Flight (4 page)

After a painful moment, instead of the truth,
the guilt-driven side of Prissi opts to go with a non sequitor.

“Smarkzy. What do you think?” Prissi blurts
as a second part of her brain wonders how Joe’s nose still seems to
be pointing up when his head is tipped down over his plate

“What about Smarkzy?”

“Genius, huh?”

“Not to me. He’s just a garden variety
scientist.”

Prissi’s face goes from the pink of internal
conflict to anger’s bright red. She asks combatively, “And that
would be?”

“Dissatisfied, superior, tunnel-visioned
snoops.”

Prissi fakes a smile she hopes will convey
her surprise that such a handsome privileged alete can be so
cynical.

“But, interesting, right?”

Joe puts his fork down and tilts his head so
he can face Prissi more directly.

“Not to me. They’re all the same. It’s all
about dissatisfaction. It doesn’t matter how much they know, it’s
not enough. Science is all about knowing. Every time a scientist
learns something, he wants to leap forward to learn something else.
It’s like they’re Boy Scouts collecting badges and can’t get
enough.”

“So, like every other alete who got in here
on brawn and nor brain, you prefer ignorance.”

Joe Fflowers shakes his head in disgust and
turns back to the solace of his plate. Prissi stirs her food and
savors the double dip of guilt—over what she has said and what she
hasn’t. After waiting long enough to suggest that she is
withdrawing rather than retreating, Prissi gathers everything onto
her plate and pushes back her chair. As she tentatively walks
behind Joe, the unhappy teener retches a small, bitter,
“Sorry.”

Joe nods his head, then, without turning
around, quietly says, more to himself than to Prissi, “I prefer
feeling to knowing.”

Since it is easier to feel righteous than
guilty, Prissi says, “Well, since you do, let me say that I FEEL
more like studying tonight than dancing.”

A part of Prissi hopes that Joe will parry
something back, but he just shakes his head again. Prissi hurls her
plate and silverware onto the conveyor at the bussing station,
then, bolts from the silence that trails behind her.

Minor Miracles

One hundred sixty kilometers south of Dutton
on the wounded island of Manhattan, Joe Fflowers’ grandfather, one
hundred-seven year old Joshua Fflowers, is tapping the treads of
his wheelchair and thinking of flight. Before him, through the
glass wall, a flurry of rare and precious snowflakes dance in the
currents of the updrafts rising from the street one hundred
thirty-eight stories below. Ever since he moved into the Airie
almost seventy years before, Fflowers has been intrigued by the
phenomenon of a rising snowfall. To the west, across the three
kilometer-wide Hudson River, ragged vermillion clouds scud toward
him as the source of their evanescent beauty, a dying sun, drifts
toward the horizon. It is just minutes before the ancient’s
favorite time of day. His gnarled bones, more claws than hands,
tattoo the treads in anticipation of what’s to come as well as
anger at the slow passage of the minutes.

Years blur by, and, still, minutes drag.

Fflowers nudges the wheelchair closer to the
electricity-generating Secur-solar windows so that he better can
see Fifth Avenue a half-kilometer below. After a long look into
what once had been the world’s economic Grand Canyon, the
trillionaire looks out at the thousand upon thousands of
aquaphorous lights that give a blue-green glow down the spine of
the island south all the way to the Houston Levee. As he waits for
the minutes to pass, the old man recalls the first time he stepped
onto what once was such a vibrant island.

May 21, 2010. His eighth month at Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory. An MIT PhD. micro-biologist and post-doc
researcher at twenty-two. Dragged, along with Elena Howe, by the
primary researchers, their mentors and bosses, Reiklein and
Grammai, to meet Larktston, the magic money man, who was becoming
interested in meta-mutancy. Spring fog and drizzle. Grid-locked
streets. Muted headlights. Bleating horns. Shiny surfaces
everywhere. A gauntlet of umbrella spokes as they hurried toward
The Plaza after abandoning their marooned cab. Larkston meeting
them in The Oak Room—beyond garrulous, maybe drunk. Pork chop hands
squeezing shoulders and elbows, herding. Into the elevator. Up
twenty floors. Larkston big in an airless room. Little things—red,
black, green—on silver trays. Big slugs of alcohol in little
glasses. Napkins, napkins and more napkins pressed upon him by a
tiny waiter with a comical Hispanic accent. Larkston’s laugh, like
his billions, growing exponentially. Ricocheting off the walls
despite the floral rug and damask-covered couches. Grammai rolling
his eyes, stuttering in alarm that a magic moment, so long schemed
for, might pass without being seized. In her first of a thousand
times, Elena into the breach. Fingers. Calming fingers stroking
Larkston’s arm like a favorite horse’s mane. Soothing words. Her
low whisper of a laugh taming Larkston’s bray. Grammai with the
laptop. Reiklein, the breathy, hyper-kinetic zealot, interrupting
Grammai, the Oppenheimer clone. Elena, touching, smiling,
breathing, not begging, but rather imbuing the rich man with
belief.

Then…the moment. The mutation. From
interested observer to contractually-shackled benefactor.
Handshakes. Back pats. More over-generous drinks. The
just-shy-of-impolite retreat. Gamboling down Fifth. If over-weight,
middle-aged genius can gambol. To the train. To the labs. To the
ramparts.

The old man looks at his watch, a stem-wound
gold-cased graduation gift from his ineffectual father, who himself
had received it from his almost wealthy great-grandfather.

Only two minutes have gone by.

A snowflake as large and light as a dandelion
seed bounds up, hits the window, rotates ninety degrees and melts
away. The ancient Midas watches its rill slide toward earth. His
fingers tap. He looks out toward the southern half of Manhattan.
The island is so different from when he first came to live on it.
Back then, it had felt as if the city were more alive at night than
during the day. He loved to wander about looking at the lights and
the magic they made of the night. While the streets of SoHo,
Tribeca and West Heights were busy and even crowded during the day,
they weren’t bustling, they weren’t kinetic with the edgy kind of
energy that they had at night. He had come to the city and the city
had changed. In part because of his efforts, but, he told himself,
the vision before him would have been even more different without
his efforts.

It was not just Manhattan. The world itself
had changed. The world had gotten warmer and wetter and Manhattan,
once capital to the world, now was dying. And, he had changed. He
had gotten colder, drier, and…and…he was dying.

It was almost quitting time in the thousands
of offices below him. A century before, a human wave of energy
would have spilled out onto the streets. Like a broken dam. And
that torrent would have plunged through the canyons and poured into
the restaurants and bars, the bodegas and markets. What had been
full during the day would empty and what had been empty would fill
and overflow.

The city had been so alive…but, then,
immutable, unstoppable metamorphosis. Like all cities, in all
times. Like all of life.

Ice melted a half a world away and that newly
released water found its way to Long Island Sound and the rivers
that bordered both sides of the city. Tides had risen and then
barriers to protect the city had risen and the waters had risen
higher and the city had fought back but the waters rose again and,
after awhile, the city had tired of the fight. The streets of
southern Manhattan became canals. The ground floors of buildings
were abandoned. Entrances were raised. Catwalk and elevated
sidewalks hugged the facades of Wall Street for a time and, then,
had been abandoned like a rotting ship. Like an old pensioner
facing straitened circumstances, the city had retreated from what
had been and cobbled together what could be. Over time, more and
more people decided that it was easier to leave than absorb the
changes. Two new, clean, well-lighted, sterile cities, nicknamed
Newton and Screwton, had been birthed in the western hills of New
Jersey. Newton—birthmother of the new in fashion, music and the
vid-arts, the only visual art remaining. And Screwton, the ever
cold, ever hungry succubus to Mammon. On this particular
weather-mad March eve, the old man, now, finally, a realist, slips
his noose and indulges both in nostalgia for a city, and a life
once ten times as bright. His mind jumps with bright-hued, but
scattered, memories, like a scrap-book unbound.

….Bursting through set after set of double
doors with the desperate desire of a salmon on a fish ladder,
through the final portal, then, sucking blue-black night air deep
into his lungs while his eyes feasted on the star-pocked sky. A
night heron’s pale moon shadow racing across concrete the color of
old ivory. The tic-flicking exhaustion and brain-inflaming
exhilaration of knowing they are close, so close to the biological
switch they are trying to divine. A galvanic fear that they will
miss the small turn that can take them through the maze. Moments
later, knowing it is the perfect moment, Elena Howe, now wife,
though not named Fflowers, licorice black shiny hair keeping time
to the broken rhythm of the breeze, rushing up to offer perfect
lips to Fflowers. Elena, a silver sylph brightening a lunar world.
Hermes in disguise.

Fflowers emaciated fingers drift to his face.
He touches the drought dry corners of his eyes before rubbing the
ridges of his forehead.

The sky goes scarlet. Finally, six o’clock
comes. Below him, a first thousand doors open. Workers in
therma-jerkins of every color, kanga-paks cinched tightly across
their chests, crowd the doorways. Two or three quick steps along
the docks jutting from each floor of every building, a moment’s
plummet, and then the flap of wings.

Thousands upon thousands, one hundred
thousand, then two, then three hundred thousand winged humans begin
their flights home. All those flights and freedoms, each and every
one, a boon from his small band’s efforts almost eighty years
before.

Human flight, now an old trick, but one still
worth the wait for an old earth-bound man. A dying man.

For a few short moments, like the bats in
Carlsbad Cavern, clouds of humans, their wings of every shape and
color, fill the sky. Ten minutes later, the flock is gone, the city
empty except for slow exodus of the wingless.

The old man rolls himself back from the glass
wall, executes a slow turn and makes his way down a long hallway
toward his nightly chore.

Joshua Fflowers wheels himself to the dining
room, where a table that could, and a half-century before regularly
did, seat thirty, is set for one. Although he is not hungry, when
he is served, Joshua Fflowers eats. Despite the palette of colors
on his plate—the sea-grass green of asparagus, an arterial red
tomato sprinkled with chalk-white chevre, two seared lamb chops
with golden edges—when those colors get inside his mouth, they turn
to gray. The old man has ageusia, has had it nearly a half-century,
since the year after Elena was lost. All food, whether crisp,
crunchy, chewy or of a pudding softness, whether marinated in wine,
bathed in infusions of basil or rosemary, or drowned in a puree of
Scotch Bonnets, vinegar, molasses and milk, tastes like…gray…like
nothing. Food as slurry. Food as duty. And, since his health has
failed, he can not even eat what is on that brightly hued plate.
That plate is just art, artifice and irony. His health is such that
dinner comes from a bottle fitted with a tube. The centenarian’s
twisted hands drag the bottle toward him. He lowers his lips and
suckles whatever is in it that supposedly harms him least.

Oh, Romulus, such a meta-mutancy, the craving
wolf into a craven lamb.

There are not many areas where Fflowers is,
or ever was, dutiful, but this is one. He eats to sustain a life
that passes both too fast and too slow. A life that, at midday, is
much too short, and, alert and alone at three in the morning, much,
much, much too long.

“Oh, Elena, what we could have wrought.”

The old head jerks up when he realizes that
he has blurted out in anguish what he only had meant to think.

He swallows methodically, but thinks less so.
He is dying and hopes for that relief. He is dying and begrudges
that darkness. He has all of an old man’s wants—revenge, love,
forgiveness, eternity.

He hopes he has just one more day with all
this weighty age that has worn him down. He will dedicate the
building tomorrow. Then, go off to his rejuvenation. If all goes
well, in two weeks he might be eating from a plate. He might be
walking. He might be happy. If all goes wrong, well, then, a bane
is lifted and he is free.

Betrayals

Bissell School sophomore halfa-hunk and
modestly talented soccer…hero, Jack Fflowers flung the FRZ-B past
Prissi’s right shoulder toward Lake Wanapocamuc. From twenty meters
below her, Nancy Sloan challenged, “No waya you can playa.”

Prissi yelled back, “Oh, yaya?”

Prissi dropped her right wing, threw her left
leg over her right, and shoved her left wing forward and down. Her
body pivoted around. She drew up her legs and pulled her wings
tight to her body. She cannonballed until she was less than ten
meters feet above the lake. When she executed a two-part wing
flare, her silver and red feathers shimmered like the aurora
borealis. Prissi dove down and caught the FRZ-B in her mouth when
it was less than a meter above the glittering surface of the lake.
She barked in delight as she skimmed just above the lake’s dimpled
water. As the winger passed from water to land, she banked up,
then, abruptly dropped her last rows of remiges down to brake. When
she landed, the exuberant teener skidded on a small patch that
remained of the previous night’s snow. As she snapped her body to
keep her balance, something popped in her right shoulder. Despite
the needle-sharp pain, Prissi forced herself to finish off the one
hop landing. The hurting winger stopped just in front of the
granite perches by the Bissell School boathouse where she, Jack and
Nasty Nancy had been sitting nd talking until competitive juices
and spring hormones had motivated them to play an under-manned
version of 3D-FRZ-B.