Incident Two:
Where Bennet Flies
The lunch line was normally slow, but today it stalled. It was no help for Bennet that he had no idea what he wanted to eat. He would probably settle for the first remotely edible thing he came to, with black coffee. No one else he knew ever had their coffee straight, and he had never been interested in trying anything else. To him all the new stuff sounded foreign, like something to be suspicious of, that somehow it was not real coffee.
Cappuccino sounded like Al Pacino, and he didn’t think Al Pacino would make a very nice drink. Espresso was something express, like it was in a hurry. Mocha was macho, latte was late. He didn’t know what any of it meant. He just wanted coffee.
Typical for Mondays, it had not been a good day. He had not been able to concentrate on his work all morning and nothing had been accomplished. There was only one thing on his mind, and nothing else was important.
The night before, he had one of his best dreams. He was back on his roof, with Mrs Weebley looking up at him from her patio, shotgun in hand, telling him about dangerous birds, when he just floated up, right in front of her, as easy as that. She kept talking like nothing happened, about birds and her late husband, and that made his flight all the more enjoyable. For all he knew, that was how it would feel if it were real. He circled his yard so happy that he laughed himself awake.
The line shuffled forward. Someone ordered Al Pacino.
He tried to bounce up and down on the balls of his feet, right there in the line. A little at first, he then started to become more obvious. He closed his eyes and tried to return to his dream. If he could just leave the ground for a second, he would be happy enough to get back to his work. The food line to nowhere, would not matter. The dull conversation around him, would not matter. All that would matter was that he would know that his dream might be possible.
He would be subtle about it, so no one would notice. They would be focused on the food selection, not that a man in line happened to be floating. Their focus would be on choosing their food and drink, their coffee with a funny name, plus whatever extras they might need, and then getting a good seat. None of them would be looking at his shoes, or wondering why he looked taller, or why he was suddenly happy.
The line moved again and Bennet began to lift away from the floor. Just the smallest ascent, but it thrilled him like he had suddenly soared straight up into the blue sky like a skyrocket. He held back a celebratory hoot.
“Hope the eggs are nice today,” said the unsightly overweight man in front of him. He was someone Bennet had seen once or twice before. He did not know what he did for the company, and he never felt the need to ask.
“I’m sorry?” Bennet responded, feeling his feet stuck to the floor, feeling like he had been woken up, feeling like his elation had been ripped away.
“Yesterday they gave me gas.”
“They must have had older stock,” Bennet said, trying to disguise his regret.
The man turned to him like he could not wait to share his opinion. “You know, I think it’s the chickens. I’ve been wondering that for years, actually. They’re different, the ones today. Not like when I was young. They do something to them, something not natural. All kinds of laboratory messing with genes and whatnot. Those chickens need help.”
“They need to be freed?”
The man did not like that comment and turned away. Then, as the line moved, he looked back to him with renewed vigour. “They need to fly, like all birds. They stash them away in cages, doesn’t do them any good. What kind of life is that for them? Locked up like they’re being punished?”
“Isn’t that the same with all of us?”
The man was not expecting that and he looked at Bennet with a smile. “I know what you mean,” he said with a small nod. “Cooped up in this place, sucks the life out of me. The eggs they’ve been getting out of me have all been all that good, either.”
He expected Bennet to be amused as he was.
“Everyone needs to fly,” Bennet said, and he was serious.
The unusually tall woman behind him, who had been listening without showing it, added her thoughts. “Let me know how you go with that,” she said with a laugh.
Bennet knew her as a secretary for one of the big bosses. Her blond hair was very short and her clothes would better suit a much younger woman. As with the man, Bennet did not know her name, and they did not seem interested in knowing his.
They came to the food selection and no one felt like saying anything else. The man ahead of him wanted a latte, since he was late, apparently. Bennet took the first sandwich he saw and ordered his coffee. He heard the woman behind him order an espresso, since she must have been in a hurry, or so it seemed.
It felt good to get away from the line, and as he walked to one of the few spare tables he thought he felt his feet leaving the floor, more and more with each step. He stopped and looked down to his feet, and he tapped the floor a few times to be sure. From what he could see, there was no difference to the way he stood. He looked around the cafeteria and felt cramped by the tables and chairs and customers talking and eating and staring and regretting that they would soon need to return to their work. It was no place to fly.
After only a few sandwich bites and one sip of his straight black normal coffee, he made his way down to the ground floor and then outside the building. Once on the street, amongst the hoards of the quickly-moving lunch crowd, he felt his confidence surge. There was an energy about the crowd, and that gave him the encouragement he so badly desired.
Walking with them, every now and then he jumped. Unable to see the ground or his feet, he could not be sure what was happening, but in his spirit it felt like he was soaring, up in the sky, with the birds, free and alive. He could go far from the crowds and his job and the doubters and mockers, were he could live as he pleased.
He glanced at his feet and saw a gap between his black shoes and the grey pavement. He briefly wiggled his feet to be sure that what he was seeing was no dream.
Then he ran into someone, and had to grab the person’s arm to prevent him from falling. It was a man in a brooding suit and heavy workbag. Bennet apologised to him and felt clumsy. The man gave him a quick glare and mumbled abuse, and then resumed walking. Bennet wished he could explain what he was doing, but the man became one with the crowds.
Finding himself isolated, standing on his own with everyone walking around him, he could clearly see his feet and the ground, and he wondered if any of what he had just felt was true. He could not separate what was dream and what was reality.
The elevator took him back to the floor where he worked. He remained silent and the conversation around him sounded muffled and without life. Travelling up made him feel pinned to the ground, more than ever. When his floor came he did not move and then watched the door close. He wanted to see how it felt to fly when going down.
After going up a few more floors, the elevator changed to go down. Bennet knew it was time to take his chance. He closed his eyes and imagined himself back on the roof to his house, with the sun on his head and wind on his heels. He lifted off, and quickly crashed his head on the roof of the elevator.
There were two people in the elevator with him, and they were both shocked and asked if he was all right. Realising that he hurt his head enough to make himself dizzy, he was not expecting such immediate sympathy from strangers. He was also not expecting them to ignore him after he told them that he was all right. Had they not wondered why he hit the roof? Had they not seen how he left the safety of the floor? Did they not consider that perhaps he had discovered the secret of how to overcome gravity?
When he returned to his desk, in a tiny cubicle that he had to share, he felt pity for those co-workers. They had such low expectation that a man could fly, that they did not even recognise it when it happened right in front of them. He looked up to the endless white ceiling of his office, telling himself that in future he must note where the roof was. He also told himself that he must never again tr
y to fly in an elevator.