Flight (15 page)

“The rightly revered Dr. Vartan Smarkzy.”

Prissi’s head was nodding but she failed to
hear any more of Jones’ words. Her brain was processing the face of
someone he hadn’t named. What had Prissi poring over the ancient
pix was the face of a young woman holding hands with a tall,
crane-legged man in khaki shorts. The woman in the lo-def pix had
an eerie resemblance to some of the pixs in a flashbook her mother
had sometimes showed her that that held images of LBP, Life Before
Prissi. Her mother had worked for Joshua Fflowers? On The Lost
Path? Nora Elieson, oatmeal cookie and butterscotch brownie maker,
queen of guina fowl life cycles,had had an exciting life that she
hadn’t told her daughter about? Suddenly, Prissi couldn’t wait to
get home to go through the boxes in the basement. A mystery within
a mystery. That notion was irresistible to the teener, far better
than reading another CRN.

Prissi began packing her kanga. Pequod Jones
was right and wrong. The pix did energize Prissi, but not because
of some scientific mystery. It was what the possibilities might be
for her own history that inspired her.

Prissi had never felt especially close to her
father. He was over seventy when she was born. He was a very good,
but not a very warm person. It wasn’t that he was cold; rather, he
seemed to be perennially distracted. Prissi knew that her father’s
work with regenerative chickens and guinea fowl had helped
thousands upon thousands of Africans lead a better life; however it
was the science and not the savings in misery that seemed to hold
his attention. When villagers tried to thank him with a smile,
words or a small gift for designing a bird whose wings could be
removed for meat and, then, grown back to be harvested again, he
always looked like he was about to bolt.

Despite Beryl Langue’s undemonstrative
nature, Prissi knew that her father adored her. In return, she held
her father in high esteem for his rationally-bounded caring, good
works, and forthrightness. From all of the CRNs she had consumed,
Prissi knew that Beryl Langue would have made a horrible lover, but
a perfect 1950s father.

In Prissi’s estimation, her mother was her
father’s complement. Nora Elieson was fun. Despite being in her
late eighties, she had been as much a pal and fellow adventurer as
a parent. When the family spent the too short weeks of summer
school vacation east of the Rift in Karuzi province, Prissi and her
mother would quietly sneak around the mud and wattle camp in
pre-dawn dark paking picnics and gathering gear to take to their
blind by the waterhole, where they would spend hours watching the
animals come to drink. They had rolled and cut cookie dough into
lions, tigers and wildebeest with wooden cutters carved by an old
blind man in the village. They had produced plays with tribal masks
and paper cutouts with the village children on a powdery red clay
stage. They had whispered secrets to each other as a harsh dry wind
punched at their hammock. Even when it was time to leave the
highlands so that Prissi could return to school, the adventures
didn’t end. The mother and daughter had explored most of Bujumbura,
sometimes even without their guard.

Those memories were her parents. More than
once Prissi had heard her mother’s tale of the chance meeting
between two middle-aged scientists outside a Global Nations
conference room, of how that led to love and how their love for one
another gave birth to Prissi. So who were these two in the picture
with their shoulders touching, eyes slightly squinting, glorious
teeth backlighting theatrically wide smiles? There didn’t seem to
be too many GN aid recipients in the picnic picture. Who was the
man holding her mother’s hand, who, assuredly, was not her father?
Who were all these people who weren’t in any of the stories her
parents told? What romance and mystery was Prissi holding in her
hand?

Prissi didn’t think asking Pequod Jones about
the couple would do her any good. As garrulous as he was, if he had
known more, she was sure he would have told her. She considered
sending an EM to Dr. Smarkzy, but held back for a reason she
couldn’t quite explain. Looking again at the pix, Prissi was sure
she was looking at her mother. Prissi prided herself that after
almost two years of boarding school she could smell a secret a
kilometer away. What was before her was less than a half-meter away
and it smelled to high heaven. She was absolutely sure she was
looking at something she wasn’t supposed to know, but, as a budding
scientist, but she wasn’t going to confront her father until she
had amassed more information.

When she got back to the apartment that
night, Prissi smiled brightly at her father’s muted welcome and
curbed her impatience when he told her he wanted to eat at Fraunces
Tavern, the oldest restaurant in New York. Instead of having the
hissy fit that welled within her from being put off the track, she
smiled again at her father as she whispered to herself, “Science,
with a small s.”

Fraunces Tavern, which had been built in
1719, had been moved from its location on Pearl Street when the
waters began to rise around Manhattan. As she and her father
entered the columned door fronting on Madison Square Park, Prissi
could tell from the lack of noise that the restaurant was mostly
empty. Although Beryl Langue tried to appear engrossed by Prissi’s
answers to his questions about her life at Dutton, it was obvious
that her father was sad. Prissi guessed it was his response to the
arrival of the crates. To Prissi, it seemed that the longer her
mother was dead, the harder it became for her father. It had gotten
so much worse in the last year that there were times when Prissi
thought that there must be something more than the death of his
mate pulling her father down into such despondency.

During their dinner, just the two of them
sitting at a table for four in the dim yellow light of the
colonial-era structure, they vacillated between staring at one
another and speaking in non sequitors. Her father drank two glasses
of Danish chardonnay before their dinner arrived. He drank another
glass with dinner and after dinner alternated sips of cognac and
coffee. Prissi watched him as he blinked his eyes to keep back what
she guessed might be tears.

As they walked back downtown toward Gramercy
Park, Beryl Langue told his daughter that he had been thinking
about his life, what he had accomplished and what he had not. He
paused, as though choosing his words carefully, before telling her
that his life had been both too long and too short. When Prissi,
being dutiful, asked him what he meant, her father said that he had
lived long enough to make many mistakes, but that he didn’t think
he would live long enough to rectify them. Prissi stayed quiet
until they got through the door of their Gramercy Arms apartment,
then, having decided that the time was not appropriate for her
questions, she hugged her rigid armed father until he made a noise
she wished she had not heard.

Once in her room, Prissi resumed work on her
mystery. She sat on her bed with her puter balanced on her crossed
legs to continue her ogle, but she soon found that the evening with
her father had paralyzed her for much beyond rumination.

Prissi was grateful that she didn’t have to
live with this morose man, and she was grateful that he paid her
way to Dutton, but those feelings were tempered with a bruising
guilt.

After they left Africa, Prissi and her father
had spent six weeks in Costa Rica looking at bird farms, and
another two months in Cuba. When they left the fifty-second state,
they took a boat to Miami, then, took their time driving north to
New York City in a rented van.

It seemed to Prissi during that time of
transition that every time they moved, they left more things,
excluding memories, behind. The farther from Africa they got, the
more pensive her father became. But, when she asked him what he was
thinking about, he never would say.

They had arrived in New York City in October
of 2094 and settled into a non-descript flat in the run-down area
surrounding Gramercy Park. Until he found a job with a small
company that massaged data for the GN, her father stayed in the
darkened apartment during the day hunkered over his puter and took
long walks in the evening.

Having arrived in New York after the fall
semester had begun, Prissi’s only option was public school. She
started eighth grade at a dilapidated concrete box in the shadow of
the FDR levee without protest. The teachers were dull, but not as
mind-numbing as those she’d had in Africa. The material was mostly
useless, boring or both. But the kids—speaking a Babel of
languages, with erupting skins of every hue, playing music she’d
never heard before—were great. The thirteen-year old pushed Africa
away and welcomed all the variety to be found in fading fin de
siècle New York.

Other than being a bit surprised, Prissi
didn’t think much about it when, in early November, her father told
her that he wanted her to take the PSB, the Private School Boards.
Before her mother had died, the question of sending Prissi out of
Africa to go to school had come up at the dinner table many, many
times. Back then, Prissi had complained bitterly that she wasn’t
challenged in school, and, the older she got, the worse it became.
People said how hard it was to be stupid in a smart world, but the
frustrated girl told her parents that it was much worse to be smart
in a stupid world. She had given her parents two choices. They
could send her off to school—England, Gerance, China, Noramica or
Japan—she didn’t care which. Or, they could give her a
lobotomy.

Ever Prissi’s defender, even though she
admitted it would break her heart, Nora had argued that she and
Beryl would be the prime beneficiaries from sending Prissi away
since everyone knew that one of the world’s most dangerous
creatures was a bored teenage girl. But, her father repeatedly had
rejected those plaints and pleas. They were a family. Families
stayed together. England, with its war with Scotland, was too
dangerous and Japan or China were too far away.

Suddenly, after less than a month in New
York, her father had been insisting that she take the exam. He told
Prissi that he just wanted to see how she compared with other
kids.

That answer came back loud and clear with her
PSB results. Even though the schools she had gone to in Africa had
been very bad, the tutoring she had received from the parents,
especially in math and science, and the constant reading she had
done must have been very good as Prissi placed in the ninety-eighth
percentile of those tested.

It was not until Prissi’s scores came back
that Beryl Langue began to talk about schools. When he did, Prissi
tuned out. She liked where she was and whom she was with. New York
City might be a century past its prime, and certainly offered no
academic competition to Hong Kong, Addis Ababa, Montreal or
Beijing, but it was far better than the dust, dirt and sudden death
of Bujumbura. While Beryl Langue insisted that Prissi needed more
of a challenge than she was getting in a New York public school,
Prissi thought that the truth was that her father wanted less of a
challenge than he was getting at home.

Prissi had ignored her father and the whole
idea of going off to school until he rented a car, took her out of
school for three days and drove them to Connecticut to visit
Choate, then up the road to Dutton and Bissell. In Western
Massachusetts, they looked at Deerfield, after which they drove
north to St. Paul’s and Exeter in New Hampshire. On their way back
south, they stopped In Massachusetts again to visit Andover and
Middlesex.

Prissi could not believe how beautiful the
schools were, but she was slow to accept giving up the scary thrill
of New York. Her father pushed. He assured her that even though the
setting was very different, she would keep the same mix of kids as
were in her present school. The only difference would be the high
probability that the boarding school kids would be smarter, more
talented and more competitive.

Finally, Prissi wrote the essays and filled
in the forms for her top five choices. And hunkered down for the
interminable wait. Would a 98th %-ile PSB score, good soccer
goalie, tri-lingual, African-born girl get through the narrow
gate?

The answer was yes and no. In March, she
found out that she wasn’t good enough for Andover, St. Paul’s and
Deerfield, but Exeter and Dutton had accepted her.

Given that her father had become even more
depressed and distracted over the intervening months, Prissi was
happy to have an opportunity to escape. She decided that she would
go to Exeter. It had the advantages of being not only a bigger but
a far richer school than Dutton. It also was much farther away from
Beryl Langue. Beryl Langue, however, insisted that Prissi
matriculate at Dutton.

Prissi arrived in Waterville, Connecticut
reluctantly. However, by the end of her first week, Prissi Langue
was in love with Dutton and her roommate Nancy Sloan, and the pond,
her soccer-mates, and the emerald green perfectly limed soccer
fields, and the meatburgers and fries at The Jig and even Mrs.
Mallory, who hovered around the juice and espresso dispensers in
Mullen Hall dispensing motherisms.

After massaging her stomach to move more than
memories of Fraunces Tavern into the past, Prissi fell asleep
feeling exhausted and very sad that, after a half-day at home with
her father, she was wishing she were back at school.

Escapade

Joe Fflowers is right. Even though the
Greenlander lair is devastated by the loss of its tea and salt,
they have not taken their disappointment out on him. Instead, in
the two days since his supposed fall, he has been treated kindly by
almost everyone in the den. They offer him salve for his knee, wash
his clothes, and give him larger portions of food than they
themselves take.