icarus

America’s squeamish Puritanism had grounded him too long. He’d had enough of prudish laws – his money was good, as evident from the bidding war that erupted when he told Shelton to contact foreign companies. A firm in Shanghai won the nod when they offered to reduce their fees if the media caught a whiff. Two months later he landed his jet at Shanghai International in the middle of the night.First it was introductions (smiles and bows) and tours (one polished lab after another). Then the battery of tests, measurements, models and wind tunnels and simulations and more meetings and more tests.

The compound, an hour south of Shanghai, had one building converted just for him: a cabin resort with his own private beach, festooned with gliding gulls. Shelton, whose lodging was just down the shore, accompanied him through every step, as did Waiban Huai, the project liaison with the studied British accent. The labs were full of handshakes and nods and “yes” eyes, and in the evenings Huai arranged performances by local dancers.

After ten weeks the plan was finalized.

Even he was surprised by the number of contracts they required (Shelton suggested he threaten a pullout), but Huai’s assurances were as fierce as the legal terms. Eager to step into history and surrounded by applauding executives, he signed everything.

More tests, with a sudden sense of immediacy. Shelton, who spent most nights videoconferencing with Silicon Valley, left him entirely to Huai’s zealous care. They visited the aerodynamics group, the wind tunnel, the cloners with their wide swaths of skin culture. Sometimes he wore a sensor-studded harness, courtesy of the neurorobotics team. He tried little jokes with the surgeons who gave him weekly checkups but had little else to do. Huai brought in fewer dancers, and Shelton had begun sampling Shanghai nightlife, so at the end of each day he walked the shore alone, taking in the sky, sifting the dusk breeze with his fingers.

Eventually the engineers punched probes into his shoulders, binding him like a puppet to a monstrous prototype. He swept his arms like a conductor – wide, fluid arcs that resulted only in fitful jerks. It was worse than trying to write with his toes; he spent days digging through muscular twitches to develop the slightest control. In the evenings he scrutinized the gulls, offering them bread from his upraised hand so he could track their adjustments as they wheeled and tilted about him. He visualized them every morning, wires protruding from his shoulders and the great dance partner before him, attempting to replicate the sweep of his arms. After five arduous weeks Huai’s smile at his progress grew sincere, and he came to feel with the gulls a sense of comradeship.

Then the project stalled. The skin cultures had been grafted successfully onto the prosthetics, Huai explained, but the outer layer flaked and cracked, threatening to peel away from the understructure. They would hire a young woman to massage in a moisturizer twice a day, Huai reassured, but it was possible that the prosthetics might need this care even after project completion, perhaps perpetually. A few days later Huai brought him to meet the masseuse. She was named Mei Mei; she was in her teens; she forced a smile for him as her deft hands rubbed the base of one broad wing. He hoped the skin did not feel cold, he said, and she answered that it was kept warm by the self-heating structure within. Watching from the doorway as she stroked the smooth skin across the room that was his, he felt he should make more conversation, but he didn’t know what to say with Huai interpreting.

Once the wings were back on track, surgery began. First they removed his legs and monitored his vitals for three days as he recovered. Then Huai set before him another series of contracts. The second procedure was the point of no return, he smiled, and the firm needed certain assurances. Besides (this was said almost in passing), they were aware of his corporation’s recent financial challenges. Shelton drove in from Shanghai to report that the language, although extremely thorough, was boilerplate liability coverage, and his corporation was perfectly fine – so the only real question, Shelton quipped, was whether he was ready to give up his manhood. But he’d conquered enough frontiers as far as that was concerned; he was ready for the next. Upon his signature they removed his lower torso up to his ribs and placed him on dialysis and a nutritional drip.

He had an odd feeling coming out of the anesthesia. Without bowels or kidneys or even a stomach, borne aloft only by the wealth from his conspicuous achievements, he seemed small, inconsequential; he did not even fill up the bed. He felt both bold and quite abandoned; he called the nurses frequently and wept convulsively. This was to be expected, Shelton and Huai assured – hadn’t they briefed him? Every pioneer knew the isolation of surpassing humanity’s limits. He was doing something the world had never seen, ushering in a whole new stage of evolution. It was at heart a matter of weight – soon the air would be more substantial to him, supporting his lighter mass like water for a swimmer, and then his dream would be realized. Besides, Shelton was flying a renowned psychologist out from Los Angeles to meet with him (although later he admitted that upon arriving, she had not seen herself as the best fit and returned to L.A.).

The only way to move was forward, so he demanded an accelerated schedule. One operation divested him of his arms, leaving behind the shoulder stumps. The next caged his ribs in a sturdy mesh that locked above his shoulders and into his spine. Finally the surgeons grafted to his body the prosthetic tail and legs and wings. At one point in the procedure Mei Mei was ushered in to moisturize the wings, but had to be assisted out when she became faint.

His body did not adjust smoothly. When the arteries of the first wing were spliced into his shoulder, a sudden drop in blood pressure set off heart palpitations that required an emergency pacemaker. Then, during recovery, nerve grafts sent phantom pains streaking up his spine. The doctors kept him out on sedatives as his body stabilized.

When they eventually lessened his dosage, he awoke in a different body. A tail of synthetic feathers descended from his spine, just beneath his ribs. When he shifted his weight, the tripod talons of his telescoping legs scratched at the sheets. His tail and legs were skinless; he could only observe them, not feel them directly – not the way he felt the teasing warmth of Mei Mei’s hands smoothing lotion into one of his wings, supported by hoists along his thirty-foot wingspan. He rolled his head in her direction and grinned.

He wanted to fly.

It took two months of physical therapy – two months of stretching and collapsing his wings, of curling his bat-like fingers into a grip, of spreading and twisting his tail, and of hobbling awkwardly on prosthetic talons – to prepare him for the wind tunnel. The ever-present entourage of doctors, engineers and technicians had disappeared, replaced by a handful of nurses and physical trainers. Shelton visited only once, and even Huai dropped in only infrequently. Quickly he came to know which trainers to dread. He also came to know Mei Mei – the language barrier was insurmountable, but he knew her expressions, her moods during the morning and evening massages. Rarely did she look him in the eye, but she hummed little tunes as she stroked the wide expanse of his skin, and he angled his wings for her, this way and that, humming back noises of content.

Then the day came. The aerodynamics group locked him in a colossal cylinder and cranked up the turbine, stirring the first light breeze to wisp across his wings. They rippled over in goosebumps, but the understructure warmed his skin, and he begged for more. That came gradually, day by day, as the engineers grew confident his wings would not rip away. At times the wind caught them at odd angles, careening him into the cement walls, but whenever they shut down the turbine he relentlessly picked himself up to continue. When the airstream strengthened, his wings acted as sails, the skin stretching painfully as it tugged at his weight. Flight was close, and he grinned at his growing buoyancy, blinking tears into the fluid blast of air until they fitted him with a pair of goggles.

In the afternoons a chauffeur returned him to his cabin, where he crawled across the beach to watch the gulls. He huddled low in the sand, wings curled tight to keep from blowing askew in the ocean breeze, like a child in a warm beach towel. The sky was bigger somehow. Ants and sand crabs occasionally nipped at his wings, but the gulls were worth it; only time and proficiency held him back from joining them. Soon he would lift off effortlessly, a planetful of troubles dropping away as his sleek form ascended with the wind. Planes were nothing, he smirked, gazing upward as he squatted with the sand pests. Cars, submarines, rockets – mere artificialities, clunking tin cans for the stagnant human mold. He would soar far beyond the Henry Fords and the Howard Hughes and the John Glenns. There was nothing new under the sun until he stretched his own goliath wings beneath the pinking sky.

Weeks passed, windspeeds increased, and he began to lift off the floor – exuberant, rapturous lift! But he could exert far less control than he’d expected – it was less flapping than coasting, a matter of nuance, an exhausting attention to slight eddies that could veer him into the floor or walls seemingly without warning. He’d become adept at adjusting his wings, retracting his talons, tilting and spreading his tail, but he lacked instinct. The gulls enjoyed an innate sense of buoyant balance that he could only resolve to master through effort, as he had mastered so much else in life. Huai suggested a self-stabilizing system that would sense real-time wind changes to make minute wing and tail adjustments, but immediately he ruled it out. He wanted natural, self-powered flight, and to achieve it he would spend as much time in the tunnel as necessary.

Over months, however, the tunnel sessions grew tiresome – the bland cement walls, the treadmill airstream in only one direction: featureless, visionless. Worse, he could not coast without an unnaturally powerful wind. He had honed his technique; he simply weighed too much. They could not have anticipated this, Huai explained, nodding. They would devise a workaround. In the meantime, he could continue practicing with elevated winds.

A few days later came the fix: lose the skin on the wings, which added forty pounds.

Unacceptable. He’d come to love the air’s natural caress. He would not be merely a brain and a pair of eyes, with a heart and lungs for life support. He sent Huai away and continued gliding in the thick, mechanical rush so wholly unlike the delicate skies he yearned to sail.

After two weeks Huai returned with a new solution and a third series of contracts to sign. Of course it was still a battle against weight – the team had designed lighter versions of the legs, the tail, and the robotics battery housed beneath his lungs. But he also needed to be more aerodynamic. They would replace his ribs with an internalized cage, repacking his organs into a flatter wing shape to increase his lift. They would remove his ears, as well as his entire jawbone, tongue, and esophagus, since they added unnecessarily to his drag – he hadn’t used them ever since he went on the nutritional drip. Only these measures would enable him to fly naturally. Already they were past the point of no return, so close to success, but they would need one last set of signatures to authorize the final stage. Even as they spoke, the firm was recruiting a neurolinguistic team to design a voice synthesizer so he wouldn’t lose all speech.

He called Shelton only to discover that he’d been left in Shanghai alone – Shelton was in New York defending his corporation against a lawsuit, and could give no guarantee about when he might return. So with the clutching fingers of his right wing he practiced his signature, and Mei Mei held each page for him to sign near the appropriate places.

When he emerged from the anesthesia, neither Huai nor Shelton was there to tell him how long he’d been in surgery. Without a mouth, he felt as if he were suffocating – every second he distrusted whether he could draw enough air through his nostrils, even though they sounded as if they’d been enlarged. At times he slid his tongue against the roof of his mouth, clicked his teeth, gagged on gathering saliva, but they were phantom sensations. He could no longer smile at Mei Mei’s massages, and when he tried to hum his appreciation, he realized that his vocal box was gone. He could communicate only with his eyes, but as usual Mei Mei avoided meeting them with her own.

Yet in the wind tunnel he finally coasted at low speeds. Softer airstreams created less turbulence, allowing him to glide at last with confidence, and making him thirst for the natural sky, for gentle fluid air beneath his wings.

One evening, watching the internet as Mei Mei soothed the soreness in his shoulders, he was struck by a documentary on decathletes preparing for the summer games in Las Vegas. The conditioning, the constant drilling unto perfection, the close shaving of ounces and tenths of seconds, the painstaking encoding of movement into muscle memory until conscious thought was redundant – he knew them all. But soon the Olympics would be eclipsed, sliding into obsolescence as he ushered in a new horizon of physical achievement. How could plodding sprinters possibly compare to his own gracious power?

He wanted Shelton to arrange a meeting with the decathletes. He wanted to size himself up against them – but Shelton was still in the States, extricating him from the growing finance scandal, and couldn’t be reached. A phone was useless to him anyway, and would be until the promised neurolinguists arrived (they hadn’t been mentioned since the pre-surgical conference). Muteness had begun to fill him with anxiety, spurring him on to longer and longer tunnel workouts, flapping his wings until his shoulders and wingskin ached.

One morning, however, the technicians failed to flash him their customary smiles. The tunnel session ended early without explanation, and he was driven back to his cabin and hooked up to his nutritional drip. He feared something had been detected in his vital signs, although he was as confident in his well-paid medical team as he was in his own wings – money had surrounded him with a formidable team.

That evening Mei Mei did not show. His skeletal fingers succeeded in dialing Huai’s number, but all he could do was exhale loudly through his nostrils and bang the phone. Finally he managed to type an email using the fingers of one wing – he couldn’t bring both wings together at the keyboard at once.

Mei Mei did not appear the next morning. Neither did the chauffeur. No one hooked up a new bag of drip; no one started his scheduled dialysis for that morning; he was unsure he could manage either by himself. Rather than sit indoors hyperventilating about it, he crawled across the beach to take in the gathering cumulus clouds until someone showed up. Cutting across the relaxing breeze, the gulls tracing the water’s edge took no notice of him, and suddenly he ached to join them, to take his place alongside them, to be accepted into their fold. For his inaugural flight he’d always envisioned a throng of executives and reporters and politicians, cameras capturing the action live for pay-per-view, but he’d waited so long – too long. The time was now. Now, when it was just himself and nature, a miracle transpiring hidden, the gulls his only witnesses. Now.

Inhaling deeply, shifting the balance of his talons in the sand, he positioned himself headfirst into the breeze and spread wide his wings.

He felt rebellious, deciding to lift off and sail the sky alone. The breeze wasn’t strong yet, so he waited, muscles quivering, breath suspended. A running start would do it, but his flimsy legs were nearly useless in the sand, so he waited. The wind varied enough to keep him hoping; after a long time he began flapping energetically at every minor breeze. He kept one eye on the cabin and the road beyond, embarrassed that the chauffeur might discover him out there when he arrived. Hours later it rained, a soft drizzle that sent him crawling back through the moistened sand sticking to him in places he couldn’t reach.

That evening dehydration combined with the gradual buildup of toxins in his blood to leave him lightheaded, spinning. He got the voicemail for Huai and Shelton every fifteen minutes until he fell asleep on the living room rug.

No one came the next day. He crouched on the front steps gripping the phone in one wing, illogically craving soup, distrusting the fact that he hadn’t urinated in half a year. Later that afternoon he sailed over the main strip of Las Vegas, stroking through the iridescent air. To the cheers of millions he swooped upon the Olympic stadium, caught the flaming arrow in mid-flight, and lit the torch himself. But the surgeons found another problem, and had to wittle him away until he was no more than a pair of eyes with wings, and finally not even that – just a whispered, shallow breath rustling an empty sheet. Then Shelton was carrying him into a van, into an unfamiliar jet. Someone hooked up a bag of drip, and through the grayness Shelton was describing the stock market and the bankruptcy of his corporation and his portfolio, decimated. The Shanghai firm was demanding a cash payment of the entire balance, had already filed a preemptive grievance. Shelton was bringing him back to America, to a lab outside Phoenix that would guarantee anonymity. He would have to be smuggled through customs, Shelton explained – and sure enough, before they landed, Shelton and another man folded up his wings and squeezed him talons-first into a compartment behind the restroom.

The new lab had no wind tunnel. It was a nondescript medical facility with one doctor and not enough nurses. He was kept in a room barely large enough to contain his wings – tired fluorescent lights, shrill beeping machines, a sliver of a window. No one greeted him when they entered. No one smiled. No one massaged his wings, and as the days passed he could feel his taut skin parching and cracking. When he developed a sinus infection, they stinted his nasal passages open. He wrote demands for a masseuse and a neurolinguist; the nurses checked his vital signs, kept him fed and on regular dialysis, and made sure the TV remote was always within his reach. No one looked him in the eye.

After months of fumbling notes dutifully mailed off by the nurses, he gave up on Shelton ever returning.

Sometimes through the lone window he could see vultures circling in thermals above the desert floor. Sometimes dust storms pinged against the single pane separating him from the sky. Sometimes the wind whispered at the glass softly, teasingly, and he would shut his eyes tight, stretch his chafed wings, and soar.

On one of those days, when the wind was perfect and the sun blazed into the room as if the glass weren’t there, when the sky opened deep and bright and all potential teetered on the utter brink of nothingness, he snuck outside.

It wasn’t easy. Blood splattered when he yanked free of the dialysis, and then he had to skulk down the hall, sliding his wingskin across the buffed linoleum. He was seen before long, but the nurses, too horrified to approach, gave him a wide berth to the exit, and he pushed through.

The crisp air and fierce sun brutalized his wings, the heat so strong it hissed like crickets. He cringed, wrapped himself close in the searing, suffocating wind. Months of pale fluorescent lights had weakened his eyes against the glowing expanse above, but he could still distinguish dark forms beating against the dazzling liquid air, and for several minutes he squinted after them longingly.

Then, like a sigh, he unfurled his wingspread wide beneath the blasting sun. His skin pulled tight, caught the rippling breeze, and as the nurses behind the windows gaped in disbelief, he felt himself borne aloft.

They notified Shelton immediately, who, for lack of a better idea, notified the local authorities (he kept the details vague). Three days later a trucker reported a pterodactyl on the shoulder of Interstate 40, less than two hours from Las Vegas. By the time Shelton arrived, the vultures had already picked clean the skin of the wings.

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copyright © 2004, michael w. hobson