The Long Delirious Burning Blue, page 9
Jack? I could have told Jack, of course. After all, this was his idea. But Jack is away. And besides, I wanted to wait before telling Jack. Because what if it all goes horribly wrong? What if I pitch a full-blown panic attack in the air? I wouldn’t want to go back to Jack with a story of failure.
I don’t want to go to anyone with a story of failure.
I don’t do failure.
‘Two November Romeo, cleared for takeoff.’
The voice in my ear startles, piercing the cocoon of unreality in which I’ve wrapped myself. Moth-like, fear unfurls its wings and takes flight. I shake my head but no-one is watching. He pushes in the throttle; the engine roars and the airplane shudders. Slowly, so slowly, we cross the white line at the beginning of the runway but we’re picking up speed now and suspended, powerless, eyes fixed ahead of me, I watch as the runway sweeps on past us in a pale grey blur.
‘Rotate,’ he says steadily, ‘pull back. We’re approaching fifty knots.’ The control wheel slips towards me and the nose is lifting and we’re straining upwards and surely we’re not going to make it but then oh, dear God, we’re off the ground.
Reality reasserts itself like a slap in the face and I’m slick with sweat, horrified to the core of my bones.
I cannot believe that I’m doing this. We are rising now, rising and I’m trying not to look as the earth slips away beneath me and a chasm opens up in the place where my stomach should be. Eyes fixed to the instrument panel as though, if I turn away, the airplane will dissolve around us, leaving no other choice than free-fall through the unforgiving desert sky. Holding the wheel in a death-grip, knowing for certain that if I let go or even loosen my hold we’ll plummet to the ground. I am holding us aloft by sheer force of will, risking an occasional glance at the horizon to be certain that our wings are level. But then we’re turning and isn’t the nose too high? – and the wings are dipping and I know we’re going to fall, to slide, to just slip down in a beautiful graceful dive, because how can it be possible that the air supports us so, how do we dare presume?
And then we’re level again and he takes his hands off his wheel. He turns to me and smiles, blue Montana skies shining out of his eyes, all space and distance and glory. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You’re flying.’
Time is suspended as we twist and turn, back and forth between the cold blue clarity of the sky and the blinding glare of the desert sun. The smell of the cockpit: vinyl seats, hot plastic, dusty electrics, the faint acrid whiff of combustion. The constant droning vibration of the engine, the rhythmic thrumming of the propeller. Sweat breaking out of every pore and running down my skin in small rivulets. The sun fragmenting through a web of small scratches on the Perspex windscreen, a kaleidoscope of orange and blue light. A lone cloud on the western horizon, floating in the haze like a mirage. And all the while I grip and I clutch, my movements tense and jerky and uncoordinated.
He has picked up on the fear that seems to have taken complete possession of me: I couldn’t think to hide it from him in this small space. And so he requires little of me, restricting himself to short explanations, to simple manoeuvres – minor altitude changes and shallow turns. I can’t seem to speak; I don’t take very much in. I am surrounded by sky, by light that dazzles and bewilders. Nothing here is solid.
I don’t know what to do, here in this place. I don’t know how to be. Each time the wings dip, I lean in the opposite direction, trying to balance it out. As if my small weight is all it would take to just tip us over and cast us on down into the flat, burning landscape below. ‘No,’ he says, ‘go with it. Go with the turn. Let the wings go – that’s what they’re built for. Let her wheel – let her swing, a little. She’s built for this. Just let her fly.’
Dear God, I’m flying. I can hardly breathe and my chest is so tight I can hear every beat of my heart pounding hard against it. My stomach is in knots and blood throbs at my temples but I’m flying. Do you hear me, all of you voices? Do you hear me, Mother? I may be paralysed with fear and I may be dizzy with vertigo and part of me may want more than anything else in the world to be back on solid ground – but just this one time I’m doing it. Just this one time, I’m flying.
‘Ready to go back down?’
I am so relieved that without thinking about it I turn my head and look at him for the first time since we took off. I am mildly surprised to find that the plane manages to keep itself in the sky quite nicely without me supervising it. All I can do is nod. He’s completely relaxed, quite unfazed by my fear, by my lack of response.
‘Okay, then. First of all we have to find our way back to the airport. Do you have any idea where that is?’
‘Somewhere down there, I imagine.’ My voice cracks as I nod vaguely in the direction of the ground.
He has the grace to laugh and out of the corner of my eye I see him shake his head. Lord alone knows what he’s thinking.
‘Okay, then let’s just head down thataway, shall we? My controls.’
With relief I loosen my vice-like hold on the wheel and place my shaking hands in my lap. The airplane is all his and he’s more than welcome to it: I am quite happy to relinquish the responsibility for keeping us safe. But still something in me can’t just relax and let him take over. Compulsively, my eyes move in turn from the instrument panel – where I check the altimeter reading, just as he’s shown me how to do; to the windscreen – where I check that the propeller is still turning; to the window on my left – where I make sure we’re still the right way up. This is all so very unlikely; I can’t quite seem to come to grips with what I’m doing here. And then without warning he pulls the throttle back and the sound of the engine falls off a little and my heart skips several beats and I clutch at the seat, feeling every muscle in my body tense in shock.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ he murmurs softly – crooning, almost, in the kind of tone I could imagine he might use to gentle a frightened bird. ‘If we want to descend, one of the things we have to do is to reduce thrust – that’s the power that the engine produces …’ I catch snatches of his explanation between the rhythmic waves of panic as I wait for the aircraft to settle into a new attitude. ‘… We also need to slow down, to reduce our airspeed – so we’re going to lift the nose a little …’
I shake my head and close my eyes; I hardly dare look. Can’t possibly be a good idea. How can we descend if the nose is pointing upwards?
‘… And generally we need to be at an altitude of around a thousand feet above ground level when we enter an airport traffic pattern …’
I try to follow what he’s saying but still can’t seem to process all this information; my attention wanders as he makes the radio calls. The pressure of the headphones around my ears is beginning to hurt and I shift them around on my head, looking for a more comfortable spot. I don’t find one.
‘Can you see the airport now?’ The airport? I scan the horizon and the ground around us but I don’t understand the patterns and the distances; I can’t make out anything remotely resembling an airport. I don’t even know where to begin to look. ‘Right there, see it? Around five miles out at twelve o’clock.’ He points. I stare in the direction of his finger. What direction is that, anyway? East? North? I have no idea. There’s nothing much there. Just flat, featureless desert in one direction. A handful of surprisingly green cultivated fields in the other. And right out ahead of us, a whole slew of housing developments in various stages of construction. ‘Right there. Just look out in the direction that I’m pointing. See?’ I bend my head in towards him and follow his line of sight. Look again. ‘We’re too far out to see the runways clearly yet, but can you see the control tower?’ The tower? It was white and round, that’s all I can remember. So I look for something white and round. Scanning; sun behind and to the left of us now, the horizon ahead of us obscured in a typical polluted valley haze. Is that …? Yes. A tiny white blob protruding from the ground.
‘I see it.’
‘That’s good. It always helps to know where to bring the plane down.’
I manage a grin.
‘When you’re down here in the practice area – what we call the Greenfields – here’s how you find the airport. You keep Interstate 10 – look down there below you – to the west, and the San Tan Mountains over there to the east.’ I look down, out of the window by my side and the grin fades; I’d forgotten how high we were. ‘Then you’ll see the tower right ahead. You aim the plane in that general direction, until you get close enough to see the field and make out the runways and enter the traffic pattern. Which is what we’re going to do now …’
We’re coming so close now, but still I can’t relax. I turn my eyes forward, and focus on the flat space of the airport – follow the runways obsessively with my eyes, afraid to look away in case they disappear on me. He points out another aircraft – down there, just below us; we’re to follow it in. I’m only half-listening to the voices that crackle through my headphones.
For a moment we seem to be flying away again – flying right past the airport. I crane my head around, look back at the runway – then the magic words seep into my consciousness: ‘Two November Romeo, cleared to land …’
And we’re turning back so sharply now but we’re too close to the ground and the nose is so low and surely this isn’t right? – and I clutch at the wheel and I want to pull it back but he says, ‘It’s okay, Cat,’ and we’re levelling off – and then there it is: the runway. Right there ahead of us, there through the windscreen, so close now, so very close and we’re floating on down, we seem to be floating … The main gear touch down very softly. The front wheel follows, a few moments later. A perfect landing.
We’re on the ground.
I let out a breath that sounds almost like a sob.
‘There you go,’ he says quietly, as he works his feet on the brake pedals and rudder and we swing off the runway. ‘There you go, now.’
We pause for a while as he talks on the radio yet again and then pulls onto the taxiway with its completely impenetrable signs and markings. In a minute or two we arrive back where we started all those aeons ago. He parks the airplane right where we found it, pulls out the throttle, cuts the mixture and turns off the ignition.
Entranced, I watch the propeller winding down, finally coming to a halt. The silence is startling. He opens his door to get out, but I find that I am incapable of movement. I don’t seem to have the use of my legs, and my hands are shaking as I unbuckle the seat belt. Overcome with vertigo, I close my eyes. My black tee-shirt clings wetly to my body. The door opens beside me, and wordlessly he lifts me from the plane. The ground feels strangely insubstantial beneath my feet.
‘You okay?’ he asks me as I tentatively let go of him, reacquaint myself with concrete, with buildings, with the earth.
I take a deep breath and find that I am smiling as I exhale. Before I can falter or think or change my mind I open my mouth and the words fly out. ‘When can I have another lesson?’
He laughs abruptly. He looks confused, disconcerted. ‘Why are you doing this?’
Why am I doing this?
The smile fades and I clench my jaw so he will not see the sudden, rare threat of tears.
Why am I doing this?
Listen, I want to say to him: Listen. Have you ever woken up in the morning, stepped out of your house and noticed that the ground all around you has shifted? In some subtle, sinister way that you can’t quite define? You see the cracks in the driveway and you know it’s not just the heat of the desert sun that’s caused them. Something is shifting, you think. Something is giving way, and you have no idea at all how to stop it, how to wrest back control. You plug the cracks with concrete, sand over the joins but the next morning there they are again. They smile darkly at your rising fear.
Why am I doing this?
Listen, I want to say to him: I don’t know. All I know is that right now it feels as if my life somehow depends on it. That if I don’t find a way to fly free of it, the earth will rise up and swallow me, snatching me down, down into the underworld, never to emerge, never to escape. And I’m no Persephone; there’s no Demeter to rescue me from the clutches of the dark god. I will need wings to fly from this sunless place.
But of course I do not say this. I look into his eyes and the steady firmness of his gaze defeats me. He doesn’t look like he’s ever had a day’s doubt in his life. I smile wryly; I become myself again. ‘Congenital insanity?’ I suggest. ‘Midlife crisis?’
Gently, he shakes his head, looks at me intently, eyes narrowed, measuring, assessing. I raise my chin and return the gaze as steadily as I am able. I need to do this more badly than I can put into words, and something in him seems able to grasp the need even if the understanding of it eludes him. Because eventually, he shrugs. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘All right. You got yourself a flying instructor.’
I walk across the burning concrete and out to the parking lot with a spring in my step and what is undoubtedly an utterly inane grin on my face. Clutched tightly against my chest is the tangible evidence of my initiation into the world of flight. ‘Jeppesen Pilot Logbook’, it proudly declares in the bottom right-hand corner of the hard black cover.
Pilot.
The Jeep has been baking slowly in the afternoon sun; I unlock the driver’s door, bracing myself for the rush of hot air that hits me in the face. A tangle of sweaty blonde hair falls in a clump over my eyes and I run a hand through it, wishing I’d had the good sense to tie it back. I start the engine and perch on the edge of the driver’s seat with my legs sticking out of the car. The air-con will need to blow a little cooler before I can bear to get in properly and close the door.
I open up the logbook and run my hand reverently over the first page and the first entry. It shows the date, the aircraft type and identification number, and then the route of flight. In the column that’s headed ‘remarks and endorsements’ he has written in clear, tiny print: ‘Discovery flight: pre-flight, run-up, takeoff.’ There are more numbers in the next columns: I have achieved precisely one takeoff, one landing and 0.6 hours of flight in the ‘single engine land’ aircraft category. Around thirty-five minutes. How odd to see it so simply, so clearly defined, that hazy interval when time stalled and hung and merged with space and light and sound. And then his signature: Jesse J. Gordon, followed by a long number that presumably represents some kind of flight instructor identifier.
Jesse. A good Montana name. It suits him.
The car is cooler now; I swing around and close the door. The traffic is already building as I head out onto the highway and drive north to Scottsdale: the Friday evening rush hour getting into full swing. It’s going to take me forever to get home. But I can’t seem to bring myself to care. For once, as I drive, I am not burdened by the increasingly obvious truth that every aspect of my carefully constructed life seems to be falling apart. I am not thinking of what to do about Adam. I am not thinking about the daily and ever more nonsensical grind of life as a corporate lawyer. I do not care about who to be or where to live or what to do with the rest of my life. In my mind, I am flying.
Now that the fear has passed, only elation remains. Every few minutes the enormity of what I’ve done washes over me and a wild burst of laughter escapes my lips. I clench my fist and press the knuckles hard against my mouth to curb the deliciously mounting delirium. I have just taken a flying lesson. I have just taken the first step on the road to becoming a pilot. I plan to fly a plane. I plan to fly … I have just left the ground in a thirty-year-old two-seater tin can with a couple of flimsy wings attached and an engine that looks no more complex than that of the average lawnmower. Two slender strips of metal have propelled me into the sky as they spin and hum and weave their giddy dance through the warm sparse molecules of desert air. Into the sky where, against all odds, I have managed to remain. I have placed my hands on the control wheel and I have pressed my feet on the rudder pedals and I have caused us to wheel and to swoop and to soar and I have not fallen out of the sky. The gods did not strike me down for my hubris; my wings did not melt and cast me down into the glistening, shifting sea of sand below.
I giggle again at the uncharacteristic burst of excess. But I cannot believe that I’ve done this. I certainly can’t believe that I’m planning to do it again. None of it makes any sense. This isn’t how I am. I am not a brave person.
I reach up and adjust my sunglasses. I don’t have to wear spectacles any more – not since I was thirteen – but just the slightest touch of the sunglasses on my nose brings it all back. Back then, if I removed my glasses, I would see two of everything. The world would dissolve into duplicates and doppelgangers and I could never be sure which was real and which the mirror image. And by then my life was quite uncertain enough. So I clung to my glasses. They set me apart from the unshrinking souls, the children who had faith that they would not fall. The children who knew that even if they did, there would always be someone there to pick them up, dust them down, and set them on their feet again.
I was not one of those brave children.
I look up; a small plane is circling around above me like a large buzzing insect. I have been there. Up there, with them. I cling to my elation; I won’t let it seep away into fear. I won’t think of intangibles. I slow, and crane to see up into the sky again. And beyond, higher up in the deepening blue, white vapour trails from the jets passing overhead. Lines as straight as runways.
