Luminous Airplanes (18 page)
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.
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.
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.
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.
part.
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—well, 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.
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.
Finally, in desperation, I went back to cleaning out the house. I finished my grandparents’ bedroom and started on the attic. I hoped there would be some treasure hidden there—a painting by Thomas Cole, a secret diary kept by one of my ancestors—but finding treasure in your grandparents’ attic turns out to be something that happens only in novels and on TV. What I found were cardboard boxes of sweaters, a trunk with a missing hinge, extra leaves for tables that had long since vanished, mattress frames, box springs, empty dressers and cracked leather shoes. I slept; I woke; I packed; I slept again. I carried skis and tennis rackets down to the garage, and a box of dolls that must have belonged to the Celestes, curiously unlifelike in their stiff smocks, with their big, blinking eyes. When did dolls first have movable eyelids, I wondered, it must have been in the nineteenth century, when realism was in vogue and the simulation of domestic life was the business of novelists and playwrights and even husbands and wives, all of them concerned with getting the details right, from wedding banns to mourning crepe, and what game would have been more in keeping with the Victorian spirit than to make dolls sleep? But what about peeing dolls? Not a nineteenth-century invention, I thought. For realism that extended below the waist you had to wait for Freud. And then also plastic. Sometime after the Second World War, probably, you got peeing dolls, doll diapers, doll messes, Henry Miller, the apogee of scientific psychoanalysis, Nabokov. I put the dolls with the things to sell or give away, guessing that some child might be interested in them, if the fashion in dolls hadn’t moved on to catch a new facet of the human experience: dolls who threw up, mentally ill dolls, dolls who grew old and hung on.
For the first time, I wondered who would receive what we were giving. A family of refugees, washed up on the American shore with nothing, maybe, or else a family whose belongings had been lost in a fire, although in either case, I reflected, looking over the great heap of Rowland junk, it would have to be a family with some unusual hobbies, or one that wasn’t particular about what it owned. I called Goodwill and the Salvation Army, and left them messages describing the situation. I watched game shows on television, then dramas, then the news, which told us that a group of African-Americans in Minneapolis were building a space ark. They showed pictures of the ark; it looked like a big silver egg studded with colored lights, a Fabergé egg that could seat up to a hundred people. The TV reporter asked how it was going to fly, and the spokesperson for the ark project, a light-skinned black woman, said it wasn’t going to fly, it would be picked up. “By whom?” the TV reporter asked, and the spokesperson said, “You will know them by their craft,” a phrase that’s stayed with me ever since. Still no word from Yesim.
I finished the attic and started on the study. The small room, with its single window that faced our other neighbors, the Karmans, was the place where my grandfather’s presence could still be felt the most strongly, and for this reason I had avoided disturbing it. It was as though Oliver continued to exist as long as his clutter occupied the space he had given it. When all the signs of his life were packed away, then he would truly be dead. Now I wanted that moment to come quickly. I threw away catalogs from building-supply companies, letters telling my grandfather that the Republican Party needed his help because the Democrats were up to unspeakable mischief, letters from a foundation that worked to reunite missing children with their parents, the kind of mail that old people get from organizations that prey on their absentmindedness and goodwill, each letter annotated by my grandfather,
Can this be true?
and
Free calendar!
I threw away the book of word-search puzzles in which he had marked unfinished puzzles with Post-it notes. All At Sea, Creatures of the Night, Roman Holiday.
Can this be true?
and
Free calendar!
I threw away the book of word-search puzzles in which he had marked unfinished puzzles with Post-it notes. All At Sea, Creatures of the Night, Roman Holiday.
By morning the drawers of my grandfather’s desk were empty. The closet was robbed of its wealth of original packaging, hard styrofoam pillows that fit the contours of long-gone machines. The bookshelf had surrendered its helpful volumes,
Bargain Your Way to a Better Life
,
How to Be a Nice Guy … and Still Win
,
How to Make Time for Everything
, to boxes with DONATE written on their sides, and now the bookshelf itself was labeled for donation. Maybe someone would take boxes and bookshelf alike, set them up in another study, and learn from them what they had been unable to teach my grandfather. More likely the books would be pulped. They would dissolve in a slurry of acids, fall fiber from fiber, until not a word of their advice remained, then they would be put together again in a new shape, cradling white, unbroken eggs. The floor lamp was gone, the set of five-pound weights was gone, the boxes of Christmas cards, which contained far more envelopes than cards, suggesting that my grandfather had written several drafts of each card he sent, was gone, although one box had a few cards in it, with pictures of a Japanese fishing boat and a fisherman waiting before a wave that was about to break.
Bargain Your Way to a Better Life
,
How to Be a Nice Guy … and Still Win
,
How to Make Time for Everything
, to boxes with DONATE written on their sides, and now the bookshelf itself was labeled for donation. Maybe someone would take boxes and bookshelf alike, set them up in another study, and learn from them what they had been unable to teach my grandfather. More likely the books would be pulped. They would dissolve in a slurry of acids, fall fiber from fiber, until not a word of their advice remained, then they would be put together again in a new shape, cradling white, unbroken eggs. The floor lamp was gone, the set of five-pound weights was gone, the boxes of Christmas cards, which contained far more envelopes than cards, suggesting that my grandfather had written several drafts of each card he sent, was gone, although one box had a few cards in it, with pictures of a Japanese fishing boat and a fisherman waiting before a wave that was about to break.
All that remained were the dozens of thick folders related to
Rowland v. Snowbird.
They contained articles from law reviews and scientific journals, newspaper stories about snow-related accidents, photographs of cars and houses half-buried in snow. I felt a little thrill when I found the original complaint, with Richard Ente, Esq., listed as counsel for the plaintiffs. The facts were more or less as I remembered them from the research I’d done years ago: in October 1966 there was a big snowstorm in the valley. Sixty-two inches of snow fell in a forty-hour period, a white deluge that left Thebes submerged for days. Trees and power lines came down; cars went off the road. There were slips and falls, accidents of all kinds. And this was just after Joe Regenzeit had begun seeding the clouds—he’d even boasted about Snowbird’s “scientifically augmented snow” in an ad. It looked awfully like his cloud seeding had worked, and Oliver, along with a dozen other Thebans, set out to make him pay for it.
Rowland v. Snowbird.
They contained articles from law reviews and scientific journals, newspaper stories about snow-related accidents, photographs of cars and houses half-buried in snow. I felt a little thrill when I found the original complaint, with Richard Ente, Esq., listed as counsel for the plaintiffs. The facts were more or less as I remembered them from the research I’d done years ago: in October 1966 there was a big snowstorm in the valley. Sixty-two inches of snow fell in a forty-hour period, a white deluge that left Thebes submerged for days. Trees and power lines came down; cars went off the road. There were slips and falls, accidents of all kinds. And this was just after Joe Regenzeit had begun seeding the clouds—he’d even boasted about Snowbird’s “scientifically augmented snow” in an ad. It looked awfully like his cloud seeding had worked, and Oliver, along with a dozen other Thebans, set out to make him pay for it.
Seen close-up, some of Richard Ente’s arguments were far-fetched: could you sue someone for trespass because his snow fell on your land? If a storm knocked down power lines, was that theft of electricity? But there were masses of documents to support these claims. The files held analyses of the wind patterns in the valley, charts showing the seasonal fluctuation of temperature and precipitation in the area, affidavits from people who had seen the clouds change as the cloud-seeding plane flew through them, medical records of people who had slipped and hurt themselves. Then there were the counterassertions, doctors who admitted in deposition that their patients had been off-balance for years, meteorologists who pointed out that winter weather in the mountains was wildly variable. Had Regenzeit really made it snow? Had the snow hurt anyone? Behind or beyond these questions of fact were the questions of law. Did Joe Regenzeit have the right to seed the clouds that passed over Snowbird, and, if so, was he responsible for them when they passed over someone else’s land? Where did Regenzeit’s interest end, where did the public interest begin? Who owned the clouds?
I thought of Victor and MySky, which was making headlines with its
weather mill
, its promise of renewable energy from medium-altitude wind layers. When Victor told me what MySky did, I’d laughed at him; it wasn’t until I began to read about his company in the papers that I wondered if his engineer friends could really do what he said they could. Now they had
weather farms
in the Sierras where they were testing their technology, and protesters were gathering at their gates. What a strange world it was, I thought, where these dreams kept coming back. Human beings had been trying to harness the clouds forever, and no one had really managed to do it, but we didn’t stop trying. It was just like with the airplane, thousands of years of total failure didn’t deter us. And maybe MySky would get it right. Would the human race be better off if its weather mill worked? By any reasonable standard the answer was yes, clean low-cost renewable energy would make the world a better place to live, but a perverse part of me resisted this answer. For reasons I couldn’t articulate—maybe I was just jealous of Victor, who used to be a graduate student like me, and was now so rich—I wanted MySky to lose. I wanted humans not to control everything. I felt a wave of unexpected sympathy for my father, who had fought Joe Regenzeit with every legal argument he could think of. Why did he run away, I wondered, not for the first time, and just then, as if in answer to my question, I came to a thin folder labeled
Richard Ente, Esq.
weather mill
, its promise of renewable energy from medium-altitude wind layers. When Victor told me what MySky did, I’d laughed at him; it wasn’t until I began to read about his company in the papers that I wondered if his engineer friends could really do what he said they could. Now they had
weather farms
in the Sierras where they were testing their technology, and protesters were gathering at their gates. What a strange world it was, I thought, where these dreams kept coming back. Human beings had been trying to harness the clouds forever, and no one had really managed to do it, but we didn’t stop trying. It was just like with the airplane, thousands of years of total failure didn’t deter us. And maybe MySky would get it right. Would the human race be better off if its weather mill worked? By any reasonable standard the answer was yes, clean low-cost renewable energy would make the world a better place to live, but a perverse part of me resisted this answer. For reasons I couldn’t articulate—maybe I was just jealous of Victor, who used to be a graduate student like me, and was now so rich—I wanted MySky to lose. I wanted humans not to control everything. I felt a wave of unexpected sympathy for my father, who had fought Joe Regenzeit with every legal argument he could think of. Why did he run away, I wondered, not for the first time, and just then, as if in answer to my question, I came to a thin folder labeled
Richard Ente, Esq.
I pressed my forehead to the cardboard in the hope that its contents might pass directly into my mind. But no, I had to open the file, to leaf through onionskin invoices for $100, $200, $500. Richard might have been cheaper than other lawyers, but he wasn’t cheap. There were bills from the months before the trial: $400 for an unspecified meeting, $212 for “initiation fees,” $675 for research. Where was Richard going, what was he doing? The last bill was for $3,000, trial prep, but it wasn’t the last document in the folder. That was in an envelope, addressed to my grandfather in a big, spiky hand I’d never seen before. My father’s hand. The letter was postmarked Denver, and it had been mailed in May 1970, about three months before my father died.
Dear Oliver,
You opened the letter. That’s a good start. Now be brave and don’t chuck it until you’ve read everything I have to say. First of all, forget about the lawsuit. You must know by now it couldn’t have gone any other way. Little money loses to big money every time in America, and even with a lot more money you wouldn’t have got what you wanted. The only way to beat the Regenzeits is to kick em in the nuts, I told you that. Now you know. And if you’ve really been thinking, you know the Turks are the ones who will lose in the end. You can twist Mother Nature but She springs back every time and woe to the one who bent her then. If it hasn’t happened yet it will soon, and you’ll be there to say you told them so. OK, now the tough part. Are you ready? Oliver, you may choose to be my enemy, and if you do, God knows you won’t be the first. Plenty of people have hated me for my faults—and believe me, I know what they are, I know them like a high-diver knows his pool—as if they had never in their own lives made a mistake. I don’t know if you can be bigger than that, I don’t even know if I have the right to ask you to be bigger, seeing how small I can be myself. But if you can, Ollie, if you see what I see, that we’re all creatures of more or less the same species dancing around on this planet for only an eyeblink and then forever gone, sans money, sans folks, sans everything, then maybe you’ll be able to do what I’m going to ask you to do now. I’m enclosing a letter for Marie. I want you to pass it on to her—give it to her if she’s at home, or else send it to her wherever she lives. For gods sake don’t read it. I can’t explain all the reasons why it’s important for you to do this, but I’ll tell you that in the last three months I have walked through hell on foot—literally, Ol, you should see my feet, what calluses, what cracks—and if she doesn’t get the letter I will have made the trip for nothing. And I don’t have the strength to walk back home.
I wonder if you’d know me if you saw me now? I’ve gone so far into my head these last few months, I’m as faint as a memory. I haven’t cast out my demon but I’ve got the bastard’s throat between my hands. And I’m squeezing. I’m asking you for help, Oliver, not just for my sake or even for the sake of Marie and her sister, but for your own sake. I know you won’t want to hear this, but you’ve got to see what big plants your daughters are, and how you’ve tried to choke them, to keep them from the light—it’s not just you, of course, but the whole system of socialization that came over in the Puritan ships—we’ve got to disentangle ourselves from it if we’re ever to be happy. Happiness is love. Love is freedom. OK, but enough Richard Ente–izing. I trust you to do the right thing. I can’t tell you how much depends on it.
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