13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [38]
It must be her; he recognizes the pun in her request that he get a room to take her to—this stray cash she delivered with that strange little smile that afternoon on his walk home through the public garden. Surely it is a signal that she wants to be recognized. The meaningless play on words acquires meaning by being repeated in this new context, and becomes a harbinger of something enormous, some portentous and thoroughly inappropriate development in his life.
His body hums. His soul roars. The feeling reminds him of his fighter pilot days.
Yes, he, one of the first fighter pilots in the world, swooping through the sky in this war that started with cavalry charges. At first, his mission was always reconnaissance, and he was given only a revolver to defend himself. A revolver!
Was he supposed to steer his machine while making note of trench locations and shoot the pilot of an enemy plane right between the eyes, should such a plane make its sudden appearance in the air next to him? It was absurd and he knew it, but he tried not to let himself know it too acutely. He failed at this. Images of being destroyed often came to him too clearly, and he could not push them away.
Eventually, they gave Langlais a plane with a machine gun mounted on it, right in front of him for easy reach. Yet the contraption was put together oddly: the weapon was aimed right through the radius of the rotating propeller. The gun had to be calibrated to shoot between the spinning blades with each revolution. The engine had to be in perfect sync with the weapon—such delicate and dangerous engineering for his rickety, shuddering little flying machine.
Every time—every single time he went up—every time, Langlais could picture the mechanism hiccupping just once. Just this tiny failure would make him shoot himself in the most important place in the plane’s body! He would go down right there, howling over enemy lines. If he didn’t die in the wreckage somehow (but he had to), they would take him, and that would be even worse. The images that flooded through him were crystalline in their clarity, triggering a cold terror. It possessed his body utterly; it was almost a beautiful thing, alive and sentient like some evil animal.
Before every time he went up, he vomited. Helplessly, like some little nothing boy. He would fall to his knees as if someone had kicked the backs of them and heave all the contents of his stomach onto the ground (sometimes on all fours, bracing himself to the earth with the palms of his convulsing hands). The other pilots would laugh. They would slap him hard and manfully on the back and call him a pansy. He was so pale then, with a yellowish tinge like old paper.
Truly, the other pilots did not entirely scorn Langlais; they were even a bit jealous. They wished they could grovel on the floor and vomit, too. Pansy was not the only thing they called him; he had a nickname that was a play on his last name: L’Angle. The Angle. It was also a reference to the sharpness of his military posture, to his formal and polite manner. One of the men who was fond of math liked to call him Acute Angle when he said something clever, and from then on this punnery followed him everywhere. When he said something stupid, he would immediately be called Obtuse Angle.
When the mission went well and the other pilots were happy, they would take Langlais out that night and get him rip-roaring drunk. It wouldn’t take much to do so: his body was already so overwrought from what he had been through that day that it was entirely wound up. His stomach burned so hard that it shot the alcohol immediately into his bloodstream, straight to the brain before he even took a second shot of liquor. The poor fellow, his face was already crimson