Taking Off (21 page)

Someone always did, and so the most difficult and exacting tasks were sent to shops—or, sometimes, to family garages—around town, shuttled there and back by car or bicycle, even on foot. This subcontracting would certainly have resulted in chaos and idleness, with many willing workers—those who had been assigned to assemble the aluminum skeleton of the wings, for example—left behind in the garage, finding that they had nothing to do while the components essential to their work were across town being drilled by somebody's uncle—had it not been for Spike, whom Mr. MacPherson had immediately appointed his assistant, in charge of keeping idleness and chaos at bay. She created on the fly a chart that tracked every outsourced job, and she assigned a tracking agent to each of those jobs whose sole function was to observe the progress of the work and report to her. With up-to-the-minute knowledge of the state of readiness of every component and subcomponent, she was able to predict when the item would arrive and to ensure that a group gathered just in time to unload it and begin incorporating it in the grand scheme.

“Rose,” said Mr. MacPherson suddenly while watching Raskol, Marvin, and me wrestling with the tricky job of fabricating the framework that would hold the engine in front of the handlebars, “how long will it be before the tail assembly is delivered?”

“My best estimate is ninety-seven minutes, Mr. Mac,” Spike said with a glance at her watch and clipboard, “but remember that it won't have the fabric on it.”

“Mm. I had forgotten that. Are we going to have to send it out again?”

“I don't think so. I've got Patti Fiorenza out scouring the town for people with upholstery experience, and I'm hoping we'll be able to get them in here to cut, fit, and stitch the fabric right on the frame.”

“Good thinking.”

“Thanks.”

“But how is Patti getting around? She's not going to be able to cover much of the town on foot. Perhaps the telephone—”

“Rocco is driving her around in his T-bucket.”

“What on earth is that, Rose?”

“It's a hot rod, sir.”

“I see. A hot rod. I understand the use of
hot,
meaning ‘powerful and keen to go,' as
fiery
does in ‘a fiery steed,' but I wonder why
rod
should be the word for the steed itself.”

“Possibly a corruption of
ride,
sir,” suggested Spike.

Mr. MacPherson looked at her with love-light in his eyes. “Quite possibly so, Rose,” he said. “Quite possibly so. Did you arrange for that transportation?”

“I can't take the credit, sir. Rocco found Patti's prominent breasts and buttocks, attractively displayed in a tight top and tighter skirt, a powerful incentive to drive her anywhere she might want to go. That's why I chose her for the job.”

“You are a smart cookie, Rose.”

“Thank you, sir.”

They knit their brows in tandem, wondering about that use of
cookie.

*   *   *

I WOULD BE less than generous if I did not acknowledge here that Mr. MacPherson and Spike were not the only ones who kept the crew occupied and available during what might otherwise have been downtime. Some of the credit has to go to my father, who put them to work mowing the lawn and weeding the vegetable garden.

*   *   *

TO ALL OF US but Spike and Mr. MacPherson, I think, our efforts truly did seem chaotic. We did the jobs we were told to do, and we derived some sense of satisfaction from whatever work we were doing, and we were held together in our work by the camaraderie that inevitably binds people who are working in a suburban garage to achieve a great goal, a feeling familiar to any reader who has launched a high-tech start-up, but individually we often had no clear notion of the part that our bit of work was to play in the grand scheme. This, I think, represented a failure in Mr. MacPherson's management style, which was otherwise both masterly and masterful. Even I, who had been dreaming over the drawings of the aerocycle for weeks, who had a picture of the completed aerocycle ever in my mind's eye, sometimes wasn't sure where the gizmo I had been assigned to assemble would fit in the finished plane, and I think Eddie Granger, who lived a block away from me and was notorious for having brought a teddy bear to school with him in the third grade, may have suffered some permanent damage to his self-esteem when he found himself, after the craft had been assembled and wheeled into the sunlight, left holding the device he had labored on for nearly the entire two days, something that fit nowhere at all in the finished plane but belonged in the sliding assembly of a hideaway ironing board that had been presented as a project for the amateur builder in the same issue of
Impractical Craftsman
as the aerocycle, the plans for which had somehow—perhaps by accident—found their way into the chaos of the garage.

*   *   *

ON MANY MORNINGS in Babbington, fog lies along the estuarial stretch of the Bolotomy, a “patchy” fog that is thick in some places, thin in others, obscuring and revealing, so that the landscape and townscape beyond it appear in bits and pieces, like the pieces of a picture puzzle with soft, blurred edges. For quite a while, the workers' understanding of the aerocycle was a similarly patchy picture obscured by a patchy fog. However, the fog began to dissipate, as morning fog does, when the sub-subassemblies became subassemblies and the subassemblies began to come together as assemblies, and we began to see not just nameless parts whose functions we couldn't describe or predict, but wings, a fuselage, a tail, the motorcycle's running gear, the engine, and, at last, a hybrid machine, part plane, part bike, the aerocycle of my daydreams, my ride to the Land of Enchantment.

*   *   *

I WAS ABOUT TO MOUNT the aerocycle when Rocco, Patti Fiorenza's hot-rodding boyfriend, stepped forward and stayed my progress with a callused hand. I'm proud to say that I didn't flinch.

I did raise an eyebrow questioningly.

“Hey, ah, just a minute, there, Pete,” he said, spitting my name's initial plosive at me.

I elevated the eyebrow a notch.

“Somebody left an old rag on the tail there,” he said, with a nod in that direction. “Lemme get it off for ya.”

He swaggered to the tail and whisked the rag away.

“Jeez,” he said. “Look at that.”

Painted on the tail was SPIRIT OF BABBINGTON.

A lump formed in my throat. “Is that—your handiwork?” I asked, swallowing.

“Yeah,” he said, scuffling his feet and looking at his shoes. “I got a little talent in that area.”

“Thanks, Rocco,” I said.

“Aaaaa, it's nuttin',” he said. “Patti made me do it.”

I gave him a comradely punch on the shoulder, and he gripped my hand in a way that made me think he might break my wrist just for the hell of it, but instead he gave me a return punch.

I mounted the aerocycle without rubbing my shoulder or even betraying a desire or need to rub my shoulder. “Next Saturday,” I said. “I'll take off next Saturday.”

Chapter 45

Through the Agency of Dust

Coördination is the soul of flying.

Francis Pope and Arthur S. Otis

Elements of Aeronautics

I KEEP MY OLD COPY of
Elements of Aeronautics
in the bookcase directly in front of me, on a shelf just above my computer screen. I keep it, and keep it near, not only because it is indispensable as a reference work but because it is a means of transportation: it takes me back. This morning, here and now, with Albertine still in the hospital, just down the street but so far away, the apartment is quiet, empty, and lonely. I've been escaping the loneliness by flipping through the old book and reading at random. A moment ago I returned in memory to the time when I first opened the book, and the pleasure of being back there, back then quivered along my spine. For an instant, I was in my father's bedroom in my grandparents' house, where I slept whenever I visited them. Having returned so completely to a moment in the past, I felt a comforting sense of removal to a safe place. The safest place of all is nowhere, and the past is a place close to that, because as soon as a moment becomes something to remember, it no longer exists for us as anything
but
a moment to remember. The past has had its effect on the present, but the present and its problems can never have an effect on the past, can never find their way there, nor cause any trouble there. We can't go there, either, of course, and yet we experience, from time to time, moments when we seem to have made our way there, to be for a moment where we were rather than where we are. How do we do that? We require an agent. Dust does it for me, the particulate matter of the past. According to Freeman Dyson,

The dualistic interpretation of quantum mechanics says that the classical world is a world of facts while the quantum world is a world of probabilities. Quantum mechanics predicts what is likely to happen while classical mechanics records what did happen. This division of the world was invented by Niels Bohr, the great contemporary of Einstein who presided over the birth of quantum mechanics. Lawrence Bragg, another great contemporary, expressed Bohr's idea more simply: “Everything in the future is a wave, everything in the past is a particle.”

Preserved in my copy of
Elements of Aeronautics
is some dust, some of the dust from the cabinet of wonders in my father's room, a vast number of tiny particles of the past. That dust takes me back—but it hasn't the power to keep me there for long.

My moment in the past, begun when I began this chapter, has nearly run its course; the sensation of actually being there is fading as I write about it, my hasty fingers stumbling over one another. When the feeling was at its strongest, I could smell again the old wood in my father's childhood bedroom, the peculiar and singular smell of the half-completed model airplanes that were stored forever in a cupboard with sliding doors.

At the time, I equated the aroma with loss.

I spoke to my father about this, once upon a time.

“That aroma,” I said, one evening when Albertine and I were visiting, probably—though I'm not certain that this is so—for a holiday dinner, “the smell inside that cabinet, where your old airplane models were, somehow it meant loss to me.”

“Hmm?”

“Because it was the aroma of the past, of something old and even dead, it meant loss to me, but now, in memory, it means something different from that.”

“Mm.”

“That aroma was a real thing, you know, particulate matter. It was significant dust. Dust: the only tangible, detectable remnant of the past. One of the ways I knew those unfinished models was through the particulate matter that I inhaled when I opened the cabinet. I smelled them.”

“Yeah.”

“And the olfactory experience modified the synaptic network in my brain in such a way that the potential for the return of the memory of the smell of that cabinet and the potential for the return of a certain emotion that I felt in that room when I opened that cabinet and examined those models was equal. See what I mean?”

“No.”

“The two things—the memory and the emotion—had a high probability of recurring together, and since that time they have recurred together, now and then, apparently coincidentally, and the aroma of old balsa wood and dust is now equated or closely associated not with loss but with comfort and security.”

“Oh.”

“There's another thing—”

“I figured,” he said. “Do you want a beer?”

“Okay.”

“You mind getting it?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Get me one, too, will you?”

“Sure.”

I got us a couple of beers.

“The other thing,” I said, “is that the remembered aroma of balsa wood and dust brought back my—um—reverent attitude toward those models. I handled them like cult objects, fetishes. Why did I have that attitude?”

“I don't know.”

“I think—but I recognize that this is my adult self thinking—I think that I understood that those models, or more precisely the incompleteness of those models, represented the end of your childhood, and in understanding that your childhood had had an end, had come to an end, I understood that a day would come when mine would end, when I would begin to become someone more like you and less like my little self.”

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

A moment passed. We drank our beer.

“Those weren't my models,” he said.

“They weren't?”

“No. They were Buster's.”

“Buster's.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

Buster was my father's brother. He had been killed in World War II, the war that was to everyone I knew “the war,” the way that “the city” was to everyone I knew New York City and no other.

“I wasn't much for model building,” my father confessed. “That kind of thing was too tedious for me. I didn't have the patience for it.” This from a man who sat for hours in a chair watching whatever appeared on his television screen. “Buster really went in for it, though. He'd spend whole afternoons at it. He was the patient one.”

Chapter 46

Paneling, a Thought Experiment

“IN THAT MOMENT—that moment that was already past as I tried to record it, already lost—every bit of the old sensation was returned to me by memory, and the catalyst was the smell of old wood and glue and dust that wafted from
Elements of Aeronautics
when I opened it. I remembered the cabinet of unfinished airplane models, of course; but I also remembered the clatter of the old typewriter on the built-in desk, which I used every time I was there, turning pulpy canary yellow second sheets onto the platen, because I was forbidden to use the bond paper in the upper drawer; I remembered the rifles that stood upright in a vertical cabinet to the left of the desk; I remembered the chubby, tubby ship model to the right of the desk, its hull painted orange and white, a lightship, I think; and I remembered the pine paneling on the walls of my father's room, regular and upright, its millwork pattern of ridges and valleys where one panel met the next, and its irregular and intriguing knottiness.”