Behavior Pilot

Matthew Derby

People kept having children, and the government kept taking them away. We wanted, more than anything else, to have one. Not because we didn’t think our children would be ashamed of us, no. We knew that they would be ashamed. Like everyone else, though, we believed that whatever it was we might create as a result of the fitful, brief conveyance of our bodies onto one another could help us reclaim the dignity we had lost simply by agreeing to stay in whatever place we found ourselves. People told us not to think about it. Our neighbors, some of whom had made similar attempts, tried distracting us with rich, heavy foods and outdoor games. It was all useless; we saw this desire marked all over our bodies--little black spots in our life where children should have gone.

Aescha was an engineer’s assistant at The Factories, her day punctuated at precise intervals by the contraction and expansion of the major bellows. I was a Behavior Pilot--my colleagues and I went up in teams, seeding the clouds with different suggestive gestural medications. To say that the world looked any better from that altitude was an incredible overstatement--all was white and indignant, making a mockery of what went on below. It was easy to lose all sense of where you’d come from. Still, though, it was quite something to see, these great planes in formation, cutting a ragged swath in the sky. Something close to what one might call uplifting.

From the ground, one witnessed the fruits of our labor as a fine, burgundy mist that spread quickly in broad, tenebrous sheets and evaporated so soon after contact with the earth that it seemed as if it might never have been there at all. Aescha often woke to the tiny droplets tapping at one of the floor-length windows along the south wall of our apartment. From the bed she could see the parking lot where, on a good day, whoever was out there would start to move in perfect unison with everyone else, as if in an elaborately staged dance.

The city we lived in had been recently and brutally reworked to resemble a bustling, late nineteenth century industrial center. Old buildings were made to look new and the new buildings were made to look old. Certain clothing styles from that era returned vengefully and without warning on the bodies of those of us who lived there. We hobbled around in ludicrous, binding pants and topcoats, wielding elaborate, useless canes. I felt the desire to live this way less urgently than most of the people I knew--perhaps because, up in the air, we were relatively immune to the behavior we were administering. We were required to shower in the solution after each sortie, but usually we got away with a brief rinsing. I would go home afterwards and find Aescha curled inside the kitchen cabinets, head in her hands, weeping.

We decided to have a child underneath the amusement park, where we were sure nobody would look. Aescha’s body frame, we thought, would hide a child well, at least up until the last months, when we could slip away. I worked during the day while she slept, and when she went to work at sundown I would scurry off to the man-hole on the outskirts of the park to fashion a birthplace. There was a ledge and a small alcove at the stem of the slender, ribbed pipe down which I crawled, night after night, carrying whatever essential materials I had collected during the day--sheets, a copper cauldron, twist ties, pillows, a rubber bib and footies. I was stopped twice on the way there, but, in each case, the officers were my age or older, too old to qualify as Life Architects, and consequently not overly concerned with what I was up to.

None of the pilots knew what sort of behavior we were administering, or to whom. Only the commanding officer in each squadron, who carried around a sealed foil packet with the proper instructions, had any idea what we were doing in whatever area it was that we were. They were tall, bulky women who were required to adhere to a strict vocabulary, none of which applied, even remotely, to us. This seldom mattered, as they were stiffly and relentlessly unavailable to us in any way, a point driven home by the form-fitting wooden girdles they wore over their uniform. Everybody worked, more or less, in silence--we were given a set of coordinates, and when we reached them, the commanding officer would peel back the rip-wire on the packet and adjust the machinery to whatever specifications had been ordered. There was a clarity in our missions, an infallible, crystalline protocol that was, perhaps, the only thing of true beauty in our lives.

Aescha wrote down the days in a book, charting out in red pen a precise ovulative trajectory. The first month we missed, as well as the second. Summer approached--I knew I would not be able to maintain an erection in the heat. "Please, don’t think about it. Don’t worry. This, this error - it will give us more time to prepare," she said, but she was old, and knew as well as I did that our time was ludicrously short. We had no time at all. Night after night she knelt on the floor, attempting with great and desperate enthusiasm to worry some life from my penis, which only lay on its side, breathing heavily like a beached fish. Days, we wandered aimlessly, exhausted and ashamed. Then I heard someone say in passing that a prosthetic surgeon in the city built genital armatures in exchange for firewood. In the middle of June we discovered that she was pregnant.

Shall I say that we were happy then, as we were, for a short time, dangerously elated by this new and sudden transcendence of our condition? Perhaps, but the dread that we might well have to follow through with the plan that we had, admittedly, thrown together with bits of loose fabric and string followed so closely on the heels of our happiness as to completely overtake it.

Royston was once a Life Architect, but then he got too old and had to leave. He operated the rear hose assembly on our plane. He was cleaning out the drum when I approached him in the hangar.

"I’ll tell you what I think, but you’re not going to want to hear it," he said, lacing the steel chassis with orange gel.

"That’s why I’m asking."

"I think you should do what you want."

"That’s not what I wanted to hear."

Royston hoisted the drum into the felt chamber. "The fuck did I tell you?"

"You can’t be a pal and tell me what to do?"

"I’ll tell you right out of this room. I’ll tell you what to do." He stood up, exposing the raw, unimaginable length of his body. His parents were Mormons, and this was all he had to show for it. "What I would do? I would do it."

"I don’t think you would."

"How long has it been?"

"Weeks. A month. A month and ten days."

"This is too long a time. Think of what’s there already--some part of your face is already taking shape."

"We should get rid of this thing."

"See? See what I said? I’m not in the business of telling people what to do. What people want, really, is for someone else to tell them what to do, and I don’t do that. I’m in the business of telling people to keep their chalky, perishable lives away from wherever I am."

I felt terrible, having derricked the shameful details of my situation on Royston who, like anyone else, wanted only to be left alone. He put his bib in the plastic barrel and left. I sat as still as I could on the bench until I could no longer tell where it started and I left off.

Aescha started to make things for the child--terribly small outfits with wide, misshapen arms and legs, little suits with club-shaped foot receptacles. She lined these articles up along the floor by the T.V., where the dancing carbon light gave a convincing impression of movement. The child, it seemed, was already there in the room, watching us with its unruly, almond-shaped head.

I saw two officers in the lower decks, sitting close on a bench seat. We had just doused a stretch of farmland, a duty we looked forward to for the spectacular show the birds put on in our wake, gathering in elaborate fractal patterns against the sky. The women were whispering to each other, and crying. The larger, uglier one unbuttoned her flight suit at the abdomen, and the other one slid a trembling hand underneath, nodding her head gravely as she palmed the pale flesh.

As quietly as I could, I went back to my seat and buckled myself in. Outside, a flock of cardinals hovered in a jagged arc, shadowing with eerie precision the flight of the plane.

Aescha was adopted. Her biological parents, she was told from an early age, had died in a cataclysmic train wreck, but she suspected with great conviction that the story was a lie, that they were out there, somewhere, waiting anxiously not to be discovered. She often drew pictures of them in a yellow ruled notebook, giving each sketch one half of her features. In her crude, cramped pencilmanship they took on the quality of forensic artist’s renderings. She went out of her way to point out that, for all she knew, her parents could be living in the next-highest apartment, where what we heard at night, for hours and hours on end, was the sound of a metal pipe being drawn across a sheet of thick glass. In the Plaza of the Honorable Dead she would brush up against some older couple and faint, certain that they were the ones. Her anxiety worked itself over into my life--I quickly grew to hate and fear the elderly, and avoided contact with them whenever possible.

She started to show far earlier than we had anticipated. Three and a half months in, her body began to list and sprout. The condition showed up in her face, under her eyes and around her cheeks--her ankles became thick and unwieldy. Some of it we were able to stave off with heavy tape and splints, but each morning there was more, whole bodies’ worth, it seemed. People started looking at her. I packed two identical green bags and we headed out into the night to the amusement park.

It was dark out, unimaginably so, the sky punctuated only by the tiny, ovular red lights of nighttime dirigibles. Aescha held my arm at the elbow for stability--her ankles were bruised and raw from the tape. We walked slowly and assuredly, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible.

Just past the green luminescent supermarket some children approached in a horse and buggy. There were three of them--two girls and a leggy, preposterously oversexed boy, and they wanted directions to the park.

"The amusement park?" Aescha asked. Her hand began, subtly, to tremble. She was going to give us away before we’d even had a chance.

"Actually, we were going in that direction," I said with a deliberateness that surprised even myself. "If you’d kindly--" Aescha tugged at me imploringly. The children looked us over with mild disinterest. One girl nodded to the other, and the boy opened the door.

Inside, Aescha kept her head away from anywhere I might be looking. The two girls examined her body carefully from the opposite bench, whispering and holding hands. Both of them wore elaborate, bone-necked dresses with bountiful skirts. The boy removed a copper cigarette case from his breast pocket, fondling it as he searched for a lighter.

"Do you work at the amusement park?" one of the girls asked.

"I work in the kitchens--I make shapes with batter. My wife is in the chorus--she plays the part of one of the fecal men."

"Is that why she’s bleeding?" The tall girl pointed to Aescha’s ankles, blood from the wounds of which had soaked through her pant legs.

For a long, precarious moment I lost my breath. My body was neither excessively hot nor too cold--it achieved a sort of lukewarmness. "She--"

"Yes," Aescha said, her voice wavering. "The costume is very painful."

"They’re barefoot," the boy said, his lips clamped dramatically at the service end of a thin cigarette.

"Excuse me?"

"The fecal men--they’re barefoot. How else could they slide down the dung mound?"

"The legs are prosthetic. I wear them over my regular legs," she said.

"Rubber mock-ups. They chafe," I added.

The boy said nothing, only swung his patchy, liminal head back on the plush leather cushion of the bench seat, exhaling a terrible plume of brass colored smoke.

We continued on in silence. The two girls played hand games, the rules of which, although unknown to me, appeared rich in heritage and tradition. I put my own hand on Aescha’s thigh, an action that was heavily discussed in hushed tones by the girls.

I directed them around the left phalanx of the park, past the static, willfully overcomposed towers of the haunted airport terminal. There was a service door between two dumpsters that looked plausible as an employee’s entrance. Thanking them, we let ourselves down from the high coach. The girls stuck their mawkish heads out the windows to see where we’d go. One of them held a silver, crescent-shaped phone to her ear. I took Aescha’s hand. The tender clobbing of the horses’ hooves faded as we approached the door. I looked back and saw only the dim green brake lights hovering in the darkness. We hid behind a dumpster until we were sure they were gone.

"Do you think she was calling--" Aescha whispered.

"Stop," I said.

Helping Aescha down the man-hole, I felt the weight of her body, the true weight--I had her by the hips, guiding her down the thin rails of the step ladder, and I could feel this other body going on inside her, this thing that would, birthed in glaring, nude stupidity, reach out for the world, for whoever in the immediate area gave the sincerest impression that they cared about it. Because what we were making was a person, and not a thing. We were responsible--accountable, even--for the billion tiny disappointments that would accrete in this person like the rings in Archimedes’s tub, culminating in the maturation of another club-faced, knockly genetic impression of my own disastrous shortcomings, so that I could finally say with absolute authority that all of it, right down to the bitter, knotted rind, was my fault.

I lay her down on the wheat mattress and dressed her ankles and calves.

"You know that we don’t have to do this," she said, gripping the dingy sheet in a tight bundle.

"Yes, we have to do this. We have to."

"We could have the child now. I bet she would be small enough to keep in our pockets. Think about that. We could carry her around--"

"Stop It, Aescha."

There was a grating sound, and then a flushing sound. I sprinted down the tunnel to see what was happening. A squadron of Orange Jackets had arrived, and was dumping gestural medicine down the shaft by the gallon. Two of them were slowly descending the ladder, rung by rung, In Inflatable safety suits.

I backed up slowly, crouching against the concavity of the tunnel wall. There was no other way out of the tunnel--the Orange Jackets would confiscate our child, drawing it from Aescha’s womb with a fetal horn. And then--what? No one knew what happened to the children, only that they were gone. I searched around in the silt for a suitable rock, one that was sharp or heavy, or both, one that would successfully end the child’s brief, troubled life.

Aescha yelped from across the haystack barricade. The Orange Jackets swung their lights in our direction, scooping out the darkness. I climbed over and saw her kneeling on the ground, palms outstretched, covered in blood. She held a small, naked person in her hands.

"It just came out, I don’t know how--" she said, sobbing. I knelt down to examine the child. It was the size of a small kitten. I put out a finger to stroke away a translucent flap of amniotic material. It shook in her palms, flailing delicate limbs, mewling.

The Orange Jackets came closer--we could hear them sloshing heavily through the streambed, borne on awkwardly by the rushing current.

"Aescha," I said, shivering, "Please help me know what to do--"

She looked at me carefully, thoroughly, and I saw clearly what we had gotten ourselves into. She rose slowly, still holding the child in her hands, and crossed over to the streambed.

"This is something they used to do," she said, lowering the child into the water. It sputtered and kicked as the frigid water rushed over its body. "This is how they saved kings." She let go. The child was drawn under immediately, sucked down by the fierce undertow. As the Orange Jackets made their way over the pathetic barricade we saw its tiny head surface for a moment further down the way, as If to reassure us that nothing we ever did would go unnoticed.

© 2002 by Matt Derby

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