Taking Off (24 page)

“An occasion can be happy,” I asserted. “This is a happy occasion.”

“It was,” grumbled my father.

“Yes, an occasion can be happy,” Matthew conceded.

“Isn't a meal an occasion?” I asked.

“Not quite. A meal is something that occupies an occasion. It is not itself an occasion. Consider the analogy of a headache—”

“That's what I'm getting,” said Porky.

“A headache occupies a period of time,” asserted Matthew, “but is not itself a period of time. Similarly, a meal occupies a period of time but is not itself a period of time. A meal is like a headache—”

“I'm getting one, too,” said my father.

“—in that it occupies a period of time and during that time may arouse emotion in beings capable of feeling emotion. The emotion, however, is in the sentient beings, not in the activity. Thus, to speak of a ‘happy meal' is an absurdity.”

“Fixed!” announced my mother with a flourish, like a wizard. “I just snipped out one
n
and sewed the pieces together.”

“Ella!” cried Porky, sweeping her up in a bear hug. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. You are amazing.” Swinging her in his arms, he called out to everyone there, “Isn't she amazing?”

We cheered her until she hid her face in her hands, then Porky set her down beside my scowling father and said to me, “We've got to attach this to the back of the plane.”

“Aerocycle,” I corrected him.

“Right,” he said. “I brought wire.”

Porky and I wired the banner to the rear of the aerocycle while everyone else watched. When at last the operation was done, I was truly ready to go.

I remounted the aerocycle, pulled my goggles over my eyes, stood up, and came down hard on the kick-starter. The engine roared into life. The propeller began to turn. Dust and pebbles whirled in the air and drove the circle of my friends and supporters outward. I rolled forward, down the driveway, toward the street.

The aerocycle was, I found to my immense relief, quite easy to maneuver on the ground. I had had some concern about this, inspired by my reading of Pope and Otis. They warned the readers of
Elements of Aeronautics
that most light planes of that time were difficult to control on the ground because they were steered by the same control surfaces that steered them in the air—the rudder and ailerons. Those controls functioned well in the air, at flying speeds, but barely at all on the ground, at taxiing speeds. The aerocycle, however, retained its motorcycle handlebars, and they turned its front wheel in addition to its rudder and ailerons, making it easily maneuverable. I knew how to ride a bicycle, so I found that the aerocycle felt familiar, and I could steer it well enough to avoid running into my friends.

In the street, I turned toward the south, toward Main Street, where I planned to make my takeoff.

Chapter 51

Pleasure and Pain, in Sympathy

WACKO WOKE ME, chirping at me in that eager way he has. Wacko is the alarm clock that I keep on my bedside table. That is, “Wacko” is what Albertine and I call the alarm clock that I keep on my bedside table. The manufacturer of the clock called it Whack-It, not Wacko, but that was because the manufacturer did not, I think, have the degree of familiarity with the device that Al and I have, a degree of familiarity that we've developed over the fifteen years that we've owned him (yes, him). Wacko is a personality in our lives. He wakes us every weekday morning with that chirping sound, full of pep and vigor, keen to get at the day and conquer it, and then I reach out and whack him to shut him up, as the manufacturer's instructions encouraged me to do. The whack-to-silence feature was what led the manufacturer to name him Whack-It, but after he became a member of our household, Wacko earned his nickname by insisting that time passes more quickly for him than for other clocks. He is a tiny digital clock, controlled by a chip, and he should be stable and accurate, yet he gains about a minute a day, and his attitude toward his inaccuracy is of the dismissive shrug and “so what?” variety.

I whacked him. I fumbled for the slide switch and turned his alarm off. I opened my eyes. They stung. I closed them again. I stretched and let my head fall back on the pillow.

Time passed, no more than a minute or two, I thought. Little by little, I urged my eyes open. The bedroom was bright with sunlight. I glanced at Wacko. According to him, an hour and a half had passed. Suddenly, in the moment of my looking at Wacko's digital display, I remembered a dream, a dream about Albertine. We had been together, in bed, doing delightful things to each other. It was a tremendously erotic moment of recollection, and the dream was as arousing in the memory as it must have been in the dreaming, but the most intriguing aspect of the dream was that it was actually a dream about dreaming. In it, I had been dreaming; I had been a dreamer dreaming of being in bed with Albertine, and that distance between me the dreamer and me the lover made it seem as if my being in bed with her was somehow illicit. It was all so deliciously erotic that I, the I who was the dreamer dreaming of making love to Albertine, wanted to wake up in the middle of it, to get out of the dream.

“Why?” I can almost hear you asking. “Why would you want to wake up in the middle of a gloriously erotic dream and end it?”

So that I could tell Albertine about it, of course.

I knew that she would enjoy an account of it—that is, within the dream, the dreaming I (Peter the Second) knew that she would—and so within the dream Peter the Second forced himself to wake up, ending his dream (in which he was enjoying Albertine as Peter the Third), and, still in my (Peter the First's) dream, he (Peter the Second), now awake, reached out for Albertine, and there she was beside him, and he nuzzled her and said, in a whisper, “I had a dream, a dream about you.”

She stretched herself, drew herself alongside him, caressed him and extended, lasciviously, that most generous of invitations: “Tell me all about it.”

Then Wacko began his cheery chirping and woke me, Peter the First, from my dream.

But wait. That waking must have been within the dream as well, because Wacko was there on the bedside table, with his alarm turned off. There must have been Peters One through Four …

This was definitely something that I had to tell Al.

I swung myself to the edge of the bed, swung my legs to the floor, and put my weight on my legs, standing, as we human beings have been doing for some time now, and a pain shot through my right leg, a pain so severe and so totally unexpected that the leg collapsed under me, and I had to throw myself back on the bed to keep from falling to the floor.

I was overjoyed.

“Albertine,” I called out to the empty apartment, “I feel your pain!”

Chapter 52

Albertine Takes Off

I HAD TOLD MYSELF, often, that it would not be a good idea to enter the hospital through the emergency entrance, where the flyguys were likely to be, that the wise course would be to use the main entrance and to avoid the flyguys if I saw them, but desire—or need—opposed that wisdom. I wanted—or needed—to measure myself against them. I suppose that I also hoped that by observing them I might pick up some of their swagger or—even better—that I might learn the art of swagger itself and so develop a swagger that I could call my own, a swagger that Albertine would find even more attractive than flyguy swagger.

It seems to me, by the way, that
swagger
is not entirely a complimentary term. It's just a letter away from
stagger,
for one thing, and I seem to hear an echo of
braggart.
The term
swagger
may (one of my dictionaries says “may possibly,” which I take to mean “probably doesn't”) derive ultimately from the Norwegian
svaga,
which gives us
swag,
meaning a swaying or lurching movement, which suggests to me the walk of a sailor who hasn't regained his land legs after a voyage, or who after a long life at sea affects in landlubberly retirement the rolling gait he used to use on the moving surface of a deck, or who is drunk.

The emergency entrance, at the corner of “our” street, the street where “our” apartment building was located, was the quickest way into the hospital, and so, instead of doing the wise thing and continuing around the corner to the main entrance, I limped through the emergency entrance, favoring the leg with the sympathetic pain. The flyguys were there, right there, standing in a group, drinking coffee, managing somehow to exhibit swagger while standing still. I put my head down and made my way to the elevator. I pressed the button and waited. When the doors opened, I staggered in, and suddenly the flyguys crowded in with me. I reached for the button for the sixth floor, Albertine's floor, but one of them beat me to it.

“How's it goin'?” he asked me after pressing the button.

“Huh?” I replied, surprised by the question, the attention, the notice.

“How you doin'?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. I've seen you here before, right?”

“I—”

“Our floor,” said a flyguy in the back.

We got off, and we walked toward Albertine's room as if we were a group.

“My darling,” I said as I stepped through the door, “I had the most amazing—”

“I passed!” she squealed.

“Way to go, Giggles!” boomed a hearty flyguy from over my shoulder.

“The Walker Test?” I asked, and then I added, “Did he call you Giggles?”

“This morning,” she said. “I tried to call you, but there was no answer. I told them that Giggle Bars are my favorite candy.”

“Hoo-rah, Giggles, hoo-rah, Giggles,” boomed the flyguy chorus.

“Oh,” I said. “I must have been on my way here when you called. Or maybe I was asleep. Wacko—”

“Ready to go home?” asked a hearty flyguy, pushing past me with a wheelchair.

“Am I!” cried Giggles. She began sliding from the bed into the wheelchair that the flyguy was holding steady for her.

“We'll take it from here, sport,” said another of them, clapping a firm hand on my shoulder.

“I'm her husband,” I said, as if it were a conjurer's formula for effecting disappearance.

“The hapless dreamer!” said the wheelchair jockey, standing and frankly staring in my direction.

“I told them that's what you call yourself sometimes,” said Albertine. She blushed. Reader, she blushed.

“
Entre nous,
I thought,” I said. I pouted. Reader, I pouted.

“I was under the influence of drugs.”

“And swagger,” I said, mostly to myself.

“Didn't they used to call you the Birdboy of Babbington, back in the old days?” asked the wheelchair guy.

“Well, yes—”

“Holy shit. You were my inspiration.”

“I was?”

“My parents used to tell me about you when I was a kid, growing up on Long Island. You were a legend.”

“Well—”

“I was inspired by your example.”

“Were you?”

“Hell, yes! Because of you, I built a small jet, using surplus parts.”

“A jet?”

“Just a small one.”

“We're going to give Giggles a lift,” said the flyguy with the grip on my shoulder.

“We live just down the street,” I said. “I can push her.”

“Sure you can—but why not enhance the experience?”

“Yeah,” said another. “Why should she be going home in a wheelchair when she can be going home in an XP-99 chopper?”

“That'll make it a thrill, not a walk.”

“It will be fun for me, Peter,” said Albertine, as if she were asking permission to stay out after curfew.

“But where are you going to land?” I asked. “The courtyard inside our building is too small, I think, and there are lots of trees—”

“We're going to land on the roof.”

“Of our building?”

“Of the hospital.”

“This hospital?”

“Sure!” said one, as if only an earthbound idiot could have asked such a question.

“You're going to take off from here, and then land here?”

“We'll take off, take a spin around Manhattan, and then we'll come back and land.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“How does she get home from here?”

“You can push her in the wheelchair.”

“That was my original idea.”

“But the experience will have been enhanced.”

We took the elevator to the roof. Along the way, I had to suffer the deference that everyone paid to the flyguys. Even the surgeons, who had a type of swagger of their own, seemed to shrink a bit in their presence.

They loaded her into the helicopter. She waved, smiling like a little girl. They took off, banked, and headed south, over the river.

Chapter 53

I Take Off

MY DEPARTURE from Babbington was everything that I could have wished it to be. As I rolled southward from my house in Babbington Heights, I saw, here and there, people standing at the curbside, waving. Now and then a parent would bend to a child and point at me and say something that I couldn't hear. Of course, I allowed myself to think that the words I wasn't hearing were words of praise for me, for my pluck and enterprise and ingenuity. I may have heard, uttered in a hushed tone of awed admiration, the epithet “Birdboy of Babbington,” but I am sure that I never heard anything that sounded remotely like “birdbrain.”

By the time I reached the intersection with Main Street, where I intended to turn right and head west, the people gathered along the roadside had become quite a crowd. Across the intersection there was, at that time, an empty lot, just a bit of long grass. In that lot, a small platform had been erected, and on the platform stood the mayor of Babbington himself.