It is the first meeting. Our gaze is bleak, austere, and focused, yet our fingers chatter, skeletal, around crude ceramic cups: the force field of combat discipline weakens at our appendages at the farthest distance from our hearts.
Already the physiological deployment of resolve and commitment has begun to falter, has become less certain.
Our enemies are despair and shallow breathing.
The light in the room has shifted to glacier tints of ice and water, sky and eye. Our skin glints silver—more trout than human.
The coffee is tepid, and we barely sip it. It is our 342nd meeting.
There is a green gelatinous murk to the light, and our fingers only loosely wrap our coffee mugs, a drape of slimy flesh that suggests a grip.
At the crests of our heads, each bears adipose fat and the beginnings of fins.
The admiral strikes his fist against the table, and we snap into shape again: ankles, knees, hips, and shoulders emerge from sinuous spines, and we once more resemble ourselves, our former selves.
The forms that we recall, we rebuild.
We reach up with real fingers to feel our skulls, and find these sites reassembled. Sharply razored hair appears—snipped into a brush of platinum or ebony or gold, obeying appropriate military affiliations.
We clench our memories of torso and leg, and blood pulses at our jawlines.
This is the tactic we learned to keep from blacking out.
Although we could as easily seat ourselves by branch of service or by aircraft, in our earliest meetings, we instinctively calibrate ourselves according to ideology.
Geopolitical affiliation is at first divisive. There are sharp disputes, often erudite. The North Koreans confront the French. The Americans accuse the Cubans. Confusion mixed with cultivated hostility forms the basis of aggression. Repartee is offensive and unflinching. Often, we have killed one another—either directly or through a causal chain of events—and that escalates the tensions.
Most questions we cannot answer, and, stymied by the inexorable failure of dialectic, we begin to hit each other.
Our wounds get in the way.
We shyly coalesce into groups corresponding to fatal injury: skull fracture, stroke, drowning, asphyxiation, hemorrhage, burns.
This is what starts us talking about women.
We first remember arguments. Stubbornness, selfishness, recalcitrance, and dishonesties on both sides. Lies told and retold, polished and honed to a state of purity that felt like truth. Disappointments.
It’s not as simple as recalling a name, a breast, or five proud, blue bruises on a thigh gripped tight to facilitate lovemaking—the memory of specificity intrudes.
A dispute in a rowboat at the park after eating a tin of spoiled oysters, the pilot and the lover both heaving over the sides into the path of an astonished mother and her summer ducklings.
She was going for a test at the doctor. Worried, the lover rewired the house and her hairdryer shorted out. She would never be authorized for another and changed to braids, which smelled of chamomile and licorice.
It was raining in Pyongyang, and the pilot went to buy her tampons—so expensive and difficult to find. She wore galoshes.
The pilot shared the same dreams with her at night, unconscious. Autobiographically accurate, yet identical. They had even dreamed them at the same hour, and woke together, crying. She drove the pilot so crazy, sometimes it seemed possible they were the same person. Perhaps a single schizophrenic.
Sun coming through the leaves in patterns. Buttercream frosting on her nipples for the pilot’s twenty-seventh birthday. Pushing the old bones of the car home—the pilot shirtless, she barefoot. Mockingbirds. Lost keys.
It is the precision of love that startles the pilots. All the training at instrument panels and aeronautics controls—the muscles remember, but not the mind.
Our minds are mobiles strung with counterbalanced points of desire.
To wake with the smell of her under my nails. To hear her cursing in the shower. To find her short, dark hairs on my pillow.
For seventy years, the Cold War test pilots have avoided such sentimentality, but now we have exhausted all other agenda items for our meetings.
We have waited long enough.
With each meeting, the suggestion of gills becomes more prominent.
We seem increasingly ectothermic.
We call another meeting.
One pilot says:
It must be a question of where the body thinks it is. We are half human, suspended between spirit and purpose. At the moment of death, on impact with the sea, the wet itself seemed to want to take us and make us some other sort of species.
Nature abhors a vacuum, but it was love that held us back.
Why must we die, yet retain a mortal’s desires?
Our final days as human ghosts are drawing to a close. Like radiation, there must be a finite period of time elapsed before our atomic matter is called upon to form some other thing. Fish are to water what pilots are to air. The transformation is as simple as that. Nature adores a pattern.
We must leave our loves behind.
We drink from our crude ceramic cups of unsatisfying coffee, and hide tears.
On this we all agree: We are fading away. We are lonely and far gone, and our true loves have doubtlessly moved on.
We have been training heavily. We can now pass through the air unimpeded.
No longer suspended in armature of aluminum and steel, we move without fuselage.
Without weapons.
We know we will soon fly blind.
We must now navigate by other senses.
At our next-to-last meeting, we find it increasingly difficult to make eye contact, or to successfully maneuver the exchange of coffeepot from one pilot’s hand to the next.
Everything is bleached white and overexposed, with refractions of pale pink and lavender obstructing the crucial functions of our corneas.
It seems unduly cruel for our eyes to fail us; we are test pilots.
Or were.
At our final meeting, we certify one another good to go: we have done this before, when there were other vessels at our command.
Now there are no insignia.
No diplomas or medals or sashes or stripes.
There are no new hats, no special helmets.
Gloves and scarves and boots are useless. Goggles, throttles, thrusters. No bombs or rockets now. We counsel one another on the voyage: The Cold War is over. There will be no red borders, no blue. No orders or directives.
In all lands, the citizens will have left their fallout shelters to go shopping.
We descend in the night. Our women are sleeping—a shoulder above the sheets, a toe exposed. Hair tied up, or loose and tangled.
It is night, but the eyes of the pilots see only white and periwinkle gray.
We find our women by their scents alone: nicotine, citrus, rose attar, shoreline, lotion. There are nightgowns, or a ratty chemise, or nothing.
We slip through the windows, then along the walls and across the floor to stand there, dripping slightly by the bed.
The poor blind pilots.
When our women wake, they press their hands to the cold, flat flesh of these apparitions and cry out—they are guilty, lovesick, torn.
We the pilots make knees of bone and flesh again, and press them up between our women’s legs.
We raise our women off the ground, pendent.
We are airborne.
I’m not dead, we the pilots say.
Speechless, our women find their tongues. They count every tooth before speaking, but find they cannot speak.
I’m here, we say to them. I was never dead. I was never gone. I’m alive. We’re together.
It’s a dream come true, and yet a nightmare. For we are dead, and our women have met others and moved on.
We follow our women’s scent as they return to bed, as they entwine themselves with the living limbs of the peacetime beings who have replaced us.
One day, whisper we the pilots, you will be dead.
And we the pilots return to our aquatic, atomic states, and wait.
It is a line. A long vein of a line that barely moves. The queue for the afterlife curves toward a shrewdly engineered gate—a kind of vascular faucet that opens with an occasional gasp.
We the pilots locate one another in the crowd. We navigate and negotiate, and because we are test pilots and soldiers and confident with communism and competition, we are adept at clever stratagems that bring us ever closer to the front.
Whenever the gate opens, the crowd thickens and thins. It clots and coalesces around itself with vascular anticipation. One pilot rushes forward—Is it her? Is she here at last? Did she finally die?
There is a jostling for position, for vantage.
It is first come, first served. If another suitor gets there faster, it’s all over till the next time.
The light has shifted to a crisp magenta. It is uterine—the color of both a birth and a sloughing off.
One by one, the women come through this passageway and find themselves deceased.
There is a kaleidoscope of recognition and recollection.
A pink prism of memory and longing.
She was going for a test at the doctor. The test pilot drowned still strapped into the cockpit. Her hairdryer shorted out. Ducklings. Hemorrhage. I had rewired the house. The pilot’s cause of death was asphyxiation. The oxygen useless. She braided her hair the way I loved. She smelled of chamomile and licorice. She wore galoshes in Pyongyang in the rain. My skull was fractured.
There were oysters. Mockingbirds.
Rowboats.
