Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

by James Van Pelt

  He shrugged. “All places are the same place. Heaven, I guess, if you want a word. But you’re in it all the time, sleeping or awake.” He put his hand on his leg, fingers wrapped around something. “Only now, not everyone will die. We get to choose a survivor.”

  Maybe it was his calmness about our conversation. Maybe I just didn’t have any anger left, but all of the sudden I just felt empty. Everybody in the dream but me was dead. I said, “Before, no matter what I did, I was going to die anyway.” It was more a statement than a question.

  “In the end.”

  “And now I’m not going to, ever?”

  He opened his hand and held it out to me. It was, naturally, the black bordered patch with the gray background. In the middle, in black, 1/1,000.

  “No, never.”

  He walked away, into the desert, and from the other direction I heard feet marching, a thousand sets of feet. I pinned the patch to my shoulder and waited for the troops.

  ROCK HOUSE

  From the highway where I parked my car, to the door of Rick’s house, my school-years friend, I climbed a mile of twisting, scrub oak-lined, tree-shrouded path that looked more and more to my satisfaction like an animal track the farther from the highway I traveled. Every foot into the late spring woods was a foot farther from everything else. When the sound of the last diesel truck faded in the leafy rustle, it was as if I had stepped back in time. Tree bark grew rougher, with gaps wide enough to slide my hand into. Roots crossed the trail like great, vegetable veins, and when I stopped the third time to recheck his instructions in the letter I’d received the week earlier, something large and ponderous crushed through the underbrush just out of sight. I stood, my heart paralyzed, his letter fluttering in my fingers, until the heavy snap of branches vanished in the distance and an unafraid mountain jay lighted on a rock near the trail to look me over.

  Despite everything, I almost turned around then, but I’d lugged my suitcase so far already.

  Rick’s eccentricities drove him to excess when he was young. He’d been a bookish, pale shadow in college. So had his sister, Lynn, but I’d been a reader too, and we’d found camaraderie in our novels, swapping books, discussing imaginary lives between classes. They were trust fund kids, unbound by finances, and their worries were not the world’s worries. By my junior year, I’d fallen in love a little bit with them both, but we didn’t have any classes together my senior year. Lynn grew increasingly quiet and absent in the way pale girls can, and Rick started haunting used bookstores for rare editions, expensive leather-bound volumes with cut edges and sewn in bookmarks. I remember the second to last time we talked. He put an old book with an indecipherable title on the table beside him, which, in idleness, I picked up. He snatched it from my hands, his cheeks suddenly red, like blood under the snow, and I saw in his eyes a rage that frightened me. The next day, he tried to apologize, but all I saw was the rage. His skin became a furnace with it, baking me. We never spoke again, but I passed him or Lynn on the quad every once in a while, and I mourned the darkness in their eyes, the burnished silk of their hair. Few people know books. Few like to talk about them.

  So we drifted fifteen years apart, until his letter importuning me to visit, to see the “strange edifice of my rock house home,” as he put it, to “salve his maladies and afflictions.” As misfortune would have it then, time lay heavy on my hands, and my office found me useless. Three weeks vacation and “more if you need it” became my prescription. A week in the mountains with my old friend, Rick, seemed like the best of the bad options. If there was a way to arrange it, I wouldn’t go back. Nothing in the world seemed worth the effort.

  Two turns more up the tree-shrouded track, then I came to a small clearing in the woods, thigh-high with alpine grass and spring flowers. After the aged forest’s overhanging gloom, the sudden space should have lightened my spirits, but instead I felt a twinge of agoraphobia, as if the overwhelming branches held me to the Earth, and their disappearance marked the opening of a gate between me and a gray abyss. My stomach rose. I staggered a step before shaking the impression away. His letter said the clearing was his front porch, but it seemed like any other undisturbed forest space. Certainly nothing manmade marked the scene at first. I looked for a minute to find it. The mountain’s shoulder swelled at the clearing’s other side into a black limestone cliff shot through with bright mineral lines. At its base, cut into the stone, stood an entrance, tall and pointed like a medieval cathedral’s, and when I drew close, the grass tips brushing against my fingertips, I saw that the door was stone too with a stone knocker in the center. Grotesque carvings lined the recessed archway, hideous heads no bigger than my fist, all caught in mid grimace, tiny mouths filled with cat teeth and sharp tongues. Human faces, just barely. I smiled at the sight. Rick lived on a better Earth, a literary one, and where I’d failed in my bookish dreams, he’d clearly pressed on.

  I used the knocker, the sound no louder than a pebble tapped against a boulder, but a few seconds later, the door drew back.

  “Allan, welcome to Rock House,” said Rick, shading his eyes against the clouded sky. “I didn’t realize it was day.” He laughed. “I didn’t realize it was spring.”

  He’d become even more slender since school, still as pale, but his face had developed middle-aged character. Distinct lines crossed his forehead. A patrician patina surrounded his mouth. His hand rested on the door’s edge, and he opened it more to let me in as a waft of cool air brushed my face, smelling of dark stone and deep places. Awkwardly, I stepped across the threshold and into the gloom. The door closed behind me.

  My eyes adjusted slowly. Thankfully, I put my suitcase down. “That’s a long way to carry groceries.” Two hefty lamps at either end of a dark couch provided the only light. The ceiling was high, maybe twelve feet. Later I would notice the engravings that marked its surface, but now it only seemed black except for a foot-wide crystal vein that meandered diagonally across the room.

  “Backpacks are the secret.” Rick gestured toward the couch.

  No carpet covered the floor. The same black stone, polished to a glassy sheen, absorbed the light, and although it looked slick enough to reflect an image, I could see nothing of myself within it, not even a shadow. Glad to be done with the uphill climb, I sat. Rick stood beside the couch, his arms crossed, a scattering of nearly white hair falling across his forehead and over his eyes.

  “Your house is spectacular.” I turned in my seat. The walls bowed around the room, a rounded square, maybe twenty-five feet from side to side. Tapestries alternated with bare stone. A log smoldered in a niche cut into the wall. “It must have cost a fortune.”

  “I had it built.” He leaned against the couch, partly sitting on the arm. For a moment he gazed around the room, perhaps trying to see it as I saw it. “It took time to find the right location.”

  “But the effort! How long would something like this take?” I imagined craftsmen dynamiting the cliff face, burrowing into the mountain, and then widening their shaft into this chamber. The floor alone would have taken hundreds of hours to turn from raw rock into a slick black plane. Slowly, out of the darkness, two other doors took shape. It wasn’t just a single room. How big was Rick’s house?

  “A project like this never stops. It takes a life of its own.” His voice sounded wan, like his complexion. “Remember, we used to talk about living in stone?” He rested his hand on his knee. “Beautiful, gothic palaces. Wuthering Heights. Prince Prospero’s castle. Gormenghast.” He sighed. “Khazad-dum.”

  “So, a nice brick bungalow in the suburbs wouldn’t be enough for you?”

  He smiled. “No, not for me. Not for Lynn either.”

  I didn’t have time to reply. The shadow that marked the door on the left shifted, and a ghost filled it. I started half from my seat, but then the ghost said in Lynn’s voice, “It’s been a long time, Allan. The sun must be abroad.” I’d almost forgotten how low she spoke. How she drew that contralto note from such a narrow reed, I never kn
ew, but it recalled the nights in her brother’s dorm, the three of us sprawled across his bed on our backs; Rick at one end, listening; Lynn at the other, propped by a pillow, a book in her hand reading out loud. My back against the wall, I crossed the two in the middle, our legs intertwined. I could almost feel Rick’s bare foot braced against my thigh; how Lynn’s leg draped over mine so that when she reached a climactic moment in the story her calf muscle tensed, pulling me closer to her; her voice soothing us both, like a steady wash of waves against a rocky beach. Now, her face and hair reflected the table light perfectly, but from a distance, a far moon behind thin clouds, and her white dress hung from her shoulders to her feet in an unbroken line.

  She walked a step closer, and the lunar glow grew stronger. Where Rick had aged, Lynn had improved to lustrousness. She smiled and pushed her hair away from her ears. “Do you want to see the rest?”

  The door on the right led to a kitchen and storage room. The chrome surfaces seemed out of place in the stone chamber.

  Rick opened a cabinet beside the stove, revealing a large tank. “Propane for cooking and heat, although I prefer the fireplaces. There’s solar panels outside and battery storage for electricity. We have to budget our use, I’m afraid.” He turned off the lights. “We’ve grown used to darkness or candles. Books by candlelight, ah, that is the way they were meant to be read.”

  I sighed with content. The empty years after college already were fading. Books, a comfortable chair, and people to talk to about them.

  Lynn excused herself when we entered the other hallway. Her fingers grazed my cheek. “It’s really good to see you again, Allan.” She entered the first room before closing a door behind her.

  Rick grimaced, his emotions hard to discern in the hallway’s dim ceiling light. “She’s not totally… healthy. She tires, I’m afraid. We both do.”

  I touched my cheek. The year after college I’d taken up with a goth girl who looked somewhat like Lynn, except with black lipstick and multiple piercings. The same slenderness. A passing resemblance in her eyes and hair, but the relationship was a failure. She didn’t read beyond Anne Rice. She felt lovemaking was too earthy, too mundane, below her ideas about death, decay and her fascination with vampires. I tried, but I couldn’t picture Lynn when I was with her. The few times she consented, it was an act of quid pro quo, a straight exchange of services. She liked me to drive to a cemetery where I could go down on her in the car’s backseat, the windows open so the cut grass and freshly turned dirt smells would fill her nose. She longed to couple on a fresh grave or in a tomb, but I was too squeamish. Her voice was wrong. She was not Lynn.

  Rick opened a second door. Beyond him, the light didn’t show more of the hallway than a few feet.

  “You said in your letter that you weren’t doing well. Something about ‘afflictions?’”

  “Yes.” A switch clicked on. “This is the guest bedroom. I hope it’s comfortable enough for you.” A bedside light on a small stand showed a bed, a bureau and a chair. Like the front room, tapestries hung from the ceiling to cover the walls. “Afflicted, did I say that? I suppose I am.”

  “You said maladies, too.” I shivered. Away from the fireplace, the air bit with cave cold. I wondered if I had packed a sweater. A thick, folded quilt covered the foot end of the bed.

  Two other doors opened into bedrooms. The next revealed a bathroom, where both the toilet and the sink had been shaped directly from rock. A black curtain covered the shower. I didn’t realize the bathroom had a mirror until I stepped in front of the sink, where my own face startled me.

  “How many square feet?” I still couldn’t see the hallway’s end.

  “Two thousand, originally.” He sounded ironic. “Now, I’ve lost track.”

  The heart of Rick’s house came at the last door. Another peaked cathedral arch like the front entrance waited, but this was unadorned, and our footsteps echoed when we entered. Rick turned on a single lamp on a reading table flanked by two soft-looking chairs. Its weak rays barely reached the walls, twenty feet away, and what they illuminated were books on shelves all the way around the room. A ladder attached to a rail fifteen feet above and mounted on wheels below provided access to the higher volumes. My breath caught in my throat. Books filled every space, all leather-bound, and rarities, no doubt. Their smell filled the air, parchment and ink and binding glues.

  “My library.” Rick waved his hand. “It and this house have been my life’s work.”

  The books’ spines felt cool across my palm. They were solidly packed from end to end. I saw no place to add a new acquisition.

  Rick stood beside me. “Here’s an oddity.” He took a book from a shelf above his head. “Look at this one.”

  Its brown cover had no title. I moved to the light, but when I tried to open it, the pages stuck at the bottom as if glued. “It’s damaged.” I held it out to him.

  “No, not really. Look at the edge.”

  I turned the book on end. The bottom pages didn’t look like paper at all. The surface was slick, and it clicked against my fingernail.

  “Fossilization takes centuries, they say. Water carries dissolved minerals, and the minerals displace the organic material, cell by cell, so thousands of years later we can find complete trunks from ancient trees. Perfectly duplicated leaves in stone.” He took the book back. “We find the dinosaurs, even, revealed in rock’s slow triumph. Stone echoes.”

  “But it is, as you say, a gradual process. You can’t be implying that your book is turning into a fossil.”

  “It has been on that shelf for fourteen months. Some of the titles have become… permanent, a part of the wall and shelf. The shelves themselves.” He shrugged. “I’m not sad about it. There’s a poetry here. If the trend continues, my library will always exist. I only read the same one or two of them anymore anyway.” His tone became wistful. “Mostly I like to come in here and sit with the books around me.”

  I shivered again, but not from the cold.

  “You must see this, though, at the back of the library.”

  He led me to a narrow exit surrounded by shelves, but it didn’t look like the other doors in the house, although its top led to a point too. The edges were rolled and smooth, more like flesh than stone, and a damp seep glistened on the surface. Rick handed me a flashlight. “The electrical lines don’t go this far.”

  I had to rotate my shoulders to squeeze through the door, and the wet stone moistened my shirt. The flashlight cut a clear shaft in the darkness to reveal the library floor’s perfect plane broken into gentle corrugations, and instead of walls, long, natural stone columns connecting the floor to the ceiling. Tan stone replaced the black. “You broke into a cave?”

  “I don’t think so. I only discovered this a few weeks ago. It wasn’t as large then.”

  “What do you mean?” The light played across the ceiling, catching water drops in brilliant flashes dangling from stalactite teeth.

  “I mean, this room is new. It didn’t exist when I finished the house.”

  When I turned, the flashlight changed his face into a landscape of bright whites and shadows. “I don’t understand.”

  He walked into the strange room, dragging his hands across the stone on either side, past me so that he stood near the middle. “This is the affliction I wrote you about. My malady. My evolving rock house.”

  “Jesus, Rick.” A water drop released from the ceiling, caught the flashlight’s beam for a glittering instant, then plinked loudly like a glass bell into a shallow pool. “What can I do? Why did you ask me to come?”

  He looked at me intently. “We ended on some awkwardness, I remember. I’ve always been sorry for that. It was my jealous soul.”

  I couldn’t think of an adequate reply. A straightforward apology left me uncomfortable. “Are there bats, too?”

  Rick shook his head.

  He pointed his flashlight at his feet. The pool picked up the glare. It was if he stood on a radiant platform. “You have the imagination
for it. I would have thought of you, eventually, but it was Lynn’s idea. She asked me to write.”

  After much conversation, I grew too tired to talk. Most of the time he sat on his library chair, a book unopened in his lap. He’d lit a candle and turned out the lamp. I sat with him next to that flickering flame, reminiscing about the books we’d read in college. It made me happy to talk with him again, like those times when all that mattered were our thoughts and interpretations, when we considered ourselves a part of the literary elite, polishing off volume after volume, washing them down with wine and talk and long passing nights listening to Lynn read. I thought again of her leg draped over mine and the small contractions in her calf as her speech bathed us, of the intensity in her gaze moving from word to word. She kissed me goodnight the last time we read together, at the door of Rick’s room. It was the only time. The next day was when Rick grew so angry about the antique book.

  Lynn had asked for me!

  When I couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer, I excused myself to my room. It wasn’t until I was in bed that I looked at my watch. It was only 6:30 p.m. I turned the light out.

  The darkness descended. Nothing else describes it. Lying in bed, the quilt pulled to my chin, the utter blackness of a cave enveloped me. My eyes strained to see anything, vainly, waited to adjust to the darkness, but there was nothing to adjust to, and for the first time since I had entered Rick’s rock house, the weight of the mountain above me made its presence known. The quiet, too, was utter. No click of a clock. No whisper of air conditioning. No refrigerator buzz. Nothing except the rush of my own pulse in my ears, and soon I couldn’t hear that. I held my breath in the silence. Finally, I felt on the table beside the bed for my watch. The tiny green light exploded behind the time: 6:43. It winked out. I pressed it again just to see the hopeful green planet swimming in the unlit space. But when I pressed a third time, the light shone dimmer, and on the last press, the light barely came on before fading to nothing. My battery had died. Sadly, I put the watch back on the table. It felt cowardly to turn the table light on, and Rick had said they budgeted the electricity.