It took me more than a moment to get any sense out of this mishmash of outmoded jargon. Then: “You’re saying the prince is our pilot?”
“You ain’t just bumping your gums together. It’s ceiling zero, visibility zero, and we’re comin’ in on a wing and a prayer.”
As he spoke it came to my attention that the aircraft had begun to move: I had been subliminally aware that the engines had been idling for some time. Olga came along and insisted I take a seat and fasten the belt, and then upbraided me for putting a suitcase in the overhead rack.
“It’s not mine!”
“A likely story,” said she, and demanded that I put it under the seat in front of me; if it didn’t fit, the takeoff would be delayed while the case was ejected.
“It’s yours, isn’t it?” I angrily asked the cable clerk, across the aisle.
“Not on your tintype,” said he. He moved his head to indicate the ex-concierge. “Belongs to that hepcat.”
Therefore I did as ordered. The case must have contained stolen metallic things from the hotel, clinking and heavy as it was, and I had the greatest difficulty in moving it with no aid from anybody. But when it was lowered, it did fit under the seat.
“Now,” said Olga, scowling down at me, “extinguish your cigar, cigarette, or pipe.”
“As you can see,” I said derisively, “I’m not smoking.”
She brought a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her tunic. “Take one of these and light it.” She gave me a cigarette and a folder of matches, and actually forced me to take a puff or two, again threatening to stop the aircraft unless I complied.
I obeyed her, but I did demand an explanation.
“It is one of the new regulations of the People’s Airline,” said she. “Gregor has warned us that the punishment will be stern for any failure to enforce any rule. Since nobody on this flight was smoking, it was impossible to observe the regulation. You were the obvious choice to bring about the proper state of affairs. Now put the cigarette out, so that we might take off promptly.”
The takeoff, when it came, seemed professional enough. When the plane was level again, the intercom came on in a rush of static, and someone, presumably Prince Sebastian, said something through the auditory fog, but as on every flight I have taken throughout my life, only the odd word was comprehensible. I gather our altitude was specified in thousands, and the phrase “on your left” would suggest that the passengers were urged to look out those windows for a view of something on the ground.
That the ex-sovereign of the country was now piloting a commercial airliner was not as remarkable a fact as it would have been only a day earlier, for one result (perhaps the only) of my visit to Saint Sebastian was a diminishment of my capacity for wonder, already weakened by several decades of adult life in the known world before I ever heard of this little land it was easy to call preposterous. Perhaps too easy. Did things make any more sense elsewhere? Or, to be fair, any less? It was true that where I came from you could get more or less fresh fish (allowing for the fact that most of them came by truck, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, from Boston), and not plastic. On the other hand, not New York nor any other American jurisdiction, to my knowledge, had a department of hoaxes, though obviously almost any of the existing bureaus could be, with justice, so labeled. The same might be said with respect to a department of irony, and if you got right down to it, was there not a crying need for a government agency that rose above pedestrian meanness to the grander, more generous view: viz., the vision of human problems as allergies? If the Saint Sebastian of old had been ridiculous, it was not altogether ignoble. But the stress must go on the penultimate word, for the country’s shortcomings were obvious, and it might be asked whether this had really been a feasible way for human beings to live—though not by one who had ever had occasion to travel by Interborough Rapid Transit.
Derailing such a train of thought, perhaps in the nick of time, Olga appeared with a trayful of glasses filled with a liquid off-puttingly colored in a vermilion that looked as if it might glow in the dark.
“I trust you have an alcoholic alternative,” I growled.
“Drink this,” she ordered. “It was developed for the Sebastiani space program.” She lowered the tray from the back of the seat ahead and deposited the glass on it.
“You can’t be serious.”
“The project may not have gone farther,” said she, “but the orange drink was a beginning, anyway.”
“You are serious. Do I detect a note of nostalgia? Are you already looking back on the old regime with a certain fondness?”
She frowned and went along the aisle.
I put the glass onto the tray, slid out of the seat, and went forward again, passing Rasmussen, who had taken his place in first class and was, of all things, reading a paperback edition of The Aspern Papers. Perhaps naïvely, I could not resist returning to comment on this phenomenon.
“This is disgusting,” said he, putting a finger to the cover. “Publishers can’t even spell anymore.” I confess I have never been able to decide whether or not he was jesting.
I continued unopposed into the cockpit, through an unlocked door; hijackers were not feared on this flight. The first person I saw was old Rupert, the prince’s butler. He sat in the co-pilot’s seat and wore a 1920’s Lindy type of leather helmet, the flaps of which were buttoned under his withered chin, the goggles pushed up on the forehead. He turned and sneered at me.
Crammed into the pilot’s place was the stout figure of Prince Sebastian XXIII. He wore a green uniform trimmed with gold. Clamped over his billed cap, World War II-style, was a set of earphones.
Though the noise of the engines was considerable up here, Rupert was audible, though he seemingly spoke at no more than his normal volume.
“Go away,” said he. “His Royal Highness is engaged.”
At this the prince turned. “Wren, old chap! Welcome aboard. I’m afraid we’ll have to pig it as to food until we reach New York, but I did manage to bring along a few bottles of Bollinger, a pound or two of sterlet, a cold grouse, and some other things my cooks were able to put in the hamper before they were packed off to become refrigeration mechanics.”
I had an odd feeling of disequilibrium.
“Sire,” said Rupert.
“Can’t you see I’m speaking to Wren?” Sebastian asked in annoyance.
“Sire, we are losing altitude.”
“Then pull us up, you old dog.”
“But where, sire, is the joystick?”
Sebastian shook his head at me. “The ancient sod hasn’t been in an aircraft since the Fourteen-Eighteen War.”
“Which side?” I soon had cause to regret my question, for the airplane continued to descend, at an ever steeper angle, yet the prince answered me at length.
“The Central Powers, I’m afraid. But you see, we were surrounded by them, and the Hungarians, who could not whip anyone else, would have been only too eager to punish us if we had not declared ourselves their allies. My grandfather made the necessary decision but of course had to pay the price at Versailles: our so-called empire was dissolved. On the other hand, this was no more than a formality, for our only overseas possession, claimed for the Crown by the Sebastiani explorer Giovanni Dori in 1611, an unpopulated island very near the magnetic North Pole, had long since proved to be only a flat iceberg and, unbeknown to the geographers, had melted during one unusually warm winter. Fortunately we were ignored by all the major powers during the Second World War, though it was touch-and-go at one point, when Marshal Goering sent a team of emissaries to inspect the pictures in the royal collections. Luckily for us, Germans have no taste in art: they soon went away and we were not molested.”
“Sire,” Rupert said again, but in the same tone of gentle impatience, though I was about to scream by now.
“Haven’t you watched me at all, you fool?” Sebastian asked. “One simply pulls back on the wheel!”
I sighed as the old retainer clutched the device before
him. In a moment the leveling-off could be felt.
“Of course, he was never much of a pilot, I gather, and was said to have crashed our only airplane on his solo flight. It was not repaired while the war was in progress.”
“Highness, how is it that you can fly this airplane?”
“I did such things when I was younger,” said he. “I raced cars and boats and could fly any aircraft. All this is in the royal Sebastiani tradition, like sodomy.”
“Pardon?”
“I’ve been deposed now,” said the prince, chuckling. “I’m not obliged to be a bugger anymore.” I confessed I did not understand. He explained: “I no longer have to take measures against creating bastards, you see?
“Nor need I now get married!” he added. “I’m a free man, for the first time in my life.”
“Is it true you will make a series of public appearances in America?”
He nodded. “Having to make a living is new to me. I was going to send Rupert out to work, but then how could I get along? Tell me, is Rasmussen a good talent agent?”
“He’s wily enough,” I said. “But tell me, Highness, why did Gregor permit you to leave the country?”
“While Saint Sebastian has for a long time existed on credit domestically, we have of course sometimes been required to use money abroad—for my food and drink, for example. I could not abide the swill eaten and drunk by my subjects. And for the odd piece of machinery—for example this airplane—I have always paid cash, and I get it from my accounts in Switzerland. Gregor would like to have access to that money. I agreed to give it him if I were allowed to leave unmolested.”
The airplane hit a bump in the road of wind, and had I not clutched the back of Rupert’s seat, I might have tumbled.
Recovering my balance, I said, “But, sir, why would he take your word? Once you’re in America, you can ignore him with impunity.”
Sebastian looked at me with an expression of disbelief. “My dear Wren, I am a prince of the royal Sebastiani line. It would be impossible for me to break my word. And what of my poor subjects? A scoundrel like that would take revenge on them. If the exalted are not trustworthy, then the world would indeed be a hopeless place.”
I was amazed to learn that being a parasite did not disqualify a man from having principles. Whether they would survive in his new life of show business was to be seen.
I was about to say something, probably the sort of banality with which fate provides us on the unwitting brink of a catastrophe, when an explosion occurred somewhere aft. Perhaps Gregor had had second thoughts about letting us go, having found another means of getting to the Swiss accounts, or maybe there was still another group of the disgruntled who made their case with explosives.
Up in the cockpit I was hurled to the deck as the nose lifted violently, then thrown against the ceiling as the balance shifted the other way. Something or someone was suddenly on top of me. Ungodly noises were being produced, the loudest by myself. All was swirling, then dark, then blazing bright, then fragmented, then in horizontal striations.... Enough of this: we crashed.
I found it remarkable that I was conscious all the way down, instead of fainting away as I had always supposed was one’s obligation, and that in fact after such a fall I was totally conscious. And had apparently—though only tomorrow would tell, for I bruise easily but slowly—sustained no damage whatever.
True, I had fallen only a few feet. What had obviously happened was that, as is my wont, I had lowered my head to rest on my arms, which were crossed on the top of the desk, to ponder on possible solutions to my persistent problem with the second act of my play. At some point, weary from a day’s undercover work at Rothman’s Deli, aching from the subsequent drubbing I had taken from the gang of little-girl thugs, I had dozed off, my chair had slid slowly backwards, and I fell...
Saint Sebastian, and all that went with it, had been but a dream, if not a nightmare. My home, such as it was, had not been destroyed: I was sitting amidst it at the moment. I stood up. Yes, the dog-eared sheaf I called my play was still on the desk. For the first time I could admit that it was a vapid thing, whereas, judging from the dream, I had untapped riches in my unconscious. Now that the Rothman job had come to an end I was at liberty, with more than ample time to begin another play—about a Utopia that was probably not admirable except, like life itself, by chance, but which, like most phenomena, seemed better when it had receded into the past.
But meanwhile I sensed, from the bleak light that penetrated my front windows, that dawn had come to Manhattan: always the best part of the day if you are awake to see it, for the simple reason that so few others are.
I lurched to the window, in a stride reminiscent of the imaginary McCoy (funny how certain items are retained from dreams), threw up the sash, and a pane fell from the rotted wood and went to shards on the pavement below, which fortunately was deserted, else I should have provided another entry for the local list of deaths-by-falling-object: in winter concrete cornices drop, and when summer comes the air conditioners fall like rain. The sidewalk was otherwise reasonably clean this morn, as was even the gutter: indeed I saw Mr. Rat’s whiplike tail as he scuttled away with the last morsel of edible filth. A flock of lugubrious-looking starlings was on the edge of the building across the street. I saluted them and cried, “Hey, you slugabeds! Why aren’t you up with the Wren?” As it happened, I was in a uniquely fine mood, for no reason at all, as if responding to a posthypnotic suggestion.
Gee, what a nice place the New York sidewalks would be if most people were kept always at the movies!
But when I went to make that matutinal cup of coffee that forms the bedrock on which is mounted the day to come, my mood changed abruptly. The hot plate was still plugged into the socket that hung from the ceiling, but its coils were quite cold, which meant that they had been burned out or the fuse had blown. The fusebox for all the circuits in this wretched building was in a cellar the door to which was locked to keep, as the super said, surely comprising me in his term, “the assholes out.” I could easily gain entrance using the all-purpose skeleton key I had provided myself with from Krachlich’s Third Avenue hardware store (which offered a full range of burglar’s aids), but the fusebox itself was locked more elaborately. Not to mention that Mr. Rat, his stout wife, and their multitudinous offspring made their home down there and at any moment would be, as McCoy might have said in his vivid vintage lingo, tying on the breakfast feedbag.... Funny how one can become attached to a supposititious personage, but then, I am in life a lonely man. I wish I could again afford a regular girlfriend: the incessant bickering keeps one on the qui vive. Almost every day I read somewhere that a bachelor’s life expectancy is alarmingly short.
I can’t function in the morning without my caffeine fix, I don’t care what the doom-crying nutritionists say. Unless I wanted to mix my instant coffee with the tepid water from the lavatory tap, I had to go out to breakfast. I searched my pockets for the money I remembered was not there: I found only a crumpled business card, which I hurled to the desk in frustration. I went through the spare clothing I maintained in a heap on the studio couch, then to the garments that hung on the nails driven here and there into the woodwork. But could locate not so much as a single verdigrised relief of Honest Abe. Merde!
I went back to the desk and picked up the card so that I might ball it and fling it cursing, an event from which, like most of us, I get a wan satisfaction, and I glanced at it and—good gravy!—saw the legend thereupon: Our American Cousin Productions, 1 Shubert Alley, NYC, a 944 number, and Norman Rasmussen, President.
But before I could even begin to reconcile reality with dream, my telephone rang. I answered it warily, and this time heard a tenor voice with a local accent.
“There’s supposed to be a bomb in your building. Better get out.”
I snorted derisively. “Sure there is.”
“Whadduh yuh, arguing? Bomb squad’s onna way. Get out right now.”
“Who are you?”
 
; “Getcherass outa there and you can have my shield numbuh.”
“You’re a cop?” But the distinctive Celtic-tinged speech of the NYPD, even when the speaker himself is Italian or Jewish, was unmistakable. “All right, I’m leaving. But tell me this, officer: why do people do this sort of thing?”
“C’mon, willyah?”
I abandoned my attempt to elicit some judgment on these terrorists, if only a pungent epithet, but I suppose cops say “scumbag” only on TV these days. Alas, I had lingered too long in what proved a vain pursuit: I was still in the doorway downstairs when the bomb went off, projecting me onto the sidewalk, where however my fall was cushioned by the small but firm body of Bobbie, my friendly neighbor streetwalker.
“Jesus, Rus!” she protested, rising quickly and dusting her clothing, a slack suit in a subdued color, with her hands.
I got up slowly and looked at my building. It was still standing, nor could I see any flame or smoke. “It’s different from the dream,” I said.
“Are you on something?” Bobbie asked, anxiously peering at my eyes.
“A bomb just went off in there! Didn’t you hear it?”
“You’re kidding. That was a backfire over on Madison.” Bobbie went into her purse. “Take a look at my new ad, Rus. How you like the writing?”
I accepted the newspaper clipping and read: “Virgin college girl newly arrived in town. Need quick money to pursue Ph.D., and therefore must sell maidenhead to highest bidder.” This was followed by the address of a mail-collection service in Chelsea.
“It’s clever, Bobbie, but do you think it will fool anybody?”
“You’ll see,” she said. “I’ll get all kinds of answers. The kinda people who read Crotch like stuff like that. The kinda people who go to prostitutes are romantics, Rus! If you don’t know that, you don’t know much.”
“Do you ever see any articles in there by a man named McCoy?”