Slowly, with great weight, we turned away from each other and started walking blind, completely blind, in the dark.
The midnight PASSENGER TO BE PICKED UP flare sputtered on the tracks. Only when the train was pulling out of the station did I lean from the open Pullman door and look back.
The old man was seated there with his chair tilted against the station wall, with his faded blue pants and shirt and his sunbaked face and his sunbleached eyes. He did not glance at me as the train slid past. He was gazing east along the empty rails where tomorrow or the next day or the day after the day after that, a train, some train, any train, might fly by here, might slow, might stop. His face was fixed, his eyes were blindly frozen, towards the east. He looked a hundred years old.
The train wailed.
Suddenly old myself, I leaned out, squinting.
Now the darkness that had brought us together stood between. The old man, the station, the town, the forest, were lost in the night.
For an hour I stood in the roaring blast staring back at all that darkness.
Icarus Montgolfier Wright
HE lay on his bed and the wind blew through the window over his ears and over his half-opened mouth so it whispered to him in his dream. It was like the wind of time hollowing the Delphic caves to say what must be said of yesterday, today, tomorrow. Sometimes one voice gave a shout far off away, sometimes two, a dozen, an entire race of men cried out through his mouth, but their words were always the same:
‘Look, look, we’ve done it!’
For suddenly he, they, one or many, were flung in the dream, and flew. The air spread in a soft warm sea where he swam, disbelieving.
‘Look, look! It’s done!’
But he didn’t ask the world to watch, he was only shocking his senses wide to see, taste, smell, touch the air, the wind, the rising moon. He swam alone in the sky. The heavy earth was gone.
But wait, he thought, wait now!
Tonight – what night is this?
The night before, of course. The night before the first flight of a rocket to the Moon. Beyond this room on the baked desert floor one hundred yards away the rocket waits for me.
Well, does it now? Is there really a rocket?
Hold on! he thought, and twisted, turned, sweating, eyes tight, to the wall, the fierce whisper in his teeth. Be certain-sure ! You, now, who are you?
Me? he thought. My name?
Jedediah Prentiss, born 1938, college graduate 1959, licensed rocket pilot, 1965. Jedediah Prentiss … Jedediah Prentiss….
The wind whistled his name away! He grabbed for it, yelling.
Then, gone quiet, he waited for the wind to bring his name back. He waited a long while, and there was only silence, and then after a thousand heartbeats, he felt motion.
Th
e sky opened out like a soft blue flower. The Aegean Sea stirred soft white fans through a distant wine-coloured surf.
In the wash of the waves on the shore, he heard his name.
Icarus.
And again in a breathing whisper.
Icarus.
Someone shook his arm and it was his father saying his name and shaking away the night. And he himself lay small, half-turned to the window and the shore below and the deep sky, feeling the first wind of morning ruffle the golden feathers bedded in amber wax lying by the side of his cot. Golden wings stirred half-alive in his father’s arms, and the faint down on his own shoulders quilled trembling as he looked at these wings and beyond them to the cliff.
‘Father, how’s the wind?’