Issue #96

Above It All

by Luci Kelemen

I had to climb above the clouds that day.

Dodging death somewhere around Rome in a Spitfire. I wouldn't have believed you had you told me two years ago that we'd come this far. Flight by flight, we pushed back at the bastards, and they were finally beginning to crack.

It was a bright and windswept day, the sort where the blue sky surrounds you and even the passage of time feels like an impossibility. The mountains below are the only fixed point you can hold onto, and they approach you at such a low speed that it feels like you will fly on forever.

Then you spot a grey dot or two on the horizon and remember that the end is always near.

It must have been a Messerschmitt, one of the older ones, with a pilot who was experienced enough that he knew he had to turn the tables on me, because he immediately dove up for cloud cover. So much for a quiet patrol, I thought. I began to climb, too, as I would have been a sitting duck had I stayed down here. Even the kindest cloud can rain bullets down on you if you wait for long enough.

Soon, everything was white, and I knew that it was the same for him. The fog of war. The only way out is through. I kept on climbing, just as I knew he would. We would meet up high for a showdown. Fighter pilot instincts began to kick in. The blood, pumping. The gritted teeth. Lungs grasping for the smallest wisp of rarefied air.

And there it was, a rickety Emil, a 109E, already up top by the time I made it out of the clouds. Even from a distance, I could see the wear and tear on the plane, either the sign of a survivor in the cockpit or the work of a bunch of lousy mechanics down below. But I knew it was the former, that this would be one hell of a fight.

So we began the dance, bits of metal circling each other, the chunks of flesh sitting inside trying to blind each other with the sun. Alone together at the top of the world. I went for my usual tricks – the feint, the dive, a sudden halt of the engine, a risky move but one that saved my life many times – but the Kraut matched my every move. He had tricks of his own, too: a hammerhead, a snap roll, a break turn. As he turned a corkscrew and exposed the plane's belly, I fired. Flesh or metal, it never mattered, as long as you hit something other than the sky. Something flared up in the 109E, then I spotted smoke, and I smiled. His plane began to fall, but it got off one last volley on the way down, and now it was the Spitfire's turn to scream out in pain. I felt something in my stomach, and for a moment—

—and then, to my astonishment, the Kraut's plane began to float up, tranquil and quiet. I caught a glimpse of the pilot. He had fallen forward on the controls. He wasn't moving. But even if he was, this was impossible.

I wanted to follow him, I tried to, I knew I couldn't, and yet I did. It all went very quiet, even the engines went silent. Just the two of us with our thoughts, marveling at how such things could be. It was as if we had always been deep underwater and were finally granted passage to the surface.

I think a part of me understood what was going on when I spotted the second layer of clouds above me, but my conscious self couldn't grasp the thought. We kept on floating higher, almost side by side, the 109E still a little ahead of me, a bit above me, once more into the white blankness, and once again I felt as if my heart was pumping fast, but I knew it was a different sensation entirely.

There are no atheists in a foxhole, they say, but I knew of a few in the sky. How would they explain the golden hum, the winged angels, the pulpits, the endlessness of it all? The pearly gate was far away, a divine marker in the distance. I sat back up from my slump, and I saw the Kraut straighten himself out as well. Was it a race now? We sure thought so.

He was ahead of me – just by a little, but by more than enough. The engines came back online with a heavenly whine. How was this possible, the Spitfire is superior—

—and how could a German get to Heaven in the middle of the war?

I couldn't catch up. Maybe I wanted to stay behind him. I was a fighter pilot, and I did what I had to. I fired again to finish the job. My bullets pierced the tail, but he seemed ready, dodged out of the way before I could have ripped it all apart. I wondered what he would do now that we were up here, in foreign territory. The dark and cold sound of his machine gun answered the question. But I quickly got on top of him this time, shredding the Emil over and over again. We got so close to our target that some of my bullets ricocheted off his plane and bounced off the pearly gate. It made an awful sound, like a church bell dying of thirst.

And then I looked at him, and he looked at me, and suddenly, I didn't know why we were fighting at all. He had brown hair and blue eyes and an ugly patch of crimson on his forehead where his brain used to be. And I could feel we were not that different after all.

That we both would have deserved a place in Heaven had we been able to stop being fighter pilots at the last moment.

The planes stalled out and began to fall, much as you would have always expected them to do. We got into a spin, faster and faster, back down to the sky, below the clouds, once, then twice. Would anyone believe me, I wondered, as I stared at the foreboding mountains below. We were both going down now, and perhaps he also knew how far we would fall.

The stone peaks were like spike traps. I hit them first, and it all went black and then red and then very, very hot.