AIRPLANE!
BEFORE TAKEOFF, I put on the ancient leather gloves and a leather bombardier’s jacket with a ratty fur collar left in the Cub—clothes doubtlessly belonging to Pierre Saad. As I flew—over Egypt, eastward over the elbow of the Mediterranean, over Lebanon, and northeast—I rejoiced at being in the pilot’s seat again. My eyes passed fondly over the simple instrumentation as though I were surveying the eyes of trusting children: the tachometer, the pressure and temperature gauges, the altimeter with its two clocklike hands, the airspeed indicator, the bubble compass. While it was too big for me, I was glad to have the antique leather helmet’s protection from the wind. Piloting the Cub was like flying in a sieve.
Twice, since Cairo, I had been able to spot small informal runways as indicated on my flight plan. I had been able to land the plane and refuel without arousing even a murmur of suspicion, but the magical third port indicated in the flight plan refused to appear. I checked the handheld global positioning device for reassurance. When I looked down, all I saw was the shadow of my own small plane as it undulated over the crowns of acacia trees.
Under my plane slid a changing topography, sometimes of undulating green, sometimes a sandy dun flatness. High overhead a tiny jet zipped across a blue hole in a masklike cloud. Not all the way across. Within the circumference of the eyehole, the glint of silver suddenly burst into a few sharp, red splinters, the way a tiny blood vessel sometimes hemorrhages into the human eye.
There’s death, I thought: death for a pilot beyond the clouds, a man or woman who was as real as I was riding in the cockpit of the ancient Piper Cub. As real as Thom had been. Igtiyal? My heart had contorted even before I learned its translation.
Igtiyal? How could Thom’s death have possibly been murder? If Thom had been murdered, did someone want to murder me, too? The idea was preposterous. Totally harmless, I wasn’t worth murdering. Why swat a bumbling, stumbling bee out of the air?
The warplanes were miles overhead, and they cast no shadows. But exactly where was I? Anxiety would have been a reasonable response to my uncertainty, but instead I felt almost lighthearted—strangely free. Perhaps I didn’t care what happened to me. Since Thom’s death, I had occasionally had such moments of disregard for my own life. It pleased me that Pierre Saad’s Piper Cub was nearly identical to the one in which I had learned to fly. “Fly me back to childhood,” I whispered to it. “Let me try again.”
I had been eleven years old when I called my grandmother on the telephone to ask permission to fly with Mr. Stimson in his latest toy. Sandwiched exactly between his daughters aged ten and twelve, I had been closest friend to both Janet and her younger sister Margarita. Being sandwiched between them alleviated the loneliness of being an only child whose parents were missionaries in Japan.
Their father was a large fleshy man with red hair. Once when he was washing his car, I saw that his milk-white back had been plowed by a big bullet. He had fought in Vietnam. It gave me a rather optimistic view of war: if you came home from it with a big scar on your back, you got to be the fascinating father of the two most wonderful girls in the world.
The first time I came home from school with Janet (we were in the same grade because I had been double-promoted), Mr. Stimson had asked me what my IQ was. Though I knew such questions were considered impolite, I felt flattered that he was curious. When I told him, he remarked admiringly, “You’re even smarter than I am.” I had felt smugly glad (for his sake) that he had the intelligence to look at me with new appreciation. After that I was always welcome at the Stimsons’, and when opportunities for fun came up for the Stimson girls, I was often included. After Mr. Stimson took me up in the Piper Cub, he taught me to fly it.
“Yes,” my grandmother had said, when queried over Cheerios. “It would be good for you to learn to fly. I don’t want you to end up like me.” My grandmother was referring to the fact that she herself had never learned to drive a car. “Who knows what people will need to be able to do in the future?”
When I asked Janet and Margarita if they were excited about learning to fly, they had answered with one voice, “We don’t want to. We’re not going to.”
I could hear their voices again, while I piloted the Piper Cub over the Middle East, as clearly as I could hear my grandmother. Janet had added, “Mother doesn’t want us to.” Over breakfast, my grandmother had only cautioned, “Pay attention and be careful.”
I noted the oil temperature gauge had slightly passed the normal range, 170°F–180°F, but the air over the desert was quite hot, which could account for an abnormal reading.
Biting down on the fingertip of the glove, I pulled my hand free. I wanted to touch my talisman, the metal case of Thom’s memory stick. Fumbling into the leather jacket, from inside my shirt, I retrieved the pendant. As soon as I touched it, I relived how Thom had lowered the black cord over my head that last morning together. How he had remarked on its warmth. It was warm now, from my body. Stroking the smooth metal casing between my thumb and forefinger, I listened to the comforting low hum of the little plane’s engine. Murder? Thom murdered? I tightened my whole hand around Thom’s best gift to me. Actually, it still belonged to him. I had just been entrusted with it—like the manuscript. While the codex was a capsule from the past, the flash drive pointed to the future. Did I hold the location of extraterrestrial life within my hand?
If Thom had been murdered, surely it was my duty to find out why, and by whom? Perpetuity?
The sound of the engine seemed to transpose up a half step. The temperature had passed 200°.
Once again I traced the shape of the memory stick, rounded at both ends and only as long as the last joint of my thumb. In 2017, Thom and I had thought it to be wonderfully miniaturized. Now, only three years later, such devices were only as big as the nail of my thumb. “Buttons,” they were called.
Such a strange item. All it could do was remember—but not think.
Thom was dead. All I could do was remember him. What if he had been murdered instead of accidentally killed—so ironically, by a falling piano? Would he be any less dead, if he had been murdered?
The compass reading changed abruptly. Perhaps a magnetic deviation—an iron deposit underground. Far above the Piper Cub, the mask and its empty blue eyeholes had sailed east.
I flew over what may have once been an oil refinery. Now it was a pile of ashes. The rims of seven huge holding tanks had been reduced to rusted curves of cut metal. Then the land beneath became sandy—desertlike, gray and tan.
Below, there was still no sign of a third airport hacked out of the wilderness, though a third airport was noted in my flight plan, and then a change of planes. Below me scrubby grass gave way to a wave of trees.
To go forward, to reclaim my own life, did I need to know? Had Thom been murdered? Igtiyal?
As soon as I had left Memphis for college in Iowa, I met Thom, who was as tender and sympathetic as any mother, as strong and reliable as the best of fathers, and who regarded me as a desirable adult.
“If you’re undecided about having children,” Grandmother had managed to whisper when she was very ill, “I mean if it’s a fifty-fifty proposition—not if you’re sure you don’t want to—go ahead and do it, for my sake.” But I had hesitated to do anything to unbalance the happy equilibrium of marriage and work.
In the layer between the fighter zone and the green earth, my craft moved steadily forward—was this what it meant to be lost? Just moving along? And was I lost? Maybe I was locally lost; globally, I and the small plane were someplace over Mesopotamia. The dial of the fuel gauge indicated I could make it to Baghdad if I had to. Was I lost or free? I realized the battery in the GPS had failed.
When the Piper Cub engine began to emit a persistent grinding sound, the peril of the moment seized me. The engine was struggling. Plenty of fuel, but the temperature gauge read 218°F. Between 220° and 230° the engine would seize up. The metal parts would stick together, and the propeller would stop turning.
As the plane lost altitude, the acacia canopy rose up at me like aggressive heads of broccoli. To the left side stood a surprising group of very tall trees—redwoods?—rising over the other vegetation like cathedral spires over a medieval village. Redwoods? Here? Ahead a break in the greenery was doubtlessly caused by a river. To try to gain altitude, I turned the nose of the plane down a little so the wings would hit the air at the right angle for lift. It’s counterintuitive to point the nose down when you’re falling, but it speeds the airflow over the wings, lowering the air pressure. The maneuver can result in lift. There, there! I had a moment of lift, but the propeller stopped dead. I was gliding, not falling. Yes, there was a river with a broad, bare embankment. I tried to pull the lever to dump the gasoline, but it was rusted shut.
When I looked down, I saw a huge worm lying on the bank of the river—no, surely a man. In a brief flash, I envisioned Thom’s body, clothed but mangled, lying under the snarl of piano wires and gilded struts. This man seemed to lie on his side, naked, alone on the bare bank.
My plane was stepping down and down through the air. If I was going down, I must try to save the codex. I saw Arielle’s brown eyes, her father’s golden gaze. Still holding half a tank of fuel, likely the Cub would burn after impact. The codex would be safer if it went down separately. I pulled the hard case onto my lap. I raised the unlocked lever of the door, then shuffled the heavily reinforced case outside. Instantly, the French horn case dropped toward the green of the treetops.
The trees themselves disappeared. Ahead, waves glittered like a field of diamonds—prismatic, silver, gold. Unless I was wildly off course, there was no sea in this location, yet there was a sea and a sandy shore! How could an ocean, sparkling like the streets of paradise, lie ahead? The presence of soft blue water, as blue as the sky? I tried to angle the plane to land on the beach—a gust lifted us for a moment, airspeed sixty miles per hour, and I sailed, I sailed, now the sea was parallel to the plane—I wouldn’t plunge into the water. If only I could float on air forever, on and on, half a mile, good wings, good wings, but sinking, finally sinking. If only my speed might drop to forty—not an impossible landing at all. The tip of the right wing gouged into the sand—a sudden drop with too much torque for a pancake landing—then the beginning of a grand loop of cartwheeling, the fuel tank rupturing, while the good seat belt held— Impact, and my vision sheeted with blood, the greedy crackle of flames.