“She never worked out that part.”
“‘We must embrace our galactic heritage, the spiritual dimension of human flight, lest we forever chain ourselves to earth,’” Zach read from the screen. “Was she in that plane crash?”
“No, she’s still alive. That was just something she had a wild hair about. She thought the guy who invented that plane flew it a few years before the Wright brothers made their flight, but she could never prove it.”
“But it says there was a movie,” said Zach. “So someone saw it happen.”
“This is Wikipedia.” Robbie stared at the screen in disgust. “You can say any fucking thing you want and people will believe it. Leonard wrote that entry, guarantee you. Probably she faked that whole film loop. That’s what Leonard’s planning to do now—replicate the footage then pass it off to Maggie as the real thing.”
Zach collapsed into the beanbag chair. “Why?”
“Because he’s crazy, too. He and Maggie had a thing together.”
Zach grimaced. “Ugh.”
“What, you think we were born old? We were your age, practically. And Maggie was about twenty years older—”
“A cougar!” Zach burst out laughing. “Why didn’t she go for you?”
“Ha ha ha.” Robbie pushed his empty beer bottle against the wall.
“Women liked Leonard. Go figure. Even your mom went out with him for a while. Before she and I got involved, I mean.”
Zach’s glassy eyes threatened to roll back in his head. “Stop.”
“We thought it was pretty strange,” admitted Robbie. “But Maggie was good-looking for an old hippie.” He glanced at the Wikipedia entry and did the math. “I guess she’s in her seventies now. Leonard’s in touch with her. She has cancer. Breast cancer.”
“I heard you,” said Zach. He rolled out of the beanbag chair, flipped open his phone, and began texting. “I’m going to bed.”
Robbie sat and stared at the computer screen. After a while he shut it down. He shuffled into the kitchen and opened the cabinet where he kept a quart of Jim Beam, hidden behind bottles of vinegar and vegetable oil. He rinsed out the glass he’d used the night before, poured a jolt and downed it, then carried the bourbon with him to bed.
THE NEXT DAY AFTER work, he was on his second drink at the bar when Emery showed up.
“Hey.” Robbie gestured at the stool beside him. “Have a seat.”
“You okay to drive?”
“Sure.” Robbie scowled. “What, you keeping an eye on me?”
“No. But I want you to see something. At my house. Leonard’s coming over, we’re going to meet there at six thirty. I tried calling you but your phone’s off.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry.” Robbie signaled the bartender for his tab. “Yeah, sure. What, is he gonna give us manicures?”
“Nope. I have an idea. I’ll tell you when I get there; I’m going to Royal Delhi first to get some takeout. See you—”
Emery lived in a big town house condo that smelled of Moderately Successful Bachelor. The walls held framed photos of Captain Marvo and Mungbean alongside a life-size painting of Leslie Nielsen as Commander J. J. Adams.
But there was also a climate-controlled basement filled with Captain Marvo merchandise and packing material, with another large room stacked with electronics equipment—sound system, video monitors and decks, shelves and files devoted to old Captain Marvo episodes, and dupes of the grade Z movies featured on the show.
This was where Robbie found Leonard, bent over a refurbished Steenbeck editing table.
“Robbie.” Leonard waved, then returned to threading film onto a spindle. “Emery back with dinner?”
“Uh-uh.” Robbie pulled a chair alongside him. “What are you doing?”
“Loading up that nitrate I showed you yesterday.”
“It’s not going to explode, is it?”
“No, Robbie, it’s not going to explode.” Leonard’s mouth tightened. “Did Emery talk to you yet?”
“He just said something about a plan. So what’s up?”
“I’ll let him tell you.”
Robbie flushed angrily, but before he could retort there was a knock behind them.
“Chow time, campers.” Emery held up two steaming paper bags. “Can you leave that for a few minutes, Leonard?”
They ate on the couch in the next room. Emery talked about a pitch he’d made to revive Captain Marvo in cell-phone format. “It’d be freaking perfect, if I could figure out a way to make any money from it.”
Leonard said nothing. Robbie noted that the cuffs of his white tunic were stained with flecks of orange pigment, as were his fingernails. He looked tired, his face lined and his eyes sunken.
“You getting enough sleep?” Emery asked.
Leonard smiled wanly. “Enough.”
Finally the food was gone, and the beer. Emery clapped his hands on his knees, pushed aside the empty plates, then leaned forward.
“Okay. So here’s the plan. I rented a house on Cowana for a week, starting this Saturday. I mapped it online and it’s about ten hours. If we leave right after you guys get off work on Friday and drive all night, we’ll get there early Saturday morning. Leonard, you said you’ve got everything pretty much assembled, so all you need to do is pack it up. I’ve got everything else here. Be a tight fit in the Prius, though, so we’ll have to take two cars. We’ll bring everything we need with us, we’ll have a week to shoot and edit or whatever, then on the way back we swing through Fayetteville and show the finished product to Maggie. What do you think?”
“That’s not a lot of time,” said Leonard. “But we could do it.”
Emery turned to Robbie. “Is you car roadworthy? It’s about twelve hundred miles round-trip.”
Robbie stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The Bellerophon. Leonard’s got storyboards and all kinds of drawings and still frames, enough to work from. The Realtor’s in Charleston; she said there wouldn’t be many people this early in the season. Plus there was a hurricane a couple years ago; I gather the island got hammered and no one’s had money to rebuild. So we’ll have it all to ourselves, pretty much.”
“Are you high?” Robbie laughed. “I can’t just take off. I have a job.”
“You get vacation time, right? You can take a week. It’ll be great, man. The Realtor says it’s already in the eighties down there. Warm water, a beach—what more you want?”
“Uh, maybe a beach with people besides you and Leonard?” Robbie searched in vain for another beer. “I couldn’t go anyway—next week’s Zach’s spring break.”
“Yeah?” Emery shook his head. “So, you’re going to be at the store all day, and he’ll be home getting stoned. Bring him. We’ll put him to work.”
Leonard frowned, but Robbie looked thoughtful. “Yeah, you’re right. I hadn’t thought of that. I can’t really leave him alone. I guess I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think, just do it. It’s Wednesday, tell ’em you’re taking off next week. They gonna fire you?”
“Maybe.”
“I’m not babysitting some—” Leonard started.
Emery cut him off. “You got that nitrate loaded? Let’s see it.”
They filed into the workroom. Leonard sat at the Steenbeck. The others watched as he adjusted the film on its sprockets. He turned to Robbie, then indicated the black projection box in the center of the deck.
“Emery knows all this, so I’m just telling you. That’s a quartz halogen lamp. I haven’t turned it on yet, because if the frame was just sitting there it might incinerate the film, and us. But there’s only about four seconds of footage, so we’re going to take our chances and watch it, once. Maybe you remember it from the gallery?”
Robbie nodded. “Yeah, I saw it a bunch of times. Not as much as the Head, but enough.”
“Good. Hit that light, would you, Emery? Everyone ready? Blink and you’ll miss it.”
Robbie craned his neck, staring at a blan
k white screen. There was a whir, the stutter of film running through a projector.
At the bottom of the frame the horizon lurched, bright flickers that might be an expanse of water. Then a blurred image, faded sepia and amber, etched with blotches and something resembling a beetle leg: the absurd contraption Robbie recognized as the original Bellerophon. Only it was moving—it was flying—its countless gears and propellers and wings spinning and whirring and flapping all at once, so it seemed the entire thing would vibrate into a thousand pieces. Beneath the fuselage, a dark figure perched precariously atop the velocipede, legs like black scissors slicing at the air. From the left corner of the frame leaped a flare of light, like a shooting star or burning firecracker tossed at the pedaling figure. The pilot listed to one side, and—
Nothing. The film ended as abruptly as it had begun. Leonard quickly reached to turn off the lamp, and immediately removed the film from the take-up drive.
Robbie felt his neck prickle—he’d forgotten how weird, uncanny even, the footage was.
“Jesus, that’s some bizarre shit,” said Emery.
“It doesn’t even look real.” Robbie watched as Leonard coiled the film and slid it in a canister. “I mean, the guy, he looks fake.”
Emery nodded. “Yeah, I know. It looks like one of those old silents, The Lost World or something. But it’s not. I used to watch it back when it ran a hundred times a day in our gallery, the way you used to watch the Head. And it’s definitely real. At least the pilot, McCauley—that’s a real guy. I got a big magnifier once and just stood there and watched it over and over again. He was breathing, I could see it. And the plane, it’s real too, far as I could tell. The thing I can’t figure is, who the hell shot that footage? And what was the angle?”
Robbie stared at the empty screen, then shut his eyes. He tried to recall the rest of the film from when it played in the General Aviation gallery: the swift, jerky trajectory of that eerie little vehicle with its bizarre pilot, a man in a black suit and bowler hat; then the flash from the corner of the screen, and the man toppling from his perch into the white and empty air. The last thing you saw was a tiny hand at the bottom of the frame, then some blank leader, followed by the words “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon (1901).” And the whole thing began again.
“It was like someone was in the air next to him,” said Robbie. “Unless he got only six feet off the ground. I always assumed it was faked.”
“It wasn’t faked,” said Leonard. “The cameraman was on the beach filming. It was a windy day, they were hoping that would help give the plane some lift but there must have been a sudden gust. When the Bellerophon went into the ocean, the cameraman dove in to save McCauley. They both drowned. They never found the bodies, or the wreckage. Only the camera with the film.”
“Who found it?” asked Robbie.
“We don’t know.” Leonard sighed, his shoulders slumping. “We don’t know anything. Not the name of the cameraman, nothing. When Maggie and I ran the original footage, the leader said ‘Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon.’ The can had the date and ‘Cowana Island’ written on it. So Maggie and I went down there to research it. A weird place. Hardly any people, and this was in the summer. There’s a tiny historical society on the island, but we couldn’t find anything about McCauley or the aircraft. No newspaper accounts, no gravestones. The only thing we did find was in a diary kept by the guy who delivered the mail back then. On May 13, 1901, he wrote that it was a very windy day and two men had drowned while attempting to launch a flying machine on the beach. Someone must have found the camera afterward. Somebody processed the film, and somehow it found its way to the museum.”
Robbie followed Leonard into the next room. “What was that weird flash of light?”
“I don’t know.” Leonard stared out a glass door into the parking lot. “But it’s not overexposure or lens flare or anything like that. It’s something the cameraman actually filmed. Water, maybe—if it was a windy day, a big wave might have come up onto the beach or something.”
“I always thought it was fire. Like a rocket or some kind of flare.”
Leonard nodded. “That’s what Maggie thought, too. The mailman—mostly all he wrote about was the weather. Which if you were relying on a horse-drawn cart, makes sense. About two weeks before he mentioned the flying machine, he described something that sounds like a major meteor shower.”
“And Maggie thought it was hit by a meteor?”
“No.” Leonard sighed. “She thought it was something else. The weird thing is, a few years ago I checked online, and it turns out there was an unusual amount of meteor activity in 1901.”
Robbie raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”
Leonard said nothing. Finally he opened the door and walked outside. The others trailed after him.
They reached the edge of the parking lot, where cracked tarmac gave way to stony ground. Leonard glanced back, then stooped. He brushed away a few stray leaves and tufts of dead grass, set the film canister down and unscrewed the metal lid. He picked up one end of the coil of film, gently tugging until it trailed a few inches across the ground. Then he withdrew a lighter, flicked it, and held the flame to the tail of film.
“What the—” began Robbie.
There was a dull whoosh, like the sound of a gas burner igniting. A plume of crimson and gold leaped from the canister, writhing in the air within a ball of black smoke. Leonard staggered to his feet, covering his head as he backed away.
“Leonard!” Emery grabbed him roughly, then turned and raced to the house.
Before Robbie could move, a strong chemical stink surrounded him. The flames shrank to a shining thread that lashed at the smoke then faded into flecks of ash. Robbie ducked his head, coughing. He grasped Leonard’s arm and tried to drag him away, glanced up to see Emery running toward them with a fire extinguisher.
“Sorry,” gasped Leonard. He made a slashing motion through the smoke, which dispersed. The flames were gone. Leonard’s face was black with ash. Robbie touched his own cheek gingerly, looked at his fingers, and saw they were coated with something dark and oily.
Emery halted, panting, and stared at the twisted remains of the film can. On the ground beside it, a glowing thread wormed toward a dead leaf, then expired in a gray wisp. Emery raised the fire extinguisher threateningly, set it down, and stomped on the canister.
“Good thing you didn’t do that in the museum,” said Robbie. He let go of Leonard’s arm.
“Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind,” said Leonard, and walked back inside.
THEY LEFT FRIDAY EVENING. Robbie got the week off, after giving his dubious boss a long story about a dying relative down South. Zach shouted and broke a lamp when informed he would be accompanying his father on a trip during his spring vacation.
“With Emery and Leonard? Are you fucking insane?”
Robbie was too exhausted to fight: he quickly offered to let Tyler come with them. Tyler, surprisingly, agreed, and even showed up on Friday afternoon to help load the car. Robbie made a pointed effort not to inspect the various backpacks and duffel bags the boys threw into the trunk of the battered Taurus. Alcohol, drugs, firearms: he no longer cared.
Instead he focused on the online weather report for Cowana Island. Eighty degrees and sunshine, photographs of blue water, white sand, a skein of pelicans skimming above the waves. Ten hours, that wasn’t so bad. In another weak moment, he told Zach he could drive part of the way, so Robbie could sleep.
“What about me?” asked Tyler. “Can I drive?”
“Only if I never wake up,” said Robbie.
Around six Emery pulled into the driveway, honking. The boys were already slumped in Robbie’s Taurus, Zach in front with earbuds dangling around his face and a knit cap pulled down over his eyes, Tyler in the back, staring blankly, as though they were already on I-95.
“You ready?” Emery rolled down his window. He wore a blue flannel shirt and a gimme cap that read STARFLEET ACADEMY. In the hy
brid’s passenger seat, Leonard perused a road atlas. He looked up and shot Robbie a smile.
“Hey, a road trip.”
“Yeah.” Robbie smiled back and patted the hybrid’s roof. “See you.”
It took almost two hours just to get beyond the gravitational pull of the Washington Beltway. Farms and forest had long ago disappeared beneath an endless grid of malls and housing developments, many of them vacant. Every time Robbie turned up the radio for a song he liked, the boys complained that they could hear it through their earphones.
Only as the sky darkened and Virginia gave way to North Carolina did the world take on a faint fairy glow, distant green and yellow lights reflecting the first stars and a shining cusp of moon. Sprawl gave way to pine forest. The boys had been asleep for hours, in that amazing, self-willed hibernation they summoned whenever in the presence of adults for more than fifteen minutes. Robbie put the radio on, low, searched until he caught the echo of a melody he knew, and then another. He thought of driving with Anna beside him, a restive Zach behind them in his car seat; the aimless trips they’d make until the toddler fell asleep and they could talk or, once, park in a vacant lot and make out.
How long had it been since he’d remembered that? Years, maybe. He fought against thinking of Anna; sometimes it felt as though he fought Anna herself, her hands pummeling him as he poured another drink or staggered up to bed.
Now, though, the darkness soothed him the way those long-ago drives had lulled Zach to sleep. He felt an ache lift from his breast, as though a splinter had been dislodged; blinked and in the rearview mirror glimpsed Anna’s face, slightly turned from him as she gazed out at the passing sky.
He started, realized he’d begun to nod off. On the dashboard his fuel indicator glowed red. He called Emery, and at the next exit pulled off 95, the Prius behind him.
After a few minutes they found a gas station set back from the road in a pine grove, with an old-fashioned pump out front and yellow light streaming through a screen door. The boys blinked awake.
“Where are we?” asked Zach.