FAQs

Flight Leader

So, yesterday I am on the phone with a group of students from Mary Washington College who are asking me questions about writing, an interview for a new magazine they are starting called Pendulum, and there is trouble with the connection they are trying to use, they are trying to use Skype for the first time, and each time they connect they sound like the sound is ripping cloth or more exactly muffled ripping cloth, and then a recorded voice with a British accent comes on and says this phone call is being recorded and then the call is cut off, and then they call me back several times until they connect, and then they ask me the first question which is a question I get often when I do interviews which is how do you find the time to write?, or maybe something like-do you need time to write?-and I am getting ready to answer my frequently answered answer when this ripping sound comes tearing into the house as if it is the ripping sound in the phone and it has leaked out and been amplified on steroids, and I look up and see the silhouette of a jet aircraft cut through the quadrant of mullions of the window I am sitting across from, streaking through the graphed paper of the tree branches, overwhelming the static of the phone connection, and I ask them-did you hear that?, and they all-it is a conference call and I think there are four of them but I can’t be sure-answer, yes, and I tell them the Blue Angels are in town, and that was a Blue Angel practicing for the air show that will take place tomorrow over at the airfield right across the river from my house.

Wing

Outside now a second jet, dark blue and close enough to the ground I can see the gold trim and the gold number 2 in Helvetica painted on the outside port surface of the port vertical stabilizer, and it is so close to the ground (I have gone outside now and I don’t think the voices on the phone know I have, but they can’t help but hear the screaming of the jets as they vector back and forth over the neighborhood doing a maneuver they call an opposing knife’s edge) that I can see the rudder flexing, and the control surface that is the whole horizontal stabilizer digs into the air, ricocheting the jet up up up and then the afterburners kicking on and through that roar I hear the second question which is what is the difference between fact and fiction?, and I am preparing to answer that one with my frequently answered answer about how a fact is a thing done and a fiction is a thing made so that even the most real thing, after it is done, has no reality, and how even the most made-up thing, when it is made up, has a reality-the reality of a book, say, of words on paper, a transcript you can hold, manipulate, when the two jets meeting at the apex of the loop they have both been pulling begin to emit a dark blue smoke that I will learn later is a paraffin based solid vaporized by the flame in the engines, and the punctuation of the smoke, a kind of cursive wave, is already drifting to the north as the planes (one tucked under the wing of the other) disappear over the horizon toward Mississippi.

Fat Albert

The sound, too, of the two jets is drifting away though it seems (when you do hear anything) it is always trailing way behind the jet that is actually making the sound, or, even stranger, the echoes from some other run-by are running ahead of the jet, reverberating, coming to meet the jet as it dives toward the ground, and the sound is bouncing off the ground up to meet it, a kind of stutter or shriek, and the students on the phone ask me if I think teaching has affected my writing, and they can actually hear through the phone the sound of the jets bouncing off the sky and the ground and the trees and the river and the buildings, and I give them an answer about how writing isn’t like the other subjects of the university, how it is more like a gift that runs through us all, both students and teachers, what is received must be given away, that art is erotic property, property that stays in motion when, suddenly, a huge blue C-130 cargo airplane, the one the Blue Angels named Fat Albert, rises up behind my house, as if it were a big balloon floating up, actually nicking the top of the long leaf pines in my neighbor’s back yard, its four turbo-props digging into the humid air as it lumbers so slowly; it is so slow, especially after the blinking speed of the jets, that it doesn’t seem to have enough oomph to remain aloft, always already about to fall, as it is more like a blimp, a zeppelin, wallowing now right overhead as it rolls port, showing me its belly like a whale sounding and stalling, sliding backwards, it seems, but then splashing forward, a graceful awkwardness out of the water, over the golf course, its overstuffed rounded and rounding organic shadow casting on the organic cutouts of the greens and bunkers and ponds, and the plane shakes, straining to find an inch of lift, and hunking down to gain momentum, and then seeming to levitate, waging its tail and launching, like a navy blue cetaceous cumulus cloud, shading, now blotting out the bloated sun.

Slot

The jets are back as the intermission clown car of the cargo plane settles down for a landing on the other side of the river, and the jets-there are four of them now-in their famous formation of four, emerge from behind a cloud, diamond-shaped, the fourth airplane in the slot beneath and behind the lead plane who’s wing-tip-to-wing-tip with his two wingmen’s wing-tips but that is hard to see, hard to say, because what is behind or below or above changes instantly effortlessly constantly, it seems, as the planes move through the delta v of this calculus, rearranging themselves in each dimension-x, y, z, and time-and from this distance, it looks as if there is just one plane instead of four, so precise is the handling as the “they” that is really an “it,” roll and pitch and yaw as one, and the students have all been talking to me on the other end of the phone, asking their last question, saying this question coming now at me at the speed of sound, at the speed of light, is their last question, and it is this: If I would consider publishing something on-line, as their magazine Pendulum is published on-line, and would I send them something to publish?, and the four blue jets up in the blue-going-to-white sky, their manufactured blue smoke spilling from them, another signature, with serifs and accents and underlines, and I tell the students that I am working on a book of fictions made up of things made up in fours-the four chambers of the heart, the four seasons, the four humors, the four winds, etc., etc., etc., etc., and I am working on something now I will try to finish and send to them to consider putting in the magazine, and I am watching the formation reposition itself into what I will learn later is called a Double Farvel, with two of the four planes inverted, creating a mirrored image of each other, before they breaking apart once again, corkscrewing through the air, vectoring to each corner of the sky, reining in their speeds then raising their noses at an extreme angle to almost stall, and then extending their gear, bank, and heading for the airport over the river, and I tell the students that the Blue Angels seem to be finished for the day, and the pilots of the F/A 18s will now attempt what they call a “landing” on land but what they usually “land” at sea, on an aircraft carrier (they are navy planes after all and the pilots are not pilots because in the navy a pilot is someone who pilots a ship not an airship, so these pilots are naval aviators), and they are about to land on land and not on the deck of ship with a tail hook and arresting cables, the ungainly and suddenly ungraceful difficult ending to what has been all effortless and elegant, the falling, gliding, silence, all taking back with a vengeance, in the final maneuver called simply, a controlled crash, the only true answer without question… gravity.