Luminous Airplanes: A Novel

by Paul La Farge

  The Day of Outrage began as every day in San Francisco did that season, wrapped in a dense white fog that smelled of the ocean. By the time I finished breakfast, though, the air was warm and still. It was spring, but it felt like summer, real summer, as though we’d stolen a day from the world of seasons. I thought it was a good omen, and Alex agreed. We took the bags Josh had told us to pack, with water and chocolate bars and a list of phrases we were supposed to say if we were arrested, a highly improbable contingency. Dolores Park was full of people sunbathing; the tennis courts were full, the soccer field already churned to mud. Two kids were throwing a Frisbee back and forth, leaping in the air, running, catching it between their legs. After all the rain we’d had that winter, the grass shone emerald like a patch of wet Scotland hung out to dry here on the coast. Josh and his friend Todd, the organizer, were in the park already, talking on handheld radios to their distant minions, who, to judge from their voices, were not doing as they should. When Josh ended his conversation, I asked if I could do anything to help. Josh looked at my folded banner and emergency bag with distaste. “Not unless you have a sound system and a truck.” This was at eleven o’clock. The rally began at noon. As the remaining hour passed, the story of what had happened to the truck and the sound system came to light, phrase by angry, garbled phrase. Erin’s bassist Tristan had set off in the wrong direction, toward Berkeley; he got stuck in traffic at the entrance to the Bay Bridge, then the van overheated; it was an old van, it didn’t like to idle. A tow truck was summoned; the van was dragged across the bridge and fixed, provisionally. Now the traffic was on the Berkeley side of the bridge and Tristan was afraid of another breakdown.

  Erin and Star arrived with the literature table, and arranged the pamphlets and flyers published by the various organizations that were sponsoring the rally. We sat on the grass and waited for the crowd to arrive, while Josh and Tristan shouted at each other on their radios, and Todd called people who might own microphones and speakers. I lay back and closed my eyes. No speakers had arrived by noon, but on the other hand no spectators had arrived either. The sound system was back on the Bay Bridge, but now there was an accident on the bridge and nothing was moving. Alex and I drank beer and talked about Stanford.

  “Did you know that Schönhoff used to be a Jesuit?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you know he was defrocked?”

  “No.”

  “Absolutely. He slept with a seminarian.”

  “Is that a defrockable offense?” And so on.

  One o’clock, one-thirty. Todd and Josh conferred on the stage. A small crowd had gathered, drawn by the illusion that something was about to happen.

  “OK,” Josh announced, “we’re going to go ahead without the sound system.”

  “How is anyone going to hear us?” Erin asked. She had agreed to sing, and Tristan would in theory accompany her on the guitar.

  Todd took one of the posters and rolled it into a tube. “Hello,” he said into the tube. “Can you hear me?”

  Three or four people sitting in front of the stage nodded yes.

  “Welcome to the Day of Outrage,” Todd said. “I’m glad you could join us. Now let’s talk about what this is all about.”

  No one was listening. This is a fiasco, I thought, and worse, it was just like every other protest I had ever been to. How could I have believed that it would be otherwise? I opened another beer.

  “OK,” Todd shouted, “we’re going to have some music now. Sing us something, Erin!”

  “No way!” Erin shouted from the literature table.

  “You promised!”

  “I promised when there was a microphone.”

  “Whose fault is it there’s no microphone?” Todd yelled through the rolled-up poster.

  “What do you mean, whose fault?”

  “Why did your bassist go to fucking Berkeley?”

  “I don’t know, Todd. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Because he’s apparently switched off his fucking radio!”

  Josh and I went to buy more beer, and came back with a fifth of Jameson, which induced a slight wobble in the rotation of the earth, a periodic dip, like cardiac arrhythmia. At some point Todd called to me to talk about Swan. I stood on the stage, overlooking the crowd, which, at this point, consisted of Erin, Star and Star’s knitting friends. The makeshift megaphone was wet with spit, but I didn’t mind, I pressed it to my mouth and spoke about Swan’s plan to bring vegetarianism and the love of animals to San Francisco. I spoke about Saint Francis of Assisi and some aspects of his biography known only to a few enlightened souls, and how important it was to know these stories, the stories that only a saint could tell you. Then I said, “Holy shit, there he is.” There he was, all right, twelve feet tall, colorful and impassive as a god, wobbling down the hill toward me at the head of a line of like-sized deities, coming down the hill in silence. “Motherfucking puppets,” I called into the megaphone. “You’re just a bunch of mother-fucking puppets!”

  There would be no procession. We finished the whiskey and used the banners to sit on. The puppets lay on the grass like passed-out revelers, their arms splayed and their faces turned to the sky. Now and then people who had heard about the Day of Outrage showed up, and we yelled at them to sit and drink with us. Some of them did, and as the sun went down our numbers grew, until there were thirty or forty people gathered in front of the empty stage. We had failed utterly to organize a protest, but something else was happening, something remarkable. Strangers were speaking to one another. Alex knelt by Erin, picking blades of grass and tossing them over his shoulder. Star was talking to Neil. I lay on the ground, my ear to the earth. This was good, this was very good. People were joining with one another. Even more than a protest, this was what we needed, for everyone to be joined together by many threads, we needed each person to be entirely surrounded by people, because we had seen what happened when you were at the edge of the crowd, like Swan and Mr. Babylob, you could be plucked from the world at any moment, you could vanish. By this measure the day was a success. We were bound to one another now; we could not disappear. We would remain in this place forever.

  The sun went down; the dog people called their dogs homeward. Tristan appeared just after sunset, his hands and face streaked black with motor oil. He looked at our little drunk crowd and howled, Bastards, you bastards, but it was no use, Todd tackled him and forced him to roll through the grass until he was happy. “We’ve at least got to set the fucking thing up,” Tristan said, so we ran to the truck, which was parked illegally between palm islands on Dolores Street, and hauled speakers and cables from the back. Tristan and Todd carried a generator between them, and Erin danced around them, plugging things together while there was still light to see by. The generator roared like a failing car; we had power. Erin sang a song about being so much in love that she wanted to kill us all, then someone hooked up a portable CD player and put on one of Pearl Fabula’s mixes. I pulled Star to her feet and we staggered toward the speakers. You could hardly call what we did then dancing. It was pure autonomous motion. I held on to Star’s hand, because I was afraid if we were separated in that darkness we would never find each other again. If no one held my hand I might become one of the unattached people, one of the people who could be made to die. We staggered back and forth; someone elbowed me in the stomach; I tried to kiss Erin but bit her eyebrow instead. The music got louder, its beats and bleeps building toward something utterly magnificent, a universal binding together of all of us, and as it reached the peak of its intensity blue and white lights came on, flashing, making a real club of the stage. Our hands rose joyously into the air. For a moment it seemed as though we had succeeded in doing that impossible thing, we had made a complete, real, other world, then someone shouted, “Police!” and people were running, falling, getting up and running again. The music stopped. Tristan and Erin and Josh grabbed parts of the sound system, which were, unfortunately, still cabled together. The wires got caught on a tree and
they dropped the speakers and ran. I looked for the bag that contained my instructions in case I was arrested, but it was too dark to find an object that size in the disorder of empty bottles and banners, leaflets and posters. Neil was shouting, “Save the puppets! Save the puppets!” so I picked up a puppet, it was massive and difficult to maneuver, and stumbled down the hill, across the soccer field, toward the tennis courts. I was a giant, my shadow enormous in the tennis-court lights. I ran into the street, around the corner, this giant head waving above me like a flag, a totem, a burden. When I had gone far enough and no one was following me, I stopped. Only then did I look up to see whose head I was carrying: Swan’s. Thus the Day of Outrage ended.

  SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS

  Three months later, I dropped out of Stanford. There was no obvious reason why I left: my dissertation topic had been approved; all I had to do was write it. But after the Day of Outrage my heart no longer pointed in that direction. I struggled all summer long with the first chapter of The Great Disappointment: Progress and Apocalypse in a Michigan Millerite Community, and in September I sent a letter to my department chair, informing him that I would not be returning to the program.

  “You moron!” Alex cried, when I told him what I’d done. “Go down to school right now and take that letter back.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t believe in history anymore.” I hadn’t realized that it was true until I said it. But actually I was angry at history, I hated history. It was good for nothing. Could history make Swan come back? Could it change anything about the city where I lived?

  “So?” Alex said. “What does that even mean, you don’t believe in history? How is that not a historical statement?”

  “I think it’s useless,” I said.

  Alex sniffed. “Baby, if you were looking for useful, you should have become a doctor.”

  “Well, I don’t want to do it. If I’m going to do something I don’t care about, I want to get paid for it.”

  We kept arguing, but Alex didn’t change my mind. Finally he said, “Do what you want, but don’t come crying to me when you’re peddling your ass on Polk Street.”

  In another city, or another decade, he might have been right to worry, but this was San Francisco in 1997 and the Internet caught my fall. I mailed my letter to Stanford on a Wednesday, and the next Monday I was temping for Cetacean Solutions, LLC, and laughing at their motto, “We Go Deep.” A few weeks later I let slip that I’d once written a BASIC implementation of Adventure, and my boss, Mac, urged me to get back into programming. I learned Java and C++ easily, and at that point Cetacean hired me and I was issued a key to the Fun Room.

  If I had been thinking about it, I would have realized that my facility for programming was proof that the past mattered. In some significant if cryptic way I was picking up where I had left off when I was expelled from Nederland, as if everything I’d done since then was merely a detour or, as Swan might have called it, a long strange trip. But I wasn’t thinking about it; I didn’t want to think about it. I was happy to work long hours at Cetacean, managing other people’s content, about which I knew nothing and cared not at all. On weekends I went dancing with Erin and Star and Josh. We took Ecstasy and promised to love one another forever, then, at a party in Oakland, I met a woman in a white fur coat. “What’s your name?” she asked. I told her I wasn’t sure, I had names for various occasions, names that revealed my essential self to greater or lesser degrees, this was, for me, the problem with Ecstasy, I was filled with love for those around me, but love, in my case, took the form of complex sentences, each of which had to be uttered with great care, because I loved the concepts they articulated almost as much as I loved the people I was saying them to, or maybe just as much, I had to think about it, and so, when I was rolling, I did nothing but talk, talk, talk. The woman in the white fur coat accepted my explanation. “I’m Alice,” she said. It was deliciously simple. By the end of the night, my head was in her lap, and I had told her no fewer than three times that I loved her. Oddly, she seemed to believe me. And more oddly still, after the drugs had worn off, after the sun had come up and it turned out that we had been in a courtyard all night, and not, as I had supposed, a vessel hurtling through interstellar space, I believed it myself. I was happy, although in retrospect it seems to me that I was already becoming a ghost.

  REGENZEIT

  By the time I finished my story—obviously I didn’t say everything I’ve written here, only the gist of it, and I left Alice out completely—it was after midnight and the tea had grown cold in our cups. Yesim was looking at me with affection and sadness.

  “Swan never came back?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You should look again,” she said firmly. “You never know, he might turn up.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me that Yesim might take the story practically: not as an account of delusion or moral weakness or spiritual collapse, but as a problem that could be solved. But of course she was right, I had barely looked for Swan. It was possible that he was alive somewhere, and that he could be found.

  “Where would you look?” I asked.

  Yesim smiled. “One thing at a time. First let’s finish with your grandparents’ things, then we’ll find your friend.” She stood up. “Now it’s late.”

  For a moment Yesim’s face hovered happily beneath mine. I leaned down to kiss her and she stepped away. “I can’t do that,” she said.

  “Because you might lose Mark?”

  “Because I might lose everything.” Yesim hesitated. Then she said, “Good night!” and went out to her car, to drive the fifty feet to her house.

  It was only a matter of time before she changed her mind, I thought. I didn’t believe sex was really her problem; what was so terrible about sex? I knew people in San Francisco who’d slept with far more people than Yesim had, and they were fine. They were sex-positive, they went to sex clubs, it was no big deal. By day they sat in cubicles like everyone else. If I could just convince her that I wasn’t going to hurt her, that I wanted her to be happy and free, like, as my yoga teacher said, all beings everywhere, if I could only convince Yesim that I loved her, sooner or later she’d fall into my harmless arms.

  But I was wrong, possibly in my diagnosis, certainly about what would happen next. Two days after she’d tried it on, Yesim brought back my grandmother’s dress, its seam invisibly fixed, in a dry cleaner’s bag. I asked if she wanted to come in, and she said, “I can’t see you now.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Please, don’t ask any questions,” she said.

  “Is it something I did?”

  “Just be patient. I’ll tell you when I can. OK?”

  “OK,” I said.

  The next night her car didn’t come home. Surprise! The good part is over. That’s why they call it a part.

  LOST THINGS

  I didn’t have the courage to pursue Yesim, but I couldn’t let her go either. I drove to Snowbird, pulled into the parking lot, then turned around and drove away. I dialed her number but hung up before it rang. I stopped by the organic grocery in the morning, and ended up becoming friends with the girl who worked there, Carrie. She’d grown up in the valley; her parents had a farm out past Maplecrest. Her uncle owned the grocery. Yesim didn’t appear. And she kept not appearing, through a week of blue fall days, as the leaves in the valley lit up, and the ones on the mountaintops fell, and lines of smoke rose up from the hillside like strings connecting the earth to the sky.

  I sat in my grandparents’ kitchen, looking across at the Regenzeits’ house. Kerem came and went uselessly, but not his sister. Where was she? I imagined Yesim in Mark’s strong former-construction-worker arms. I imagined her with Dr. Y, with Professor X, and at this point I began what I can only describe as an advanced degree in masturbation. Alone in my grandparents’ house, I wrote a thesis in the bowl of the downstairs toilet, and my subject was Yesim. If it was a little theoretical—w
ell, so are many dissertations. Its footnotes said everything there was to say about her feet, and its endnotes got to the bottom of her rear; the curls of her hair tangled in the index, on the title page I put her eyes and her mouth took the place of my name. I submitted my Yesim to the committee on Yesim in partial fulfillment of my need for Yesim; I submitted and submitted.

  Then one night she came home and that was even worse. To watch her walk across the kitchen, take pins from her hair and make tea, to watch her pick up the phone and not to hear my phone ring; to watch her speak and hear nothing. Given that I’d never had Yesim, it shouldn’t have been so bad to lose her, but in fact it was worse to lose her that way. I kept wanting to call her, to run across to the Regenzeits’ house and pound on the front door, to throw myself at Yesim’s feet and ask her to take me back, but I was keenly aware that she couldn’t take me back, she had never taken me in the first place, unless you counted the things we did when we were ten years old, or that night in Kerem’s study. I had no standing, as a lawyer might say, to plead before her. I was just a childhood friend with a house full of junk and a collection of unbearably vivid images of what might have been.