Living under the flight path, Zorbic observed planes emerging from cloud banks, depressing watching them land safely.
Then one fulfilled his dreams–it crashed.
From his usual window, he saw two aircraft, one pursuing the other, their windowless, silver-cream fuselages pearly in night’s blackness. The first one nose-dived. Orange stars sparkled in mushrooming mist as the aircraft struck Terra Firma, Latin essential when pursuing glory, the impact gorgeously sonorous.
The chance to examine wreckage had finally arrived.
Yellow lights illuminated houses–those bastions against weirdness–the houses set back from wide footpaths, distance stopping insanity from affecting protected lives.
Arriving in the crash zone, Zorbic drove, head out the window, searching for disaster. Cackling chortling yielded black-haired, guffawing heads, like laughing sultanas, in a party in a house’s garden.
“Did you hear the crash?” Zorbic kept asking.
“No,” the constant reply. “What crash?”
A woman, beside hanging bedsheets, filled men’s eyes with lust, her blue irises of arcane introspection suggesting unresolved mysteries were swirling, like hissing reeds, in her head, Zorbic convinced she adored crash philosophy.
“You’re here,” she asked, “because of the crash?”
“Affirmative,” he replied.
Investigation requires appropriate diction. His steely distance amid vacuous bliss was exciting.
“A gate crash,” she said, “because of an air crash?”
“Crass,” he replied, “but true.”
Her lips curled.
“I investigate crashes, too,” she said.
“This I had assumed,” he replied, “for that unconscious force that creates illusions of truth tells me that your support is vital.”
For her, crashes were metaphysical, details eclipsed by implications, Zorbic’s entanglement in relevance’s hidden roots absorbing. He had nice eyes, too.
They got into his car.
“Maybe,” he speculated, “it fell into a black hole? Or a vast ditch? Are there black holes or huge ditches nearby?”
“Only the sewer,” she replied.
“Of course,” he said, slapping the steering wheel, “the sewer! How stupid of me!”
His fiery, self-deprecatory focussing upon relevance delighted her.
Rastafarian palm trees lined the road. They spotted molten wreckage in a turd sea, glowed like beacons. Upon Wellington-boot stilts they reached the cockpit, the deceased, hirsute, Greek pilot in a pink cocktail dress, red seats floating in a “biblical Sea of Shite”.
“Beautiful,” Zorbic mumbled. “A fuselage jigsaw puzzle in a shite sea.”
The woman, studying his fascinated face, imagined him gliding over sewerage like “Jesus Scheiss.” She deposited her tongue down his throat. The cockpit’s walls revealed classical art. She spreadeagled him on the cockpit’s floor. A plant snaked up a wall. Prism chandeliers turned light into music. She bounced on his penis.
“Your aestheticism,” she said, “awakens sexuality.”
He didn’t argue.
“I plan to spreadeagle you constantly,” she groaned, “until this mystery has been resolved.”
Please do, he thought.
“Orgasms,” she pronounced, “create mystery resolution.”
If you say so, he contemplated, while thinking: What a night! An air crash and I get laid! But where’s the black box?
“You can spreadeagle me eternally,” he said, “but first I need the black box.”
“Of course,” she replied.
The pertinent adventure she was thrilled to be linked with was enhanced by his eyes and by his lust for unravelling mysteries that intertwine in the jungle of exhilarating facts. They hunted for the black box. The pilot was slumped over control sticks.
“Plato,” Zorbic remarked, “claimed: ‘Never let emotionally unstable, gay, Greek transvestites fly DC-26’s.’”
“That,” she said, “created modern ethics. And what is ethics but common sense for the common good?”
“Your pronouncements,” he said, “make my dick rise and sing like Pavarotti. And you have a face like an orgasm.”
Flattery turned her face into luscious cream.
They found the black box under the pilot’s seat. The pilot’s botty had warmed it. He was a plump chicken in pink.
“There must be an office,” she said, “where black-box finds are registered, for two tendencies drive human compulsion: finding new ways for people to compete against each other; and: magnifying the web of government departments for recording purposes.”
The Unclaimed Black Box Office resembled a massive Spitfire. A bald man, wearing red, blue and white glasses, awaited them.
“Remember that DC-26 sewer incident?” he heard Zorbic say. “Well, here’s its black box.”
“JESUS!!” the public servant cried, pinching a handkerchief over his nose.
The public servant’s eyes resembled mineral sections under microscopes.
“Sorry,” Zorbic said, “I should have cleaned it first.”
“No,” the public servant explained, ‘it’s not that. This is the black box I’ve always wanted! Let’s listen.”
They heard about unrequited love. The pilot had committed suicide; he had adored the pilot of the second aircraft, who had “fallen for the Egyptologist who wears red roses on his forehead.” The second pilot had pursued the first, trying to save his life.
“Can I ask something?” the public servant asked.
“All questions, like all species,” Zorbic replied, “have purpose. I am a dartboard for pinpoint enquiries. Shoot.”
The woman’s face, cleansed by this genius, went even creamier. Zorbic made her feel like a cleansed bedsheet of shameless sensuality.
“What drove you to become the first man to find the black box of an aircraft whose transvestite pilot committed suicide by flying into a sewer?” the public servant asked.
“Greatness,” Zorbic replied, “comes from obsessions that create psychological fluidity, so nothing remains trapped in despairing fixation.”
“Fascinating,” the public servant said, ripping his glasses off. “I’ve always wanted to be the first government employee to report the finding of the first black box to have been extricated from the first DC-26 to have crashed because of its jilted pilot committing suicide by plunging the plane into a sewer. My dream exists for the same reasons that caused your remarkable deed.”
“Extraordinary,” the customer replied. “Let’s become friends.”
“I agree,” the public servant said. “And you,” he continued, addressing the woman. “What’s your motive in this occurrence of vast historical import?”
Her white hair pulsated against her dark glasses and her black, leather jacket, a Mata Hari of glamorous intrigue, her lips big and red.
“I,” she replied, “must resolve the mystery of the discoverer of the first black box to have been found aboard an aircraft that a gay, jilted, Grecian, transvestite pilot crashed into a sewer. And there’s more.”
“What?” the public servant asked, his mineral-section eyes glowing like jewels of fascination.
“I plan,” she replied, nobly sadistic, “to keep the results of my investigations a secret until departing from Terra Firma.”
“Oh, how bitchy,” the public servant smiled, his face shining with wondrous appreciation. “Driving victory’s heel into the putty of your competitors’ fragile self-perceptions! What dick-raising bitchiness!”
“It’s thrilling having prime knowledge,” she replied. “Call it advanced investigative journalism in which orgasmic pleasure combines with riveting facts to crush my opponents under the iron heel of justice, destroying pretenders to crowns not theirs, but MINE!”
Her lips bloated with red satisfaction as the public servant’s face melted.
“You,” the public servant said, “must annihilate opposition. No doubt you adore equal rights,” he added, ironically.
“Ha!” she smirked. “I extend my privileges eternally. Equal rights! Ha!”
The public servant collapsed, dropped by the passionate depravity of this guiltless assertion. His dreams had materialised. He had known that the discoverer of the first black box to have been taken from the wreckage of the first DC-26 to have been destroyed by a gay, transvestite, pink-cocktail-wearing, Greek pilot would have a woman like this!
His quivering neon penis bathed the walls in fluorescent crimson. The woman he knew he could never have stood on his chest and said: “Sign.”
The certificate confirming the find flapped in the public servant’s face. Sweat slid down his forehead like pearls of pleasure. His hand shook while signing. She increased the pressure on his chest. He mumbled: “You emphasise my puerility.”
His face resembled a melting Dalí clock, female force melting him into oblivion.
Mata clutched the black box to her chest, a child box symbolising union between supreme relevance and feminine, sensual strength.
The threesome left, the public servant gyrating masochistically in a lemon puddle of euphoric juice.
THE END
Kim Farleigh has worked for NGO’s in Greece, Kosovo, Iraq, Palestine and Macedonia. He likes to take risks to get the experience required for writing. He likes painting, art, bull-fighting, photography and architecture, which might explain why this Australian lives in Madrid. Although he wouldn’t say no to living in a Swiss ski resort or a French chateau. 183 of his stories have been accepted by 107 different magazines.
Angel Rust 