Authors: Eric Kraft
On the Wing
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Contents
Preface: Albertine Gets the Urge for Going
Chapter 8: Egoists and Egotists
Chapter 11: Real Diner Cooking
Chapter 12: Surprised and Delighted
Chapter 14: Retrospective Manifestations
Chapter 16: Dreams of a Professional Fool
Chapter 18: Tomorrow's News Today
Chapter 21: The Ideal Audience
Chapter 22: Eldritch, Redefined
Chapter 23: A Muddleheaded Dreamer
Chapter 24: Pre-Traumatic Stress
Chapter 25: The Second Most Remarkable Thing in the Life of Curtis Barnstable
Chapter 28: On the Street of Dreams
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For Mad
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There is a great deal of enjoyment to be gained in learning to fly a plane ⦠but a new thrill is had when the pilot sets out on a cross-country trip.
Francis Pope and Arthur S. Otis,
Elements of Aeronautics
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The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flyâand Lo! the Bird is on the Wing!
Omar Khayyam, “Rubaiyat”
(translated by Edward FitzGerald)
Preface
Albertine Gets the Urge for Going
⦠we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight â¦
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
THE STORY SO FAR: I had thought, when I began writing about my aerocycle, my trip to the Land of Enchantment, my sojourn at the Faustâroll Institute for 'Pataphysics (known to some of its alumni as the Faust-roll Institute for Promising Lads), and my return to a hero's welcome in Babbington, my home townâClam Capital of America, Birthplace of Teen Flight, Gateway to the Pastâthat I would write one book of medium size ⦠however, the single book that I had intended to write about my exploit has become three books, the Flying trilogy.
This book is the second volume in that trilogy, which will, when it is complete, set the record straight on the subject of the celebrated solo flight that I made in the summer of my fifteenth year from Babbington, New York, to Corosso, New Mexico. (I was fourteen at the time of the flight; I would turn fifteen at the end of October.) In the first volume,
Taking Off,
I built the aerocycle,
Spirit of Babbington,
a single-seat airplane based on drawings that I had found in an ancient issue of a magazine called
Impractical Craftsman,
made my travel plans, and departed. In this volume,
Spirit
and I meander from Babbington to New Mexico, and in the third volume,
Flying Home,
I will return to Babbington, somewhat older and, possibly, somewhat wiser.
While I was writing the first volume, Albertine (my darling, my lover, my muse and inspiration, my constant companion, my wife) suffered a crash while riding her bicycle in Manhattan. Emergency medical technicians took her to Carl Schurz Hospital, just down the street from the apartment building where we lived. X-rays revealed that the accident had fractured her pelvis along a nearly continuous line from the symphysis pubis to the crest of ilium, cracking the bone badly enough to keep her off her feet for weeks.
During the several days of her hospital stay, days that were only the very beginning of her convalescence, she experienced a Baudelairean return toward childhood, regaining in the highest degree the faculty of keenly interesting herself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial, seeing everything in a state of newness, with the sensory drunkenness of a child. One consequence was her becoming infatuated with the “flyguys,” a swaggering bunch of medical technicians who ferried the sick and injured to Carl Schurz Hospital in helicopters.
When Albertine finally earned her release from the hospital by demonstrating that she could hobble about with the aid of a walker, the flyguys announced their intention to take her on a celebratory joyride around Manhattan in their chopper. Her eyes lit up. The flyguys hustled her to the hospital roof in the wheelchair that I'd rented to take her home, and then they trundled her aboard their helicopter. I stood and watched the machine rise and tilt and chatter out over the East River. Then I remained for a long while on the roof waiting for the flyguys to bring her back to me.
I waited. Time passed. Foolishly, I had thought that the flyguys would deliver less than they had promised, just take her for a short spin, and bring her right back to me. When that didn't happen, I began to panic. What if they had conspired to spirit her off, take her from me forever? What if she had become so enamored of them that she couldn't live without them? What if she thought of this as an escape? What if she had come to think of me as an encumbrance, something that she had to shed before she could fly? What if she had left me on the roof like a broken shackle and had made her getaway?
Writing in the calm of a morning several years later, I can allow myself to think that I was deluded, and I can even allow myself to think that, despite my moods and my boundless ineptitude, I am not nearly so difficult to live with as I feared she might think, but at the time the likelihood that she would want to escape from me suddenly seemed very high. I waited some moreâand I waited some more. Every time I heard the clatter of a helicopter, my heart leapt and raced like an excited pet eager for Albertine's tickling caress behind its ears. Every time the clatter passed or turned and trundled away, my heart sighed and slunk into a corner. As time passed, I began to sweat. I began to feel powerless, hopeless, impotent. There was nothing I could do to bring her back. I was standing on a rooftop, with no way to confront the flyguys, reclaim her, sieze her, carry her off, take her home to my cave. When another helicopter began to rattle into range, I decidedâor some part of me below consciousness decidedâthat I wasn't going to let this one get away. I dashed to the elevator penthouse, punched the button, and banged the door with my fist until the elevator arrived. I rushed in and rode down to the ground floor. I hastened through the emergency room with an affectation of calm, as if I weren't insane, but as soon as I was outside I began running in the direction of the sound of the helicopter. I ran like a boy, a lovesick boy. After a couple of blocks, I stopped to catch my breath and to listen for the sound of the helicopter. It was south of me now. I began running down 2nd Avenue. I paused again at 86th Street. The helicopter had turned west. I began running along 86th Street. If you've tried running along the sidewalks of New York in midafternoon, you know that you step on a lot of toes. I stepped on a lot of toes. People shouted at me. People lashed out at me. One or two people tried to trip me up. I ran until I was out of breath, and even then I walked as quickly as I could, until I heard one helicopter approaching as another receded and realized that I was a man on foot chasing helicopters. I stopped, and I told myself that I was acting like a fool, then corrected myself and told myself that I
was
a fool.
Then, when I had caught my breath, I began running again, in the direction of the most recent helicopter, because, after all, it might be the one that she was in.
Did I think about calling the police, dialing 911? Oh, yes. I did. But then I thought about what I would say:
“My wife has been abducted by flying EMTs.”
They must get a lot of calls like that on any given day. There must be a category for them.
Eventually, I gave up. I would tell you that sanity returned, if I thought you would believe it. The truth is that I surrendered to exhaustion and resignation. I walked back to Carl Schurz hospital. I decided that I would wait on the roof. I would wait all afternoon, all evening, all night if I had to. If she never returned, I would be able to say, “I waited all night.” I found that consoling, somehow. I have no idea, now, why I found it consoling then, but I did. I also told myself that I would never tell her about my running through the city in panic, chasing helicopters, and I never haveâuntil now, here, in the pages you've just read.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
THE HELICOPTER eventually reappeared from the north. It swung over Carl Schurz Park and settled gently onto the hospital roof. The flyguys off-loaded Albertine, hugged and fondled her, and finally settled her into the rented wheelchair. We all descended in the elevator, and there was another leave-taking at the hospital door. Then I pushed her home to our apartment, and on the way I confessed to her, with some fervor, my hope that neither she nor I would ever see the flyguys again.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
ALBERTINE WORKED HARD at her recovery. As soon as she was permitted to exercise, she began riding a recumbent bicycle in the vast, multistory gymnasium up the street from our apartment building, and she swam lap after lap in their 25-meter pool. She never missed a physical therapy session and did all the exercises that her therapists prescribed. One therapist was amazed by what he took to be her tolerance for pain.
“It's not that,” she said. “In truth, I have a very low tolerance for pain, and I'm feeling terrible pain right now, while I'm trying to do what you tell me I should do, but I want to be back on my feet as soon as possible, and if you tell me that this exercise is going to be good for me, then I will do it.”
She wasn't foolish; she didn't allow her urge to be up and about to drive her to excess. She began slowly, and she avoided any position or effort that was not prescribed, but as she felt her strength return and as the pain began slowly to diminish, she increased the work she did, going far beyond what the therapists had expected her to do. It hurt. I could see that it hurt, when she let it show. There were times in bed when she made the mistake, in sleep or half-sleep, of turning onto her sideâor merely beginning to turn onto her sideâand the pain made her scream.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
I PUSHED HER EVERYWHERE in the wheelchair I'd rented, but she hated being in it. She yearned to graduate to the walkerâa frame of aluminum tubing that would allow her to take some of her weight off her legs as she moved ahead one slow step at a time. Although she'd passed a “walker test” before leaving the hospital, she wasn't permitted to leave the chair and walk with the aid of the walker until the line of bone repair along the fracture was strong enough. When that day came, she began a determined assault on distance, beginning with a walk of just a few feet eastward from the front door of the building, along East 89th Street, and back. From that beginning, she extended her range until she could circle the block, working at it with determination and perseverance, as if she were in training for the walker Olympics.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
ANOTHER CONSEQUENCE of Albertine's convalescent return toward childhood, and her thereby regaining in the highest degree the faculty of keenly interesting herself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial, seeing everything in a state of newness, with the sensory drunkenness of a child, was her surprising interest in the literature of home-built and kit-built aircraft. In particular, she became an avid reader of builders' logs.