The taxi ride from the airport to First National Flightpaths took a maddening forty minutes (The brochure had promised: “Just ten, minutes from Kennedy”). It took another fifteen minutes to register as Ben and Beverley Bosola (The brochure had also pointed out that New York law did not hold it criminal to adopt or use an alias, so long as fraud was not involved). And to be shown to their suite on the twenty-fourth floor. There were three rooms: a regular hotel room (with double-bed, kitchenette, and a sound system to equal the best at Worry) and two small studios adjoining. When the attendant asked Daniel if he knew how to work the apparatus, he took a deep breath and admitted that he didn’t. The explanation, together with a demonstration, took another five minutes. You smeared a little stickum on your forehead and over that snugged on a headband to which the wires connected. Then you had to lay back in what Daniel would have sworn was a dentist’s chair. And sing. Daniel tipped the attendant ten dollars, and finally they were alone.
“We’ve got eleven hours,” he said. “Ten, really, if we don’t want to miss the plane. Though it’s silly, isn’t it, talking about planes when here we are, ready to take off ourselves. Jesus, I’m so nervous.”
Boa threw back her head and whirled one small whirl on the mustard yellow carpet, making the pumpkin-orange of her wedding dress billow out about her. “So am I,” she said quietly. “But in the nicest way.”
“Do you want to make love first? They say that helps sometimes. To put you in the right frame of mind.”
“I’d rather do that afterwards, I think. It may seem terribly presumptuous to say so, but I feel the most complete confidence. I don’t know why.”
“I do too. But, you know, for all that, it might not work. You can never tell in advance. They say only about thirty percent make it the first time.”
“Well, if not tonight, another time.”
“But if tonight, oh boy!” He grinned.
“Oh boy,” she agreed.
They kissed and then each of them went into a separate sound studio. Daniel, following the attendant’s advice, sang through his song once before wiring himself in. He had chosen Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.” From the first moment he’d heard the song on a recording, a year ago, he’d known that that was the song for his first flight. It’s three short stanzas read like an instruction manual for takeoff, and the music… Nothing could be said about such music: it was perfection.
He sang, wired in, to his own accompaniment, recorded on a cassette, and at the end of the second stanza — “For really, I am dead to the world” — he thought he had lifted off. But he hadn’t. A second time, as the song went on — “Lost in death to the world’s riot, I rest in a realm of perfect quiet” — he felt the music propelling his mind right out of his flesh.
But at the end of the song he was still there, in that pink padded chair, in his starched shirt and black tux, in his own obdurate flesh.
He sang the song again, but without the same conviction, and without results.
Not to panic. The brochure said that very often the most effective song, in terms of reaching escape velocity, isn’t one for which we have the highest regard or greatest love. Probably his problem with the Mahler song was technical, despite the trouble he’d taken to transpose it down to his own range. All the authorities agreed that it was useless to tackle music beyond your capabilities.
His next offering was “I Am the Captain of the Pinafore,” to which he gave all the extra faith and oomph he could muster. That was the way he still remembered it, almost like a hymn, from the dream he’d dreamt the night before he got out of Spirit Lake. But he couldn’t stop feeling silly about it and worrying what someone listening would have thought. Never mind that the studio was sound-proof. Naturally, with that kind of self-consciousness, his score was another big zero.
He sang his two favorite songs from Die Winterreise, to which he could usually bring a sincere, droopy Weltschmerz. But in the middle of the second song he broke off. There was no use even trying, feeling the way he felt.
It was less an emotion than a physical sensation. As though some huge black hand had gripped his chest and squeezed. A steady pressure on his heart and lungs, and a taste of metal on his tongue.
He got down on the mustard carpet and did pushups rapidly, till he was out of breath. That helped some. Then he went out into the bedroom to pour himself a drink.
At red light glowed above the door to Boa’s studio: she was flying.
His instant reaction was to be happy for her. Then came the envy. He was glad, thinking about it, that it hadn’t happened the other way round. He wanted to go in and look at her, but that seemed somehow like admitting defeat: you look at people do the things you’d like to do yourself — and can’t.
The only booze in the icebox was three bottles of champagne. He’d been drinking it all day long and was sick of it, but he didn’t want to phone room service for beer, so he guzzled a bottle of it as quickly as he could.
He kept looking up at the light above the door, wondering if she’d taken off on her first try, and what song she’d used, and where she was now. She might have been anywhere in the city, since all the First National’s studios had direct access to the outside. Finally, unable to stand it any more, he went in and looked at her. Or rather, at the body she’d left behind.
Her arm had fallen from the armrest and hung limply in a filmy envelope of orange crepe de chine. He lifted it, so limp, and placed it on the padded rest.
Her eyes were open, but blank. A bead of saliva drooled down from her parted lips. He closed her eyes and wiped away the spittle. She seemed colder than a living body ought to be; she seemed dead.
He went back to his own room and tried again. Doggedly, he went through everything twice. He sang songs by Elgar and Ives; they weren’t as great as Mahler’s but they were in Daniel’s own language, and that was a consideration. He sang arias from Bach cantatas, choruses from Verdi operas. He sang songs he’d never heard before (the studio was well-equipped with both scores and accompaniment cassettes) and old love songs he remembered from the radio, years and years before. Three hours he sang, until there was nothing left of his voice but a rasp and an ache deep in his throat.
When he returned to the outer room, the light was still on over Boa’s door.
He went to bed and stared at that baleful red eye glowing in the darkness. For a while he cried, but he made himself stop. He couldn’t believe that she could just go off like this, knowing (as she surely must) that he’d been left behind. It was their wedding night, after all. Their honeymoon. Was she still angry with him for what he’d said about her father? Or didn’t anything else matter, once you could fly?
But the worst of it wasn’t that she had gone; the worst of it was that he was here. And might be, forever.
He started crying again, a slow steady drip of tears, and this time he let them come, for he remembered the brochure’s advice not to let your feelings get bottled up inside. Eventually, with a bottle of tears and of champagne both emptied, he managed to fall asleep.
He woke an hour after the plane had departed for Rome. The light was still burning above the studio door.
Once, when he was learning to drive, he’d backed Bob Lundgren’s pickup off the side of a dirt road and couldn’t get the back wheels up out of the ditch. The bed of the truck was full of bags of seed, so he couldn’t just go off to look for help, since Bob had few neighbors who would have been above helping themselves. He’d honked the horn and blinked the lights till the battery was dead — to no avail. Eventually he’d exhausted his impatience and started to see the situation as a joke. By the time Bob found him, at two a.m., he was completely unruffled and calm.