The Beginning and End of Flight

By Dan Ward

A collection of short fiction and mock biographies that play with love, time, loss, the effect of distance on our souls, and the struggle to make our own marks on the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Ward
• Release date: Dec 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465996183

Dan Ward

DAN WARD is associate department head, Cyber Intelligence and Intelligence Community Workforce for the MITRE Corporation.

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The Beginning and End of Flight

Published by Daniel Ward at Smashwords.com

Copyright 2011 Daniel Ward

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Fiction

In the Belly of Leviathan

Persian Gulf War for Two

The Catholic Child

Coming Up for Air

The War in Texas

Orville and Wilbur

The Uploaded

Biographies That Aren’t

An Introduction to the Works of Miguel Sanchez Guerrero

Sam Boswell: A Gunfighter on the Margins of Cultural Thought

The Paintings of Vespasian: Dilemmas in Transgressive Creation

Renaissance Man: The Continuing Problem of Hafiz Yilmaz

Foreword

The stories in this anthology span decades. In the Belly of Leviathan went into the world in 1989, published in an arts & events magazine in Washington DC that has long since gone away. When I read it now, it seems like really good writing produced by a deranged mind, and I understand why Stephen Spielberg feels the need to go back make his movies not as dark or threatening. However, the only thing I have changed from the published version is that I rewrote two sentences that had unforgivably lazy wording. The Persian Gulf War was an incredibly fertile time for me in terms of writing, and led to three published stories, one of them included here as Persian Gulf War for Two. I was struck by how war fever spread through the East Coast, and how opposition to the war was incredibly stressful, and sometimes dangerous.

The Catholic Child is not autobiographical in any of the events related. The feeling, however, is one I have lived with for ages, and I still think about the person the character of Tamar is based on. Coming Up for Air is not autobiographical at all. I certainly never had a tangled romance in Spain, and I never did Tarot readings based off a deck of playing cards.

The War in Texas was a breakthrough for me in terms of writing, and was published in the Adobe Anthology, a one-shot publication from my favorite bookstore. I’ve often wondered why more bookstores don’t try to produce original material. Orville and Wilbur took the same kind of writing structure and took it one step further. You’ll notice a protagonist’s relationship with his brother comes up again in my writing.

The Uploaded is a more traditional science-fiction story, and it was only after I’d finished it that I realized I’d been inspired by FaceBook. Social media is going to change our relationship with mortality.

I have a lot of fun writing biographical sketches of people who never lived. This is more or less directly an inspiration from reading Borges, who once remarked that it was much more fun to write about a novel he had envisioned than to actually write it. One of the best compliments I’ve received is the number of people who have read my introduction to Miguel Sanchez Guerrero and asked where they could find his books.

Sam Boswell was originally intended to be a chapter in an epistolary novel that has yet to be written. Hafiz Yilmaz is, in its own way, a response to the financial crisis gripping the world. These two stories together can be seen as asking why in the world we trust history at all, given how often people lie.

Making a narrative out of history is not necessarily lying, though the process of imposing this much order on chaos inevitably involves fictionalizing events. I’m interested in the question of whether Vespasian – the painter, not the Emperor – is imposing that same process on himself.

For that matter, that question is alive for me. As I look back on my life so far and what's to come, the visualization of that past and that future is, inevitably, a fictionalization of a sort. Am I crafting my self as a work of art? That would truly give me a literary soul. But in that case, how much of the story is true, and how much is inserted because it sounds good? In any case, whether I’m truth or fiction, my hope is that in reading these stories you’ll say to yourself, at least once, Wow. I have never thought that way before.

Lawrence, Kansas

July, 2011

In the Belly of Leviathan

He had spent most of that bright summer morning spreading the napalm he had made at home the night before all over the piers, the beams, and the planks underneath the New Jersey Boardwalk. He was putting most of it right in front and right below the game where the object was to eject your dead rubber frog onto a rotating plastic lily pad. He had lost a lot of money on that game one night, without even winning so much as a small stiff teddy bear that he could have dangled off of his rear view mirror.

He smiled as he thought of the petulance he was showing by getting back at them like this. It was not their fault, really, if he wanted to lose so much money at their game. Even so, they were going to be the first to go.

It was not that he hated them or that he hated the Boardwalk. That wasn't it at all. . . he loved the Boardwalk, and when he had first walked on to it, he had felt like Marco Polo discovering Cipango. Looking at the lights and the rides, feeling the warm muggy air blowing in from off the ocean, eating the taffy and the ice cream, he knew he was onto something incredibly important. He wasn't sure why he was spreading homemade napalm all over it. He just was, because it did have to be done. He knew that much.

It had been delivered unto him in a vision. He had spent far too much of his life running away from visions to think that a vision could be escaped or disobeyed. His visions had chased him all the way from California to New Jersey, and now this was the end. He couldn't go any farther east, and he was too tired to go north. Besides, he had known when he had seen the boardwalk that first night that he had come to the end. Now he no longer wanted to escape. It was time to find out the answers, it was time to come to the terms of the deal.

What he still didn't know was which side he was on. This thought was what had been holding him in check, what had kept him from scattering the freeways of Los Angeles with the sharpened sheet metal triangles he had made, this is what had stopped him from spray painting FUCK THE POPE on the Alamo, this is what had stopped him from kidnapping the infant son of the mayor of Houston and drowning him in the toxic waters of the Buffalo Bayou, and this is what had stopped him from shooting Henry Kissinger with an elephant gun loaded with hollow point bullets. All of these things had been his commands, his appointed missions. Each time he had run away.

But when he saw the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Ferris Wheel, the lights on the spinning Black Whip, when he saw the Bumper Cars, he knew that he hadn't really been running. Someone or something had been choosing his destinies for him. There was no reason to run away. Each time, he would only be going to another mission, until he finally found one that he was willing to fulfill.

He wondered in a vague sort of way as he lit a cigarette and tried to smoke it without coughing if was going to kill anyone by doing this. It wasn't something that he had ever done before. But, by the same token, he had never seen Nebraska. He could take it or leave it. That wasn't so important.

Out past the boardwalk, invisible behind the lights and the happiness and the money and the idiocy and the food and the sex and the misery and the heartbreak, out there was the ocean. He couldn't see it, but he knew it was there. If he went down to the sand, there was still time. He didn't have to light the matches that would light the fuses that he had hidden, he wouldn't have to hear the screaming or feel the heat or come to grips with who or what it was that kept calling him on these missions that he had never wanted and hadn't ever asked for.

What he really wanted was to be a professor of philosophy. He wanted to smoke pipes and wear tweed jackets and talk in monotones to sleepy students about solipsism and the ontological argument and how in the world do we presume to know what we think we know anyway. He wanted to be boring, and stable, and marry the kind of woman who would marry a boring stable philosophy professor and raise the kind of troubled, over-educated, under-socialized child that a Ph.D. would raise. He wanted a meaningless and vapid life full of pretension, because almost anything would be better than the feeling he had now of stage fright and of embarrassment at being the kind of person who would see a picture in the newspaper and be seized with a trembling all over his body while the world went away and a voice came from everywhere and nowhere, telling him: Kidnap this child. Drown it in the most polluted water that you can find.

He had to laugh at his life. He was humiliated. He was like a stripper on amateur night, fumbling with the catch on his pants, while the spotlight followed him everywhere and singled him out.

There's still time, he told himself. There was still time to walk down to the ocean and start swimming. A few thousand miles across the sea was Portugal. He could start swimming to Lisbon. If he made it, maybe he would be forgiven or released from this involuntary servitude that he had been drafted into.

Well, hell, he thought. So what if nothing makes any sense? Does getting married and getting fat make any sense? Does living to get old make any sense? Does getting visions make any sense?

There was only one thing to do: it was time to get to work.

He started one last look around, not looking at or doing anything in particular. He played a game of pinball, and lost quickly. He looked at three plump blondes with too much make-up, smoking cigarettes, gossiping and pointing at two young men with a dangerous look of mean stupidity in their eyes. He drank a glass of very sweet lemonade that left a clot of phlegm in the back of his throat. He saw a pimply faced kid of about seventeen talking to a girl of about fourteen who was working behind the french fry counter. He suddenly felt depressed by the dreariness as though he had been stuck in a gray room with no windows and only a three year old issue of a women's fashion magazine to read.

Before he realized where he was really going he was in front of the frog game again. Hit the motherfucker, hit the motherfuckers, softly chanted the drunk man with long greasy black hair pulled into a pony tail. The lights shone off his bald spot, and the barker's voice was loud, blowing out the cheap tin microphone he was shouting into.

Out there was the ocean and he felt its cool wind come up exactly in time to reassure him. Everything was going to be all right. The ocean was eating away at the shore with soft, insistent strokes, like a hungry mother soothingly skinning her children, dressing them for the oven. He was part of that, part of that huge darkness that ate everything. He was here to eliminate and to purge and who had sent him on this mission no longer mattered.

He bent down and lit the fuse. When he saw that the fire had started, he began to take off his clothes. People began to point and laugh, and he smiled and waved at them. He saw the police coming down the boardwalk for him, and he laughed at the surprise they were getting. He could feel the heat underneath him. Out on the shore, the lonely walkers and depressed drunks were beginning to point. The comprehension of destruction was just beginning to dawn on them.

Persian Gulf War for Two

I'm lying in bed feeling sleepy, and it occurs to me that I'm hearing the music I'm listening to in a different way than I ever have before; I can hear the thoughts of the musicians playing it, and I can hear each note, I'm not losing any of the music as background noise.

As soon as I think about this, the effect is gone.

Julienne and I are having coffee. There is a war going on somewhere, but there is no visible evidence of this except for the yellow ribbon tied to all of the parking meters outside the restaurant.

You know what? Julienne says, shaking her head. I used to read the whole paper. Sports, gossip, Ann Landers, fashion, travel, the funnies, the local news, all of that. I never read that anymore, I can't remember when the last time I read that stuff was. All I read now is the war news.

Your clue that Julienne is not from the East Coast is that she says funnies, and not the comics. This is a Midwestern or Southern way of speaking. It is a corruption of funny papers which can still be heard in some working class neighborhoods in the older cities of the North East.

Julienne and I are having coffee. It is the morning after we have made love. This morning, she turned down my offer to make breakfast for her. I woke up wanting to bake for her, and I told her this.

The waitress at the diner is not talking to us this morning. We are not talking to each other either, because while driving to the diner we nearly got into a wreck, and before that, we had a fight over gas money.

I'm drinking coffee and waiting for scrambled eggs, which I realize I don't really want. The thought of slightly runny eggs makes my nose wrinkle and my stomach feel shaky.

I'm drinking coffee and waiting for scrambled eggs and I realize as I'm sipping that my back teeth are mashed down against each other and it takes a lot of conscious effort to open them.

Julienne is reading the paper and not looking at me. She snorts in derision.

God, she says, still not looking at me, who the fuck came up with the idea of an approval rating for a war anyway?

I once read the Hebrew Bible from cover to cover. I was struck by a sense of being watched, and by a sense of the power of water, but mostly by a sense of doom, because every deed has persistent consequences.

Later that day, Grant is on the T passing out antiwar flyers on the Braintree line. He is jumped by three guys who beat him up but do not put him in the hospital.

When I tell Julienne what has happened, she is disgusted. At first we are too angry to be scared, but after we have gone over to his house to give him orange juice and hot tea we drive past a tree full of yellow ribbons, and we pass it in silence. Later that day we fight over whether to put garbage in a plastic bag or a paper sack. She puts the garbage in a paper sack which bursts and spills wet coffee grounds all over her kitchen floor. After that she sends me back to my apartment.

There are days when I have the urge to open time like a box.

It is morning and Julienne and I are having coffee. People are thrilled and happy at the news from the war. The waitress wears a yellow ribbon on her uniform. The men in the booths are drinking coffee and making sweeping motions with their hands, enthusiastically wishing out loud that they could be there, slicing effortlessly through Iraqi tanks and covering men with bombs, being powerful, being masterful; they are thrilled that these young men and their planes are triumphant over the weapons of the enemy.

Julienne and I can not summon up the strength to tune this out. We stare at each other.

You didn't listen to me, Julienne says. You knew I wasn't ready, I told you that, but you pushed it on ahead anyway. And that is just so typical.

Goddam, someone says gleefully, "those Iraqis