Hands open to the heat she waits.
He is taking her for another flying lesson. In the pockets of her overalls there is always a pen, always some paper. She is a promising student, he doesn’t need to tell her that. Like all other growth in her life, all other knowledge, this goes without document or ceremony. It is evident only in how she speaks and moves. A word that wasn’t available to her before, a concept she turns over alone. The desert is her partner in this, a blankness where she sees new parts of her life and thinking printed.
Behind her in the Florida evening is the rocket, designed she knows by the German whose first destroyed cities. She forgets what life is like with the cushion of sleep. In her pockets there is nearly nothing. A dime, the book of matches. The people around her know her name. To her they are legs in denim, feet in woven leather sandals. They hold signs and banners, photos of lives cut short. Numbers of innocent dead, of dollars spent on launches such as this. She knows to get to the real inside of any message is like a trip to the center of the earth. It goes only one way.
In his truck they hardly speak. Sometimes it is like this, a kind of praise, a proxy for love, evident in how little needs to be explained. There are his two fingers on her ear, there is the air that whips from his window over his body and then over hers, comparing the interruptions of their shapes. When they reach the hangar, a structure that looks accidental in the flat of sand, he kills the truck and slips his hand past the rivets at her waist, beneath the cotton men’s undershirt to the curve of her belly.
She is arranged in lotus posture, an exacting shape her body knows well. It is not supposed to come easily, she can remember reading. Do not sickle the ankle. Enlightenment is a thousand lives away. The tops of her feet are flush with the tops of her thighs. The soles look at the sky. Then a question appears in her body, somewhere in her molars or the juncture in the throat that allows water in. Where is her son?
Both their doors are open. He keeps his face on the view while he does this to her, as if his middle fingers moving in her underwear are dependent on the purpling chaparral or the smear of cirrus. That he has seen this part of her more closely than she ever will, how it changes given touch or heat, has not gone unconsidered in her mind. A mirror couldn’t show her, a camera couldn’t. This is part and parcel of the female, which is created, she begins to know, not by who lives it but by who watches it—a male invention, stunning, wicked. She imagines herself as separate from the body he acts upon. At a certain moment he loses precision and goes too fast and she cries out. When it is over he calls her Clyde. Are you ready, Clyde? She hops onto the dirt first. It is how she needs him to see her, a few feet ahead, a few minutes more prepared.
The question she treats as any other thought, a ripple in the surface. Where is my son? She allows it to pass. A thought is not a rule or fact. It cannot yell or conduct heat. A thought alone cannot open a door or turn off a light.
As she prepares for the flight, circling the plane, he keeps his hands flat on his knees where he sits inside it. With the strength of her calves she rolls the plane two feet back to test the tread of the tires. She enunciates her checks, every light that works, calling out what this man has taught her in secret. Now she sits next to him. Right aileron. Left. Oil temperature at seventy-one.
The oil in her hair feels cooler and lighter than she had imagined, when she let herself. Less like a change to her body and more like a change in the weather. The match she lights without seeing.
Hats on, he says, and they slip the headsets over their ears, although she only ever listens. To the control tower, the low auctioneer voices that yawp numbers, it is always just him in the plane. The figures he bleats about its weight are lies, her one hundred and ten erased. What does this make her once they’re off the ground? She passes beyond being his secret into something else, a life so removed from its context it weighs nothing.
The question comes to her again and she realizes now it is not her mind feeding it to her but something outside of her. A sound, an advancing movement. Her eyes are just cracked, a tiny crescent of vision, but what she sees is enough. Crouching, he removes the match from her hand and holds it there, a little limp. He has only planned this far. She knows this about him, the way he is led by his mind, the path up but not down.
It’s a kind of pain she likes, becoming nobody, being nowhere anyone knows. As a child she was drawn to guest quarters yet to be furnished. As a child what she wanted to be was an empty room. The plane, taxiing now, is a sound so complete as to ask what was there before, and to answer, in the down-tick, nothing. The blue swims through the glass and into her mouth.
It is not what she says that will make a difference, but the voice that she uses, the name. No one knows it but the two of them. In speaking it into his ear she asks his permission to go. When she can no longer hear him breathing she lights another.
There is a kind of understanding that occurs just after. If we are lucky, we catch it at the door on our way out, watch it enter the rooms we have left. It is not always possible to tell the exact moment you have separated from the earth. So much of what we know for certain is irrelevant by the time we know it.