The Philosopher's Flight

by Tom Miller

  I looked at the page, torn from a magazine:

  The discovery of a new sigil to induce pregnancy without sexual congress represents the most vile and unnatural development ever to challenge mankind. Used in concert with the glyph that murders unborn boy children, these harlots can, within five generations, eradicate the entire male sex. This was the goal of the female Antichrist Cadwallader from her earliest days.

  “God,” I said. “That’s wrong in every possible way! There’s no sigil to—”

  “Now, now,” said Dar. “If you were smarter, you’d worry about convincing me to include you in the small harem of men we’re building for our own pleasure once we render you superfluous.”

  “There’s no such sigil! Does he think the women in the philosophers’ communes get pregnant by magic?”

  Dar laughed. “Your mistake is thinking the Trenchers want to know the truth. They’ve been doing variations on this line for forty years—something about it thrills them. You’ll never reason it away.”

  “I don’t think it’s funny,” I said.

  “Neither do I,” sighed Danielle. “Not even a little. Did you know the State of Kentucky is launching an investigation? They want all philosophical clinics closed until they can guarantee there’s no conspiracy to make men go extinct.”

  “How do they plan to investigate something that’s imaginary?”

  “They won’t. But it’s all part and parcel—their governor’s trying to get back to the good old days when women knew their place. Ten years ago, he told the county clerks to start dropping women from the voting rolls. Any who complain or try to register, come up with an excuse. Keep delaying. And it worked. Only nine hundred thirty-eight women in Kentucky voted in the presidential election last year.”

  “For the entire state?” I asked. “That’s outrageous! That’s illegal.”

  “Who’s going to stop it? You think President Wilson is lining up a blue-ribbon committee to investigate? He’s a Democrat, too—he doesn’t want a million Republican voters back on the books. No, what we need is a national movement for philosophers.”

  “The Jayhawks,” I suggested.

  “With fewer murders. Something mainstream. I got this—oh, I don’t even want to—”

  “What?” I said.

  “I got a letter about a conference in Syracuse over Christmas. Blackwell will be there and Polidori and Senator Cadwallader-Fulton,” she said, naming several of the better-known philosophical agitators of the age. “Trying to get organizers from different states talking to one another. Cadwallader-Fulton wrote me a note after the march in Washington, said I seemed like the sort of woman who ought to be involved. But I don’t really want to go.”

  “You got a letter from Josephine Cadwallader-Fulton and you don’t want to go?”

  Old Josie was the senior senator from Wisconsin, the daughter of the famous smokecarver and an exceedingly capable sigilrist in her own right. She’d served as her mother’s board girl during the Civil War—only eleven years old when she marched out of Detroit at Lucretia’s side—before running for office in middle age. She was the sole woman in the US Senate and its only outspoken philosopher.

  “You’re not the one who has to explain it to my mom,” Dar said. “ ‘I’ll only be gone a few days—and I think I’ve developed a taste for politics.’ She’ll lock me up, Robert.”

  “She’ll have a hard time holding you.”

  • • •

  The rest of November and the first week of December passed in a similar blur of calisthenics and tutoring and politics. And then it was time to fly.

  “Do you want me to come tomorrow?” Dar asked.

  “There’s nothing to see if I do it right,” I said.

  “Put the kettle on and wait at home with warm blankets?” she suggested.

  “God, if I splash in front of everybody again . . .”

  “It wouldn’t be so bad. Bring you up here, half-frozen, strip you out of your wet clothes and . . . well, isn’t body heat how you save someone dying from the cold? Bare skin on skin?”

  I nodded, wide-eyed.

  “Are you scared to say it?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “May I say it, then?” she asked. “You want it. And I want it. And I want it even if you’re not freezing to death.”

  23

  The town’s entire population had lined up to receive us: the councilwomen, the shop mistresses, the professional philosophers, all in their Sunday best. The children, too, the sweetest little girls you could ever imagine, row upon row, all in matching pearl-gray dresses. Everywhere, a sense of peace pervaded, of feminine order and solidarity. One could begin to see why women might choose to live apart (and visit a man with sterling references when it came time for children).

  Anna Blackwell, Travels Among the Women’s Settlements of Upstate New York, 1916

  “MR. WEEKES,” GERTRUDE SAID the following morning, as she surveyed the gray water of the Charles River, “if I have to go swimming, it’ll be with the intent of drowning you. It’s too cold to mess about. On the first drop, rotate clear and brake immediately.”

  I was in my sleeveless summer-weight skysuit with no boots. I wedged my hands under my armpits, trying to keep them warm enough to draw. If I landed in the water, there really was a chance of hypothermia.

  Essie launched and carried me to one hundred feet. I flexed my fingers to keep the blood flowing, then drew my sigil for down thrust, keeping it as small as I could.

  “Dropping!” Essie announced. “In three, two—”

  I consciously stopped listening. Just the position of the body. Shoulders, chest, belly, hips, legs. The cold metal of the regulator biting the skin between thumb and forefinger.

  I felt the vibration of the strap about my ankles releasing rather than hearing it.

  Shoulders, chest, belly, hips, legs.

  And with no more than that, I’d somersaulted backward and snapped into the L position, falling fast.

  Right hand.

  The largest glyph for upward thrust I could manage, followed by another hard glyph and another.

  And I was sitting motionless in the air thirty feet above the river. I held my position a moment then drew for forward flight and a landing.

  “He doesn’t want to get wet!” Gertrude crowed as I set down. “That was serviceable. Next one, dive under full power. You’ll flip after one and a half seconds.”

  Essie towed me back to altitude. I drew to initiate. Essie counted down.

  Don’t listen. Don’t anticipate. Only the position of the body. Where were my upper arms in relation to my pelvis relative to my feet?

  The shackles came away. I was diving headfirst. I drew hard and harder still to push toward the ground. No counting. Brake at fifty feet. Wait for it. I knew fifty feet. Had known it for years and years.

  I snapped upright into L position—shoulders back, chest out, belly tense, hips forward, legs up. Sigil to brake, brake, brake, BRAKE.

  I came to a stop two feet above the water in a dead hover.

  I straightened my legs to brush the surface with my big toe and made for the shore. I had no feeling of triumph, no joy. More like exhaling a breath I’d been holding for two months. I was now competent a single time in performing half a maneuver that I should have mastered years before.

  I didn’t realize until I landed how many people had come to watch me. They were cheering.

  “Christ, but that was an ugly swan dive!” Dmitri shouted, pushing his way forward to thump me on the back. “We’ll have to find a ten-meter platform and fix that, too!”

  “Congratulations, then?” asked Unger. “Did you do it right?”

  “Like he was born to!” proclaimed Jake.

  “Robert!” shouted Danielle. She was running toward me, unbuttoning her coat to pull out a blanket that she’d kept tucked against her body. She wrapped it around my shoulders. I’d never felt anything so warm.

  “I’m taking you out to celebrate!” Da
nielle said. “You and your whole army. We’re going to drink up all the—”

  Essie was in front of me, too, holding my parka. She handed it to Dar, who helped me into it.

  “I’m sure that’s more sensible,” Dar said. “So we’ll go to—”

  “Begging your pardon, Sigilwoman Hardin,” Gertrude said as she forced her way up to me. “But you’re not taking him anywhere. He hasn’t been up in two months. I need to fly him.”

  Gertrude turned to me. “Change into weather-appropriate gear and start working on the first half of the flare—flipping inverted to brake against your forward momentum and start your dive. As many repeats as you can manage in an hour.”

  “Well, after that—” Dar said.

  “I reserved the boxing ring for this afternoon,” Dmitri broke in.

  “And the final exam for Theory?” Unger added. “You said I could take you through—”

  • • •

  I did an hour of flares with Gertrude critiquing my form. Then to the classroom for Essential Sigils and Chemistry, to the gym with Dmitri, back home for Unger’s tutoring in German and a cram session for Theory.

  Splndid, as expctd! Mother messaged when I sent word to her. Hope th big dustup here ddnt wrry y. We’re all wll.

  What dustup? I asked.

  Tell y all abt it when y gt home.

  Which was classic Mother. Don’t worry about the thing I won’t tell you about.

  I’m rentng an apt in Billings, she continued. More busness in town. We’ll have Chrstms there. I’ll send y addrss.

  That was unexpected. When it had been just the two of us, Ma had contemplated selling the house and moving into town. But with three apprentices, the big old place seemed sensible enough.

  I tried pumping Angela for information.

  Ma wont tell me nthing eithr, Angela wrote. I say, good fr her if sh wants to be in town. Mor social. Speakng of whch—y hav girlfrnd? Whn wr y going to fess up!

  I’d asked a few too many offhanded questions: What was the style of dress on an outing to the botanical gardens? Should one split the tab at a dinner suggested by the woman but planned by the man? Would a phonograph record be an appropriate gift for your one true love? I’d prefaced all my queries with “I’m advising a friend on . . .” or “Willard Gunch was on leave and messaged to ask . . .” She’d seen right through me.

  Dnt knw wht yr talkng abt, I tried. I could hear my sister’s laughter through the sand.

  Liar. Tattler had 2 lines in gossp column—Hardin w/ a Radcliffe Man. Mrs. Pasczek askd Julie Yzermn and she askd me. I said had to be y.

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” I sang out. Everybody back home as good as knew.

  • • •

  “Popular man,” Dar said, when I made it to her place quite late that evening. She was sitting at her table, answering her mail. I pulled up a chair beside her.

  “Is your mom okay?” she asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “I still don’t know what kind of dustup. Maybe a disagreement with a client. Folks get upset when you can’t resurrect their sheep or bore a two-hundred-foot well in an afternoon. Or angry when the bill comes and it’s high as the doctor’s. Collecting used to be my job.”

  “Poor Robert. Well, shall we round up whoever we can find and drop in on the Wag?”

  “Unger’s writing a paper,” I said. “Jake has a study group. Essie’s a teetotaler. Dmitri doesn’t keep a message board.”

  “God, you have boring friends,” she said. “Just the two of us, then? Or would I have to carry you home?”

  I stifled a yawn. “Yeah, you might.”

  “Cup of tea?”

  “No thanks.”

  “You bring a book?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well,” Dar said. She was standing, looking at me with intensity. “What do you want, then?”

  The question boomed out across the room. My heart rebounded from sternum to spine.

  She came to me and took a double handful of my hair. My hands went around her waist. I kissed her.

  “Come to bed with me,” she whispered.

  My scalp was on fire and my shins were sweating.

  “I’m not going to be any good at it,” I said.

  “I don’t care.”

  The top button of Dar’s blouse was a little pearl thing girded round by a thin loop of fabric. My hands were trembling so badly I could barely keep hold of it.

  And then, after a minute, we were standing naked in each other’s arms, her flesh—warm, smooth, ample—pressed against mine, my mouth against hers. The room spun. Or perhaps we spun, rocking back and forth, turning barefoot circles on the cold wooden floor. Then we were in bed, our hands and lips searching out the full length of each other’s bodies.

  I wanted so desperately to please her. The only thing I could think of was a piece of advice Willard had given me once in Billings—a foolproof method for inspiring supreme ecstasy in any woman. I took Danielle’s buttocks in my hands and commenced rubbing. I tried gently at first, then with more vigor.

  Dar seized my hands. “What are you doing?”

  She looked at me for a moment as if I must harbor some sort of bizarre perversion. I stared right back at her, burning with desire.

  “Anything,” I said. “Tell me.”

  She stroked my cheek and kissed me hard and long. Then she took my right hand and guided it between her legs. “Tiny circles, like that, with your finger,” she said. “For ten minutes or an hour, I don’t know. Afterward, anything you want.”

  I lay against her, caressing the spot like she’d asked. My other hand followed the angles of her face, her shoulder, her collarbone. Cupping the curves of her breasts and flanks.

  After hours or days I felt Dar stiffen, clutch me to her, and convulse, letting out a long, husky sigh in a register I’d never heard her voice reach. Her face was slick with perspiration.

  “Stop,” she gasped.

  She looked at me, and her eyes shone. “Anything.”

  I whispered four words, one of which I’d never before uttered aloud, much less in the presence of a woman.

  Ninety seconds later, we lay in a heap, our sweat intermingling, my forehead pressed against her neck. I was gasping for air.

  I drew back to look at her.

  “Hi,” I said stupidly.

  “Hi yourself,” she said, so flushed that I could feel the heat from her cheek radiating to mine. She adjusted the pillow beneath her head and gazed at me.

  “You’re shy,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “A little.”

  “Don’t be. You’re going to be wonderful. Was that—well, it wasn’t your very first time, was it?”

  I fumbled for a reply, unsure what she wanted to hear. I tried to explain about Daisy, a high school classmate for whom I’d provided flights to and from Billings’ two-room schoolhouse. It had been a chance for me to make a few dollars and for her to avoid walking an hour each way—I’d done the same for a few different families over the years. Daisy had been stolid and provincial, unphilosophical, not the sort of girl I usually noticed. But carrying a passenger regularly creates a strange kind of intimacy. Yoked together, her rump brushing across your thighs each time you maneuver, the pressing together of bodies during a landing.

  One spring day during our last year of schooling—I was seventeen, she was eighteen—Daisy asked if I could help her with a philosophical matter. She’d just gotten engaged to a bachelor farmer from out past Dolph’s Rock and wanted to know how to draw a particular glyph. I took her by the house, but Mother was out. “Don’t you know how to do it?” she asked. I did. I got a bottle of saline, she pulled up her shirt, and I showed her how to draw the glyph on her belly. “Don’t you want to make sure it works?” she asked. And so we did, on a blanket spread out in the root cellar, where it was cool and dark and the air smelled of onions. I spent the whole time too terrified that Mother would come home to think about her pleasure or mine. I’d felt like the worst kind o
f cad for months afterward.

  “But that’s the most innocent story I’ve ever heard!” Dar objected.

  “No it’s not,” I said. “Stealing another man’s fiancée.”

  “Don’t say it like that—like he owned her. Besides, you think she didn’t know your mom was away?”

  I’d never considered the possibility.

  “I hope she was paying attention,” I said. “I barely knew the glyph myself.” Then I looked at Dar in a panic. “Did you—”

  “Of course,” Dar said. “I’ve drawn it the last two months, just in case.”

  Perhaps I was an innocent after all.

  I closed my eyes.

  “You’ll keep me?” I asked.

  She nipped me on my chest.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  • • •

  I stumbled home the following afternoon to find Unger at work with his dish of walnut ink and a ream of paper, having failed four hundred consecutive times to get the manual reduplication sigil to take.

  “Did you spend the night with Danielle?” he asked. He was so genial about it that I almost slipped. But surely better to be discreet, even with Unger.

  “I was out late,” I said vaguely. I pulled off my boots and tried to organize my thoughts. If I slept three hours, I could study a bit of German, eat an early dinner, and then work on my vocabulary until I dropped. My final exam was the following morning.

  Unger sat smiling, still watching me. “The two of you radiate it when you’re together. I could set up a detector and discover the wavelength of happiness.”

  “I always look happy,” I grumbled.

  • • •

  I bludgeoned my German exam into submission and took a B for the course. Empirical Chemistry and Essential Sigils were easy As, while Freddy’s genius was enough to steer me through my Theory final so I could escape with a C.

  Dar and I lingered for a couple of days after the end of exams. We flew out to Harvard’s arboretum to hike, just us and the trees. We ice-skated on the pond at the Boston Common. Dar bought me a new pair of gloves at the counter of one of Boston’s finer department stores. (“Close your eyes! It’s supposed to be a surprise! Just let me borrow your hands to see if they fit.”)