Andrin Albrecht, Zurich, Switzerland
Look up there: a star!
Hmm…
Why not?
It’s moving.
No, look, it––oh. Right. It’s moving.
Duh. Just an airplane. You can’t see any stars from here.
Oh, all the theories that circulated about what would happen to air traffic! There would be no getting rid of it, some claimed. People had always dreamt of flying, and the only way to fly, sad but true, was by sitting in a metal tube propelled by kerosene: contrails, turbulences, economy and business class, ladies and gentlemen, we are happy to welcome you to Paris Charles-du-Gaulle, please remain seated for another ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes until the aircraft has been fully prepared for disembarking…
Others talked of innovation. We’d be able to fly with solar power, hydrogen cells, or propelled by the clean wind alone. To circle the globe without poisoning the air, to spend the weekend overseas and be just as unproblematic as a cyclist headed for the other side of town.
Oh, we had more theories than the countryside has stars at night. The government would take action and force restraint, impose their ticket taxes, quotas, research stipends and machine guns at airports. The oligarchs would take over everything and monopolize the skies. Fuel would run out, oil rigs would be consumed by rust, and the plains would run on coal or children’s dreams, insatiable metal beasts no matter the circumstances…
No one, however, expected that we would simply forget about them.
I wandered lonely as a cloud…
Honey, stop it.
What instead?
What what?
What would you like to wander as instead?
Oh… How about not as a cloud, but across them?
What then?
Whatever you’d want! Just imagine: down here it’s raining, but you don’t even notice because the rain only starts below your feet; the ground is white and above you it’s just purest sunshine. You look around and see these cotton mountains, and in their midst a great city.
A city?
Why of course! We just cannot see it from down here. A city with alleyways and parks, with fountains, onion domes and citizens who’ve never seen any other than a bright blue sky. You can’t prove me wrong; you know? It could be there, right above that cloud yonder…
The first measures were implemented before anyone really believed in the virus. It wasn’t worse than your seasonal flu, they all claimed. It was a hoax by the media, a publicity stunt by Big Pharma––hysteria! hysteria!––and nevertheless, the first international routes were being severed. Soon, they only allowed business travel, then only trips for diplomats and foreign correspondents, and finally none at all anymore. The sky was a blank azure sheet. The planes stayed down.
When I was still a child, you could look up at any time of the day and watch the planes pass. The blue was segmented. Sometimes, we imagined the crisscrossing trails were hieroglyphs, and if we’d only be able to decipher it, we’d receive superpowers, or a free flight to Hawaii.
But then came the Pandemic, and the planes stayed down. Pilots made themselves comfortable on their living room couches, the aluminium bowls were repurposed to deliver warm meals for the elderly directly to their homes. Flight attendants spent their time doing yoga, learning to play the guitar or to make their own sourdough. Months passed. The exceptional became trivial. And when the Pandemic was finally over, when we had counted the dead and hugged the living again, we had simply––
––forgotten.
I see them as if it were yesterday: the aerospace engineers, fighter pilots and professors of aviation, standing dumbfounded before a line of parked jumbo jets. The controllers and maintenance workers wiping cobwebs from the vast metal wings; the corporate bosses holding grand speeches about how Heathrow and Tokyo Narita would soon feel just as close again as Heathrow and London Gatwick.
My, the glee of the boulevard journalists when the first pilot sat himself in the cockpit and started pressing buttons at random in mounting despair, like a child who had been asked to conduct a symphony!
We had stayed on the ground for too long––or, perhaps, a prescient part of our collective consciousness had merely decided that it wasn’t so bad down here after all? Or… or… There were myriad theories just as there had been before, though not a single conclusive explanation.
The fact was that these colossi of steel and aluminium were standing still all over our airfields, and not a single human being could recall how the hell we had ever managed to get them up into the sky.
Scorn, irritation, then, finally: indifference. We shrugged our shoulders and turned to other worries. Didn’t we have plenty of them?
Daedalus spent day after day collecting feathers all over the island. When he had finally gathered enough, he glued them together with wax from a beehive and made them into wings for himself and his son.
With wax? Is that even possible?
Back then it was: that was in Ancient Greece––the laws of physics were different still…
No kidding!
Why don’t you tell the story yourself if you don’t believe me? Anyway, and as he was finished making the wings, he and his son Icarus rose up above the clouds with them. It all went quite swimmingly––flyingly––hadn’t Icarus been such a reckless boy. He flew higher and higher, until he finally got so close to the sun that its heat melted the wax…
But isn’t it colder higher up?
No, higher up it is warmer. You’re closer to the sun, aren’t you? As I said, the wax melted, and his beautiful wings came apart, and Icarus…
No!
Yes, Icarus fell, really plummeted, faster and faster…
NO!
There, there, it’s all good! Don’t cry, it’s all good. He just got a really good scare, but, fortunately, Icarus fell into the sea and was soon washed ashore on a nearby island, where he lived in a hut with a roof of palm leaves ever after, ate bananas directly from the tree and swore to God to never in his life collect feathers again…
The airplanes had become useless, but they still weighed tons. Nobody had any use or purpose for them, so we simply left most of them standing where they were. On weekends, I sometimes drive out to the airport and look at them. A lot of people do that, actually, especially on sunny spring days. It’s really quite magical––ethereal. Back in Victorian England, it was in fashion for the wealthy to have a ruin standing in their garden. Master builders specialized in them and erected entire castles of natural stone, with towers and battlements and walkable round paths, only to immediately demolish them in the most realistic way possible, to coat the rubble in filaments of ivy and have it admired on chaperoned walks.
Nowadays, airports have become our English gardens.
An Airbus A380 biplane towers venerably in a field of asphalt that is cracked in intricate patterns. Dandelion and young birch trees push from between the clods. Most of the airplane’s windows are still intact; light is refracted in them, and butterflies dance in the scatters of rainbow on all sides. Ivy hangs from one of the primordial wings like a curtain, and you half expect it will lead you into some fairytale world––all you’d have to do is walk past beneath it and let yourself be surprised. The other wing has broken off halfway. A swallow has built its nest in the tangle of electric wires that pours from the fracture and is already raising its third generation of chicks.
A little apart, there is a much, much smaller Boeing E74 Stearman: an ancient double-decker, which had only seen ceremonial use for a long time even before the Pandemic. Perhaps a squirrel buried a pine cone under it years ago: now, a mighty fir pierces straight through the yellow-and-blue fuselage of the Stearman. The tree has lifted the entire plain six feet from the ground and fixed it in place with branches bigger than a grown man’s arm. There is a kind of feral poetry in the image: it’s the closest to flying any of these relics will ever come again.
Just after the gates, you can see an Avro RJ85: a medium-sized passenger plane with the pictogram of a crane on its tail fin. It’s the only plane in the airport not smothered by layers of green. Instead, its doors have been expanded, all seats have been removed, and the walls have been painted white. The Avro now hangs full of modern art: every three months a new exhibition opens; there is an original Giacometti standing in the cockpit and watching patrons through the windshield with the indifference of bronze.
They transported some of the smallest machines to the inner city right after the end of the Pandemic, re-lined them, wrapped them in tarps and fairy lights. They now house some of the hottest new bars. On the wings of an F18 by the lake, you can catch Punk bands play every other Thursday.
Something has ended, and something else begins. The word is that an entire fleet stranded in LAX has been re-purposed as luxury condos. In Berlin Tegel, a collective of international artists painted two hundred and forty planes in pastel colors, and in Singapore Changi, they now raise pangolins, monitor lizards and endangered birds in the hollowed steel husks. Cape Town King David was flooded for a reservoir project, and the planes forgotten there now sleep submerged, almost invisible in the crystalline wet. You can see shoals of colorful fish flit by where they used to sell duty-free booze. Scuba-divers like to have their picture taken with a joystick in hand before they bring a tiny in-flight TV or earbuds with an old airline logo back up as a keepsake.
Merry Christmas! Joyeux noël, feliz––
Right, right, that’s enough…
Come on, get out of bed! Here’s some coffee. But hurry up, we’re about to do something special!
Today? So early on Christmas morning… It’s still dark outside!
Yes, precisely, and that’s the point! Come, drink your coffee, then off to the car.
To the car? What now? Where are we going?
To the airport.
It doesn’t snow often in these parts, but last night––last night it snowed for real! The car tires scrunch, and the city is white on all sides. White roofs, white front yards, white trees, almost as if they were brimming with blossoms. At the shore of the lake, a white swan pecks at an ice floe with an indignant look.
The snow clouds, however, have dispersed, and the sky instead is littered with stars: countless, speechless, motionless. It glistens almost as white as the world.
He’s already expecting us when we park our car in the middle of a former runway: a grinning man with a beard, handing us protective goggles, enormous gloves and feather down jackets to wear over our regular winter coats.
So, you guys ready? The adventure of a lifetime: seeing the world from above?
A hiss, a flicker in the cold, a bright orange light. Behind the man, the multi-colored tarp of a hot air balloon billows out of the snow. His colleague is already at work in the wicker basket, firing up the burner. He waves at us. Off to the east, between the angular outlines of hangars and crumbled towers, a first shimmer of morning blushes against the sky.
All aboard, all aboard! You can stand down here plenty after we’re back!
The day becomes brighter, and the balloon ascends. The mechanics of this vehicle are infinitely easier than that of a plane, our pilot explains, so that a select few people still remember it even nowadays: hot air rises, and if enough heat is generated, it is easily capable of lifting hundreds of kilos of fabric, basketwork, four people and four thermos flasks of hot coffee up into the clouds.
The sky turns from black to violet to mauve to green to morning blue. The airport grows smaller, the city grows smaller; our car is virtually invisible.
The air is so cold that every breath you draw hurts.
And everything is so white. I know there should be airplanes down there, lined up as far as the eye can see. Row after row of forgotten machines. Marvelous, marvelously useless ruins of metal––some of them still standing in perfect symmetry, others tipped to the side, broken apart, devoured by patina and rust, overgrown, towed away to other places, purposes, and names.
Right here and now, however, in the cold and the sharp morning light, I can see nothing at all. Everything’s white. Maybe there are hundreds of airplanes hidden down there under the snow, like feathers, waiting to be picked up. Maybe there really was a time of different physics, when not hot air but piles of metal would rise. But maybe––and that seems much easier to believe ––there has never even been such a thing as a plane.
Andrin Albrecht was born in 1995 in Switzerland. He studied English literature and history in Zurich, Colorado, and, for one semester, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In 2019, he won the Targe Centro UNESCO di Trieste for his poem “21 st Century Dreaming”, and his short fiction in English and German has appeared in The Foundationalist, the CMU Literary Review and Literaturhaus Zürich. He currently lives in Zurich, writes on his debut novel, and plays electric guitar in the German alternative rock band TRACK 4.