P3 text submission

 

 

Bern Roche Farrelly

Flight

Excerpt from Carbon 12

 

 

When the uniformed horde of children were ticked off and sent away for the last time he had not fled hastily like so many of his collages. Instead he had stayed behind to lock with care each of the old, institutional, wooden doors. He knew that with his connections to the world of learning that he would soon be able to find someone in the States who would be willing to take him in and arrange a satisfactory legal status for him while he waited for grumpy old Europe to get over this fit and fall peacefully asleep again.

 

Vidac Gorval was an old Academic. He had spent years in one of the universities in Oxford, England occupying a Chair of Classical Poetry. Three years ago he had returned to his home country and native village and took up teaching, in the same private school he had attended as a boy.

 

In the over lit computer lab he sent out emails looking for aid to all his former collages, students and lovers. Before he could read any responses the area where he lived lost its electrical supply. Isolated, he did not know if this was due to air raid damage or the power being re-routed away from civilian use.

 

His own parents were dead. His only sibling, a brother had left the town years ago never to be heard from again. Gone and wished good riddance is how his mother had put it. However, some of the towns’ folk were still related to him, if distantly. He feared being asked by them for help in fleeing to America. Extra people, old, frail and rural people would be a burden to travel with, difficult at customs and unwelcome when he arrived, most probably at a small American Liberal Arts College.

 

He considered his options rationally while sitting in the chapel’s bell tower. Below he watched the locals run about. “Dancing to Pan’s pipes,” he thought. He resolved to leave by himself at night so as to avoid goodbyes of any sort.

 

He was elderly but quite fit and easily cycled to the next town on one of his pupil’s abandoned bicycles. There he stole a car and siphoned extra petrol from several other vehicles using the sliced inner cylinder of the bicycle tire to suck the precious fuel out from a row of anonymous oil tanks.

 

He was driving towards a small market town on the way to the nearest Airport. As he drove he watched the sky for bombing raids. A pillar of smoke appeared on the horizon without a flash. Unsure of his route, Videc was forced to follow the main road right into the black cloud.

 

Inside the filament of dust the town was still sanding. Amazed, Videc stepped out of the car, onto the cold ground to inspect the still, lifeless statue of a town. Its every surface was totally black. Nothing about, neither a tree nor a telegraph pole was burnt or chard. Everywhere was a smooth, overall absence of colour. The ground was not warm. The town had become a scale model of itself, set in soot and ash. Chemical complexity had given way mono oblivion mimicking familiar forms. All the objects in the town square were dead copies, their cores converted to dust. Everything had simply turned to carbon. Videc got back in the car and drove on.

 

By car he drove to the closest city with an airport. Coming over the last hilltop he saw the sunken blue sea with its old port and the tar fields of the runways all in one wide eyeful. He parked in an empty petrol station forecourt at the mouth of the motorway. Deserting his ride, Vedic took care to open the windows and lock the keys inside, leaving the car just as he had found it.

 

Taking the steep hill into the centre on foot he regretted leaving the car behind. Perhaps he had been overly cautious. He was quite sure that the bombardment had eroded society sufficiently to allow many minor crimes to pass unremarked upon. Eventually, he arrived in the terminal city just before lunchtime.

 

Videc guessed that the phone network within the country had collapsed entirely by this point. The streets were temporarily strewn with mobile phones of all colours and values. Soon some one would spot the opportunity to collect these and resell them abroad, perhaps in central Africa.

 

The port’s population had more than tripled. Lots of families were frightened to get on a plain without knowing exactly what awaited them when they landed. When the phones stopped working so too had the Internet. Thus the city’s new populace of escapees waited for news to arrive by other means. They were stalled. Small markets in information had sprung up overnight.

 

People suddenly wanted to look up distant relatives who had moved away years or generations ago. Genealogists did their best to prove that everyone who asked discovered that they had unremembered grand parents that leant them citizen status in foreign, unaffected lands.

 

It was a forger’s paradise. Heavy trucks filled with old fashioned printing presses and the latest digital photography equipment flowed into the city. Factories were set up to supply the markets. Birth certificates, passports, driving licenses and letters of introduction were all produced in a slow trickle so as to rinse the best possible prices from the unique economic situation. Desperation became an oil and a fuel.

 

The academic watched all this with great interest. This fantastical sideshow was distracting many of his countrymen from their own escape. With his own travel papers in the best order he could muster, Vidac simply walked to the airport and brought passage upon one of many specially chartered non-stop Boeing flights to Newark Airport, before transport itself became a problem.

 

The Airline made it quite clear that their sole responsibility was to fly passengers across the water and that whatever happened to them once they landed was a separate issue. They joked that if he still had the money he could pay them to fly him home in style rather than waiting to be herded back in a Military plain without proper seating. He laughed with them knowing that this would be the fate of many of his countrymen.

 

He felt confident that his situation would have been taken care of in his absence. His only fretful thought was that he might need to travel further north to Canada if someone up there was willing to offer him a full professorship rather than a simple teaching job.

 

Once he was in the Air the pains of his homeland were forgotten. The one hundred or so passengers gave each other meaningful looks. Videc noted the way in which they proclaimed their mutual respect and sense of achievement. They were beginning together new lives as exiles. This was a romantic and intoxicating idea that helped them to relax.

 

The Airline food and drinks trolley spoke of the world of normalised luxury to which they would all soon be returning. All the other passengers bought extra bottles of vodka and gin that they either drank or pocked for later. Joining in, the professor pocketed two miniature dry gins before remembering to be more careful with his ready cash.

 

To his great delight Vidac realised there was an Air Phone onboard. He pulled his last two remaining possessions. They were exactly the same size: a leather bound address book and his pocket book, which still contained a few hundred dollars in cash, should he need it. He looked threw his numbers. There was one Nobel Prize winner amongst the names. He stood up to use the phone only to discover that his credit card was no longer valid.

 

He talked to the cabin crew, who in hushed tones, explained that all the cards issued in his country were unusable, as the credit records had been frozen by an interfering international economic body. His problem was a common one but there was a solution. A kind airhostess would let passengers use her card in exchange for cash. During the call however, she would stand over by their shoulder as they talked to make sure they didn’t spend more than they paid her.

 

Realising that the call might be more expensive than he had reasoned, especially if he couldn’t use his Cards to buy clothes and food when he arrived in New York, Vidac decided to make only one call to his own voicemail box. This way he could collect all the information he needed without wasting time reassuring people of his wellbeing.

 

He dialled the international code and his home number quickly. In the connecting silence he wondered what would happen to his country’s familiar national prefix number if they lost the war. He only had one message waiting for him. Damage to the network, he reasoned, had prevented all the other well wishers from leaving messages.

 

He listened to the slow and tired voice of an old student. It was Karl Strenham. The recording explained how senior American academics were fearful of an Europeanising of the education system. The number of new staff from abroad had been caped through out the continent. Karl talked about other figures, people with families. Once upon a time Karl had been so eager to please.

 

The message continued explaining what Karl would do if put in the same situation. It described how to find someone on the plain who would help him hurt himself just enough to be allowed to stay on in the Federal States. Vidac realised how much it was costing him per second to be insulted like this and hung up. He paid the Airhostess and returned to his seat.

 

He felt as dry and still as a pillar of salt. He had hours to think of a solution before he landed in America. He wondered if he should have stayed a few days until he could have had a proper visa forged. He wondered what the small print of the law was. Could he impregnate one of the women flying into a similar uncertainty? Would they be willing? Was he even capable?

 

As the flight continued he became more desperate. It seemed next to impossible to hurt oneself seriously in a deliberate fashion, especially given the small size and slight resources of an airplane toilet. Returning to his seat he looked again to his fellow passengers. He noticed that they were quick to return his gaze, expectant even.

 

A slight boy, not unlike one of the first years he encountered in England was already starring at the back of his head when he turned around and spotted him. The boy began to repeat the old man’s every movement. He grasped in mirror time the sides of his seat, just as Videc did. He scraped his brow with the back of his left hand just when Videc did. This was the opportunity.

 

The boy raised two fingers to the older man just like the Christ in a Byzantine painting. Then he crossed the fingers like a desperate gambler at the last dog race. His other hand pulled two pencils from his jacket pocket. As he pulled them out a few buds of cotton wool came up and fell upon the floor. Videc looked up and down the isle to see if they had been spotted.

 

The cabin staff was being impeccably incurious, but he did notice for the first time how pale and still the fat old couple by the emergency wing door had become. They were sweating an alarming amount yet there was no obvious sign of what they had done to one another. The air in the cabin was getting thick with iron sent.

 

Closer to the front of the cabin it was possible to hear a low groaning sound. A woman there had just cut herself violently between her legs. Her husband couldn’t comprehend it. His own arms became frozen and he whispered that he needed her to cut him too. He was already incapacitated.

 

The Academic imagined standing next to the boy in the toilet, without talking before the act was performed. He thought about removing his contact lens, choosing a pencil, picking an eye. They would have to do it at exactly the same time. It would be impossible without trust. He tried to visualise the action itself.

 

The boy undid his safety belt, walked over and sat in a spare seat next to the man. It would be easier to plunge threw the eyelid and then directly into the open eye. That way you don’t have to watch the act as it takes place. However this method has its problems too. Not only does it make the process more difficult it also leaves a disfiguring scare in the middle of your permanently closed socket.

 

Vide did not want this for the boy of for himself even. Many of the travellers were openly weeping now either in pain or apprehension. He wanted rather to take the boy in his arms and explain how none of this was really necessary: that the Americans were not the really barbarians that the Europeans made them out to be. They would understand. They would have sympathy.

 

The boy grabbed Videc’s hand but Videc dared not let go of arms of his seat. The boy tried to glare into his eyes but he turned away. He whispered gentle words in to the old man, using their native language, promising to be gentle, dropping colloquial phrases to coo and calm the old man. The boy said how he had chosen Videc because he needed a man who looked clever as well as brave, someone who would know how to clean up afterwards and avoid infection.

 

Directly behind them a farther with three young boys plunged a silver pen deeply into his left ear before attending to his children. Soon all four of them were howling into their own mono oblivion. Abandoned, the mother sat across from them in tears as the farther tried to sit the smallest two children onto his lap to comfort them.

 

The boy abruptly stood up and grabbed the limp wife and dragged her half walking into the bathroom. The farther shrieked directionlessly. The children convulsed, kicking and screaming, triggering more screams from the rest of the cabin. The Stewardesses stopped mincing informally about, upon recognising this queue from former flights and calmly locked themselves in the cabin.

 

The festival was at full swing and the old academic know he must take the momentum of this moment to cause him self some harm. He was transfixed by the chorus of cries that rang out from behind him. They seemed to resonate with each other and block out the sound of the engines. In this music, he saw one man hopping about the aisle holding his own foot in his hand trying to bite off his big toe.

 

The toe biter then tripped over another man who was simply trying to trash his brain out against the floor. The moment ended as the last of that air passed out of those who were screaming in unison. Someone cried the word “monsters” several times with decreasing hysteria. The boy and the wife walked out of the bathroom holding their faces and trying not to look at one another in their eye.

 

He wonders what substances on boarded he could potentially be use to poison him self. He considers asking the boy if he can borrow one of the pencils, so that he might use the other end. He thinks about the scores of people who waited not for a flight out but for forged papers. He wonders if his lost brother had by chance gone to live in America. If he had not left the shadow of their home country by now, Videc reasoned, he could finally count his brother as dead.

 

Their stewardesses soon walked back into the cabin and began to collect the debris from this flights set of accidents. Videc struggled to remember if they had performed the instructional safety talk at the beginning of the flight of not. Everything seems to have fallen silent and he ponders what will happen when they land and he has to walk unharmed across the carpet towards the immigration desk holding his legitimate legal papers.