Imagine a biplane. Left to its own devices, the plane will naturally begin to bank, slowly entering a balanced, insidious turn that a pilot can’t always detect if the real horizon is obscured by darkness or cloud. Neither your ass nor your inner ear will bother to tell you about a balanced turn if you’re in it long enough, and without help from the right instruments, you’ll think you’re flying along straight and level. But the airplane’s nose will drop toward the earth; its path will tighten, begin to describe a funnel. Presently, you will become aware that your airspeed has increased and altitude decreased, that the engine is whining and the guy wires singing, that the dials are moving and you’re being pressed into your seat, and without an artificial horizon you will conclude the plane is in a dive （speed going up, altitude going down）， not a turn. At this point the airplane might be banked to vertical or beyond, might even be upside down, and when you pull back on the stick to bring up the nose, you will only tighten the turn further.
It’s called a graveyard spiral.
Now one of three things will happen. You will pop out the bottom of the cloud with enough time to make sense of where the ground is and to level the wings and pull out. Or the airplane will break apart under the stress. Or you will spin directly into the earth or ocean or whatever’s there.
With the right instruments, you have a fighting chance of leveling out even if the cloud goes all the way down and brushes the earth like the marabou hem of a diaphanous white robe worn by God. But getting right with the horizon isn’t easy. The sky is full of traps and temptation. Pilots report that their instruments went haywire in cloud, though of course they didn’t—the pilots’ own bodies are lying, not the dials. Your inner ear gets comfortable in a spiral. Even after you’ve extricated yourself, when the instruments say you are flying straight and level again because you are, your ear begs to differ. You’re the blindfolded man in the rotating chair. The fluid inside that labyrinth is still spiraling, and the tiny little sensory hairs insist you are, too. Your ear begs you to throw the controls over, to make the spinning stop. Sometimes pilots listen, put themselves right back into a spiral. An oblivion of mist hides the earth, the truth.
It’s difficult to believe the gauges, that array of soulless little dashboard windows, over the insistence of the body, which is as sure as you live and breathe that you are funneling down into death.
But you’re not. You’re dizzy inside a cloud. That’s all.
* * *
—
The second month of Marian’s fifteenth year, October, the stock market crashes. Black Thursday. Black Tuesday. All of it spiraling. Things breaking apart.
But Marian barely notices. Wall Street seems far away, and, anyway, she is flying.
From high enough up, the mountains in their blazing autumn dapple resemble lichen-covered rocks, bright and nubbly, and she imagines they are in fact only rocks, that she has been shrunk to the size of a gnat. What is the difference between her and a gnat, really? Relative to the distance between the planets? To the size of the sun?
No, you can’t go up every day, Trout says when she asks. Not too much too soon. You’ve got to give things time to sink in.
Trout can’t teach her every day anyway. He has to fly to Canada, pick up booze in some hamlet, fly it back over the line, land on some stubby landing strip hidden in the mountains. Men in fast cars will be waiting there to distribute his cargo to points unknown. The nation is thirsty. The nation wants to drink away its cares. If he’s landing after dusk, the leggers will light up the strip with their headlights, make a small glowing green rectangle in the great shadowed nothing of the mountains.
Marian keeps driving for Stanley. She nearly causes an accident when she steps hard on the brake while going around a corner, daydreaming it into a rudder.
Practice is all she needs to be competent, Trout says. As far as being good, well, that comes down to a lot more practice, some natural ability, and a bucket of patience. To be great? Trout shrugs. Not everybody has it in them.
She doesn’t tell him she is determined to be the best. Probably he’d say there’s no such thing, that she might as well be determined to be an actual bird, and even birds get lost or caught in bad weather, fly into things, misjudge their way into that last smashup.
After six lessons of an hour each, she solos. Trout believes it’s better to solo sooner rather than later so she won’t build it up too much in her head. “Just fly the same as always,” he says. She goes up and is alone in the sky, but she is concentrating too hard to exalt. Trout’s voice has lodged in her ear, pointing out her mistakes, keeping her company. She bounces her landing, and Trout waves her up again. She circles around, lines up, touches down a little long. The earth below, so dependable and stationary when she is standing on it, turns into a wobbly, tippy thing on final approach. He waves. Again. Go again.