After several years (who's counting?) of writing and re-writing, I decided that I may be finished with TO BE THE DRAGONFLY. Fortunately, I already had another novel in the works (90,000 + words). It was fun to plunge back into that world. Now to figure my way through and eventually out...
Here is an extract from the beginning of
Born Into Color
“Don’t go anywhere without me.
Let nothing happen in the sky apart from me,
or on the ground, in this world or that world,
without my being in its happening.
Vision, see nothing I don’t see.
Language, say nothing.
The way the night knows itself with the moon,
be that with me. Be the rose
nearest to the thorn that I am.”
(Rumi - In the Arc Of Your Mallet)
PART I - THE JOURNALIST
"Songes-tu à ce que signifient ces mots: lever l'ancre?"
André Gide (La Porte Etroite)
1
I shall remain nameless. But really there’s no need to panic because no one ever asks. No one ever wonders when your life began, when you felt a disjunction in time, the momentous start of something distinctive, the arrow pointing you towards an ever-fleeing target. Why would anyone want to peer into someone else’s life? Unless you earn a living as a trained psychiatrist or psychologist, one of those anxious, devoted people who try to solve the puzzle of someone else’s anxiety — but only in exchange for that anxious someone’s hard-earned money. Or only if you are trying to escape your self.
You’re no different from the rest, are you, so why should you ask? Why should you care? Everything began carelessly on a Valentine’s Day in 196-, one of those mornings on earth when you inhale a breath of lukewarm air, and you start believing that Spring might return, as if an intangible spirit had whispered this message of hope into your ear, and urged you to keep walking, trustingly, carefully, expectantly, and to take any of the streets surrounding you — your choice. Outside my apartment, I like to pretend I’m not in a city, but on a quiet path in the countryside. The pretense lasts a few meager seconds. As I capture the city sounds, I quickly glance towards the sky to check its mood, count clouds (none that day), listen to echoing doves, and spy acrobat squirrels on the telephone wires. All this busyness on the outside distracts me from worrying. Don’t lie. If you live on your own (and even if you don’t), you worry, even panic sometimes, although there is often no need. But it goes with the territory, restricted, as if you were camping on a tiny piece of land, just wide enough to stretch your tent, on the edge of the wild, forbidding, forbidden frontier, but with civilization holding you safely back with its constricting rules, “no camping” being one of them.
Civilization on that day offered me hearts. The windows, filled with dark pulsating heart shapes, stared angrily as I passed. They glowered from every direction, reproachful, as if I were in dire need, and ought to purchase a heart immediately to fit into the hole they could glance through. In response, I would lift the small bouquet of daffodils that I held somewhat desperately in my hand as a shield. Everyone could determine that I was not heartless on Valentine’s Day. Any other day I would have felt foolish holding onto flowers, even as unobtrusive as a bouquet of daffodils, but today it was like showing a passport of approval. Anyone on the street could spot it, zoom in, open it, see the proof of my existence (a name, a birth date) and verify that I also had a visa for love: I must have a special someone, an expectant person with her arms ready to open for me (yes, me!) at the end of my road. She would beam when I would hand her the bouquet. I was a lucky guy, such a lucky guy!
Fortunately, no one followed me. Who ever bothers to follow you and find out the rest of your story? No one had noticed the demarcation in time, the recurring song that had played in my head since I had heard it on the radio that morning, timelessly: “Hello Darkness, my old friend...” as if someone had planted it there. Why is it that songs take possession of your soul as if conjured by spirits to send you a message? This image of darkness contained a secret meaning I had not yet figured out, but it was troubling in its insistence to interrupt the course of my thoughts. I would try to silence the words by glancing down at the flowers. The daffodils, though their bodies had been severed from life nourishing roots, showed not a hint of sadness or despair; they lived on as if holding within their magic cups a promise of eternity, meant to cheer me up. The rest of their meaning was up to Pamela, and she had informed me recently — she was always well-informed — that we had reached the end of our brick road.
I did not think so, partly because I could not see any bricks, but mostly because I could not visualize the end of our road either separately or together. If I tried (I did not tell her this), I was instantly transported to Vietnam and a deep trench with dead bodies that I could not identify. I was too literal, she said, this was due to my daily deal-dallying with words that needed to be “edited out” like myriads of tumors out of control. I thought “excised” sounded more appropriate, but I had enough sense not to tell her (besides, I like the word “myriads”, it makes me think of mysterious naiads). She did not want to be an appendix in my life, she added, or a Nota Bene at the bottom of the page, or whatever. The “whatever” reminded me of the song about darkness.
I was trying to focus on a young squirrel deftly, or perhaps not so deftly, venturing to the swinging end of a tree branch and contemplating the wire from an unusual distance, when I ran into a small group of humans huddled together, but not too close, on the sidewalk ahead. Strangers to each other and to me, they were not part of some demonstration. They were just scattered humans happening to have stopped simultaneously to look up, the sky reflected in their eyes.
Of course, being human, I looked up too, making sure I was not too close to anyone either, and camping my body in such a way as not to lose balance. Humans are not used to look up. I immediately followed the contours of nearby tree trunks, and I saw that the trees were reaching out — defying gravity, trying to expand into the infinite, to grasp the ungraspable, filled with the hope of a rotating organism. Anchored forever, yet trying to escape. This will sound obvious to everyone of you reading the above, but I had never noticed it before. The trees’ reach, I thought, spanning millions of years, would seem laughable but for the tiny seeds that take off, propelled by winds, and reach further, an extension of the trees, a futile effort at evolution trying to scratch the skies. There they were, the skies. Infinite possibilities. Timeless, borderless, white on white. No darkness there. Except for one tiny spot, a beginning.
Out of nowhere, the dot enlarged into a plane which appeared like an insect discarded from Earth, light and fast, quick climbing, two miles up to where the wind is steady. I imagined the lone pilot glancing at the words written upside down on the dashboard, pulling a trigger back. I could see myself up there, starting to race horizontally into the wind.
All eyes were on the bright white smoke. Up above us, the plane was dancing, and it was exhilarating to watch its seeming ease and virtuosity — vertical banks, loops, showing off with a purpose. Racing into the wind and out of the sun so there would be no glare for the human watchers below. Like an artist expertly drawing on an unattainable blackboard. Racing with time to scratch the skies, taking a break, then pulling the trigger quickly forward. I imagined he could almost hear the tiny crowd two miles below.
“A!” they screamed.
The letter was 2,400 feet tall.
I knew a little bit about skywriting; it is a race against time. Words inscribed on the board doomed to quickly disappear. They would last an hour at the most; a strong wind could erase them in a matter of seconds. I visualized the trigger being pulled back again. The shadow of a smile on the pilot’s face despite the drenching oil and smoke. Anticipation. And the shadows would reveal a deep concentration in a lonely task meant for people of another world. How the view from above changes as you get further up. They say distance makes the heart grow fonder.
“F”, a young boy screamed, and suddenly there was a flash in the sky.
People had slipped out of their shops and houses to find out what our small group was staring at. Cars were sporadically driving by, oblivious of the excitement, lost in their own separate world.
“Sometimes,” I explained to the excited boy, “they use two planes to write a long message.”
I had hardly finished speaking when the second flash, much faster on the climb than the first, turned as if to underline or cut off part of the F, or perhaps change it magically into a P. The boy, accustomed to playing with plastic soldiers, toy cars, and model airplanes, had let his imagination soar above the earth and was the first to anticipate danger: “Watch out!”
A very bright flash, a punctuation out of place, bouncing back, catapulted from the blackboard.
The plane reappeared only to plunge, twirling, spiraling white smoke, beautiful. The child stared in awe, while people around me turned for the first time to face each other with questions, desperate to identify recognizable emotions on complete strangers’ faces:
“Did you see what happened?”
“Is that part of the stunt?”
“Is something wrong?”
“Should we call an ambulance?”
“What the hell was that?”
All important questions.
I did not wait. I ran, watching the horizon, keeping the plane in my line of sight. I have always enjoyed running and, with the surge of adrenalin, I relished the rough, passionate kiss of the wind swiftly parting against my face, the fierceness of flying, aware of the rest of the crowd far behind, hoping I would not stumble and fall and make a fool of myself. I imagined that the expression on my face as I ran was not unlike the skywriter’s mien of concentration barely a minute ago. And now, I held but one thought: I need to get there. Not knowing exactly where ‘there’ was. It was as if I was racing to arrive on time and catch myself.
The plane steadied, only to stumble back again. Rocking like a wounded seagull far from sea. Before it hit the ground, it straightened up, miraculously, slowed down, avoiding houses and trees, to land with a shriek in a deserted park, sending a mass of starlings aloft in a gust of wind.
I was still running, taking deep breaths, feeling the urgency. There was no one around. Where is everybody? What a lonely world, I thought. This feeling of loneliness had been with me for some time. Perhaps it was something we all shared, but at that moment the pilot and I were the only ones on Earth. It was imperative that I pull him out of the plane.
Panting, switching the flowers to my left hand, deftly, I grabbed a handkerchief in my pocket, wrapped my hand in it, ran the last few steps, and reached the fuselage. It was vibrating, as if trying to communicate — or was the vibration coming from my own hand? Everything eerily silent. I saw the head of the pilot. Blood, I thought, and the image of a raw, pumping heart jumped through my brain in all its bloody, pumpous, and desperate effort at life. My old friend... I ran from one side of the plane to the other. The pilot must have kicked the door open, then collapsed.
I reached in, fought with the belt, pulled the body, forcing myself not to see the physical damage, a jumble of metal parts.
The pilot muttered. The sound gave me a jolt of energy. I was dragging the body when the metal exploded, fire sparkling into the sky in multiple directions, throwing (I was told later) a wild palette of red, yellow and black, waking up those who were dutifully driving down the nearby streets, oblivious of everything but the tenacious worries of their jobs waiting like spiders to catch and hold them, the procession of mini-skirt temptations on the pavement, a feast “for your eyes only”, and the flash replay in their minds of the last time someone had reached and actually touched them, knocking against the absurd heart-shaped box obligations of the day.
I found myself covered with debris and embracing the grass, as if I had suddenly discovered the countryside hidden within the city. Were you hiding here all along? The pain hit me; I looked around to escape from the creeping darkness, and saw the pilot, face down, as inert as a leaf that a tree has dropped. I flipped the body, and for an instant, I saw my own face staring back at me, lifeless, scratched beyond belief. It is the end, I thought, and what did I accomplish? Nothing. But then, as if on a rolling tide, I drifted back, pulled off the helmet, watched the hair tumbling out. Confronted by this stranger — not just any stranger, an absolutely unexpected young black woman — I felt an immeasurable grief at the loss. Someone I didn’t know, but who was part of this world, and despite my efforts, I had been unable to keep her in it. Nevertheless, I ought to go through the motions to bring her back, do mouth to mouth resuscitation, feel the power of my life mingling with hers. Instead, I pulled away. Was someone, God perhaps, laughing at me? Was this a joke? These thoughts fired very quickly through my brain, milliseconds, maybe even faster. I pounded on her chest, but stopped short of mouth contact. I could not, I would not, and because I could not (and don’t ask me why now), I pounded her chest with an energy born of despair, my eyes tearing from the effort: “Breathe, goddamn it, breathe!” Then I heard the sound of ambulances — what took them so long? — and the voices of people who interrupted their life to commune with strangers about the mystery of why things happen the way they do, and why here, why now.
I straightened the body of the skywriter, closed her eyes full of clouds, laid her arms at her sides. One hand was tightly coiled in a fist, and I unwrapped it. Unveiled, staring up at me, like a message snatched from above, a torn piece of paper with two hand-written words that would change my life forever: Dr. SKYE. Without thinking, I pocketed the paper, giving the flowers in exchange, a small Valentine’s Day bouquet, meant for her surely. I wrapped her fingers around the flowers, untouched by fire, untouched by disaster, beauty in a forlorn world.
*
© Copyright 2010-2019 by M. deSalle Horchler
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