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Armand can’t walk afterwards.
Can’t even move his legs, in fact, and the dull thrum of panic races down his neck to his ribs and then just stops. Alright. Sure. Plaster falls around him in sheets.
“Are you going to get up?” Daniel asks eventually. He looks worried through the layer of fear on his face. His fingers shake. Distracting, Armand thinks. He tries to still them with his mind, but it only works for a moment.
“I can’t,” Armand tells him. Already would’ve, if he could, he doesn’t add, because the pain is exquisite where he can feel it, and shocking where he can’t.
“Oh.”
There’s been other times, he knows. Him on the floor, unable to move, someone looming over him, looking at him with a mixture of pity and anger. It’s hard to place it now. The immediate present takes precedence. His tongue traces the shapes of the sounds, the abundance of s sounds. He’s always liked the way it slides off the tongue. Like water. A hissing stream, the lap of ocean waves. How is he going to pray?
“You want a turn as well?” he asks, studying the texture differential of the tips of his fingers against the floor. “Now that Louis is gone. Go ahead. I can’t stop you.”
Or won’t. Strange how breaking the body seems to break the spirit as well. Another time, hundreds of years ago: Lestat with his hands, those big fists, raining upon him from each direction until he was on the ground, limp and placid. He’d deserved it then. He deserves it now.
In some versions of this memory Daniel says yes, no in most of them. What happens next is fractured regardless of the specifics. Hands or mouths or blood or nothing, nothing, nothing. Eventually Daniel always leaves. It’s comforting to know things always end. Always an event at the end of things, everything building up to an ending, yes.
Armand thinks about birds, their hollow bones and flight feathers, making their way across the open sky, and then, eventually, the birds turn into airplanes. He doesn’t even notice at first. It just happens.
–
The plane dilemma, which needn’t exist, strictly speaking, goes thusly:
A plane takes off, continues its glide with the continuous thrust of its engines and the lift of the air over and under the wing, and then it lands. It maneuvers through various routes in the sky, altitudes and horizontal separation, thousands of people occupying radio frequencies to tell one another to turn or change speed. This is normal. Armand knows this: lighthouse, captain, compass, map with little dots all over. The mystery isn’t about how a plane takes off, or how it stays airborne, or how it lands. All of that is just math, and math is – math is. Sometimes during wudu he thinks about spirals, fractals, the shape of a prayer. It’s easy to elaborate on it: the way a winglet helps generate lift, how an engine placement is such a delicate thing, center of gravity, loadmaster checking the weight balance of each separate cargo hold compartment. A great many planes with the window shades down wondering whether a vampire would survive a plane crash. The atmospheric sunlight and the rotation of the earth, how everything tends towards daylight. Louis had said this: a vampire pilot with the first vampire plane. He’d said it the way he often tests things out, a joke waiting for laughter or serious consideration. It hadn’t made sense, back then, but then things tend to make no sense to Armand until they do. Photograph, winglet, flight cycle. The stress of pressurization on a continuous sheet of metal. A plane landing in crosswind nearly completely sideways, straightening out at the last second: if he’d seen it then he wouldn’t have found it so silly.
Of the dilemma: everything is temporary. One cycle is a single flight. It doesn’t matter how long: what matters is the pressurization. Ten flights is ten flights. Stress cracks form and then they spread. The tendrils made their way in and then everything exploded. It’s easier to think of it like that. The planes keep flying. There is no retirement for a plane. They get scrapped and then, eventually, the registration will be given to a new plane. How beautiful, he thinks. Shiny fiberglass in the mirror. Arun, Amadeo, Armand, back to Arun again. Fitting, that, Louis with his hand on the yoke. He can picture it now.
–
On his back on the concrete floor he looks upwards and thinks engine fan blade, nose gear, flight cycle tolerance of the airframe. When he was still fifteen and a trembling thing he would look at the ships and think about exteriority. How one can be inside of something and then suddenly outside of it. He doesn’t remember the last time he was on a boat. In Egypt, arriving into Alexandria, he turned to face Louis and said do you see the cargo ships? In his head he’d added: from here all your eye is drawn to are the great masts of white sheets in the wind. Louis hadn’t known what to do with that. It would’ve been better if he’d said it, at least, but it’d been obvious enough in his face, how he’d smiled, said, look, the water, and then that’d been it. Difficult to say it again, and now, lingering at the harbour.
He had. Still does. Ships with their engines and their sails. Enormous bellies full of cargo, or cabins full of passengers, Venice-bound boys mesmerized by the craftsmanship of the wood, how it bends around metal. You can make just about anything airtight, anything waterproof, if you try hard enough. That’s easy. Armand was already old when the first aircraft took off and then landed, and he was barely older when they dropped bombs from machines much larger. How comforting, he thinks sometimes, how humans will always find more ways to kill each other.
–
Armand lies on the floor for a very long time. Dust, concrete, running water. The wind against the windows, the creaking of the building. A structure must yield to the forces that existed before it. Things tend towards entropy. Armand lies on the floor, gathers dust, pretends to be a dead spider, a sheet of metal designed to bend and expand. He thinks of how hot air is thinner. Dubai, Arizona, Singapore. Scrapyards in the middle of the desert, planes unable to take off into the liftless air, as if anyone would sincerely worry about this.
–
Someone turns Daniel. It must have been Armand, he reasons, mouth full of blood clots and teeth, even if he can’t remember ever getting off the floor. The dust gathers around him in a perfect, unbroken shape. He used to care so much about ships. He wishes he could go home, exactly where he is, right exactly where he already is.
–
“Still here,” Daniel says when he comes back for his things. “I thought Louis told you to get gone.”
”He also told me not to hurt you,” Armand says. His mouth is dry. Talking feels like trying to peel wallpaper off of drywall.
“You didn’t hurt me,” Daniel says. “Made me all better, in fact.”
He’s wearing sunglasses in the darkness, fumbling for the wall switch to turn on the hall light. He’s all beach-salt breeze and blood splatters up the shins. He finds it funny now, because if he takes it seriously he might just set the whole penthouse on fire. Armand lies on the floor and considers the merits of this endeavor. A great big funeral pyre for the both of them.
“Don’t,” Armand says. The rest of this they’ve been through enough times that it gets tiresome. The same argument with Armand unmoving on the floor, dust settling on the eyelids, telling him how he’s cursed forever, his soul destroyed, body bound to this miserable existence. Armand does not want to go through this again right now.
“Fine,” says Daniel. He, too, seems unwilling to poke more. “I’m going home.”
”Good,” Armand says. Wall, ceiling, the noise of an engine. He can hear the airport from here, if he focuses. He wonders, sometimes, if he could tune into a radio frequency, if he could only inhabit the mind of a radio. Handheld, Louis used to say. How perfectly a waist can fit into a pair of hands. He’d fit against the wall, too, shoulder blades tucked against each other, his body a coiled up thing.
“I worry about you,” Daniel says from the door. Time moves in pulses, wet and constant.
“Worry about yourself,” Armand says. Something shifts at the click of the lock. A tear at the eye, unexpected and warm. How could his maker ever let him go?
–
The great machines of fiberglass and metal. He drags himself to his coffin and cannot place himself in it, and regardless Louis had told him to be gone by the time he comes back, so there’s no point in making himself comfortable. Next to the coffin, then.
“You’re still here,” Louis says, nearly quiet from the doorway. Some time has passed, though it’s difficult to know how much.
“I am,” Armand agrees. Palm flat on the floor, then the other, like he might be able to lift himself up by the arms, put himself into a mangled parody of a handstand, finish this conversation like that.
“Thought I made myself clear,” Louis says. He does not come any closer. A ball of fury from his brain barreling towards Armand.
It’s tiresome to agree, but Armand’s got no other choice. “You did.”
“Then why are you here?”
What’s the point of lying? What’s the point of doubling down? He doesn’t want to be here. He wants to go home, and this place feels hostile to the touch. The room is covered in dust.
”I can’t move,” he says. ”I think you – I think my spine is broken.”
It’s a bad move to blame Louis for anything right now, no matter how accurate. Better to pretend his body just did it by itself. He puts a thumb in his mouth. “You’d have to carry me,” he whispers. “I don’t expect you to do that.”
”And put you where?” Louis asks. His hands are balled into fists at his sides. “On the sidewalk?”
Armand looks away. On the sidewalk, in the sunlight, he wouldn’t burn to his death but he would hurt. Blistered skin and broken spine, left in a position where he wouldn’t heal right. It troubles him, that Louis doesn’t want to do that. He could punish him however he wanted to. Armand is a ragdoll with punishment, a receptacle, it’s easier to take it lying down. Why fight? People will find a way to make it hurt regardless.
“I suppose not,” he says, and then, because he feels like he has to, “I’m sorry.”
”Fuck your sorry,” says Louis, and then he turns on his heels, slams the door shut.
–
In his dreams the airplanes. He wonders about this. Where did they come from? Airplane after airplane landing on the runway, thrust reversers set, spoilers deploying, sparks from the overheating brakes. Armand imagines himself by the fence, watching them land, take off, land again. He studies the websites on the iPad until it dies. Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, Bombardier. He was curious about the business jets at some point. It’s more interesting when something can fit dozens of people. This is why we worry about plane crashes, he thinks, to think that one second of things going wrong can result in a mangled mass of metal and flesh. A plane is a predator neutered by wire and computers. They have to identify people by the DNA in hunks of charred flesh. Body into body into fabric into metal into body. He was thinking about bomber aircraft at first. Maybe he should’ve set his sights closer.
–
Hot air is thinner. Hot air generates less lift. Arizona, Dubai, the middle of the desert in the middle of nowhere: in these thoughts, lying on the floor next to his coffin, Armand approaches the sun, invincible and breathless, and the aircraft does the rest. Air, fast and thin, everything underneath him small and quaint. Golden sand, then water. In the back of the plane people settle in for sleep, the way people tend to when the air gets thinner, the plane pressurized to six thousand feet. Natural effects of natural forces.
Armand? Armand is free. Like a wave is free. Like a gust of wind is free. He thinks of these things: the apartment in Sausalito, the house in Berlin, the duplex in Toronto. Louis with his feet in the water, swaddled in blankets up to his nose, his boots in the snow. And Armand, there, also there, always there, until eventually they were always away, always elsewhere, eventually, always.
–
He listens to the sounds of Louis in the rest of the penthouse. Kitchen, living room, the sound of his breathing, the air whistling through the teeth, the gap between tooth and lip. He used to do this, when he was scared of things that no longer happened in the active. The first vampire pilot. Where had that come from? When Armand wants to leave he does it. It’s just Armand never wants to leave. He grows shallow roots and sits still. Louis takes him by the hand, says I wanted to show you something. The world with its wonders. It just never occurred to him that Louis didn’t want to see it either. That their house was always going to be an escape pod, something always ready to deploy. Some things are always about taking flight. Sometimes things take flight the wrong way, simulator crash landings and thrust reversers deployed in midair.
–
The stillness of the light, the dust particles in the light, his eyes swimming with tears. What did he do? Truly? What part of it was so truly different? He lives in half-truths. Everyone does. If he asked Louis to explain himself he would also leave things out. He has been thinking about the honesty of steel, the naked concrete of their walls. People in the wheel wells of these machines freezing to their deaths in the sky. What did they expect? One has to wonder. If a plane flies too low the drag of air to the airframe burns too much fuel. Frame and framed. Cold atmospheric air, aircraft breaking through the clouds, suspended water in limbo, hitting the paint and the windows as if incidentally. Moths will orbit a lamp thinking they’re circling the sun until they burn themselves on it. Pilots, confused by the g-forces and the lack of a visible horizon, will enter death spirals with no possible stall recovery maneuvers, thousands of pounds and millions of dollars worth of delicate electronics floating towards the ground like a lead feather. In the daytime Armand would lie on his side with his hands clasped together next to his body and stare at Louis. It’s been on his mind, lately, the smell of burning flesh. Louis had forgotten but Armand hadn’t. He’s not sure who it was for anymore. Things continue until they end. One sleeps expecting the world to go on in the background until there’s a reason to wake up. Maybe that’s why.
–
He reaches the charger still plugged into the wall socket. The iPad wakes up. Blue light for his tired eyes, just what he needed, blue light and dry air. He remembers the air conditioning unit. He read about it before: the engines with the intake design that could poison everyone inside in the event of an engine fire, bird strike, malfunctioning hydraulics. A man on YouTube saying this: if Boeing does not act now, someone will die. This is worse than MCAS. He is wearing a lanyard and a pin, both of them certifying him as an expert. This man trains other pilots, it says. He knows what he’s talking about when he tells you the size of a Canada goose. Armand types the acronyms into Google. He remembers the engine balance, the delicate connections, yes, he knows of this. He thinks of the mangled meat and metal. He likes m-sounds too, the glottal stop of a t, how meat feels in the mouth. File that away for later. The history of aviation is like the history of anything else, people doing things until they can no longer get away with it. Nothing on the news he could find. When he says he dreams he means he imagines things happening on the ceiling in the dark. Outside the sun is already up. He should be feeding, he knows, but there is nothing for him to eat in this room. He could ask Louis for something, but he doesn’t know if Louis would give him anything, and anyway he’s gotten the hint already. He has no right to ask anymore. His body heals in stretches of sinew and bone. The spinal cord reconnects. It hurts: no one tells you this.
–
In the manuals he goes through one can learn about how to set waypoints, where to crosscheck pressurization, what to do in the event of a fire in the avionics bay. One can fly a plane like talking to a computer. Armand’s hands itch. He would take apart anything made of wire if he could. A plane is more computer than anything, these days. An Airbus flies itself, he reads. A Boeing makes you work for it. A hundred crying laughing emoji reacts on the Facebook post, the rest of them default likes. His finger hovers over the like button. Louis would see it, if he did. What of the planes? He wouldn’t ask, but he’d be upset. Like Armand getting curious was indicative of him finding ways to make fun of Louis. Maybe he wouldn’t think this. It’s hard to say.
He can’t perform wudu like this. The sink is too far away, the shower across the hall, and he couldn’t reach either of them even if he tried. Nothing else for him to use in sight. For his prayers he forces himself into poses he shouldn’t be able to get into, a punishment for the body. He forgets to think of this, sometimes. The rhythm of a soul, like rain pounding against the roof, a sound he grew used to in Seattle, forgot again in Dubai. It’s good to remember what really matters. He will have to repeat all of this. Pressurization, flight cycle, knowing oneself to be impure to the point of burning with it. In some way it feels good to know he can still feel panic. A frame full of souls, this is how metal works. His eyes water, forehead to the ground. If he was in the bedroom he would be trapped on the highest level of the stairs, close enough to the bathroom. In the guest bedroom the air smells like dried blood and cerebrospinal fluid. This, too, is how metal works.
–
By day three he can feel his toes again. It’s bittersweet, he supposes, to know that his existence now registers again. He’d been having such a lovely time imagining himself as a sheet of metal.
“You need to leave,” says Louis when he sees him at the end of the hall. “You need to be gone now.”
“I know,” Armand says. His legs shake with each step, ankle to hip. He hadn’t realized his legs were mangled, too, his body too numb, his body hidden by his clothes. The steps he takes are strange and unfamiliar to the bones healed nearly correctly. “I’m going.”
Louis does not ask where he’s going. His lip trembles the way it does before he starts crying. It used to frustrate Armand, to see him fight it back. He would’ve liked his face in the skin of his neck, his head under Armand’s chin. Armand likes to stroke his back, to kiss the top of his head. The wobbling lip, the scrunched up eyebrows. Armand doesn’t deserve that anymore. Perhaps he never did.
He dangles off his own leash. Daniel is gone. Armand is gone, too. He considers the entire world while he waits for the elevator, but by the time he gets to the door he already knows where he’s going. His legs are going to take him to the airport perimeter fence, whether he wants it or not.