Flight: New Novel
A new book by author Ned Hayes. ( Coming soon! )
Preview of First Chapter
I should have found you twenty years ago. Lost in impossible dreams I burned with impatience, looking for you everywhere. Where were you in those times?
“J’aurai du te découvrir il y a vingt ans. Perdue dans des rêves impossibles je brulais d’impatience te cherchant partout. Ou étais-tu en ces temps la?”
— Amba BongoSo we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publication Details will be available here:
Flight Book Page
First Chapter from FLIGHT
A spark in the sky.
The girl stands still, white ribbon in her auburn hair. She stares upward. Large blue eyes shadowed by one small hand. The sky beyond the glass a deep indigo bowl. The moon a waning sickle. Faint color pours over the skyline, pale light seeps up.
At first, she thinks the speck is on fire. It appears to be made of white metal. Small as an insect, it sparkles above, touched by dawn light that has not yet crossed the horizon.
The tiny particle came out of nothing. Now it floats, it moves. The child imagines that she brought it into being, just as she creates whole worlds in her mind, and gives voice to her dolls. She speaks to it now in the language she knows the best. She whispers of angel wings.
Ange céleste. Ailes d’anges.
And to her surprise, as it draws nearer it does grow wings. The floating speck unveils a pair of pointed limbs, just like an angel’s. She does not yet know that this approaching aéroplane carries a mystery within it. She will be the first to be presented with this mystery, which is only fitting, as she herself is connected to the secret within it.
*
The girl could turn away now, leave behind this expanding celestial plaything. The plane moves closer. Her parents are ready to depart. But the sky has fished for her, and caught her gaze.
At this moment, she does not fully understand that she flew to this great city in the south in just such a craft. She is only five years old. She is new to this family. It has not been an easy adjustment. There have been new rules to understand. New foods. New names. Things have felt foreign for weeks. Now, this is yet another strangeness.
The girl is cold, her skin trembles. A skinned knee throbs, blood welling to the surface like dew. But she is fixated on the speck that moved at her command. It floats in a blue depth as deep as any lake. She is ready for further revelations. New miracles appear every moment.
The great structure looms over them. Vast ribs of steel: a distant ceiling tendoned with metallic slats and exposed beams. Almost, she expects the colossal joints to flex and move. This building could travel far away with all of them inside.
The girl looks back at the sky. She pushes her forehead against the vast windowpane. She does not hear her mother’s entreaties. She does not listen to her father’s grumbling. The girl does not understand that this is merely the beginning of a long journey, not the end. They have many miles to go this day.
She does not care to go yet. Instead, she presses one small hand darkly against the great window, holding onto the rectangle of sky. The aéroplane awaits her command.
Viens à moi, she says. Come here.
And it does.
*
As she stares outside, her stomach roils with vertigo. She feels the absence of the known world. In fact, she will remember this moment in the years to come, it will be an echo of the first hurt she took when she was taken away from the house of her birth. She will carry this sense of loss with her. It will wake her in the night years from now, and she will not know why she has awoken. She will only remember staring outside, into an alien sky, looking out through a thick glass pane. Alone.
The sky melts into a translucent turquoise, the color of a bright scarf worn by an old woman the girl once saw in the street. The memory of a swing comes back to her – she remembers swinging back and forth on a hot afternoon. She wishes now for crushed ice, for the scent of pine trees. Those things would taste like home. But there is no ice-candy here, no trees. Only a metallic taste in her mouth. The girl swallows.
Outside, shards of pallid cloud can be seen in the light of the rising sun. The object in the sky resolves slowly into the solid shape of an aéroplane. It comes closer and closer. The wings widen, the body elongates. Small, round portholes emerge.
The girl can see vapor coming off the plane, but she cannot taste the air. If she were outside, a bitter scent would be evident. Bitumen is off-gassing in the sunlight, volatile organic compounds dispersing. Given a few hundred thousand years, the tarmac itself will dissolve into the air. A disappearing trick: just give it time.
All that the girl sees from her vantage point is the bright shimmer above the runway. She hopes for magic. But despite whatever sorcery might be at play between earth and sky, the pairs of giant wheels sliding down into view beneath the aéroplane’s belly are real. They descend from the shell of the aircraft like a giant proboscis, searching for solid ground.
Impact. In the first seconds, the tires skid. Smoke rises. Rubber chars. The girl wonders how long the wheels will smolder until they burst into flame.
Tires spin madly, catching up to the craft’s rotational velocity. Then the smoke stops. The tires roll fast the rest of the way. Finally, the craft slows to a sedate walk.
Ahead of the aircraft, in the distance, she watches a woman in a yellow vest gesture, a long wand held in each hand. The two wands glow with a magical light.
The aircraft moves forward. It goes out of sight. Then, a few moments later, it looms over the corner of the terminal from which the girl watches. Its shadow slides over the window and obstructs the sunlight. It is larger than she could have possibly conceived. And closer too.
The plane at rest before her. The whine of decelerating jet engines. Animal moans of metal adjusting to the sudden stresses of sea level.
Bon. Her mother touches her arm. On y va, ma cher. Time to go, my dear.
Yet the girl remains riveted. She does not move.
In a space once occupied by one of the great wheels, she sees a shape that should not be there. In the darkness, the shadow of a human figure. She stares, uncertain if it is actually a man.
Then the womb of the aircraft delivers him from confinement. The body, helpless as any newborn, glides out of the aluminum canal. A backwards birth. Feet, then legs; his belly, then torso; his hands, then arms, stitched with a line of long white scars. Finally, shoulders come into view. Above them a calm, closed face. Eyes shut, face still as rigor mortis. She is surprised to see matted red hair on his head. The color of his hair matches her own.
Yet white frost covers his skin. His mouth parts as he slides forward, his damp head thrown back, as if he might cry out.
For a moment, the girl is the only one who sees him.
He slides down in a languorous motion; it almost seems intentional. There is a bit of yellow plastic on the ground nearby him now. A toy. Did it fall from his pocket? Did he bring it with him?
Far away, inside the terminal, the girl cannot see if his eyelids flicker, if any faint breath exits his mouth, animates his lungs. For a few of her own heartbeats, he is merely a crumpled mass, the shape of a man collapsed into himself, like a discarded garment.
Then the woman in the yellow vest darts into view. She has seen the man on the runway. The woman outside calls out in another language: ¡Ayuda! Este hombre esta en problemas!
Yet even this shout is muted from inside the terminal, it resounds as if underwater. ¡Ayuda! The woman drops a glowing wand from her hand and retreats.
Rapidly, another worker comes into the picture. This second person, another woman, moves swiftly to the man on the ground, urgent intention in her face. Other people enter the frame now, most of them also wearing yellow vests. Mouths move. They shout, but their sounds do not carry into the terminal. A mute pantomime. A man in a suit holds a radio, barks unheard orders into it.
Someone has begun wrapping the man’s body in white. A vehicle accelerates into view, lights flashing. They can hear it inside the terminal: the siren utters a high, throbbing chorus.
A flurry of activity. The girl closely watches the people’s faces, trying to determine how she should feel. Some of them seem angry. Some are upset. No one appears to be happy. The girl is intrigued to see that the glowing wand remains on the ground.
The crowd parts and there he is again. Alone. The man’s body splayed out across a white ambulance cart, one arm hanging helpless over the side. The rest of his body curled away, as if to seek succor. Someone stands at his feet too, as if in supplication.
The girl sees this pietà for a heartbeat. Then the crowd closes in and her view of the man is again blocked. She squints as though that will help her look through the people. She recognized the man. She thinks she may know him.
Le connaissons-nous? she asks her mother in French. They are both staring outside.
Non, je ne le connais pas, her mother says. No, I don’t know him.
The girl nods. She is only five years old, and she understands that she might be mistaken. She once mistook a stranger for her new father in a crowd. She knew him, and then she didn’t. A longer look might confirm her initial impression. But she won’t get a second chance to stare at the man’s face.
Emergency personnel mill about outside, more mute shouting, orders given, the wail of additional approaching sirens. Flashing lights. Soon there are so many people bustling about that the reason they all arrived seems lost in it all. In fact, the girl is uncertain if the man remains on the tarmac at all.
Eventually, people melt away. Vehicles depart. The man is gone now as well. Even the airplane itself has moved out of sight. Only a wand is left there, still blinking on the ground, illuminating the bit of yellow plastic left behind. The abandoned toy.
Où l’ont-ils emmené? she asks.
Her mother does not know where they have taken him.
The girl asks so many questions. She continues to cling to the glass wall. Her now-father goes and finds a coffee. He is weary beyond words. Thirty-six hours. No sleep. His very flesh is fatigued. They are still getting to know this girl; she is new to them. And he fears he has no words of kindness or care remaining in him to give to her.
Her new mother listens, though.
The girl wants to know if the man had children. Unbeknownst to the girl, this question touches on the very reason he hid inside the plane. She does not know then that she herself is one of his children. That lack of understanding is part of the sense of unspoken loss that will haunt her in the years to come.
Some of the girl’s questions can be answered. What the people did to help. How the wheels fit inside the plane. But some questions cannot be answered. It is exhausting to try, but the woman who holds her hand is as long-suffering as any mother. She nods along as the child insists on pointing out that the wand is still lying on the ground, forgotten.
In the end, before they depart, leaving the strange tableau forever, there is only one remaining question. The girl asks it repeatedly: Vivant ou mort? But no one knows the answer.
No one can tell her if the red-haired man is alive or dead.