Luminous Airplanes

Cetacean Solutions, LLC, a provider of content-management solutions (a.k.a. laboriously customized databases) to enterprise clients (a.k.a. businesses), was in a slump. All spring we had been overrun by orders, which we worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day to fill, but in the fourth quarter of 2000 the orders suddenly ceased. Cetacean, which our company’s logo instructed us to picture as a mighty whale diving deep into the ocean, presumably to do battle with the giant squid of unmanaged user content, now seemed less like a whale than like a whaling ship roaming an ocean from which whales had largely vanished. Dave, our captain, sent the sales team to the top of the mizzenmast to scan the water with their telescopes; meanwhile on deck the engineers mended the boats, sharpened the harpoons and polished the brass fittings. Even the maintenance work we did for our existing clients had slowed to almost nothing by August. It was like the middle of Moby-Dick: no whale in sight, only occasional contact with another passing ship, and nothing to fill the time except digression. Our office, a converted Victorian on the eastern flank of Potrero Hill, within sniffing distance of the Anchor Brewery, had a Fun Room in the basement: a brightly carpeted lounge where, in busy times, we rested our brains while playing ping-pong or foosball. Now that there was no work and our days could, in theory, have been all fun, the Fun Room had taken on a new, sinister purpose. Every third or fourth day we assembled there for an all-hands meeting on a different theme: Defining Standards in Code Creation, Measuring the User Experience, Working in the Cloud. Employees with vacation days suddenly experienced a desire to go on vacation; those without them petitioned for unpaid leave. I was hoping that when I came back from the desert meaningful work would be in sight, but on Tuesday morning I found Mac, my boss, looking at boat trailers on the Internet. He didn’t own a car, much less a boat, but there was something about the structure of the boat trailer that interested him, he said, something about the way it suggested absent realities. I asked if there was going to be a meeting.

“Will you look at this thing,” Mac said. “This is for sure a nuclear-sub trailer.”

“What happened to the sub,” I asked, “that it’s for sale?”

He thought about this. “Maybe there are no bridges rated for sub transport.”

We fell together into silent estimation of submarine tonnage vs. bridge loads, then Mac snorted and switched to his e-mail. “All-hands meeting at eleven.”

“What’s the topic?”

“Hydration for Performance,” he read off the screen. “Did you know that twenty percent of human fatigue is caused by improper or insufficient hydration? An optimal fluid-consumption program developed by NASA for long-duration space missions will be presented. But, aren’t astronauts catheterized?”

“Does it matter?”

“Depends.”

I groaned at his pun and went down to the Fun Room to get a free Coke. I twiddled the handles of the foosball machine. Something had to happen, I thought. Any minute the cry would go up from the lookouts and someone would claim the gold doubloon nailed to the mast, but nothing happened, nothing at all. Eventually I heard people coming down the stairs for the performance-hydration meeting, and slipped out the fire exit.

I took my filthy festival clothes to the laundromat, and while they washed I called Alice. The call went straight to voicemail, and I left a message, asking her whether what had happened last night meant that we were on again, whether she wanted to be on again, what being on again might mean. I went across the street and bought an iced coffee, and while I was standing outside the laundromat drinking my coffee, I saw a man in a green Army jacket crossing Seventeenth Street. From the back he looked like Swan, a homeless man who used to distribute leaflets in my neighborhood. For years I saw him every day, handing out his leaflets, or typing them, or feeding the pigeons who were his other chief occupation. He was angry, dirty, taciturn and paranoid, but at the same time he was completely extraordinary. It was as if mysterious powers had put a light house in the Mission, a strange beacon left over from an era when people traveled differently and different things mattered. Like a light house, Swan stood all by himself, marking a place no one else had reached— warning us off, I sometimes thought, and sometimes I thought, inviting us to follow him. Swan disappeared in the winter of 1997. My friends held a rally to protest the city’s policy of driving its homeless citizens from gentrifying neighborhoods like ours, but it didn’t bring Swan back. That was when my life in San Francisco began to feel ghostly. And now, I thought, here he was, as if nothing had happened! “Swan!” I cried, and I ran after him. The old man was quick; I didn’t catch up with him until Church Street. And of course it was someone else. Swan was gone.

I went back to the laundromat and retrieved my clothes from the dryer. I carried the clean clothes back to my apartment, but now my apartment itself looked wrong. The living room contained only a coffee table and an ancient red futon; the dining room had an even older sofa, a TV set, and a white imitation bearskin rug that my ex-housemate Victor had inherited from an uncle in Moscow. When Alice and I were going out, she nagged me to redecorate, but I said I liked my old things. “Your things aren’t old,” she said, “they’re just ugly.” She was right, but I refused to see it. Whenever she pointed out a chair or table or sofa in the window of a store downtown and said, “Why don’t you get one of those?” I objected that it wouldn’t go with the furniture I already had, even though nothing would have gone with my furniture. It was a question of living with it or replacing everything. That afternoon I considered replacing everything; there was a store on Seventeenth and Valencia that catered to people like me, bohemian types who had a little money, and if I had gone there, everything might have turned out differently. The desperation of my heart, the feeling of loss that I still couldn’t connect to my grandfather’s death, all that emotion might have resolved itself in a sofa and loveseat, a leather armchair, a media center made from salvaged pine flooring. I might be in San Francisco now, living with Alice in my redecorated apartment; we might be happy together. But in fact I didn’t have the energy or the will to buy furniture, and here I am in New York, living with a stranger.

I went out for a super vegetarian burrito, came home, opened a beer and took it into my study, which was cluttered with books and papers from the days when I had been a graduate student in history at Stanford, the pre-Cetacean era. Now I didn’t use the study for anything; on the whole it depressed me. I rummaged through the drawers of my fireproof filing cabinet for Swan’s leaflets, hoping that his talk of laser wolves and spirit flight and the Coming of the Great Ghosts would somehow cheer me up, but what I found were the notes for my dissertation. They were the opposite of what I wanted, but I was in that totally exhausted state where you don’t think clearly and your goals and objectives shift around like shadows, leading you from one bad idea to the next. Soon I was leafing through xeroxed microfilms of nineteenth-century newspapers, my annotations squiggling past in the margins like flipbook animations. Was there any use for this stuff, I wondered, or was it just lost time, and not even lost time in the Proustian sense, time that comes surging back to you out of a cup of cooling tea, but time truly squandered, irrecoverable, lost to a kind of academic coma? My head hurt just thinking about it. I left the papers heaped on the desk and went to bed, and the last thing I noticed before I fell asleep was that Robert was playing “Positively 4th Street” upstairs at top volume, and that I didn’t care.

THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT

My dissertation was, or would have been, about the “doom-minded Millerites,” a group of radical Protestants who believed the world would end in 1843. They were named for William Miller, a New York State farmer who had added up the years of the prophecies in the books of Daniel and Revelation, according to a complex and not obviously correct system of his own, and fixed 1843 as the deadline for the apocalypse. Tens of thousands of people were convinced by his calculations, and as the final year approached they prayed and read and danced themselves into a frenzy of anticipated salvation. But the world did not end. Late in the year one of Miller’s disciples added up the numbers again, and concluded that the world would end on October 22, 1844. On that day, somewhere between fifty thousand and half a million Millerites gathered in churches, on hilltops and in cemeteries. They sang; they prayed; they waited. Nothing happened. Eventually they returned home to sleep.

After the Great Disappointment, as the day when the world didn’t end came to be known, most of the Millerites renounced their faith and went on with their lives. Some recalculated the date of the apocalypse: it was going to happen in 1846, or 1853, or, anyway, soon. And a few asserted that Jesus had come back, and that he’d shut the doors of salvation to all unbelievers— in other words, to anyone who wasn’t them. Believing that their souls were out of danger, they gave themselves over to free love and “promiscuous foot-washing,” something I’ve always wondered about. For these “shut-door” Millerites, the world had ended; what they continued to experience was only a sort of appendix to history, in which a few problems that remained obscure in the body of the text would be resolved. What led these otherwise reasonable people to believe that the world was going to end, that it had ended? It was an interesting question.

SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS

I woke up at dawn the next day, to the sound of a fire truck headed east on Sixteenth Street— for some reason they always went east. My body hurt with tiredness, but I dragged myself out of bed, made coffee and began mechanically to put my notes back in their filing cabinet; then with a sudden rush of resentment I carried the files downstairs and dumped them in the recycling bin. I went upstairs, put my clean laundry in the bag I’d just unpacked and wrote an e-mail to Mac, saying that an emergency had come up and I needed two weeks off. I left Alice a message, threw out the uneaten food in my refrigerator, emptied the trash and carried my bag down to Norman Mailer’s car.

Four days and three turns later I was in Thebes.

LOST THINGS

Thebes is tucked away in the northeastern corner of the Catskills, more or less where Washington Irving set the story of Rip Van Winkle, and even as a child it wasn’t hard for me to see why Irving chose that location. As you drive east on the only road that leads into Thebes, the mountains seem to close their gray shoulders behind you, cutting you off from the rest of the world. The valley looks older and stiller than the rest of the country, as though the land itself were asleep. There are billboards for things no one sells anymore, their photographs bleached blue by the sun, and signs for Summerland, a resort that closed a few years before I was born. It isn’t a place that promises great excitement, and in fact, with the exception of my last two summers there, when marvelous and unprecedented things happened, my memories of Thebes have a Rip Van Winkle– ish quality to them, as though I and the town and everyone in it were not so much living as dreaming.

In fact the town was bigger than I remembered, and richer. It began with a sign for the Snowbird ski resort, then the self-storage complex, the graveyard, a stand of trees, a bar called Fire and Ice, a bed-and-breakfast decked out prematurely with orange Halloween bunting, and the ski shop, which had taken over the house next door to it and become a kind of sports emporium. Across the street, the Kozy Korner gift shop and the Kountry Kitchen, then Arturo’s, the Italian deli, which had a new sign with golden letters carved into a green oval of wood, then a video store and the Country Barn Antique Emporium, the crossroads, the gas station, the church, the public library, a branch of the TrustFirst Bank, which I didn’t remember having been there before. Just past the bank, on the lot which used to have a drugstore, there was an organic grocery. An organic grocery! When I was little, you could barely get vegetables in Thebes unless you grew them yourself. Now there were bins of late-season tomatoes, apples and squashes, all faintly luminous in the late-afternoon sun.

I wondered what my grandfather had thought of it. When I was a child, he was always telling me about how things used to be in Thebes. He spoke of the town, which was founded by his ancestor Jean Roland in the early part of the nineteenth century, like an heirloom that had passed into the hands of strangers who were treating it badly. He knew what everything had once been: the Kountry Kitchen was the lunch counter for workers at the Rowland Mill until the mill closed in the 1940s, and Arturo’s was a smithy. Sheep had grazed where the ski shop stood, and I got the impression that my grandfather would have much preferred the sheep. He reserved his greatest displeasure, however, for Snowbird, the ski resort. Not only had it disfigured a swath of Mount Espy; it brought outsiders to Thebes: not workers who would buy houses and send their children to the public school and be humbled and annealed by the long winters, but seasonal people who had no respect for the town’s history or its way of doing things. It didn’t help that Snowbird’s owner was Joe Regenzeit, a Turk. My grandfather had never been to Turkey, and surely he exaggerated the Turkish people’s fondness for winter sports, but to him the resort was un-American, maybe even un-Western. It was the intrusion of a foreign culture into the deepest, best-hidden fold of his native land. And not just any foreign culture, but the Turks, hereditary enemies of the French ever since the Battle of Roncevaux in 778 c.e., which was the historical basis of the Song of Roland (and here I hear my ex-housemate Victor, the medievalist, correcting me: Those weren’t Turks who slew Roland, they were Basques— but be quiet, Victor). “The Turks don’t understand what these mountains are for,” my grandfather complained. “The Catskills aren’t the Alps. They aren’t the Rockies. These are old mountains. You can climb them, but you can’t ski them. It’s ridiculous.”

Compared with the rest of the town, my grandparents’ house was reassuringly unchanged. A white Colonial three stories tall, with flaps of black tar paper on the pitched roof, gray shutters and a gray porch with white posts, the exterior almost entirely devoid of color, as though it belonged to an era before things had been colored, or, more accurately, as if it were one of the Greek temples that had once been gaudily painted but were now worn down to a white austerity that they seemed, in retrospect, always to have possessed. The old oak tree that menaced the house was larger than ever, its leaves a dusty late-summer green. There was a pickup truck parked in front of the garage, with rowland’s towing and salvage painted on the driver’s door in yellow cursive: my uncle Charles was there. The kitchen door was open; I went in. The white linoleum floor was tracked with muddy footprints, which my grandmother would never have allowed; the radio was tuned to a call-in show. “OK, OK, I’m going to admit it,” the caller said, “I really like fat women. The bigger, the better.”

“Say it!” shouted the host. “Let it out!”

I called out, “Charles?”

A door shut above me, feet on the stairs. “Well, hey! It’s Mr. California!”

We embraced, and I breathed in Charles’s atmosphere of cigarettes and Dial soap. “Thought you’d be tan,” Charles said.

I explained that San Francisco wasn’t always sunny, and besides I didn’t spend that much time outside. I didn’t say what I had expected him to be, the Uncle Charles I remembered from my summers in Thebes, a giant in an undershirt, with a walrus mustache and red stubble on his chin, who chewed tobacco and spat in a coffee can outside the kitchen door, to the great disgust of my grandmother, who told him that one day he’d go out to spit and wouldn’t be allowed back in. He was no longer that person. There was a bend in his back that hadn’t been there the last time I saw him, at my grandmother’s funeral, and as he led me in he picked up an ugly black cane and leaned his weight on it. White hairs poked up north of the collar of his undershirt, in the hollow of his shrunken neck.

“So, you were out of town when Oliver died?” he asked.

“Camping,” I said. “I’m sorry I missed the funeral.”

“Don’t hold it against yourself. Hell, I’m surprised the twins came. Not that they stayed. No. It was whup! Shovel of dirt on the coffin, whup! Off to the train. You’d think they were afraid the ground would catch fire.” He laughed at his own turn of speech. “They didn’t even stay for the reception, not that I blame them. You know, they don’t speak the language.” Charles meant this literally. The old people in Thebes have their own vocabulary, a couple dozen French phrases handed down from the original settlers. Langue d’up, my grandfather called it jokingly, langue from the French for language, and up for upstate. Further evidence of how tightly the Thebans cling to the past.

“Anyway,” my uncle went on, “it was just a bunch of old Thebes farts talking about the nice things Oliver Rowland did for them in the long ago and far away. For example, Mo Oton made a joke about how Oliver was generuz de son esprit, generous with his spirit. What Mo meant was, he was a skinflint. His spirit was the only thing he ever gave away! Gabby Thule told a story about how he came to visit her in the hospital when she had her gallbladder out. And how he brought her the nicest bunch of wildflowers. Of course he did! Nothing’s free like wildflowers!”

He got us each a beer from the refrigerator. “You’re still living in Frisco, am I right?”

“San Francisco. No one who lives there calls it Frisco.”

“Is that so?” Charles lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. “You know, I had my heart set on going out there, back when. San Francisco, or Big Sur, more like it. One of those hippie places right on the ocean.”

“You were a hippie?”

“I wasn’t anything. I was just a kid.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

Charles coughed. “Things got in the way.”

I wondered if he meant the war. Around the time I was born, Charles had enlisted in the Army, against the wishes of my grandfather, who wanted him to become a lawyer, or a banker, something commensurate with the family’s status in Thebes. Instead he went to Vietnam. No one in the family was entirely clear on what he’d done there; all we knew was that he came home knowing how to fix cars. With money grudgingly loaned him by Oliver, he opened a garage in Maplecrest, the next town over. The business grew quickly; by the time I was old enough to know anything about it, Charles had four tow trucks, a half dozen drivers, and a pretty secretary named Mrs. Bunce who gave me sour-cherry sucking candies.

“You should come visit,” I said. “I’ll go to Big Sur with you.”

Charles looked at me in a way that I didn’t understand, as if, I thought, he’d known what I was going to say before I said it. “Maybe in a while,” he said.

He left a few minutes later. I walked him out, and when he saw Norman Mailer’s car in the driveway he stopped, transfixed by horror. “Holy Jesus,” he said. “Tell me you didn’t drive across the country in that.”

“It runs OK. It just makes a grinding sound when it goes uphill.”

“I’ll bet it does. What is it, a seventy-seven?”

“Seventy-six. It used to belong to Norman Mailer, the Norman Mailer. My ex-girlfriend thinks I was stupid to buy it, but it turns out to be a pretty good car.”

My uncle laughed. “At least you aren’t gay.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, or even why Charles would think I was gay, until I remembered that he hadn’t seen me since I moved to San Francisco. No gay man in the city would have thought for even a second of dressing like I did, but my uncle couldn’t be expected to know that.

Charles said he’d come back in a couple of days to see if I was still alive. He climbed into his truck. I wanted to stop him from going, because it hurt me to think that after ten years apart we had made such poor impressions on each other, and also because I was afraid to be alone in the house, but it was too late; his truck honked and was gone, two red lights dropping into the deep blue of twilight in the country.

The radio was still on in the kitchen. “Speaking as a woman of generous proportions,” a caller said, “I just want to let everybody know that I feel good.”

I opened a can of chicken noodle soup and heated it on the stove. Outside, the wind whispered in the oak tree. In my hurry to leave San Francisco I’d packed only one book, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, which I’d been meaning to read for months; but as soon as I started it I realized that I was not in the mood. Reading a novel, especially a contemporary novel, with its small stock of characters and situations, felt like being stuffed into a sleeping bag head-first: it was warm and dark and there wasn’t a lot of room to move around. I looked through my grandparents’ books and eventually chose Progress in Flying Machines, a purplish hardback with a winged contraption stamped on the front cover in gold. My grandfather had liked reading to me from it when I was a child. Published in 1894, it was, he said, the book that inspired the Wright brothers to build their airplane. What this meant was that none of the flying machines described in Progress in Flying Machines had ever flown. The book was a catalog of failures: giant wooden birds with flapping wings, aerial rowboats beyond the power of any human being to propel, corkscrew-crazy helicopters which under the best of circumstances never left the ground. I often wondered why my grandfather thought this was appropriate bedtime reading for a child. Maybe he hoped the book would teach me the importance of hard work and persistence, and give me faith that what looked like failure could be transformed, by history’s alchemy, into magnificent success. Perhaps he was also preparing me for the likely if not delightful possibility that the success would belong to someone else. As he didn’t tire of telling me, “Remember, it isn’t just the successes who matter. Even the ones who fail get us somewhere, if we learn from their mistakes.”

He meant this to be reassuring, but I found it sad: even as a child I suspected that the person he was reassuring was himself. And in fact my grandfather’s history, like that of many of the so-called pioneers of flight, was largely the story of his failure to get off the ground. My grandparents lived on the rent from properties they owned in Thebes, but over the years my grandfather had tried to increase this income by means of various schemes, not one of which did anything but fail. My mothers told me about them with acid glee: there was the time your grandfather bought real estate in Catskill, they said, he took a bath on that. There was the time he sold seeds from your grandmother’s garden! Even Mary couldn’t believe it and she loved those plants. And then of course there was the lawsuit, the great battle with Joe Regenzeit, which he lost. Oliver was not discouraged. That was what irked my mothers most of all: to see my grandfather fail, and fail again, and not give up. It wasn’t just that my grandfather’s hopefulness reflected badly on his common sense; it also made him unbeatable. No matter how high my mothers climbed, they could never have the satisfaction of getting above Oliver, who was always, in his sober way, hoping for something better.

My soup was ready when I came back to the kitchen. I opened a beer and sat down to read. At midnight, half drunk and far from sleep, I called Alice. Her voicemail picked up again so I read it a sentence from the book in front of me: “If one had an unlimited height to fall in, affording time to think and to act, he would probably succeed in guiding himself at will.” I added: “Hi, it’s me. Just wanted to let you know I got here OK. The house is a disaster, it’s going to take like a hundred years to clear it out. And my uncle is dying. Miss you. Bye.” I made up a bed on the sofa. The bedroom where I used to sleep was full of boxes, and I didn’t want to sleep in my mothers’ room, because I was haunted by the memory of what had happened there thirty years ago.