Dreams of Flying

by Donald J. Harlow

From a period in 1978-1979 when I was wondering where I was going next. For some time I had been thinking the same question about mankind -- not who would be elected in the next year (it was Reagan), but what our next step in evolution might be. Frankly, I suspect that intelligence is not all it's cracked up to be; maybe we will be turning in some other direction.

Flying! The great dark lands swept past below him, moon and stars were like shining angels that floated overhead, watching, watching. It felt to him as though he were in a great, eternal plunge. He could feel the drag of his mighty wings, gossamer transparencies a million miles across that kept him safely aloft and free of the leaden ground below. Into the teeth of the whistling wind he sang a wordless song and cried out in love and admiration for his universe and all the beautiful things in it.

How could he have known that he was falling when he was so intoxicated with exhileration? His first indication came when the side of his head struck the floor next to his bed. "Mommy!" he wailed in shock and pain. But it was not the pain of the fall that drove him to sobs as his mother rushed into the little room, dark on the walls where paint had long since peeled off, splotched with water on the ceiling. It was the utter anguish that came with the extinction of his dream. Once again he was earthbound.

Doctor Weiss, who was very proud of himself for the one morning a week that he sacrificed at the free clinic, made a great show of checking the Medicaid records in the manila folder. "No, I don't think that your boy is seriously disturbed, Mrs. Coffman. Falling dreams are not unusual among children of his age, although this apparent fixation might indicate some minor but deap-seated problem. I doubt whether it's anything we would need to handle here, though, even if we were qualified to do so."

Mrs. Coffman was not completely reassured. "But Doctor ... Eric seems so ... well, so slow, if you know what I mean. His teacher says that he's falling well behind in reading and arithmetic."

Weiss sighed. He was acquainted with Eric's school, and doubted whether any of the teachers there would know a slow child from a genius. Eric's neighborhood got the dregs. "Well, perhaps there is some minor organic problem that could be corrected. We could perform an extensive (and expensive, he did not add) series of tests to find out." At the look on Mrs. Coffman's face, he hastened to add: "No, I don't mean brain damage sustained during his fall from bed. Such falls are as common among children as flying dreams." He consulted the x-ray again. "There does seem to be some peculiarity in the development of the right parietal lobe, though at first glance there appears to be nothing wrong. I don't know ..."

"You mean he might have a cancer? A tumor? God forbid!"

"No, no, nothing of the sort," Weiss hastened to reassure her. "It's just an oddity in the positioning of the convolutions - it's not anything that we can cut out." He closed the manila folder and laid it on the desk with definite finality. "Some children are just naturally slow, Mrs. Coffman. Many of them catch up later and go on the outstrip their classmates. In Eric's case, we can only wait and see."

They tortured him with the torments that only children can visit upon other children - cuffs, sharp blows, the disdain of his peers. "But it's true!" he cried out in anguished protest. "I did fly!"

Bucky scowled and gave Eric a push that sent him back down onto the grass in an undignified sprawl. "You're a fuckin' liar, Eric. Nobody can fly."

"But I did, I did," he protested.

"Eric's a liar!" cried Tim. "He said he flew, he said he flew! Nobody flies except in air-uh-planes!"

Doug, who gloried in being Eric's greatest tormenter, had a shrewd look on his face. "Now, don't call poor Eric a liar," he counselled with false solicitude. "Maybe he really does believe that he flew! Maybe he's just a little ... you know." He touched the tip of his right forefinger to his forehead, and they all laughed.

"But I did! I did!" He was crying now. "I did fly! All across the world, with great big wingsi And I could have flown up to the moon or the sun, if I'd wanted to!"

"Eric's a liar! Eric's a liar!" They formed a circle and began to dance around him, chanting their mocking refrain. When Eric finally lost his temper and tried to bash his way free, they pmmnelled him until he could not move.

Tony Coffman gave his son hell that night. "Boy, I know you're maybe too dull to understand this, but for what you done you oughtta be horsewhipped."

Not understanding, Eric looked innocent. That only served to infuriate his father more. He gave his son the back of his hand, knocking him sprawling to the floor. "In my day her father wouldda been after you for that, at least. Mightta brought along a shotgun. What a nice, sensitive kid like her sees in a dimwit like you ... maybe that's why she's gonna have the baby, put it out for adoption; they wouldn't wanta have you in the family."

Now Eric began to understand. "It's ... Marcia? She's gonna have a baby?"

"Like he didn't know!" Coffman spat sideways. "God in Heaven, give me strength. Yes, you dimbulb, she's gonna have a baby." He mimicked Eric's thirteen-year-old voice. "Your kid. Now, how you gonna pay for it? They slap a paternity suit on you, you're broke for the resta your life."

"They won't," Eric said, almost brokenly.

"Why won't they? An' it won't be you what pays - it'll be us!"

"Marcia don't want nothin' to do with me anymore. She just wants to have my kid. Because I can fly."

"What?" Eric gad been climbing slowly to his feet; his father floored him again, this time raising a bruise on his right cheek. "You little ... That's crazy! I thought you quit that kid talk years ago, after Doug Smith and Gavin Wyshinski and those others beat the shit outta you for it."

"I quit talkin'," Eric said, fingering his cheek. "I didn't quit flyin'." He stood up and Coffman noted for the first time, not without some trepidation, that his son actually loomed over him when he didn't stoop.

"Okay, smart ass, if you fly, how come nobody ever seen you doin' it?"

"Cause I only do it when I'm sleepin'."

"You dreamed it," Coffman hawked and spat through the open window next to him. He looked once more at his son and decided that a third blow might be injudicious. "God damn thirteen year old kid still dreams of flyin'. You wet your bed, too, kid? Maybe I oughtta think about puttin' you in one'a them homes. You're not very bright, you gonna screw things up for people like Marcia ..."

Eric's smile was sad. "They gotta be screwed up, Dad. That's what they call 'the way of the world.'"

Now the dreams came more and more clearly, and while he was immersed in them he did not know that they were dreams, nor did he want to. Far below the earth rushed past, far overhead the moon and stars hung, waiting breathlessly for he knew not what. And there, in the great, empty sky he raced alone.

There were no airliners in his silent heaven, no noisy jet bombers, no thundering shuttles boosting men up into the emptiness of space, He was as alone as no man had ever been, lost in a world that no other man could see. The feeling was magnificent. In the pleasure it brought him, it was better than orgasmic.

He never wanted to wake up again. He always did.

MacReady looked at the name on the slip of paper in front of him. "Eric Coffman." He looked up at the young, fresh-faced coed who sat on the opposite side of his desk. "Why am I not surprised?"

She took his comment with equanimity. "That's what I thought you'd say, Doctor MacReady, He's had a lot of girls in ... in trouble, hasn't he."

"At least four that I know of, two of them before he had left high school. You make number five." The doctor found himself not knowing whether to hate Coffman or to envy him. Stupid little brute, he thought. I'll get him. "I'm going to have to recommend that he be expelled, This is a very liberal institution; we value individual freedom and behavioral diversity more than almost any comparable school in the country, But, by God, enough is far too much!" Then, more quietly and sympathetically: "Do you love Coffman, Luanne?" .

She blushed now, where she had not when he had told her the news. "Doctor MacReady, I don't even particularly like Eric. He's not bright, he's not interesting to talk too, he's not handsome, he has more arms than an octopus - and he just loves to brag about his conquests." More understandingly: "Maybe that's all he has to brag about. But he's fascinating, Doctor, and I mean that in the original sense of the word. When he's near me, it's like I'm Trilby and he's Svengali. When he took me, it was just like I was hypnotized. And when I came, it was like ... oh, my Lord, Doctor, it was like I was flying!"

His two worlds became more and more entangled with each other as his life grew longer and his memory of what had gone before became dim, for he really was not very bright. There were at least three different colleges, but they were all the same; poor grades, too many women, and they would expel him. Later there were construction jobs - he was strong and up high, on the girders, he had no fear - a couple of clerical jobs - those never lasted long - and an endless succession of bars, floozies, singles clubs, street pickups ... he felt an unslakeable desire for women, any kind of women, and for some reason they always seemed to respond to him. And at night, on those nights when he lay by himself, there were always the dreams of flying.

Now he no longer had wings; it was as though he became a part of the sky itself, racing down it from point to point, sometimes stooping like a hawk, sometimes hurling himself forward like a shuttle. And occasionally he thought he heard a voice, a whisper, urging him up and up. Go! it came. Go! All the world, all the universe belong to a man who can fly!

And he would wake up in the morning and go to the tiny, patchy mirror over the stained washbasin and look into it, and he would see the sagging, lined face, the prematurely grey hair, the dull, washed-out, brooding eyes; and he would wonder to himself, in his own dim way: Is it worth it? Are the dreams worth so much?

He knew that they were more than dreams. If only the others could understand ...

One night he awoke and remembered his dream in its entirety. He remembered how to fly.

Now he could fly while awake. Should he? Did he really want to? Somewhere, a tiny fragment of rationality asked: What if he should fall?

He would not fall. He knew. He reached out those other arms, the ones you could not see, and felt them fit into the great magnetic field around the earth as though into a pair of slots made for them. Then he let them swell until they had cupped enough of the field to lift him. Throwing himself out of bed, he raced across the seedy room without touching the floor and leaped through the window, five stories above the sidewalk below.

He did not fall. He had know that he would not. Instead he rose into the night sky, awake this time rather than in dream, and climbed up the massive fields of force that interpenetrate the world and all space around it. His eyes were on the stars. He knew that he should stop to get his bearings, but somehow the driving force that had dreamed of flying for so many years had become detached from his rationality and he could not stop. He knew that he could never stop.

The voice came again. Yes, Eric, fly, fly as you have never flown before! Now you belong to the universe ... and to the ages!

Let me down! he screamed soundlessly. The stars were ceasing their eternal twinkling as he climbed higher and higher. The air was growing thin and cold; soon his capillaries would begin to hemorrhage, his eyeballs would freeze, his lungs would coat with frost. Let me down! I can't live up here!

I know you can't, poor little Eric, said the voice to him. But that makes no difference. Your business in the world of men is done. You've left yourself behind, among men. Soon there will be another Eric, and another, and a dozen more, and a million, and a billion, all of them hurling themselves into the sky to die when they come of age.

But why? he cried. What purpose does it serve?

What purpose did it serve when a million and a billion innocent Devonian fishes found themselves flung ashore on those ancient, lifeless beaches? the voice asked. Most of them died, too. But not all, Eric, not all. Someday, a thousand or a million years from now, one of your descendants with hardier lungs than the rest will return to earth to breed again. And a million yeaxs after that, one of his descendants will drive himself skyward and never return, nor will he die. The descendants of men will learn, slowly, ever so slowly, to live without the earth. And you were the first, Eric, you were the first.

I don't want to be the first! he tried to scream. But it was too late. The stars and the moon and the earth had all gone out.

The tumbling corpse reached the top of its trajectory at an altitude of more than a thousand miles. Then, slowly, it began the long fall back down toward the great dark lands below.

Tommy awoke just in time to see the falling star race down toward the horizon where the summer sun had just set. For a moment sweat beaded his brow and a look of nearly religious ecstasy illuminated his face.

"But I did fly!" he whispered to himself. "I did fly!"