Flight (52 page)

The gnome darts past Joe and blocks the door,
“How come da rich have evrythin—houses, boats, jewels, art,
everythin, but never a sense of humor. Why’s dat?”

Joe slides to the left with the thought that
he will rush the shopkeeper, knock him aside with a shoulder check,
and escape through the door.

As if he can hear Joe’s thoughts, the
homunculus takes a step away from the door.

“I god it. You can’t afford da buy it. I
can’t afford to sell it at a loss. So, that leaves just one option
as far as I can see, which bein short mebbe ain’t….”

The man stops talking. Joe waits. The little
man scurries past the boy, grabs the frame of the bike and gives it
a push toward Joe.

“I give id to ya. No strings. But, you godda
remember a stranger gave ya a gift. Okay? You god the kinda mind
dat can keep a memry like dat?”

Joe freezes for the second time since he’s
been in the store. He realizes that it has been days since he has
thought of Blesonus and all that she had done for him. A burst of
honesty impels Joe to say, “I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve been
too good at it. I’m pretty self-involved. Selfish.”

“You’re what?”

“Selfish.”

“Really? How old?”

“Fifteen.”

“Nodda lodda fifteeners even know what
selfish is. Gwan. Take it. And work on da memry.”

Not knowing what else to do, Joe says thank
you, but in a voice as thin and fragile as a Meissen teacup.

Joe is ten minutes and six kliks away before
the idea comes to him that the shopkeeper has set him up. The
STA-450 is so distinctive that even in an area with thousands of
inhabitants it makes him stand out, and, as he travels farther east
and the population dwindles, it will make him stand out even more.
If he tries to minimize his risk by traveling at night, the
possibility still exists that the bike has a bug on it. Joe can
continue making his way on foot, but in just the short time he has
been aboard, he has become enamored of the speed and comfort of the
STA.

The boy tries to think what Bob Tom might do
if he were in the same situation. After another block of pedaling,
he guesses the old man would enjoy the bike, minimize the risk, and
have confidence in his ability to handle whatever was going to come
his way. Deciding that he is going to emulate the riverman’s
thinking gives Joe a burst of energy, which he transfers to the
STA’s pedals.

In a little over three hours, Joe is more
than seventy kliks east of the East River. He has ridden through
the shopworn streets of Queens and past the overgrown trees and
under-populated tract homes of the outer suburbs. As he travels
east, the works of man grow smaller and less impressive while
nature’s efforts begin to take on a certain ragged and unkempt
majesty. A motley of ancient trees stretch cloudward with their
limbs spread in wide welcome to the masses of birds that fill the
air. Despite the air whistling past his ears from the bike’s speed,
Joe still can hear their trillings, an octave higher than the
bike’s song,

As he pedals along, Joe watches his shadow
race ahead of him. As the sun falls, Joe’s shadow grows longer and
leaner, but its sharp contrast with the world around it fades.
Finally, the sun falters and the shadow disappears into the murk of
dusk.

The 450 has lights and Joe uses them to guess
his way along the road’s broken surface while he waits for the moon
to rise. After climbing a long hill, which leaves his calves aching
and his lungs burning, Joe pauses at the crest. In the time it has
taken Joe to pedal up the hill, the moon has finally shown up for
work. While he catches his breath, he notices a line of silver
outlining the next hill. He rides for another twenty minutes before
he understands what it is he is seeing.

Behind the silvery line is an unbroken swatch
of purple black. Joe realizes that somehow the silvery thread that
rides along the land as far north and south as he can see is a
warning the all the land beyond is an uninhabited jungle that has
grown up in the fifty years since fires destroyed eastern Long
Island during the Ticklish Situation.

As Joe remembers the story from grade school
history, a mutant form of Lyme’s disease had been discovered near
the eastern tip of Long Island near Montauk. The new spirochete
proved to be much more virulent than any of the previous forms of
Lyme’s. Within a year of discovering the first case, not only had
that victim died, but several thousand others also had been laid
waste. When the New York Public Health Services proposed a tick
eradication program far more draconian than any of its earlier
programs, the Noramican EPA had prevented the program from going
forward because of fears of what the spraying program would do to
indigenous wildlife, particularly the millennially endangered
miniscule population of piping plovers. As the matter was being
wrangled out in a federal court hundreds of miles away from the
danger, another three thousand Long Islanders died. When Senator
Stacy Clinton-Bloomberg called for hearings and summoned Bionia
Adams, former Green candidate for president and EPA’s chief
administrator to testify, Adams countered the senator’s charges of
gross incompetence by noting that there were fewer than eight
hundred plovers in existence while humans numbered in the
billions.

Less than a month after that famous exchange,
as the annual westerly mistrals blew strong and steady, a series of
fires, obviously coordinated, were lighted across the width of Long
Island on a north-south line just west of Islip.

The fires merged into a single fire which
burned out of control for five days—many said purposely so—as a
flotilla of boats from Rhode Island, Connecticut and the New York
metropolitan area rescued more than three hundred thousand
inhabitants. Nearly ten thousand died in the fire, but within a
year, no one was dying of the new version of Lymes. In the fire’s
aftermath, the federal government declared the area an NVNS refuge.
Westegg Preserve became the only No Visitor No Stewardship refuge
on the east coast north of Virginia. In order to minimize the
chance that any surviving ticks would infect or infiltrate the
western half of Long Island and the country beyond, a fifty meter
high laser curtain had been installed along the western end of the
burned territory. The goal was that any tick bearing animal trying
to pass through the curtain would be incinerated by the laser.

Although Joe has known of the barrier, he
hadn’t considered that he was going to have to get past the lasers
in order to find his friend. That thought stymies him for a minute
and makes him wish, not for the first time, that Bob Tom was still
his traveling partner. The old man’s absence, the darkness on all
sides of him, the obstacle ahead and a sudden sharp hunger begin
washing over him like torrents of rain. Joe finds it hard to keep
pointing his small beam of light into the chilly night. At the
bottom of the hill he slows his pedaling so that he can better look
for a place to spend the night.

It takes the teener twenty more minutes, and
his search brings him within a klik of the laser fence, before he
discovers a narrow path carved into the wall of kudzu which borders
the road. Using the bike’s headlight to guide him, Joe follows the
path’s twists and turns until he comes to an opening, perhaps ten
meters in diameter that is carpeted in tall grass. Joe centers
himself in the meadow before he tromps down the grasses to make a
campsite. When he finishes with his rude resting place, he rustles
through the food in his pak and in the small camping bag suspended
from the bike’s handlebars and wonders what he had been thinking
when he had dashed into a Qwikee on the eastern edge of Queens to
provision himself.

After a day that started with him being towed
across the Hudson River just as the sun was rising, traversing
Manhattan, both above and underground, and bicycling for hours, he
wants meat and potatoes or rice, or, better, mounds of both.
Instead, he has high school happy food—Nougie-nuggets,
Swirls&Kurls, apple chips, and warm Zzzoltkola. As he lays
propped on an elbow eating what would have been fun at a bonfire
before Bissell Day, Joe stares at the million stars in the sky
above. Unlike the ancients, he sees chickens and rib roasts rather
than bears, belts and archers.

Joe is lost in his food reveries when he
suddenly realizes that in addition to the soughing boughs, the
rustle of leaves, and the flutelike sound of some gregarious night
bird, he is hearing a popping sound that reminds him of bacon
frying on a camp stove. Occasionally, along with the unidentified
noise comes the slightest whiff of a familiar but hard to identify
smell.

Joe has finished his meal and has told his
grousing stomach that what it holds is far better than twigs and
berries in an Adirondack cave. Leaning back on a elbow, the boy
vacillates between giving in to that part of him calling for sleep
or obeying the part urging vigilance against whatever unseen
dangers that may lurk nearby. Joe opts for the former and is nearly
asleep when it comes to him that the popping sound and faint smell
come from animals being incinerated by the lasers. That thought
delays Joe’s sleep until the birds themselves grow quiet.

* * *

The boy awakes before the sun itself. He lies
on his side with his knees drawn to his chest and examines his
discomforts with a private nurse’s care. He is cold, especially a
three centimeter-wide belt along his back where his shirt has
escaped his pants. He tenses his muscles to trigger a shivering
fit. He is famished. He pulses his stomach a half-dozen times until
the organs begin writhing on their own. His guts churn, but find
nothing to grind. His hands ache from the fists they have made
throughout the short hours of sleep. Beyond those aches are the
blisters at the base of his fingers from the hours of gripping the
STA’s handlebars. Some things hurt and others are raw, but of all
those things, it is the deep muscle aches in his thighs that take
pride of place. Joe gently touches the surface of his thighs, but
hesitates to do more because of the fear that the slightest
movement might cause them to lock up in a cramp that will leave him
thrashing on the meadow.

To divert himself from his woes, Joe thinks
back to the feelings of exhilaration he had had at the end of his
first night on the Hudson River as the sun, in her slow stately
processional, had bleached the sky of ink. Surviving that first
night had given him a sense of competency, even maturity, different
from anything he had ever felt before. He had done something
dangerous and harrowing with no adult supervision or guidance. He
had escaped the Greenlanders. Alone on the Hudson, without parents,
coach, teacher or servant to rescue him from his mistakes, he had
survived. That satisfying thought leads to the next, one much less
reassuring, of being held underwater in the Hudson’s implacable
current. That thought leads to a question he has been keeping at
bay throughout the hours since being abandoned by Bob Tom.

Is he too much the boy and too little the man
to help Prissi? More directly: is he nutz?

That question, as unanswerable as it is,
causes him to consider why it is that ever since he has decided to
help her that he has been thinking less of Prissi Langue as a
fellow Duttonian, a funny fascinating friend, and an irritating
unknowable near-girlfriend and more of her as a quest, The Holy
Grail, a catalyst for his metamorphosis into something heroic. In
other words, Joe tells himself, what he has been doing over the
last days is seeking a new Joe rather than a lost Prissi. And, that
thought leads Joe back full circle to the question he has been
avoiding: Does he have what it takes to help his friend?

Joe answers that question with action rather
than more thought. He rolls onto his stomach, draws up his knees
and pushes himself upright. He draws a deep breath as he stares at
the bleed of red oozing along at the horizon. He holds the chilly
air inside his lungs in the same way as he had on the Hudson.

In less than twenty minutes, Joe is sitting
on his bicycle staring at a four meter high mesh fence. The fence,
whose bottom is hidden by a pile of leaves and trash dropped by the
westerly winds, is about ten meters away. Beyond it, perhaps twenty
meters from where the boy balances on the bike, is a double mound.
Joe studies the two humps and sees that it disappears into the
distance, almost like an immense mole’s mound. The nearer mound is
much lower than the one behind it and seems to be composed of white
almond and globular shapes. The higher mound behind is a dense
puzzle of white sticks.

It takes Joe a minute to make sense of what
he is seeing.

Animals from the east come under the laser
screen. The beam kills them and then burns through the skeleton.
The skulls fall forward to make up the smaller mound and the torsi
remain behind. If, because of a malfunction with the fence, an
animal happened to survive, it still would have to climb over the
four meter fence to escape.

Dismounting his bike, Joe walks forward. As
he reaches out to grab the fence he abruptly stops as the thought
comes that the fence itself might be electrified. As he stares
through the fine mesh, he sees a scattering of small delicate
skeletons on the ground between the laser and fence, which he
realizes are the remains of birds.

As Joe’s eyes follow the length of the dead
zone until it disappears in the dawn’s mist, he is overwhelmed at
how much life has ended here. The boy squats down onto the
dew-drenched, but sere, grass as he tries to come up with a plan
for how to get beyond the barrier. He assumes that Prissi was
healthy enough to fly over the laser. He looks up to see the source
of danger fifty meters above, but, even as he looks, a low flying
wren suddenly stops its flight and begins a corkscrew fall to
earth. Joe pushes away any thought of Prissi’s fate matching that
of the just fallen bird.