections, a time when everything could be coaxed into alternative service in pursuit of adventure, could be animated, and the grand plan of speed could be achieved with discards assembled and powered by fantasy?  

     First, the take off. Brief.  A little dry military argot.  Cessna something or other with a niner and November in it, cross wind take off, whatever.  You pull back on the throttle the little plane throbs with energy-that encouraged me. It had no doubts; it could barely keep from lifting off. It was no longer frail, it seemed agile, alive, spirited. The engine was stronger than it looked; frankly, to take seriously any calculation of horsepower and torque that ended in an air screw, and a smallish one at that, was a bound into the absurd, but the chesty roar of the engine and its manhandling pull of the now become graceful all slim ankles and hips of the Cessna, placed a bruiser between my abject groveling and the implacable blue.  Not that it was enough.  I wanted more.  I hadn't been converted.  I wanted some big time rhetoric, Henry's St. Crispin's day rally, instead, just a simple go-ahead, Cessna November niner, whatever, you're cleared for take off, and a too short ramp ending in a chain link fence with houses beyond, and supposedly, but not included in my prognostications, a million leagues of sky above.  But, I learned.  Catalina taught me. It's a sewing needle through the nose and into the brine with you.  What's down here cannot go along.  Your ears are either stuffed with silence or filled with wind, but there's not a word will carry across.  And what we know, even those of us who has never kicked the mud from their boots and longs for a hearth-even while cursing and punching, we chose it, and we chose it for this very thing:  To get back what we were talked out of.

     Already a long time ago Catalina had been lifted grain by grain into memory. I don't have a clue how to measure the weight of light and especially its carats in memory, but anyway, Catalina had been pecked clean into lumens.  And then it’s out there.  We've become weightless, a lot of work to counter-balance us; the noise from the engine makes conversation only possible with radio headphones, but the job is done.  We obey what gravity the motor augers out of the extended suspension, and part of the bargain is Catalina refloated, hanging out in front of us, not getting closer for a while though a gage tells us we’re moving about a hundred miles per hour, just slowly accruing details.  We've entered the corridor.  No lie.  The corridor.  It's a tunnel up here, material to those living in air.  Strictly speaking, it is an area protected for planes taking off and landing at L.A. International, however, it is the gadget-loving engineer's mind which has lifted us here, and highways, causeways, tunnels, and corridors are the air palaces he would build, and at five thousand feet we are passing over one of the grand boulevards of his Atlantis, heading towards mine. 

     On the pane of water a mile below, tiny ships are scratching exact geometries with their bows, a precision impossible at full scale.  Things are missed, retreated into a distant past, and inspire nostalgia and longing.  Suspended up a mile, and maybe at the half way point between the coast and Catalina, a witchy thirteen miles, the moorings to land and everything left in safe harbor slip away, and I resolve on the beauty of the day, make a pact between those elements in myself that like a bird's hollow bones dissolve in air into ambient light, that if this is my last day or last hour, that right now before the haunted silence of a dead engine and the blood curdling screams of the plummet, that I could not have finished at a later time with less regrets for the final tally, that if it led to this, air born in light and convinced of the suzerainty of beauty, my life has found its way to grace.

     “Mark, I actually just heard your eyes rolling. You better oil them.”

     “Well, about five minutes ago they started needing a twenty thousand mile lube. You can’t smell the smoke coming out of my ears?”

     “It’ll be worth your while.”

     “At a nickel an hour you can’t don’t have enough to make it worth my while.  But, go on, I’m punch drunk.”

     “Ok, the doors to Catalina opened. We were approaching it now, no question anymore, unless, it was approaching us, but one or the other was gaining.   You had pointed to the saddle in the hill crests where the airport sat, but now I could make it out, and for my sake, hang the additional expense, considerable, since the rental fee was $140 per hour, you circled over the northern half so I could have a look.  We had announced ourselves to the island's control tower, and as we circled we sloughed off altitude, bringing us within intimate space to the hilltops, while the inlets a thousand more feet below were still set in the serenity of distance, the front landing gear quixotically skating over.        

     We could see both sides of the isthmus, the staked rows of sailboats, a slice of white beach, a village that had taken root there.  The small bays, the different colors in their variegated depths, they looked like the origami spectrums of ornamental cabbages from two thousand feet.  The hills were green from the heavy rains, the ground red and steep, flying in, able to overview all of it made it a garden, a nest for a little daydream.

     You were turning to starboard, and I dug that, getting a charge from seeing the horizon tip, power flying, carving the air, but you saw what I didn't. Far enough off you weren't absolutely positive, even though it's pretty unmistakable, but because it's your first reaction and it's just an outline miles away and it’s a quick view, well, it's in the broth of wish-fulfillment, not what it is, maybe, but what you'd like it to be.  A DC-3.  And it turned out to be one, great day and perfect, the freight scow from the mainland, still in service, supplying the courts of Avalon.  It was parked, whatever, just off the runway, already unloaded by the time we walked out to it because, because the day called for it, or better, allowed it as we would have liked: to be on a mountain top with a pacific Pacific all around, a distillation of distance, or some  solution of moonlight and daylight, longing and the long, cloistering a time when this bird was still in service, not an object of nostalgia, but a work horse of flight, and still with all flight meant, shrinking distances and scraping mystery from the floor of heaven; baptizing mail, peaches, apples and passengers in pure light. 

     What a sleepy, sweet place that day and island and airport.  The control tower a three-story stucco campanile with Spanish tile on the roof, casually manned by an old timer who seemed to be doing it as a hobby, like a ham operator.  Cafe down below where you ring a bell to get service. The primary employment at that airport seems to be basking in an oxbow of time, sandwich good for all that, appetite whetted by travel, eating out on a porch, bougainvillea near by and a cage with two cooing doves, a steep carved valley to one side, the mainland to another, the Angeles Crest a snowy cloud bank, and the encrustation of years dropping with all its getty yup that nips at my butt, basking myself on this broken off, drifting chunk of the California  I'd lived in  when I was twelve. 

     We’re in this angled hue in the spectrum, the tint to all the light up and out there slightly off the usual rungs of shades. My head was in the clouds falling up. Barely sticking to the ground, the yardstick to the horizon and the gallons of blue was inside the globe of my eye, so everything on the ground was seen from there, through far blue. I was seeing everything from the edge of departure, and from there each thing gives its farewell, and that farewell is what in them you knew and will never forget.

     The proposition.  You retire in five years or so, by that time you're probably making eighty thousand, more or less, and you'll get this fat pension.  My proposal is to set up a trust in your name that will pay you a hundred thousand a year for life and switch to your wife if you die first. Plus, payments to social security while you work for me, so you get both anyway, plus your teacher's pension, slightly abridged.  I'm going to purchase a DC-3, I need a pilot.  We're going to fly all over.  To see if this will work, I'm going to enroll both of us in a flight training school.  I'm starting from scratch, but you need twin engine experience, and all instrument ratings.  All this, my gamble, at my expense, the course, flight time, living quarters, everything. That's the trial, done during your vacation time this summer, and if you go for it, I set up the trust.  Then, the life of travel begins, and if I get tired of it, you still get that hundred thousand for life and you've learned to fly a DC-3 with all the rights and privileges thereof.” 

     A pause, and then, inimitably Mark, a way of mixing entropy with enthusiasm uniquely his own; "Bitchin."

     Jed picks a flight school in Iowa.  He’s not exactly sure why.  He drove through that state nearly a half century ago. He remembers corn, a Sargasso doldrums. Maybe because of the thickness of the sky starting at ground level, its heft. But, maybe it was the doldrums, satiating somehow, an eddy in the continent where old things might wash up alongside where you sat. It was his first time there, he was eighteen, but in Iowa, he felt he had spent his American boyhood here, the one he didn’t get in a city, the one where he would have daydreamed foreign ports and pirates but more than that, daydreamed the country and it would come true because the dream was made of American stuff and it fit. 

     They rent a farmhouse from some college students who will not be there for most of the summer.  Posters tacked to the walls, a couple of American flags used as curtains, cinder block bookshelves.  In the closets some high tech sneakers and space age hiking boots boarding for the summer, and parkas and ski pants of colors and fabrics from the antipodes of sunlight, smelling of hot plastic.  Two shabby sofas and three shabby easy chairs are loosely arranged in a half circle in the big, echoing living room, facing the entertainment center, which has enough electronic equipment for the control tower of a major airport.

     Mark and Jed are usually in bed early, just after the nine p.m. sunsets, having spent the last hours of unhurried twilight sitting on the wooden porch. Asleep, they let the ocean of dark flood over them without contest.  The house and a barn are on a small island carved out of the corn.  Thunderstorms whip up from the empty sky. The windows are always open: the imps and geniis of wind scurry through the corn; the uncountable numbers of stalks refract the wind passing through them to its full spectrum, from summer fragrance to ghostly whispering.  Jed crunches his way through the gravel yard past some rusty farm equipment on his way to the edge of cornfields to take a piss.  It’s only fifty yards from the porch to the fields, but such a volume of space lies on them that the lights of the house seem barely to reach there.  It retreats. Still, Jed does not regret his choice.  Once here, there seems to be no way back. The choice to learn to fly has been enlarged.  The sky has become part of it. It has been invoked. They have to balance with it  

     Two dreams reappear while Jed's sleeping.  The first is of crawling out of the roof of a house that has become a warren and maze.  He breaks through into a landscape made from light.  He has had this same dream for years; it seems to be coming into resolution now.  He suspects that if it progresses this way it will soon clear to a sheer veil and then vanish completely, realized by the place he is, a prophesy evaporating as it comes true.  The other has him marooned on a railroad siding somewhere in the mid-west during the Great Depression. On a string of flatcars are his family and all the good people thrown into a perfect day among perfectly equal and friendly companions, who have all had the good fortune of gaining the earthly paradise of the nomad by being tossed out of their lives. These dreams have been stored in the air, Jed thinks. They’re among the elements of the air, the ocean of it can hold clouds, storms and stars and the substance of dreams and heaven, and when you have cast yourself into it, you can see them.       

     Search for DC-3 on the inter net. It’s a type of porn. You can bring up the specs and the biography. There are photos. The old bird is painted in different colors. Somebody’s asking for funds to restore her. Can Jed fail to identify with these sentimentalists?  Once you’ve admitted you’re flipping through these sites for the same reasons these guys have posted them, then you just have to figure what those reasons are and how best to feed them. One link goes to this flight school in Iowa. The administration doesn’t really know how to design a web site, there’s a big plus right off. Somebody was nagged into muttering a few words, and got it over with as fast as possible.  The Iowa School of Heavier than Air Vehicles is located in an airfield. Applicants must have proof of three months solvency. Dirigible pilots may plead their case. Let the phone ring, then try again. What more could you want? Guys in an airfield smart enough to know this is one crop will never fail out there. No skin off their teeth you want to buy some bushels of the stuff to float a blimp.  Come on out, no more needs to be said. We fly, that’s what we do. Air, got it? And where there’s air properly regarded, arena for free enterprise, barnstorming, material for liberty and pursuit of happiness, stuff of life, well, just naturally you’re going to find DC-3’s there, bees to honey if you will. Why else this link with no needed explanation to the lonely heart’s chat room for unrequited lovers of the DC-3?

     Three days of haranguing the void with ten minute fits of telephone rings, trying to detect some difference in the series, some mutation in the tone that indicates it is being heard, and someone picks up the phone who has no idea he’s in the Iowa School of Heavier than Air Vehicles, asks if Mick put him up to this, then when Jed says he wants to learn to fly Dc-3’s, says they could pretty much teach anybody to fly anything, and if that makes them the Iowa School of Heavier than air vehicles, then you’ve got the right number. How’d you hear about us anyway?  Through the inter net, Jed answers. Must be Mick, the guy says. 

     And there it is, the school, below them, Mark and Jed, picked up at Des Moines in a twin-engine Beechcraft by a guy who is not Mick, there is no Mick, just Mickey Mouse, a jack of all trades gremlin who goofs around with any project and is not above phone tricks, a long strip of tarmac, a truly outlandishly long strip of tarmac that could certainly serve a DC-3 but what’s it doing in a cornfield with a sure enough corrugated metal hanger beside it, the campus, but what incubates in that large hangar waiting to be launched along its more than a mile length?

     Fine flight in, competent pilot, Larry, bushy mustache trimmed straight-edged on the bottom, blue work shirt stained forever but clean for introductions, twinkle to his eyes, smile creases at their corners, will be the provost or dean, whatever they might ask, the professors at the school are guys who can re-tool as the need arises. The approach for landing shows two tail-tipped big birds on a taxi belt, DC-3’s. They weren’t kidding, only they can’t fly yet, but they could do it with the knowledge collected here, re-fly those gutted birds of salvage.  It’ll happen, the right team is assembling here in Iowa, god knows exactly how they all found their way here, but they’ll need him-this god of odd tastes and cracked sense of humor-because it’ll take divine intervention to get those birds into the clouds. But, the plan’s afoot, you’ll see, and Larry brings them down as sweetly as you might please, no hop or screech, and turning her around for the taxi back to the hangar pauses for a respectful moment by the two wrecks that look disgraced and proud both at once on the ground in Iowa below a sky whose color is draining into night.

     “We call him Mickey Mouse”, says Larry without looking at them but they can hear the twinkle in his eye. “The god of better bad luck than no luck. Mickey Mouse, that way even atheists have to capitalize his name since it is copy written.” 

     After about a month the kinks in this riddle smooth out, and about the time he forgets it, Jed realizes he’s looking through its eyes: The gremlin of lost causes, the myopic god in details. The mouse is supposed to be the bane of risk and bees in the bonnet, but you have to consider that BS in one form or another has dominion. All battles against it are the good fight, the rewards are grails, but you’re not usually matched against dragons-fleas and mosquitoes are more like it, red tape and taxes-the hag ridden principle that sticks to every small bolt and tithes every act. Nothing so grand as a principle, just a gripe everything has with everything else-a part no longer manufactured, a small but indispensable part, or a really maiden aunt stupid place to put a bolt where you’ve got to bark every knuckle to get at it, and the earth shattering thunder that it gooses out of you, this fight is also Mickey Mouse, but if you would fly, take a crate of crabby nuts and bolts to the clouds, touching each one of them-beating the living daylight into them, sweet talking a tiny washer into a corseting hole-touching each one of them with spirit, and take along for the ride a grease monkey with a foul mouth, you’re going to have to count on an ornery, persnickety gaggle of runty gods who have the interest to mess with men. Here in Ioway, the imp they have named is Mickey Mouse to stand for that most peculiar and diagnostic quality of luck: that it will exert itself only for the smallest cause, and completely ignorant of grand designs, squirrel in splendor or ruin.

     “The early bird has the firm worm”.  Every morning the same thing.  “The early worm has the firm worm.”  Ertle must sleep in the hangar, just to get in his clever dig.  A lifetime to perfect it, to figure out the moral in the story, then the old dog finds a place in the road you got to kick him to walk past and gets to bark it out every morning.  There’s a farmhouse for the professors right on campus, Ertle must sleep there, and the door to the hangar always swung wide before they arrive, and here comes Ertle, clicking the dental bridge that gives him front teeth, greasing some collar of ball bearings in his solid hands, dressed in overalls, red rag hanging from the pocket, metal-toed work boots, exercising his worm.  How did all these guys get here?  The farmhouse more like an orphanage for, well, retired this, divorced that, pensioned the other, for housing casualties of tragedies or restlessness or nostalgia, or maybe victims of adages, diehards of a type who can find no place where “Rots of Ruck” still gains you entrance, or, if Jed and Mark take them at their word, guys who can’t fit in to society because their sex organs are too large, but they’re too short to play basketball. The woes such a deformity visits on you. The wounded girlfriends, the emergency room fees for them, the hassle of registering at police stations.  The ASPCA hounding you to return the python to the zoo.  Jed understands their pain.  It soon becomes clear that their collective problems are nothing compared to the incidents he begins to relate, banishment from every racetrack in the country, being shipped as luggage on airplanes because of the paranoia of the times. King sling has found a kingdom, Mark remarks. Jed says this is the first place he can be real, where he can admit his torment. But, here they are, in Iowa, living together in a farmhouse that on inspection turns out not to be the bachelor dump you might expect, but home to craftsmen, tight and neat as a sailing boat, six old duffers only two of whom knew each other during their alleged lives, planning on hanging some unlikely hardware from the stars.

     This place is a lucky landing for Mark and Jed. Some DC-3s’s are still in service, but neither Mark or Jed is ready for training directly on the old bird, so what they needed was a place in love with the promise of flying a DC-3, of shaping it out of spit and glue and devotion. A school that’s caught the spirit of the venture, which is only a bit less than resurrection. 

     It's a honey trap, sort of.  Drawing, say, odd birds of a feather together.  And with Jed they landed the goose with the golden eggs. Once upon a time these guys would have been the standard; they were all over the place when Jed was growing up. The world must have been less finessed back then, requiring more shoulder to the wheel. Results were more important than promises or explanations. You had to get the job done, and that took work. How else could there ever have been a place for these mull-headed fellows with beautiful hands?

     Jed likes them.  In fact, he can't think of guys he has liked more right off the bat.  These guys are do-it-yourselfers, which is rebellious and mischievous without bitterness.  They are pretty much as sovereign as any one he has met.  Specs and calcs are the only earthly authority they trust, they are not introspective, at least they are not exhibitionists about it, and it is possible that their delicacy is kept private.  They fully respect the meddling of chance in its numberless guises; what chatter these basically laconic men indulge in is stories about its veto in every plan, funny tales that replace psychology as the engine of events.  Jed fits in.  He balances his initiation into wings with a groundhog’s pleasure in minutia.  He likes tinkering with the engines, the smell of grease and oil, and just generally the pragmatic logic of machines, where prayers of relief from the world's abuses are answered by ball bearings floating in the balm of grease, where the ambitions of the ego are harnessed to ailerons and hydraulic engineering, and where the spiritual realm is sufficiently manifest when tactile.  And he's good at it, the courtesy, the husbandry, and the chaste eroticism of dirty but bloodless work that is rapport with a machine.    

     From the deck of the airfield's tarmac you could look to four horizons so far away they gave you the power of prophesy. Weather and sunrises and sunsets were a day away.  It was ten miles into cornfields on all sides, a distance foreshortened to the immediate after take off; it took about four minutes to be over a small town, but there was no bleaching of the night sky by a distant city, and the moon bobbed up huge beside them.  Moonless nights, the stars seemed to be hung at different depths in the sky, as if Jed were sailing through them on a magic carpet.  A windsock hung on a pole; this simple mail drop for the cosmos confirmed Jed in his plan.  A simple reflection, you see, another Iowa up there measured in common sense and a spanning wrench. 

     The guys gave him and Mark nicknames.  You deserved them, and your old name was pretentious here and it was a relief when it peeled off.  It didn’t work anymore.  Buddy, pal, they worked.  Jed?  Jed answered to unrealistic expectations.  If you come to the place where eenie, meenie, miny, moe is the best abacus for predicting the future, then Jed has got to go in favor of Mutt-though Mark is not Jeff, he's Sky King because his wife visits them and she's blond and looks a little-blue-eyed and all-either like an actress in that series or else like a rough hewn Amelia Earheart, and so she must be hitched to a King.  When the cornfields become a quilt and a creek catches a ribbon of light between willow lined banks, someone has to be at the controls that has not spent sixty years obeying Newton's Laws with their break even results.

     Jed's lessons begin on a Cessna.  Mark moves directly to a twin-engine model.  Jed is forking out enough green to single-handedly finance the entire operation, so they get plenty of air time, hours a day, compressing a month of installment training into a couple of days. They are flying for hours, from dawn into the night, getting landing practice to use the crapper; almost more used to being in a cockpit, to air turbulence, the whole ecology up there, than time on the ground.  The fuel tanker rolls in twice a month, and all the guys come out to greet it, jolly with prosperity, the system revved up and working, lit at night, coffee broken out in the flannel, slightly steamy pre-dawn, guys coddling the warm mug in their big hands, sipping the elixir, anticipating a day devoted to doing. 

     Jed is looking forward over the high instrument panel of the little Cessna at an armada of thunderheads making their serene approach over the landscape. This is about Jed's two-hundredth hour or so of flight time, second week in school.  The plane is becoming an extension of his will, or he is becoming its nervous system.  He sits the plane with the same fly by the seat of your pants as he has with a bicycle, balancing it without the timorous courtesy he had when he started. He’s becoming skilled. He's at ten thousand feet and will head the plane away from the clouds and the winds they stampede.  There's a municipal airport where he can land if the weather reports are right and these clouds will pass over the school cutting off their return.  He is not going to race home and wait hunkered down for the cloud burst to end.  He and Bluto, the former Baby Huey-recently re-christened because of a beard he started in answer to one of those unfulfilled pledges to self whose last chance is middle age and then quickly repented, but not quickly enough to perhaps be doomed to Bluto until the last heckler has been buried-are a little more than an hour out.  Hours of fuel left.  This is Jed’s neighborhood, the whole sky; he's a nomad of the air, and he wants to settle things here, find the equivalent of the lee side of a hill, or raise the yurt.  

     Bluto should have kept the beard.  He was nearly chinless and his naked mouth was small, full lipped and pouted, like a nursing infants.  Either the face or his soul was misplaced in that brute's body, probably both at different times.  And he would never reach a resolution, or even hazard it anymore; it would have taken more hardness than he had in him, though his deference must have seemed cowardly to him, a big lug, shoulders furled, heading towards the sidelines.  Short, bandy legs, long torso, and an iron pot, potbelly.  A body with bear-quick reflexes and strength which now resisted the conditions of defeat by sullen, private labor or sluggishness.  The best Jed could do was return him his real name, which being Myron, connoting fussy, petty autocrat to Jed, seemed a dubious gift. 

     A portrait is still hanging in a cabin in the Sierra Nevada. The face is in profile, mostly in shadow, the doughy cheeks lit by a soft light from a small window. That face glances back at Jed with a look of sad disappointment, the weak chin futilely jutted in hurt pride, the pouting, little mouth clamped shut. 

     This portrait in his mind is of a guide in the Sierras, and it is not just the similarity in features but what life has drawn on them that has Jed seeing that face on Bluto, the radio mouthpiece brushing the sad little mouth. 

     The guide had packed the mules, used a diamond hitch, led Jed and his dad up the mountain to these lakes where the trout were.  Taught Jed not to throw his shadow over a creek, to put the hook in the glass smooth water behind rocks, how to tie the barrel knot.  Jed was ten years old.     

    He remembers a lake. It was above the tree line and was just carved out of rock and behind it was a bare peak, maybe rising a few hundred feet, and it was basically just a rock tumble sliding down around the lake.  The lakes were stocked from the air, but this one would have been too small for aerial stocking. The lake, more a pond, was like an aerie, above the others, and it comes to him now, at ten thousand feet and so within the same stratum of air where the lake lays, that he had been brought there as a rite by the guide, nothing fabulously portentous, just a chance after being ferried up the mountain on horseback, to get a feel for altitude, a peek at the gem cached in summiting.  It would only be there, in a tarn without any softening into pasturage where the stocked fish had never reached, that he might catch the most beautiful trout. The hatchery fish, though beautiful in their own right, replenished every year could afford finery, while the beauty of these Golden Trout pleased the unforgiving winter gods with their tempered glide along a knife edge. 

     He never caught one, the pool was clean and free of snags and he cast his lure into it just practicing his skill, and it suits him now that a ten year old with the insouciance that a snag free lake inspires, was not able to fool these heaven favored fish with that lure.  But, the tale of these unicorn fish is the kind only a child can believe and one which the man can never find enough world to disprove, continuing to look out for them in the transparency of every lake, having learned from the most laconic of men that the actual world, from out of no where can assert mystery, or more plainly reveal its substance to be mystery, cloaking its hoardings of gold in what to the eye is completely clear and empty. 

     It is July, apples become ripe in September, and even in Iowa the few trees that grow in family gardens have green fruit as small and hard as walnuts.  Jed banks the plane to port, the thunderheads roll gently up, then he levels out and the clouds slide slowly behind them.  Headed where? The Sierras are no less solid in the distance, snow covered peaks floating, than the clouds solid, too, in the distance.  All that charged air the clouds mark, an open window in the sky through which daydreams are pushing,  and this daydream and reverie particularly as the plane levels out at two thousand feet, good weather ahead of them, countryside below giving away its caches of summer trance, looking for a creek which makes a particular bend.  They cross a cornfield and a rusty red pickup is kicking up a plume of dust, they can just make out the driver's arm resting on the window frame, and a spray of small shadows on the ground is cast by swallows, amber still in the spell of their speed delivering the daydream. This is the place and time...they make a gradual turn so that they can fly over the creek he knows is waiting, and he lands, dust billowing, setting down in that still day.  Then he takes Myron down to the creek.  It's over a wire fence, willows and aspen hiding it from the ground except for gleams through the leaves, but there's an apple tree down there heavy with Lodi Transparents, best apple Jed has ever eaten, the lightest suggestion of apple there ever was, golden color, apples and tree apparitions with just the fairest crust on them of roosting existence, and he twists one off a heavy bough and hands it to Myron, payment in golden apples of the sun for the golden trout of the other day. 

     That third week of July the apples-Lodi Transparent or not-are bare knuckled green. But, lost days may be harvested ripe from cloud orchards, and amends made to all those men now sinking into the dark whose names, whatever they were, were nicknames over their title of guide.

     Mark, his wife, Patti, and Jed are sitting, more sinking into mildew smelling old couches on the front porch of the rented house late in summer, visible to each other only as silhouettes, digesting dinner.  Jed foresees trouble.  It’s time for Mark to decide if he’s on board for the duration or if he is returning to teaching, and Patti doesn't like this place and probably the whole idea as it’s materializing.  Seeing it through her eyes Jed can see why.  A neglected mess, the house, Des Moines where she’d landed a suburban sprawl, and the flight to the school is over the endlessly discouraging view of corn stubble in the harvested fields.  But, more than that had been Mark's and his obliviousness to it.  They were caught up in the training; both of them in twin-engine craft now, and instrument rated, or headed that way, flying night and day. Comparing the look of this place to their contentment, Jed thought she must be wondering if thirty years of marriage had sunk in very deep. There was a house and the house has their bed and linens and pots and pans, let her list only those things of the every day which might be depended upon to prove week in and week out years of living together, those things that prove a living body, forget photos and trinkets which were always tainted by precognition.  How is it that two steps out the door you can tumble the house into a box that would fit a jigsaw puzzle and take off Scot-free?     

     She is not a pouter; she doesn’t sulk.  Just having someone around who is that sober calls the whole project into question.  If only she were a hysteric, then horse sense would favor them.  Instead, her quiet witnessing seems nothing more than an assay of a sleights-of-hand, a justifiable bite on the coin, placing her weight against an airy future simply by tarrying behind a bit. By not faking an understanding of the pidgin culture they had set up in the last two months, a few grains of salt drizzle on their tails.  

     These last two months were only a feasibility test, or so they had been advertised.  Had she been counting on the assumption that a reasonably mature man facing the actual discomforts of flight training and the disruption of routine, the relative squalor of life without a wife in a place not his own, could be relied on to weigh the dream even of a lifetime against that lifetime and at the end decide that he had actually lived as he had chosen, perhaps a compromise, but a compromise based on self-knowledge and not defeat?  Gambling, of course, that during this sanctioned break he would not discover that the practice of his dream was continuous with his life and that his biography with all the privacy that could never be taken into account now fell into place, his past not reduced to a trial or rehearsal, but become a fortunate metamorphosis from an original search.  A gamble, sure, but the house always wins, and didn’t she know her man?  His distaste for dirty socks and his allergies to dust.  The imperative for a place to sit listening to music or to play his guitar.  The somnambulistic comfort of routine.   

     This was her third trip to Iowa, and she came having agreed to fly with Mark and Jed to Oshkosh to see the amateur flight fair.  Mark had attended this fair every year for over a decade, so by itself the trip did not mean the decision had been reached, but Jed's plan to harvest starry eyed aeronautical and avionics engineers from the self-selected cult that would have gathered there so he could re-fit a DC-3, seemed to indicate, at least in his case, the bridge had already been crossed.  How might a reasonable woman have calculated the chances of success for the second phase of Jed’s plan, the part he would have to build? She’d probably begin with the way he had made his fortune.  We are not talking here about a man who forged steel or built trucks, but had merely written fantasies, a step removed from the production of them, and that production was the rather perverse activity of employing dozens of burly technicians and drivers, carpenters, mechanics, electricians, cooks, lawyers, seamstresses, hairstylists, computer experts(not to even mention actors, who live not on ambrosia, but on the lesser gods diet of lotus flowers and so do not enter on the left side of the equation) in short all the necessary people to start a civilization, only to dissolve matter into flickering light. Is that man a credible spokesman for heavier than air craft?  Would that be the man acting completely in character that you would trust with your spouse’s butt?

     The fireflies are passing by again, or maybe it's a new bunch.  It's like watching the sketches cigarettes make when smoked in the dark. 

     Mark and Patti on their own couch sit flank against flank, Steven's white t-shirt and Sue's blond hair glowing slightly.  Moths occasionally feather past an ear. 

     Imagine Jed’s surprise when from thirty years of intimacy and loving Mark, Patti says, “Mark thinks you’re getting a little jumpy about me.  I think it’s time to tell you that he thought he owed you one-King Sling isn’t it?  I’ve been a hundred per cent from the beginning.  I’m planning to retire at the end of the school year, myself, and accept the invitation you extended to join you anytime. Let’s go.”

     I give you  now this strange machine, neither beast nor angel, flying through a sky going royal blue after sunset, scattered clouds gone gray now disappearing, stars starting to pitch their lamps, and Mark at the controls, altitude 12,000 feet, Jed stepping back to the navigation booth, closing the curtain, preparing to shoot the stars through the glass dome. 

     After decades of affectionate modification it is probably true as the adage would have it that there are no two Dc-3's alike, but none could be as different as the one flying now over the South Pacific.  Advances in avionics and a hegemony imposed on gages by micro electronics has cleared the clutter and crimp from the cabin and allowed the installation of what looks from the outside very similar to a machine gunner's bubble from a B-26.  Seated on the horizontal it gives a view of nearly 360 degrees.  This is not the only expanded window space on the plane, there are picture windows staggered along the fuselage including a glass bottom, inspiring wags to call it the “Wonder Woman”, in honor of her transparent plane, and the “negligee”, and the “retro Stealth bomber”, invisible to the naked eye and a juicy tomato for radar.      Insulation for such a compromised fuselage presented a problem, only one of dozens of riddles the builders of this plane had to solve; the more difficult and quirky the better, like the installation of retractable pontoons, bringing out the Dionysian in retired NASA engineers, fighter pilots, computer hackers, weathermen, astronomers, agriculturists, geographers, fishermen, hobbyists of all stripes, and the rest assembled around the picnic tables in the Iowa hangar for the daily sit down feast, nerds spilling glasses of wine with expansive gesturing, blasting food from their mouth rather than choke on a belly laugh. 

     The insulation conundrum was solved by an architect experienced in passive solar heating brainstorming with an expert on reptile physiology and involved the green house effect of windows and the circulation of air from the outside passing by the heat of the engines when it was cold or flowing through alternative tunnels and venturi cinches when warm, a system of locks and canals and capillaries which kept the interior at 70 degrees subject to adjustments made in colored curtains and wooden levers without recourse to machinery or thermostats.

     Maybe mechanics made up the largest part of the crew, or machinists, but not by much.  More pilots than in the general population, but not a clear majority.  Almost everyone who came to work on this lightest of heavier than air ships, under the motto, "What can't be done for love or money, can be done for both", were retired.  An ex-coal miner was recruited at Oshkosh, an ex exterminator, too.  An ex-cop, an ex-school teacher.  Engineers and metallurgists were tapped, of course, but what might have come as a surprise was how many of them volunteering revealed themselves to have been closeted alchemists for decades.  Who would have thought that the exterminator had authored private journals about insects filled with intricate drawings, and had made a study of their flight mechanics, completely naive, but figuring them as the most graphic examples of mechanical engineering, and that his journals would be invaluable in re-building the "exoskeleton” of the plane, or that the coal miner, also naively, had pondered for years under mid-night oil the physics of motion, constructing experiments out of wood and stones, and without any math to his credit, duplicated some of Newton's work, but all of it so imbedded in his bones, including the shifting spectrums of light in dawn and dusk skies that it would be he, with his private labor of putting mind into matter, who would be instrumental in rigging the controls of the plane, so that without hydraulics they lost no power in maneuvering the rudder and ailerons and lowering the landing gear, saving themselves more weight and complications, or that both of these guys had taught themselves how to play a musical instrument and sang love songs in the evenings they had written themselves?

     Of course they found a place for a bicycle mechanic.  They were the guys who got this whole thing started about a century ago, and the collective mind the rest of them formed together could do no better than trying to replicate the imaginative impulse and windmill tilting chivalry of those original adventurers.   Besides, the quest had never changed, there were just different interpretations of the route.  Some bicyclists had taken to the air, others had tried to bring airiness down to earth, whittling a steel frame down to nothing more than incarnated vectors, and that skill served the project well, the fuselage eventually conceived and built as a torus clad in bird bone, the graphite and epoxy and titanium skeleton composed of a matrix of microscopic arches supporting billions of pores, the sinuous arch a better shape than a triangle to inscribe a circle, and when the bird's frame was complete and the hangar door left open on the silver of a pre-dawn lightening, the light percolated through like a planetarium projector, while Buddy Holly's "Every Day Things are getting Closer" rang through speakers mounted in the rafters, an anthem for garage launched enterprises everywhere.

     What were they to christen, baptize, or just plain brand this..chimera?   And so it was, although there were some who dreamed under the name Confuciusornis, pronounced by others as confusionosaurius. Little windmills could be extruded like a car's radio antenna to drive a juice mill in the galley without tying in to the main electrical source that was powered by the propellers and wind sluicing through portals in the wings driving turbines.  It was a similar windmill that spun the rod of the bicycle generator that powered the bike light that lit the charts in the navigation booth where Jed shot the stars.  Though they had a bona fide speedometer, small vents passed air through flutes and strings, letting them know their air speed from any part of the plane by the rise and fall of musical chords, and all of these had been tuned together so as to produce those disembodied harmonics of the Lamas when certain talismanic speeds were reached.  The pontoons with their long struts which could convert the plane to a hydrofoil were operated by the same racing yacht's two handled winch as the landing gear, throwing a lever channeled alternative sheets through the reel.  The origami of folding them into the fuselage was a wonder, as was their lithe strength, reinforced on landing by water skimmed from ocean or lake and driven up valved plastic tubes. 

     Shaving off weight was the teleological guiding light in every design.  The plane weighed only forty percent what an old DC-3 had weighed, engines included.  The surface area of the wings was more than doubled both by increasing length and through the use of sophisticated flaps, hybridizing it nearly into a glider, allowing it to cruise at speeds slower than those at which it would formerly have been forced to land and at a ceiling ten thousand feet higher if they chose, and with their increased lift they could take off or land in a quarter the distance.  The engines could be smaller, they were far more efficient, and at the slow speeds that Jed preferred, around fifty knots, could work off a storage battery-a load excess made up for by carrying less fuel-giving them a range of 2,700 miles, about three times what an old DC-3 could manage.

     The interior is perhaps best described as shipshape.  The main weight would have come from galley and water closet, and this is where the main economies have been made.  When Jed learned there was no way to marry the plane to a blimp, he had decided to take full advantage of speed to gather and keep only what was fresh.  In place of a freezer he substituted a computer program that tracked crops and their harvest times.  The program included farms and festivals, map coordinates and aerial photos of nearby airports or waterways, and used the talents of a disgruntled ex-employee of the U.S. intelligence services to blend and cross reference the whole thing, so that Jed could descend on a French farmer and ask him weather Edith, his keenest nosed truffle sow, had turned up the goods.  Indexing the world according to its bounties had been a blessed purge for the old spy.  He compared it to photographing in the full spectrum, rather than imaging the world in the feverish hues of infrared or the post-mortem tones of x-rays. 

    So, the galley was more pantry than kitchen.  Hoping around the Pacific mangoes, pineapples, papaya, coconuts and bananas filled its oak and maple slatted shelves.  Cooking at altitude is the torture of Tantalus, and so while flying they mostly ate raw foods. In a storage locker they had an inflatable skiff and outboard motor and bicycles.  Fresh caught fish were grilled on shore, they had provisioned themselves with grill and charcoal, in Europe they pedaled to restaurants and inns or else to an orchard for a picnic.  Still, a good hot meal, a stew, the smell of baking, the hearth, cannot be replaced.   The galley was equipped with a wood burning stove that in the kingdom of stoves, as the plane was to the kingdom of planes, is as close to a perpetual motion machine, the philosopher stone of engineers, as it could be made.  Like the plane, it incorporated organic design, in its case for respiration, heat conduction and retention, and its inspiring idea was the heart and lung, and like the plane, the result seemed on the cusp of living and capable of evolution if left on its own.  On the last night before take off one of those biggest you ever saw moons floated slowly over the near horizon of flat old Iowa, glowing orange, and this skinny fellow with a thousand miles of silence around him who had shown up a few days before with little more to his biography than his name, could be seen gazing off into that intimate cosmology; and last seen that night at the edge of the tarmac, sighted at the lip of flat earthed horizon spilling upward with the moon, was next morning found, with no explanation needed, in the cockpit of Chimera, assumed to have not slept a wink or not yet awoken: the transparent skull of Chimera, facing East as she had been left, soaking up the lunar whispers that summon tide and love songs,  memorizing directions to harvests and balms that tune the migrating flocks.

     So, the things missing to animate this plane may not include spirit, and gliding over Lake Superior she drops a hydrodynamic siphon tube to reap water for the shower, skimming the blue like a drinking frigate bird or is it the lordly Albatross, both too sky bound to land-practical plane carrying as little weight of water as possible and channeling these pick-pocketed gallons through a solar panel to a painted tile cabinet and out a funnel. 

     Mark at the helm, flying them towards ripe bartletts and ready-to-incubate boscs will take them to high altitude, spreading wings to max, deploying the painted outrigger sails borrowed from grasshoppers, and coast them in among flocks of migrating geese who pace them in every window, the air speed chimes Gloria in Excelsis. 

 

     Jed returns to the cabin from the navigation booth or sky bridge, having shot the southern cross among other constellations, redundant considering the solid state avionics and GPS they have in the cabin, and certainly superfluous are the old maps and charts with sea serpents and bulbous coastlines crowded into tiny seas, but he tries to collate astronomical and astrological charts over old and new land maps, exploring, as it were, the migrations of a racial imagination, the serpents and the crab sharing space with creatures from newer minting, feeling the presence in the small booth with its crown open to space, especially at the deeper fathoms of dusk, the entrance of generations.

     "Mark, it's air time.  Could you strike up the musical intro?"

     "Why shoore."

     Jed straps himself into a pilot's seat and dons his radio ears while Steven inserts a disc that plays songs he composed and sings, accompanying his self on guitar. They broadcast through the internet to a web site given to their friends.  

     "You have been listening to Mark Pupil coming to you from over the Pacific Ocean and under the Southern Cross.  This is Jed. We wish to re-affirm delivery of our freight assignments to designated locations, re-affirm, because we have yet to receive via telephone, general post, or radio, the return receipts requested to prove you got our first announcement about duties performed.  For example, Peter, fond memories of paradise regained led us to the orchards of Mount Hood to reprise the passage over the summit of a hill and into fertile valley with a gleaming river ahead. I’m still waiting for some indication you got the photos showing the place is still in tact. More air mail to deliver, Tim, return receipt requested. For you, we’re off to California with special obligation to confirm the childhood of you, old friend, whose memories were being evicted by sub-divisions and malls, and worse, by a fuller understanding of the romantic figures from your past, whose heroism and happiness can only be recovered by the validating taste of true Monterrey Jack cheese, not the albino twin of American cheese, but the original, home made variety, which is first cousin to brie, from France, where rural life is redeemed by taste.  Result: Two-pound wheel sent to you, but apparently lost in space.

     Our stateside journeys traced the strangest blind man's stitch, searching for unicorns our friends had once spotted in their lives and whose continued existence would spare them an apostasy against themselves. In your case, Tim, a kind and cultured aunt, of all creatures, who having traveled the world returns to her farm and banishes shadows that have lodged there for a generation, and tells her young nephew about Paris and the South China Sea, while working in the sun lit garden, and retrieving preserves from the pantry which yet are glowing like treasured days. She's the one who can convert a corruption of milk, which to you is the definition of family, into art, so that bland ignorance is not required to forgive. Our assignment was to verify that if a bean trellis and an apricot hued pantry can survive, and then along with them a palace of art called the Louvre, and with that a demitasse of coffee, a cafe table under a tri-colored umbrella, and a song on a hurdy-gurdy, which from the beginning were only confirmations of dreams yet to be formed, all these luminous mists persisting in a mind pillaged by experience-a visit to Paris where the ethic is rudeness and then the imperceptible final death of Aunt Thalia after fading away in a rest home, the farm sold off years ago-then why can't the stubborn preserves that cast their bright shadows wrestle a glen for unicorns from the developers?  And we found the shady nook back in the hills behind Santa Cruz, a goat farm where a shy denizen of the landscape, one Rumpelstiltskin who had changed his name from Tim, converted sour milk to buttery Monterey Jack. 

     Apologies to those who named old loves made while hitchhiking or left behind at grammar school's closing.  Not within our powers, but I will report that retracing my steps through my old neighborhood, I discovered every garden hidden by shrubs, every shaded porch and curtained window opened onto her ghost, and that all the longing I have always felt saved her a place where she can enter again like she did fifty years ago.

     We flew south from California to these island rookeries off Baja I remembered from an overnight fishing trip with my dad. I wanted to watch them rising out of the water, glowing orange-red like a harvest moon, which meant getting there the night before and making a sea landing, and then trying not to peek as the sun set, and spoiling my surprise in the morning. 

     Chimera bobbed up and down with the ocean swell.  We put out a sea anchor, but still awoke in the pre-dawn out of sight of the islands and had to take a GPS reading to find our way back in time. On that long ago day, father and son would lay on the deck, victims of sea-sickness, while everybody else on board was pulling barracuda and bonitas from the water as fast as they could clear their hooks.  I was here now to redeem a promise, call it an aside of destiny, which baring my dad and me from that day, gave us the morning when the first moon embarked with all souls on board. 

     Up early, ahead of the alarm, Mark sawing logs, marine dampness to the air, still dark but thinning, morning on its way, the daylight beginning to seep through. Sorry, Steven, couldn't do it without the engines.  Weighed the sea anchor and made about four knots to a point a little more than a mile off her East face, traveling through mist that gradually fluoresced to threadbare cotton as the sun rose at our back.  I’ve been getting up earlier and earlier in order to catch the tentative moment at its point of whimsy, when a thought of my own might weigh as much in the amniotic light as the commitment to old covenants, and I might smuggle in my own conception, less than a creature, less than a chair, just a tick of the watch held in abeyance while I take her hand that has passed out of reach a million miles, or to be there when unable to resist an apparition in a dream that has fed from his palm, a new bird is floated into the mist when we might not notice.    

     And once again Coronado Island rose from a blue sea, birds wheeling off its jagged face. Unlikely when you think about it, that you might seemingly stumble on some spot impossible for you to have ever stumbled on and where there is scant chance you’ll ever return, and find that you could have left or found there a core of your being which recognizes you immediately. Maybe, a few places entered you intact and always remain entirely their own substance, and whether encountering them in dream or travel, they hold their first light of revelation.  That fish and birds should recognize them seems inevitable, and more than luck that yearnings bereft of body have gathered there or that we will add wings or fins to reach them. Coronado Island, luminous, rising stone where my dad’s soul booked passage a half century ago.

     Central America.  To interview hummingbirds. At rest, their hearts beat four hundred times a minute; the bird weighs about as much as a penny. How completely filled by a warriors heart must you be to keep abyssal cold at bay, as each night for them is a Plutonic winter? Feeding on ghosts of beauty draped as orchids, do you turn the color of gems because nectar is the tears of the underworld? Maybe their answers are too high and fast for us to hear, or maybe after a few seconds hovering they consign us to the realm of frozen objects, so last question unanswered. Four hundred times in a minute your hearts fraction infinity-if swallows stitch the two worlds together, realists that you are, give us the physics connecting the two vanishing points and predicts Quetzalcoatl.

     Always someone willing to chatter, so, off to the Maya ruins in Palenque and its monkeys to audit continental drift. We agree with Kipling that they have great plans but little concentration. Possibly the ones we see now are in transition.  Easy to imagine the first rubes that entered the abandoned city, their jumpy caution leaving the jungle and crossing the locust happy doldrums of empty fields, feeling their way across bridges with their tender fingertips, beetle brows squinted against the raw sun, on elbows and knees drinking from stagnant irrigation ditches where deer have left crisp hoof prints, traveling at day to elude jaguars, large birds soaring overhead, slouching on knuckle towards Palenque.  And then the Golden Age for their hysterical culture of febrile curiosity.  Bowls and baskets forgotten in the exodus, a flute, a stringed instrument, a corn mill, wooden boxes with clothes folded at the bottom, broken sandals, a cache of toys and an armory of weapons.  How long did it take them to reach there and how long before the jungle caught up to them and they resumed their monkey lives, maybe gladly, returning to the trees and only rarely sitting on a stone step until roots covered it, forgetting in a generation the time they had put bowls on their heads and dragged blue blankets behind them and gathered on the moon washed altars of tall temples?

      Once again the city is cleared from the jungle. The monkeys steal from tourists. With this preparation their next civilization furnished with cameras and cell phones, and sun glasses and watches and soda and beer bottles will be more glamorous and meretricious than the one before, and its sparks and shards of reflected light more suited to dazzle their wandering attention.  Maybe a gesture of ours will be passed along for generations; a monkey will take thumb and index finger and press it to his bridgeless nose long after the last pair of stolen spectacles has been broken and lost, and this will be their philosophy.

     Should we have eaten the psilocybin mushroom that grows near Palenque, the bloom of the underworld?  We thought better of it, though it might have been a tonic, a hair from the dog that bit you.  We agreed that flying itself was sufficient vehicle for second sight, though finding a worship pre-dating civilization remained a continental imperative, and had Angel Falls on our list, a recreation to perform.  It was my idea to baptize our stowed glider in the updraft of that highest cascade. But, you can't force a symbol's economy onto the world, too many shears and buffeting and no place to launch, and so that mythic equation between light and gravity went untested by us, though later we were to see Marabou storks-sullen undertakers of Africa-scaling the updraft at Kalamboo Falls, and though not named for angels' wings, these more extreme emissaries of internment seemed to balance the equation once again.

     We coasted over the matto grosso, slalomed through and over the jungle islands of Venezuela. We put Chimera down on the Amazon and other rivers in the jungle.   Desert folk, modern men, pilots, who knows?  But, too much verdure for us; too much immortalized estrous.  Overwhelmed by trees of life beyond counting and the rampant bloom of the present choking off the clear, deep pool. 

     In the Andes there were miles of spongy clover fields where we slept, white clouds, close overhead, tattering and mending.  Cheese, apple, and dense grain bread, their taste volatile at 8,000 feet; three inch bed of clover, neatly cropped by a short growing season and scoured off topsoil.  Sleep irresistible.  The mountain villages, steeples visible first, like a mast at sea, over the horizon of a mountain's shoulder, already off shore.  You stretch out in the clover field, trespassing in the basilica of altitude. Those who live there have chests like asthmatics, bowed like a skiff. With their enlarged hearts, they are better prepared for what dreams may follow.

      We flew over the carvings scraped in the Atacama dessert. Imagine those without the technology of perspective using a constellation for a template, not a constellation of stars, no humidity here, no sky, the stars wiped out, vanishing into black, former moons flung away-instead crocheting the shapes of the vast empty which swept them away, a lizard, a tarantula, feeding on the few stars left. The ravens list and tilt, oar and kite, swim the air, surf the break of wind on the Andes, conscious of a restraining tug, a leash the eagle doesn't fathom in his statuesque shape. I dreamt no higher than the eaves of the sky, already aloft in that stratum I had only to spread my arms to float in unaided by sleep. But, if you dared sleep in the Atacama the less than dew of dreams would hurtle away and if someone else hauled you down, you would be left able to see shapes from twenty thousand feet or more, reflections on the sea bottom of those cold phyla waiting to eat the falling stars. 

     Had we awoken when we reached the observatory on top of the Andes where we found the astronomers in drunken celebration?  There is a small airport for delivering supplies situated at the foot of the mountains, and a flock of bush planes had convened on the tarmac. Several of the astronomers were pilots and they had spent the day collecting native women from villages in the surrounding countryside to join in the revelry, drinking the whole way.  A few of the planes rested on the grass beside the runway where they had been abandoned with their wheels stuck in mud. This traffic in party supplies had been supplemented by professional bush pilots, and we landed a few minutes behind one of them and were ferried up the mountain in the observatory bus along with small, melancholy Indian women, a case of Tequila and several cases of beer.  The bus driver had an opened bottle of beer in one hand, the stick shift in the other, and with the wheel between his knees drove us up the mountain in a style meant to impress the pilot who was sitting to his right on the front seat swapping tales of near death and mad sex, the setting sun hitting us head-on through the windshield with a golden fist at each right hand turn of the switchback road.  Our Spanish is pretty poor, but they had seen Chimera and it earned us membership in the fraternity of reckless courage, so they translated into broken English aided by elaborate hand gestures we would have preferred the driver omit.  An Indian woman in a derby and huipele put her child-sized hand in mine all the way to the summit.  I wondered what rite she thought must be waiting for her on the naked peak. 

     She had cause for worry, although not for any organized ritual.  The observatory complex fit my description of a ship hit by plague.  Every light was blazing, bodies lay about on stairways and pavement in the rapidly cooling air, and when the sun fell behind the edge of the world, the stars hit like a hailstorm. We were marooned.  Obviously we were not going to attempt a down hill return with the driver at night, even if we could bribe him to make the attempt. 

     “Thought we’d get a peek at the real Sistine Chapel, Mark.”

     “We better drag these guys in; they’ll freeze out here.”

     We climbed up a short flight of stairs into a two-storied office bunker. From some office down the long hallway came the sound of that endlessly repeating house music known as jungle.  It could not be taken as proof of life.  We grabbed some poor soul under the arms and propping him between us hauled him into the building. 

     “Throw the apostate back to Leviathan.  Who are you, anyway? The Cavalry?  Too late.  Kurtz, he dead.”    

     We were addressed from the floor by a pasty-faced, thin figure propped up against a wall, a bottle of beer with a straw beside him. 

     “Let them dance.  We want to see their dance.  Give them wampum.”  The Indian women had followed us up the stairs.  Steven and I looked around for a place to deposit the body we were holding between us.  His toes dragging on the floor, we found an office and sat him in a chair.

     “Hey”, Mark asked the guy leaning against the wall “Where’s the dorm?  This is a mountain top, they’re going to freeze.”

    “You can’t help them.  Anyway, they’re volunteers. The vanguard.  Expendable.  But, if you’re eager to offend..Here give a fellow American a hand; I’ll take you there.  They’ve got to dance. Huh! They’ve got to.  Give `Manhattan back to them.  Take it all, from sea to shinning sea.  And the pipers?  Where are the pipers?  Who blew this?  We asked for pipers.  They’re not going to get the buffalo without the pipers, you can promise them that. This way”, and leaning against Mark for support, he led us back out the lab building to another large bunker a hundred yards away, and through a door into the galley, where the party was still smoldering, another pale, unhealthy looking man, this time plump, playing “Closer My God to Thee” on an electric keyboard, while around Formica tables sullen or bewildered drinkers were wilting into their cups, a few of them weeping quietly.  Those that could, regarded Mark and me with the feverish eyes I’d have expected at a vampires’ ball, and began to slide towards us.  “You’re a son of a bitch”, our guide said, rather merrily, pointing at one.  The guy cringed.  “I am not”, he answered, sadly I would say, and not very convincingly, in a plush Spanish accent.  “Oh yes you are. A complete son of a bitch.  I told your wife you sold her down the river.  I told her what you did to your boy. You can’t go back. You can’t go back now.  Nobody leaves here, dead or alive.” “I want to go home.  Tonight, I return home tonight,” and he began crying.   Our guide patted his stomach.  “The hypocrites will be eaten first.  Then the nerds.  No, the nerds first; smug little devils, can’t take the cold.  Always cold here.  Punks”, and he set his sights on what looked to be a hermaphrodite or octogenarian fetus slouched at one of the tables, grooming dandruff out of his hair. “”Jelly roll.  Gimme that spoonful, you squishy turd.”

     Whatever beast dined on nerds would not go hungry in this place.  Our brief survey showed a full plate of bodies that never had known ripeness and never would, apparently born with insufficient vitality to blossom in youth or mature.  In fact, if our guide’s imagination ran towards some toothless monster, a bony-fingered crone, I could see why she would look here for spongy morsels.

      “You are American guy?  I am Korean.  Perhaps, you are playing at golf when chances are favoring for you.  I plead your permissiveness to invite a game.  Nine holes for business.”

     “Don’t go, mate, he’s plugged in to every freak site in the world.  Wants to know about big teats, is all.”  

     Mark was spirited away by a guy who promised to show him where to find a beer.  “I was not spirited away, and I was not looking for a beer.”  “Well, you disappeared.”  “You got dragged off by that horny Pakistani, and this kiwi promised me a look at the observatory.”  “I got it right that you thought he was sober and got a surprise, right?  You want to tell it.”  “He could hold his booze better.”  “Come on, you thought he turned out nuts.”  “It’s not going to be as much fun if I tell it. Give it the old spin, King Sling.” 

     “O.K.  He takes Mark to one of the observatory buildings.  The guy doesn’t stagger or wobble, he’s not slurring his words, and he doesn’t seem changed into someone else like a drunk does.  Doesn’t seem to be bothered by what’s going on here, not part of the opera.  For that matter, he doesn’t have the inmate look of the others, maybe has a set of weights in his room.  The building is bare ass open.  Dome open like the end of a soft boiled egg, doors flung back, and this superb machinery running, what keeps the telescope pointed at its target, and you can’t hear it, it’s too well fitted for that and the motion is too slow to see, but the required force to move those forty tons or whatever of metal and glass a precise thousandth of an inch per fifteen seconds without a hiccup, that more or less puts a charge through the whole building.  Now the guy starts to give Steven a tour of the works, switches, knobs, purpose and function.  As he’s doing this he’s telling the history of the downfall of this place.  It’s like hearing the last native of Easter Island explaining their extinction; all unexcited and fatalistic.  He shows Mark the wires that connect to a computer that takes account of atmospheric fluctuations and peels back the sky.  They’re already at ten, twelve thousand feet, only about ten percent of the atmosphere remains up there; this machine finishes the job.  Gives them a true naked eye look into space, or to put it another way, drains the moat between them and the cosmos.  Now, all of them start to suffer altitude sickness, not just the shortness of breath, nausea, and light-headedness you’d expect.  Actually, after you acclimate, those symptoms disappear.  What they get is very, very high altitude sickness.  They get the vertigo of weightlessness.  And what they find is, it extends to your thoughts and memories.  They just kind of float off into the black.  This is not happening to everybody to the same degree.  Not everybody looks through the scope.  Different specialties up here.  The cook has his own problems, and goes mad in the traditional way of cooks, knives and roars.  But, for most of them, there’s a twist added to the expected degeneration of men marooned without women.  He shows Mark a box attached to a feed from the telescope.  This box holds a photo plate that is fed digitally from the scope, and enables them to image light too faint for the telescope to pick up except incrementally with a long exposure, sometimes lasting for a week of nights, the computer tracking the progress of the nebulae while the nocturnal scope is asleep.  So, here’s what’s going on. People can’t see stars without atmosphere.  A window in a space ship is worse than useless; it would just let the black pour in.  That’s the window they have in effect opened on this peak.  They have extinguished the stars.  Of course, they can look through the scope and see, but their eyes depend on the detour through the atmosphere.  It is this unholy contraband that is unhinging them, made worse because they can’t see it and because it is portable.  It is loose on the peak and fits inside the mind.  At the same time that digital plate is printing images of stars that have been dead for billions of years, basically collecting light that has turned to dust.  The concept of infinity is impossible to grasp, but the slow addition of light on the plate until it reaches visibility is as close as science has come yet to realizing it. What they have done by accumulating the estranged particles of dead photons is to assemble the nucleus of that last matter which will disappear at the end of time.  And remember who’s doing it.  Not alchemists steeped in runes and dirge, but computer nerds without even the tone deaf abbreviations of math.  “They all thought they would not have to die”, the kiwi is saying. And he points Mark towards a metal ladder, nods that he should leave the platform first.   “Technology would save us, a separate universe, project ourselves into the virtual and make our microcosm habitable.  Live in our own heads, sport.”  The ladder is perhaps thirty feet long and worth caution, but his going is made even slower because thousands of white moths are laying eggs in absolute silence on every vertical surface of the ladder.  “That’s right, mate, and not just those little sweethearts, look at all the bird shit.  Done something to the magnetic field up here, open a stitch or something, and all these migrants keep coming through, don’t know how they make it.  Twelve thousand feet, maybe the leak, gravity seeping out or something.  Find them in the morning, some seasons seems like millions are roosting here, songs can be bloody deafening, hear them a mile away, I’ll bet.”  No sooner had Mark reached the bottom of the ladder then the kiwi flipped some switch that must have been kept near the eyepiece, and the building was plunged into darkness.  As his eyes adjusted he detected a faint glowing behind him.  Slowly it resolved itself into a pale tower of light.  The source was the mirrors of the telescope that had greater reflective power than the four hundred inches at Mount Palomar.  Looking down he fell into the well of the universe.  “That’s what we lost, sport, a death worthy of heroes.”  The sound of liquid splashing on the mirror alerted him that the guy was pissing onto it. 

     Meanwhile, the Pakistani takes me upstairs to his room.  He’s got photos on his wall of stars and planets and moons, and also of extra-terrestrial landscapes from lunar and Mars landings and orbital photos of Venus, Mars, and Europa.  On his shelf are science fiction books, girlie magazines, and most notably,  “The Little Prince”. “It is so lonely here”, he is telling me, and he’s rummaging through his closet until he comes up with a cowbell.  “I am not taken seriously.  We discovered a planet.”  He holds the clapper so he can carry the bell without a sound.  “I have made the effort to understand them”, he indicated the books and the photos.  “They do not appreciate it.  I don’t care about the others; they are twits.  But, Olaf, I know him and he refuses to admit it.”  He was herding me along the hallway. “You must remember this for me.  I don’t know how the others will explain it, but they will make me look like a fool some way.  But, you will remember.”  We climbed a stairway.  “He lives high up.  Of course.  We can only discover large planets, at least as large as Jupiter.  Life cannot exist on these planets.  That is common knowledge, but there are ways that it could.  I argued this for months, and then I realized they were leading me astray.  The planets are not important.  They all know, but they were shielding Olaf.”  We stopped in front of a closed door in the third floor hallway.  He began ringing the bell.  “Olaf, you must not reject me.  You give yourself away when the others drink and you avoid them.”  “Go away, you crazy bastard”, a voice from behind the door.  “You hear him.  What have I done?  I have been smeared with the others.  I should not have believed in the other planets.  He is rejecting me for idolatry.  I repent, Olaf.  Show me your face. Save me.”  Speaking sotto voice.  “I had to love him to know.  They’re here, keeping watch on what we do.  The angels.  It is obvious when you think about it.  They inhabit the asteroids, one on each.  Some are given moons.  To live that way, you must learn another kind of love.  Love without hope.  Then you do not need the universe.”    The door popped open and a tall, blond Norwegian stuck his angry face out. “Will you get the hell out of here.  Get him out of here.  Damn to hell, get a brown woman.”  He slammed the door.  “You see? He is teaching me” the Pakistani said so quietly I could barely hear him, and he smiled.  “You will see, I will pass every test.”  His face was glowing.  “You saw.  He is softening.  The bell is not in my throat as he threatened.  I feel such sorrow for him.  Many of them have fallen from heaven, I am afraid.  I think they forget it like a dream.  Maybe, I am too clumsy to remind him, but what is one to do?  You see?” he displayed the cowbell with his hand “We are many buffalo in China.”        

     I had to find my own way back to the galley, the Pakistani returned to his room refulgent with success.  Our first guide had not been able to make the Indian women dance, at least not on their own, but as near as I could tell when I arrived, they were willing to be taxied around the floor by him like so much freight, standing inert just where he left them while he tried inspiring another one from their group.  “Quetzalcoatl” he would say, standing very close to them, speaking loudly and enunciating each syllable.  “Quetzalcoatl” and then tried demonstrating a native dance, doing a charade of a turkey.  “Not virgins, eh?  End of days, get it.  The end of days.  Everything degenerated.  We’re not going to be saved just because no god will eat us.  It’s the carrion feeders.  O.K?  Look around.  Plenty of dead meat here.  Forget it, boys, we don’t get no stinckin’ rituals, just what we deserve.  I’m going to tell you right now you’re going to be eaten by worms and nothing better than that.  No nerd is fit to fuel the beast’s fart. Worms and bacteria, and they’ll still be hungry when they’re done.  It’s not coming back this time, lights out, the show is over.  Not enough balls left to kick start the damn thing again. Shit, how did a bunch of ninnies end up running the house?” 

     We went up there to see the Sistine chapel, and I am here to report the plaster is falling into dust.  We found bats in the belfry, and slipped out the next morning after a breakfast of frosted flakes on the bus carrying the women back down the mountain.  They had not been touched as far as I know, although at breakfast I overheard one astronomer telling another one someone tossing her black hair in front of his eyes, or maybe he said combing it and maybe he was talking about getting laid in Japan or maybe about a movie.  Wherever, whenever, whoever, if I heard this part right, there is a constellation, perhaps Andromeda, modeled after the glistening in her tresses.  

     “Since the pipers never showed up that night, I’d like to dedicate this disc to the guys back on that mountain; flute tunes from the altiplano, a moonscape satisfactory for a lonely Pakistani, and the airs are played on the stops between the stars.”

     “You done? Be done. Look at these numbers. Look at rpm and fuel“, Mark’s voice sounded shrill. Jed thought he had gone on too long, still that voice got on his nerves. He meant to extract the recording disk and file it. He had decided that talking into the night to an invisible audience was a good way to compose a journal, and now he was pissed to be distracted. Grudgingly, he looked at the dials. Holy shit.    

     “What are you doing? Look at the altimeter.  Did you look at the altimeter?  We’re at five thousand, you’re dropping us.”

     “No I’m not.”

     “No?  No? It’s down to forty-five, you still are.  Throttle up.  You got us in a dive.  We’re doing three hundred knots.  Shit.”        

     As suddenly as it had begun, the panic left him. Maybe this was despair. The cabin was intact, no g forces ripped at his body, only the instruments in monotone telling them they had entered a dead man’s spiral, the whirlpool waiting for those flying at night without a horizon to mark the level. Mark tried the only maneuver possible to unwind the maelstrom, but the plane was not responding and if it had, the wings would have been ripped off.  Jed watched as a familiar and precious hand with much trembling, switched on the radio and heard his own hoarse voice croaking out mayday while he tried to read their coordinates into the black enveloping the cabin.  He must have flicked the wrong switch, he heard a scribble of language, which then, perhaps responding to some change in their course, became legible and he heard:   

     “Instead of making an ass of yourself, ignore your instruments and set course to “G” minor.  Right now you’re practically shattering crystal an octave above high “C”.  Throttle down and tune to this and I’ll sing you in.”             

     And the voice, which spoke in what used to be called a trans-Atlantic accent during the salad years of talkies, began singing “A Little Worm in a Hickory Nut”, paused briefly to say, “The real International”, and then added, “You are listening to your wind chimes, aren’t you?  Isn’t it poetic that a tin whistle can remove the slander of a tin ear? Trust me, not excessively, you hardly know me. Just with your lives, or baring that, with a peek out your window. Then throttle down, way down.  You’re just screeching up there” and the voice continued singing the song which Jed knew from childhood, adding verses to it that seemed risqué to Jed, although any flippant addition would have seemed abusive to him. 

     Mark was hunkered over the instruments and controls. Jed had seen him this way before. He would not look at Jed now, he was feeling baited. If he had to look at Jed he might take a swing at him. He trusted numbers. Jed looked out the bubble and his jaw dropped, a melodrama he had never really believed in before.  Chimera was plowing through phosphorescence as thick and white as the spume from a bow or the drifts cut by a snowplow.  And better to compare it to a snow plow, because the two plumes were alight with stars like the gem-sparkle of thrown snow, while ahead of them they could see a shimmer, like oil sliding on ripples, and stars were bobbing on it, substantial as jellyfish.

     “Mark, get a load of this.”

     “Nope, don’t want to. Who’s that guy? I don’t like that voice.”

     “Don’t look at me, just look.”

     “Fog?  Fog?” he asked after a minute of staring.

     Behind them they could see the wings, clear through the transparent air, the propellers whipping up huge rooster tails 

     “Cut the throttle.”

     “We can’t just cut it.  We got no idea where we are.”

     “Mark, you’re the musician, slow it ‘til we get a “G” minor.  I know that song.”

     “What does that mean?”

     “I didn’t shit my pants.  It’s miracle time. I don’t know, nothing else is working, fly into the tune.”

     Because nothing conformed to the laws of aviation, and if their diagnosis of a death spiral had been correct they must have already crashed, and because the somewhat fatuous voice on the radio seemed to strike the right tone for cartoon physics, Mark gingerly throttled down until the wind chimes were piping “G minor”, and they found at that speed the controls again began to respond, although the readings remained lunatic and piloting had to be trusted to staying on key.  According to rpm’s they should have been falling, but the altimeter at first had them climbing, and then at the point where they could look out the window and nearly resolve the individual spokes in the sluggishly rotating props, it steadied out at two thousand and remained there the rest of the flight. 

     Any deviation from their compass heading was announced by a change in pitch, and storms of static on the radio. As for the radio, since they had slowed down to an air speed of sixty knots, they had begun hearing a medley of music, all presumably in the key of “G” minor, and so they navigated into a melancholy latitude that seemed a traveler’s rest. At one point they thought they were hearing that furious static that chastised any improvisation in their route, but it turned out to be the sound of a shower, and Mark recognized Jed’s friable adolescent voice singing “Looking for an Angel”, and Jed’s mooning it and the slippery toehold he had on “G” or any other key for that matter, dampened Mark’s anger and he cackled “You suck”, but he was hushed when he heard his own voice recounting its own diary of sincerity. When Jed started hearing names of girls he had loved being whispered into the dark, as he used to do to conjure events, he said “Forget it, I never jerked off to these girls, not whispering, anyway.”      

     After several hours of flying, their frivolous guide announced they were overhead and could choose to land if they wished, but since there were reefs it would be better to wait for morning when he could aide them in landing-a different procedure here then back home.  Meanwhile, they could circle at about half their present speed, although after tomorrow they would realize how superfluous such precautions were.

     Looking down they could see an atoll, the waves breaking on the reef garlanding it with foam.  Since they had gotten this far at an impossible cruising speed, they throttled back one half, and felt abandoned and saddened that this mad dispensation from gravity was taking Chimera from their hands.  Sure enough the plane was able to maintain altitude at thirty knots.

     The GPS had stopped working at the same time as the gauges went AWOL, and Jed decided to shoot the stars.  At last, what had always been an act of faith had its necessity restored.   “Rots of ruck”, Mark sighed.  The stars were far too close to get a reading.  They might still be under familiar constellations, but it was like trying to read with your nose pressed against a page. He was still trying even though the sextant could only be described as having become gummed up with globs of stars, when he heard Mark’s high pitched giggling, an odd laughter for a man with a barrel chest, but familiar over a lifetime as his true belly laugh.         

     “Shoot this, navigator. Hurry up.  Shoot this.”  And Jed rushed out to see a man in a kayak-sized outrigger canoe whose pontoons had been refitted with blades from household fans and an oar with a pump handle that turned them, vigorously rocking at the handle as his craft climbed the vortex the circling DC-3 had created in the gelid air, a single lateen sail bosomy in the wind.  Jed raced to the cockpit where he had nearly a 360- degree view, and could see behind their tail the small canoe catching a ride in their wake. 

     Mark collapsed into the pilot’s chair.  He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.  “It’s not really funny. Who was I?  A clown? What an epitaph, “His life was a joke”. We’re probably already drowned, these are just the lights going out, I already missed the tape about my life, or maybe this is all I get and I didn’t miss it, all the rest I never took seriously and I get cartoons. We must be on the bottom. I don’t think if I saw us dead it would make a better soul of me or whatever this little epilogue is, but you wonder, not about the justice, without judgment this is close enough, this is your life pal, slapstick, but Patti’s not completely wrong to feel, well, to remember say, solemn things, beautiful, not just fun, the good times, but something that had another feel to it, not just ours, part of love, why not? Part of love, instead of love being part of us, a feeling like that. I was there.  I was. And now here I am and instead I get this, which makes all the rest impossible for as long as this lasts, and makes all that time seem incidental, my life, to whatever I must have wanted or was ready to believe, and me a liar right at the times I thought I was most true.          

     “How’d I fit in your coma? I had a life, too, more or less. I’m not so sure this proves we once made a choice to be born in Hollywood.”   

     Neither of them would trust themselves to sleep that night.  They would keep each other awake, talking in the cockpit about shared memories, testing to see how they held up in this new place.  If they went to sleep they might disappear.  They could not imagine what kind of dreams they would have here, and how they could re-assemble themselves from them.  Would they wake up someone else? Someone who would accept this place as natural?  Their shared memories were not sufficient to validate themselves. As long as they held the memories in common, one of them might be dreaming the other.  To solve this riddle they began telling each other stories from the decades they had not seen each other, but that did not work either.  How could you be sure you were not making up memories for the other If you had dreamed him, he would voice his memories like a ventriloquist’s dummy and you would never be the wiser.  Neither fully believed in the other, but the corruption went deeper.  They could not fully believe in themselves.  I think therefore I am seems as reliable as a lug wrench when you are not at risk, but if what you are experiencing does not conform to what you could predict or imagine then the realness of your thoughts and primacy of you, the thinker, are doubtful. Just whose unthinkable thoughts are you using as the foundation of your existence?  Certainly, this was death, locked in your head until the flame guttered out, and both sat beside each other waiting for things to be yanked away, leaving them with a brief moment of universal blackness before evaporating into it.             

     “Mark, I got to pee.”

     “So?”

     “Just in case.  Thanks, for the last fifty years.  Glad we met.  And sorry, for the karma or the coincidence. You should have been with Patti.”

     “Yeah, if things made sense.”

     “Can’t pee in a dream.  Maybe in a coma.  Farewell.  Safe home.” 

     They looked at each other tears in their eyes, and then Mark let out his high pitched, chugging laugh.

     “Stay in touch.”

     Jed shuffled aft to the head, noting the familiar scene with affection while expecting at every step some grotesque obstacle to come between him and the consummation of his urge as it would in a dream. 

     “Hey, I’m doing it.  You still there?  I’m singing in the rain, I’m happy again.”

     “I’m here.  Just don’t jerk off, I don’t want the cabin to fill up with little boys.”

     “Mark, take a look towards the tail; there’s some kind of tapping going on.  I’m checking back here, but I can’t see anything rattling.”

     “It could be in the hydraulics; we can look tomorrow.”

     “Did you hear what you just said? Tomorrow, you said tomorrow.”

     It probably was an air bubble in a pipe with the vibrations being referred to the fuselage, what a happy, glorious detail to include in a coma, along with this solid coconut that still resisted cracking and broke open pure white, whose jagged pieces Jed brought forward from the galley where he had thought to search for the tapping since the galley held the most eccentric collection of objects. A perfectly glorious, burlap-husked coconut that chaffed his hand and took two pops with a hammer to split, and made every flat sound you’d expect from it during the process. Jed brought two butter knives to the cabin to pry the meat off the shell, the deeper you went into actions the better, as of yet they didn’t seem to be running out of reality and trailing off into error. Gave some chunks to Mark, chewing joyfully, and something catching the corner of his eye, he looked aft to the tail, and was in time to see the canoe zip at high speeds off to their port, whipping past like a water skier, shaving plumes of phosphorescence, the lateen sail furled.  The man in the canoe was grimly holding a paddle, using it as a rudder, and fighting the fifty-knot windblast that slapped him when he left the shelter of their jet stream and factored in the vector of his travel.  He caught Jed’s eye and in the short second before he was whipped around to the other side, he managed to convey a request for them to slow down.  In a world where a man can secure a grappling hook to the rear landing gear of a plane in flight and toboggan behind it, such a request deserves to be honored.           

     They slowed to twenty knots, this time Jed raced back to the picture window and when the man snapped out alongside of him, Jed could see him nodding approval and mouthing, “Slower, slower”.  He looked to be a complete lunatic, long white hair and beard flapping in the wind-three sheets to the wind as they say-and an ear to ear grin at two thousand feet on a walnut shell, who better to trust? So they cut it down to ten knots, figured maybe that was bad faith and lopped off five more, spreading their gliding webs and the guy gave them the O.K. sign with thumb and index finger and unhooking himself set off to their aft.  

     At five knots the plane did not so much drop as settle downward, like a dog circling its bed for a snooze.  They were losing about a thousand feet an hour. 

     “Look who’s here.” 

     The old man floated in front of them, waiting for them to catch him as they circled.  He was pumping leisurely to match his rate of descent to theirs and when they passed him he made the choke sign across his throat and they cut the engines almost completely, leaving only enough residual speed to maintain balance, and within minutes the old man had caught up with them and Jed opened the door to let him board. 

     “Thanks.  What a beauty.  Never knew anybody to bring so much along.  Can you help me get this aboard, it’s pretty heavy out of the air.”

     “Are you the guy on the radio?”

     “Nope, we just share the island.  He’d never try this out, actually never got used to flying.  I’m Sam, and I’ll bring you down, I have no idea how Arthur thought he’d do it. Given his antipathy”

     He was not such an old man after all, maybe a few years their senior, but bright eyed and spry, with unwrinkled skin, almost as if the hair and beard were stage props.  He was wearing a nightshirt and noticed Jed looking at it.

     “Not pure decadence.  It’s about the best thing in a hot climate if you have fair skin.  A little decadent; anyway I had it with me.  Look at all this stuff.  Wonderful.  A lot of it superfluous, but top shelf just the same.  And look at this; I’m beginning to see how you could import all this.  Yep, quite an assembly.  We all of us had at least a kit’s worth, but this thing looks likes it’s making a return trip.  Wind chimes, and those gliding sails, and the pontoons and the windows, and what’s this? A glider.  Oh my, you saw more than the shadows on the cave wall.”

     Mark came back to meet their hitchhiker.

     “Sam, just telling your friend what a remarkable machine this is.  Almost fitted for this place.”

     “What place is this?”

     He was too excited with exploring the plane to bother with an answer.  He figured out the mechanisms in the galley clucking his tongue in admiration.

     “This is all cargo cult. That’s how you must have made it. Back home, the project was artificial intelligence, but those of us trying to find the soul of the machine, well, you’re the guys did it.  Seems to depend on retro engineering to the naive hope. Put it another way, you guys retrofitted back to the archetype, which is a contraption whose beauty is its faithfulness to the soul’s desire. I’m a physicist, emeritus, if you will, or manqué, to be more precise.   I got here when I was no longer of any use, you lose it pretty young in math, and I started following my conceit.  My cultural pretensions:  music and culture.  The valuable guys in my field were all speaking computerese and expanding the universe, I basically ended up translating my work into prose and the unforeseen consequence was I thinned out my separation from physics, got to the heart of the study.  You’re going to have to make some changes in this beauty to get around; you can’t get fuel for one thing.  I’ve got a shop, my lab, below.  Just let her drift down, and you can land at sun rise.”

     “What about getting back?”  Mark asked.  “We don’t want to get stuck here.”

     “You just arrived.  Let curiosity be your counsel.”

     Down they drifted through a sky filling with color.  The stars folded like Morning glories.  They slid back the picture window and the cabin became fragrant with the smell of flowers.  There were birds everywhere; they roosted on this blossoming air, floating among the stars like a swan through water lotuses.  It seemed as if each creature and thing revealed in the pre-dawn owed no gratitude to the sun, but instead, each had chosen this same moment to pour its glowing form into the sky, and the sun might better thank them for its cloth of blue.

     Sam was shoeless and padded fore and aft checking things out. He had never seen a GPS and shook his head when they described how it worked. “Won’t work here. But, what a miss-guided idea, if you’ll pardon the pun.  All those hermetic machines.  Expression of blind paranoia.  First thing you do, close your eyes, then try to figure out a way to run around.  Let’s say I wanted to go to Kawaloowllo Island. I can’t think of a better place at the moment. Wait a minute, Barlumcarawelfore. Now that I’ve said it, I wonder how I’ve resisted it so far. First, you have to put it to music.  That’s why you have to let the name choose you; you’ve got to know what it wants. How do you do it?  There is no electromagnetic field here. We had that backward; it’s not an integral idea, it’s a lack of ardor.  Back there, if you wanted to catch a certain wave frequency, you had to adjust the antenna to the wave’s requirement.  Here you must tune yourself to hear the echo of desire to receive the message on Barlcumcarawelfore. Then verses begin coalescing. Now, I can look for a green valley, quite deep in excellent pasturage, watered by a quick stream, where wonderful hard cheeses are available, very pungent and smoky, too, oh yes, from peat fires burned in the warm cellars where the ochre-colored cattle are stabled in winter. The cows are the midwives of these cheeses and an excellent yogurt, oh yes, the yogurt is inevitable and will not be forgotten since “awel” has been included as a syllable.  With this in hand, obviously in a major key, I set course for the proper altitude, tuning fork in breast pocket of my nightshirt, leveling off at about twenty thousand feet-cold streams and hard cheeses will not be found lower than that, and if it’s night when the song insists I leave, it will be a snow capped mountain, lunar white, that I’ll spot if I’ve kept the key, and I’ll start smelling that smoky odor holding close to the word, and probably hear cow bells as the song realizes it has found an ear and comes to nest.

     A DC-3 like this is chock full of music, the finest example of merry-go-round technology applied to wanderlust, but still, you’re going to have to open her up a bit, quiet her down, and dress her lighter to captain her true in this archipelago, but it’s not luck that brought you to Oxysyonim, our island. We can outfit you, the three of us. We’ve got classical studies in physics, music, and poetry going on here. Our poet in residence has discovered a machine for declenching verbs that he believes will unlock the first language. Our musician, after cajoling songs from the stars-with my assistance in designing ladles and silverware, hoops, flutes, and harps of hospitable shape for the notoriously finicky constellations-is now assisting the poet in amalgamating wrens, larks and whippoorwills under agency of a mockingbird, and adding the octave range of gulls and frigates, into a choir that will transpose a priori notes into oracular lyrics.  You’re in good hands”, said trustworthy Sam in a nightgown, hair and beard shy of the shears no less than a year. Chimera bobbed and rocked with each additional bird landing on its wings and at the first forged rays of the rising sun was overleapt by a school of flying fish whose wings flashed opalescent rainbows.

    The atoll is beautiful, the soft breezes curry whispers from the coconut palms, the sand, the palest blush of pink-powdered coral-might have absorbed some color from the sunrise, the transparent waters are filled with incandescent fish, and Chimera settling ever slower through the air came to rest with hardly a ripple, affirming Sam’s acumen, and if navigation to such a paradise depends on song, verse, and desire, then they are as guilty in their wishes as their new acquaintances, and something less than criticism might be directed at equation, poem, or lieder that brought these fellows here rather than a landfill in New Jersey.

     Our two travelers on alighting in the lagoon are introduced to Paul, the composer, and Jason, the poet. Paul had on black slacks; a couple of strides with the sun glinting on a shiny strip identified them as being tuxedo pants. For the rest he wore a silk evening coat, burgundy, left open over a thin, pale chest sprouting a few wiry black hairs. This was the ensemble he had worn when composing at the piano what had always turned out to be 1930’s era show tunes. These tunes found a sentimental reunion waiting for them in this exile born fifty years too late. The song that got him here had been a cross between “Guardian Angel” and “Down Mexico Way”, both ersatz 30’s tunes themselves, and never meant to be mixed, Just how two kitsch fabrications could fuse into sincerity was a mystery of human nature, and here he was, narrow shouldered, precise more than graceful, wearing a crown of purple blossoms, a small boned man in his late thirties, sad, soft eyes magnified a bit by wire rimmed glasses on a high bridged nose, three day growth of surprisingly thick beard, full lips, a man of overly civilized passions and paradoxical mood swings, disgorged on a tropical island from a piano stool.

     Jason, the poet, was another happy casualty of time displacement. By his twenties he was out on the streets, a medieval stratum in any city, and started writing notes to himself that on gaining sobriety read like poetry. He was dried out now, looked healthy and strong, a heroic body ill-suited to the late twentieth century was probably one of the reasons he had tumbled to the streets, and his last moments before arriving here had been spent in the public library at Forty-second and Fifth, sober by the way, working on deciphering one of his drunken messages to himself by staring through his left eye at the word ”aleph” and through his right at a photo of the Mandelbrot set, trying to make them blend as in a stereoscope. He sported a three cornered hat made from a palm’s flower pod, and boxer underwear.  He was as bright and shiny as an apple, as if his years of drinking had preserved him.

     Sam, Paul, and Jason are proud of their workspaces, and they are hustled into a tour, circling the small island in a matter of a few hours, breakfasting on mangoes, papayas, and coconut on the way.  Paul’s musical studio might be mistaken for a delusional blacksmith’s or carpenter’s shop.  The great families of instruments are all represented but they have gone through mutations.  As promised, there are birds galore around; the studio opened to the four houses of the winds.  Paul shall be responsible for converting their avionics into useful instruments. The grand project of arranging the birds into a choir looks something like a pipe organ. There are pedals and stops for Paul and perches and hoops and god knows what other inducements for the birds, an obstacle course, a scavenger hunt that will coax and bribe them into opera. Some exquisite frustration, a disappearing minnow for the gulls, a retreating seed dish for lark and wren, will wring syllables from their throats already twisted and otherwise prepared by a circuitous route to the perch, the complaint voiced calculated to be no less heart rending than a plaint for love from featherless fools of destiny. The man with such a sound idea in mind certainly has the right credentials to bowdlerize solid state electronics, and if Jed and Steven still had doubts after being shown the product of his serious and highly educated meditations, they must be put to rest by his accompanying lecture, delivered in that spotless trans-Atlantic accent of his, on the new paleontology of song which goes far in explaining the dirges that re-forged dinosaurs into birds, and that soon shall be excavated if that great Eastern gull, the belligerent one over there in the yard, will just cooperate.  Granted, the cacophony of bird twitter and screech occasionally pierced by the perfection of lark song is not alone persuasive even accompanied by explanation, but here comes Sam, the resident physicist, with a corroborating theory which goes like this:  If one were somehow to enter a younger universe all things would have their original vigor and as a consequence properties would exert a force more pronounced and graphic.  Light, for example, would exceed its present governed pace and to the eye things would appear to move slower.  In addition, all the laws of optics would be enriched, that is to say, the experience of sight being different, the laws describing these interactions would have to change.  In practice, it would mean optical laws would more conspicuously resemble acoustical ones.  Science would undergo synathesia.  How could one get to such an infant universe? Apparently, through harmony and auditing. By synchronization. At least, this was demonstrated in every wayfarer he had met here. And this universe, so young, is still dreaming itself into being. Here, we interpret dreams to evolve physics. Those rules are largely emotional and so musical. The laws of nature remain pristine. Light wends its way towards joy, gravity to longing, and the irresistible ardor that impels it is still ambient, singing the heart into every form, compelling them to shine.

     Needless to say, they had no arguments to offer in response, not only because here they were, but out of the habit of not arguing with bearers of bird-brained schemes.  Besides, it was hard to gainsay the therapeutic effect of the light, sight had mutated into vision so that everything looked as beautiful and near cartoon-like as it would in a Japanese print.  This should have been scary, but instead this solid beauty seemed an edible form of contentment, and to tell the truth, the song of the lark delivered at slower tempo without losing proper pitch need only last another dilated second to be understood.

     It could break your heart or split your gut to see Chimera as she was when declared ready to leave the island, and Mark, the high school math teacher, sat nearly morosely in the orchid bedecked cockpit as the balloons inflated to carry her aloft, and passive at the keel as her sail opened to the freshening breeze in middle “D” blowing from constellation Ophelia-she who had been found floating amongst lilies and plucked blossoms-sitting lonely and silly in a world that might well exist in a nutshell or nursery rhyme, and whose eons entire wingspans stretched no more than the first circular phoneme of time mouthing the song of zero flourishing outside his arithmetic.   

     The disc player was deemed still useful.  It would be their new GPS, where putting in a disc was the equivalent of programming the old GPS with a route along the great arc of the world.  A disc of folk songs took them to an island where Jed found the boxcar he had always longed to see resting in a field of black eyed Susans, mustard and Queen Anne’s Lace.  A meadowlark sang from the tree line, hawks circled lazily above, the sun was warm and guys in snap caps and button on suspenders lazed around basking, shoes off, yellow straw dangling from the corner of their mouths.  They shared some beans and black coffee, and Jed threaded his way through purple nettles and swam in a creek.  When evening came there was a hootenanny.  A banjo was produced, and several harmonicas, some one had a recorder, a woman had an auto harp, there was even a fiddler.  They sang until the moon rose and then danced to the fiddle.  Jed danced with a girl in braids.

     They were guests in a Shaker village that was airborne; all it had needed was the right song, the furniture and houses, the tools and fields, they had always anticipated this world of things perfectly themselves.  It was easy as launching a feather. 

     One evening Mark heard a song to Patti and grabbed it out of the air and sang it.  The moon rose so close they could see the mountains on it, and as it pulled them nearer drawing on Mark’s song, they could see the mountains were covered with trees, and the plains with flowers, and it was possible to tell as that globe slowly turned that there was no dark side to it.  They could not have been more than a few miles above it when a dory came alongside and Patti guided them to a landing.