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petroniaMore like fictionalized annotations toward a non-existent reading (viewing?) comprehension essay than anything else. Bastardization of Ovid etc. etc. etc. Probably I just wrote this much because I like Jack? He's one of those characters you can assume knows everything, even stuff you don't know yourself and have to mine Wikipedia for.
Did not reference La Sylphide, though. Pushing one's luck is pushing one's luck.
Halcyon
I.
In August he spent a week in the last house in which he had lived before leaving Earth. It had changed owners in the interim – a couple had bought the lease and had nearly completed the process of renovation. They occupied the entirety of the first floor. Some of the rooms on the third floor had no doorknobs. Fixtures were missing, and the air still smelt of solvent. The bathroom tile grout was sparkling white and speckled the surface of the mirror above the sink.
Jack did not take his old lodgings, opting for the room above and across the hall. There was nothing in the view to trigger nostalgia. On the first night he slept profoundly and woke suddenly at 3AM, snapping back to consciousness as if a switch had been thrown.
"Rei?" he said aloud. He extended his hand, not even bothering to wonder at the absurdity of the gesture, and encountered only a cool expanse of bed sheet. A conviction of feeling more than logic: Rei was no longer in the room.
II.
JB: I'll answer your questions. What clarifications do you need? You've talked to people up and down the chain of command. You know the kind of missions we sent him on.
LJ: I have a timeline. I'm mostly interested in establishing a sense of how Lt. Fukai himself felt, why he took the actions he did. His psych file is classified information; they told me to track you down. (he laughs, softly) You'll tell me that you can't speak for him – again – which is fair. But you were his senior officer and his friend. He wasn't close to any of the other personnel.
JB: No, they had names for him. Did they mention that much?
LJ: (pause) Something like that, yes.
JB: They were right to. FAF was a superstitious lot, we all lived on the edge. The squadron directive meant he could watch you be shot down and not lift a finger to help you. He was too good at what he did.
LJ: At flying? At reconnaissance?
JB: At reconnaissance... no. At making other human beings dispensable. He was talented from the beginning, if you can call it that, and we made him better with practice.
III.
Jack had dreams about flying, a fact that in itself was unremarkable. He had done so ever since he'd retired from pilot duty and spent the larger part of his days confined to base. Most of the dreams were meticulous replays of aerial battles he had won against the JAM, or at any rate survived. Others were simply of flight.
In these latter – more recent – dreams he shared the sky with no one; no other aircraft was in sight, whether friend or foe. The sky was that of Fairy, but a metallic sea such as he had never seen on that planet spread from horizon to curved horizon, tinged with gold from the setting sun. The air, too, was gold. The binary descended through banks of cloud and turned them to flame, unfurled banners of violet and orange and rose. It cast misty rays on the sea like a path opening in the sky. A road of light, not blood.
His plane hummed around him, a shell of carbon fiber and steel and reinforced glass, nearly alive.
He was returning home.
IV.
JB: We'd all read your book by that point. Talked about it amongst ourselves.
LJ: You thought I was full of it?
JB: At times. (she laughs) Your assessment of SAF in and of itself was fair, I thought. As for social repercussions Earthside – I'd have to say it was none of our business. SAF's mission was to combat the JAM, period. Anything else is the stuff of paranoia.
LJ: But not to protect Earth. That stuck in the pundits' throats.
JB: None of us had anything left to protect. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: tried the idealistic route, got a stream of flag-covered coffins in return. Empty coffins, mostly. (pause) The war gave us a reason to wake up in the morning. You don't think when you're up there. If you can't ID it, it's JAM. You down it before it downs you. Simple, seductive... addictive. In a sense.
LJ: And if you'd been ordered—
JB: You don't turn your back on that kind of enemy. We – I think we all had the sense that we were being tested. That one couldn't show weakness. We barely trusted each other.
LJ: Is that what Lt. Fukai felt as well?
JB: Certainly. I'd say the attitude was endemic.
LJ: Did he trust you?
(pause)
JB: When it came down to it, yes. I believe so.
V.
He explained the intricacies of his hobby to Rei the second – or perhaps the third – time they got drunk together, on the cheapest beer carried by the Antarctic convoy. A regular boomerang was thrown at an angle approaching vertical and returned in a horizontal hover from behind, but a long-distance competition boomerang was thrown at an angle less than 45 degrees and returned, diving, on a path that projected on the ground roughly as an elongated ellipse. Its highest point was near its furthest.
"I test them on the airstrip," he said, "when I can. Wind conditions aren't ideal out here." But his interests took deprivation as their starting point; similarly FAF rations were no hotbed of creativity.
He glossed over the ensuing physics lesson, reserving two cans of lager for a discourse on airfoil design. Rei was ensconced in an armchair halfway across the room, and Jack had no desire to get up to find a pen and paper with which to illustrate his ideas, but they were both pilots: words were enough.
Eventually he realised he was speaking too slowly. "Gyroscopic precession," he said, "combines with the tilt of the top wing and the bottom, so the force of the pressure is applied. That is, the principle of gyroscopic precession makes the tilt in such a way that—" He was making no sense. He let the sentence trail off, and after a few seconds turned his head.
Rei was watching him. He had forgotten to close off his face: he had a look of absorption, lips slightly parted, as if the puzzle of Jack's speech required all his concentration. His eyes were wide and dark. He was sprawled in his armchair and seemed in danger of sliding off onto the floor.
The incongruity combined with an unexpected shock of pleasure at being noticed. Jack laughed – and after a startled moment Rei joined in, a soft strained sound as if he were not used to breathing this way, the corner of his lips turning up and making him look even younger. Then his eyes slid closed, and he laid his forehead against the armrest and was asleep.
Jack let his head fall back against the sofa, still chuckling to himself. The alcohol was a warm glow in his belly; he had the sensation of having resolved a conundrum, though the thesis of the hidden meaning itself eluded his grasp.
He drifted to sleep in that position. The ache in his shoulders the next morning made him curse and forswear the practice, but it wasn't until a Friday night two months later that he managed the presence of mind to get to his feet when he saw Rei dozing off. He dragged Rei up by the jacket collar, marched him into the adjoining room and dumped him on the bed. Rei murmured something nonsensical under his breath, curled up on himself and went still.
Jack stood with Rei's jacket in his hand, swayed and muzzily considered his options. They were not legion. Eventually he circled the bed, threw himself down on the mattress and passed out before his head hit the pillow.
VI.
JB: It's easy for humans to be callous toward other humans. There's nothing surprising about it. It made us underestimate the danger. They weren't human, but we thought they could do no worse than we'd already done to ourselves.
[...]
JB: I wouldn't say he was mistaken. But we all used him. The high command, General Cooley, me... None of us were exempt. There was a war on.
VII.
On the third night he woke again. He stared up into the darkness, trying to collect his thoughts. He had been dreaming. He thought it might – he had been flying. Beyond that he could not be certain. A sense memory came to him: the length of Rei's body pressed against his as Jack pinned him to the bed, both of them still clothed. The measured pulse of Rei's blood in his throat, against Jack's lips. The rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, slow and even.
Jack's heart pounded once, twice, then settled. He slid out of bed, eased the door open and padded down the corridor, careful not to rouse the other occupants.
The attic level had thus far escaped rehabilitation; the stairs up looked much as he remembered, but for the addition of a fresh coat of varnish. The door was locked. He fumbled around the lintel, and was gratified to find both the loose chunk of molding and the key beneath.
It took him only a few minutes to retrieve the box. Evidently what the previous owner had left behind had remained untouched. He tore at the tape and removed the lid, trying not to breathe in the dust. Books, decades-old magazines, manila folders bulging with papers – he recognized those without examination as his own conceptual sketches. A thin pamplet caught his eye. He flipped it open, held it up to the light.
He read. He turned the page, and paused.
The girl gazed out at him, her head turned over her shoulder, crouched as if in preparation to leap. Her eyes were blank, her lips very red. Her hair was a tangle of brushwork that spread over the page like spilt ink.
Her arms were no longer arms. They had spread and changed shape, elbows hooking back, bone thinning and lengthening into filament. In the tale her skin would have sprouted feathers, but the artist took liberties: the web that grew between her fingers was translucent filagree, weighted and iridescent with dust, veined in gold.
He knew her face.
"Daughter of Aeolus," he whispered. No wondrous metamorphosis; the gods could take pity, for she had never been mortal.
VIII.
JB: It wasn't merely that Yukikaze was the best of our weaponry. Rei was standard deviations off the mean. By the end no one else could have taken her on. She was beyond what a human pilot could bring to the table in terms of judgment, reaction time...
LJ: But Lt. Fukai was necessary?
JB: No. Not in a technical sense. (pause) He struggled with that, of course. What I meant was that Rei was capable of accepting her.
IX.
He had always harboured a fascination for Japanese culture that extended to the people itself. There had been few Asians in the surroundings in which he grew up, and it was not until his last year of high school that he had followed a preexisting interest in painting into calligraphy, and then language lessons. After the debacle of his marriage there had been two girls – no, three – in quick succession. They had been casual affairs but he remembered their bodies clearly, with a trained eye: pale-gold skin fringed here and there with coarse dark hair, boyish hips, high small breasts, an exotic slenderness of thigh. They could all have been the same girl.
One aimless afternoon he had used her skin as canvas. She had giggled and complained of the cool feel of the ink as he wrote. He had laid down strokes of sumi like prison bars, marking her with words in which he did not himself believe: her own name, truth, non-existence, love... She had shifted around and made a mess of things. It had been the last time he had touched a brush.
He never spoke of this to Rei.
When Rei told him the name of his plane he said, "Write that down for me," and when Rei began to do so, "No, in kanji." Rei gave him a startled look before complying. Jack carried the scrap of paper in his jacket pocket for several weeks, taking it out to glance at on occasion, until the foolscap grew wrinkled and soft with wear and even the ballpen markings were smudged into illegibility.
Rei's characters were round and childish, awkward in shape as if he had difficulty with the simplest of stroke orders. He had written: 雪風. Snow. Wind.
X.
JB: I wonder... (pause) Do you know the story of the Snow Woman? It's a Japanese tale.
LJ: Yes, I think—
JB: A spirit that lives on the mountainside, in the forest, appearing as a beautiful woman dressed in white. On snowy nights she visits men and steals their breaths, causing them to freeze to death.
LJ: I do know. There was a film, wasn't there? A Kurosawa film.
JB: Part of Kurosawa's Dreams. What did you think of it?
LJ: The film? I only watched it as a college student. I remember that I found it visually impressive... (pause) It's in the Belle Dame Sans Merci mode, isn't it? The demon seductress who dwells in the wilderness, luring adventurers to their downfall.
JB: One of mankind's universal fears. (she laughs at his tone) I had a book when I was a child – fairy stories from around the globe, sentimental Victorian retellings thereof. In that version she takes human form and becomes the wife of a woodcutter, until he inadvertently breaks the spell... I used to wonder what she thought.
LJ: What she thought?
JB: What she wanted. What did it matter to her? Did she hate those men? Was she afraid, did she feel threatened by their presence? Did it amuse her? And why him?
LJ: Novelistic considerations.
LB: (laughs) You could call it that. (pause) I must have been twenty before I realised none of those things moved her. She was what she was. Some men saw a dream and followed it and fell down a ravine filled with snow, that's all.
XI.
At twenty years of age Jack did not believe he would live to see thirty. Nor would he have wished to do so. It was a madness not uncommon to the young – young men especially – and he survived it without learning the cause, like a disease. He said (even at the very time he laughed), an auto-immune disorder. His blood rejected the component within itself that partook of the world. Food had no flavour; he would willingly have killed the ones he loved. Art was futile. A hole had opened in the sky.
The fever was a deadly one. That is to say, by most definitions he found it necessary to leave the world in order to be healed.
Rei simply caught his attention because he reminded Jack of his former self. When he thinks back on their early acquaintance he finds pathos in his own eagerness, his stubborn inability to drop the cause. It was the missionary zeal of the converted. See, he wanted to say, this is what the world can do for you. This, and this. A reality beyond the maze of the subjective self.
It was possible to be reconciled: to relearn the faculties of sensation, the ability to find meaning and pleasure in the existence of others. Each SAF mission redrew the line between death and life until – poor student that he was – he grew to understand.
XII.
LJ: Let me ask you a leading question, Jack.
JB: Go ahead.
LJ: Suppose they wanted to understand us?
JB: (pause) I'm not fond of that word.
LJ: Understanding?
JB: Wanting. It smacks of pathetic fallacy. (pause) The basic prerequisite for predicting the enemy's next move is to learn the set of rules he's following. If I had to make an educated guess I'd say the fact that they found it easier to reproduce planes than humans bought us a good ten years. Ten years that we wasted. (pause) Are you religious, Lynn?
LJ: I am a Catholic, yes.
JB: Then you accept the transcendence of the soul, I'm assuming.
LJ: As opposed to molecular processes triggering emergent behaviour at a macro scale? (laughter, the sound of a chair being pushed back) Yes, I do. I think it's why we naturally feel such horror at the idea of becoming them, whereas they had no such inhibitions… so to speak. (pause) It didn't save us in the end, you're going to say.
JB: I wouldn't say that. We'll never know if they truly succeeded. It's impossible to know.
LJ: That's where faith comes in. No, I realise. I meant— (pause, then speaking rapidly) After all we couldn't tell who had a soul and who didn't, could we? We parametrized the problem and turned it over to our machines, and they executed the decision for us. But we will never be sure if we were right, to draw the line as we did in the first place. We've lost that ability.
(long pause)
LJ: Do you think Lt. Fukai ever doubted her? Yukikaze, I mean.
JB: (begins to speak, then abruptly) Do you want to take this outside? The weather is beautiful, I'd hate to waste it.
XIII.
Sometimes he wonders if he had a hand in creating the conditions within Rei that caused the rest. If he could have pulled Rei closer within the circle of firelight—
Or if he had never tried. If.
(Somewhere, far above an alien sea, a plane banks and turns. Its afterburners mark a curved path in the rarefied air, a white plume that shows stark and bright against blue sky. It remains, dissipating slowly, long after the craft itself has disappeared from sight.)
He tells himself he is overthinking. Rei has – Rei had fingerprints. He had genetic material, warm blood, memories. An imperative toward survival. Faith, doubt. Desire. In certain ways he could not help being human.
Perhaps the fact that he chose her is the most compelling evidence.
It proved impossible to map the JAM's goals onto the constellation of human desire. Humanity – Jack thinks – will either be haunted by its failure for all eternity, or bury it so deeply that even the scar will be forgotten before he is old. But this is a dilemma with which writers must contend.
XIV.
JB: They don't always come back, of course. One throws at a certain angle, the balance could be off, it depends on the wind... But with experience one gets a feel for it.
LJ: So you know...
JB: As soon as it leaves my hand. Either I've botched the throw or I haven't. If I haven't... (drily) We've had to devise astonishingly complex algorithms for our war-machines, merely so they might reproduce what happens when a man catches a flying stick before it hits him in the face. No wonder we can't tell the difference anymore – we've been trying to remake ourselves.
LJ: Man the creator, in the image of God.
JB: And see where it got Him. (pause) Maybe I spent so much time drumming the squadron directive into his head that I've come to believe it myself. I don't know. It doesn't feel like he's gone.
XV.
In folktales one hundred years could pass on earth for a day in Faerie.
As he watches Lynn Jackson drive away, the thought occurs to Jack that he could live forever. For a time that is forever. He has thrown something of himself outward with all his might. His line of sight is obscured, but his heart still traces the path of its flight. Not a line: an arc. The major axis nears infinity. Forever is an instant. He is waiting.
Now I can read the rest of the novel without having to bother my head about this. =_=
Did not reference La Sylphide, though. Pushing one's luck is pushing one's luck.
Halcyon
I.
In August he spent a week in the last house in which he had lived before leaving Earth. It had changed owners in the interim – a couple had bought the lease and had nearly completed the process of renovation. They occupied the entirety of the first floor. Some of the rooms on the third floor had no doorknobs. Fixtures were missing, and the air still smelt of solvent. The bathroom tile grout was sparkling white and speckled the surface of the mirror above the sink.
Jack did not take his old lodgings, opting for the room above and across the hall. There was nothing in the view to trigger nostalgia. On the first night he slept profoundly and woke suddenly at 3AM, snapping back to consciousness as if a switch had been thrown.
"Rei?" he said aloud. He extended his hand, not even bothering to wonder at the absurdity of the gesture, and encountered only a cool expanse of bed sheet. A conviction of feeling more than logic: Rei was no longer in the room.
II.
JB: I'll answer your questions. What clarifications do you need? You've talked to people up and down the chain of command. You know the kind of missions we sent him on.
LJ: I have a timeline. I'm mostly interested in establishing a sense of how Lt. Fukai himself felt, why he took the actions he did. His psych file is classified information; they told me to track you down. (he laughs, softly) You'll tell me that you can't speak for him – again – which is fair. But you were his senior officer and his friend. He wasn't close to any of the other personnel.
JB: No, they had names for him. Did they mention that much?
LJ: (pause) Something like that, yes.
JB: They were right to. FAF was a superstitious lot, we all lived on the edge. The squadron directive meant he could watch you be shot down and not lift a finger to help you. He was too good at what he did.
LJ: At flying? At reconnaissance?
JB: At reconnaissance... no. At making other human beings dispensable. He was talented from the beginning, if you can call it that, and we made him better with practice.
III.
Jack had dreams about flying, a fact that in itself was unremarkable. He had done so ever since he'd retired from pilot duty and spent the larger part of his days confined to base. Most of the dreams were meticulous replays of aerial battles he had won against the JAM, or at any rate survived. Others were simply of flight.
In these latter – more recent – dreams he shared the sky with no one; no other aircraft was in sight, whether friend or foe. The sky was that of Fairy, but a metallic sea such as he had never seen on that planet spread from horizon to curved horizon, tinged with gold from the setting sun. The air, too, was gold. The binary descended through banks of cloud and turned them to flame, unfurled banners of violet and orange and rose. It cast misty rays on the sea like a path opening in the sky. A road of light, not blood.
His plane hummed around him, a shell of carbon fiber and steel and reinforced glass, nearly alive.
He was returning home.
IV.
JB: We'd all read your book by that point. Talked about it amongst ourselves.
LJ: You thought I was full of it?
JB: At times. (she laughs) Your assessment of SAF in and of itself was fair, I thought. As for social repercussions Earthside – I'd have to say it was none of our business. SAF's mission was to combat the JAM, period. Anything else is the stuff of paranoia.
LJ: But not to protect Earth. That stuck in the pundits' throats.
JB: None of us had anything left to protect. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: tried the idealistic route, got a stream of flag-covered coffins in return. Empty coffins, mostly. (pause) The war gave us a reason to wake up in the morning. You don't think when you're up there. If you can't ID it, it's JAM. You down it before it downs you. Simple, seductive... addictive. In a sense.
LJ: And if you'd been ordered—
JB: You don't turn your back on that kind of enemy. We – I think we all had the sense that we were being tested. That one couldn't show weakness. We barely trusted each other.
LJ: Is that what Lt. Fukai felt as well?
JB: Certainly. I'd say the attitude was endemic.
LJ: Did he trust you?
(pause)
JB: When it came down to it, yes. I believe so.
V.
He explained the intricacies of his hobby to Rei the second – or perhaps the third – time they got drunk together, on the cheapest beer carried by the Antarctic convoy. A regular boomerang was thrown at an angle approaching vertical and returned in a horizontal hover from behind, but a long-distance competition boomerang was thrown at an angle less than 45 degrees and returned, diving, on a path that projected on the ground roughly as an elongated ellipse. Its highest point was near its furthest.
"I test them on the airstrip," he said, "when I can. Wind conditions aren't ideal out here." But his interests took deprivation as their starting point; similarly FAF rations were no hotbed of creativity.
He glossed over the ensuing physics lesson, reserving two cans of lager for a discourse on airfoil design. Rei was ensconced in an armchair halfway across the room, and Jack had no desire to get up to find a pen and paper with which to illustrate his ideas, but they were both pilots: words were enough.
Eventually he realised he was speaking too slowly. "Gyroscopic precession," he said, "combines with the tilt of the top wing and the bottom, so the force of the pressure is applied. That is, the principle of gyroscopic precession makes the tilt in such a way that—" He was making no sense. He let the sentence trail off, and after a few seconds turned his head.
Rei was watching him. He had forgotten to close off his face: he had a look of absorption, lips slightly parted, as if the puzzle of Jack's speech required all his concentration. His eyes were wide and dark. He was sprawled in his armchair and seemed in danger of sliding off onto the floor.
The incongruity combined with an unexpected shock of pleasure at being noticed. Jack laughed – and after a startled moment Rei joined in, a soft strained sound as if he were not used to breathing this way, the corner of his lips turning up and making him look even younger. Then his eyes slid closed, and he laid his forehead against the armrest and was asleep.
Jack let his head fall back against the sofa, still chuckling to himself. The alcohol was a warm glow in his belly; he had the sensation of having resolved a conundrum, though the thesis of the hidden meaning itself eluded his grasp.
He drifted to sleep in that position. The ache in his shoulders the next morning made him curse and forswear the practice, but it wasn't until a Friday night two months later that he managed the presence of mind to get to his feet when he saw Rei dozing off. He dragged Rei up by the jacket collar, marched him into the adjoining room and dumped him on the bed. Rei murmured something nonsensical under his breath, curled up on himself and went still.
Jack stood with Rei's jacket in his hand, swayed and muzzily considered his options. They were not legion. Eventually he circled the bed, threw himself down on the mattress and passed out before his head hit the pillow.
VI.
JB: It's easy for humans to be callous toward other humans. There's nothing surprising about it. It made us underestimate the danger. They weren't human, but we thought they could do no worse than we'd already done to ourselves.
[...]
JB: I wouldn't say he was mistaken. But we all used him. The high command, General Cooley, me... None of us were exempt. There was a war on.
VII.
On the third night he woke again. He stared up into the darkness, trying to collect his thoughts. He had been dreaming. He thought it might – he had been flying. Beyond that he could not be certain. A sense memory came to him: the length of Rei's body pressed against his as Jack pinned him to the bed, both of them still clothed. The measured pulse of Rei's blood in his throat, against Jack's lips. The rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, slow and even.
Jack's heart pounded once, twice, then settled. He slid out of bed, eased the door open and padded down the corridor, careful not to rouse the other occupants.
The attic level had thus far escaped rehabilitation; the stairs up looked much as he remembered, but for the addition of a fresh coat of varnish. The door was locked. He fumbled around the lintel, and was gratified to find both the loose chunk of molding and the key beneath.
It took him only a few minutes to retrieve the box. Evidently what the previous owner had left behind had remained untouched. He tore at the tape and removed the lid, trying not to breathe in the dust. Books, decades-old magazines, manila folders bulging with papers – he recognized those without examination as his own conceptual sketches. A thin pamplet caught his eye. He flipped it open, held it up to the light.
...and then, while beating the light air with wings that instant formed upon her, she flew on, a mourning bird, and skimmed above the waves.
He read. He turned the page, and paused.
The girl gazed out at him, her head turned over her shoulder, crouched as if in preparation to leap. Her eyes were blank, her lips very red. Her hair was a tangle of brushwork that spread over the page like spilt ink.
Her arms were no longer arms. They had spread and changed shape, elbows hooking back, bone thinning and lengthening into filament. In the tale her skin would have sprouted feathers, but the artist took liberties: the web that grew between her fingers was translucent filagree, weighted and iridescent with dust, veined in gold.
He knew her face.
"Daughter of Aeolus," he whispered. No wondrous metamorphosis; the gods could take pity, for she had never been mortal.
VIII.
JB: It wasn't merely that Yukikaze was the best of our weaponry. Rei was standard deviations off the mean. By the end no one else could have taken her on. She was beyond what a human pilot could bring to the table in terms of judgment, reaction time...
LJ: But Lt. Fukai was necessary?
JB: No. Not in a technical sense. (pause) He struggled with that, of course. What I meant was that Rei was capable of accepting her.
IX.
He had always harboured a fascination for Japanese culture that extended to the people itself. There had been few Asians in the surroundings in which he grew up, and it was not until his last year of high school that he had followed a preexisting interest in painting into calligraphy, and then language lessons. After the debacle of his marriage there had been two girls – no, three – in quick succession. They had been casual affairs but he remembered their bodies clearly, with a trained eye: pale-gold skin fringed here and there with coarse dark hair, boyish hips, high small breasts, an exotic slenderness of thigh. They could all have been the same girl.
One aimless afternoon he had used her skin as canvas. She had giggled and complained of the cool feel of the ink as he wrote. He had laid down strokes of sumi like prison bars, marking her with words in which he did not himself believe: her own name, truth, non-existence, love... She had shifted around and made a mess of things. It had been the last time he had touched a brush.
He never spoke of this to Rei.
When Rei told him the name of his plane he said, "Write that down for me," and when Rei began to do so, "No, in kanji." Rei gave him a startled look before complying. Jack carried the scrap of paper in his jacket pocket for several weeks, taking it out to glance at on occasion, until the foolscap grew wrinkled and soft with wear and even the ballpen markings were smudged into illegibility.
Rei's characters were round and childish, awkward in shape as if he had difficulty with the simplest of stroke orders. He had written: 雪風. Snow. Wind.
X.
JB: I wonder... (pause) Do you know the story of the Snow Woman? It's a Japanese tale.
LJ: Yes, I think—
JB: A spirit that lives on the mountainside, in the forest, appearing as a beautiful woman dressed in white. On snowy nights she visits men and steals their breaths, causing them to freeze to death.
LJ: I do know. There was a film, wasn't there? A Kurosawa film.
JB: Part of Kurosawa's Dreams. What did you think of it?
LJ: The film? I only watched it as a college student. I remember that I found it visually impressive... (pause) It's in the Belle Dame Sans Merci mode, isn't it? The demon seductress who dwells in the wilderness, luring adventurers to their downfall.
JB: One of mankind's universal fears. (she laughs at his tone) I had a book when I was a child – fairy stories from around the globe, sentimental Victorian retellings thereof. In that version she takes human form and becomes the wife of a woodcutter, until he inadvertently breaks the spell... I used to wonder what she thought.
LJ: What she thought?
JB: What she wanted. What did it matter to her? Did she hate those men? Was she afraid, did she feel threatened by their presence? Did it amuse her? And why him?
LJ: Novelistic considerations.
LB: (laughs) You could call it that. (pause) I must have been twenty before I realised none of those things moved her. She was what she was. Some men saw a dream and followed it and fell down a ravine filled with snow, that's all.
XI.
At twenty years of age Jack did not believe he would live to see thirty. Nor would he have wished to do so. It was a madness not uncommon to the young – young men especially – and he survived it without learning the cause, like a disease. He said (even at the very time he laughed), an auto-immune disorder. His blood rejected the component within itself that partook of the world. Food had no flavour; he would willingly have killed the ones he loved. Art was futile. A hole had opened in the sky.
The fever was a deadly one. That is to say, by most definitions he found it necessary to leave the world in order to be healed.
Rei simply caught his attention because he reminded Jack of his former self. When he thinks back on their early acquaintance he finds pathos in his own eagerness, his stubborn inability to drop the cause. It was the missionary zeal of the converted. See, he wanted to say, this is what the world can do for you. This, and this. A reality beyond the maze of the subjective self.
It was possible to be reconciled: to relearn the faculties of sensation, the ability to find meaning and pleasure in the existence of others. Each SAF mission redrew the line between death and life until – poor student that he was – he grew to understand.
XII.
LJ: Let me ask you a leading question, Jack.
JB: Go ahead.
LJ: Suppose they wanted to understand us?
JB: (pause) I'm not fond of that word.
LJ: Understanding?
JB: Wanting. It smacks of pathetic fallacy. (pause) The basic prerequisite for predicting the enemy's next move is to learn the set of rules he's following. If I had to make an educated guess I'd say the fact that they found it easier to reproduce planes than humans bought us a good ten years. Ten years that we wasted. (pause) Are you religious, Lynn?
LJ: I am a Catholic, yes.
JB: Then you accept the transcendence of the soul, I'm assuming.
LJ: As opposed to molecular processes triggering emergent behaviour at a macro scale? (laughter, the sound of a chair being pushed back) Yes, I do. I think it's why we naturally feel such horror at the idea of becoming them, whereas they had no such inhibitions… so to speak. (pause) It didn't save us in the end, you're going to say.
JB: I wouldn't say that. We'll never know if they truly succeeded. It's impossible to know.
LJ: That's where faith comes in. No, I realise. I meant— (pause, then speaking rapidly) After all we couldn't tell who had a soul and who didn't, could we? We parametrized the problem and turned it over to our machines, and they executed the decision for us. But we will never be sure if we were right, to draw the line as we did in the first place. We've lost that ability.
(long pause)
LJ: Do you think Lt. Fukai ever doubted her? Yukikaze, I mean.
JB: (begins to speak, then abruptly) Do you want to take this outside? The weather is beautiful, I'd hate to waste it.
XIII.
Sometimes he wonders if he had a hand in creating the conditions within Rei that caused the rest. If he could have pulled Rei closer within the circle of firelight—
Or if he had never tried. If.
(Somewhere, far above an alien sea, a plane banks and turns. Its afterburners mark a curved path in the rarefied air, a white plume that shows stark and bright against blue sky. It remains, dissipating slowly, long after the craft itself has disappeared from sight.)
He tells himself he is overthinking. Rei has – Rei had fingerprints. He had genetic material, warm blood, memories. An imperative toward survival. Faith, doubt. Desire. In certain ways he could not help being human.
Perhaps the fact that he chose her is the most compelling evidence.
It proved impossible to map the JAM's goals onto the constellation of human desire. Humanity – Jack thinks – will either be haunted by its failure for all eternity, or bury it so deeply that even the scar will be forgotten before he is old. But this is a dilemma with which writers must contend.
XIV.
JB: They don't always come back, of course. One throws at a certain angle, the balance could be off, it depends on the wind... But with experience one gets a feel for it.
LJ: So you know...
JB: As soon as it leaves my hand. Either I've botched the throw or I haven't. If I haven't... (drily) We've had to devise astonishingly complex algorithms for our war-machines, merely so they might reproduce what happens when a man catches a flying stick before it hits him in the face. No wonder we can't tell the difference anymore – we've been trying to remake ourselves.
LJ: Man the creator, in the image of God.
JB: And see where it got Him. (pause) Maybe I spent so much time drumming the squadron directive into his head that I've come to believe it myself. I don't know. It doesn't feel like he's gone.
XV.
In folktales one hundred years could pass on earth for a day in Faerie.
As he watches Lynn Jackson drive away, the thought occurs to Jack that he could live forever. For a time that is forever. He has thrown something of himself outward with all his might. His line of sight is obscured, but his heart still traces the path of its flight. Not a line: an arc. The major axis nears infinity. Forever is an instant. He is waiting.
Now I can read the rest of the novel without having to bother my head about this. =_=
