Luminous Airplanes: A Novel

by Paul La Farge

  “Did he discover it?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Charles said. “Maybe he did.”

  My father had gone to discover America. It’s just the kind of thing an aging hippie might have said before hitting the road, circa 1970, but to me it had a different force: not that of truth, but that of myth. I stood up, brushed the sand from my legs and dove into the lake, down as far as I could go, beneath the children whose legs hung down like dark branches from the silver overhead.

  Charles’s secret was about to get me into a lot of trouble, but I didn’t know it and in fact I had other things on my mind. A few days after our trip to the lake, I went home to New York and found my mothers changed. Celeste wore a cardigan and pants, like an old man; she’d pulled her hair back into a bun, uncovering the whole of a face that looked more and more like my grandfather’s, big, waxy and serious. Marie, meanwhile, had permed her hair into loose curls, and, what I found even more shocking, wore dark-red lipstick that made her look like a film star from the 1940s.

  “What happened to your lips?” I asked.

  Celeste laughed.

  Marie was working for S now, as an assistant to the Quick Styles editor, and already something of the magazine’s glamour had been transferred to her, in the form of narrow black skirts that she bought from the designers at a discount, and little jars of beauty products which she got for free and arranged on the bathroom sink, where the potions of imaginary powers had once stood guard. In the medicine cabinet, there was a small, round beige plastic case, whose purpose I wouldn’t have been able to guess, except that next to it lay a tube of contraceptive jelly, crinkled at the bottom. A new kind of potion for a new kind of life. Celeste, meanwhile, had given up talking.

  “Did you have a good summer?” I asked her, but it was Marie who answered, “Comme ci, comme ça, you know? Up and down. Celeste hasn’t been working.” Celeste, not work? But she was always working. Something tremendous must have happened while I was away, a reversal of my mothers’ polarity, so that Marie was now leading the way, and Celeste trailed behind.

  I was so puzzled by my mothers that it didn’t occur to me that my perspective on them might have changed also, and I was surprised when Marie asked me at dinner, “What happened to you?”

  “To me?” I squeaked.

  “It looks like you did a lot of growing up this summer.”

  “Not really,” I mumbled. “I was just hanging around.” I was afraid the Celestes would mention the lies I’d told my grandparents, but they never did. Either they didn’t know about them, or they’d dismissed them as nonsense from my grandmother, the unforgiving so-and-so.

  “Hanging around with a girl, I bet,” said Marie.

  “No,” I lied, “just with Kerem.”

  “The Regenzeit boy?” Celeste said. “Hm.”

  “Anyway, you look older,” Marie said. “I like the way you’re doing your hair.” I’d experimented with gel, in imitation of Kerem.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I like your hair, too.”

  “Ha!” said Celeste.

  Marie blushed and touched her curls. “The magazine did it for free.”

  As soon as the meal was over I fled to my room and put on one of the cassettes I’d dubbed from Kerem. After a few minutes Celeste opened my door and stuck her head in.

  “What’s that music?” she asked.

  “Dead Kennedys.”

  “Hm,” said Celeste, and closed my door again.

  It was as though my mothers no longer had any idea what to do with me, as though they were a childless couple taking in an orphan, a child who belonged only to a mystery. I was a mystery, I had been kissed, my father had discovered America, and in this exalted state I began my seventh and final year at—or as I sometimes thought, in—Nederland.

  NEDERLAND

  The Nederland School for Boys was founded by the Dutch a long time ago. How long ago, exactly, was a subject for perpetual inquiry by the school librarian, an enormous shiny man who looked very much like Thomas Nast’s caricatures of Boss Tweed, and who discovered, once or twice a decade, a document that proved the school had been founded at an earlier date than anyone had dared to guess. With due ceremony the year on the school’s coat of arms was changed and the Board of Trustees ordered new letterhead for the staff. Occasionally this led to incongruities, as when Nederland celebrated its 350th and 375th anniversaries only two years apart. My mothers were invited to both galas, and the school’s pretensions became, for a while, one of their favorite jokes. In a few years Nederland would be older than New York, older than the New World, older, probably, than the rock it was built on. I laughed with the Celestes, but with the consciousness of being wronged: they were the ones who had chosen the school for me in the first place. I think they sent me to Nederland because it was close to our apartment, twenty blocks down West End Avenue; also, and more to the point, I started first grade at a happy moment in the seventies when Nederland’s trustees, moved by the protests of some upperclassmen and recent alumni, raised scholarship money for underprivileged students. My mothers were poor but not unsavory, I did well on the entrance exam and the end of the story was that I went to school practically for free, provided that I kept my grades up and posed yearly for a special group photograph.

  My last year there began as every year did, with an assembly in the Great Hall, which was what Nederland called its auditorium, where our principal, Mr. Van Horn, a grim homunculus who might for all we knew have been as old as the school itself, amplified for us on the motto, Recht Maakt Maakt, or Justice Is Our Strength, and on the importance of correct behavior generally. We, clean, chilly and newly awed by the gloom of the Great Hall and the red banners that hung from the ceiling, celebrating NEDERLAND AT 375, behaved correctly for about as long as the assembly lasted, then we were released to our homerooms and began the important business of sizing one another up. Who posed a new threat? Who had something new to offer? The truth was that most of us had been at Nederland since the first grade, and we already knew more or less everything we could expect from one another. We were like characters on a long-running soap opera, who are required to display the same personalities for so long that they stop being personalities at all, and become mere functions, guidelines for the production of dialogue in the style of X or Y. August Waxman, who had been the fastest runner in the third grade, fished for something in his nose; next to him Andrew Ames, honor student, drew insane rabbits in the margins of a blank notebook. David Metzger had finally convinced his parents to let him grow his hair long, like the singer of Def Leppard, whose name I forget but who has certainly not been forgotten by David Metzger, wherever he is now. Ronald Kaplan and Gideon Peel, indistinct, indistinguishable, had spent the summer in the Hamptons and said they’d both got laid. “Right,” sneered John De Luca, who had curly black hairs on the backs of his knuckles, “more like you fucked each other up the ass.” There it was, ass and fuck in the same sentence, a sign that the gloves were once again off. The rituals had all been observed; Mr. Fitch could yell at us to be silent and the year could begin.

  Actually two things marked the year as different from the ones that had come before: we had American history with Mr. Savage, and I discovered Nederland’s computer room. The two strands which, twined each around the other, would occupy the next twenty years of my life, presented themselves almost simultaneously, maybe even on the same day, but at first I understood the importance of only one of them. The computer room was housed in the basement of the New Building, formerly a residential hotel, which the school had purchased in the sixties and renovated in a fantasia of Formica panels and fluorescent lights. The computer room was down there because no one knew, yet, how important computers would be, whether they would spread, like coeducation, or dwindle, like civics and home ec. Still, the trustees had approved the purchase of a magnificent machine, an Alpha Micro with ten terminals and eighty megabytes of storage, which seemed like enough room for all the information in the world, although now you could emulate fiv
e hundred such machines at once on a cheap laptop. There was a dot-matrix printer and a staggering stack of manuals, thousands of pages of instructions, all written in a language that presupposed that you already knew how to do the thing you were trying to learn. As soon as I found my way to that low, stuffy basement, I knew that I wanted to re-create Adventure on a vastly larger scale, a world of words without end. But it was beyond my ability to make even the smallest part of my world appear on the other side of the terminal’s dull glass. I had typed Adventure in from a book, and although I figured out many things about how the program worked in the course of getting it to run, the ideas behind it remained completely mysterious to me. I was like a caveman who had, by dint of banging, repaired an automobile, and now set out to build himself a new car. With a great deal of effort I could make nonworking replicas of some features of the original, a seat, a wheel, a grinding sound, but no matter how well I made these things they wouldn’t add up to a vehicle, or take me anywhere.

  One day I came home late and Celeste, who was home already, told me that I was looking serious, which was the highest compliment she ever paid anyone. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Working on the computer.”

  “Hm,” said Celeste. She mistrusted computers herself and had very little idea how they worked. “Well, it looks like you’re doing it seriously.”

  I threw myself on my bed. I didn’t feel serious, only consumed, exhausted, permanently puzzled. At dinner Celeste asked me questions about programming, which even someone who knew more about it than I did might have found difficult to answer. “How does the computer know what you want?” I tried to explain that it wasn’t about what you wanted, you had to say things just so. “But what if you mean one thing, and the computer means another?” Impossible; all the words in computer language had fixed meanings. “The words, all right, but what about the sentences?” I dodged, I ducked, I grunted Keremishly. I was a caveman, but Celeste refused to believe it. No matter what I said, she nodded gravely and asked another question.

  By the time we came to dessert, even Marie could see that I’d run out of answers, and she tried, out of pity, I think, to change the subject. “You won’t ever guess what happened at the magazine today,” she began, but Celeste interrupted, “Hold on. This computer thing is serious, and I think we should take it seriously.”

  Celeste’s faith in me was steep and sharp. She gave me a book called Algorithmic Programming in Structured BASIC. “For every logical function f,” the preface began, and that was as far as I got. In retrospect it seems clear that Celeste was using me to leapfrog over her sister, who was, she feared, getting ahead of her, her sister whose new clothes she mocked because they were only a fashion uniform, her sister who was making money, her sister who was invited to media events where she made friends with media people, with sheep, with those Ivy League bitches who ran New York. At the time, I knew only that Celeste’s confidence was hard to take, almost as hard as her doubt had been. I wanted to be the person she believed in, but I was constantly afraid she would figure out that I was not that person, I was no kind of programmer, I was a caveman, banging stones together and grunting in something that wasn’t a language yet, not even to me.

  THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

  In class I sat by the window, looked at the sky and thought about my invented world. My teachers were happy to let me go. I was quiet and as long as I did well on their tests and showed no signs of abusing alcohol or drugs, unlike August Waxman, who came to school one day with pupils the width of pencil leads and his shirt buttoned askew, and said, Say what? to every question, no matter how many times you asked it, Mr. Fitch didn’t mind if I slumped forward in my chair, and Mrs. Booth let my unrolled French r pass without comment. Only Mr. Savage, who taught American history, still wanted something from me. “You asleep?” he shouted when I rested my head against the wall. “Wake up, we’re making history here!” He called on me to answer questions, and embarrassed me when I didn’t know the answers, oblivious to the rolling eyes of my classmates, who had seen me embarrassed so many times that they could take only a moderate pleasure from it. Mr. Savage didn’t know this. He was a new teacher who had come to Nederland the year before from a public school in Detroit. He was short and dark, with menacing eyebrows and a five-o’clock shadow that was in full bloom by one-fifteen, and he dressed like a plumber at a funeral. Mr. Savage had made the mistake of telling last year’s American history class that he had a black belt in jujitsu, and could flip someone twice his weight. Now, when he bored us, Ronald Kaplan would raise his hand and ask, “Um, is it hard to learn jujitsu?” And when one of us misbehaved, the others would shout, “Flip him! Flip him!” Mr. Savage was not amused. “Violence is serious,” he said, the first week of American history. “If you learn only one thing this year, it should be that violence is serious.” Violence is serious, I wrote in my notebook; then I stopped listening again.

  “Hey! How’s the weather?” Mr. Savage called to me.

  I opened my eyes. “Partly cloudy.”

  “You think it’s going to rain?”

  I looked at the sky. Low lumpy clouds grazed the spire of the chapel, the black weathervane with a figure of a Dutchman atop it, the school’s emblem. “It might.”

  “No chance,” said Mr. Savage. “Those are stratocumulus clouds. You never get rain from stratocumulus.”

  He continued the lesson as if this checking of the weather were an ordinary event. Gideon Peel looked at me and rolled his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he meant that I was an asshole for not knowing that stratocumulus clouds were not rain-bearing, or that Mr. Savage was crazy for telling me so. I rolled my eyes back and returned to the window.

  Mr. Savage stopped me as I was leaving class. “Why don’t you come with me?” he said. He led me to one of the small rooms, furnished with a coffee warmer, some vinyl chairs and a strong sour smell, where the teachers lived. He asked if I wanted coffee, I said no. “You aren’t paying attention,” said Mr. Savage. “You don’t notice anything. It’s like you’re living on another planet.” How close you are to the truth, I thought. “Are you like this in all your classes?”

  “Yes.” It was the truth, and besides he was a decent person and I didn’t want him to think I found his class any less interesting than the others.

  “What is it? What do you think about?” I wanted to tell him about the game, but it would have been too humiliating to confess that I was consumed by a project I didn’t have any idea how to do and would probably never figure out. The secret of it was all I had; if I told him I would have nothing. “Are you thinking about girls? I could understand that,” Mr. Savage said. “I think it’s terrible that you don’t have girls here. You’re like”—he waved his hand again—“you’re like astronauts, on some space station up in orbit.” He shifted his jacket, which was, I saw, too small for him; in another life he could have been an athlete, or a bouncer. I was afraid that he would pick me up by the lapels of my jacket, lean his stubbled face to mine and whisper threats featuring the word youse, even though there was only one of me. I giggled. “Astronauts, it’s funny, right? But you have to learn how to live on earth.” Mr. Savage struck his knee with his fist. “Help me,” he said. “If there was one thing you wanted to learn, something you really wanted to know, what would it be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anything,” said Mr. Savage. “Just one thing you want to know.”

  I looked at the coffeepot. “Maybe the discovery of America.” It came into my mind because of what Charles had told me.

  “Really?” said Mr. Savage. “Who discovered America?”

  “Columbus or Leif Eriksson,” I said. “We had it in world history last year.”

  “But you’re not convinced, is that right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Good.” Mr. Savage tapped my breastbone with a thick finger. “That’s a good place to begin.”

  The next day, Mr. Savage asked how many of us had read Plato’s Ti
maeus. Not a hand went up. “In that dialogue,” Mr. Savage said, “Critias tells Socrates a story that comes from the priests at Thebes, which is where? Andrew, yes. Egypt. Thebes is the oldest city in Egypt, which is quite possibly the oldest nation in the world. The priests at Thebes told a story which was already thousands of years old, about a land to the west of the western ocean, which they called Atlantis.” He wrote ATLANTIS on the blackboard. “Anyone heard of it?” So we embarked on the discovery of America, the discovery of the discovery of America. Strange facts were coming to light in Mr. Savage’s sixth-period class, stories about seafarers and prevailing winds, about the climate in Greenland and the Gulf Stream, about carved stones and burial mounds. For a week, it couldn’t have been more than a week, we studied the people who might have discovered America, not only the Vikings, but the Phoenicians, the Basques, the Chinese; there was a story that Welshmen had been the first Europeans to arrive in North America, so we learned about that. Mr. Savage spared us nothing, not even the story that the Indians were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the proof of which was that the Jews, like the Indians, once lived in tents, that both races had been known to anoint themselves with oil and that the Indians did not eat pork, or at least some of them didn’t.

  Our textbook had nothing to say on these subjects, so Mr. Savage photocopied the maps drawn by people who had seen much, a little or none of the New World, the fantastic maps that show California as a peninsula the size of all the rest of North America, the maps that stocked the interior with lions, serpents, dragons and gold. “Why gold? Matt, yes. Good, yes, so that people would keep exploring.” We kept exploring. Mr. Savage talked about cannibals, about how each tribe the Europeans met reported that there was another tribe, over there, who ate human flesh. “Anyone want to draw any conclusions? Andrew, yes.”