Flight (18 page)

“Look, I’ve got to go. Stay here. I’ll be
back as soon as I can.”

Jack stood up. “I need to go out for awhile.
I’ve got a hunch. If I go, can I get back in?”

“No.”

“Okay, maybe, I’ll stay. But don’t take too
long. I’ve got to keep moving…for Joe’s and my own sake. Plus,” the
smile flashed like a shooting star, “a pining heart is a…”

When Prissi reached out to Jack, he stepped
forward and held her tight. They swayed together like tidal seaweed
for too many seconds before a weak-kneed Prissi shoved him back.
Jack’s eyes were big in surprise at the force Prissi used to
disengage. She laughed.

“You misread my intentions.”

She reached forward and plucked a convenient
piece of rice noodle from the sparse stubble on his chin.

Jack grabbed her again and held her tight.
Prissi felt his hands smoothing her feathers and fought the urge to
let those caresses go on.

Finally, when she stiffened in his arms, Jack
released her as he said, “I hope you don’t misread mine.”

Like a dog to its bowl, the wolfish grin
bounded back onto Jack’s face just before its owner slouched back
down onto the floor.

An hour later, when Prissi pushed through the
basement door after having eaten a quick Malay take-out with her
father, she was surprised to find the basement dark. As she punched
the light-switch, she whispered Jack’s name. She half-expected him
to play Jack-in-the-box a second time. She walked past all of the
cages until she was in front of the utility room door. She tried
the handle to see if he might have figured out how to get past that
lock. When the handle didn’t turn, she spun back around to catch
him sneaking up on her, but the room was empty. She hurried back to
the Langue storage area and looked behind the re-arranged totes. No
Jack there, and no Jack hiding in any of the storage areas.

No Jack. No Joe.

When Prissi plopped herself down on a black
crate, it protested with an angry sigh. She tried to figure out
what she had done to cause Jack to leave. Her hand drifted to her
face where her fingers played with her pimples like the buttons on
an accordion. She sat, thought, regretted, grew angry, at him, at
herself, at it, and finally, when there were no more targets, she
slumped and stared at the tips of her wings. She savored her
unhappiness. She probed and prodded the tenderest spots like a
defeated fighter poking at the greenest of a set of bruises.

Finally, having grown bored with her
self-indulgence, Prissi pushed herself to her feet. It wasn’t until
she snapped the lock shackle to secure the Langue cage that she
remembered the tote in the other cage. This time when she stood in
front of the wire door, she listened to her intuition. She rotated
the dials of the lock until they duplicated the combination for the
lock on the Langue cage. When she gave a tug, the lock opened.

Prissi took a few seconds to listen to the
building’s sighs and groans before opening the door. Once inside,
the teener brushed aside her lifeless mouse fur hair and used her
feet to push aside the boxes surrounding the one with her mother’s
writing. She spread her wings enough to kneel down. Her hands
hovered over the gray container before her trembling hands began
peeling back its shipping seals.

The top layer held boxes filled with Prissi’s
art and homework assignments from elementary school. As the
motherless refugee opened the boxes, along with all of the
memories, came the faintest smell of Africa. The next layer
contained a flash album, which was all black because of dead solar
batteries. It would take hours of exposure to light to see what pix
it held. There was another ancient album with images on paper
protected behind plastic sleeves. Prissi couldn’t remember seeing
that before. Taking her time, she found two pix of the young woman
who had been holding hands in Pequod Jones’ pix. In one, the woman,
wearing a lab coat and a serious face, was leaning over something
which looked like an aquarium. In the second image, the woman, who
Prissi was sure was her mother with a half century of living
removed from her face, was standing on top of a mountain in jeens
and heavy boots. Prissi took the pix from the album thinking that
she would add them to her arsenal for when she battled her father
for her family’s past.

The third layer held banded stacks of
letters. When Prissi flipped through the relics, she saw that most
of them were from her father to her mother. Two were not. They were
from someone named Al Burgey who lived in New Jersey.

On the bottom of the box Prissi found a red
plastic filo. When she opened it she discovered a small bag covered
with a pattern of tiny red and black beads. Opening the bag, Prissi
found a spiral crystal, banded in gold, and suspended on a heavy
link gold chain. This was a piece of her mother’s jewelry she had
never seen before. When Prissi held the crystal up to the light,
its interior was hazy with tiny fractures. She dropped the pendant
over her head and tucked it inside her shirt. It felt good to have
something of her mother’s against her skin. It was good until that
feeling started to make her eyes itch.

Prissi went back to her exploring. At the
very bottom of the box, she found a large, tattered composition
book. It only took her a minute to realize that its pages contained
her mother’s notes, ideas and observations about different
scientific experiments.

As the entranced girl read, she fingered the
pendant. Most of her mother’s work seemed to be focused on mutancy.
There was no mention of Centsurety, but Prissi was now even more
sure that her mother had worked there for Joshua Fflowers. Her
hands vibrated as she held and read the evidence of a secret life
her mother had lived.

After spending twenty minutes thumbing
through the notebooks, Prissi had no better idea of what her mother
had been working on other than that it involved a mutancy project
which brought more frustration than satisfaction. When Prissi
turned the last page of the notebook, she saw from the remaining
scraps that many pages had been torn out.

Prissi compared the first entry in the
notebook with the last and wondered why she had never heard a
single word about the three years her mother had spent doing this
work. She wondered why the notebook and pendant and pix were in a
tote in the wrong storage area. And, lastly, she wondered if there
could be a connection between the things before her and her
mother’s suicide.

In frustration, Prissi used her outstretched
feet to shove the boxes away from her. She flared her wings, flexed
her shoulders, and rolled her neck. She took a deep breath, held
it, slowly released it, and began her story: She was not the evil
spawn. Instead, her mother was an evil…no, her mother was a good
scientist who worked with evil ones…a good scientist who had been
going to blow the whistle on the evil scientists. Who had found out
what she was going to do…and tried to stop her? Someway—she would
have to work that out later—the good scientist had evaded her fate
by going underground. Years later, she had resurfaced in Burundi as
a housewife who helped her scientist husband help mankind and
adored her daughter, and….unbidden by Prissi, her story’s unwanted
ending came...who committed suicide.

Prissi shook her head. That couldn’t be the
right ending. It couldn’t be. She packed everything back in the box
as she had found it, except for the pix and the pendant. She locked
the wire door and was on her way out when she noticed a small piece
of paper wedged into the chicken wire of the Langue cage.

Opening the note, she read: 213?
SFE-B/TZT/K.

Since Prissi knew it hadn’t been there
earlier, she assumed that it was some kind of coded message from
Jack. One of the things she was beginning to hate about Jack was
that when he tried to be mysterious, he came off as being either
snarky or stupid.

Feeling that she didn’t have the time, Prissi
shoved the paper in her pocket. She didn’t need for everything to
be so cryptic. She headed upstairs to interrogate Beryl Langue…her
purported father.

* * *

It was after midnight before Prissi got in
her bed. Although she was exhausted, she tossed and turned as she
thought about what her father had and hadn’t told her.

They had sat in the living-room—she sprawled
on the couch, he, after carefully draping his frayed gray wings,
sitting stiff and upright in a century’s old captain’s chair.
Prissi’s strategy had been to work on her father’s past before
confronting him with her mother’s history and, finally, her
suicide, but, on a whim, she had begun her interrogation by asking
him if her mother ever had been a scientist. After a long pause,
her father nodded his head yes. Thinking of the pix Pequod Jones
had shown her, Prissi persisted. Was it a long time ago? Well, it
would have to have been. Was it possible that she was a
meta-mutanist? He had never been sure what that phrase meant. After
all, how much change was a big change? Growing impatient, Prissi
asked if Nora Elieson had worked for Joshua Fflowers. Beryl Langue
said that he didn’t know the answer to that, but that he himself
had occasionally seen Joshua Fflowers because, back then, Fflowers
still went to conferences and spent time with scientists. Prissi
decided to return to her original plan. What had Beryl Langue
worked on back then? Her father shrugged. Like all scientists, he
worked on little pieces of puzzles. Exasperated, Prissi had asked,
what kinds of puzzles. Her father took his time before answering
that just before mid-century a lot of time and research money had
been spent on expanding the parameters of meta-mutancy. Prissi
asked if he meant flying. His nod was barely discernible in the low
light of the living room. Certainly, flying, in the broadest sense.
Even his re-gen work was an off-shoot of flying. Flying and
nanotics had been the money magnets. Everything had to be linked in
some way to those two topics if it was going to get funding. Just
like the money had once been tied to TB, AIDs and nuclear bombs.
Wing design, especially deltas, had gotten its share. He had done
some work on remige edges. Prissi let her father ramble on about
feathers and wing designs even though she didn’t believe it was
anything other than a delaying tactic.

When her father finally sputtered to a stop
and started to push himself out of his chair, Prissi knocked him
back by immediately asking: What else was being researched? Beryl
Langue had to think about that. It had been a long time ago.
Finally, he said nothing was coming back to him.

Prissi asked if her mother had ever worked on
delayed fledging. He shrugged and said he didn’t know the specifics
of all of her research. He shook his head, almost as if he were
denying what he was saying. Since everything tended to be
connected, it certainly was possible that some of what she worked
on might have been related. He paused before saying that any
efforts in that area obviously hadn’t been useful because delayed
fledging still was proving to be an intractable problem.

Prissi started to ask another question when
her father stopped her. “Why the sudden interest in the past? I
thought science had proved that the last thing a fifteen-year old
girl is interested in is her parents.”

Figuring that she had as much right to
dissemble as her father, Prissi avoided saying Smarkzy’s name but
told Beryl Langue about the lecture on False Paths. He was nodding
in approval until she mentioned her idea of the Lost Path. That
something wonderful had been discovered and then lost at a company
named Centsurety that Joshua Fflowers had owned. The mention of
Centsurety froze her father. He stared at her. A finger rose to
make a point. He opened his mouth, then closed it and shook his
head. Finally, he said, “I suggest you find something more useful
to do.”

Prissi always had thought of her father as
either too nice or too naïve to lie. But, tonight, after listening
to his words, especially after the mention of Centsurety, and
noting the hesitations, watching his eyes with their slight shifts
and darting glances, Prissi had known that her father was lying to
her. In a way, though it was frustrating and made her angry, it
also made her feel a new respect for him.

Propped up in her bed, unconsciously
smoothing her feathers and massaging her sore shoulder, Prissi
gloated that all her father had done was to make her even more
eager to find out how her mother was connected to Joshua Fflowers.
If she could immerse herself in figuring out that connection, then
maybe, just maybe, that would keep the other, bigger question at
bay.

But not until tomorrow. As soon as her mind
allowed the smallest wedge, the bigger question filled the molasses
thick, black, suddenly claustrophobic air of her bedroom.

Why had her mother committed suicide?

The teener’s breathing became shallow and
fast as she thought of all the things she had done, or hadn’t done,
that would make her mom want to let go of her life. Prissi couldn’t
stand it. She swept her arms through the night’s murk to dispel
them. When that didn’t work, Prissi changed tactics….

….Jack had held her and his lips had
been….

A Row and then a Row

Joe starts awake in the thick pitch black
dark with the rough skin of callused fingers rubbing his lips.

“It’s okay. It’s me.”

In the silence of the underground space,
Blesonus’ whisper sounds like distant thunder. Joe, after being
pushed and nudged, rolls his cold crampy body, as unwieldy as a
memfoam mattress, into a sitting position.

“You’re lucky I found you. What are you doing
down here?”

Joe is far too groggy to make up much of a
story.

“I couldn’t sleep. I wandered off. I was
going left, right, left right, but I forgot. I ended up here and
just stopped—both because I was tired and because I was afraid that
the farther I went the worse off I’d be.”