Artificial Light

by James Greer

  We never went to any of the other bars, which were more exclusively the province of the students, except occasionally to The Hangar, which opened at 6 a.m. to take advantage of the many third-shift factory workers in town (General Motors, mostly). These swarmed the bar from dawn until late morning, when they would slowly disperse like a cloud of impermeable alcoholic vapor. From time to time, when under the influence of various illicit substances, some few of us would find ourselves still conscious as the sun began its slow climb in the Midwest sky, we would stagger or sway over to The Hangar to join the crowds of weary workers slumped over their beers and shots. Which was never an uplifting vista.

  We lived then, and still, in a large one-bedroom apartment in an old brick house, on the corner of Morton and Hickory Streets—about two hundred yards from the Hive—that had been divided into three similar spaces. We have a tin porch, rusting at the edges and intolerably hot when the sun beats down. The bricks, faded to a dusky yellowish-brown over the years, serve a little too well as insulation, meaning that in the summer the inside of the apartment remains sweltering until the very earliest hours of the morning. The bricks radiate heat even in deepest night; we sometimes wander out on the porch late and place the flat of our palms on the walls to feel their warmth.

  There’re three rooms and a smallish bathroom, all painted a sickly yellowish-brown, presumably to match the exterior. The ceilings are very high, which we like, and the windows, at least the ones which face the street (three facing Morton and two facing Hickory) are likewise tall and somewhat imposing. We’ve festooned them with strings of white Christmas lights which we never turn off. In the living room is a small desk, a busted mustard-colored couch, two similarly hued easy chairs, three rickety bookshelves, and a blue aluminum trunk which serves as a coffee table. The bedroom features our bed, two motel-room-style dressers, and a large dusty mirror. The kitchen has a gas stove, an ancient refrigerator, and a small folding table. Various carpet remnants, ugly dark red, are laid over the darkly stained hardwood floors. We’re a bad housekeeper, in general. Although the apartment is usually neat, it’s very rarely clean. There’s a song called “Opalescent” by Sad Blue Moon which is also neat but not clean. If you listen to the song, imagine our apartment. Or don’t. Either way, we still live here.

  Notebook Four

  Manuscript, unruled paper bound in brown leather, Box 113, File 5, the Wright Brothers Collection, Wright State University Archives, Dayton, OH. Temporarily relocated to Hickory Street Satellite.

  1.

  • Around noon took it into my head to determine the workings of Miss Beck’s electric typewriter, which had been tormenting me by its presence since arriving less than two weeks ago. I took the thing apart with nothing more than a screwdriver, and had carefully spread its components on a sheet of newsprint on the floor of my laboratory when Miss Beck, returning from lunch, surprised me at my work and expressed a certain understandable dismay. It was agreed that if I could not successfully reassemble the machine by the end of the business day we would call the man from International Business Machines. However, engrossed as I was in my task and, sad to say, somewhat bewildered by the array of small springs and switches (many with no immediately apparent function) that turned out to be hiding inside, I was unable to finish the job in the agreed time. In fact, I only managed to further dismantle the device, so that it now resembles a puzzle of a typewriter. Miss Beck says the company man will be here in the morning, from Columbus, and in the meantime is rather cross at having to resort to her manual machine.

  • I was always better at the inner workings of things, but I could never see the long view, the overall picture, the way Will did. More than thirty years gone I miss his perspective. Will would not have had it back together before me, but he would have had the sense not to take it apart in the first place. I cannot resist the lure of the smallest and most complex devices. A corollary: We developed lateral control of the wing-warping (the application of the lift balance) because of Will. I would not have thought of that.

  • Another letter from Lindbergh. Insists that an autobiography would be a chance to set the record straight, to repair the damage wrought by Curtis and the Smithsonian crew. But I spent better than twenty-five years repairing that damage, and no longer have the energy to fight the calumnies and distortions provoked by greed and jealousy of our accomplishments. Perhaps I am guilty, too, of an untoward pride in those accomplishments, which after all amount to little more than the usual duties of a midwife. Attention to detail was our only advantage, and ceaseless industry, which are fair uses of the gifts of divine Providence given to every man; our success therefore less the result of any arrogance or unseemly ambition than a reflection of God’s glory made manifest in His humblest creation.

  • Hard to believe that only fifty years ago, the very concept of powered flight was considered not only impossible but absurd, and moreover, to some, an effrontery to Nature. Whereas the pace of flight’s development in that time has so accelerated that the terrible war just concluded was altered in its balance and duration considerably by the application of the basic principles established by my brother and me. Oppenheimer grew to regret the atomic bomb he had labored for so long to construct; but it was my invention that delivered his device. Who bears the greater responsibility?

  2.

  • Difficult sleep last night, dreams of flying again. Always the same scenario: the crash with Lt. Selfridge. The shudder of the plane, and sudden swift descent. Smack of the green earth. There’s a detached, newsreel quality to the dream, very similar to how the actual event filtered through my senses. The twisted fabric of the wings at a crazy angle above my head, acrid smell of the still-sputtering engine, clumps of Virginia turf gouged by the iron bars of the frame. I’m trapped at the controls, the absurdly complicated but precise controls, while men work frantically to lift the wreckage and free me. If I strain my neck, which isn’t easy because of the injury to my back, I can see a cluster around the prone body of Selfridge, who was thrown clear on impact. The first death by airplane. I remember the sharp crack of the overstressed propeller announcing our doom, the immediate wobble of the craft, the downwards spiral. I struggled to regain control but we quickly fell, too quickly for me to register the danger. I felt nothing, not even pain, for several days. In my dream, I see Selfridge’s gray eyes staring back at me, calmly, with a cold accusing gleam. I’m not even sure he had gray eyes. There’s so much I cannot remember clearly, so much that’s been lost. Selfridge was a last-minute substitution for old Charlie Taylor. His loss I could not have borne.

  • Had we not cracked flight’s stubborn code, someone else would have, and soon, and almost did. If we had the advantage in anything, it was in common sense.

  • I have other dreams of flying, too, similar to the daydreams of my youth, when manned flight was still a fantasy only. These are my favorite, because they come closest to the original feeling, when I would lie in bed unable to sleep with the excitement over our latest discovery, however small, which brought us that much nearer to our goal. The imagined flights I took those sleepless nights, in their purity and sustained thrill, were more real to me, then, than the memory of our many actual successes, now. The experience itself never matched the anticipation of that experience. I suppose what I mean to say is that the enabling flight was one of fancy and not of iron and linen, elevator and rudder, wing and warp. The ground rushing beneath me during those early experiments was formless and abstract as it had never been in my reverie of flight. I’m not sure I ever fully adjusted to that initial disappointment.

  3.

  • When we first went around Europe demonstrating our Flyer, the crowds were enormous, frighteningly so. In Berlin, nearly 200,000 people. I flew nineteen times from the military parade grounds there, Tempelhof Field, to Potsdam and back. I took the Crown Prince on a fifteenminute flight, and he gave me his stickpin. Met the Kaiser—this was before the war, of course. When I look back on that exhilarating period of my life,
a great sadness overtakes me, not for the passing of such excitement, but for the loss of those without whom the experience would have meant nothing. Mother, of course, but bless her, she passed many years before our labors bore fruit. Dear Will first, then the bishop, and last of all K., whose death, while devastating, hurt less than her defection by marriage three years prior. I have wasted many hours in the twenty years since with self-recrimination, but no matter how abjectly I prostrate myself before the altar of regret, I cannot wipe clean my heart. She was everything to me, and when she left I shunned her. The sight of her lying on her Oberlin—so far from home!—deathbed, the painful wheezing of her breath, unable to speak, eyes wet with tears … and I said nothing. I forgave no one. I was cold and uncaring, and could think only of the slight to myself, that I had been left alone. She left me twice, and neither time did I say goodbye.

  • I was closer to K. than to anyone, even Will. It is easier, sometimes, to discuss introspective matters with a woman, especially one in whom the faculties of understanding were so advanced. K. understood what there is to understand of me, which is, centrally, that I have always preferred the small life to the important one. Events were thrust upon me by the success of our invention, but I never enjoyed myself without the company of such of my family as could make the voyage. Chief among these, always, K. My sister was one of the first women to fly, not many people remember that. At Pau, in 1909, I believe. There’s a picture of it somewhere. Wilbur took her up. She grasped the strut so hard with her little white-gloved hand I thought she might tear it right out of the base. She wore a billowy white kerchief over her hat, and her customary polka-dotted veil, which I never liked. Made her face look like she had the pox. Suppose it was the fashion for ladies at the time, however. Not that K. was caught up in that nonsense, but when we spent time in Paris, around the same period, I did notice various small additions to her wardrobe. Hard to resist the example of the glamorous parisiennes.

  • When we made the move from Hawthorn Street to Hawthorn Hill, to Albion, I’m not sure K. entirely approved. We had lived our whole lives on Hawthorn Street, but with both Father and Mother gone, and then Will, and Lorin and Reuch married and moved away, the place resembled less to me the home of my upbringing and more the museum it would eventually become. When Ford came and wanted the house and the bicycle shop for his Greenfield Village, I was glad to be rid of both. Memory is far richer than the physical evidence of the past, in any case. But K. always claimed to be happier on Hawthorn Street than ever after. I have grown used to Albion, and it has been my home longer than any other. But it will never replace our familial home in my affections, for the simple reason that a house is not merely a construction of wood and bricks, but of the bonds between parent and child, and brother and sister. I can remember sitting on the front porch at Hawthorn Street with K. when we were very young, perhaps I was ten, which would have made her seven. It was summer, and late in the evening, and the most extraordinary thing about late summer evenings in this part of the country is the massing of fireflies all along the hedgerows and bushes and even in the tangled ivy growing up the bricks of the hardware store opposite our house. There are few sights on earth more peaceful, and more beautiful, than the winking of these fluorescent armies as they move, together yet separate, over the cooling earth at sunset. K. ran from one end of the porch to the other, leaning over the railing, pointing at one and then another and another, shrieking with happiness, as if to miss one were to miss them all. Her joy turned quickly to tears when she accidentally crushed one of the poor insects in her tiny hand.

  • I am a religious man, but not a reflective man. I believe that one should conduct one’s life in accordance with the principles inscribed in the Bible. I recognize that despite my attempts to lead a virtuous life, I am a sinner, and repent of my many sins, and hope that Our Lord Jesus Christ will find room in His infinite heart to forgive my transgressions. I believe that my repentance, if sincere and heartfelt, will enable me to enter the Kingdom of Heaven when I die. I am a religious man, but not a reflective man. It is with full knowledge of the requirements of my faith that I say I would trade the Kingdom of Heaven without a moment’s hesitation to have her by my side right now.

  4.

  • Writing from my specially constructed chair at night, about 9:30. There is nothing I hate more than enforced idleness. Disabled by a sciatic flare-up—more common, these days, and more troubling—I have spent the better part of the day designing a more efficient vacuum system for Hawthorn Hill. The problem, I now believe, was in the pinions for the pump mechanism, which were too small and inflexible to provide the necessary leverage. I have designed a new pinion, to be constructed from aluminum rather than stainless steel.

  • I rarely fall ill, but whenever I do I am put in mind of the terrible time fifty years or so ago when I contracted typhoid fever. I was bed-ridden for nearly six weeks, unconscious or delirious for over four. K. and Will took turns feeding me milk and broth, to which ministrations I was nearly insensible. Even when the fever finally broke, I was too weak to return to the bicycle shop for some few more weeks. This was about the time, in 1896 or so, that Will and I first undertook seriously to look into the problem of flight. Lilienthal’s death set Will thinking, coupled with a banal remark I am supposed to have made in my delirium: “Mark the buzzards circling.” Our researches, soon thereafter, into matters ornithological received its initial spark from that febrile outburst, which led, before long, to Pettigrew’s book, the source of all our later investigations. Inconceivable that man could not achieve on a larger scale what God had provided for His winged creatures. Nothing worthwhile ever comes easy, and anything useful runs up against the usual gamut of fools and knaves. Had I not been taken ill just then, had notice of Lilienthal’s death not appeared in our local wire service, had I not uttered a random remark that reminded Will of our childhood fascination with the toy helicopter and with the romantic idea of flight—had any one of these things not happened, or had they happened at a different time or in a different order, we would not have been the first to invent the airplane. We would not even have been the first to discover wing-warping. The achievement, I have said before, was an achievement of all mankind, the massed learning of every preceding student an enabling weight, and one that would have succeeded quite without us if necessary. The time had come to advance to the level of manned flight. That is quite evident. Whatever principle drives history forward chose us as its random instrument. Sometimes I wish God had chosen someone else, though.

  • I am seventy-six years old. Every once in a while some would-be biographer writes to pester me with the same question: Is there anything you regret? I answer, always, the same. I regret nothing except the time spent answering fool questions. Kelly, who started as a friend, made an enemy of me by including all sorts of pointless conjecture in his book. I tried to keep him to the facts, but there’s something about a writer that makes him want to get inside a fellow’s head and find out exactly what he’s thinking. I understand the impulse, it’s doubtless related to the impulse that drove me to take apart Miss Beck’s typewriter. But you cannot ascribe thoughts to another human being without that person’s knowledge or permission. Such fancy inevitably distorts the true record of events, the sequence and development of ideas, the intricate pattern underlying and leading to the final inspiration. One cannot see into another’s heart and mind. That insight is left to God alone.

  • In truth, I do have regrets. I regret, as I’ve had cause to reflect recently, the treatment K. received from me after declaring her intention to marry. I regret, moreover, never having married, myself, or rather never having found one to whom I might make such a commitment of life, love, and property. While I might argue that my work consumed so much of my being that the meager portion left over would, however bound by devotion, have made me a poor a husband, who knows what joys might have ensued from a union of my own, and from children of my own issue?

  • I helped invent the airplane, tr
ue. I gave men wings. But I could not lift my own heart above ground level.

  Notebook Five

  The setting sun hung like a viscous, glowing pear low in the pale sky, occluded from time to time by wispy strands of gold-and-gray-tinged clouds. Slender, sinuous Mary Valentine selected from the bunch of keys in her hand the one, color-coded with an indelible red marker, that slid with some effort the ancient dead bolt into its groove and permitted her to swing open the heavy door on its tired heels and exit the musty cool of the store’s interior. In the sunset heat she turned and performed a reverse image of the same sequence, a movie rewinding in a mirror.

  She was dressed in a heavy dark gray sweater and black jeans, as usual during the winter months. She had short, bright blond, tousled hair, sometimes held in place with a couple of cheap ornamented hairclips (mock tortoiseshell, ironic ivory). Around her neck was wrapped a robin’s-egg-blue cashmere scarf. Her shoes were open-toed, with short wooden heels that clacked noisily on the veiny sidewalk as she crossed the street back to her apartment.

  Mary hadn’t taken any speed since before work, and was feeling strung out and hollow. She walked up one flight of carpeted stairs, unlocked and opened the gray-painted door, and entered the small room, divided neatly in two by a Japanese screen, behind which lay an old mattress piled with magazines and disheveled sheets. She decided to take a bath, and stripped off her clothes while running the water, leaving them in a heap next to the bathtub. From a drawer next to the bathroom sink she took a tiny plastic baglet half-filled with a white powder, and poured a little out on the cover of a paperback lying on the counter next to the sink amid a jumble of cosmetics and costume jewelry. Perched on the edge of the toilet, she arranged the pile into a short fat line with the unfolded edge of a matchbook, and, taking a bit of plastic straw scissored from its now-discarded parent, snorted the line with her left nostril.