[Musical interlude: “Little Train of the Caipira,” by Heitor Villa-Lobos, Toccata, Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2 for Orchestra]
“You were right! This thing does have great bathrooms! What a blast of gleaming brass—no wonder you don’t have money to pay your bookkeeper. Give me those controls back, would you? I’m feeling much better now, more relaxed. You know, this ship is mighty spacious. It’s like we’re in the belly of the whale, but once you get the hang of it, with your hands on the wheel —”
“It’s not a hummingbird. It’s not a helicopter.”
“It’s not an eighteen-wheeler. It’s not an oil tanker or ship of state.”
“You do seem to be getting a feel for it.”
“I think I am! Does this mean I have a job?”
“Looks like it.”
“Outstanding! Congratulations to me, new girl pilot! No cop choppers or—”
“No surveillance or hostile interference visible at this time. All screens are clear. Steady as she goes.”
“Good! Look at all those people sleeping down there. America’s dreamless sleepers. Tired out, tossing and turning—I can see them all in their beds. Dreaming of a blank future! I wonder what they’d think if they could see this ship in the clouds?”
“You got a real imagination on you.”
“I can see them. I can see everyone.”
“I can’t see anything down there but streetlights, houses, big shadows of trees on the avenues. It’s a dark landscape, dark fields of the republic rolling on under the night. I can’t see any people at all.”
“I can see everything from up here—their individual lives flickering like candles. What a feeling.”
“It’s all just a blobby blackness sprinkled with a few random lights to me.”
“Wow, what happened to you?”
“I don’t know. I think I got burned out working on all these secret plans, underground utopias, machines to transport our future. I think they were killing too many people while I was working hard on something else. Time went by, stuff happens.”
“Really? You look down there across the whole city at night, you don’t see those souls burning and scattered like stars against the dark?”
“I don’t even see the stars any more. I think you might be talking about the streetlamps.”
“No, I am definitely not talking about the streetlamps. I am talking about the people.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re embarrassed about that, I see.”
“It is a little embarrassing.”
“Is it?”
“Sometimes I feel like my feelings for people went out with the last century. I’m looking down on the eviscerated cities of America day and night from my floating vantage like a squinty-eyed Captain Nemo, and I feel like I lost most of my soul somewhere along the way. Or maybe it just dried out completely and stuck on me like a scabbed-over herpes sore on the corner of my mouth.”
“Yeah, that could be kind of embarrassing. What’re you gonna do about that?”
“Thanks for the sympathy. I appreciate that.”
“Welcome.”
“Really.”
“Hee hee.”
“I have bared my scars and here you are snickering.”
“Sorry. Habit.”
“See those yellow gauges off to your left. That means that bank of batteries are reduced; switch over to Bank Three. Bank Two off, Bank Three on.”
“Roger that.”
“That’s the professional air transport lingo I like to hear.”
“I feel like I’m really flying this thing.”
“We’re flying!”
“We’re flying?”
“We’re zooming.”
“So gimme the rest of the story. And not just some cheap allegory either, like we’re the all-seeing Eye of Surmise, of the Flying Id above the dreaming mind of America, asleep in its bed of ideological rubble, its subconsciousness submerged in the ruins of everything it has consumed and discarded like the Indian nations and the Civil War dead and the slaves and the Chinese who built the railroads and the Mexicans in the fields. Dead-dreaming America except for cops and gangsters running around shooting at each other. That’s not a story.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“So just say it. You’re taking me to Sky City aren’t you? If not now, then.… But wait a minute. This all has something to do with her, doesn’t it?”
“I didn’t tell you I saw Isaura last month.”
“Really?”
“We had lunch. She wanted to talk.”
“Uh-oh!”
“She looked good. Looked great, as a matter of fact.”
“I’ve seen pictures.”
“Better than the pictures.”
“Pictures may lie. What did she want to talk about?”
“She’s turned her life around. She’s taking care of herself now.”
“That’s what she told you? Did you laugh? Did she ask you to lend her a down payment?”
“She looked like she’s got a handle on it. She might have been coloring her hair, but she looked like she put down some demons. Maybe they went down hard, but they went down.”
“Her? After what everyone’s told you, in the face of your own experience, you’re going for that? After everything she’s done? No wonder she keeps calling.”
“She didn’t mention money once, except to say she could pay me back.”
“Really. I don’t know whether to believe you. Is there any actual verifiable fact associated with her at all?”
“I’m relating it exactly as I have been told. I heard she’s been working in South Central, gang intervention for at-risk kids, getting them off the street, into school, changing some lives. I did some checking up.”
“News to me! Secondhand, too. I can’t say as I am believing it yet.”
“I relate it just as I was told. She said she got into it after the riots of 2021. She had to drive through an intersection where the TV choppers were circling. She was on her way to work that morning, and she saw cars mobbed, people dragged from their vehicles and beaten. One car on fire. They smashed out the windows and—”
“Yeah, I saw it on TV.”
“For Isaura it wasn’t on TV. She’d almost made it through—people were on the ground—when a guy smashed out her window and hit her in the head with a piece of concrete. He grabbed the steering wheel and was jerking it away. She said she hit the gas and dragged him along till he fell off. Blood pouring down her head, glass all over.”
“She didn’t, like, pause at that point, light a cigarette and look at you from the corner of her eye and ask for a favor?”
“She wasn’t sure how badly she was hurt. She felt wet, she knew she was hurt but not how bad, and she wanted to live. The guy was trying to grab the wheel from her and push his way into her car, and she was thinking,