“Sure,” I said.
I must not have sounded convincing because he said, “You nervous?”
“A little.” I could tell he hadn’t bothered to google me, didn’t know about my parents. He thought my misgivings could be cajoled away.
“Don’t be. I do this every day. I’ll talk you through every step, and you don’t have to do anything you don’t feel comfortable with. Deal?”
Ordinarily I would have found his teacher-coach vibe irritating, but now it reassured me. “Deal,” I said, and he beamed, close-lipped.
The seats in the cockpit were bourbon-colored leather, cracked with use. The doors locked with levers that seemed too flimsy to keep out the sky, and the seat belts were floppy nylon straps that didn’t retract. We put on green plastic headsets, the cups bulbous like flies’ eyes, and the pilot’s voice came pinched and tinny through them over the noise of the engine as it warmed up. He was telling me about the instruments, pointing at the dashboard, but I wasn’t really listening because I had no plans to ever become a pilot. What caught my attention was the slight sideways jostle of the plane caused by the turning propeller. I knew the plane didn’t have a mind or feelings, wasn’t capable of eagerness, but it was an eager, ready feeling, like a racehorse in a starting gate or a boxer just before the bell, the movement of something constrained that knew it was about to be free.
The pilot taxied out and throttled forward, peeled us up off the runway into pulsing gray cloud. The propeller droned; my armpits prickled. I held perfectly still, as though the plane were a frightened animal I didn’t want to startle. The pilot was talking, but I couldn’t focus on his words. When we surfaced into the sky, pulling the sun up with a flash, he said, “There she is!”
A mat of plush gray lay over the ocean and the coast. Mountaintops poked up like islands. “That’s Catalina,” the pilot said, pointing. So some were actually islands.
He made the plane go slowly up and down, turned it to the right and then to the left, explaining about balanced turns, about how you didn’t just steer with your hands but also controlled the rudder with your feet. Eventually he asked if I wanted to try. “Put your hands on the yoke,” he said. “Don’t turn, just try to fly straight and level.”
I put my hands on the yoke. I felt overwhelmed by precariousness.
“Good,” said the pilot. “Now, Hadley, if you want, you can gently pull back, and the plane will go up.”
At first I pulled so tentatively I wasn’t pulling at all, and nothing happened. I pulled harder. The windshield angled incrementally toward the sky, and I felt the earth falling away behind me, sucking me down.
I snatched my hands away. “I don’t want to do it,” I said.
“Okay,” the pilot said, calmly taking over, clearly no stranger to freak-outs. “Okay, but you did just fine. You asked the plane to go up, and it went up.”
I said, “I don’t like the feeling.”
He shook his head. “Best feeling in the world,” he said.
Ten
When I went in to audition, Sir Hugo was there, sitting at a table with Ted Lazarus, the boss of Sun God Entertainment whose wife got banged by Gavin du Pré, and Bart Olofsson, the director, and a casting director who shall remain nameless but is much-feared and looks like someone’s kooky aunt with her pink Keds and spiky red hair. “How are you, Hadley?” she said, and I could tell from her grave intonation she was asking about Archangel, about Oliver.
“Great,” I said. “Really excited to read for you guys.”
An assistant tended a camera on a tripod. Off to the side in overflow seating （a wheeled desk chair） was an enthused-looking hipster guy with a dark beard, retro gold-framed glasses, and hair just long enough to tuck behind his ears. “This is Redwood Feiffer,” Hugo said. “I mentioned he will be producing as well.”
“Fantastic to meet you,” Redwood said, jumping up to shake my hand. “I’m a massive fan.”
At some point, Sir Hugo had set about wooing Siobhan, and since wooing is one of his strong suits, she’d come around. The information that a rich young dupe was involved in the project had helped her warm up to the whole thing. “These obscure historical footnotes do make for good content,” she’d conceded to me. “And the Day brothers are having a moment.” It could be an interesting angle for publicity, she’d said, this whole family affair, Redwood and his novelist mother and publisher grandmother. Just like Sir Hugo had, she’d called them Feiffer Feiffers. “And your own history—” She cut herself off.