Flight
About five months ago a young Pakistani man, prostrate and facing
At the swirling center of the tumult, scientists at every institute and
university banded together as one massive global brain to try and understand
this new plague, because, I suppose, that’s what scientists do. They were
frightened, not so much because people were dying, but because the universe had
stood up and pissed on their fundamental models of how the universe works;
nothing, least of all humans, is supposed to combust spontaneously. Yet, even
with the collective brilliance of mankind at the helm, no progress was made.
From a medical standpoint, each autopsied body was no different from the charred
casualties of every housefire and pillaged hamlet throughout history. Unable to
derive an explanation from those unrecognizable corpses, the most they could do
was sit back and count the dead with analytical eyes. In two and a half weeks,
their worldwide observation nets had come up with the first conclusive numbers,
and they found that the plague was consuming its victims with a disturbing
consistency. Around six thousand people per day were dying indiscriminately,
young and old from every country. Taken as a fraction of the entire global
population, that amounted to about…
One in a million– I laughed when I first heard that, the same statistic
that once described one’s friends and lovers. Their rare qualities, her
one-in-a-million grave beauty or his one-in-a-million weird, lyrical soul,
became overnight the ones that condemned them to die flailing in the streets.
Suddenly, everyone in
The window of my apartment overlooks the sidewalk, and I take some time
out every evening to watch people pass by each other on their ways to wherever.
And every day, at the same time, I see the same woman, with whom I have been
hopelessly smitten for a long time now. She lives in the same building– this is
how I know her– and on occasion we will pass by one another at the front door or
in the stairwell and exchange smiles. If we chance to be travelling in the same
direction, we will also exchange words, innocuous conversations less meaningful
than if we hadn’t spoken at all. Outside of these encounters, we don’t speak,
and so most of my seeing her happens at my window. She arrives back from work
each evening at seven-thirty, and for nearly a full minute I get to see her
approach steadily her and imagine where she’s been and what she’s thinking, to
simply observe, high up and unnoticed, like a child’s balloon lost in a room
with high ceilings. I determined, through some tangled but poignant logic, that,
while people were burning in their beds, I would not win her over by any normal
means. It would have to be a single, unmistakable display of feeling, a grand
gesture of sorts, the kind of one-in-a-million act that the whole of the
universe was encouraging us not to do.
Around the start of the plague, I, like many others, started to get
philosophical. During my evening observation time, I began to turn questions
through my head, and would always come back to the same one: If it is possible
for people to start spontaneously combusting, then why not anything else? This
one exception to all belief had shown itself like a loose thread on an aging
sweater; where, then, were the all the other loose threads? On one of these
evenings, watching her pass under my window, I realized what my grand gesture
would be. Exploiting the gaps in this new reality, I would do what the old
reality had informed all children that they could not do except in dreams: I
would learn to fly. I would open that window and glide over the throng of
anonymous heads, my gaze fixed solely on her, and when I landed, a crowd would
form around me, and I would push through the faceless bodies to find her and
dedicate my flight to her alone.
I began to read. I researched the old Indian mystics who would leave the
ground as they meditated, and whom civilization views today as bullshit figments
of ludicrous superstition. But maybe, I reasoned, they were more than that.
Maybe they, through some transcendental clarity, were able to see the universe
for what it was: an imperfect sweater. Maybe they were able to levitate simply
because they never asked why they were able to levitate, as if their skepticism,
their complete and perfect uncertainty, was the force that held them aloft.
Maybe they had unraveled all those loose threads and reweaved them tightly into
sails, so that they could ride the monsoon winds while they slept floating in
the air.
And so, my plan fully formed, I started collecting that kind of
uncertainty, filtering and refining it again and again in my mind until it was
purer and more potent that jet fuel. Most important and nourishing was the
uncertainty of how she felt about me, what ran through her mind after each of
our parting smiles, whether she thought about me when I wasn’t there. Secondary
was the uncertainty of her interpretation of such a gesture– perhaps, after
seeing me take off from my fifth-floor window and drift pointedly down to meet
her, alighting next to her on bended knee and with my heart on my sleeve, she
would think me childish and idealistic, and walk up to her apartment to fix her
solitary dinner like, I imagine, she does every night. Finally was the
uncertainty that I would be able to fly at all, that my proclamation of love
might land be with a fractured spine rather than a whole lover, and that my
family would not think to invite her to my funeral service. And always present
was the uncertainty of my surviving to carry out the plan, that I might burst
into flame before I ever got my head out the window, but I had by then become
used to that feeling.
It took three months. During that time, I did nothing differently. I
still watched her unseen, still exchanged meaningless words with her when the
chance arose, never breaking the stride of our motionless dance. I kept my
smiles and my glances the same, rolled the same questions through my head as we
talked, or as I looked down at her making her way home. Science had not yet come
up with an explanation of the plague, so those loose threads were still there. I
set a date for my flight, and on that evening I stood by my window and was
ready.
I didn’t need to look, I knew she was down there, cutting her usual path
to the building through that crowd of everyone. My window was flung wide open,
inviting. Short of breath, dizzy at the sudden meaning of being five stories off
the ground, I placed my feet on the threshold, braced my arms against the top of
the frame, and, with an empowering second thought, took the leap.
And there she was below me, brown hair and brown coat directly in line
with my downward trajectory, but slightly and earth-shatteringly different than
I had a million times envisioned her: she was with a man. They walked
side-by-side, matching their footsteps intentionally in some private game, her
left corresponding with his right, and his left with her right, and they
appeared indifferent to the possibility that they, as a pair, might at any
moment catch fire and die, bright and screaming like fireworks, while I watched
from above. As gravity drew them closer to me, I was able to read with
increasing clarity the note addressed to me in the script of their intertwined
fingers: your flight is futile; you can stop now. I was unable to see her face,
but still knew that this was the happiest I had ever seen her. Weighed down by
this new and terrible certainty, I plummeted towards the cold, gray pavement and
realized my mistake.