The Philosopher's Flight

by Tom Miller

  “They’re choosing to go,” I said.

  Dar opened her eyes and shut the book.

  “You really never pray?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. And then, to lighten her spirits: “Just Fox’s Prayer.”

  She snorted. “Of course you would. Well, it couldn’t do any harm.”

  She bowed her head. “Dear God,” she whispered, “don’t let us fuck this up.”

  26

  Men huddled around the fire, mad with the cold. They cried out to me to give them fuel, but they were even at that moment squandering a wealth of smoke. So I did not pity them. For it is a poor flame that burns but once, a poor heat that warms but once, and a crooked soul that would freeze to death while the means of his salvation blows away on the wind.

  Galen Wainwright, Confessions of a Confederate Smokecarver, 1875

  THE TRENCHER PARADE WAS scheduled to begin at nine; by eight thirty nearly a thousand women and men had crowded the streets surrounding Boston’s former Trencher meetinghouse. The “Castle Club” they called it now—eight stories of rough-hewn stone topped by a pair of crenellated turrets.

  Out front, a doorman stood at attention. He was dressed in red silk hose and a bronze breastplate, the Trenchers’ outfit for formal occasions, with the bronze to disrupt any untoward sigils. He finished an attempt at counting us and ducked back inside.

  The toughs from the Benevolent Society had arranged themselves around our perimeter, with a handful of bats and blackjacks on display. I recognized a few of Radcliffe’s guards scattered among them; they’d replaced the gaudy vests and ties that they’d worn for the freshman social with anonymous overcoats and tweed jackets. Addams herself, in her corpswoman’s uniform, was attending as a member of the Philosophical Veterans Association.

  Dar enlisted me to remind the latecomers that the event was supposed to be peaceful and to hand out papers with the order of the day’s musical program. She’d decided that singing would keep everyone occupied, reducing the risk of a sigilrist shouting threats or throwing rocks. As soon as the Trenchers emerged, it was to be “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” followed by “Sunset on Havana Bay,” and “Detroit, My Sweet Soul’s Rest.”

  By nine, it had started sleeting. There was no sign of the Trenchers.

  I was handing out flyers on the other side of the Castle Club and missed Danielle’s speech. Patrice found an apple crate for her to stand on and Danielle offered a few words on the power of unity and sisterhood, asking for each woman to introduce herself to the one next to her, so that we would be able to turn to one another if we were ever in need. (It was, by Dar’s later analysis, a middling effort. She’d misplaced her note cards and spoke extemporaneously. No one thought to make a transcription, so the exact wording of her first of many thousands of public orations is lost to the ages.)

  But still no sign of the Trenchers. Some of the protesters began to trickle away. At nine thirty, we ran through our three songs for practice. The effect was stirring and filled us with warmth, even as the wind began to pick up and the sleet turned to stinging frozen rain.

  By ten, I’d made my way back to Dar.

  “Are they scared to come out?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or scared of the weather.”

  We sang our three songs again. Krillgoe was enlisted to belt out a few hymns, which took hold up and down the ranks, though not with the vigor of the earlier tunes. A newspaper photographer asked Dar to climb back up on her crate and reenact her speech for some pictures. By eleven, several of the less hardy groups had come to shake Dar’s hand before going home.

  “A lot of old men cowering in there,” gloated Gertrude, who’d also attended with the Veterans Association. “I’m pleased to have frightened them so badly, but I’m going to catch my death if I stay out any longer.”

  The Trenchers finally straggled out at noon. We’d lost nearly two-thirds of our number, but the remaining crowd sang lustily as a small group of old men in overcoats hobbled six blocks to the State House under cover of their umbrellas. They hadn’t even worn their breastplates.

  “That’s it?” Dar fumed. “That was only three dozen of them!”

  “Thirty-one,” supplied Mayweather.

  “Which one’s Gannet?” I asked. I was imagining him as he’d appeared when he ran for president—a big, barrel-chested man with thick whiskers and mutton chops.

  “The scrawny old one in the middle,” Mayweather said.

  It was a good description of pretty much all of them. Part of me wished I’d brought Mother’s little pistol, though I wouldn’t have known which Trencher to shoot at.

  Dar shook her head in embarrassment. “I called in women from Connecticut and New Hampshire, I asked women to sacrifice a day’s wages for that?”

  “You did marvelously, Danielle,” said Addams, who’d come over to join us. “You tell the newspaper men you had a thousand women, you kept the Trenchers in hiding for three hours, and the whole thing went off peacefully. Tell them you won. And you did. It’ll make the next time that much easier.”

  Addams gave her a hug. Dar could not have looked more shocked if the Devil himself had come up from Hell to offer his congratulations.

  • • •

  Afterward, Dar and I filled the tub in my apartment with steaming water and climbed in together. Cramped, but sublime.

  She half-lay, half-floated atop me, her head nestled against my neck.

  “Corcoran and Fitzgerald from the union want to talk again next week,” she said, nearly asleep as she recited the litany of women who’d sought her out. “The head girl from Wellesley. The maître d’ from Tippler’s.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “It’s a restaurant. Right across the street from where we were standing, probably the nicest place in Boston. He told me to come back for dinner—someone paid for me and a couple of friends, a table for four. I said I never accept that sort of thing. But . . .”

  “You want to go?”

  “I’ve wanted to eat there for years. Was it wrong to say yes?”

  “Of course not! Some rich philosopher is doing you a favor. Who was it?”

  “Anonymous. In thanks for organizing.”

  “Then it would be an insult not to go!”

  “Exactly. Would you run the hot water again?”

  “And then put you to bed.”

  “For a week—at least. Dinner’s at eight. Find a couple to go with us? Mayweather helped you with Durstman. We should ask him.”

  I silently cursed myself for having told Dar. “Or we could ask—”

  “He’ll be fun. We’ll make him pick the wine.”

  I wrapped her in a towel and carried her to my bed.

  “It’s silly that I enjoy this,” she said. “Dark, handsome man came out of nowhere . . .”

  She sighed contentedly as she burrowed into my sheets.

  “Wake me at five? Oh, and Jake, of course, if we’re asking Mayweather.”

  In the new year, Jake and Mayweather had begun—no one quite knew what to call it: a romance, a dalliance, intensive flirting. I’d worried to Dar over Jake, whether I ought to warn her about Mayweather.

  “Oh, Jake knows!” Dar had laughed. “Everybody knows. Everybody and her kid sister and her dowager aunt. He’ll be a perfect lamb or Jake will string him up by his toes naked from the steeple of the Old North Church.”

  “He’d probably enjoy that,” I’d grumbled.

  And so, reluctantly, I messaged Mayweather, who cleared his social calendar to go out with us on short notice.

  • • •

  At seven thirty, the four of us climbed into a carriage in Harvard Square. Dar wore a low-cut green dress with a velvet bodice, a pearl necklace, and a net of fine seed pearls in her hair. Jake sported a form-fitting sheath of silver silk overlaid with a mesh of like-colored beads; it made her every movement like flowing mercury. Mayweather outfitted himself in a cream-colored three piece, with sparkling diamond cuff links. And then there
was me in my sober gray suit, wearing a black Homburg that could never have been stylish in any time or place.

  “Which newspapers?” Mayweather asked Dar, amid a great deal of chitchat over the morning’s protest.

  “Just the Globe,” Dar answered. “I tried everyone who ever interviewed me or came beating down my door after the disaster in Washington. I was hoping for reporters from New York and Philadelphia, maybe Detroit. But just the one.”

  “A pity,” Mayweather said. “They’ll only do an article if you’re naughty.”

  “But no more naughtiness for Brian,” Jake said as we pulled up at the restaurant. “Conduct unbecoming and all that. Did you tell them yet?”

  Mayweather jumped down and gallantly extended his arm to assist Jake to the ground. I was too busy glowering at the Castle Club across the street to remember to do the same for Dar. Full of Trenchers even at that very moment.

  “Not official yet,” I heard Mayweather say. “Still time left for misbehavior.”

  Over oysters on the half shell and a bottle of Blanquette de Limoux (and I could hardly decide which I liked less), Mayweather described his most recent exploit: a commission as a second lieutenant in the artillery.

  “A general for a great-uncle, I’m afraid,” Mayweather said. “I report as soon as the semester’s over.”

  “They’ll let you out of your Contingency obligation to serve in the army?” I asked. I’d mused on that same question whenever the idea of taking a plush job during wartime made me feel guilty.

  There followed an uncomfortable silence. Dar glared at me, but I couldn’t decide what I’d said that might give offense.

  “You’re too generous, Robert,” Mayweather said. “I haven’t a prayer of passing my Contingency exam—I can’t do half the sigils and that won’t change in four weeks’ time. So, I’ll write a check to Radcliffe for my tuition and take my commission.”

  “Better than taking his chances in the draft and getting turned into cannon fodder,” Jake added.

  “Gloxinia, dear,” Mayweather replied. “That’s needlessly depressing. Our boys over there haven’t done anything but sit on the southern end of the lines and frown at the Germans in their trenches. Not even a proper battle yet. It’s the French and the British who’re taking it on the chin.”

  “That’ll change,” Danielle said. “Gen. Pershing will have two million Americans in France by the end of the summer. Then he’ll go on the offensive.”

  “That’s ages away,” Mayweather insisted. “I’ll go over in June and polish my cannon and play cards. It’ll probably be over before I even get there.”

  He topped off Jake’s glass.

  “Besides,” Mayweather said. “We can’t all be as lucky as Robert. The draft board can’t touch him on his Contingency year, not with that vital work he’ll be doing for the Durstmans.”

  I seethed at that—it was half an inch short of him calling me out as a coward in front of my girlfriend. Mayweather looked amused by my reaction. He ordered another bottle of white wine and a bottle of red. Citing Dmitri, I abstained.

  “Robert’s no fun anymore,” complained Danielle. “He only eats rabbit food.”

  “Now, now,” Mayweather said. “You never know—if R&E takes Robert, I want him in top form. I might have to be evacuated and I don’t want some overweight—”

  There was a great clanging out on the street as a fire engine sputtered past, one of the new motorized ones. I turned to catch a glimpse of it. Such things still impressed the country boy in me.

  “Or perhaps Miss Stewart would fly me,” Mayweather suggested. “After all, Radcliffe has to take care of her own.”

  Jake sighed and took a swig from her wineglass. “I tried to talk Essie out of it again yesterday—I raised my voice to her, poor girl. But tell me you wouldn’t do the same.”

  “Of course,” Danielle said. “Half of them dead or wounded every year, how could you not?”

  “And yet they never have trouble finding volunteers,” Mayweather mused.

  I hated his snide tone.

  “It’s the highest good of philosophy!” I spat back. “It’s saving lives. They rescued a million French and British wounded in three years. They even take German casualties when they’re able—they’ve done it regardless of nationality in every war. It’s been a vital tool of international diplomacy.”

  Mayweather laughed. “What book did you read that in?”

  “Life and Death on San Juan Hill,” said Jake. “It’s every hoverer’s favorite.”

  “Well, it’s true,” Danielle said soothingly. “R&E does important work. I suppose if Robert really did—”

  Outside there was a dull boom. The front window of the restaurant shattered.

  “What the hell?” Dar said.

  Several of the other diners were pushing through the door, pointing out toward the street and shouting. I got up and followed them.

  The Castle Club was in flames.

  27

  I’ve never killed a man. But I have separated many an enemy from a fresh supply of oxygen and allowed him to breathe himself to death.

  Galen Wainwright, Confessions of a Confederate Smokecarver, 1875

  I COULDN’T SPEAK. THE smell of the smoke. The flash of heat against my skin. I willed my heart to slow, but it raced away. A more primal part of me insisted, Let them die. They tried to kill little Carla Klein like that. Plotted against Dar, against Ma. Let them burn the same way.

  Flames were shooting out of the third-floor windows of the Castle Club on all sides, thick orange fire mixed with dark black smoke, which sank instead of rising, puddling on the ground around the base of the building like a moat.

  “Of course it’s not natural!” Dar was saying to Jake behind me. “I put on a peaceful rally and someone buys me a front-row seat to a goddamned assassination!”

  “Let them die,” I whispered. My voice sounded choked and twisted.

  Mayweather was the only one who heard me. He still had his wineglass in hand, the rim pressed against his lips. He raised his eyebrows at me in surprise.

  The fire engine had found a hydrant and was beginning to pump water; firefighters working from horse-drawn wagons were trying to position ladders to reach the upper floors. Several firemen were kneeling around a female figure lying unmoving on the ground—they called out for a stretcher. The woman wore a heavy waterproof coat identical to theirs. A gray helmet lay beside her, as did a large utility box filled with powders. Billings’ volunteer fire company had carried equipment just like that for Mother.

  “Oh, Jesus, that’s their smokecarver!” I said.

  I hurried toward her.

  “Let me through!” I shouted. “I’m a philosopher!”

  I dropped to the ground beside the unconscious woman. My fingers scrabbled across her neck and found the faintest of pulses. I put my cheek above her mouth to feel for her breath. Nothing.

  “Immediate evacuation,” I announced, as Mother had taught me years before. The firefighters seemed to take it for granted I knew what I was doing.

  I pawed through the woman’s powder box—vials organized alphabetically, thank God!—until I found the silver chloride and a packet of stasis indicator papers.

  “She was trying to get a cloud inside to smother it and it recoiled back on her like a hammer!” one of the firefighters told me, panic in his voice. “The way her head snapped, I thought she broke her neck.”

  “Fine, okay,” I said.

  “She’s got three kids. You’ve got to help her!”

  I squinted at the tube of silver chloride. The whitish powder was streaked with black. An old vial, partially decomposed back into elemental silver. Bad for my sigil, but I didn’t have time to search for a fresher tube.

  “Everybody clear!” I shouted.

  I stuck an indicator to the woman’s neck and drew the largest stasis I could. I pulled the strip off and checked it—eight minutes.

  “Shit,” I whispered.

  The smoke ringing the
base of the building exploded into flames and the firefighters who had been putting up ladders went running for cover. One of them—an older man—hurried toward us.

  “Chief, this is a philosopher here!” the firefighter with me called out. “This man. He put Mrs. O’Sullivan under.”

  “You’re a philosopher?” the fire chief asked. “Male philosopher?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What kind of philosophy? Smokecarver? Transporter?”

  “General practice. And hovering.”

  “A flier! That could work. Listen—there are about a dozen people trapped on the sixth floor, say the ones who got out. We’re never going to get a ladder through those flames. Any chance you can fly one of my guys up there to search?”

  I dusted off the knees of my suit. There was no way I was going into a building filled with Trenchers. Let them die. Let them burn.

  Everyone was looking at me. I’d been at a hundred fires and cave-ins and collapsed buildings. I’d only ever been asked, Where’s your ma? Where’s your sister?

  “What do you need to get in there, boss?” the fire chief asked.

  “Axe,” I said, before I had time to reconsider. “Helmet. Cotton webbing straps cut to twenty feet if you’ve got them; rope if you don’t.”

  The firefighters rushed off to retrieve equipment. I saw Dar and Jake watching from in front of the restaurant. I waved them over.

  “Jake!” I said. “Can you fly their smokecarver to the hospital? Her stasis only has seven minutes left on it.”

  “I’ll have her there in two,” Jake said. “What have we got for bags?”

  There were a pair of waxed-cardboard powder tubes with disposable regulators in the smokecarver’s box. The regs were nothing more than a big screw for piercing the cardboard, with a paper drinking straw attached for the powder to flow through. You pinched the straw shut or open to adjust the flow.

  “These things are trash,” Jake sniffed. “They either give you too much powder or none at all.”

  The firefighters brought me several loops of webbing. I trussed up Jake and the smokecarver with the same style harness I’d used on Gertrude.