Taking Off (23 page)

A VASE OF FLOWERS was on Albertine's bedside table, another on the rolling table that held her meals and books, and more flowers at the foot of her bed, on a small table that held equipment for the nurses.

“This is nice,” I said, indicating the flowers. “Friends and family checking in?”

“Yes,” she said, “but most of the flowers are from the flyguys.”

“Oh,” I said. “Of course.”

“Peter—”

“You're going to tell me that you've decided to run off with the flyguys?”

“What?”

“You're not, are you?”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“They've got that swagger.”

“Don't be silly,” she said with a giggle that I'd have to call involuntary, possibly irrepressible. “I was going to ask you if you have any plans for planes that seem as if they might really fly.”

“Like the Pinch-a-Penny?” I asked, to cover a secret sigh of relief.

“Not at all like the Pinch-a-Penny. Something that appears to be aerodynamically sound and doesn't seem likely to fall apart at the wrong time.”

“At the wrong time?”

“In the middle of an Immelmann turn, for example.”

“There are some.”

“Are there any that we could actually build—you and I?”

I wasn't accustomed to being asked to consider what would be required to realize a dream that I thought of as “only a dream.” I needed a moment to think, so I said, “Hmmm,” put my hand on my chin, and walked to the window. After a long moment's consideration, I said, “Yes.”

“But?”

“But those tend to be expensive. The ones that you'd be interested in, willing to fly in, aren't the ones that the builder builds from scratch.”

“The ones built from scratch are the ones with the graceful lines of coffins.”

“Right. The sleek ones are built from kits, with the smooth parts made in a factory somewhere.”

“So there wouldn't be as much work for the fun couple?”

“From what I've seen, I think there's plenty of work involved in assembling even the most complete kit. Besides, the fun couple would have to do some work to scare up the money to buy the kit.”

“Suppose we ignore that for the time being.”

“You sound like me, my darling.”

“I do, don't I? But still, I wish you would bring me some pictures. I'd like to explore the idea a bit. I think I've got the urge to build a plane.”

“Where on earth could that have come from?”

“I don't know,” she said, and she seemed bewildered, as if she actually didn't know, as if the swaggering flyguys had nothing to do with it. “Maybe I'm only dreaming—daydreaming or nightdreaming—it's hard to tell here in the hospital, with the drugs and the way people come and go. I read, and then I doze, and I dream, and then I seem to wake, but later, when I actually do wake, I wonder whether I really was awake earlier, or only dreaming that I was awake, but more and more I find myself dreaming of flying—no, that's not right—I find myself dreaming of the two of us building a plane.”

“We still don't have a garage,” I reminded her.

“I like the idea of our working together,” she said, ignoring the impediment to our doing so that the lack of a garage represented.

“So do I,” I said.

An awkward silence fell. An unasked question was in the room, stalking us like a mosquito.

“Did you—the walker—the test?” I asked.

“No,” she said, frowning. “I walked a few steps, and then the pain and the strain were just too much for me. I got woozy. I had to stop.”

“Oh.”

*   *   *

ON THE WAY HOME, I turned toward the river again, walked east to the railing at the edge of Carl Schurz Park, and walked along it, northward, homeward, but listlessly. I wasn't in any hurry to return to the empty apartment. After a while I began to think that I heard footsteps behind me, raising questions of strategy. Would it be best to speed up, walk at a pace brisk enough to get me away from whoever was behind me, or to assume the attitude that Al and I call “tough and crazy” in an attempt to get the stalker to walk off at a pace brisk enough to get him away from me, or simply to stop, turn, and confront this other nighttime walker as if he were as harmless as I?

I stopped. I turned.
I found myself confronting a guy known in the neighborhood as Baudelaire because of his uncanny resemblance to Nadar's portrait photograph of 1863. Baudelaire always walked tough and crazy, but he was as harmless as I.

“How's the sweet patootie?” he asked.

“She's—do you know that she's in the hospital?”

“Sure. It's all over the neighborhood. I sent her flowers.”

“You did?”

“You find that hard to believe?”

“No. Not at all. It's just—”

“Hard to believe. Okay, it was a joint gift. I chipped in.”

I was tempted to ask him where he had gotten money to chip in. It was hard to believe that he was gainfully employed. On the other hand, perhaps he was. Perhaps he was paid by the city to walk the neighborhood at all hours like a brooding zombie. There might have been a New York City Department of Brooding Zombies, lightly funded but with a few dollars to give out. I didn't ask. Perhaps I didn't want to know.

“Those flowers frightened me,” I said.

He gave me a wary look and drew an inch or so away from me. “The flowers frightened you?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Not yours, but bunches of flowers that came from the flyguys. When I saw them there, for a horrible moment I feared that Al was going to tell me she'd decided to run off with the flyguys. One of them, anyway.”

“I'm not acquainted with the flyguys.”

“They're paramedics—emergency medical technicians—EMTs—but they fly helicopters instead of driving ambulances.”

“I see.”

“They swagger.”

“Oh,” he said sympathetically.

“Worse than that, they've
got
swagger. Even when they're not actually swaggering, you can see that at any moment they could swagger if they chose to, without breaking a sweat.” I paused. I leaned on the railing. I exhaled. “I think Albertine is infatuated with them.”

“It may be nothing more than a symptom of the phenomenon of convalescence,” he suggested.

… his uncanny resemblance to Nadar's portrait photograph of 1863.

“Really?” I asked hopefully.

“Convalescence,” he said, apparently musing on the subject as he spoke, “is like a return toward childhood. The convalescent, like the child, is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial.”

“Mm,” I agreed.

“Let us go back, if we can, by a retrospective effort of the imagination—”

“A thought experiment?”

“If you like. Let us go back toward our most youthful, our earliest, impressions, and we will recognize that they have a strange kinship with those brightly colored impressions that we receive in the aftermath of a physical illness.”

Side by side, looking out at the dark water, we made that retrospective effort of the imagination.

“Yeah,” I said after a while. “I see what you mean,” though in truth I hadn't experienced or rediscovered the kinship with impressions after an illness of which he had spoken because, standing there, under pressure to bring to mind an illness and its aftermath and the impressions that I had had in its aftermath, I couldn't remember any impressions after any illness. I couldn't even remember any illnesses. Memory, as Proust said in so many words, resists the demands we make on it, does not want to be brought onstage before it has its makeup on right.

“Provided, of course,” he continued, “that the illness has left our spiritual capacities pure and unharmed.”

“Of course.”

“The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk.”

“In this case, she.”

“She. Yes. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and color.”

“Or appreciates swagger.”

“Or anything else.”

“So her interest in the flyguys, in flying, in building a plane, might only be symptoms or characteristics of the childlike state of wonder and receptivity that convalescence has put her in.”

“Yes, I think that may be. Or she may be one of those who have the ability to recover childhood at will, to regain that state of newness.”

“I've been told that I—”

“That ability is nothing more nor less than genius, I think.”

We watched the water in silence for a while longer.

“What have you been told that you—?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I said. I held out my hand. “Thanks for sending the flowers.”

“Chipping in,” he corrected.

“Right. Thanks.”

“She's a sweetie,” he said, and with a wave that I'm tempted to call jaunty, he went on his way. I went on mine.

Chapter 50

A Banner Day

SATURDAY CAME, the day of my departure, and I was ready. I felt ready, and I knew that I really was ready. I felt that, overnight, I had changed: I had become an adventurer, a daring adventurer, an outstanding example of the type, in the teen division. As I ate breakfast, I seemed to detect in the manner of my eating the manner common to all great adventurers on the mornings when they set out on, well, their great adventures. I had cocoa and buttered toast, and I told myself to remember the fact, because what I ate on the morning of my setting out was somehow significant, that
everything
I did now was somehow significant, a part of the exploits of the Birdboy of Babbington. Having eaten, and having filled myself with self-importance, I stepped out the kitchen door and discovered, assembled in our driveway, everyone who had worked on the aerocycle. Under their admiring gaze, I descended the steps, crossed the bit of packed earth beside the back stoop—a patch of ground that never would sustain a covering of grass—crunched across the driveway, and mounted the aerocycle. For those few steps, I may have swaggered.

For a while I just sat there on my machine, in the driveway in front of the garage, while my friends applauded me, or their handiwork, or both, and I applauded them. Then I said a few words of thanks.

“I don't know how to thank you,” I began, and though so many other people in similar situations had said that, it was, I think, no less true for its being the expected thing. “You took my dream and made it a reality,” I went on. “Without your work, I wouldn't have been able to do more than
imagine
a trip to the Land of Enchantment—but, thanks to you, I'm really going.”

I intended to say more. I wanted to spend some time discoursing on the inestimable value of friendship, on the type of debt that can never be repaid, on the acknowledgment that adventurers owe to all the little people whose efforts make their ventures possible, that sort of thing. But I was interrupted by the arrival of Porky White, my sponsor.

Porky's delivery van rumbled up and shuddered to a sagging stop at the edge of the road, and Porky clambered out, shouting, “Not yet! Don't start yet!”

He ran around to the back of the van, opened the doors, and began tugging at something inside.

“You can't go without the banner,” he called. He grabbed Matthew Barber, handed one end of the banner to him, and said, “Here. Unroll this.” Matthew began backing up, unrolling the banner. Porky had tied wooden uprights into the banner at intervals to keep the upper line and the lower line separated and the letters upstanding. When Matthew was about thirty-five feet away, the message was revealed:

KAP'N KLAM IS COMING! THE HOME OF HAPPY DINNERS!

“I made it myself,” said Porky with pride.

“It's, um, it—” I mumbled.

“What?”

“It's supposed to say ‘THE HOME OF HAPPY DINERS.'”

“Yeah. It does.”

“Well, no. It says, ‘HAPPY DINNERS.'”

“Huh?”

“Actually, it says, ‘YPPAH SRENNID,'” said Marvin Jones, from the other side of the banner.

“You've got one too many
n
's.” I pointed out.

“Oh,” said Porky. “Shit.”

“Porky!” said my mother.

“Sorry. I just—it's just that it's important to me. I've got a lot riding on this, you know? My hopes and dreams are going up there with Peter, and—”

“Maybe it doesn't matter,” I suggested. “Why not ‘happy dinners'? Maybe it's happy dinners that make happy diners.”

“Dinners cannot be happy,” said Matthew. “Diners can be happy. Dinners cannot. Dinners are meals. Meals are inanimate. They have no emotions. They cannot be happy.”

“They can make people happy.”

“Yes, they can, but they cannot themselves be made happy.”