Taking Off (20 page)

“Oh, I am. If only I could get out of here, I think I'd be quite chipper indeed.”

“Any word on that?”

“It's hard to pin anyone down.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“I still can't turn at all. The pain is just too much.”

“I'm sorry—”

“And the lump on the side of my head is as big as a grapefruit—half a grapefruit.”

“Your hair hides it.”

“I know, but it worries me.”

“I'm sure.”

“However … I can sit at the side of the bed and I can stand with the walker.” She inclined her head toward a framework of aluminum tubing that stood beside the bed, a “walker” that allowed a person to stand within it and support herself by taking her weight partially on her arms, with her hands gripping plastic foam pads on the uppermost part of the frame.

“Really?” I said. That seemed like tremendous progress to me.

“Yes. Really. Apparently I have to pass a test to get out of here.”

“A test?”

“The Walker Test.”

“You have to show that you can use it?”

“I have to show that I can go some distance using it.”

“How far?”

“There's some disagreement about that. The big nurse says a hundred feet, but the flyguys say a hundred yards. Of course, they may be pulling my leg—”

“The ‘flyguys'?”

“That's what they call themselves. The EMTs who fly the helicopters.”

“Oh.”

“They're so cute.”

“I'll bet.”

“They've got swagger.”

“You've mentioned that.”

“I have?”

“Yes. The other evening.”

“Oh? I don't remember. It must be the pain medication. Do I smell something good?”

“I brought chicken tikka masala.” Albertine is fond of chicken prepared in a hundred ways, and chicken tikka masala is at or near the top of the list.

“I don't have much of an appetite.”

“Did you eat the hospital dinner?”

“The flyguys brought me a hero.”

“A hero?”

“Italian cold cuts.”

“You ate a whole hero?”

“No, no. Just a couple of bites. But that couple of bites filled me right up.”

We talked about coincidence and accident for a while, but it was a conversation in fits and starts. Al was still sleepy, inclined to close her eyes after a few minutes, doze for a while, then wake and smile in apology for having drifted away. When she was awake, we talked, and when she was asleep, I ate a little of the chicken.

*   *   *

AFTER LEAVING ALBERTINE, I detoured to the emergency room instead of going straight home. The emergency “room” was actually a suite of rooms arranged around a central administrative and bureaucratic area that was open except for a chest-high partition defining it and limiting its access to two openings. A dozen seats were arranged opposite one of the openings, provided for those who accompanied the ill and injured to the emergency room, and I sat in one of them, choosing the same one that I had occupied on the night of Albertine's crash, when I had waited for her there while she was being examined elsewhere in the building. Now I had come to the emergency room because I wanted to see what the flying EMTs, the flyguys, looked like. There were none in evidence when I arrived, so I waited, but I feared that I might be told to leave before I got the chance to see them. I expected to be challenged about my right to be in the emergency room, occupying a seat provided for the companion to an ailing party when I had no ailing party to play companion to, but no challenge ever came. I was never asked to move along, never told to leave. No one seemed to notice me at all. I could have sat there all night, I think. I might have sat there every night. The thought came to me that sitting there for a while every night might be interesting to try, to see whether anyone ever noticed that I didn't belong there, that I had no legitimate claim to one of the molded seats. It might also be possible to get free coffee that way.

A phone rang, and its ringing occasioned a sudden bustle and flutter that had not occurred when other phones rang. Someone sprang up to answer it, and I saw that the ringing phone was red, mounted on a pillar at the very center of the central bureaucratic area.

“Schurz ER,” said the young woman who answered it. She flipped a switch beside the phone, and the incoming side of the conversation was broadcast to all of us. What we heard was a man's voice, stern, clipped, efficient, self-confident, calling from a helicopter on its way to Schurz from the scene of an accident somewhere, calling out over the roar of engine and wind. (Schurz, I learned later, was the “catchment” hospital for trauma cases in a wide area roughly centered on our neighborhood. Three helicopter EMT services transported victims to Schurz, landing on a helipad on the roof of the hospital, where the flyguys offloaded the injured, commandeered an elevator, and rushed their charges to the ER.)

The voice detailed the nature and extent of injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident by a male Caucasian who would be arriving at the ER soon, and three people—a doctor and two nurses, I think—began preparing a bed and assembling equipment. After what seemed only a moment, double doors burst open down a hallway to my right and two flyguys came through, wheeling a collapsible stretcher with a victim on it. The flying EMTs were suited up in jumpsuits, gray with a red lightning bolt over their breast pockets and a much larger red lightning bolt on the back with the name MEDAIR beneath it. They were all business, those flyguys. They were professional. They were cool. They did not smile … but they sure did swagger.

Chapter 43

Albertine on Coincidence and Accident

AT HOME, in bed, alone, missing Albertine, aching for her, I brought her to mind and rehearsed our conversation on coincidence and accident.

“You won't believe this,” she had said, drifting up from sleep to a state of drowsy wakefulness, “but one of the flyguys is the grandson of your Mr. MacPherson.”

“What a coincidence,” I remarked.

“He asked me if I planned to sue,” she added matter-of-factly.

I stopped eating the chicken tikka masala, closed the lid of the container, and asked, “Sue?”

“Mmm,” she said distantly.

“You seem to be in a wee bit of a dwam,” I said, as Mr. MacPherson might have.

“Mmm,” she reiterated.

“Are you?”

“In a dwam?”

“Planning to sue.”

“No. My crash was an accident.”

“Pure and simple?”

“Of course not,” she said, suddenly more alert. “Why do we say that? ‘Pure and simple?'” Then, because she recognized that the question might have been asked by Mr. MacPherson himself, she spoke in an amusing version of his brogue. “Is anything ever pure and simple? No. Nothing. Everything is impure and complex. I suppose we say ‘pure and simple' because we wish that something would be pure and simple, we yearn for things that are pure and simple, things that are pure enough and simple enough for us to understand them, see through them like pure water and swallow them as easily as simple syrup—but nothing is ever pure and simple.”

“You're right,” I said. “Your crash was an accident, but forget the pure and simple part.”

“Am I raving?” she asked.

“Not exactly.”

“It must be the pain medication.”

“Maybe you should rest again.”

“I think I'd like to make a point about the concepts of coincidence and accident, if I can stay awake long enough.”

“Please do.”

“Feel free to eat while I ramble.”

“That's okay. While you talk, I listen. While you sleep, I eat.”

“Coincidence,” she began, and I could see from the way she paused and puckered her lips and knit her brows that she had not prepared this in advance, “is a simple matter of the simultaneous occurrence of two events.”

“‘Simple'?”

“You said, ‘While you talk, I listen.'”

“I forgot myself.”

“Eat the chicken—and don't talk with your mouth full.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Oooh,” she said suddenly, and she shivered.

“What's the matter?”

“A chill,” she said, “as if the ghosts of Einstein and Gödel just passed through the room, admonishing me as they wandered through against playing fast and loose with time and simultaneity.”

“Oh,” I said, and I couldn't keep myself from glancing around, trying to catch a glimpse of the famous friends.

“I know better than to claim that simultaneity is universal and absolute,” she assured them, “but I'm only discussing the type of accident that is local and macroscopic, on the level where daily life is lived, the level where collisions with dogboarders occur. There—or here—as the term
accident
is usually used—make that commonly used—an accident is an
unfortunate
coincidence,” she said firmly, in the manner of one who will brook no further interruption. “The idea of misfortune is so embedded in the term that on the rare occasions when we want to use it to designate a coincidence that brings good fortune, we have to specify that we mean a ‘happy accident.' If your Mr. MacPherson were here, Peter, he would tell you that at its Latin root,
accident
simply means ‘occurrence' or ‘what has befallen.' After the fact, we ascribe significance to the simultaneity, sometimes great significance, based on the effect that one of the simultaneous occurrences has had on us, and so we give to coincidence a meaning that in most cases it ought not to have. That habit of overestimating the importance of coincidence has driven coincidence to its low status among skeptics. The truth is that coincidence is not merely commonplace but constant, a pervasive fact of life and all existence. The universal characteristic of the vast panorama of ‘it all' is ceaseless motion, an uncountable number of events, happening all the time, with an uncountable number of them occurring coincidentally at any moment. We regard those events as directionless and meaningless until one of them affects us. At that moment, or slightly later, after the brain has done its work, we interpret all the other events in the light of that one that has affected us. That one is significant to us
because
it has affected us, and in our worldview we are always at the center of all action. No occurrence becomes significant until or unless it affects us. Put another way, we could say that an event will become significant
when
or
if
it affects us, but not until or unless it does. So, most of everything that happens is taken by the human mind to be insignificant, but the little bit that directly affects us we take to be tremendously significant, looming large over all the rest, and we suddenly seem to see an astonishing coincidence or set of coincidences that produced the significant event. If we could ever understand at a deep level the essential insignificance of simultaneity, we would not have our cultural fascination with the fallacy of significant coincidence.” She was beginning to fade, and she knew it. She gave me a wan smile, as if apologizing in advance for the drifting off she was about to do. “I said ‘cultural fascination,' but maybe our fascination is even deeper than that,” she continued bravely. “It may even be genetic. Apparently, according to the reading I've been doing, one of the brain's primary functions is the detection of coincidence. Certain structures—combinations of synaptic links among neurons—work as coincidence detectors. Detecting coincidence must be of such high evolutionary value that it became a part of our genetic makeup … long … long … ago.”

Visiting hours were over, and of the chicken tikka masala only a snack was left.

“Do you want me to leave this with you?” I asked. “One of the nurses can probably heat it up.”

“No,” she said drowsily. “Thank you. You have it for breakfast.”

“I will,” I said. “Good night, my darling.” We kissed, and as she dwammed over I left her for the night.

Chapter 44

The Spirit of Camaraderie

When energy is converted from one kind into another, no energy is actually destroyed. We may lose track of it, but it exists in some form. The statement of this fact is called the Law of the Conservation of Energy.

Francis Pope and Arthur S. Otis

Elements of Aeronautics

IMPRACTICAL CRAFTSMAN
had told the truth, at least in part: the aerocycle could be built in a single weekend, and I think that it could have been built, or at least assembled, within the confines of the family garage. However, the crafty folks at
IC
had neglected to say how many people they expected to work on the construction. They never wrote in terms of builder hours. If you had a gang on the job, as I did, the aerocycle could be built in a single weekend. I am not really qualified to assess the adequacy of the confines of the family garage for the complete construction of an aerocycle, because not all of the work on my aerocycle was done there. We subcontracted some of it.

We built the plane during a time in Babbington when everyone knew how to do something, or at least knew somebody who knew how to do something, so we had a network of artisans available to us, if we knew who they were and how to enlist them. Mr. MacPherson, brilliant in the role of the boss, was quick to notice when a task was beyond the ken of the worker he had assigned to it. He had a sharp eye for the telltale signs: the befuddled brow; the perplexed scratching of the head; the first clumsy, hesitant effort; the furtive glance that followed a mistake and betrayed the intention to let it go uncorrected if it had gone unnoticed. As soon as he saw any evidence of befuddlement or perplexity or clumsiness or carelessness, he would seek someone better qualified, asking, for example, “Does anyone among those of you here assembled know someone with a drill press and the skill to use it?”