by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Flight
Joshua Fflowers leans back against a single pillow as he listens to his grandson Joe’s story. His face betrays almost nothing of what he feels. Some of that sangfroid is from the medication he takes, some is the product from being so old, but most comes from the last dregs of a life lived with obdurate will.
From the boy, the old man learns of how, if he had allowed himself to play any part in Joe’s life, how he might have known Prissi Langue, or, as he prefers to call her, Prissi Fflowers, for more than a year. He is chastened when he considers that if he had known who and what Prissi was earlier, he might have protected her, kept her alive. In a darker, more familiar, vein, he considers how he might have used Prissi as a key, an intriguing peace offering to Elena. If he had shown up in the Bury with a girl who looked like, and, from what his grandson is telling him, is…was…so much like Elena in her fierce intelligence and even fiercer will, Elena might have given him a word, a bit of a smile that would have ameliorated a half-century’s bitterness, loss and remorse. Fflowers tells himself that if he had known that Prissi existed, of who and what and how she was, he could have insured that what he had built, his company, collections and wealth, would have been hers, rather than left to the schools, fools and foundations he has named.
If. If.
As Joe talks, one if after another come to the old man’s mind. After Joe leaves, those ifs cause Fflowers to sift and re-sift memory. To look at what he has done—all of the things he has accomplished, all the people and things he has gathered around him, and, lastly, all of the things, despite the long years, monumental intelligence and Herculean efforts, that he has not done…respect his wife, love his sons, forgive himself.
Fflowers measures. He reviews. As the hours pass and the sun moves past its meridian to begin its own slow fall from grace, the old man listens to things in his head he has not heard in years.
He listens to cautions and secrets and words of praise. He hears the whispered concerns of the machines which surround him. The old alchemist weighs and balances and, at the end of the hours of doing that hard math, he concludes that he has just two things of true significance left for him to do. The fate of Cygnetics becomes background chatter. The active hands Adanan and Jack may have had in the deaths of Beryl and Prissi Langue is someone else’s burden. His place in history will be shaped by hands other than his own and written by strangers.
As the afternoon begins to fade, Joshua Fflowers takes pen to paper and writes, “I am sorry.” He seals that note and writes two sets of numbers, the very same numbers that Allan Burgey had left for Prissi. He puts that envelope into a larger one along with a note that it is his wish that the envelope be delivered to the location whose coordinates he has just written. He seals that envelope and addresses it to Thes Mason, his roto pilot.
Fflowers’ finger pulses a button, and when a triad of attendants respond, he tells them that he wants to be disconnected from his support systems so that he can spend a few minutes in his gallery, loggia and gardens. His guardians protest, but Fflowers protests more.
The old man is freed of his tethers and placed in a wheelchair. When an obese, smoky smelling nurse tries to help him, the old man waves him away. He hooks the control knob with a claw like hand and drives toward the gallery. He takes his time admiring the idealized marble forms that have survived since they were carved by philosophers and fools three thousand years before. He studies the men and women with their perfect, smooth, white hard beauty and form…perfect humans, except for their missing limbs, half-faces, and hidden stony hearts. He moves out of the gallery, into the elevator, and up a flight.
Despite being one hundred thirty stories over Manhattan, Joshua Fflowers can smell spring as soon as he wheels himself outside into the garden. The air is so fine that he takes small sips as if he were drinking an old Calvados. He slowly motors down the loggia that runs alongside the gardens. His alternates his attention between the azaleas and hyacinths in the raised granite planters and the statues that run the length of the black and green marbled colonnade. He stares at his statues and wonders about those who could see such potential in the world around them that they felt compelled to invent gorgons, gryphons, harpies, unicorns and chimera. Krakens and centaurs.
Of all that Fflowers looks at, it is the man-horse, a white marble millennial old Etruscan statue standing three meters tall that holds his attention the longest. When he finally moves away, he whispers the same three words that he had written minutes before.
Fflowers rolls his way close to the parapet that surrounds the Airie. Manhattan is glowing from the reds and oranges a profligate fallen sun is splashing across half the sky. Far to the west, the spires of Newton and Screwton glisten. To the east, the old scientist can see where the interlacing of rivers and ponds and land has made urban islands which, from his vantage point, look like giant flagstones. To the south are the canted masts of Wall Streets’ lost fleet. But, it is the open air beneath him that holds the most intriguing sight for Fflowers. Here and there, far below, solitary winged workers are leaving their posts a few minutes early.
Fflowers pushes himself to his feet. As his body wavers from the exertion, the old man is struck with how long is has been since he has stood on his own two feet—with no doctors, no nurses, no helping hands. Despite his fragile stance, the trillionaire revels in that small gift. He is upright and alone.
The old man stands in the warm light of the failing sun and waits his moment. And, when that moment comes, as thousands of his fellow humans below spread their wings for home, he, too, spreads his limbs and takes for himself, after decades and decades of jealous waiting, the gift, the complicated gift, he has given to so many. And, as Joshua Fflowers, finally, flies, as he leisurely flaps his rail thin arms, his ancient face breaks into a wide smile as he welcomes the freedom he has achieved in that last, late warm spring afternoon. And, as the seconds of his short flight into a longer journey pass, Fflowers, still the purveyor of dreams, thinks of how he and Elena, Reiklein and Grammai, damp from rain, bubbling over with excitement at what the future held, squeezed into a cab and rode away into a glistening spring night.