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The Pilot
Guarded by a scattering of Douglas Fir, Horse Chestnut and Birch, the south wind dissolved into a mere breeze. Occasionally the depths of true sky were visible as blue glacier mountain lakes, amongst a field of late wildflowers. A day and a world born of contentment and resilience.
Ray Flickinger stood in the middle of his driveway at the end of the lane and shivered with the pale blossoms of the cherry trees. The William's trees lined a short driveway perpendicular to his own home and flowing to the north. On clear days the stray blossoms would cover his old Chevy pickup in the form of snow from a rare winter blizzard, the soft drizzle adhering a pink kaleidoscope to the windshield. As he walked towards the west and the mailbox, once more a shower of intense sunshine bore down, carrying a dusting of nostalgia and an illusion of timeless summers. His body relaxed in temporary fulfillment until the clouds and impudent wind dipped the temperature into a state of chill once again.
Below the gradual sloping grade of the lane lay Clyde Road and the true proponents of suburbia. An endless stream of mini-vans and casual pedestrians not active for the sake of travel, but indentured to the community’s ideals of fledgling affluence and inflated status. Flickinger closed the mailbox with a clang as a shrieking Stellar's Jay imitating a red hawk circled the heights of a nearby fir. He paused for an instant to gaze down the hill and enjoy the visual benefits of living at a higher elevation than the majority of region. Beyond Clyde Road, the trickle of wealth flowed around the golf course, and over another hill until finally dispersing into the mountain cool waters of Lake Washington. Just across the mirrored surface of the lake framed within a postcard of the view, naive skyscrapers of the city carved the mark of progress into the base of the Olympic Range an impossible 25 miles in the past.
With letters and junk mail in hand, he strolled across the driveway and into the carport. The peaks of childish laughter hindered his progress as visions of two special grandkids occupied his thoughts. "Watch my glider," the strident but voice with zeal of the William's boy was real and brought Flickinger back to the present, knifing through the South wind.
Flickinger stopped and hesitated to enter the realm of his workshop, bound by curiosity and amusement. "It's stuck in the tree! That thing really flew," trumpeted a different youthful voice, brimming with enthusiasm.
Flickinger envisioned the blonde blur and non-stop energy of the William’s boy leading a playmate into battles, on space adventures through 200 dimensions and flying paper airplanes. These games would almost ultimately lead to the boys ending up on his property and prompting him to ensure that his yard was free from any hazardous materials, but inundated with thought provoking gadgets. "Let's make some more before the wind stops," the word "stops" muffled as Flickinger entered the sanctuary of his tool shop.
He chuckled to himself and recalled the day in the mountain deserts of California when he drove a car for the first time. Eight years old and using a couple of encyclopedias for needed height, his thoughts surrounding how much dust and sand the automobile kicked up as he cornered sharply. But those were different times and besides what harm could be done by plowing into a Joshua Tree at 13 miles per hour.
On the workbench and under a few wood shavings and sander grains, plans for a new staircase running down the steep bluff and beach access to Hood Canal were coming into fruition. As he surveyed the drawings, once again a bout of nostalgia emerged in his heart. Whether it was a product of age or the play of the boys next door which he could relate to from similar life experiences, or a combination of the two he could not tell. Recently, the William's boy had transformed into a mold of endless energy, a sponge-like curiosity with an interest in flight.
From the Pappy Waldorf comfortable pageantry of the Berkeley campus, Flickinger was whisked into duty. The war changed nothing and everything. As a successful fighter pilot possessing an education, he began a long career with the Boeing company as an engineer and settled his wife and children into the sanctity of the Pacific Northwest.
The plans served the needed thought, and like watching television a simple distraction that allowed for a self retraction and ultimate reflection. He saw the outlines of the schematics and wording, but his gaze burned through the graph paper as a slight boom and growl roused the distance of convenient monotony. Flickinger could perceive the outside world through the paneling with his discerning ear, as a commercial jet made its final approach to Sea-Tac in a wide arch around the north end of Mercer Island. The distinctive whine from the engines mounted on the tail an easy giveaway to the identity of the aircraft. The MD-82 safe in his mind. Only the perspiration of humanity on his forehead, now a template of the fourth dimension, plucking him from the realm of deities.
The pattering of feet broke Flickinger clear from his trance. The intensity of the steps increased as a blonde whir broke the plane of the door to the workshop.
"Ray,” the boy tried to catch his breath and spoke fast, his cheeks flushed. “Ray, my plane got stuck in the tree, so I had to build a new one," the young eyes gleamed with a quiet confidence and looked down at a carelessly held simple triangle paper airplane.
"I call it the C-316, but I haven't built the landing gear yet."
"Let me check her out," Flickinger said almost with relief to be brought out of his deep thought and with genuine like for the boy accepted the plane and brought the folded paper close to his face.
"Hmm, if you are going to have landing gear, you need a couple of spoilers or the force will tear the gear right off."
"Here, you just make a couple of...."
"What are spoilers," interrupted the boy.
"Let me finish”, he paused briefly. “You make a couple of tears like this and then fold them up when your fighter needs to slow down enough to make a soft landing."
Flickinger could see the gears in the boys head turn and imagination on the brink of running wild.
"I just have to fold them down and I can break the sound barrier again."
"Good David, spoilers are used to help a jet lose speed and go lower. Let's take her out for a test flight."
The child ran ahead through the carport and into the driveway, leaving a trail of delight. Flickinger slowly followed and watched the boy toss the plane into the wind.
"Awesome, look how high it is flying!"
Flickinger picked up a stone from the ledge of the carport and gently tumbled it in his hands. Diffusive light exposed an array of crystals, gone with each turn of the rock. He was fascinated by the idea that the sparkles adhered to their own ideals of discourse and thus free from any secular laws. No matter what angle the stone lay from his perspective, only the side within his view was subject to reality. Similar to the rarity of a snowflake or nucleic strand he would never get the same mental picture of the rock no matter how many times or ways he studied it. The randomness of the crystals shunned the order of civilization.
He watched the boy again, "Now try folding up one spoiler and the other one down."
Since the end of the War he had collected a number of exotic rocks from vacations and business trips and placed them on the ledge. Quartz, dolomite, fool’s gold and varieties of others all represented pieces of the world which in some way had breached his formidable armor of machismo.
The small fighter flew in an awkward roll from the boy's hand and hit the pavement with the sound of a snapping rubber band. Flickinger saw the child run to the impact spot. He liked the boy almost as one of his own children, the two now fully grown and with families of their own. The child had a sharp mind and at the same time was not afraid to blatantly question everything. He relished teaching and at the same time guiding. During trips with his wife to the canal, he would leave his workshop unlocked and give the boy permission to use the tools and gadgets. Only once did he have to scold him for losing a hammer.
A 737 thundered in the distance and for seconds a blank slate took his mind and the sweat slowly began to boil. The imagined paradise of a window of sun soaked the whole of the driveway and the wind whispered a temporary surrender. Evergreens of the ferns and the heights of the firs or the thick white laminate of the lacered deck, the Oregon Grape purple violet of the Jays remained at a plateau of brilliance reserved for a bank of fog. Even the nemesis of Icarus himself provided only a setting and prop for the true act of brilliance.
Evening came as the paper plane sat eerily still on the ground and the exuberance of the boy dissipated with the manufactured calm of the moment. He looked down on the ledge for his favorite sandwich rock as the 737 cooled its engines for a landing. Flickinger could not see the child sifting through the collection of stones, but was blinded by a consciousness and virtue that consumed his essence. The reverberation of the jet’s propulsion echoed leisurely and spiraled to a silence as the boy found his treasure and examined the layered rock with delight. Flickinger stood in deep reflection and homage to the sweeping view and setting sun. A gust from the south tossed the paper glider upside down, now lifeless without the energy of imagination.
He was sixty years of age and not yet ready to embrace the unknowingness of childhood once again. To have the simple pleasures of life recycled into the universe was by far the least of his worries. True love, devotion, his passion for flight, all to become simple shadow figures of their full meanings, a new value of priorities the framework for existence.
Many times in his life his imagination had carried him to the past. An intervention here, a wise choice there, if he could have only said those three words, everything would have been different and perfect. The only drawback, the man and soul inhabiting this body, a complete stranger and hidden disappointment. He envisioned meeting his infallible counterpart in the street or at a social gathering. Could he shake his own hand or feel the bonds of friendship with an individual guided completely by the knowledge of the past? Flickinger surmised that he would not at all enjoy the experience and maybe toss some choice words or a fist at his jeweled twin. After all, the pristine and imagined version of himself enjoyed an abbreviated shelf life as the real mind continued to change and grow with the wisdom of life. However, some events could never reach a refined interpretation.
Popcorn clouds and turquoise water replaced the waning sunlight. One mile above the criscutt waters and heading back to the carrier in the early morning after an exhausting night of fighting and bombing, the allied forces battling in fear of a different kind of man. A unpredictable sort of man, prone to daring feats of courage with no regard for his individual well-being. His consistency founded by an oath of self-sacrifice to the honor and reverence of the Emperor. The simple belief that life and death were one in the same, a concept so foreign a sense of desperation ran rampart in the back of the allied aviator’s minds, even before the two forces clashed.
He remembered his preoccupation with the feeling of loss and his mind played through the whole gamete of doomed scenarios, each ending with his own sacrifice by the hands of a maniacal Zero pilot saturated with the singular thought of “sonno-joi” and set on a Kamikaze ceremony that would not change the result of the battle, only torture the resolve of the victors. Japan’s foundation for war was based on a revolutionary political rhetoric born sixty years prior during the height of the Meiji Restoration. The translation of sonno-joi into the simple rant “restore the emperor, repel the barbarians” could never justify forcing the wavering puzzle piece of totalitarianism into a vacant spot of the modern world. A rare burst of post-battle adrenaline ignited the kindling of anger and for a moment the Japanese forces once again regained the title of enemy, before yielding to fatigue. He was beyond tired, covered in a line of fear sweat and looked forward to his bunk and time to make sense of everything. Death and the act of blowing another human to bits amongst a ball of fire too fresh in the subconscious mind.
Like a swan touching the waters of a pond, the landing on the carrier was perfect and as his aircraft came to rest. However, he immediately noticed a slight difference in the air that his mind could not grasp. He opened the canopy of the cockpit and luxuriously gulped at the tropical wind. Slight warning bells rang in his consciousness as he began to exhale from his initial attempt at reorientation. The breeze from the warm waters did not cool his oiled face, nor the scent of salt and exotic mystic tingle in his nostrils. The post dawn sun failed to beat down on the plane and the stark metal of the ship deck only mildly reflected the yellow light as a noisy silence fell over the Pacific. It was as if the world had been sterilized and stripped down to the bare minimum and lacked any poignant surprises. A lonely silence painted by visions of barren and dry mountain lakes first touching dawn. The calming wind ruffled the flags raised above the control deck and dusted the tips of his ears as dandelions in a Spring meadow. A tedious moment of eerie perfection ensued as he waited for the dam to burst and the War once again to begin.
The entire bustling crew on deck paused and his landing team posed frozen with silver dollar sized eyes and gawking faces as he panned his surroundings, eyes from all directions burning into his soul. The unseen glances and stares spayed his heart with molten lava and his insides stewed in pot ready to be eaten by the world. The flags once again stood flaccid and the breeze died into an artificial realm of noiselessness. Time had slowed to a melodic waltz. The only sensation other than sight that registered was the carefree thud of his heart valves palpitating on automatic. As he was helped out of the plane, a growing feeling of claustrophobia pressed at the back of neck. On the ship deck, no words were exchanged as Davis nodded his way, the colonel’s eyes usually filled with amused contempt for the world, now fixated in a lamb dead lifeless stare and not allowing him to move or feel. In some miracle of will and courage, he broke the bonds of Davis and the rest of the crew, his soul burning with every man’s hellfire. But the dead man always knows the secret as the Colonel fluttered his neck towards the side of the plane, eyes dilated and barely human. The motion of the neck swaying as seaweed in a current, pointing the way to the answer and maybe reality. He could not feel his legs, but the scenery of the aircraft and the colonel began to change and he must be walking towards the rear of the aircraft. Or maybe he was floating a few feet above the deck. Hovering and wisped into a trance of self momentum by the propeller of mysticism and flanked by the feathers of dreams. Left mind versus right, a logical voice of reassurance that this was only a nightmare and he would soon awaken layered below the wise words of Krishna read so deliciously by Professor Nordquist back at Berkeley. “Rid of fear, wrath and passion, made of me taking refuge in me,” the strong voice echoing in the flooded cave of the brain and overtaken by the reflex to blink.
Fluttering ten feet above the deck, his eyelids convulsed and he felt himself descend in silence. The feeling of motion ceased as his field of vision once again became focused. He looked in disbelief and was engulfed by a sickening horror. In an overwhelming flood, pure emotion and the cold hard facts of battle dominated his senses once again and he saw what they were all staring at. Through the slovenly disarray of ultimate confusion, the obvious was revealed. An entire third of the plane’s right wing was severed and the shark-like tail of an unexploded bomb protruded above the mangled aluminum. The symmetry of the weapon perfect and lethal with its magnitudes of explosiveness bottled up, but so easily released in a manner of torching heat followed by oblivion. His mind screamed and then utter darkness as essence of the real world returned in a blind sided attack, the veil completely lifted.
For the few hours of daylight on the return flight he had not noticed anything wrong with the plane, just a few bumps here and there he had attributed to turbulence. During the dog fight he recalled a loud thud, and momentarily losing a control of the aircraft, but simply mistook the ordeal as a light impact with a stray piece of debris or body part. The scenarios of “what ifs” began to flood his mind and he knew things should have and could have ended differently. They continued to look at him with expressions brimming with questions the unwritten code forbade asking. The eyes of his fellow warriors seared into his being from all sides and he was not at all upset or angry by the curiosity or general thought on the tips of their tongues, “Why didn’t the bomb explode? Was it luck or god’s doing?”
Numerous times during the War, he had witnessed fellow pilots miraculously surviving against the worst odds and often wondered how he would fare in the same situation. To look at another man and assess how he cheated death was easy and gave a brief escape from the mind numbing cycle of 24-hour warfare. However things proved much more complex as a near victim. After regaining consciousness, he studied the bomb impact area from the deck, careful not to venture too close as the responsibility of causing a glitch in fate sluggishly entered his mind.
After a quarter century of living an artificial shell of a life, the white chalk clearly drawn in the sand as an ending of the real human on that glorious day over the Pacific, he was tired. Ducking and dodging the unknown powers of the universe for a few years of borrowed time, in his mind order proved to be nothing other than a fight. An uphill battle that he had rejected since creation and now he possessed precious little energy to resist.
At first he tried to squelch the novel brightness inhabiting his mind. A brightness of beauty and clarity and understanding of the universe. Similar to the patterned glide of a hawk riding the thermals in search of prey, simple and free, he knew his destiny. The long road back home to everyday life, the adjustment of feeling secure enough to enjoy a deep sleep, a normal workday, and a family helped to keep things balanced for a short time, but he knew that sooner or later he would have to live as the being that evolution chanced.
In the equalizing ways of the universe each individual human is blessed with an innate ability to see into the future. For most, this pertains to the existence of a conscious or the “little” person whispering from the shoulder and aiding in the decision making process. A gut feeling is actually the product of the subconscious and complex series of assessments, calculations, facts, emotions and energy that are constantly evaluated by the mind. The solutions are so in depth that the consequences of the instant future can be predicted with alarming accuracy.
Flickinger’s mind was given a more pristine gift, a skill to sense life and death in the world. With a passion flight, over the years he narrowed the scope of his focus to strictly airplanes and took on the overwhelming self created responsibility of guarding the skies. He had the ability to sense success or tragedy of every plane in flight captured by his ordinary senses, but lacked the facilitation for changing an outcome. The minutes before the Pan Am disaster over Lockerbie, Scotland sent him into a spiral of refined agony and angst so crippling that he vowed never to feel again. Only the sane reassurance of his unique role in the world and duty to his family delivered him from the maze of emotional lobotomy.
“David,” he stopped. The jet touched down flawlessly on the runway and the glaze from his eyes cleared mysticism. Flickinger studied the child. Lost in a realm of fantasy, the boy sat with his back against the carport, exploring the sandwich rock and a quartz.
On the tip of his tongue, stories about the war, the busy deserts, Spanish Bluebells, flying, tales of the Flickinger once living, held in check and waiting to be told. In the coming years and at the right times he hoped he boy would listen to these tales, but now the time was not right. “Time for you to go home now.”
Flickinger gave the child a pat on the head as he heard his wife calling him for dinner. Somewhere in the inevitable darkness the snake hiss engines of a jet made a final approach for the oasis of a runway and his being drifted into the autonomous realm of the world itself. The vice grip of both reality and responsibility so pure that in the hierarchy of pattering milliseconds he was no more human than a weathervane amidst a thunderstorm with a current of electrical death scorching the unfeeling metal. As he entered the house, the burning stares of invisible eyes slowly illuminated the darkness. The thousands of naked eyeballs brimmed with curiosity and hidden behind the walls of the fresh night, following the every move of the survivor. With a surge of hope and strength he turned his back on the minions of the unknown, and in doing so gently breached the indestructible fabric separating the third and fourth dimensions.
A numbing breeze ferrying the indistinguishable acoustics of a stark but listless South Pacific sun stared upon a glitch in the heavens, the adroit and wise hands of time absent from the plain canvas allowing destiny a momentary, but chaotic respite of free will. The gazes of the men from the past who questioned his existence, quickly scattered and hid in the musty closet of the cosmos as he slammed the garage door shut. The foul and persistent south wind finally succumbed to the season of Spring and reality.
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