Flight (50 page)

Webs

With the inexplicability of a wavering top
regaining its equilibrium, Joshua Fflowers’ pancreas, which had
pushed him to the verge of death, suddenly pulls him back from that
last border. Where his pancreas leads, his liver and other
functions soon follow. Dr. Blaine explains to Illiya and Adaman
that there is no scientific reason for this propitious change.
Sometimes things of the spirit, be they human or something more
spectral, transcend the flesh. For now, Fflowers flesh is weak, but
it is stable.

The momentum of Fflowers approaching death,
like an oil supertanker, had pulled much into its wake. Now, as it
changes course, so must much else. The media experts—medical,
political and business—who got it wrong are quickly replaced with
new experts who explain how and why the old ones misread the
algorithms and paradigms, portents and tea leaves. Those at
Cygnetics, who had been told to take the elevator down, punch Pause
and wait. Those who had been assured of ascent skulk into the
shadows.

Fflowers is so little out of the woods that
metaphorical leaves, twigs and thorns still cling to him when, to
distance himself from all that has gone wrong and to distract
himself from all that still must go right, the old man smells the
glove, gets the scent and begins tracking down the girl whose image
and acts had floated in and out of his drugged dreams and
nightmares, conscious, subconscious and conscience.

At the first hurdle he can’t get himself
over, the impatient patient calls on the friend of his youth.
Surprisingly, Fflowers catches Smarkzy in Manhattan at the New York
Public Datatarium. And, in an even bigger surprise, Smarkzy is
going there for the exact same reason that had triggered the old
man’s call. Who is Prissi Langue? And where is she? Smarkzy has
received a cryptic message from an unknown source that his favorite
student is in dire trouble. He has spoken to his friend Pequod
Jones who has confirmed that Prissi, despite her initial enthusiasm
to do research on Fflowers past, has not been to the NYPD in
several days. Nor has he seen her friend. When Smarkzy questions
Pequod about the friend, he soon divines from the description that
it must be Nancy Sloan. A call here, a call there and Smarkzy
learns what Nancy knows about the attacks, Beryl Langue’s murder,
which has not been in the newz, Jack and Joshua Fflowers possible
involvement, and Prissi’s visit to a ghost from the distant past,
Dicky Baudgew. What Smarkzy learns he relays to Joshua Fflowers,
albeit in an edited form. That old man, still master of the
spinnerets despite his weaknesses, begins to spin his web.

* * *

Jack Fflowers had been only slightly
reluctant to do as his father first had asked. Deceiving Prissi,
besting her, appealed to him. Admittedly, his father had been
oblique. The plot, just lightly sketched, was that, with his
grandfather ill, there were bound to be seismic changes at
Cygnetics. If Adaman were not to be swept away in those changes,
there were things that needed doing. Jack might be able to help his
father’s, and his own, future. Adaman would take care of Uncle
Illiya, but Jack needed to neutralize Joe. But, to be able to
neutralize his cousin, he first had to be found. On that first
night home on Spring Break, Jack had left the family game room
thinking that bird-dogging Prissi with a bug, in the hope that Joe
would get in touch with her, was nothing more than a lark.

In the NYPD, an hour after he had led the
charge through Isabel’s House of Spirits, which had felt like such
a prank, Jack learned that he had become an accomplice to Beryl
Langue’s murder. After Jack absorbed that knowledge, he, too, lost
his father.

* * *

When he discovered that Prissi had been
attacked and ended up in the Columbia-Unitarian Hospital, Adaman
realized that he and his dying father were not the only persons who
had an interest in the girl. Adaman’s first assumption, which made
sense given the cards he held, was that Illiya was behind the
attack. What he couldn’t understand was why the girl was neither
abducted nor killed. It was when he tumbled to the possibility that
the attack was about getting something from the girl rather than
the girl herself that he decided to alter his plans.

After the FDR attack, Adaman told Jack to
lure Prissi to go with him. Adaman’s plan was to get Prissi away
from her father and then for Jack to use his charms on her to find
out what might have been stolen and what she was doing that would
be of interest to others. Adaman ordered Schecty to have his men
find out who else was following Prissi. Obviously, that message
either had been relayed poorly or had been seriously misunderstood
because Beryl Langue was dead.

Now, not only had the girl disappeared, but
Jack hated him and held him responsible for Beryl Langue’s
death.

Adaman Fflowers was in a panic.

When Joshua Fflowers began to recover,
Adaman’s panic turned to pure terror. If Joshua Fflowers found out
what Adaman had tried to do, and Adanan suspected that Jack might
be the one to relay that newz to the old man, Joshua would ban him
from Cygnetics before he disinherited him and make Prissi Langue an
heir. Just like so many of the Unbonny Prince’s, Adaman’s plan was
unraveling and with it a grand future.

Adaman Fflowers was a Bissell alumnus. He had
been taught the classics and had read his Shakespeare. Even though
all seemed gray and he knew not which way to turn, he also knew
that the worst thing he could be was indecisive. Unsure though he
was as to what might be the proper course, he knew had to act. And,
so he did.

A Change in Plans

Bob Tom Damall admits that he has done many
stupid things in his life. He left the mountains of Tennessee
instead of staying with kith and kin. He went to MIT instead of
TSU. He studied molecular neurology instead of re-forestry. He
worked for Bionatics instead of taking the job with Opti-Global. He
left that lucrative job at Bionatics instead of lying to the
investigators from CDC. After being black-balled and retreating
from those wars, instead of clearing his name, he had pursued a Ph.
D. in political philosophy at Harvard. He had taken the job at Yale
instead of Ohio State. It was at Yale that he had his epiphany and,
once again, recreated himself—as a forest prophet. Then, instead of
retreating from the battlefield, when wisdom screamed to do so, he
had married Rholealy. He had lived crazily in the cave with those
crazy women instead of taking Blesonus and going back to Tennessee.
He had made a big mistake rescuing Noby One, and made a bigger one
by abandoning him, and, now, probably, was making the biggest by
changing his mind again and going back to find the naïve
teener.

The decision to turn back, however, isn’t
made by the old riverman until he is north of Poughkeepsie. He has
been leaning over the stern rail on an empty veg barge, staring at
the churning water below to distract himself from his guilt, when,
abruptly, he sees something in the murky brown froth five meters
below his feet which he divines as if it were a scattering of tea
leaves.

His fate, maybe inexplicably, but
indubitably, is bound to the boy’s.

Seconds later, Bob Tom is twenty meters in
the air and heading southeast toward the Connecticut coast. The
message he has received is so powerful that it won’t allow him to
fly back down the Hudson, across the Manhattan and out Long Island.
Instead he will make a bee-line toward the Connecticut coast and
cut across Long Island Sound. He knows where the coordinates they
have been given lead and he also knows that Joe, somehow, despite
the folly, is on his way there. Even as he contemplates the folly
of an old man, a tired old man with nascent doubts and resurgent
fears, of flying across kilometers of open water, he knows that
Noby’s salvation, as well as his own, depend upon him making that
journey.

After the sedentary hours he has spent on the
barge, Bob Tom’s body feels fresher and stronger than it has since
the night before he pulled Noby to safety. His wings beat strong
and steady atop the eight knot westerly wind. However, regardless
of how steady those wing beats are, Bob Tom’s mind is in turmoil.
The attack of fear outside the African’s subway sanctuary caused a
crack in that ancient vessel and that crack has spider-webbed until
the contents, so tightly held inside for years and years, are
spilling free.

It has been almost a half-century since
Robert Thomas O’Malley has flown along the Connecticut coast. He is
amazed at the changes carved in the shoreline by the rising waters.
He can see that most of what had been called the Gold Coast is
gone. He assumes that those expensive homes were too expensive to
preserve. The new coastline from Darien to Bridgeport is mostly
barren sand and rock with an outline of scrub. From two hundred
meters, Bob Tom can see that this section of the almost unbroken
band of shoreline sprawl, which once ran from Delaware to north of
Boston, has moved twenty kilometers inland. The coast-hugging
sections of that once venerable highway of progress, Route 95, has
been chopped out and stitched back together beyond the twenty
kilometer limit. Looking at the ruins, the geri winger can see some
of that civilization had been snatched back by rising waters, and
some had been flattened by federal fiat and bulldozers, but most
simply had crumbled away from economic desuetude and neglect.

In New Haven, even though the cranes and tank
farms, which he remembers covering much of the harbor like yellow
and silver algae, are gone, the high hills which shape the
Housatonic are still occupied. When the old winger swivels his head
to study the divided community high on the hills, their turrets and
towers remind him of Buda and Pest. When he realizes what he is
seeing, the old man bursts into laughter.

The Elis. Arrogant Elis. Yale University,
intellectual mother of presidents and their pawns, though defeated,
has refused to surrender. New Haven, sacred New Haven, might have
fallen to the rising seas. Yale, however, has taken her billions
and made a tactical retreat to higher ground.

Bob Tom’s laugh nearly carries across the
river.

When he gets to Bluff Point, Bob Tom lands
and rests, drinks and eats. Ever since he left Joe in Queens and
made his escape, he has felt that he is doomed. How his fate will
manifest itself he doesn’t know, but a deep part of him, a part
different from and far wiser than his intellect, knows his life is
done. Surprisingly, that knowledge does not weigh as heavily on him
as he would have guessed. Although there have been many moments of
joy in the Adirondacks, on, above, and alongside her rivers and
mountains, those singular moments have been outweighed by a
profound loneliness, a recognition of his life as caricature, a
sense of the emptiness of his acts.

After the winger catches his breath and gets
back into the air, he looks out over the sun silvered water and
recalls when and where he was, and how he felt when he made the
decision to enter the verdant half-world of the mountains as a
Ph.D.-burdened reincarnation of Tolkien’s jolly woodsman, Tom
Bombadil.

…He had been grading term papers for his
graduate seminar, Machiavelli in a Non-Machiavellian World. In a
way, the seminar had been no more than a retelling of the tale of
the serpent in the garden. Is evil irresistibly attractive? All
nine of his students, the brightest master students in Yale’s
political science department, had argued that evil could be
resisted. He had finished his grading, stacked the papers
alphabetically, and, then, reread the conclusion of each student.
When he finished he knew that one of two things must be true.
Either he was a miserable failure as a teacher or he was a
miserable failure as a citizen of the world.

Robert O’Malley had pondered which might be
the correct answer. Some of that pondering had been done in long
walks along the same coastline he has just flown over. He can
remember walking barefooted in the sand at Hawk’s Nest Beach with
his wings tightly furled to keep the turbulent off-shore breezes
from flaring them.

When the thirty-eight year old professor had
decided that he was the owner of a scarred soul without ever having
had life wound it, he resigned from Yale. Deciding that truth was
more apt to be found in fiction, he spent the summer reading novels
in a New Hampshire cabin perilously perched on an outcrop looking
out at the north face of Cannon Mountain. Summer ended, but he kept
reading Leaves fell and he read on. Finally at first snow, he
stopped. He looked around at the stacks and mounds of books and
decided that, of all the stories which he had read, of all the
characters with whom he had become acquainted, Tom Bombadil, a
minor character in the Lord of the Ring, was the most
attractive.

Some critics, and Tolkien himself, had
indicated that Bombadil was god-like, a Beginner, a First. Although
Robert Thomas O”Malley had plenty of ego, he certainly didn’t think
that he was god-like; however if the ring represented power, then
he wanted to be like Bombadil, who was not affected by the ring.
Over the next months, the former professor read Tolkien’s poems
about Bombadil as well as books on forest-craft, fishing and
hunting. He went on two Inward Unbound retreats and played
Professor Higgins to his own un-Pygmalion.

Then, like Thoreau, he went to the woods to
live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, to
see if he could learn what it could teach and not, when he came to
die, discover that he had not lived.

Now, decades later, he regrets his efforts.
In a sense he has not lived. He had learned the ways of fish and
fowl, but had learned little about himself. He had been a well-met
hale fellow to his own soul. Blustery, boisterous, always positive,
he had whistled his ways through the years. Until now.