The Unlimited Dream Company

2

I Steal the Aircraft

Dreams of flight haunted that past year.

Throughout the summer I had worked as an aircraft cleaner at London Airport. In spite of the incessant noise and the millions of tourists moving in and out of the terminal buildings I was completely alone. Surrounded by parked airliners, I walked down the empty aisles with my vacuum-cleaner, sweeping away the debris of journeys, the litter of uneaten meals, of unused tranquillizers and contraceptives, memories of arrivals and departures that reminded me of all my own failures to get anywhere.

Already, at the age of twenty-five, I knew that the past ten years of my life had been an avalanche zone. Whatever new course I set myself, however carefully I tried to follow a fresh compass bearing, I flew straight into the nearest brick wall. For some reason I felt that, even in being myself, I was acting a part to which someone else should have been assigned. Only my compulsive role-playing, above all dressing up as a pilot in the white flying suit I found in one of the lockers, touched the corners of some kind of invisible reality.

At seventeen I had been expelled from the last of half a dozen schools. I had always been aggressive and lazy, inclined to regard the adult world as a boring conspiracy of which I wanted no part. As a small child I had been injured in the car crash that killed my mother, and my left shoulder developed a slight upward tilt that I soon exaggerated into a combative swagger. My school-friends liked to mimic me, but I ignored them. I thought of myself as a new species of winged man. I remembered Baudelaire’s albatross, hooted at by the crowd, but unable to walk only because of his heavy wings.

Everything touched off my imagination in strange ways. The school science library, thanks to an over-enlightened biology master, was a cornucopia of deviant possibilities. In a dictionary of anthropology I discovered a curious but touching fertility rite, in which the aboriginal tribesmen dug a hole in the desert and took turns to copulate with the earth. Powerfully moved by this image, I wandered around in a daze, and one midnight tried to have an orgasm with the school’s most cherished cricket pitch. In a glare of torch-beams I was found drunk on the violated turf, surrounded by beer bottles. Strangely enough, the attempt seemed far less bizarre to me than it did to my appalled headmaster.

Expulsion hardly affected me. Since early adolescence I had been certain that one day I would achieve something extraordinary, astonish even myself. I knew the power of my own dreams. Since my mother’s death I had been brought up partly by her sister in Toronto and the rest of the time by my father, a successful eye surgeon preoccupied with his practice who never seemed properly to recognize me. In fact, I had spent so much time on transatlantic jets that my only formal education had come from in-flight movies.

After a year at London University I was thrown out of the medical school – while dissecting a thorax in the anatomy laboratory one afternoon I suddenly became convinced that the cadaver was still alive. I terrorized a weak fellow student into helping me to frogmarch the corpse up and down the laboratory in an attempt to revive it. I am still half-certain that we would have succeeded.

Disowned by my father – I had never been close to him and often fantasized that my real father was one of the early American astronauts, and that I had been conceived by semen ripened in outer space, a messianic figure born into my mother’s womb from a pregnant universe – I began an erratic and increasingly steep slalom. Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography (I spent many excited weekends dialling deserted offices all over London and dictating extraordinary sexual fantasies into their answering machines, to be typed out for amazed executives by the unsuspecting secretaries) – yet for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique identity out of this defective jigsaw.

For six months I worked in the aviary at London Zoo. The birds drove me mad with their incessant cheeping and chittering, but I learned a great deal from them, and my obsession with man-powered flight began at this point. Once I was arrested by the police for being over-boisterous in the children’s playground near the zoo where I spent much of my spare time. For five minutes one rainy afternoon I was gripped by a Pied Piper complex, and genuinely believed that I could lead the twenty children and their startled mothers, the few passing dogs and even the dripping flowers away to a paradise which was literally, if I could only find it, no more than a few hundred yards from us.

Outside the courthouse, where I had been discharged by a sympathetic magistrate, I was befriended by a retired air hostess who now worked as a barmaid at a London Airport hotel and had just been convicted of soliciting at the West London Air Terminal. She was a spirited and likeable girl with a fund of strange stories about the sexual activities at international airports. Carried away by these visions, I immediately proposed to her and moved into the apartment she rented near Heathrow. At this time I was obsessed with the idea of building a man-powered aircraft. Already I was planning the world’s first circumnavigation, and saw myself as the Lindbergh and Saint-Exupéry of man-powered flight. I began to visit the airport each day, watching the airliners and the thousands of passengers taking off into the sky. I envied them, their profoundly ordinary lives crossed by this incredible dream of flight.

Flying dreams haunted me more and more. After a few weeks spent on the observation decks I found a job as an aircraft cleaner. On the southern side of London Airport was a section reserved for light aircraft. I spent all my free time in the parking hangars, sitting at the controls of these wind-weary but elegant machines, complex symbols that turned all sorts of keys in my mind. One day, accepting the logic of my dreams, I decided to take off myself.

So began my real life.

Whatever my motives at the time, however, an event that morning had profoundly unsettled me. While watching my fiancée dressing in the bedroom, I felt a sudden need to embrace her. Her uniform was decorated with flying motifs, and I always enjoyed the way she put on this grotesque costume. But as I held her shoulders against my chest I knew that I was not moved by any affection for her but by the need literally to crush her out of existence. I remember the bedside lamp falling to the floor at our feet, knocked down by her flailing arm. As she struck my face with her hard fists I stood by the bed, choking her against my chest. Only when she collapsed around my knees did I realize that I had been about to kill her, but without the slightest hate or anger.

Later, as I sat in the cockpit of the Cessna, excited by the engine as it coughed and thundered into life, I knew that I had meant no harm to her. But at the same time I remembered the dumb fear in her face as she sat on the floor, and I was certain that she would go to the police. Narrowly missing a stationary airliner, I took off on one of the parking runways. I had watched the mechanics start the engines and often badgered them to let me sit beside them as they taxied around the hangars. Several of them were qualified pilots and told me all I needed to know about the flight controls and engine settings. Strangely, now that I was actually airborne, crossing the car-parks, plastics factories and reservoirs that surrounded the airport, I had no idea what course to set. Even then I realized that I would soon be caught and charged with stealing the Cessna after attempting to murder my fiancée.

Forgetting to raise the flaps, I was unable to climb higher than 500 feet, but the idea of low-flying aircraft had always excited me. About five miles south of the airport the engine began to overheat. Within seconds it caught fire and filled the cabin with burning smoke. Below me was a placid riverside town, its tree-lined suburban streets and shopping centre tucked into a wide bend of the river. There were film studios, technicians on a lawn by their cameras. A dozen antique biplanes were drawn up by the canvas mock-up of a camouflaged hangar, and actors in World War I leather flying gear raised their goggles to stare up at me as I soared past, trailing an immense plume of smoke. A man standing on a platform above a metal tower waved his megaphone at me, as if trying to incorporate me into his film.

By now the burning oil that filled the cabin was scorching my face and hands. I decided to put the aircraft down into the river – rather than be burned alive I would drown. Half a mile ahead, beyond tennis courts and a park ringed by dead elms, a large Tudor mansion stood above a sloping lawn that ran down to the water.

As the aircraft crossed the park my shoes were on fire. Vaporizing glycol raced up the funnels of my trousers, scalding my legs and about to boil my testicles. The treetops rushed by on either side. The undercarriage splintered the brittle upper branches of the dead elms, and a cloud of starlings erupted from the trees like shrapnel from a shell. The control column struck itself from my hands. At the last moment I shouted at the river as it rose towards me. Falling apart in the air, its tail impaled by the branches, the aircraft plunged into the water. Spray and steam exploded through the fuselage, the hot pellets striking my face. Hurled forwards against the harness, I felt my head strike the cabin door, but without any sense of pain, as if my body belonged to a passenger.

However, I was certain that I never lost consciousness. Immediately the aircraft began to sink. As I tried to release the harness, struggling with the unfamiliar buckle, a seething black water filled the cabin and swirled in a greedy way around my waist. I knew that within a few seconds I would be drowned.

At this point I saw a vision.

3

The Vision

Supported by its wings, the aircraft lay passively in the water. A huge cloud of steam rose from the submerged engine and drifted towards the bank. The nose tilted forwards, and the river lapped in an off-hand way at the fractured windshield in front of my face. I slipped the release catch of my harness, and was trying to force open the cabin door when my attention was held by the scene in front of me.

I seemed to be looking at an enormous illuminated painting, lit both by the unsettled water and by a deep light transmitted through the body of the canvas. What surprised me, as I pushed the cabin door against the current, was the intense clarity of every detail. In front of me, above its sloping lawn, was the half-timbered Tudor mansion. A number of people were watching me, like figures posed by the artist in a formal landscape. None of them moved, as if frozen by the burning aircraft that had burst out of the afternoon sky and fallen into the water at their feet.

Although I had never been to this town before – Shepperton, I assumed, from the presence of the film studios – I was convinced that I recognized their faces, and that they were a party of film actors resting between takes. Nearest to me was a dark-haired young woman wearing a white laboratory coat. She stood on the foam-flecked lawn below the mansion, playing in a distracted way with three small children. Two boys and a girl, they sat side by side on a swing like monkeys huddled together on a perch, smiling hopefully at whatever game the young woman was trying to arrange for them. Out of the sides of their eyes they watched me in a knowing way, as if they had been waiting all day for me to land my plane in the water for them. The smaller of the boys wore leg-irons, and whistled now and then at his heavy feet, encouraging them to kick the air. The other boy, a stocky, large-skulled mongol, whispered something to the girl, a pretty child with pale cheeks and secretive eyes.

Above them, in an upstairs window of the mansion, was a handsome, middle-aged woman with a widow’s empty face, the mother, I guessed, of the girl in the white coat. She held the brocade curtain in one hand, a forgotten cigarette in the other, unsure whether the violence of my arrival might drag her down with me. She was calling to a bearded man in his late fifties who sat on the narrow beach that separated me from the bank. An archaeologist of some kind, he was surrounded by easel, wicker hamper and specimen trays, his strong but over-weight body squeezed into a small canvas chair. Although his shirt was soaked with water splashed across him by the aircraft, he was staring intently at something on the beach that had caught his attention.

The last of these seven witnesses was a man of about thirty, naked but for his swimming trunks, who stood at the end of a wrought-iron pier jutting into the river from the group of riverside hotels beyond the mansion. He was painting the gondola of a miniature Ferris wheel, part of a children’s funfair built on to this crumbling Edwardian pier. He paused paint-brush in hand, and with complete presence of mind glanced casually over his shoulder at me, displaying his blond hair and the showy, muscular physique of a film company athlete.

The water rose around my chest, surging through the submerged dials of the instrument panel. I waited for one of the witnesses to come to my help, but they stood like actors waiting for a director’s cue, their figures lit by the vibrant light that suffused the air. A deep, premonitory glow lay over the mansion, the amusement pier and the hotels by the marina, as if in the last micro-seconds before an immense disaster. I was almost convinced that a huge airliner had crashed on to this suburban town or that it was about to be overwhelmed by a nuclear catastrophe.

The river swirled across the windshield. A murky foam thrashed against the fractured glass. At the last moment I saw the archaeologist rise from his chair, strong arms outstretched across the water, trying to will me from the aircraft as if he had suddenly realized his responsibility for me.

The starboard wing sank below the surface. Dragged by the current, the Cessna rolled on to its side. Breaking free from my harness, I forced back the door and clambered from the flooded cabin on to the port wing strut. I climbed on to the roof and stood there in my ragged flying suit as the aircraft sank below me into the water, taking my dreams and hopes into its deep.