Contraband

by George Foy

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ‘Spaceflights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own self.’

  Carl Jung

  A faithful thunder filled all spectra between hearing and touch.

  The world trembled – not constantly, not even hard, in fact with the softest of hiccoughs and corrections – but it trembled enough to remind you the planet was no static thing, that even daisies had an energy budget, and a need to blow it off at times.

  The pilot’s eyes snapped open and encountered:

  A narrow aluminum bunk bed above his head, its robin’s-egg blue paint chipped and scarred;

  Blankets tumbled over his body, the edges of a thin mattress visible to one side;

  A torn curtain to his right, with a bent aluminum ladder showing through the rip;

  A chrome air vent, hanging by one screw;

  A blue canvas screen, zippered shut in the curved, scratched aluminum wall by his left arm.

  God’s box lay at the foot of his bunk. A very soft, thin rumbling rose out of the box as the rodent snored.

  The pilot rolled over to open the screen and found a small brass padlock holding the zipper shut. Bright sun dappled the canvas from behind.

  He rolled out of the bunk in panic. He had absolutely no idea where he was. No horizon; no points of reference. No knowledge of altitude. Flotsam and jetsam of flying dreams (thud of landing, stench of avgas). The fever had broken – he had that strange tinted clarity of vision he’d gotten after he licked the Chingado infection, as if he were looking through a pair of expensive spectacles only lightly colored with rosewater. Someone had taken off his clothes, his handcuffs, everything but his underpants. He rubbed the pink band on his wrists where the cuffs had been.

  Outside the curtain lay a corridor, maybe two feet wide and not much longer; closed door to his left, sound of running water. Three steps led to a door that was more like the hatch of a boat. He stumbled down the stairs, motion centers still vague, steadying himself against both walls. He became aware of a pain behind his eyes.

  He found a cabin maybe ten feet by twelve, with a row of four square windows on both sides. All of the windows were screened and padlocked. The room had wooden paneling on the walls, and small fruitwood coffee tables. The wood had once been varnished, but years of neglect had left it streaked and gray. Kilim rugs, stained and bald-looking, underlay miniature Bauhaus couches with sprung stuffing. A tight spiral staircase, a miniature white upright piano, a small bar occupied the far corners.

  Behind the bar, the bulkhead was hung thick with nightmare – huge wooden masks whose tongues stuck out. Their eyes were rimmed in red fury. A row of human skulls, cobbled and fashioned into mugs, lurked behind mahogany fiddles.

  Rocketman sat hunched on one of the couches. He wore a faded jumpsuit two sizes too small for him. His left arm was chained and padlocked to a thin steel column.

  The trembling was more pronounced here, the thunder stronger.

  The pilot put a short rein on his panic. He drew a very long, deep breath and went over to Rocketman’s side. He tested the handcuffs, but they were of Chitrali design and only a vampire could have undone the things without a key.

  Rocketman looked up at him. Rocketman looked awful. His face was blurred and mottled, his beard heavy, his eyes red from crying. The fingers of his right hand shook as he lifted a cigarette to his mouth. The pilot felt his own chin; he, too, had enough beard to pull with fingernails.

  The date on his watch said it was a full day after he’d lost consciousness in the khor.

  The thunder altered slightly. Thin cracks of light escaping the shuttered portholes moved slowly, in a ten-degree arc, across the cabin’s opposite wall.

  A sudden, heavy wash of hopelessness flooded his brain. The pilot had no idea where it came from. Maybe it was a residue from whatever drug cocktail they’d been slipped in the khor beneath the great Buddha. Whatever the cause, it was more than simply disorientation. It rushed in like a tide, inward diastole, chasing broken driftwood and dead dreams out on the undertow. Pushing out even the horizon-fear.

  ‘I killed her.’ Rocketman spoke very distinctly, to make himself heard over the thunder.

  The pilot sat on the couch beside him and put an arm around his shoulders. A little hole in the bum-out; Rocketman was talking, at least.

  ‘Why you still cuffed, Rocketman?’

  ‘I tried to get out of here. I wanted to go back. I tried to break through a door.’

  This is an airplane, man!’

  ‘I know that – now.’

  The pilot had known it in his gut since before he woke up, but he had never before been in a mood that the magic of flight and the knowledge of speed could not attenuate, and so had suppressed the fact.

  ‘You didn’t kill her,’ he went on, trying to bypass the dread of his realization.

  ‘She was so beautiful.’

  ‘I bet Zayid Shah was bluffing.’

  ‘That bastard! No. He wasn’t bluffing. I could tell.’

  ‘You didn’t sleep with her. He wouldn’t do anything.’

  ‘He would.’

  ‘He would not.’

  The pilot rose and walked around, testing all the window screens. Their canvas was thick and tough and reinforced by aluminum battens; he would need his switchblade to get through them. But his switchblade was in Chitral.

  ‘You have any idea where we are?’

  Rocketman shook his head.

  ‘Who cuffed you?’

  ‘Coupla guys.’ He shrugged.

  Ela came down the steps from the sleeping area. Her hair was wet; it splayed around the back of her neck like a lavender-blonde paintbrush. She wore an old jumpsuit, patched and oil-stained like Rocketman’s, only hers was so big she’d had to roll up the cuffs and pantlegs. She was toweling her face. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes calm. She looked like someone who knew exactly what she was doing and where she was headed.

  ‘That’s the cutest shower,’ she told the pilot. ‘You should try it, you stink.’ She wrinkled her nose at his shorts.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ the pilot asked her.

  ‘Not a clue,’ she answered, ‘but I don’t think it matters much.’ And hearing her voice the pilot’s guts flopped around like a caught flounder giving a last defiant slap of its tail on the sun-baked deck. She was separate from him already, leaving the warmth in him to flow by itself, brave and foolish in the dark.

  Marco appeared, climbing the spiral staircase, prodded by a short man in blue jeans and a T-shirt. The short man’s face was black – not American black, not café-au-lait like Rocketman, but black as no-light, dark as four-a.m. dreams. He had about three teeth, all filed down to sharp yellow points, and a huge afro. His eyes were intense, his nose very straight. He was maybe eighteen years old.

  The T-shirt read, ‘John Frum Is Coming.’ A large Army-issue Colt pistol distended the back pocket of his jeans.

  Marco turned to glare at his escort. ‘Ma che succede,’ he yelled, ‘what is going on, where is this house, what happens to me?’

  ‘Drugs,’ Ela said succinctly. ‘LSD, probably.’

  The short man clapped his hands together. ‘Conference,’ he announced in good American English. ‘Everybody’s coming to a palaver! You,’ he pointed at the pilot, ‘you should put on some duds. There’s a groovy jumpsuit in your cabin. Dig?’

  ‘No, I don’t dig,’ the pilot told him. ‘I’m not putting on clothes. Not till somebody tells us where we are, and what altitude we’re at, and opens some portholes for the love of Mike!’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ the short man said. He pulled out his .45 with one hand. ‘This isn’t one of your fancy-ass high-altitude Boeings. I could plug you, and the bullet would go right through the fuselage, and all that would happen is, you eighty-six, and the rest of us, we’d get a little cold.’ He unlocked Rocketman’s cuff with his other hand and sheepdogged them all
down the staircase.

  The lower-deck saloon was the same compact size as the smoking saloon, only narrower at the staircase end. Its walls were of cherrywood veneer inlaid with art deco designs. A large table of the same wood took up half the space. As they reached table level an elderly bald man in jeans and a flying jacket came through a door at the narrow end, followed by a broad white-bearded figure in shalwar kameez and a Chitrali cap.

  The pilot had never seen the bald man before.

  The second man was Abd el Haq.

  The pilot caught a glimpse of a long cavernous cargo bay behind the door; in the dim emergency lighting he saw stacks of metal ammunition boxes with cyrillic stencils and BM-40 mortars and the long black fiberglass boxes he’d noticed on the caravan, all tightly lashed down with cargo netting. He could also make out the distinctive housing and hydraulic lines of Dornier-Akai amphibious landing gear, the same kind he’d had in his Citation. He felt a stab of homesickness, for his plane, for clearer times.

  Abd el Haq laughed in lieu of speaking. Then he caught sight of Ela, and his eyes darkened and briefly took on an odd tint, as of madness, or indigestion.

  Ela looked at him defiantly, well aware of her nakedness from the perspective of an older Islam.

  ‘He din wanna wear duds, Cap’n Hubbard,’ the short man said.

  ‘He can wear what he likes,’ the bald codger replied.

  ‘I’m not wearing anything,’ the pilot said, ‘’till someone tells me what’s going on here.’

  ‘That’s what the conference is about,’ the bald man said.

  ‘What you wanna drink?’ the short man asked.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ Ela told the pilot. The calmness lay like spread butter over her voice. ‘Drugs. Sextants. It’s my father behind this. Why are you looking at me,’ she said to Abd el Haq. ‘If he doesn’t want to wear clothes’ – pointing at the pilot – ‘I don’t have to wear a veil.’

  ‘What do you want to drink!’ the short man yelled at the pilot.

  ‘Are you flying this crate?’ the pilot asked the bald man. ‘What kind of plane is this? And where are we going?’

  ‘I’d tell him what you want to drink,’ the bald codger advised, pointing at the short man. ‘He learned English driving cabs in New York, but his father hunted human heads.’

  ‘Good training,’ the pilot remarked, ‘for driving cabs in New York.’

  ‘English?’

  ‘No. Headhunting. I’ll have a vodka,’ the pilot continued, ‘double.’ The short man nodded, and trotted up the spiral steps to the bar.

  ‘The answers to your questions,’ the bald man continued, ‘are, yes, a Shorts Empire-Class 26-G Flying Boat, and it doesn’t matter, respectively.’

  The pilot stared at the bald man.

  ‘A Flying Boat? Empire Class? The one with the Hercules IVs, 1380 rated horsepower?’

  The bald man nodded.

  ‘That’s crazy. They don’t exist anymore.’

  ‘This one does.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘We found it on Nui, in the Ellice Islands.’ The bald man smiled. ‘The headmen were renting it as a floating bordello. But someone had kept the engines greased.’

  ‘I want to see the person who ees in charge,’ Marco insisted. ‘I am friend with the minister.’

  Everyone ignored him.

  A round Chinese man came out of the paneling with a platter full of cocktail dumplings. The short headhunter came over with a tray of drinks and peanuts. The liquor was served in the skulls, which had their tops sawn off and a tin lining fitted inside. But the pilot was not interested. He picked up his plate of dumplings and dashed them violently to the deck.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he shouted furiously.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the bald man said.

  ‘Dee voyage,’ Abd el Haq intoned in a horrendously thick accent ‘ees dee des-tee-nation.’ He laughed uproariously at his own accent.

  ‘I tole you,’ Ela said, looking dubiously at her dumplings. ‘We’re going to see Hawkley. Are these full of Orange Sunshine,’ she asked brightly, ‘or is it safe to eat ’em?’

  The bald man told them not to smoke in the head. He asked them to be patient, and offered to take away Rocketman’s handcuffs permanently if he promised to behave. Rocketman promised.

  Then the bald man disappeared.

  The conference was over.

  ‘Porco Madonna,’ Marco commented, sadly.

  Everyone else including Abd el Haq went up to the smoking saloon. The pilot made a side trip to his cabin to fetch a blanket. The fever was not that far gone and, clad in nothing but underpants, he was getting cold. The blankets were thick and embroidered with the legend ‘Imperial Airways’. He took from his skivvies the butter knife he had filched from the tray of appetizers, and hid it under the mattress. He gave God a dumpling, then brought him back to the smoking cabin to let him run.

  He stretched out on one of the couches and asked the short headhunter for another vodka.

  ‘Make it two,’ Rocketman called from the opposite couch. ‘Make it doubles. I don’t care.’ The booze he’d had during the ‘conference’ was making him morose.

  ‘It’s just the last in a long series,’ he said to the pilot. He felt automatically under the couch for listening devices. ‘Beautiful things that I fuck up. Ya know, my dad used to tell me, right from the start. “You’re going to mess up,” he said. “You’re aiming too high,” he said.’

  The headhunter brought the skulls and dumped them roughly on the coffee table.

  ‘He wanted me to be a teacher, like him,’ Rocketman continued, gloomily sipping the chilled liquor. ‘He was a full professor of history at UCLA – the first brother who held that position. He thought the social sciences were the only thing that would improve mankind – by mankind, he meant Negro people, mostly. He used to say, after the Industrial Revolution it would be the Social Science Revolution. He meant, we could improve humans the way we improve machines. But I wanted to work on rockets . . .

  ‘You know,’ Rocketman continued, ‘once, I almost had him convinced. I was working at White Sands on the Orion Project. You ever heard of that?’

  Ela had found the little piano. She plunked out tunes on the keyboard. Marco stood behind her, pretending to follow the tune, mesmerized by her neck.

  ‘Don’t get no kick from a plane,’ Ela sang. Her voice was sweet, but it was unable to stick to one key. ‘Flyin’ so high, with some guy, in the sky is my idea of – nothin’, to do.’

  ‘The Orion Project,’ Rocketman said. He looked around him, almost dreamily. ‘It was a fantastic plan. To send payloads into orbit with normal boosters, and build a really big ship out there. We were gonna use a series of fusion bombs as propellant. Ten, fifteen astronauts. Go as far as Mars, maybe beyond. Even my dad said it was a project worth doing. For the good of humanity, I guess.’

  Rocketman shook his head. He tapped out a cigarette and lit it, thoughtfully.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They scratched it. The military people wanted something they could use to kill people closer to home. No Mars, no real space flight. Just the moon. We never even left Earth’s orbit! It’s like a curse; everything we touch, dies. And now the curse rubbed off on me.’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘Aaah, I should never have looked at her!’

  ‘I get a kick, every time, I see, you standing there, before me,’ Ela sang.

  ‘Listen, Rocketman.’ The pilot’s voice was urgent. ‘You gotta stop thinking—’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for me—’

  ‘You’re the best thing ever happened to her.’

  ‘I killed her.’ Rocketman looked up in total misery. ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘I get a kick – though it’s plain to see, that you obviously, don’t adore me.’ Ela and Marco tried it out together.

  The pilot glanced in their direction and continued, ‘Because you guys had a feeling together. And that feeling’s one of the best
things that can happen. PC wasn’t wrong, to look so hard for it. I mean, it doesn’t always work, and sometimes it can get downright destructive. But the feeling itself – I mean, it’s pure communication. All frequencies. No blocks. It’s like secret cargo. It’s like you were a smuggler just then, Rocketman – a love-smuggler. Contraband of the heart.’ He downed his drink, slamming the skull on the table so hard its jaws clacked. The piano music had stopped.

  ‘Or look at it from the other side,’ he went on, still watching Ela. ‘Power. It’s the great enemy of the love-smuggler. Power means hoarding, right? Dollars, gold, information, whatever – it’s how you accumulate power. By getting it yourself. By blocking access by others. So power means blocking. So if you want to be a free-trader – no matter what the cargo, Swiss watches, or diamonds or guns, or even a feeling for someone – you’re always gonna run foul of people like Zayid Shah. People who try to hoard the love of others.’

  ‘And never mind who gets hurt in the process,’ Ela said in a voice that was low but so full of torque it seemed to rival the rumble of the Hercules engines. ‘Never mind that Noor Zayid Shah gets stoned to—’

  ‘Shut up,’ the pilot whispered to her fiercely.

  She ignored him. ‘—death. Never mind my mother, spending the rest of her life in a place she hates, with a man she never respected.’ Ela got up from the piano bench and padded over catlike and kneeled on the faded carpet.

  ‘I think I loved you, Joe,’ she told the pilot. ‘For a while. Maybe I still do, in a funny way. But there was always something wrong. And I just figgered out what it is.