by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER THIRTY
Waxwings and Waning Wings
It was hard for Prissi to leave Yoli and Lavie, but, it was even harder for her to leave the top step of the dilapidated building. She had left the murk of the ancient brownstone and stepped into the brilliant sunlight of a spring day. But, as Prissi stood in that warming light, she looked at the deep shadows of the buildings across the street and shivered. Nothing above ground felt safe. Years before, Prissi Langue had spent a couple of afternoons in a soggy hemp hammock in Africa listening to her mother read a story, a story her mother said had been a favorite of hers as a child, about a girl far, far from home. The girl was lost, overwhelmed, and beset by worries and dangers. Squeezing her eyelids tight to keep back the tears, Prissi did as the girl in the story had done. She clicked her heels together and made a wish. Even with that potent magic, it was more than a minute before the fifteen year old found the courage to beat her wings and launch herself into the air.
Within minutes the aching winger was leaving Manhattan and flying across the East River. Prissi figured that even with no tail wind and with three rest breaks, she should be able to get to the place indicated by the coordinates the mysterious Allen Burgey had left for her before dark. She hoped to find him safely there when she arrived and with answers to all her questions.
For the first hour, not sure whether she could trust her right wing, which had been dislocating even before her fight with the crazie, Prissi flew no more than thirty meters above ground. She followed the route of the long-abandoned Long Island Expressway as it crossed Queens and dug deep into the moldering towns that lay beyond.
Despite the serious doubts Prissi had about her safety and her body’s capabilities, after a week of hiding and healing in an abandoned subway, it felt wonderful to be above ground. The air was balmy and filled with spring perfumes—lilac, mock orange and kudzu. The wind was blowing out of the south west. Prissi dropped the front edges of her wings, drew up her legs and felt the soft breeze sneak past the cuff of her pants. The sun beating on the back of her neck felt as sensuous as the heat massage a Dutton School trainer would give her after she pulled a muscle. However, despite her good feelings, Prissi was not even out of Queens before she began to feel tired. The wounds she had suffered fighting off the zies were not yet healed. She considered resting, but, she told herself that what she was feeling was the kind of fatigue that could be overcome if she just kept her wing beats and breathing regular.
In Prissi’s first year at Dutton, after the soccer season was over, she had opted to run winter cross country. Although she was used to running from her years playing soccer, she had never run competitively before. It took daily practice and lots of advice from Coach Cardana for Prissi to understand that her body had both limitations and limits and that she was not to confuse the two.
Coach Car repeatedly had lectured the team that limitations were a set of physical checkpoints and mental hurdles. Limitations were where a body, or, more often, a mind, wanted to quit. Limits were far beyond those points. Limits were where the body stopped, despite what the mind wanted. The essence of cross country was running past limitations to find the limits.
Prissi’s shoulders ached and her breathing was ragged, but she was sure that if she could accept those conditions, and keep flapping her wings and feeding her lungs, that her body had a lot left to give.
Prissi was right. Ten minutes later, her compact body had metamorphosed into a machine. With her mind clear and her spirits exhilarated, Prissi increased her altitude.
Afraid of giving the men who had killed her father any clue as to where she was going, Prissi had kept her mypod turned off. As a result of staying off the grid, it was just a guess that she was over four hundred meters in the air. She was, however, high enough that when she looked down, she could see how automobile traffic once had surged in and drained out of Manhattan. The wider, relatively straight thoroughfares were in the middle of Long Island, where land was cheaper and more people could afford to live. At the northern edge of the land the roads were narrow and sinuous, almost as if they were meant to shake off the poor as the rich made their way toward their waterfront homes on Long Island Sound.
Even though she knew that it would be costly both in terms of time and her reserves of energy, Prissi could not resist the urge to keep climbing until she could see the water on both sides—the lacy green of Long Island Sound and the limitless gray of the Atlantic Ocean—that made the land below an island. Looking at the water to her north, Prissi considered whether she should alter her course and go to Cold Spring Harbor where, a half-century before, her mother had worked at Centsurety. But, as she looked at the green paisley of coves and bays, she guessed that it could take hours, hours which she didn’t have, to find the former meta-mutational lab. Deciding that it made more sense to rendezvous with Allen Burgey, Prissi turned her head back toward the east. She would find Burgey and insist that he tell her everything he knew about her mother and those long ago discoveries. If, after all that, she still didn’t understand what was going on, or couldn’t come up with a plan to stop it, then she would give up on her quest and start figuring out how to get back to the safety of Africa.
Within seconds of thinking about Africa and the comfort of its familiar dangers, Prissi was fighting a stitch in her side. She spread her wings so that she could glide while she massaged the burning coal of knotted muscle. When the fire remained hot, she closed her eyes and slowed her breathing to the slightest sigh, then rhythmically kneaded, caressed, and kneaded again. When the pain finally drifted away, like the long linger of summer thunder, and she opened her eyes Prissi found that she had drifted uncomfortably close to the ground. Climbing back to a safe altitude, the teener’s body soldiered along well enough and her mind was so occupied with splinters and shards of thoughts and ideas, that stopping didn’t even enter her consciousness.
It wasn’t until a charley horse in the arch of her right foot suddenly set her thrashing and screaming that the folly of ignoring her plan for regular rest became clear. She slip-slid through the air as the tips of her toes strained to touch the heel of her foot. She pushed the ball of her right foot against the ankle bone of her left leg trying to break the muscle contraction, but the only result was that she plummeted fifty meters.
“Suffer! But, fly!”
Her screams helped to re-orient her. She told herself that despite the excruciating pain, no one died from a charley horse, but they did die from falling out of the sky. Prissi moaned in pain and screamed in frustration that another body part, not just her wing, was conspiring against her. She canted her wings and plummeted as fast as she could without totally losing control. As she plunged back to earth, she searched for the best place to land. It wasn’t until she looked that she realized that she had been so lost in her thoughts that she had passed not only into an area of sparsely populated outer villages, but also that she had gotten away from the worn cracked snake of the expressway. The houses swooping up to meet her were dilapidated. The street they bordered was a narrow lane of crazed asphalt sprouting tussocks of weeds. Despite all the poverty and neglect, Prissi consoled herself that she didn’t see any of the burned out homes that characterized so many poorer neighborhoods where pro- and anti-green factions had fought their battles.
The crippled teener took a hurried look to see if there were a flat roof close by, but all the houses were gabled. Although she wasn’t eager to land in the road, she wasn’t about to attempt a landing on a peaked roof while one foot was twisted in a knot. Looking ahead, she decided that she would touch down in the middle of the next intersection. At least, at a crossroads, if trouble came, she would have four ways to escape.
Prissi landed hard on her left foot, twisted something, yelped, hopped, yelped, hopped again, and came to a graceless stop. Even as she was turning around to see if her appearance had drawn any undesirable attention, Prissi hobbled over to the worn, chipped curb. She stepped up on the pocked asphalt using just the toes of her feet. After getting her b
alance, the winger slowly lowered her heels toward the road’s surface. The pain was excruciating, but by the time Prissi had stretched her arches a fifth time, she could tell the cramp was starting to loosen up.
Even before the pain had subsided by half, Prissi started to laugh—partly, in relief and, partly, in reliving.
It had been the end of the first week of cross country practice. In the middle of the night she had been ripped from sleep by the very same cramp in her arch as she was now experiencing. Shrieking in pain, she had flung herself from the lower bunk and crashed into Nasty Nancy’s desk. As Prissi had thrashed about in the dark, shoes, styli, mugs and music had flown around the cramped room like shrapnel.
Prissi shrieks were joined by Nasty Nancy’s terrified screams at whatever horror had gotten into their pitch-black room. The wild teener ripped open the door, staggered into the dusky lighted hallway, and banged against a wall. She grabbed the cramping foot, staggered, hopped, hoped, then fell against the opposite wall and slumped to the floor.
Moaned.
Wailed.
Writhed.
Then, heard the clicks and slams of hallway doors and frightened whispers of floor mates.
The slap of bare feet and the calm honeyed tones of Ms. Hepenny.
“You’re fine, dear. Just fine.”
Felt soft fingers on her cheeks, stroking, stroking, then, suddenly squeezing hard and prizing open Prissi’s tightly clenched jaw. Something soft and fuzzy—a sock, no, a towel stuffed into her mouth. Again, the dulcet tones belying the violence used to open her mouth, “You’re fine, dear. Just fine.”
Not fine.
Agony.
“Where are your medications?”
Then, a hall floor fish-eye lens view of Miss Tronce’s famous teal chenille slippers. Scuffing rapidly. Stopping.
“What? What?” in Tronce’s best, and most incontrovertible, bark, “What is going on?”
“Langue’s had a seizure. Petit mal, I’d guess. I’ve first-aided her.”
Thrashing about. Shaking her head. Grabbing her foot.
“Oh my, here comes another one.”
Ms. Hepenny stooping to provide more help.
A bellowed, “Move.”
Miss Tronce on her dock piling knees catching Prissi’s flailing foot as neatly as a polar bear his salmon. Holding the ankle tightly in the dense warmth between her massive upper arm and her more massive breast shelf.
Pushing…omagod…bending…ohohmagod…pushing…ohohohmagod…pushing until Prissi’s pain turned into shooting stars, an Independence Day finale…omaaa…and, then, as suddenly as it had come, like summer hail, the cramp was gone.
Tronce’s growl of satisfaction.
“Climax and curtain, girls. Back. To. Bed.”
Tronce, in a way that defied both age and gravity, brought both herself and Prissi to a standing position.
“To bed, girls. Now.”
Holding her by the arm, Tronce walking her back toward her own apartment. When Prissi hesitated, Tronce ordering, “Walk, Langue, walk.”
Tronce’s living room. A smallish room with a dangerous maze of book stacks. Petra after the quake. Victorian deep red walls fighting the good orderly fight against dozens of parrot-colored Fifth World paintings. Tronce making Prissi step on a russet brick used as a door stop.
“Step, lower, stretch. Again. Good. Keep going.”
Prissi worked.
Tronce disappeared.
Came back with a large mug of warm milk.
“Milk for calcium. Warmth for comfort.”
Pointed a breadstick-sized finger at Prissi.
“If you’re going to run, you’ll need lots of calcium to keep from cramping. When it happens again, as it will, if it’s your arch, get all of your weight on your toes. If it’s a calf, point your toes away and then pull them back as far as you can. If it’s the back of your thigh, well, just scream until you pass out. It’ll make you feel better to do something violent.”
Milk finished, Prissi hovered. Something deep stirred by Tronce’s no nonsense care.
Tronce, again, pointed her finger, like God to Adam, “Be gone. Remember, never fear pain. Fight it. Or, accept it.”
A small tic appeared in one corner of Miss Tronce’s thin-lipped mouth and Prissi realized that she was seeing a smile.
Half-way back to her dorm room, Prissi had felt a twinge in her foot. She had slowed her pace and lightened her step, but only for a step or two. The rest of the way she had stomped. And had felt safer than she had at any time since her mother’s death.
Prissi brushed the thoughts of Miss Tronce away from her eyes and kept stretching her arch until the pain was gone. Instead of immediately returning to the air, however, she decided to walk until she was sure the cramp really was gone.
Although there were cars and truclets in a few of the driveways she passed, there didn’t seem to be anyone home in any of the houses. As her fingers unwove the snarls in her hair, the teener wondered what people did in such a desolate place so far from the city. Since Prissi had been in Noramica for less than three years and that mostly in the environs of Manhattan and Dutton, she only had a cursory knowledge of how the rest of the country lived. If she were in Burundi, she would intuitively know whether a village was empty because of war, disease, pestilence or because the villagers were in their fields planting or harvesting.
Here, the silence and emptiness around her carried no information. It could be that all of the children were in a daycarium or school and every parent was working. Or, as easily, a plague could have wiped out the inhabitants. Prissi remembered walking with her father into a village just west of Mount Heha at the end of the dry season and finding all the inhabitants dead. It had only taken seconds to know that they had died from dysentery from drinking mud water after the government troops had stolen all of their LifeStraw© water purifiers.
After walking less than two blocks, Prissi flared her wings, did a dozen deep knee squats, stretched her calves and arches and flew.
Once the village was behind her, Prissi felt better; however those good feelings weren’t buoyant enough to get her much more than ten meters off the ground. As a result, she wasn’t high enough to get a fix on the Long Island Expressway. Again, she considered activating her mypod, but quickly put that thought aside as she remembered the orange-winged men who had attacked her twice already. She now knew for sure who had sent the blue jays and knew that they had intended to kill her, but the orange wingers and their less than deadly behavior was still a puzzle. Prissi told herself that it had to be Dr. Baudgew behind those attacks, but she couldn’t understand what his ends might be. However, whatever they were, it was better to stay off the grid and deal with the problems lack of information would bring than to risk another attack. She wished that she had thought to take a compass when she and her father had fled their apartment. In Africa, she had carried a compass more often than she had worn a watch. Now, she didn’t know what to do beyond looking ahead, picking a point, flying to it and picking another point.
Twenty minutes later, Prissi was back on the ground digging the tips of her thumbs into a knot in her right calf. Fifteen minutes after she had gotten herself back in the air, she again was forced to descend. This time the only place to land was on a hillside covered in small trees, low scrub and Gordian knots of raspberry briers. In the few seconds the floundering girl had to make her decision of where to land, after the muscles controlling her right wing started spasming like an eel out of water, Prissi opted to suffer the briers rather than smash into a tree. By the time she got herself stopped, extricated from the tenacious thorns, back on her feet and standing upon a small outcrop of blue-gray rock, where she could massage her wing muscles, she was having second thoughts about missing the trees. She looked back at the thick trail of feathers caught in the briers and wondered how those losses would affect her flying.
After the cramp was gone, even though the sun was drifting lower, Prissi stood on the rock and took her time smea
ring away the blood on her legs and arms. Even after her wounds were tended, the teener remained motionless and just stared at the sky. For the very first time since she had fledged, Prissi Langue was afraid to get back into the air. She didn’t trust her wings, nor her muscles, nor her lungs. Even though daylight was fast fading and she knew that she had no option but to fly, that knowledge failed to free her frozen feet.
Prissi was still staring at the sky, a darkening vastness where those she most loved had gone, when a flock of cedar waxwings landed in the brier patch. Prissi’s gaze drifted down to watch the small brown and yellow birds. Their black masks, cockily crested heads, and intriguing habit of passing the last of the winter dried berries back and forth among one another made Prissi think of a band of merry thieves. Her old friend Jiffy and her new friends, Yoli and Lavie La, too, had shared what they had with her.
As Prissi continued to watch the waxwings, her breathing calmed and some of her courage began to return. When the flock of birds suddenly flew off, Prissi knew that it was time for her, too, to go.
For a third time, the rested traveler stared at her mypod. She knew she could turn it on and in less than a minute know exactly where she was and how far she had to go. The whole reason she had dumped her old mypod and bought the one strapped to her wrist was so that she could use it. But, she wasn’t positive that the gap-toothed man in Spicetown hadn’t done something to the mypod so that she could be traced. More worrisome, she didn’t know how the orange-feathered wingers had found her…twice. Plus, as far as she knew, anyone asking for a location fix from out in the middle of nowhere might trigger some kind of rescue effort. She didn’t need to be sitting in a police station somewhere answering questions from suspicious hawks while malignant forces gathered round.
Prissi took a last breath, exhaled and should have launched herself.
But, her wings refused to move.
Freeieekin coward. C’mon, you freeieekin traitors, flap. Now. Flap.
Prissi had a vision of teal chenille slippers flapping down a hall.
C’mon.
Finally, Prissi’s wings responded.
A couple of minutes later she was high enough to see that the land ahead was an unending carpet of what she had just left. Looking at kilometers after kilometer of brier and brush caused the girl’s newly regained courage to falter.
Flap. Dambit. Flap….
…And Prissi flapped and flew, and when her thigh cramped, she let it cramp until it was drawn up almost to her chest and she was screaming and she still flew. And when the sun hurtled to the ground and the treetops were painted in a rose that quickly darkened to red and then wine, she still flew. And when the treetops faded away under night shadow, Prissi canted her wings and flew higher and higher until, when she looked back over her shoulder, she could see nothing but a long string of blackish red, like a stream of cooling lava, on the western horizon far behind her. She flew high, and, then, higher, until the cold chattered her teeth, shivered her body, and distracted her from the cramps in her thighs. She flew over a long straight strand of seed pearls glowing north and south all the way to the water. She assumed that necklace of lights marked the outer edge of the Pale, the end of civilization. And still she flew.
Once past that point of no return, Prissi flew even higher. But, as high as Prissi flew, she could see nothing in all in the darkness before her. Not a single light. No silvery string of stream. No darker patch of black.
Prissi flew and flew until she got to a place where she knew that this would be the very last time she would ever fly. And she flew and thought about her mother and father and what it would be like, if it would be like anything, when she flew far enough to be where they had gone. And she flew through the cold and in darkness and flew until she passed through a gate that opened her memories of the ineffable joy of flight, of the indescribable welcome of being in an empty space high above the earth, without a single soul in sight. High and free of…orange wingers, free of Africa’s burnt shanties and bloat-bellied babies and mangy jackals and the swirling earth-bound clouds of red dust and black smoke, free of Noramica’s greed and power and two-faced friends, free of mystery and adventure, free of the drudgery of…everything. And, despite the pain and the fire in her lung and the spasms in her limbs, Prissi Langue flew in perfect contentment.
And when her right wing popped free and flapped to its own silent song, Prissi felt only joy. She laughed at how at peace she was. Then, on a whim, she twisted her good wing down and flew an off-kilter loop. Laughed more and did a second, then a third and fourth loop—more than she had ever done before and done so fast and so well that she had no idea, nor even cared, whether she was flying up, down or sideways, still headed east or headed back from where she just had come, or headed straight down.
Laughing. Laughing in a way that reminded her of the excited cackle of hyenas.
Prissi pulled her working wing tight to her body and let gravity tell her which way was down. Then, as she plummeted to the earth, she noticed a small break in the clouds letting the moon hidden behind those clouds light a narrow patch of earth.
In desperation, Prissi flung out her wing. The wind nearly tore it off. She flapped, but with just one wing, her flight could only be unstable and disordered. She reached over with both hands and pushed up on her dislocated right wing. Dislocated, but not completely useless. Like a luffing sail, it caught the wind, filled, and she began a slip-sliding glide toward the large patch of not quite black.
A sudden desire to come to that differently dark place, a desire stronger than anything she could remember ever wanting except her mother, swept over her. Prissi knew that only in a poetical sense would she ever get to her destination. Her altitude, her speed, her floundering wing and her dwindling energy could not get her there.
A noise as hysterical as the laughter she had made before, but sad, sputtered through her lips.
Prissi squeezed her eyes tightly shut, dark against dark, gave a desperate click of her heels, and flapped with her one wing toward her fate.