God of Speed

by Luke Davies

  But the goddess lets us have our cake and eat it, too. I came. She pushed down hard upon me. I felt her pelvis grind on mine. I tilted my head and frowned. My left hand splayed in front of me, palm open, as if saying, to everything in the world, Wait. Wait. Wait for what? I was in the middle of it, suddenly hot on the web of my hand between my thumb and index finger, hot on my belly and my undershirt.

  I tried to gain my breath. The metal screeched. My temples throbbed. I heard the wind louder and louder. Terminal velocity. Where was I? Jesus! I pulled the joystick back, straining at first. The plane pulled into a curve as if it was set on a toboggan run. I flicked the ignition switch. The engines cut back in, stuttered, then roared. Gradually the Lockheed pulled level. It might have been that nothing had happened, nothing at all for thousands of feet in the infinite night. I switched on the lights and felt the deep sadness that so often came after coming.

  I was dangerously low: eleven hundred feet. I took it slowly back up to eight thousand feet, wiping myself with a rag, lumbering toward Los Angeles and the dawn.

  Memo, 1961: Summer

  The weather man says this is a record heatwave. Some of you will be aware I am preoccupied with purchasing five Electras from the Lockheed plant in Burbank. But I feel we need to protect them from germs. I am worried that the sun will beat too fiercely down on the fuselages, which could make them an incubator for germs. So I want one of you to get onto Jack Real and see that he gets them towed inside an air-conditioned, germ-free hangar.

  Pass this message on to Jack—Jack, all I can say is to ask you as urgently and as humbly as I know how—I ask you and implore you, Jack, not to be satisfied with doing it as well or as perfectly or as smoothly or as gently as you have in the past, but please today just simply bust a gut striving as you never tried to do anything before in your life not merely to equal the best operation you have achieved in the past, but instead improve upon it and today conduct the most careful, the slowest, most perfect, most gentle, the smoothest towing operation ever, ever conducted before and with each acceleration and deceleration so infinitely gradual that it would take a microscope to measure it. Men, I want you to treat this task with the precision with which you deliver my magazines to me, when you move the cart an inch at a time, and do not breathe, so the air and the dust are not disturbed.

  In stillness all the microbes are inert. It’s been proven by Science. Please don’t let me down on this.

  PROCEDURAL PHILOSOPHY FOR THE

  LANGUAGE OF POWER

  EVERYTHING I SAY in the memos is only the language of power stripped of all its frills. I have ridden the wave of a certain power, of money, and speed, for nigh on three quarters of a century. And I don’t plan to forgo any of that just yet. When I was born, the Wright Brothers had only two years earlier lifted above those tussocky dunes for those elated seconds. Now there are Hughes satellites circling the planet. The planet!

  And yet I get so jittery, Jack, and sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it, all this vigilance. On July 20, 1969, a man landed on the moon. I could not stop crying. One does one’s best to be a patriot. I’ve had my sorry backside hauled before Senate enquiries for no good reason, because I wanted America to be the best, because I cut corners, or not so much cut corners, but there are ways of getting things done, of defying the protocols. It was all jet propulsion. We were the gifted ones. And yet certain members of our duly elected government have the audacity, under the cover of integrity, of righteousness, to question my motives, my methods. That was the forties, the fifties, before I became invisible.

  Nobody kicks around this country without acquiring a reputation, good or bad. I’m supposed to be capricious, a playboy, eccentric, but I don’t believe I have the reputation of a liar. Nobody has questioned my word. I think my reputation in that respect meets what most Texans consider important. If anyone thinks that the Communist Party is the same as the Democratic or Republican Party, I can answer it this way: we are not fighting any Democrats or Republicans in Vietnam! Fortune magazine called me the spook of American capitalism, a moniker I’m happy to wear. I was loath to give anything up, loath to admit error, but everything I did, I did for the greater good, from the aerospace industry to the cinema, from oil wells to airfields, from casinos to the star system, from the design of Jane Russell’s bra to that of a bomber. Now everybody wants a piece of me, there are investigations flaring like fireworks, all of it is nonsense, the CIA connections, the Glomar Explorer, the tax evasion, the political interference, bribery, conspiracy to defraud the United States, false tax return, perjury, false statements, the FBI, the land deals. What did I do wrong? I’m a great American. I built a backbone to this country. I bought Trans World Airlines, a piddling concern that Lindbergh had started in the thirties, and over the next fifteen years I turned it into a giant corporation and opened up the very future of passenger aviation. I built the Lockheed Constellation. Jack, you were there, you worked with me, you know this. I changed the world. I’m there any time they need me. I built the Glomar Explorer, a huge beautiful fraud of a ship (ocean-floor research!) to raise a scuttled Russian sub from the northwest Pacific, because knowledge is everything, everything, and the CIA paid me. There is nothing anywhere but information.

  That is why I had surveillance done on the women. It wasn’t anything more sinister than that.

  You always want what you cannot have; perhaps it has been like an illness for me. Perhaps I have not been well, for a long time, perhaps. A slight wooziness in the head. I told you last night how Billie Dove left me, back in ’31. I never told you why. What the hell was I worried about? It’s all done now.

  She said, Howard, I am not your damned prisoner and you are not my damned jailer.

  Well of course not, Billie, well of course not.

  Then why do you have me followed every minute of the day and night?

  Billie, I don’t—Don’t even try to pretend!

  It’s for your safety. I don’t want any harm to befall you.

  She had packed and gone within a week.

  I never felt I was controlling them, not one of them. I had to keep all my options open. Because you need to breathe. And it is important to know that everybody likes you.

  That is why the surveillance planes were no different: we were just making sure that the country was all right. That is why my reconnaissance plane, the XF-11, was going to be so beautiful. Oh Jack, it is terrible to think of, so beautiful, the XF-11, in which later I would so spectacularly disintegrate. Did I tell you yet about my disintegration? Because the XF-11 was merely a pulse, flush-riveted, a vehicle of light. So something went very wrong. We were going to photograph the entire world, so that we could know where everything was kept, could know the proper place of all things. Instead I wound up in burning tatters on a street in Beverly Hills, with my dream in fragments all around me.

  Two decades further along, that’s all the Hughes Surveyor Satellite was: an attempt to gather knowledge. A loyal American, Jack! I didn’t care about the money. I cared about this great nation.

  Memo to Bob Maheu,

  1966: Helicopters

  Did you see CBS News at 11:00 p.m. just completed? If not, please get a summary of the portion devoted to helicopters in Vietnam. More helicopters are being used than was ever contemplated and more helicopters are being lost than was estimated. CBS went on to say, over and over again, that this is a helicopter war. The first of its kind in history.

  Why hasn’t someone made this clearer to me?

  Bob, for you to have your White House relationship while at the same time our Aircraft Division sits empty-handed with the best helicopter design in the world—the whole situation is just the damnedest enigma I ever heard of.

  Can’t you do something about it?

  MALEVOLENCE OF MICROBES

  JACK, THIS LAST couple of years, some newspapers are implying I am being drugged beyond acceptable levels of basic painkilling necessity. And this is, as you can see with your own eyes, entirely untrue and in
deed scurrilous. Nobody drugs me. I am aware of what I need. I try to practice moderation and the amount of medication I take is in fact a response to the levels of pain I constantly encounter. Not just that, mind you; difficulty with the other humans also. Or else how would I have attended to the memos all these years? Left to its own, the empire would wind down to stasis, not a single rotor blade would spin, not a contract would be sought, or signed. Each new memo brings with it a new set of anxieties. Each anxiety invites a settling of the nerves, a medicinal solution. That’s not to say the new Cary Grant reduction plan won’t go well. It will have teething problems, like any new venture. But it is going very well, thank you.

  Indeed I feel few would understand the acuteness of the pain I suffer and have suffered fairly constantly since 1946. If I was not so unfortunate as to have this level of pain in my life, I believe I might not have needed to take such drastic measures of seclusion, of putting such layers between myself and the world out there. It’s not so much that I’m addicted—I know I can stop if necessity dictates, in fact the reduction plan is about to be put into action as we speak, and I will let the Mormons know about it very soon—more that I feel I need to maintain a certain level of focus. The more I take, the clearer it all gets. If I’ve got enough in me, everything is flat, perfect. I am striving for nothing less than the perfection of forms. It is imperative to trust nobody—present company excluded, Jack—as even physical presence can invite calamity, catastrophe, the chaos of germs and the sheer malevolence of microbes. To say nothing of psychic disturbances. Therefore I pay Latter Day Saints to be, essentially, invisible. I have not looked closely at a vase full of flowers in more than twenty-two years. All that pollen, ghastly. Yet inside of me whole fields of poppies sway, and along a quiet hedgerow the gorse glows yellower than butter and smells of coconut oil, and Axel my sleek brown pointer bounds ahead delirious with joy, and disappears and reappears through the hedges. Now there was loyalty. He flushes out a giant hare that almost bowls me over. In that moment in which Axel follows and brushes right past me his muscles bulge and his intent is absolutely, resolutely pure. (I will never know a summer’s day like that again.) That is the purity of which I speak, the invisible form of the world. I am sullied and assailed by life’s more ignoble duties, daily, hourly, on an endless loop, but I will not be bowed or bloodied. I will face every challenge every memo every obstacle in sequence and as appropriate. I will give to each matter its allotment of time. I will run this empire smoothly. I am doing this for all of us, the Mormons, the arms of empire, even Jack Real. I am trying to hold this together. I am handicapped by the pain but the medication helps me regain ground, achieve balance. In this way, dammit, can’t you see the medication is nothing, no more than a spirit level in the house of forms that is my life each day? Dammit, those file boxes need some cleaning up now. Have I been sitting up? Did I rifle through them like that? They look like the neglected refuse of a long-departed, highly disorganized accountant, all that yellow legal paper spilling out over the floor. Better get the men onto it. Where was I? One day I’ll get back to the way things were. In any case, I am not some strange recluse, as the papers like to think. I am as perfectly capable as the next man of walking out of this hotel and strolling through the park. Is there a park nearby? This place is called “Inn on the Park”, so I suppose so. If I was so fortunate that my concerns were worldlier, more domestic, I might well do exactly that. It is not for lack of ability. I am not in any way crippled. I have … responsibilities. I have a structure I am trying to maintain. I am the owner and creator and controller of a network so vast it is beyond the know-how of most men to move within it, to operate it, to organize its every nuance and fluctuation. I am, in short, stuck here. It’s not something of my choosing.

  But what is flying, if not my choice? You see, I’m breaking out, tomorrow—or no, of course, it’s already today—with Jack Real, with you, Jack.

  And yet one is always there again, where one begins. And in the end I retreated so far that any step beyond this room is rather gigantic. Not to say impossible. I mean, that’s not to say it’s impossible. If one wants to become what one wants to become one must start with what one is. Or has become. Perhaps I am sick, but if everything would just fall into place then I’m sure I can get better. Meanwhile, my voice gets thinner and thinner. I’m going to fly. I’m going to sit in the cockpit once again. Who devised this hideous speed of time? Who said it should go so fast? I am, very literally, suddenly sixty-seven. I didn’t plan it like that. Things just kept happening without any breaks, events cascaded one on top of the other, no gaps, no room for sleep, for rest, for peace. And then at forty-one you discover morphine. This is all so long ago. And God says eat, eat all the fruit you like. Break all the rules, because money is kinetic energy, the potentiality of the congealed, and it is for you to make it liquid. Release it, release it. It drowns you in libation.

  And yet you neither drown nor take on gills, but like Poseidon slumber in the deep. And all of the ocean is yours; even the heartbeats of the whales. And your life under water replaces the life that used to happen in the air. In any case, all is imagined and experienced as nothing more than combinations of oxygen and hydrogen in their different manifestations; flying and floating become one and the same thing. And all you are missing is fucking. I pushed Gene Tierney’s knees high up beside her ears, her mouth was open half in pleasure half in surprise, and we both looked down at my cock moving in and out of her. When our eyes met, I felt almost shy. She said, Don’t come, don’t come. Her flesh was soft in the hollows either side of her labia. It was all oceans to me. I thought that if we lived only once, then I had loved, loved deeply, loved this, been overcome by love. But perhaps we are born many times, and I have been greedy this particular time. Perhaps I merely needed to relax.

  What is contained in memory is made in any case infinite by the morphine. Please do not look down upon me as if I’ve found some lesser way to experience reality. I am trying to cram it all in. Some methods merely take preference. It is not particularly easy to do things any way other than the actual way that unfolds. Better the devil I know. My fear speaks to me with the authority of a god. There is just so much out there to fear, Jack, even if you are the wealthiest man in the world, more so if you are the wealthiest man in the world. It begins with the microbes, the germs, the tiny worlds of danger in the dust. It ends God-knows-where. I am very far away, all right, I’ll admit that much. But, dammit, in the morning I will be ready for action. I will take them all on!

  Memo, 1961: Backflow

  of germs

  Now. As you know, Bob Gross, who ran Lockheed, died yesterday, eaten up by cancer. His wife has asked me to be an honorary pallbearer at his funeral. This is patently not possible. But send flowers, telegrams, messages of condolence. Really go the limit on this.

  However:

  We have to go to great lengths to prevent the backflow of germs. Everything involved in this entire Gross operation, whether it be flowers, telegram, no matter what the hell it is, I want the absolute maximum greatest precaution and even greater precaution than we have ever taken before to close off all return paths. In other words, to make the operation truly, literally, absolutely irreversible. This will mean if we are going to use our florist for the flowers then the delivery will have to be made by some messenger service whom we will never use again, who will not be sending us literature, a bill, who will not be writing to us or sending or mailing us anything, who will not be calling upon us to try and solicit business, and furthermore, who will not do anything like this with our florist, for soliciting or business, sending literature to our florist, not sending bills or invoices to our florist, and not to be used again by our florist in any way. As for the message, it can simply go by telegram.

  Mrs. Gross will undoubtedly write a message of thanks for the flowers. Bill, can you send me a very complete memo setting forth the scheme for the receipt of this message?

  I want the necessary instructions given to a
chieve a block-off of all return avenues and to make the situation concerning the flowers and the telegram and anything else of that nature which may be required—to make any such transmission completely irreversible so there is absolutely not the slightest possibility of any backflow or return transmissions or anything of that kind even of the most indirect nature such as I have described herein.

  STEAM RISING OFF ME

  IT IS ALL a catastrophe. And all a glory. What am I hoping to remember, and what am I trying to forget? It’s difficult to keep it all straight. Because everything cycles around again. She viewed my stool before I flushed. The anxiety. The long bath. The thorough soaping. The harsh shock of the towel-drying. The running of her fingers through my hair. And every night the inspecting of the testicles. I would stand pink and steaming from the bath. She would take each testicle, one at a time, in her delicate fingers, looking for lumps. She would take her time, just like a doctor, and very gently, almost imperceptibly, feel her way around each testicle: the most careful, the slowest, most perfect inspection ever. She had a special little wooden chair for it, Jack, a kind of milkmaid’s stool. Perhaps I told you this before. And I stood, night after night, steam rising off me, willing it to be over. Then she would pat me down with talc and help me into my pajamas. She slept in the same bed with me until I was six years old, in the same room until I was eleven. Downstairs in the kitchen, her vigilance was the last defense against the amoeba-swarming vegetables.

  Why did she think that death was out to get me? How did she convince me that she was right?

  I have long since fallen, Jack. I landed here in this world of love and sleep. It is all a catastrophe.