A Madman on the Ground, A Visionary in Flight
An excerpt from The Sky Was Ours by Joe Fassler
A man stepped into the barn.
It wasn’t the boy I’d seen at the tower. This person was older, though it was hard to say how old—in his fifties, at the very least. His beard was gray and full, but his unruly mess of windswept hair had stayed stubbornly reddish gold. Thick glass disks hid his eyes.
He saw me and went stiff.
“Oh,” he said.
He looked at me strangely for a second. Then he walked into the middle of the room to lay some sheets of paper on his worktable, totally unfazed, as if he’d expected to find me there all along.
I couldn’t run without passing him, I saw that. I stood by the far wall, helplessly caught. The air seemed to cool twenty degrees, my hands shivering like the knobs of some machine.
“I’m sorry—” I started to say.
The man held up his hand.
“Shh,” he said.
He stood there and peered at me through the glasses, cocking his head as if to listen for something far away.
“I’m sorry,” I said, again, my pulse flogging my ears. “I shouldn’t be here. I’ll go—”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Just feel what you’re feeling.”
It was an odd remark, so unexpected that for a second I forgot to be afraid.
“It’s all right,” he insisted. “It takes time, I know.”
He was wearing an ancient flannel shirt—the cloth gone all frizzy, the colors running together. It was eerie, the way he spoke, like he was referencing some earlier conversation he remembered and I didn’t. For a second it was so quiet I could hear every little thing: the way his breath wheezed in his nostrils, bugs whirring in the grass outside. The cry of some distant bird.
Then he started to limp toward me—he had a bad ankle that gave with every step, reducing his gait to a frightening lurch. The fear flooded back, a hand at my throat. He wasn’t much taller than I was, but he was muscular, the thickened look of a person who did hard work with his body. I felt a scream coming on, this pressure building in my chest like a cough.
“What do you feel when you see them?” he said.
“See them?” I hated how I sounded, the words high and pleading.
“The wings!” he roared.
I backed away as he came closer, feeling behind myself for the wall. His nose had healed funny after a break, and the way the bridge curved made his face look like an ill-fitting mask. He was close enough to grab me.
“Please,” I said. It came out as a whisper.
“You’ve felt it all your life, haven’t you?” he said. “All your life. Me, too. What’s your name, my sister?”
I stared at him, terrified and uncomprehending.
“Your name,” he said again.
“Jane,” I said, before I had the sense to lie.
“Jane!” he said brightly, like it was a wonderful bit of news. “Look up, Jane.”
A sweet, fetid smell rolled off him, like a gone-off cantaloupe. The last thing I wanted to do was turn my gaze away from him, make myself vulnerable like that.
“Look up, my sister,” he said, and there was a new note in his voice—something gentle, even affectionate, an old friend surprising me with a gift. Something in his tone convinced me, just a little. It seemed to matter less that I was so afraid.
His eyebrows lifted expectantly. He would wait until I did it.
I looked up. The wings hung over us in the rafters, posed mid-flight in a dozen frozen postures.
“We’re going to fly, Jane,” he said.
The words hit like icy water.
“You. Me. All of us. We’re finally going to leave the ground on our own power, and everything will be as it should be. But you’ve always known this. Flight has always waited for us. It’s what we’re here to do.”
His voice purred low in his throat, almost like he was talking to himself, and I suddenly found I wanted to lean in closer to hear him. Flight, finally, always—these were words I’d known forever. But I felt like I was hearing them for the first time, parts of a language I didn’t yet understand, expressing things I never knew could be said.
“We’re really going to do it, this time,” the old man said. “We’re going to correct the human body. Here, come with me.”
I felt the universe shift just slightly. It was the strangest thing: like the earth had tilted on its axis toward the sun. The laws of physics began to subtly bend. Something was happening to me. His words rushed through my skull in a tide, crashing onto the bright shore of my mind.
To correct the human body.
As if lightning were about to strike us both, all the small hairs rose on my arms.
I followed him over to the naked wood frame that lay across his worktable. Huge and skeletal, the bones curved with the taut power of a pulled-back bow.
“This,” he said, “is everything I know. The work of my life. The answer. My god, we only need to fix the fabric to the wood—a day’s work, less—and we’ll be finished. Tomorrow, in the morning . . .”
His sentences picked up speed and intensity as he spoke. What he was implying seemed obvious, and impossible: That he was building a pair of wings to fly in. That the skeleton on the table would have the power to lift him, rising bird-like into the air. I peered over at him, trying to see past the thick, mirroring panes of his eyes.
“When you’re finished,” I repeated, gesturing down at the table, “you mean—you’ll be able to . . .”
My mouth faltered at the word. Fly. It seemed too childlike to say, and somehow too profane.
The old man nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes—that’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
My brain churned with effort. What he was saying made no sense. Not that the idea was purely science-fictional, like time travel or werewolves. Birds, bugs, and planes flew every day. I’d just always assumed that people couldn’t do it. Everyone did. But suddenly I wasn’t sure why.
The man watched me, smiling, as if he’d already sequenced the exact progression of my thoughts, and was delighted to watch the emotions play as expected across my face. He shook his fists in a warm, celebratory gesture, his whole being bristling with energy.
“Oh, it’s a sign you’ve come to us now,” he said. “In the last hours—and not a minute sooner. My sister, you’re right on time.”
I wondered who he meant by us—if that meant there were others, or if it was simply the pronoun that best expressed the expansive cast of his thought. There was something almost embarrassing about how eager he was, the ardency in his voice.
“What about those?” I asked, deflecting him. I pointed to the ceiling, where the other winged shapes hung, looming over us in the darkness.
He nodded.
“Those,” he said, “are different. They’re my models, my studies, my works-in-progress. My failures. Incomplete solutions to the question. What I’m saying is—they don’t fly. Not like this one will, once we’re finished.”
He gestured to the table. Then he seemed to think of something.
“Here,” he said. “You should see this.”
He limped over to the far wall. I kept my distance and started to relax a little, the jitters slowing in my knees. I could outrun him if I had to. He could barely walk.
He started to unlash a rope from a mounted iron tie, like freeing a boat from a dock. Overhead, a giant bat-like glider started to lower, the ropes whispering as they slid. I had to move out of the way to make room.
“This,” he said, “is an exact replica of Otto Lilienthal’s 1894 glider. You’ve never heard of Lilienthal, have you?”
I hadn’t. The glider settled on the floor with a gentle creaking of wood.
“No one knows him, not anymore,” he said. “But he was once the most famous man on earth. A great, strapping genius of a German. This was years before the Wright Brothers. You’ve heard of them.”
“Of course,” I said.
“They don’t deserve the credit they get,” he said. “Not a fraction. They stole wholesale from Lilienthal. Everything they knew about air pressure, wing design, the lifting properties of curved surfaces—it all came directly from him. But the Wrights, they corrupted Lilienthal’s vision. It was never about planes. What he wanted—what we want—was to fly, in the true sense, to use our arms like wings. To soar freely, powered only by our bodies. That was the dream. It was much too quickly forgotten.”
What he wanted—what we want—was to fly, in the true sense, to use our arms like wings.
He spoke so intensely, in such an outpouring of admiration and anger and longing, that I couldn’t think of anything to say. The idea of this winged German seemed outrageous, and I sensed he was exaggerating.
“You see it, don’t you?” he went on. “How, for a brief moment, we were focused on the right thing. The only thing. True flight. Lilienthal inspired the world to think of the sky as ours, to dream that we could correct our bodies and take it. People forgot about him. They moved on with their war planes, with their TWA. But it could have been different. When he died in 1896, millions mourned in the streets.”
He’d nearly talked himself out of breath, and fell silent for a second to recover, the air wheezing heavily in and out through his nose.
“How did he die?” I asked, trying to be polite.
“Lilienthal? He was killed in a glider wreck,” he said.
“Ah,” I said.
“He died at his peak,” the man said. “At his absolute peak. In a machine he’d made, with movable wings. He’d captured the world’s imagination with gliders like this one, fixed structures that could carry him hundreds of feet in good wind. But he died trying to fly. He might have gone on to do it, too, if he’d survived—he was that far along. But now that’s over. What we’ve built in the last months”—he gestured over to the worktable—“builds definitively on Lilienthal’s advancements. On the whole forgotten history of flight.”
His glasses flashed, two signaling mirrors.
“Gliding isn’t enough,” he said. “Planes are not enough. You see that, don’t you? How free, unfettered flight would be everything? How it would liberate the human spirit? And we’ll do it! Starting tomorrow. Our wings will break open the world as we know it and allow something new to be born—”
I heard something behind me and turned around. A thin form paused in the doorway, someone with long dark hair. It was the boy I’d seen at the tower, I realized. He lingered in the opening.
“Oh,” the man said, breaking out of his monologue. “It’s Ike. My boy! Come here, Ike.”
The boy stepped into the barn, giving me a wide berth as he walked across the floor. His hair hung like a veil over his face, a sullen method of concealment. He didn’t look at me or speak.
“This is my son, Ike,” the man said. “This is Jane, Ike. She’s here to help us. I’m Barry, by the way,” he told me.
The boy said nothing—he just stood there, way too thin. His ragged clothes, I realized, shared a look with the gliders overhead. They were cut from the same cloth.
“It occurs to me we should show her, Ike,” the old man— Barry—said, speaking to the boy, but smiling at me. “Shouldn’t we? So she can see it for herself!”
He’d reached a state of high animation, delighted with how the population of his barn had grown.
“Come on,” he said. He grabbed one of the glider’s wings and lifted it half off the floor. But the boy stayed still.
“Dad,” he said.
“Come on!” Barry roared.
“Dad,” the boy said again, softly. “Stop.”
“What are you just standing there for?”
“Just don’t,” the boy said. “Please.” He kept himself angled away from me, standing still with the quiet intensity of a person keeping vigil.
“Ohh,” Barry groaned dismissively, waving him away. He turned to me. “He gets like this. Help me, won’t you?”
For a second they were both looking at me, the glider between them.
“Help you how?” I said, trying to stall.
“Help me carry this outside!” he roared, shaking the glider with his hand. “I’m going to jump off the roof.”
It was a startling declaration, despite everything he’d said. I could feel the high darkness of the barn, the roof sloping upward like the ceiling of a church.
“Jump . . . ?”
“Oh, forget it,” he said. He lifted the glider himself and began to limp across the floor with it, the wings bucking in the rhythm of his lurch. The contraption was large and unwieldy, but I could tell how light it was by the nimble way he guided it through the barn’s double doors. I couldn’t see him anymore, then. There was a loud thump, and he shouted something back at us, yelling unintelligibly.
The boy, Ike, and I looked at each other. He seemed to be a few years younger than me, with the half-formed look of someone in their very early twenties, and his eyes were pretty—a sea-glass brown. But his face seemed stuck in a permanent wince, as if the whole situation were a source of chronic pain. It seemed wrong to be that young and look so sad already.
Then it dawned on me: the old man, Barry, was insane.
Of course he was gloriously strange, that was obvious. But he’d spoken with such torrential authority, and the gliders themselves were so compelling, that I hadn’t thought to write him off completely as a kook. Yet Ike had tried to stop him. I could still hear his soft, exasperated voice: Dad, stop, please.
Maybe Barry was merely in the grips of some mania, compelled by the logic of madness. Maybe I’d provoked someone who needed no provoking, and now he was all stirred up and ready to jump from his roof.
“I—”
I stammered out some faltering thing.
But Ike just shook his head, a pained expression on his face, as if he couldn’t believe what I’d done. Then he was moving. He backed out the double doors and was gone.
I followed, but by then he seemed to have vanished into the meadow. I rushed around the side of the barn, only to find Barry climbing a silver ladder that was bolted to the wall, the glider laid beneath him in the grass. He couldn’t really bear weight on his left foot, so he made his way up with his arms more than his legs, grabbing the crossbars with both hands and pulling himself higher and higher in a series of quick one-legged hops. Then he pulled himself over the lip of the roof, his boots scraping on the shingles.
Before I could say something to stop him, the glider started rising, a hallucinatory upward slide into the air. I looked up, startled. Barry was standing on a cantilevered wooden platform that jutted from the roof, and was turning a crank that squealed as it wheeled around. He’d fixed the glider to some kind of rigged-up rope-and-pulley system—I could see the metal hook he’d fitted into one of the wooden ribs. The wind pulsed in the cloth as the winged shape lifted, causing the frame to twitch and shiver like a living thing.
The barn had to be more than two stories tall—it was hard to say how tall exactly, but it was clearly a dangerous height. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe his broken body was not a sign of some interior wildness—of course it wasn’t—but the legacy of his falls. A slow, eerie sensation filled me. The feeling you get when you discover mold on a piece of bread you’ve already half eaten.
“Remember, this will be gliding, not flying,” he called down to me. “Just a prelude—a promise!—of what’s to come.”
I felt sick.
“You’re sure you want to do this?”
He laughed.
“My sister,” he bellowed. “Of course I’m sure!”
Behind him, the sun had already started to set, the clouds purpling with the vivid colors of a bruise. He stooped and lifted the glider.
There was still no sign of Ike. I can’t stop him, I remember realizing. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen.
I watched Barry guide the glider over his shoulders. Suddenly he was transformed. The man was gone, replaced by something winged and huge. Sunlight hit the fabric, turning the stretched cloth into two lit panes. His arms vanished in twin baths of light. He hobbled to the edge of the plank.
My knees tensed. I wanted to appeal to some higher authority, some minister of safety and sense, but of course no one was there.
The tips of Barry’s boots stuck out over the ledge. He swayed gently, swooning to some slow, private music. The wings tilted subtly this way and that, as if tasting the direction of the wind. Then a breeze gusted, so strong it bent the grass. Before I could do anything, Barry took a step forward and jumped.
A rush of wind bucked in the glider’s fan, and his body lurched upward. His shape started to float through the air, as smoothly as if he’d been mounted to a track. As the wings soared over me high above, I heard more than saw them pass— the wind made a tiny thunder in the grass, his body briefly blotting out the sun. It was spectacular. A human form parting the sky, suspended in midair. My pupils opened, and my brain felt every neuron fire—the world spreading out around me, everything so much bigger than I knew.
I turned in time to see Barry rushing toward the ground, far into the meadow, completing a right triangle’s longest line. The glider lifted a few feet again at the end, so that, for a moment, I thought he might rise again toward the sky.
Instead, he dropped gently, staggering a few paces before falling to all fours in the grass.
The whole thing took five seconds, maybe less.
I ran toward where he knelt in the grass, gasping. The glider shielded his body like a strange white shell, moving subtly as he breathed. His head stuck out through a hole in the fabric, but the rest of him stayed hidden. He was all right.
“See?” he shouted. “You feel it, don’t you?”
That was when I saw his eyes for the first time: two bolts of mad, dancing blue, like flames in a gas range. A sob built in my throat, taking me by surprise. I stammered something, who knows what.
“What you just saw,” Barry said, his voice shaking, “a German did more than a century ago. He was on the brink of it, even then. But we’ve nearly finished what he started. Tomorrow, Jane, it’s time!”
Across the meadow, Ike stalked toward us. Something flashed in the grass—Barry’s glasses, thrown from his head, rested half folded in a mess of stalks. I snatched them up.
“Your glasses,” I said.
“Go ahead,” Barry said. “Put them on me. I can’t see a thing.”
It seemed so strange, considering his fierce blue gaze, that I was just a blur to him.
I put the glasses on for him again, guiding the wiry arms into the red-and-gray hair above his ears, and as I did it struck me how much had changed since that morning. I could never have imagined, as I woke up into the stale smell of my car, the way the meadow would look with Barry’s glider fanning out over the grass, the old man peering up at me from the middle of his contraption. If a single day could shift like that, anything was possible—anything could happen under the neon clouds, the endless Day-Glo chamber of the sky.
“Help me, Ike,” Barry said, and suddenly the boy was there, standing mutely just three feet from us.
As Ike lifted, I saw the undercarriage of the glider—Barry’s arms were not outstretched, like I’d thought, but folded across his chest, embracing a wooden axis that held the machine together.
“Let’s eat,” Barry said. “A feast—we’re going to need it. Because tomorrow, the real work starts. We’ll want full bellies.”
He looked at me.
“But first,” he said, “there’s something you should do.”
“Me?” I said.
Whatever it was, I’ll bet you bought it from the store. Didn’t you?
We brought the glider back into the barn, and then Barry led me over to the edge of the woods, past a fenced-off chicken coop I hadn’t noticed, where hens waddled and scratched about in the dirt. A small wooden crate sat in the shadows. Something moved behind the slats: a nervous brown lump of fur, with eyes like black jewels. A pink nose twitched at the air.
“Goody,” Barry said. “We’re in luck.”
“A rabbit,” I said.
“The whole place is thick with them,” Barry said. “As the land will be, once it’s allowed to heal.”
Something about the way he said the land made me think of the wheat fields on a cereal box, airbrushed and overwrought.
Ike bent down and opened the trap, pulling the creature out. He held it against his chest, and its dark eyes bulged with terror.
“When we finish the wings,” Barry said, “everything’s going to change. I mean everything—you need to hear this, Jane. What did you eat for dinner last night?”
I wasn’t sure I’d had dinner last night—maybe a plastic tube of trail mix from the gas station.
“Whatever it was, I’ll bet you bought it from the store. Didn’t you?”
I nodded, even if the truth probably wasn’t what Barry had in mind. The rabbit’s black eyes glared back at me.
“Listen very carefully to me, now,” Barry said. “When we finish the wings, the deliveries are going to stop coming. The stores are going to close. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next month. But they will. People aren’t going to waste their lives toiling anymore, not when they can fly. The whole extractive system will start to fail. And when it does, you need to be ready. The way me and Ike are ready.”
We walked around the side of a junk-crammed shack, where a four-legged structure stood—tall and thin, like a lifeguard’s chair. A traffic cone hung upside down on ropes from the center of it, the last six inches of the orange tip raggedly sawn off. The grass below was blackened with stains.
It was blood, I realized. Then I understood.
“Ike and I, we live off this land completely,” Barry said. “We use no electricity. No fuel but good old wood. We pay no taxes, have no bills. And everything we eat, we grow and catch.”
The rabbit’s bulk struggled against Ike’s embrace, its hide swelling and shrinking with panicked breath. Ike seemed to whisper something into the shallow dish of its ear, and then he stuffed it headfirst into the cone. The creature hung there, upside down, hissing silently at us. We heard its body struggling inside, a weak scraping of claws.
Barry picked something off a wooden stool and handed it to me. A hunting knife, the blade crested with teeth.
“Cut its throat,” Barry said, “and we’ll eat well tonight.”
In the fading light, his glasses shone, twin moons.
I’d never killed anything before. I looked over at the boy, who turned away, as if the whole thing pained him—though I couldn’t tell if he was shamed by his father, by the slaughter, or by me.
“This is the transaction,” Barry said. “There is no life without death. It’s always been that way. They just hide it from you.”
The blade shook in my hand.
I could tell he was testing me. He wanted to see what I would do.
I looked into the rabbit’s face, the gleaming pebbles of its eyes. I recognized its fear. There had always been a frightened rabbit inside me, too, huddled in a slaughter cone. I had just never known I could kill that part of myself.
Their eyes were on me, watching.
I cupped the small skull in my palm and drew the blade across its throat. Blood fell from the open neck in a long string of red drool.
“Moment of silence,” Barry said, and while the animal drained we hung our heads.
“Thank you, rabbit,” Barry finally said, after a while.
“Thank you, rabbit,” the boy whispered. So I said it, too.
Eventually Ike pulled the body out, carrying the slain thing by its ankles as we walked toward the house.
By then the afternoon was coming to an end—the sun would be down soon. The three of us stepped up onto the warped back porch, which groaned as if it might collapse under our weight, and I followed them inside.
Ike produced a weathered tin can, its mouth sawed open and the lid still attached, with some holes punched in it. He dumped a twiggy bundle from the can, messy as a bird’s nest, and unwrapped it to reveal a dully glowing ember. He stuck a twist of cloth against the coal, and when he pulled it away again it was on fire. I looked on, surprised, as he used the flaming wick to light a candle, then blew it out. Then he wrapped up the ember again. It all happened quickly as a magic trick, some pyrotechnic sleight-of-hand I couldn’t fathom.
We were in the kitchen. I recognized the sink and counter, the round table flanked by chairs, the cast-iron stove. Barry carried the candle through a side door—its light bounced and fluttered as he limped down a set of stairs, before fading from view. While I stood there in stunned silence, Ike spread the rabbit out on the counter and started to saw vigorously at its neck, drawing the blade with a gruesome grinding sound across the spine.
My cheeks burned and my ears rang like I’d been slapped, but there was nothing to do except watch.
Barry emerged holding a heavy sack, and tumbled a few sprouted potatoes across the table. “Can you cook?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Well, that’s another thing,” Barry said. “There won’t be any Howard Johnson’s where we’re going. Watch Ike.”
I peered over Ike’s shoulder while he attacked the corpse, until the head finally lolled free. Then he skinned the poor thing, a process like pulling a too-tight glove away from an alien hand. The wetness underneath sparkled in the candlelight and smelled like blood. Then he cut the rabbit open and reached into its belly. He pulled out handfuls of organs and bowels, which he flung into the sink in a glistening heap.
While he worked, something caught my eye. It was a mouse, nosing its way along the counter. I dug my nails into my arm. Did I say something? Before I could decide, Ike raised his arm, and with a casual backhanded thwack sent the mouse flying. I heard it splat against the floor and scurry off.
A sound built in my throat—a scream or laugh, I couldn’t tell—and I had to suck my tongue to the roof of my mouth to choke it down.
Later, we walked out into the yard again, all laden with supplies. Ike carried the rabbit on a kind of pointed spit, the tin can dangling from a rope around his neck. Barry hauled a cast-iron pot of sliced potatoes, the eyes cut away. They’d handed me a gallon jug of fuzzy brown liquid. We laid our things down by a rock-ringed ash pit in the yard, stacked high with firewood, which lay between two tall, slingshot-shaped wooded stakes. Ike laid the spit across them, and the rabbit hung there, pink and headless on its skewer.
I truly didn’t know if I’d be able to eat it. I’d gone hours without a cigarette, and by then I’d passed into a state beyond wanting, beyond disgust—I only knew that my stomach ached in my guts, a tired fist that couldn’t come unclenched.
The firewood had already been prepared, a crisscross of logs that graduated into smaller branches, kindling twigs, and bark shavings. Ike shook out the contents of his can and unwrapped the coal again, blowing on it until it was orange and molten. Before long, he had flames leaping in the pit.
They pulled a few log stumps out of the shadows, and we sat to watch the fire lick the bottom of the hanging pot. When the carcass dripped hissing grease into the flames, Ike got up to turn the spit.
“Cider?” Barry asked, though he was already pouring me a mugful. I lifted the porcelain to my mouth and tasted, a prickle of cinnamon and sweet apples. I started to feel drunk on the first sip, my cheeks numb even before the juice had made its way down my throat.
The meal took a while to cook. As we waited, I watched cinders chase each other toward the sky. A bat twittered overhead, beaming silent radar out into the trees. I tried to remember how I’d ended up there, in the middle of a wild meadow with two homesteaders as the sun set, the sky a rumpled length of purple-orange silk.
When the food was ready, Ike tore the rabbit into three pieces, and we ate. The skin crackled on the tongue, the meat so sweet and tender I could almost feel each taste bud stand erect as I chewed and tore.
Then Barry began to speak.
When the wings were finished, he said, it would be different. We’d rove out down the country lanes, and visit all the run-down houses where people suffered through meager lives, and show them what we’d done. They’d see the wings, and their eyes would widen, and they’d know that things could never be the same.
I closed my eyes and listened, heat in my cheeks from the fire and their homemade booze. It was nice to let Barry’s words flow in and out of my ears, until his voice just seemed like part of the landscape, cousin to the fire and the crickets and the wind. I reminded myself that what he said was crazy, of course. He was crazy. Anyone could see that.
But in some private, rubbed-raw corner of my heart, I was desperate to believe it.
