The figure under the light didn’t reply.
Xas squatted to pat the plane’s wheels as though it were a horse and he was checking how sound its knees were. Then he turned around, trying to put all his questions in some order.
The man under the light was young. He had glossy brown hair parted on the side, but with a floppy boyish forelock that clearly required more hair cream than he was prepared to use.
Xas got up and went toward the table and the man suddenly switched out the light. ‘I don’t know you,’ he said. He looked away from Xas when he said it, and began adjusting his pencils and slide rule so that they lined up with the top edge of the plan.
‘I brought back the Fokker Frank flew out of here yesterday. Frank couldn’t himself because he had a problem with his ear.’
The man scowled down at the plans. He tugged at one earlobe then said, ‘I don’t have any problem with my ears—I just don’t know you.’
‘He’s deaf,’ Xas thought, ‘more than a little—and refusing to admit it.’
He moved around the table so that he stood beside the man, who glanced at him sidelong from under his eyelashes, then turned the plans face down on the table.
‘That’s a beautiful plane,’ Xas said. ‘Is it built for speed or distance?’ He spoke clearly, and inclined closer.
The man turned his head all the way across his own shoulder, giving the angel his better ear.
Xas moved around behind the man, to get at that ear. He repeated his question again, and was finally answered.
The man spoke slowly and quietly, his words in batches rather than sentences, as though they were peas he was shelling into a bowl before him for, as he delivered his information, he seemed to set something aside, the casing of each thought. After a moment Xas began to wonder whether what he was setting aside was himself. The man seemed so deeply interested in what he was talking about that, when he answered, he apparently hadn’t any urge to own, wasn’t proud of what he knew and what he had done.
‘This aircraft didn’t handle well with a bigger engine, the engine we wanted to put into it. We were aiming for speed. Distance is probably the greatest challenge, because the true future of aviation is in delivering mail and passengers—not its use in warfare, despite what you’ll hear.’ He went on, ‘You see, the two problems that have to be solved for long-distance flight are fuel and altitude. This plane has a skin that offers as little resistance to air as possible. We first tested it in a scale model in the variable density wind-tunnel at Langley. That went well. It has a water-cooled engine, so we’ve been able to close its engine in. The engine cowling reduces drag. That works for speed, but, like flying at altitude, it also works for distance, for fuel economy.’ He paused. ‘Can you follow what I’m saying?’
Xas nodded. The man gave a little stiff, unwilling smile. More a spasm than a smile. He went on, ‘The higher up you can take a plane, the less resistance there is, and the less fuel you have to carry. But a pilot still has to breathe. We tried carrying bottled oxygen. We took her up to twenty-five thousand feet, and tried to do without oxygen for a time, to conserve it. But if you stop sucking on the tube, while it isn’t in your mouth and warmed, condensation from breath that’s already accumulated in the tube freezes and blocks it. So, if you’ve left off the oxygen until you’re desperate and dizzy, there’s a danger you’ll find the tube blocked and you’ll have to do something drastic like biting the tube in two below the ice. Then you’re left with a short tube and have to keep your head down throughout the rest of the flight, which is mighty uncomfortable. Anyhow—we solved that problem by installing a small heater in the cockpit. Which, unfortunately, means more weight.’ He shrugged.
Xas said that creatures with wings had trouble flying at high altitudes because there was less resistance, less air for their wings to clutch on the downbeat.
The man leaned nearer. ‘Did you say “creatures with wings”? What creatures? Bats? Bugs? But you mean birds.’
Xas didn’t acknowledge the peculiarity in his wording, though it had led this proud deaf man to question what he thought he’d heard and Xas had the impression that this wasn’t something he did very often. He said, ‘When geese fly at altitude they go in a V formation, the strongest one going first and the rest benefiting from its and the others’ turbulence.’
‘I didn’t know that.’ The man seemed genuinely interested. ‘At higher altitudes even a propeller will run out of air. But we haven’t reached that limit yet. We don’t yet know how high we can go—what the actual atmospheric limits are. The object now is to fly as high as possible in order to fly as far as possible, in the lightest possible craft, that uses the least possible fuel. So you see—it’s all about possibility. This aircraft’s engine is modified to run on tetraethyl-lead, which doesn’t freeze. Now—’ he said ‘—a bird on a long journey must refuel as it goes. It catches its dinner. Right?’ He kept his head inclined toward Xas, eyeing him sidelong. ‘By the way, why did you say “creatures with wings”? Are you some kind of foreigner?’
‘I said birds. Birds can fly enormous distances close above the sea. That’s one way they conserve energy. The air moves slower over the sea. An albatross gets lift at the crest of each wave, on the slower, denser air there, then dives into accelerating air along the troughs of waves. It can go like that, sharply up, then slowly sliding down, for thousands of miles.’ Xas tried to explain what he knew about albatrosses, what he’d seen when he had travelled among them, riding down the air before the dark blue, foam-streaked faces of the Southern Ocean’s towering waves. He knew another trick for long-distance flight, but couldn’t explain it to the man, since it was only available to angels. An angel, invulnerable, could find a storm cell and rise inside it, up among the lightning and giant hailstones then, with an extra effort, escape the top and fly away in a long shallow glide, letting down over tens of thousands of feet, and thousands of miles.
The man said, ‘Sometimes I have impractical dreams in which I try to design an aircraft that can make the same minute adjustments to the air that a bird’s body can.’
Xas noticed that this was the first time he had volunteered the personal pronoun in relation to these experiences of flight. He’d talked of problems having to be solved or having been solved without once saying ‘I’. Xas hadn’t been able to tell if he was a designer, engineer, or test pilot. Now he thought perhaps the man was all three.
‘I’ll tell you why,’ the man went on. ‘Why I have my impractical dreams. Have you ever made a parachute jump?’
Xas nodded. As ‘The Indian’ he’d had to wear a parachute to perform his soaring stunts. His fellow wing-walkers would have thought it very odd if he’d trusted to skill and timing alone, and there had been times when he’d missed and had to pull the ripcord.
‘I’ve jumped too,’ the man said. ‘A parachute gives you unimpeded views. But it’s only a slow fall, not flight. To fly, to depend on the air without an engine, I got near to that only once. It was the very first time I went up, when I was only four. This was how it happened. My father and I were out driving when we saw some men down on one of the flat flood meadows by the river. They had a big man-kite up in the air. I hadn’t yet seen an airplane—this was only a few years after Kitty Hawk. Daddy drove us down to have a look and the men asked if I wanted to sit on the kite. They winched it down. It came down rock steady. There was a strong, even wind blowing, with no gusts. I wanted to try going up, but didn’t think Daddy would let me. But he did—though he made me promise it would never get back to Mama. The men lifted me up into the kite—there was a seat on it—and let out the line again. I guess I was only fifteen feet up at most, but there was nothing underneath me. A car with good suspension can bounce you about, but this was different. I was being buffeted and jostled very softly. It wasn’t like rocking in turbulence in a plane. In a plane you feel you’re the pivot. Either you, or the engine. And it wasn’t like a balloon or a dirigible. I’ve never felt anything like that kite. And I remember look
ing down on Daddy and the other men, all grinning like crazy. And then I saw our shadow—my shadow inside the kite’s—and I remember thinking how funny. How funny that we weren’t attached at the feet, me and my shadow. Then Daddy put his arms up for me and the men fetched me down again.’ At the end of the story the man put up his arms, mimicking his father’s suppressed anxiety at their separation. ‘Daddy was an old man then; he and I never had much fun together, but we had one or two secrets, about the things he let me do without our having to campaign at Mama. Mama was one of those women who know everything is dangerous.’
Things at night were no less visible than they were in the daylight to the angel, only coloured differently, a world of many shades of darkness from luminous to inky. The man’s eyes, his thick eyelashes, his mouth, all were variations on darkness. Xas could see him clearly, but he still seemed obscure—obscure and unfathomable. Xas was closer to the man than he’d been to almost anyone in a long while; close enough to smell the ketones on his breath and know that he’d gone without food for too long. It wasn’t a pleasant smell, but it was very human and, blowing in Xas’s face, this scent, and faintly moist breath, seemed as powerful in their way as the ram air into which he used to lean when he was wing-walking.
The man added, ‘Mama was always a stickler for neatness. She would dress me, then ask me to check myself in the mirror, where I’d find myself looking the way she wanted me to look, not that I cared then—I was too young to care. But my reflection never impressed me as me. When I went up in the man-kite I recognised myself by my shadow.’
Xas inhaled sharply. He felt breathless. He said, in wonder, ‘Is that what people feel on first leaving the ground? They feel it too? A separation from their shadow?’ This was a revelation.
‘I’m not people,’ the man said. ‘Not folk. I have no idea what folk feel.’ He had kept one arm up after miming his father’s eagerness to hold him. He had hooked a finger into the cord of the lamp. Now he gave it a tug, and the light went on.
Xas and he looked at one another.
Xas felt his own face softening with concentration. Everything receded from him but the face before him, in which he read recognition, not of himself, but of the mutuality of what was happening.
Something was happening. The man looked wondering and resigned. Time slowed, then came to a stop. It stood still so that they could both look at it. They looked into each other’s eyes and saw time. Or at least, Xas did. He saw time together, and time apart.
Then the man opened his mouth and pressed the tip of his tongue to the back of his top teeth and thrust his lower jaw out a little. It was the expression of someone who is conscious of some action he must perform with his mouth—but who can’t decide what. He chose speech. ‘This airfield belongs to the county. So do the roads around it. But the surrounding farmland—much of that belongs to me now. I’ve been buying it up. I’m going to buy a small airline and fly it out of here.’
Xas laughed. ‘Why tell me that?’
‘You look important,’ the man said. ‘There’s something important about you.’ He took a step closer.
Xas could feel breath stirring the hair at his hairline.
The man pulled a face, then plucked at the grubby collar of Xas’s borrowed flying togs.
Xas realised that he felt encumbered, and wanted out of those togs, to be free of their thick legs and stuffed underarms. He felt like a pantomime bear.
The man laughed, in a poorly-tuned, unpractised way. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s see what you have in there. Let’s see who you are.’ And he began to tackle the clasps of the togs.
Xas laughed too, surprised. Then they were both laughing and wrestling with the top layer of Xas’s clothing, till the flight coveralls were off his arms and flapping around his waist. The man took Xas by his shoulders and appraised his leather jacket. Then he let go and unbuttoned the top of his own overalls. He was wearing a white dress shirt, without a tie. He tapped the shirt’s starched front, then waved a hand at a black jacket that was hung to cover a telephone on the wall by the door. Xas recognised the thing as a phone because its receiver dangled out from the bottom of the jacket, trumpet down and off the hook. ‘I was supposed to be at a fancy send-off tonight. My own. I was going to Europe with Miss Kay North.’ He named a famous actress, and Xas knew that the man was still trying to impress him. ‘We were to sail on the Lake Werner.’
‘You missed your boat,’ Xas said.
‘I’ve been to Europe already.’
Xas wondered whether the famous actress had embarked alone, or would storm in any minute now to slap this man’s face and throw a ring at him. Xas could see her doing that, having seen her do it in a movie.
‘Tell me why you’re here again?’ the man asked. ‘Now that we’ve finished horsing around.’ He regarded Xas from under the fringes of his eyelashes.
‘I wasn’t aware we had finished. And does it matter why I’m here?’ Xas said. ‘Let’s say we missed the same boat. We’re not in the same boat.’
‘Are we in the water together then?’ the man asked. Then he said, ‘We’d better hold tight.’ He didn’t say it in a bold or insinuating way—he simply said it. Then he put his arms around Xas. His face was young, excitable, domineering. ‘You like to play,’ he said. ‘I can tell you like to play. You have a dangerous look. It would be better if you were famous. If you were famous you’d be careful to be careful. As it is I’m going to have to make you make promises.’
‘Make me make promises?’ Xas was amused. He moved his arms up so that he was holding on too—feeling skin, warm under the linen dress shirt. ‘Shall I tell you again how I came to be here?’
‘I can wait.’ The man moved his mouth very gradually toward Xas’s. Their eyes locked till the man’s gaze lost its focus and Xas was left staring into the mysterious animal darkness inside his pupils. The man put his lips against Xas’s, just rested them there, motionless, his starved breath blowing into the angel’s mouth. Then his lips moved. ‘But I can’t wait,’ he said. The tip of his tongue touched Xas’s and they were kissing.
Xas put everything into the kiss. He said Yes in his mind, in his native language—but not aloud, not to God. He had a memory then, of flying under thick cloud in the dark of the moon, deviating back and forth, winding to follow the smell of river water, a smell like a wavering green curtain thousands of feet up in the air. This remembered river smell charmed Xas to move away onto a course that wasn’t his own. He was kissing, he’d let go of his bearings, bewitched by something both behind and before the kiss, the mouth that bit through the icy oxygen tube, and the story of a boy who first recognised himself from the air, in his discrete shadow. ‘I will follow this,’ Xas thought, in rapture, ‘I will follow this.’
The moment that the stuff in the angel’s saliva hit his nervous system the man gasped and his whole body hardened and his lips flooded with heat. There was no distance between them then, for all their differences.
The lamp was swinging, then the fuse in its bulb broke with a sharp musical noise, and the shade clattered. The ground was soft, and there were too many confounded clothes, big buttons and small, and a cummerbund with hooks and eyes hidden in its pleats.
Xas had forgotten what it was like to take hold of someone avid, himself avid. He trembled and felt clumsy. His spit worked its magic—‘une puissante potion d’amour’—as his one true love had said. But the angel had forgotten how careful and exact he had to be. He was fumbling, palsied with pleasure and lack of practice, and by his fear of being too strong, till the man’s human hand gathered him and held them together, and moved, and mingled their wetness. The man’s other arm, braced against the floor, held his body above the angel’s, so that there was enough space between their bodies for them to press their foreheads together and look down the length of themselves, at what their hands were doing, and at their skins, damp and lustrous in the blue pre-dawn light. ‘Not so fast,’ the man breathed, though he was in charge, then, ‘Oh, you’re so beauti
ful!’ He kissed Xas and then stopped what he was doing and pulled the angel over so that Xas lay on top of him. Even in his eagerness he registered how easy it was to move Xas. People always noticed, whenever they by chance took his weight, that Xas weighed half what any human of an equivalent size did. ‘There’s nothing to you,’ the man panted. Then he tried to slip his arms into Xas’s opened clothes, to put his arms around him and hold him close. Xas remembered his back, and took the hands and kissed them, tasting their sweet mixed chlorophylls—and machine oil. The oil made his throat catch. He swallowed several times and the man rested the heel of his hand against his throat. He said, softly, ‘You’re not very substantial, but I think you must be—someone.’
Xas coughed. ‘Why have you stopped? Please,’ he said. ‘Please.’
‘I hope I can trust you,’ the man said, and caught Xas’s hands and held them still.
Xas was astonished at this show of self-control. ‘I promise I won’t—’ he began, but broke off. ‘What do I promise? What are you worried about? What should I do or not do? Should I promise not to embarrass you? To be discreet? To keep out of sight?’ Then, wanting to pledge everything, he said simply: ‘I promise.’
‘You promise easily.’ He stroked Xas’s throat with his palm, then his cheek with his knuckles. He said, ‘I get the impression you could cause me trouble. I wasn’t thinking of my public life. I always close the door on what I don’t like—what I don’t like at all, or don’t like any more. But it’s like you and I are in a room together already. One of my darkened rooms.’
Xas opened his mouth to answer this, but couldn’t. He was moved beyond his intelligence. He felt something closing around him, something like the warmth of a room from which all light has been excluded. He left his mouth open to taste what the man had said. Then he kissed the man, and kissed him. Then, after a moment, he stopped and thought to ask the man why he hadn’t sailed with the actress.