Flying by Eric Kraft

The Barnes & Noble Review

Pieter Brueghel's Landscape with Fall of Icarus famously depicts the mythical crash of Daedalus' son as a non-event. You remember the tale: Icarus' father, Daedalus, the tricky nerd who invented the labyrinth for King Minos, fashioned wings of wax and feathers in order to escape exile in Crete. Flighty Icarus climbed too close to the sun, melting his waxen pinions and plunging to his death. In Brueghel's version, indolent shepherds and toiling ploughmen fail to notice as Icarus splashes down indecorously in a busy sea lane.

According to Brueghel, our dreams and desperations are so much wax and feathers. But the ancients were kinder to Icarus; they called the stretch of water in which he was lost the Icarian sea in his memory. The Greeks also had a more hard-boiled version of the myth, in which Pasiphaë lends the father-and-son duo a boat to effect a more practical escape. In that telling, Daedalus invents sails to outpace Minos' pursuing galleys: instead of a miraculous, hubris-fueled flight, we get the shipping business. These mythical discrepancies prompt a question: what if both versions have their roots in reality? What if Daedalus merely hinted at flight, spreading the rumor of a killer app in order to cover his maritime tracks? Perhaps Icarus, that dolt, merely fell overboard en route -- a possible interpretation of the Brueghel painting, which depicts the lad tumbling into the drink beside a galley under full sail. It's the same the kind of doublecross that Eric Kraft's haplessly hubristic protagonist, Peter Leroy, perpetrates on the loving residents of his hometown. In Flying, young Peter rolls, stumbles, lies, and -- briefly, sweetly, accidentally -- flies his way through his own mythology, a home-brewed, do-it-yourself contraption of delusions, Potemkin tourist traps, and faulty memory.

For Peter, it all begins with a lie -- a real ingrown toenail of a lie, a richly rotted, impacted cuspid of confabulation, an ouroboros of faulty oratory. Having convinced his parents that he has won a scholarship to a science camp in far-off Corosso, New Mexico, young Peter decides to build a flying motorcycle to travel from his hometown of Babbington, on Long Island, to the desert faraway. Following instructions he finds in the pages of Impractical Craftsman magazine, Peter builds the unlikely thing out of scavenged parts, dubs it Spirit of Babbington, travels there and back again upon it, and is crowned with laurels by the proud Babbingtonians, among whom his feats of engineering and aeronautical brio ensure his immortality. They may not rechristen Long Island Sound, but they do try to turn his Daedalan escapade into tourist bait.

When an adult Peter discovers the invention undertaken in his name, he begins looking for a way to undo the knot he's tied in history without offending too many old friends. With us, his trusted readers, Peter is good enough to set the record straight early; by page 26, he lets us in on the game: "I flew part of the way," he asserts. "I also taxied part of the way, before taking off and landing. I would say now...that I flew a total of about 180 to 200 feet on the way out to New Mexico. My longest sustained period of flight might have covered six feet." While the truth outs early, its implications take a leisurely trilogy to unfold. Flying gathers three books: Taking Off and On the Wing, and Flying Home. That it takes nearly one and a half of those books to reach the account of Spirit's record flight helps to measure the labyrinthine enjambments of Peter Leroy's story. For as Peter peers back into his fickle, fungible memory, he finds events aren't ordered as well as he might like. With his wife and soul mate, the wise Albertine, Peter Leroy sets out on a new journey to separate truth from falsehood -- only to find that they're opposite ends of the same beast forever swallowing its own tail.

If you were to pick up a hitchhiking Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Pirsig, or to listen as Thomas Pynchon recited Ulysses from memory over longnecks on J. D. Salinger's tab, you might catch the flavor of Eric Kraft's work. Peter's own voice is deadpan and faux-naive, and yet it's woven with strands teased from disparate and richly plaited sheets of modern culture. With Kraft, the jaunty, decadent fables of Alfred Jarry turn into practical engineering advice, while the nerdy ambitions of American do-it-yourself magazines begin to seem like a species of avant-garde art out of some Dadaism for Dummies. His chief tools, however, are borrowed not only from the pages of Popular Mechanics but from Proust and Balzac; Baudelaire and Faustroll take turns with advertisements for Hohner Harmonicas and the Elementary Differential Equations.

Peter Leroy's lost time is sought out amid a Kraft-crafted canon of short books like The Fox and the Clam and Herb 'n' Lorna -- books that plumb the lives of Leroy's friends, pets, and collateral relations. Kraft himself calls his protagonist's stories "an alternative version of his life story" -- a fictional character's autobiographical fantasies, a funhouse of broken mirrors. Conceived as a trilogy, Flying is the Scriptural underpinning to this vast tapestries of acts, deeds, and things, a canonical, post-hoc justification to frame and enclose a vast and fragmentary corpus. Do they draw those disparate books together into a whole? No -- but then, neither is Scripture self-consistent. Leave consistency to the hobgoblins. Contradiction is dialogic, and Eric Kraft's books make a crowded shelf of rich and entertaining crosstalk.

As we follow the older-but-no-wiser Peter's quest to undo his legacy, we learn of the many dangers and reversals his young self encountered on the way west. Some are hallucinatory, others are terribly real; but all are unequivocally terrestrial encounters. Spirit may be a marvel of teenage engineering and a wise and watchful muse in her own right, but a flier she is not; astride her, Peter taxis through the long days of his journey, conjuring hilltop castles and lascivious waitresses out of the beating sunlight. His one fragmentary moment of true aviation takes place as he and Spirit enter New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment. Cresting a rise, the rushing air imparts lift toSpirit's wings. Peter descends the hill "in a series of graceful flutters" to be greeted by a band of believers in a rose-strewn tent, who take him to be a UFO-mounted alien arrived to administer their salvation. As Peter fibs his way into the cult's good graces, we come to understand that his stories aren't remotely "truthy"; they're mythopoetic, always emerging out of some extraordinary occurrence to answer the needs of those who receive them.

Though his picaresque peregrinations offer many a scrape, Peter emerges strangely unscathed, unprepared for a final reckoning with truth before the assembled Babbington masses. He richly deserves the reversals which, up till now, he fantastically avoided. Even Albertine, despite her wisdom and more than occasional chagrin, seems strangely accepting and unruffled in the end by the unraveling of Peter's clews. And yet his preternatural good fortune is tempered somewhat by final knowledge that we are all Icarus, dreaming of flight while stuck on deck fiddling with the rigging. So Peter doesn't tell the UFO watchers that he was felled when sunspots affected his "magnetomic drive" merely to deceive -- he's answering their prayers, confirming and enlarging their own mythology. And ultimately, no one needs Peter's tall tales more than the residents of Babbington. Hubris may offend the gods, but we need it -- and the accidental mythology it spawns -- if not in ourselves, then in our neighbors, sons, and daughters. --Matthew Battles

Matthew Battles is the author of Library: An Unquiet History. He has written about language, technology, and history for such publications as The American Scholar, The Boston Sunday Globe, and Harper's.

From the Publisher

Critics have compared him to Proust, Pynchon, and Fred Astaire--an artful, slyly intelligent, wildly inventive observer of Americana. Now Eric Kraft has landed an ambitious comedy set both in our present and in an alternative 1950s universe--Flying.

It is the tail end of the 1950s, and in the town of Babbington, New York, a young dreamer named Peter Leroy has set out to build a flying motorcycle, using a design ripped from the pages of Impractical Craftsman magazine. This two-wheeled wonder will carry him not only to such faraway places as New mexico and the Summer Institute in Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry, but deep into the heart of commercialized American culture, and return him to Babbington a hero. More than forty years later, as Babbington is about to rebuild itself as a theme park commemorating his historic flight, Peter must return home to set the record straight, and confess that his flight did not match the legend that it inspired.

Drawing together Eric Kraft's previously published Taking Off and On the Wing with the brand-new final part of the story, Flying Home, Flying is a buoyant comedy of remarkable wingspan, a hilarious story of hoaxes, digressions, do-it-yourself engineering, and the wilds of memory--and a great satire of magical thinking in America.

The New York Times - Laura Miller

Kraft's unpretentious parodies of contemporary society and its affectations are the best thing about Flying, shrewd enough to delight any aficionados of postmodern fiction who can get past the novel's Leave It to Beaver facade…Beneath its aw-shucks surface, Flying is an ingenious, at times dizzyingly self-inverting assault not only on the truth, but on the concoction of palatable fictions, as well. Its only inviolate god is the human imagination; it's a paean to flight by a boy who never left the ground, except, perhaps, where it counts most: in his mind.

Publishers Weekly

This chunky paperback collects Flying Home, the final installment to Kraft's Flying trilogy, along with its predecessors to give readers the full, nutty story of Peter Leroy's solo cross-country "aerocycle" flight 50 years ago. Alternating with Peter's memoir of the summer after his cross-country odyssey is the story of his return to hometown Babbington, N.Y., as a man in his 60s prepared to confess that his hand-built contraption never made it off the ground. As Peter and his wife, Albertine, continue the road trip begun in On the Wing, Peter reads aloud from his memoir, recalling the bizarre goings-on at the Summer Institute of Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry. His recollections show Peter to be an unreliable narrator whose wandering mind ends up being far more revealing than his impressions of reality might have been. The simple narrative structure belies the complex way that Kraft interweaves philosophy and science while gently pushing Peter and Albertine toward the big moment of truth. Kraft brings the trilogy to a fitting end, and the collected works comprise an intricate, intelligent and finely crafted saga. (Mar.)

Jim Dwyer - Library Journal

Kraft's protagonist through 12 novels, the memoirist Peter Leroy is both an egoist and an egotist who by all rights should be a crashing bore, but his curious idiosyncrasies, strange perspectives, and satirical wit render him fascinating. His ego is held somewhat in check by his wryly brilliant wife, Albertine, and their pithy, erudite conversations resemble those of a markedly hornier William Powell and Myrna Loy. The account of a mostly fraudulent "aerocycle" voyage to and from Long Island, NY, to a summer institute for potential spies in New Mexico by 15-year-old Peter around 1960 alternates with the tale of Peter and Albertine retracing the voyage in the present day. Both voyages could be described as picaresques, featuring a delightful variety of odd hostelries and characters. Kraft employs actual and altered illustrations and advertisements from popular science magazines from the 1930s through the 1950s to hilarious effect. Likely to appeal primarily to boomers and seniors, this is an essential purchase for public libraries, but it is also recommended for academic libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

This delightful omnibus volume includes three novels: the previously published Taking Off and On the Wing and the never before published Flying Home, which completes the adolescent adventure of Kraft's serial alter ego character Peter Leroy-aka the "Bird Boy of Babbington."Flying Home revisits the 1950s, when Peter's "flight" from Long Island to New Mexico via a home-made "aerocycle" (which, in truth, only "taxied" at virtual ground level) made him a local celebrity-and also shows him in the near-present, now in his 60s, resigned to tell the unromantic truth about his adventure. We're also made privy to his youthful experiences at a most unconventional institution of, uh, higher learning: the Summer Institute of Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry (SIMPaW), a precariously dangling branch of the New Mexico Institute of Agriculture, Technology, and Pharmacy. This southwestern Arcadia is a breeding ground for miscellaneous young geniuses and crackpots, and a vehicle, some might say, for Kraft's deadpan reworking of the imaginary discipline of "pataphysics" concocted by super-eccentric surrealist author Alfred Jarry. SIMPaW's inspired simulations of applied science are nicely juxtaposed with Peter's abovementioned later return home, accompanied by his unflappably cool and comforting spouse Albertine, as he scrambles for a palatable explanation of his "lies," which may discourage Babbington from exploiting his local fame as the main attraction of a tourist-friendly theme park. As all Kraft's novels do, this one meanders and repeats itself nearly ad nauseam. But the tomfoolery retains its power to charm, and Peter's habit of "mental traveling" finally adds up to something like a Proustianexploration of the phenomenon of memory. Besides, there's no resisting an author who, while effortlessly shifting gears and subjects, announces, "I apologize for this chapter."Flying Home doesn't soar quite so high as its predecessors, but the finished trilogy is a trip not to be missed.

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Albertine Takes a Tumble

?THE CONFINES OF THE AVERAGE GARAGE,? I said to Albertine.

?Ahhh, darling,? she said with a sigh, ?you know how I love that sweet talk.?

?The confines of the average garage,? I repeated seductively.

?Mmm,? she moaned with pleasure.

?Those confines come up again and again in the descriptions of these

build-it-yourself planes.?

?All the romance has gone from garages, I see,? she said, pouting.

?The people selling the kits or plans are always reassuring the prospective builder that the plane can be built ?within the confines of the average garage.??

?And you suspect them of stretching the truth? Or shrinking the truth??

?It?s not that. It?s the word that surprises me.?

?Garage??

?No. Confines.?

?I prefer garage. If you say it right, it sounds like a term of endearment. ?Oh, how I lahhhve you, my leetle garrr-azzh.??

We were having this conversation on the roadway that winds through Central Park, on a Sunday afternoon. The road is closed on weekends to vehicular traffic but available to runners, walkers, skaters, dogboarders, and bicycle riders. We were on our bicycles. It was a fine day in the late fall, the air cool, the sun low but warming, our spirits light.

?It surprises me that they don?t just say, ?You can build it in a garage.??

?Well, Peter, I think they want to make the point that you can build it in the space that would be available in your garage if you have a garage, but that you don?t actually have to have a garage.?

?Yes, but??

?Not everyone has a garage. We don?t.?

?We have no car.?

?Exactly. Therefore, no need for a garage. So the people selling the kits orplans may be trying to reassure the prospective builder that a garage is not actually required, just the space that your garage would contain if you had one.?

?The space contained by the average garage would easily fit within the confines of our apartment,? I pointed out.

She turned to deliver a rejoinder, and I saw the accident occur, the absurd events preceding it, the awful instant of coincidence, and the consequence.

To Albertine?s right, a woman was dogboarding, and to her left, another woman was dogboarding. In the space of the five years that Albertine and I had been living in Manhattan, the sport of dogboarding had come from nowhere to attain a status of considerable popularity. I have heard people attempt to explain its sudden rise with the theory that it suited the predilections of many because it was an outdoor activity in which the dog did the work rather than the master, that it required gear expensive enough to give it consumer snob appeal (particularly if you counted the dog), and that it offered a physical and sensual experience that other urban sports did not, combining as it did elements of wake riding, skateboarding, and snowboarding. In addition, though, I think we should not discount the powerful appeal of its giving residents of the Upper East Side something they seem to have craved for a long time: a

reason for housing a large dog in the confines of a small apartment.

The dogboarder?s dog is outfitted with a harness similar in cut to the coats that pampered pets wear in cold weather. It fits over the dog?s chest and around its forelegs and back, with reins extending rearward from the sides. Behind the dog, the boarder stands on a platform that resembles a skateboard, with the difference that instead of skate wheels the dogboard has two large wheels, miniatures of the high-tech wheels with composite rims that are used in bicycle racing, one fore and one aft, of a diameter great enough that they rise above the surface of the board, set within slots in the board and turning on axles that run through mounts below it.

I remember wondering, when I glanced at the enormous and powerful dog pulling the woman on Albertine?s right, whether it had been bred expressly for dogboarding. The dog pulling the woman on Albertine?s left was smaller, but not by much, and it was especially keen. It strained in its harness in a way that the larger dog did not, lunging forward whenever the other moved a bit ahead. I wondered, and I intended to discuss this with Albertine later, after the women had passed by, whether they were longtime rivals, competitors in business and within their social set and now in the dogboarding arena of Central Park. In the manner of superheroes, both were dressed in sleek, formfitting, iridescent outfits that advertised their fitness and firmness and enhanced the resplendence of their bodies in action. They were running a playful game, crisscrossing, playing their dogs as charioteers would their steeds, tugging lightly at their harnesses to yaw the dogs this way and that. Though neither allowed the other to remain ahead, the race they were running was not a race for position but for prominence in the eye of the beholder, status as the most adept and alluring dogboarder in the city. Their rivalry had infected their dogs; they snarled at each other across the couple of feet that separated them. Later, I told myself that I should have realized that the women and their dogs posed a threat to Albertine, but they were so fluent in their movements, the dogs so good at what they were doing and the women apparently so fully in control of their dogs, that they seemed to be harmless, until the moment when Albertine turned her head, just for an instant, to reply to me, and in that moment the smaller of the dogs did something to offend the larger. What? Nothing that I can see in my mind?s eye when I recall the moment. It may have been a look; it may have been something in his tone of voice, a vulgarity in his snarl; it may have been some grosser violation of the code of dogs; it may only have been that he strayed a bit from what the larger dog perceived as the proper confines of his lane. Whatever it was, it made the dog on the right respond suddenly and violently. He lunged at the dog on the left, to nip at his foreleg, I think, as a warning against persisting in that offensive behavior.

?Al!? I cried.

I saw the look on her face, saw that she was reading the look on my face. She saw the alarm there, and it made her swing around to face forward again. The dogboarding woman on the right tugged hard on the reins, but the dog was determined and resisted her. She yawed involuntarily, she fought to recover, she rolled, and her board shot from under her directly into Albertine?s path. Al saw it. In an instant of peripheral awareness she turned to the left to try to avoid it, but she was on top of it. Her front wheel struck the board, and Albertine pitched forward, up and over her handlebars and onto the pavement.

I was off my bike in a moment and at her side.

?Oh, my darling, my darling,? I said, kneeling beside her, kissing her, ?my leettle garajzh.?

She didn?t seem to be in pain. She didn?t seem to be hurt, only surprised, but, ?Something is wrong,? she said. ?Something is wrong.?

From the Symphysis Pubis to the Crest of Ilium

SHE LAY ON A GURNEY in the hallway of the emergency room at Carl Schurz Hospital, just down the street from our apartment, just half a block from home. Hours had passed since the accident. She was in shock, I suppose, still not quite believing that this had happened to her. In the park, when she had come to rest on the pavement, she had worn that look of surprise, but now there was added to it a grimace, and I could see that she was suffering. She had cried out when the emergency medical technicians had lifted her onto the stretcher to load her into the ambulance. Here in the hospital she had been given morphine for the pain, but she could feel it through the morphine.

?Was my skirt up around my waist?? she asked.

?You?re wearing shorts,? I said.

?I am??

?You are.? I brought her hand to my lips. I had a flash of memory, one of my earliest. In the memory, I was standing on my maternal grandparents? front lawn, with a kitten in either hand, looking across the lawn to where my grandparents, my parents, Dudley Beaker, and Eliza Foote were gathered for drinks in the summer dusk. Something had happened to disturb my mother, to upset her. I didn?t know what it was, and wouldn?t have understood it if I had, but I saw that something had upset her, disturbed her equilibrium. When I looked in the direction of the adults, I saw my mother in the act of falling from her lawn chair, and she wore the expression of surprise that I had seen on Albertine. At the time, I thought that my mother was playing, partly because of that expression of surprise. I saw, and understood in my infantile way, that she was exhilarated by crossing the line of equilibrium into a more excited state, and I laughed then, but in the hospital, with Albertine hurting so and worried that the world had seen her underwear, I saw in the mind?s eye of memory that my mother had also been shocked at the moment of her tumble, astonished that this should be happening to her, and deeply embarrassed.

?Was I wearing shorts the whole time??

?Yes, my darling.?

?How prudent of me.?

?Your dignity was preserved throughout.?

?I doubt that,? she said. She sighed. ?What happened??

?That woman?s dogboard shot in front of you, and you hit it.?

?Yes,? she said distantly, apparently struggling to regain the memory.

?You had turned backward to say something to me, but I saw what was happening and when I called to you, you turned around, turned forward I mean, and you saw what was about to happen, so you yawed to the left, trying to avoid it. You didn?t have time to turn much, not enough to avoid the board, but you did turn enough to avoid going straight over the handlebars and landing on your head.?

?Did I execute a full forward somersault??

?Head over teakettle.?

?I think it?s cracked.?

?Head? Or teakettle??

?Head, maybe. Teakettle, definitely.?

In another couple of hours, after she had been investigated by X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging, we knew that she was right. Her pelvis had been fractured ?in three places,? according to the surgeon on duty in the emergency room, who later charged an inflated fee but was, in his reading of the film as well as his estimate of what his time was worth, wrong. Her pelvis had actually been fractured along a nearly continuous line from the symphysis pubis to the crest of ilium, making the integrity of the pelvis itself?so essential to supporting the body in its upright human stance and allowing it pedal mobility?tenuous, liable to a painful and perhaps irreparable shift along the fracture if she were to put her weight on her right leg, but we didn?t know that until later.

?What did I say?? she asked.

?Say?? I stroked her hand. She was lying on her back. She had been told not to move.

?You told me that I turned around to say something to you. What was it??

?I don?t know. You never got to say it. Do you remember what you were going to say??

?No. I don?t remember,? she said. ?Something clever, I think. We would have laughed.?

SOMETIME AFTER FOUR in the morning, I came out of the hospital entrance and turned toward home. I doubted that I would be able to sleep if I went home, and it was too early to call Albertine?s mother and the boys to tell them what had happened, so when I reached the corner, I turned toward Carl Schurz Park instead. I couldn?t stop my mind from replaying the memory of Albertine in the air, flying forward over her handlebars, yawing, pitching, and rolling in her flight, until she landed?crashed, that is?on the unyielding pavement, and then the still way she had lain there, with her legs straight out and that awful look of surprise on her face, and with it, almost superimposed on it, ran the memory of my mother, falling from her lawn chair. For both of them I felt a deep sympathy and, surprising to me, a deeper sadness for the loss of dignity that they had suffered, and I felt, as intensely as if I had fallen myself, how hard it is to hold on to dignity, to attain some scrap of dignity and then hold on to it, and I resented the way that accidents had snatched their dignity from them. I stood at the railing, looking down at the dark water of the East River, feeling useless. I couldn?t mitigate Albertine?s pain, couldn?t alleviate it in any way, and I couldn?t imagine how I could restore her dignity. While I stood there, feeling the hollow emptiness of uselessness, I began to feel something else overcome me, a familiar feeling, the overwhelming feeling of being full of my love for her. There were times, and this was one, when the experience of that love was so great that it overpowered all other emotions, rendered me incapable of feeling anything else. This state of being full of love for her was buoying, uplifting, elating, and liberating, and it lifted me, made me feel that if I chose to, I could arise and fly across the river, to Queens.

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Albertine Takes a Tumble

“THE CONFINES OF THE AVERAGE GARAGE,” I said to Albertine.

“Ahhh, darling,” she said with a sigh, “you know how I love that sweet talk.”

“The confines of the average garage,” I repeated seductively.

     “Mmm,” she moaned with pleasure.

“Those confines come up again and again in the descriptions of these

build-it-yourself planes.”

“All the romance has gone from garages, I see,” she said, pouting.

“The people selling the kits or plans are always reassuring the prospective builder that the plane can be built ‘within the confines of the average garage.’”

“And you suspect them of stretching the truth? Or shrinking the truth?”

“It’s not that. It’s the word that surprises me.”

“Garage?”

“No. Confines.”

“I prefer garage. If you say it right, it sounds like a term of endearment. ‘Oh, how I lahhhve you, my leetle garrr-azzh.’”

We were having this conversation on the roadway that winds through Central Park, on a Sunday afternoon. The road is closed on weekends to vehicular traffic but available to runners, walkers, skaters, dogboarders, andbicycle riders. We were on our bicycles. It was a fine day in the late fall, the air cool, the sun low but warming, our spirits light.

“It surprises me that they don’t just say, ‘You can build it in a garage.’”

“Well, Peter, I think they want to make the point that you can build it in the space that would be available in your garage if you have a garage, but that you don’t actually have to have a garage.”

“Yes, but—”

“Not everyone has a garage. We don’t.”

“We have no car.”

      “Exactly. Therefore, no need for a garage. So the people selling the kits or plans may be trying to reassure the prospective builder that a garage is not actually required, just the space that your garage would contain if you had one.”

      “The space contained by the average garage would easily fit within the confines of our apartment,” I pointed out.

She turned to deliver a rejoinder, and I saw the accident occur, the absurd events preceding it, the awful instant of coincidence, and the consequence.

To Albertine’s right, a woman was dogboarding, and to her left, another woman was dogboarding. In the space of the five years that Albertine and I had been living in Manhattan, the sport of dogboarding had come from nowhere to attain a status of considerable popularity. I have heard people attempt to explain its sudden rise with the theory that it suited the predilections of many because it was an outdoor activity in which the dog did the work rather than the master, that it required gear expensive enough to give it consumer snob appeal (particularly if you counted the dog), and that it offered a physical and sensual experience that other urban sports did not, combining as it did elements of wake riding, skateboarding, and snowboarding. In addition, though, I think we should not discount the powerful appeal of its giving residents of the Upper East Side something they seem to have craved for a long time: a

reason for housing a large dog in the confines of a small apartment.

      The dogboarder’s dog is outfitted with a harness similar in cut to the coats that pampered pets wear in cold weather. It fits over the dog’s chest and around its forelegs and back, with reins extending rearward from the sides. Behind the dog, the boarder stands on a platform that resembles a skateboard, with the difference that instead of skate wheels the dogboard has two large wheels, miniatures of the high-tech wheels with composite rims that are used in bicycle racing, one fore and one aft, of a diameter great enough that they rise above the surface of the board, set within slots in the board and turning on axles that run through mounts below it.

I remember wondering, when I glanced at the enormous and powerful dog pulling the woman on Albertine’s right, whether it had been bred expressly for dogboarding. The dog pulling the woman on Albertine’s left was smaller, but not by much, and it was especially keen. It strained in its harness in a way that the larger dog did not, lunging forward whenever the other moved a bit ahead. I wondered, and I intended to discuss this with Albertine later, after the women had passed by, whether they were longtime rivals, competitors in business and within their social set and now in the dogboarding arena of Central Park. In the manner of superheroes, both were dressed in sleek, formfitting, iridescent outfits that advertised their fitness and firmness and enhanced the resplendence of their bodies in action. They were running a playful game, crisscrossing, playing their dogs as charioteers would their steeds, tugging lightly at their harnesses to yaw the dogs this way and that. Though neither allowed the other to remain ahead, the race they were running was not a race for position but for prominence in the eye of the beholder, status as the most adept and alluring dogboarder in the city. Their rivalry had infected their dogs; they snarled at each other across the couple of feet that separated them. Later, I told myself that I should have realized that the women and their dogs posed a threat to Albertine, but they were so fluent in their movements, the dogs so good at what they were doing and the women apparently so fully in control of their dogs, that they seemed to be harmless, until the moment when Albertine turned her head, just for an instant, to reply to me, and in that moment the smaller of the dogs did something to offend the larger. What? Nothing that I can see in my mind’s eye when I recall the moment. It may have been a look; it may have been something in his tone of voice, a vulgarity in his snarl; it may have been some grosser violation of the code of dogs; it may only have been that he strayed a bit from what the larger dog perceived as the proper confines of his lane. Whatever it was, it made the dog on the right respond suddenly and violently. He lunged at the dog on the left, to nip at his foreleg, I think, as a warning against persisting in that offensive behavior.

“Al!” I cried.

I saw the look on her face, saw that she was reading the look on my face. She saw the alarm there, and it made her swing around to face forward again. The dogboarding woman on the right tugged hard on the reins, but the dog was determined and resisted her. She yawed involuntarily, she fought to recover, she rolled, and her board shot from under her directly into Albertine’s path. Al saw it. In an instant of peripheral awareness she turned to the left to try to avoid it, but she was on top of it. Her front wheel struck the board, and Albertine pitched forward, up and over her handlebars and onto the pavement.

I was off my bike in a moment and at her side.

“Oh, my darling, my darling,” I said, kneeling beside her, kissing her, “my leettle garajzh.”

She didn’t seem to be in pain. She didn’t seem to be hurt, only surprised, but, “Something is wrong,” she said. “Something is wrong.”

From the Symphysis Pubis to the Crest of Ilium

      SHE LAY ON A GURNEY in the hallway of the emergency room at Carl Schurz Hospital, just down the street from our apartment, just half a block from home. Hours had passed since the accident. She was in shock, I suppose, still not quite believing that this had happened to her. In the park, when she had come to rest on the pavement, she had worn that look of surprise, but now there was added to it a grimace, and I could see that she was suffering. She had cried out when the emergency medical technicians had lifted her onto the stretcher to load her into the ambulance. Here in the hospital she had been given morphine for the pain, but she could feel it through the morphine.

“Was my skirt up around my waist?” she asked.

“You’re wearing shorts,” I said.

“I am?”

“You are.” I brought her hand to my lips. I had a flash of memory, one of my earliest. In the memory, I was standing on my maternal grandparents’ front lawn, with a kitten in either hand, looking across the lawn to where my grandparents, my parents, Dudley Beaker, and Eliza Foote were gathered for drinks in the summer dusk. Something had happened to disturb my mother, to upset her. I didn’t know what it was, and wouldn’t have understood it if I had, but I saw that something had upset her, disturbed her equilibrium. When I looked in the direction of the adults, I saw my mother in the act of falling from her lawn chair, and she wore the expression of surprise that I had seen on Albertine. At the time, I thought that my mother was playing, partly because of that expression of surprise. I saw, and understood in my infantile way, that she was exhilarated by crossing the line of equilibrium into a more excited state, and I laughed then, but in the hospital, with Albertine hurting so and worried that the world had seen her underwear, I saw in the mind’s eye of memory that my mother had also been shocked at the moment of her tumble, astonished that this should be happening to her, and deeply embarrassed.

“Was I wearing shorts the whole time?”

“Yes, my darling.”

“How prudent of me.”

“Your dignity was preserved throughout.”

“I doubt that,” she said. She sighed. “What happened?”

“That woman’s dogboard shot in front of you, and you hit it.”

“Yes,” she said distantly, apparently struggling to regain the memory.

“You had turned backward to say something to me, but I saw what was happening and when I called to you, you turned around, turned forward I mean, and you saw what was about to happen, so you yawed to the left, trying to avoid it. You didn’t have time to turn much, not enough to avoid the board, but you did turn enough to avoid going straight over the handlebars and landing on your head.”

“Did I execute a full forward somersault?”

“Head over teakettle.”

“I think it’s cracked.”

“Head? Or teakettle?”

“Head, maybe. Teakettle, definitely.”

In another couple of hours, after she had been investigated by X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging, we knew that she was right. Her pelvis had been fractured “in three places,” according to the surgeon on duty in the emergency room, who later charged an inflated fee but was, in his reading of the film as well as his estimate of what his time was worth, wrong. Her pelvis had actually been fractured along a nearly continuous line from the symphysis pubis to the crest of ilium, making the integrity of the pelvis itself—so essential to supporting the body in its upright human stance and allowing it pedal mobility—tenuous, liable to a painful and perhaps irreparable shift along the fracture if she were to put her weight on her right leg, but we didn’t know that until later.

“What did I say?” she asked.

“Say?” I stroked her hand. She was lying on her back. She had been told not to move.

“You told me that I turned around to say something to you. What was it?”

“I don’t know. You never got to say it. Do you remember what you were going to say?”

“No. I don’t remember,” she said. “Something clever, I think. We would have laughed.”

SOMETIME AFTER FOUR in the morning, I came out of the hospital entrance and turned toward home. I doubted that I would be able to sleep if I went home, and it was too early to call Albertine’s mother and the boys to tell them what had happened, so when I reached the corner, I turned toward Carl Schurz Park instead. I couldn’t stop my mind from replaying the memory of Albertine in the air, flying forward over her handlebars, yawing, pitching, and rolling in her flight, until she landed—crashed, that is—on the unyielding pavement, and then the still way she had lain there, with her legs straight out and that awful look of surprise on her face, and with it, almost superimposed on it, ran the memory of my mother, falling from her lawn chair. For both of them I felt a deep sympathy and, surprising to me, a deeper sadness for the loss of dignity that they had suffered, and I felt, as intensely as if I had fallen myself, how hard it is to hold on to dignity, to attain some scrap of dignity and then hold on to it, and I resented the way that accidents had snatched their dignity from them. I stood at the railing, looking down at the dark water of the East River, feeling useless. I couldn’t mitigate Albertine’s pain, couldn’t alleviate it in any way, and I couldn’t imagine how I could restore her dignity. While I stood there, feeling the hollow emptiness of uselessness, I began to feel something else overcome me, a familiar feeling, the overwhelming feeling of being full of my love for her. There were times, and this was one, when the experience of that love was so great that it overpowered all other emotions, rendered me incapable of feeling anything else. This state of being full of love for her was buoying, uplifting, elating, and liberating, and it lifted me, made me feel that if I chose to, I could arise and fly across the river, to Queens.

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Excerpted from Flying by Kraft, Eric Copyright © 2009 by Kraft, Eric. Excerpted by permission.
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