The Philosopher's Flight

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The Philosopher's Flight Page 24

by Tom Miller


  I let myself plummet for half a second, trying to get used to the sensation before kicking my legs forward and rolling my shoulders back. I over-rotated and ended up tumbling back-first toward the river. No chance to land it—safer to abort. I added power and flew off.

  “What the hell was that?” Gertrude said as I angle and tucked down beside her.

  “I missed.”

  “You weren’t even close! Show me the motions.”

  I showed her.

  “Slower!” she said, putting her hands on my body to guide me. “Slow. Roll the shoulders back. In the same moment, thrust the chest forward, then the hips, and then swing the legs up and hold. Elbows in tight so that you don’t flail with your off arm. Slower!”

  I practiced on the ground, slow, over and over, as Gertrude made minute corrections to my body position.

  “How many times did you rehearse the motions last night?” she asked.

  “Ten or twenty,” I said.

  “You should have done it two or three hundred.”

  I ran through the motions once more.

  “Better,” Gertrude allowed. “Now, go up and do it right.”

  Essie lifted me again. I dropped, somersaulted into my L, then spun out of position while I was trying to brake. I barely pulled up and away in time.

  “Terrible!” Gertrude said on the ground. “Sustain your L. Do it again!”

  I dropped another half dozen times without better success.

  “That’s enough!” Gertrude said. “You’re practicing failure. You’re weak right here.” She poked a finger into my belly. “The really embarrassing part is that you ought to do this better than any woman. A more powerful shoulder roll, a stronger chest-forward move, a harder kick. Take a month and work your abdominal muscles, then come back and try again. Twenty-five pounds lighter wouldn’t hurt, either.”

  Laughter broke out among the girls who had come down to watch me. The old ladies had brought three full classes of Ones to observe. On the Cambridge side of the river, several dozen private citizens had also stopped to watch.

  I reddened. “I can do it!” I insisted. “Give me one more. One more!”

  “Last one, Robert,” Brock said. “I have a meeting.”

  Essie lifted me a final time. I put too sharp an edge into my sigil while I was dangling, causing Essie to balk and twist on the release. I slammed my regulator on full to stabilize and then left it there a moment. A little extra speed ought to make the somersault easier. I flipped upright and kicked into my first good-looking L of the day. Maximum power and I should just about—

  I got a clear look at the river a fraction of a second before I hit. I struck butt-first and went under.

  A stinging jolt, tail to head. Water up my nose. Stunned, but all my limbs still worked. As I broke the surface, a whistle blast pierced the air. I blinked.

  “Are you okay?” Brock shouted from above me.

  I didn’t have my wind back.

  “Wave if you’re okay!”

  I tried to wave my arm, but it was more a fling of the sort a drowning man might make.

  Brock hurled her ring buoy. It hit me in the face, the rope slicing across my brow. I went under and bobbed back up. I grabbed hold of it.

  “Damn you, Weekes!” Brock shouted. She commenced towing.

  Blood was streaming from my right eye. I couldn’t see out of it. Once I was in the shallows, Brock let go of the rope and I tried to stand. Only two feet of water, but I slipped in the muck and went right back down, crawling toward the shore. Several of the veterans splashed in to grab me.

  “Help him up!”

  “Christ, do you see that eye?”

  “Call for the doctor!”

  “Quiet on the field!”

  “Did it get the eyeball? Or just the lid?”

  “Here, pry it open.”

  I groaned out an objection but they pulled my eye open. I shut my good one and squinted out of the injured one.

  “Only a little blurry,” I said.

  One of the veterans brought my towel and change of clothes, which were sopping wet.

  “One of your lady friends kicked them in the river,” she said. “Some dissatisfaction over your locker, perhaps?”

  “For God’s sake, get him out of those clothes before he catches his death. I don’t care who’s watching.”

  “No,” I said. “No!”

  “Robert!” Essie screamed as she raced up with her coat. She laid it over my shoulders. “I’m so sorry! If I’d dropped you straight—”

  “No,” said Brock, who’d landed nearby. “If I hadn’t hit him in the face—”

  “Enough, the both of you,” said Gertrude, as she hobbled up. “It’s his fault. He wasn’t ready and he knew it. And it’s my fault—I should have grounded him after the first one, ugly as it was. I’ll remedy that now. Weekes: Grounded, one month. Reclassified Zed.”

  “You can’t—” I objected.

  “Lift barbells. Do sit-ups. And don’t show your face around here until you’re ready to flare and settle for real.”

  22

  NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1917

  During our first runs with the new glyphs, one of my test fliers confided that she felt a malevolent presence as she approached seven hundred miles per hour. Something evil and monstrous, sitting just off her shoulder, waiting to destroy her. I told her it was hypoxia affecting her peripheral vision. But the first time Mr. Weekes used the new sigil, I swear I saw something following him—I could describe for you its teeth and talons. We are fortunate that he is not even a little superstitious, perhaps because he and that devil are so well acquainted. I think it’s been chasing him his whole life.

  Dr. Janet Brock, Lecture to the Scientific Assembly of the Société Internationale de la Philosophie Appliquée, 1927

  MS. ADDAMS DID A local nerve stasis to numb up my brow and put in twelve stitches to close the wound.

  “Never a dull moment with you,” she said, as she taped a bandage in place. “If you’re not too concussed, we also need to discuss a somewhat delicate matter.”

  “The locker room?” I asked.

  “I have a letter from one hundred and ten women threatening to take legal action against the college for promoting gross indecency,” Addams said. “They’re also worried this may be a first step toward unisex toilets and bathing facilities.”

  “I really, really don’t want that,” I said. Though with only one men’s bathroom in the Gray Box—on the fifth floor, no less—the idea might have something to recommend it.

  “I could arrange an area reserved for your use in the storage room,” Addams suggested.

  As much as the idea of integrating the locker room hadn’t been mine, I hated the thought of abandoning it.

  “You’ll stretch a sheet across a couple powder barrels and write Men’s on it?” I asked. “You want me to call that fair?”

  “Call it unjust, but the locker room is a losing battle. And by the looks of your face, you have some other fights that need your attention.”

  • • •

  I sought out Dmitri before Addams’s stasis glyph had even worn off.

  “You bit it in front of how many people?” he asked.

  “At least a hundred,” I said.

  “Sprained your pride, then, but I’ve done worse, I promise.”

  We went to Harvard’s gymnasium, where Dmitri led me to a set of hanging rings.

  “Show me the position, as best you can,” Dmitri said.

  I needed two tries to jump and catch the rings. Without the weight of a bag and harness and minus the thrust of a hover sigil, my body felt unfamiliar in the air. I struggled with my balance before getting my legs up into the necessary L shape. I held it only a few seconds before I started to waver.

  I dropped off and Dmitri took my place, springing up with such ease I couldn’t help feeling shamed.

  “Like this?” he said, assuming a rough copy of my position.

  “No, the hips have to swing fo
rward so the bag—yeah, like that.”

  Gertrude would have loved him. Dmitri froze in position and held it, the muscles in his arms rippling as he adjusted to cancel out the sway of the ropes. He got bored before he got tired. He swung his legs until his body was describing long arcs through the air. He let go, pulled in his knees, did a double somersault, and landed on the balls of his feet.

  “Give me an hour a day and you’ll flare and stick every landing,” he said.

  “An hour?” I objected. “I just have to make my belly muscles stronger is what she said.”

  Dmitri shook his head. “It’s not just the abdominals. It’s the lateral muscles in the back, pectorals in the chest, everything in the upper legs, the shoulders. An hour a day.”

  • • •

  Over the next month, my Russian taskmaster supervised my workouts. On Mondays, I ran three, then five miles along the river for conditioning. Tuesdays, I wore boxing gloves and hit a heavy bag. Wednesdays, I ran up and down the steps in the football stadium until my legs burned. Thursdays, rope climbing. Friday, the parallel bars and rings. Saturday, swimming. And to conclude each session, a regimen of barbells, dumbbells, sit-ups, calisthenics, stretching, and tumbling.

  Snds like th quintessence of yuck, Angela wrote when I described my routine.

  But by the third week, I was turning somersaults more easily, I could hold the L position on the rings longer, I could do a hundred sit-ups without suffering cramps. There was something to it.

  • • •

  Unger caught wind of “an hour a day,” and decided to inflict his own brand of cruelty on me for precisely that length of time, too. Given my grades in a couple of classes, I could hardly refuse.

  Unger had learned German as a child and he still spoke it at home. So it was an hour a day of grammar, vocabulary, and conversation.

  “You’re going to have me with an accent like a Hungarian,” I complained.

  “It’s at least getting recognizable as something other than very confused Dutch,” he replied.

  Then an hour a day of philosophical theory. I hated it, but it was only an hour. I could endure anything for an hour. Unger, much as he wanted to lecture on the intricacies of glyph design and differential equations, instead pared Professor Yu’s lectures down to the essentials. I scored an eighty-three on the midterm and Unger was delighted.

  “You went from the worst essay in history to a low B!” he said.

  “It wasn’t actually the worst—”

  “You’re going to pass that class whether you like it or not,” he said. “Now get your book out. We are most certainly not taking the day off.”

  • • •

  That still left plenty of hours to spend with Danielle. Her schedule was packed—she might have to travel to Washington for a meeting with the Deputy Secretary of Philosophy, or write an article for a women’s magazine on top of her schoolwork, or fly out to Fort Putnam to review a fresh batch of cadets. But she always had Sunday mornings free and we always spent them together.

  “When the Corps made me a reservist this past summer, I requested no duty on Sundays so that I could attend services,” Dar told me.

  We were strolling through the streets of Cambridge and the churchgoers were out in droves, bundled up in their hats and scarves against a November cold snap. Danielle took my arm to pull me closer as we made our way down to the river.

  “I haven’t so much as set foot in a church, though,” she said. “Dad says he doesn’t care as long as I’m there for his Christmas sermon. I told him that’s not church, it’s entertainment.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  I liked it when she fell into this mood, open and chatty, even when the conversation veered into dangerous territory. She found me easy to talk to, she said. Most of her friends and confidantes had graduated during her time overseas. She’d found Radcliffe a changed place upon her return, its ablest philosophers and brightest students in the Corps and the remainder a little lost without them.

  “Or maybe it’s just me,” she said. “Feeling lost.”

  “You do a good job of hiding it,” I said.

  We stopped under a bridge and Dar looked out over the water.

  “May I tell you something I’ve only told two other people?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She stuck her hands in her pockets. “I wake up some mornings and I have this feeling like I’m not supposed to be alive. Not like I want to be dead, but that I was supposed to die over there. And it didn’t happen.”

  She stood in front of me and pressed her head back against my chest. I wrapped my arms around her.

  “That night in Gallipoli, twenty jumps in, when I hit three hundred miles—that was my do-not-exceed number—I didn’t even have half of them out. I knew I was going to keep going until it killed me. Ten thousand of them with each jump, how could I not? So thirty times in a row I said, ‘This will be the one that kills me. And I’m ready to die.’ ”

  A flock of geese launched themselves from the water, honking and coming about to a southerly course.

  “I was delirious by the end. I spent three weeks in the hospital. I kept telling the doctors I was supposed to be dead. I stopped eating and they shoved a feeding tube down my nose. The neurologist they made me talk to—she said I survived because I started transporting at such a young age. It conditioned me. My dad said God had kept me alive for some purpose. I told him I couldn’t bear to think that.”

  Danielle turned and wiped the tears off my face.

  “Fuck, I’m sorry,” I muttered.

  She kissed me.

  “Robert, all your training for R&E—” she said. “I admire the hell out of you, it’s just—it makes me feel like a coward. Because if I could do it over again, if I knew what I know now—I wouldn’t. Never. I would stay home and let them die.”

  I held her tighter. “But you didn’t.”

  After a few minutes, we walked on, arm in arm.

  “This is why I’m going to teach you to shoot,” I said. “Take your worries out on a paper target. It’s therapeutic.”

  Danielle laughed. “And a sharpshooter’s pin for my uniform—don’t forget the pin!”

  So, we made our way to the musty sixth sub-basement of the Gray Box, where Radcliffe had installed a shooting range during the previous spring’s war fever. There was nobody else in the big echoing room but us. We lay there on our bellies on dusty mats, side by side, with battered Springfield rifles that we checked out from the circulation desk. I put my hands over hers to help her aim. Dar turned out to be a terrible markswoman; she flinched every time she fired.

  But it became part of the routine: Sunday walks followed by shooting followed by lunch followed by studying followed by dinner followed by reading or paper writing or sending messages to our families from Dar’s apartment while playing footsie under the table. We began spending Thursday afternoons in like fashion. Wednesdays, too, and Saturdays and any other day we were able. When we were snowed under with work, I took my books and we read nestled opposite each other on her couch, lying head to toe.

  Even now, when I look over the final chapter of Hovering Emergencies and Recovery, I recall the first time I read it, lying on my back with Dar’s feet in my lap, the book propped up in the crook of my left arm, my right hand tracing sigils over her toes.

  • • •

  And so my month of exile passed. Training sessions with Dmitri, lessons with Unger, evenings with Dar. I decided there was no reason to rush back. Get stronger. Wait until next semester to return to the aerodrome.

  But the Threes, all of whom had earned back their ranks, noticed my tardiness. They descended on the dining hall to call me out.

  “You’re going to let that bitch bust you back to Zed and just walk away?” asked Francine.

  “Dmitri is sweet, but we’re sweeter,” said Jake.

  “Stop pouting,” said Astrid.

  “It’s boring with you gone,” complained Tillie.

  “I’m t
aking a second month,” I insisted.

  “He needs time for his secret slimming plan to work,” Jake said. “He’s shaking the sheets four times a day with the Hero of the Hellespont.”

  The air went out of me. Dar and I had been discreet about our first few dates, but Radcliffe was a small place and we’d eventually given up the pretense.

  “Does she lecture you during the act of carnal knowledge, Weekes?” asked Tillie.

  “If you move the mattress to the floor, there’s no risk of the bedframe collapsing,” Astrid suggested.

  “There are species of spiders that bite off the male’s head and consume the body after mating,” Francine offered. “So, if she had a long transport that day, be careful.”

  Essie looked mortified. “You have to come back,” she whispered to me. “The river will freeze by the end of December and then you won’t be able to fly until spring.”

  Which was sound advice—and from someone who’d done a perfect flare and settle on her fourth try, too. (Essie had credited it to years of ballet lessons.)

  “Tell Gertrude I want another month,” I said. “Second Monday of December. Nine o’clock.”

  • • •

  “What did you think they would say?” Danielle asked that night over mugs of cocoa prepared in her little kitchen.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s your reputation. And mine. Maybe we shouldn’t—”

  “Because Gloxinia Jacobi made you blush? One of the ordinary Cliffes in my political science class told me she was shocked to hear your name and mine together, because she’d always assumed I was a committed Sapphist. ‘Though, I shouldn’t suppose a deviant man is very different from an ugly woman.’ ”

  “Well ain’t she a perfect lady to say so!”

  “That Sapphism line is everywhere right now. You heard the latest from our friend Max Gannet?”

  “Lord, don’t even—”

  “Look at it, at least. You should know what he’s saying.”

  Dar read the Trencher Times and the Boston Informer and the several other leading anti-philosophical periodicals to monitor the opposition.

 

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