Cockpit, Page 2

  They slept undisturbed. For a moment, I wanted to wake them and ask Valerie why she had lied about her reasons for staying in the city, a choice that disturbed me, considering the freedom of the agreement I had offered her. But I did not wake them. Instead, I silently returned to my niche and fell asleep. I didn’t come out until the next afternoon when they had gone.

  Two days later, I called Valerie to say I was back in town and eager to see her. She told me that staying in my apartment without me had made her miss me. She would get someone to take her place at the hospital and spend the night with me.

  She was subdued when she arrived but tender and affectionate. “While you were gone,” she said, “I decided to leave the hospital and live with you.”

  I paced the room as I spoke. “I wanted to free you from all obligations. Do you still think that’s possible?”

  “I do,” she answered. “More than ever.”

  I sat down opposite her and placed my hands on her shoulders. “There isn’t anyone else in your life?”

  She smiled radiantly. “No one. Why would there be?”

  Casually, I said, “One of the building attendants told me that he saw you during the weekend with a young man he thought was my son.”

  When she answered, her voice was calm. “Oh, yes. I ran into an old friend from medical school. We hadn’t seen each other for years, so I brought him up for a drink. We talked for a while and then he left. That’s all.”

  “Does he resemble me in any way?”

  “Not at all,” she laughed. “He’s fat and already bald.”

  Laughing with her, I suggested, “He could still be the son of a bony old bird like me.”

  She sipped her coffee. “ ‘Bony old bird.’ Where did you get that expression?”

  “A lot of people call me a bony old bird because I’m thin and have a nose like a beak.”

  “You look more like a camel to me.”

  “Are you sure you want to live with a camel?”

  “When should I leave the hospital?” she asked.

  I got up and walked over to the desk. “The sooner the better.” I sat down and removed several black and white photographs from a large envelope.

  She walked over to the desk. “What are those?”

  “Just some photos I took a while back. Look.” I handed her the first one, which she held up to the light.

  “Not too clear. Someone’s elbow?”

  “How many great elbow photos are there? What about this one?”

  “Is it a shoulder? Are they all this dark?”

  “You’re too critical. Their sole intent is to show people engaged in an act. Here.” I handed her the rest of the photos.

  As she looked at one after another, she grew tense and slightly pale, but continued until she had replaced the last photograph on the table with a hand that trembled only slightly.

  “Congratulations,” she said, moistening her lips with her tongue. “Pity you had to trust a hidden camera.” She scanned the walls and ceiling, looking for it. “Do you have tapes, too?”

  “No. Just the photos.”

  “Too bad. If you’d taped our conversation, you’d know that he was just a one-night stand. I can tell you don’t believe me, but I guess even that doesn’t matter now.”

  “What matters is that you didn’t tell me the truth.”

  “I would have told you.”

  “When?” I took her hands in mine. “Valerie, I was here while you were talking about me.”

  She looked at me with disbelief. “You couldn’t have been.”

  “But I was, Valerie.”

  “Come on, Tarden! It’s bad enough that your camera was spying for you.”

  “Remember ‘bony old bird.’ I have a very good idea what you said.”

  “You mean that he and you … ?” Her voice had taken on a new edge. “Oh, really, Tarden. You’re actually trying to make me believe …”

  I said, simply, “There are some things all men share.”

  She walked to the couch and picked up her bag. As she passed me, she didn’t even try to mask her resentment.

  Looking at the pictures of Valerie and her lover now, I realize how badly they record my experiences with Valerie, how much more accurate and explicit my memories are. My past emotions are etched into my mind like a display in a store window ready to be called up at any moment.

  I often walk through the city streets, and stop at windows filled with radios, tape recorders, stereos, watches, pens and dozens of other gadgets. As I scan the display, I memorize each object’s position in relation to every other object. Then I enter the store and walk over to the counter. The owner approaches me.

  “You must have the largest window display in the city,” I tell him.

  “Thanks. Can I show you something?”

  I lay a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. “I think I have a pretty good memory,” I tell him, “and I enjoy betting on it from time to time. In fact, I’ll bet you twenty dollars I can remember the price of every item in your window. How about it?”

  The owner looks puzzled. I take out a piece of paper. “Why don’t you make a list of the merchandise in the window? When you’re through, I’ll write down the correct price next to the item. Or you write down the prices and I’ll match the items to them. If I make a single mistake, you win twenty dollars. If I get them all right, you lose twenty. I’ll even impose a ten-minute time limit on myself.”

  The owner goes over to the window, takes stock of the merchandise and returns to the counter. “You’re on,” he says. He lists about fifty-five items on the back of a sales slip and pushes the paper across the counter. Then he glances at his watch.

  I close my eyes and recreate the window display, carefully separating from the group each item on the list, and writing down its price. I am finished long before the ten minutes are up.

  The owner takes the list from me, calls over a salesman and tells him to keep an eye on the twenty-dollar bill while he returns to the window. He eagerly begins matching my notations against the merchandise, but slows down as he realizes I am scoring one hundred percent. Finally, he walks back to the counter, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it,” he says, returning my money. He stares glumly at the floor for a moment, then looks up at me and opens the cash register. Reluctantly, he hands over the worn bills.

  If I evoke a single memory picture, others will spring up automatically to join it and soon the montage of a past self will emerge. It’s an autonomous process, and the fact that I have no control over it excites me.

  As a child, a similar lack of control terrified me. I once cut my foot on a piece of glass and its healing process fascinated but bothered me. After that, several times I intentionally wounded my leg. I observed how the cut bled, how the blood ebbed and eventually stopped flowing and how the wound began to mend. Every day, I would check the scab forming to protect the healing wound. When it was fully developed, I carefully peeled off the scab and opened up the wound again. Then I examined it through a magnifying glass, trying to see what it was that made my body heal independent of my will. Although I often tried to keep a wound open and bleeding, it always sealed itself overnight, challenging my power over myself. I hated the sense of an autonomous force in my body, determining what would happen to me.

  Years later, when I was an associate professor at the State Central Academy of Science, a young dental surgeon told me that one of my teeth had to be extracted at once.

  He assured me that one shot of a local anesthetic would guarantee painlessness. While he loaded the hypodermic syringe, I sat back in the chair, hypnotized by the powerful light before my eyes. A student nurse from the dental school was standing next to me and I felt I had to conceal my fear from her. I barely felt the needle when the dentist injected my gum, but almost instantly became aware that my heartbeat was accelerating rapidly. I wanted to tell him about it, but my throat was too constricted for me to get out the words. I grew weak and my limbs began to shake uncontrollably. My
feet and hands felt as if they were being pricked by internal needles. A great fear of dying flooded my mind and body. To counteract the terror, I forced my mind backward to the moments before I had arrived at the office. I watched myself wandering through the arcades in the bright daylight, looking at my reflection in shop windows. I struggled to warn myself to cancel the appointment. I saw myself reach the university square, wait for a green light on the corner, then enter the huge lobby of the dental clinic and disappear into darkness. I shouted after myself not to go to the office but I would not listen. I witnessed myself shaking hands with the dentist and smiling at the student nurse, saw myself pressed back against the chair in fear, my eyes following the gleaming tip of the needle until it disappeared under my lip. I struggled one last time to urge myself to escape while I still could, but it was too late. I felt a stab of pain as the needle pierced the gum. Suddenly, my chest began to fill up with a fluid so heavy it made my lungs give way. I felt my heart weaken under the burden of the ever-thickening blood it was trying to pump. I was becoming too faint to breathe. My lungs wheezed one last time and surrendered; my heart lay still.

  I woke to find a blurred face hovering over me. Slowly it began to come into focus. I pulled off the oxygen and as I was inhaling warm air I became aware that my lungs had resumed their natural rhythm. A disembodied voice explained that I had suffered an uncommon reaction to the anesthetic and that I had survived after my heart stopped only because the incident had happened in a clinic. Thanks to the State’s sophisticated medical equipment, my vital functions had been restored.

  I was kept in the clinic for a few days, then dismissed, feeling shaky and humiliated. Like the elusive substance that had once healed my wound, now the State had saved me without my consent.

  Most people surrendered their lives to the State’s omnipresence. I could not deny its existence, but I could abstract myself from its power.

  As a prize-winning photographer, I had free access to the Academy’s darkroom. Among the chemicals stored there were cyanide pellets used for retouching photographs. I selected a single pellet and wrapped it in the foil from a chocolate bar to keep it safe.

  I walked the streets of the Capital with the pellet in my pocket, as if I were a tourist, staring at grandiose government buildings, at the monuments erected to past and present heroes, at State banks, museums, department stores. Even though I was still at the State’s mercy, I mentally projected myself to a time when I would be free of it.

  I had been fortunate enough to qualify for scientific training, an invaluable protective device which I planned to eventually turn to my own advantage. In the State’s eyes, I was its property. The State had even decided on the service I would perform to repay the cost of my education. According to the identity card I always carried, I was a researcher at one of the most important political and scientific institutes within the State Central Academy of Science.

  The card not only created immediate respect, but granted me privileges not available to ordinary citizens. When I was stopped by the police for a routine document check, I would casually offer my card. They would salute and immediately wave me on, for, as minor servants of the State, they had been taught to respect their betters. My card enabled me to buy food and clothing at discount prices in special shops reserved for top-level bureaucrats, to vacation in resorts closed to the general public, to eat in restricted clubs where State leaders gathered under the protection of security men. Yet for all this liberty, I sensed freedom only when my fingers stroked the foil-wrapped pellet in my pocket.

  The State was a vicious enemy. Whether I escaped abroad or committed suicide, it would punish those who had known of my plans. What had begun as my personal challenge to the State would end with the destruction of innocent people, and I had no more right to destroy them than the State did.

  I traveled to an ocean resort on the pretext of visiting a friend in a fishing cooperative. I walked along the water under the border guards’ surveillance. I studied the empty beaches, searching for a spot where I could hide long enough to launch a boat, but found none. Finally, I gave up, realizing that, even if there were such places, no craft could evade the police speed patrol or the State fishing fleet.

  I considered learning to fly in order to escape by air. I enrolled at the gliding school but did not get clearance for a pilot’s license; instead, because of my slight frame and low weight, I was used as living ballast on the gliders. Each time a powerful gust swung our glider high into the clouds, an air force monitoring plane circled and followed us, ready to abort any attempt to glide toward the border. I also learned that even the most trusted pilots were permitted to fly planes only when paired off with a surveillance craft. As an escape route, the sky, like the sea, was closed to me.

  The Academy of Science, my employer, was a mammoth institution responsible for all aspects of the State’s educational and scientific life. It was located in the Capital’s tallest skyscraper, referred to as the “Palace” of Science and Culture. Each one of the thousands of people who worked day and night in the Academy’s offices had been selected through national competitive examinations, for their political or academic achievements.

  The Academy was comprised of various different institutes in specialized studies, editorial offices of scientific publications, publishing houses and, above all, hundreds of offices that belonged to full Academy members or candidates, and to other scholars and their staffs, including research assistants like me. The Palace of Science and Culture was a Vatican governing the church of State.

  Using the official stationery of my Institute, I wrote a letter to the Academy, stating that, since my research required me to photograph certain classified materials from the archives, a private room was essential to the completion of my project. For the same reason, I requisitioned a direct-dial telephone for outgoing calls, an item usually given only to senior personnel. No space was available at my Institute, so I was assigned a smaller room in another section of the Palace. Only the Academy’s Personnel Bureau kept records of room allocations; as I had applied directly to it, my own Institute was unaware that I had received the separate space.

  Again using Institute stationery, I suggested that, owing to the political sensitivity of my work, new locks must be installed on the door. Because I was solely responsible for the room’s security, I requested that no duplicate keys be issued to the maintenance staff.

  As soon as my routine was established, I asked for an after-hours pass. Usually, such passes were issued only to senior staff members on high-priority projects that necessitated unlimited work hours. However, since my Institute was often involved in highly classified research commissioned by the Party’s Central Committee, my requests were processed immediately. The room became my private vault. I brought in a folding cot so that I could spend the night there if I chose.

  The Palace was located in the center of a barren square nicknamed the “Tundra.” Every morning, whipped by northern winds that penetrated their inadequate coats, thousands of people rushed across the Tundra to work. From my room on one of the Palace’s highest floors, they resembled faceless extras in silent-movie crowd scenes. Yet, important as these people might look, their identity papers had to be checked at the doors of the Palace by the most experienced security men. Once in from the Tundra, the crowd separated into individuals. Some took express elevators reserved for members of the Academy whose offices were on the top floors; others were consigned to locals that stopped at every fifth level. Many visitors were not allowed to enter the Academy’s inner recesses at all. Others were brusquely directed to conference rooms and amphitheaters, while still others lined up in silence at the Postal Center, bearing written authorizations to collect mail for themselves or their superiors.

  Every day on my way home, I passed the main ticket office of the State Airlines. Peering through the window, I could spot officials with their passports in hand, waiting to collect tickets to foreign cities. They had the drab, anxious look of minor Party and govern
ment officials. I speculated that the State found them good security risks, not only because they were leaving families behind, but also because they were considered too old to begin new lives. Once, one of them caught my eye and stared at me like an animal that had just picked up the scent of an enemy.

  To leave the country legally I needed a passport. I knew it would be impossible to get an official Academy one, so I decided to apply for a short-term tourist passport. Before the Internal Security Police would issue me one, I had to present them with an authorized application specifying the State’s reason for sending me abroad, my itinerary and my foreign sources of maintenance. But once I had the passport, I hoped to trick the State National Bank into believing I had an Academy passport, for which they would automatically provide the foreign currency required for a round-trip ticket.

  One morning, I was looking out over the Tundra as the fog lifted, unveiling a mass of swarming bodies. The scene reminded me of something my father had often said: that the whole country was an endless, bureaucratic jungle in which the brush and undergrowth grew dense and intertwined. I decided to turn that confusion back on itself, to make it work for me.

  Afraid to trust my memory under the stress, I placed a large sheet of accounting paper on the floor and spent the next twenty hours listing in code everything I had to do if I was to leave the country without seeming to break the law.

  I would need the services of four prominent Academicians in different research fields that frequently required foreign study. Scholars of this rank would have influence in the State agencies that issued passports and authorized tickets for foreign trips. They would also be familiar with the necessary documents and procedures.

  The four should be able to judge my good qualities and be ready to justify my bad ones. Ideally men with Internal Security Police connections, they all would receive denunciations against me from my friends, enemies and State and Party officials. The four should send and receive mail at the Academy’s Postal Center.