Urban Flight

by Jonathan Kirshner

  “Wow,” she said slowly. “I never really thought about it.” Then she gave her head a quick shake. “Wait. Is this just one of those tricks you’ve made up so you have to be unhappy no matter what happens?”

  “No, that’s Adam. He thinks it’s impossible to be good and popular, at least nowadays. I didn’t say it was impossible, I said it was really hard. It takes an uncommon discipline—the power not to care.”

  “Are you sure you’re not just switching one trick for another?” she asked, probing further. “And ‘the power not to care’ is an excuse to champion apathy?”

  “No. You’re not going to pin that rap on me with this one.” He said it good-naturedly, but he meant it. “It’s selective—you have to care about the music but not care about the audience.”

  Alison scrunched her nose. “Then why have an audience?”

  “Because…this sounds like a small thing, but it’s not. It’s great to have an audience. And it’s great when they applaud. But once you’re playing for the applause, it’s over. And it’s hard not to.”

  Alison took a long sip of her wine without taking her eyes off Jason. “So do you think he can do it?”

  “Who, Springsteen? I don’t know. Maybe he can, maybe he can’t. It helps that he’s not too young. But no matter what, we’re listening to one of the last things he ever recorded when he was just some guy with a band. And that’s precious. Like seeing Dylan in ’sixty-three.”

  Alison thought about all these things for a while. When she saw Dylan in ’sixty-five, he was already Dylan. But he wasn’t afraid of being booed off the stage—she saw it happen. While he was playing some of the greatest music that would ever be. Who was he playing it for? She tried to come up with a definitive answer, but couldn’t. There probably wasn’t one. But the question seemed important. Jason poured out the rest of the wine between them.

  “Oh, I can’t go Sunday,” he remembered, trying to sound a little disappointed. “I have to fly a maintenance run of the copter, do some tests that I can’t do with a passenger. We have to do it every three months to make sure everything’s in order.”

  “What if it’s not?”

  “It’s nothing. We just have to do it to be able to say that we’ve done it, in case anything ever does go wrong. TV union. Got to make sure the talent is safe.” He smiled. “Doesn’t matter what happens to me. Very strict safety rules for the talent. What would the City do without Dave Edwards telling them they’re stuck in traffic?”

  Alison drank the last of her wine and set the glass down. “Do you like it?” she asked, tilting her head slightly.

  “The wine?”

  “Your job.”

  The question took Jason by surprise, and he hesitated before answering. “I like flying. I like the feeling. And I like not having some boss looking over my shoulder.”

  “How long do you think you’ll do it for?”

  Jason finished his wine, stood up, and walked his glass over to the table. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” Alison said quickly, but she didn’t let it go. “It’s just that, I guess, I mean, you know, flying other people around, did you think that this is what you would end up.…”

  Jason walked back over to the living room and sat down at the edge of the sofa, taking the higher ground, but it didn’t help. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. Chances are I’ll get fired. I think Morgan has had enough of me. I don’t know if he bought anything I said in the limo.”

  They hadn’t talked much about everything, and Alison’s voice softened. “Listen, I’m sorry. It’s been some stretch, huh?”

  Jason leaned back and rubbed his eyes. He felt warm, and the breeze from the window didn’t cool him off, it just gave him the chills. Alison got up and sat on the couch.

  “I mean, I can’t imagine what it must have been like. I’ve never seen anybody, you know.… Just thinking about it, it seems so impossible.…”

  Jason massaged his forehead with his fingers. “Yeah, well,” he said, somewhere between a whisper and a sigh, “he’s not the first guy I’ve seen shot.”

  “Didn’t you have a college deferral?”

  “No…I mean, yeah.” He folded his hands and rested his chin on them. “This was here. I mean in the States.” He took a deep breath and let it out, then gently rubbed the sides of his nose and closed his eyes. “Bobby Kennedy,” he said, his eyes still closed. Then he opened them. “I was in the room when Bobby Kennedy was shot.”

  Alison watched him as he sat there. He looked forward without focusing, as if he was seeing it all happen again. She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t, and he avoided her gaze. Sliding in closer she put her arm around him, and setting her other hand on his shoulder she gently steered him around and drew him in from behind. Leaning back against the arm of the couch, she folded her hands across his chest, and he tipped his head back and rested it against her body. They sat like that for a minute, somewhere between sitting and lying down, both staring off into space, lost in their own thoughts. Jason finally spoke.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever said that out loud before. Strange. Must be three or four years now.”

  “Seven.”

  “Seven?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Seven years.” Jason repeated it quietly, with a hint of wonder, like he’d never done the math before.

  “And three months,” she added.

  They thought about it separately again. Alison massaged Jason’s chest absent-mindedly. The tape had ended, and the silence was broken by the sound of a distant siren, so far away it sounded like whale song. It took a while to fade.

  “An ambulance can only go so fast,” Jason mumbled.

  “What?”

  “An ambulance can only go so fast.”

  “No, I heard you,” she said gently. “I just didn’t know what you meant.”

  “It’s this line from the new Neil Young album. Adam gave it to me.”

  “Is it good?”

  “It’s tough, really tough. And it sure won’t sell. But I haven’t been able to get that line out of my head.”

  “That’s tough, too.”

  “It captures a certain type of desperation. Or despair. Or something.… I mean, think about it,” his voice dropping to nearly a whisper, “you’re in the ambulance—there’s hope, you know, that you can make it. You just have to get there. But then you realize that maybe you won’t. Can you imagine being in that ambulance? It’s not fair. It’s devastating. To me at least,” he added, still quietly but with his voice coming a little bit back into the room. “That’s not the way he sings it. He sings it with more, I don’t know…resignation. Or maybe acceptance.”

  “That’s worse, I think. Don’t you?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, but tipped his head back as far as he could, meeting her eyes. Then he came back down again, took another deep breath, and started talking.

  “After my first year of law school, things started to get really interesting. Up in Cambridge and back in New York, there was this real buzz about him. Years before I hadn’t been a big fan—I thought he was kind of a nasty punk when he was Attorney General. Not at the time, I was too young, but I held it against him at first when he became Senator. But I knew he was for real in ’sixty-six, after the South Africa trip, then when he went down to the Delta—to Mississippi. He grew into the person he was becoming. You could really see it in ’sixty-seven, and it was cool because even though he was older, it was like we were growing up with him. When he started to run, for real, some of us took off from school, started to travel with the campaign.

  “It was incredible. We traveled across the country, everywhere. He gave about four speeches a day, and at least one would be in a black neighborhood. A couple of times I’d skip some dinner thing and slip back to catch a few gigs in the local juke joints. Once, only once, I actually sat in with one of the bands.… Anyway, we were pretty low down on the totem pole, but after a while, he really liked young people, he ate with
us a couple of times, knew us a little. Then, when he started winning, man, it was like…anything was possible.”

  Jason stopped talking and closed his eyes. Alison waited for him to resume, but he didn’t.

  “Then what?”

  “That night in California, it was a big win. We’d just lost in Oregon, and even though the pros shrugged it off, we were a little thrown by it. But that night—we knew that he’d get the nomination. I hate LA. I hated it the entire time we were there. You can’t walk anywhere. Couldn’t move in the ballroom either. Everyone was there. It was packed. Alive. When Bobby came out, the place exploded. It was a moment when you could imagine—when you could know for sure—that everything would fall into place. That he would win the nomination, that he would kick Nixon’s ass in the general election, that he would.…” Jason’s voice trailed off.

  “Anyway, it was a great speech—no one remembers that. All they remember is ‘Now on to Chicago and let’s win there.’ The way those words hung in the air—hang in the air—forever. I was looking right at him. Right at him. I guess everybody was. I can’t describe to you that feeling, of being right in the middle of something and knowing there was nothing you could do. Pandemonium. Madness. Rushing, rushing to get help. Didn’t matter.”

  Jason stopped talking again and sat up. He turned around to face Alison.

  “Seven years.” He still couldn’t believe it.

  “I’ll never forget it either,” she said. “We watched the news on TV. They kept talking about how it was only two months after the King assassination. Remember, that night? Bobby was at a rally in Indianapolis, and told the crowd himself from the back of a flatbed truck. I don’t remember what he said, just the beginning: ‘My favorite poet was Aeschylus.’ But it was the first thing I thought about that night, because it suddenly brought home the loss—I didn’t think Humphrey or any of the others had a favorite Greek poet. But Bobby did. And Indianapolis was the only city that didn’t have riots the night King died.”

  “I know,” he said with quiet confirmation. “I was there.”

  “Do you remember the line?”

  “ ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom.’ ”

  “You believe that?”

  “I never met a blues man who didn’t.”

  Alison put her hands on Jason’s shoulders and kissed him, softly at first, but then passionately, squeezing his left shoulder so hard he thought she might have broken the skin with one of her fingernails. She pushed him back on the couch and climbed on top of him. Jason caught up more quickly this time and tried to move faster, hoping to establish some point of no return that he had failed to reach last time, though Alison was not giving the impression she had any intention of turning back.

  This time they made it to the bedroom. Alison continued to dictate their pace, and Jason was content to let her. She seemed committed to being on top, and Jason almost laughed out loud when he had the fleeting thought of asking her if she was trying to prove a point, but that thought was quickly overtaken by others.

  He was quite pleased with himself afterwards, and Alison seemed happy. The sheets were tangled around their waists, but she made no attempt to pull them up further, which Jason appreciated, for a number of reasons. She had a self-confidence that didn’t come across as arrogant. And he liked looking at her.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” he asked, gently tracing a line from her neck to just above her belly button.

  “Big day locked in my apartment. I have this paper I absolutely must finish.”

  “Maybe I’ll stop by,” he said innocently, letting his finger drift to where the sheet met her hip.

  “Oh, you don’t want to see me when I’m trying to finish a paper.”

  “Really? I like everything I’ve seen so far.” He decided to push his luck a bit, curious how she would react, but she didn’t make even a subtle move to cover herself. He thought more about it. She always looked good, but dressed pretty conservatively, even outside of work, and when he imagined them together he had figured her for a coverer.

  “Trust me,” she said, propping herself up on her elbow. “How about tomorrow night? Are you playing?”

  “Nope.”

  “I could go for a late dinner.”

  “Sounds great.”

  She leaned in a little closer and kissed him gently on the shoulder. “When are you playing again?”

  “Tuesday. Always Tuesday. Some Fridays. We used to get a few more gigs on the outside, but it’s been a little quiet. Of course Oz pretty much has work all the time.”

  “How come you never play lead?” She asked it casually, but Jason could tell it was important to her.

  “Not everybody can play lead.”

  “Shouldn’t everybody want to?” she asked.

  Jason pulled the sheet completely off her, and looked at her naked body.

  “Shouldn’t everybody want to?” she repeated, without moving a muscle.

  There were many circumstances under which he would have gotten angry about being cross-examined, but this was not one of them. He was tired. He really liked her. And the arch of her hip had a certain perfection that he hadn’t fully appreciated until now.

  “You never let up, do you?” he said with a good-natured smile. “What is it that you want me to do?”

  “What do you want to do?” she asked.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that I want you to do whatever it is you really want to do.”

  “I know exactly what I want to do,” he said, and leaned over and kissed her. As he maneuvered across the bed she deftly slid past him, switching sides, and put her palm on his chest to push him on his back.

  “Don’t you want to live in a society where women have the confidence to let a man be on top every now and then?” he asked, laying his arms out in surrender and looking up at the ceiling with a broad smile, as if appealing to a higher authority. He knew she’d never get out of that one.

  “If you think you can handle the responsibility,” she said wickedly, grabbing him and pulling him on top of her.

  23

  Jason woke up with the sun hitting him in the face, which meant he’d slept for a long time. The clock showed 11:30, and he was so disoriented with sleep that it took him a second to realize that if the sun was out, it must be 11:30 in the morning. Rolling over, he found that he was alone in the bed, and he got up to see if Alison had left. He pulled on a pair of underwear in case she was still there, but didn’t put on his pants, for the same reason. It didn’t matter; a quick tour of the grounds proved that he was alone.

  She’d taken all her stuff with her and straightened up those things she had been directly responsible for putting out of place, but the apartment was looking even messier than usual. In the dining area he found a note written in surprisingly girlish handwriting.

  “I thought you should sleep—I had to get to work. I had some coffee—don’t you get the Times delivered? Don’t come by before 9! Pizza? See you then!”

  He read it a few times to figure out what it meant. She hadn’t mentioned the sex, but women probably didn’t do that. Still, she might have alluded to it with an “I had a wonderful time” or something. On the other hand, there were two exclamation points, and she still wanted to see him late this evening. These were positives. And she wouldn’t have had that cup of coffee if she was trying to slip out as quickly as possible. It wasn’t an easy note to decipher. He eventually decided, after considerable deliberation, that she was trying to say that she had to get back home early to work on her paper and that she’d see him later.

  Opening the front door, he saw the Times at his feet, which meant that she must have left before seven. A confirming glance at his watch suggested that she’d probably been working for more than four hours already, while he was just waking up. He tossed the paper on the table and decided it was time to take another crack at Bill’s man
ila envelope. He put up some coffee, and while he was waiting cleared the rest of the dining table and tidied up the living room a bit, just enough to reestablish its baseline messiness.

  A dedicated half-hour studying Bill’s documents proved utterly fruitless, and Jason abandoned the effort. Even factoring in the borough presidents, he still couldn’t figure out exactly what they meant. They were definitely records for some sort of payments scheme, but nothing that would prove anything—for all anyone knew they were bowling scores and league dues. He switched to the Times and caught himself stealing a quick look at the first section—scanning the headlines, flipping the pages, and noting the op-eds. Usually it was the part of the paper he discarded immediately. But it was just a glance, and he was happy to get to the sports page. The Mets would still be in last place, but he liked to check and see if they had a better record than the last place team in the western division.

  The phone rang, which was a relatively rare event. If he had any small pets they might have been alarmed.

  “Hey.” It was Adam.

  “Hey.”

  “What’s up?” Suddenly Adam had discovered the art of small talk.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Listen, did you find that stuff, you know, from the other day?”

  “You mean the secret documents from the dead guy?” Jason felt like screaming out, just to freak Adam out. He didn’t think his phone was tapped.

  “Yeah, I’ve just been looking at them,” he said instead.

  “Really?” Adam sounded genuinely surprised.

  It was Jason’s turn to talk. It’s hard to shake people off with your eyes on the phone, which was one reason Jason found it to be a singularly inefficient form of communication. He let the silence hang in the air.

  “So, uh, anyway,” Adam eventually continued, “I want to see them again. I have some new ideas.”

  “Sure. What’s good for you?”

  “I got to meet some people today,” he said with appropriate vagueness. “How about tonight?”

  “No, I’m seeing Alison tonight,” Jason said, letting her name slip into the conversation to see if Adam would take a nibble at it. “How about tomorrow?”