Gliding Flight. Anne-Gine Goemans

had once seen a platinum blond TV reporter ask Captain Sully, ‘But how did you do it?’ How do you safely land an Airbus in which both engines have been disabled by a couple of geese?

      The woman looked at Sully as if he were a sex machine who had also invented the electric light. WWSD was emblazoned on T-shirts and caps. ‘What Would Sully Do?’ Americans asked themselves when faced with a problem. Sully had become a compass for making life choices.

      Gieles stood in front of the mirror above the sink in his room and combed his hair, which was always standing on end. Then he put on the new sunglasses with mirror lenses. ‘Gieles,’ he said, with the same rapturous tone as the platinum blond reporter. ‘How did you do it? How did you manage to get those geese out of the way at the very last second?’

      ‘Well, let me tell you,’ said Gieles nonchalantly, thrusting his chin forward. ‘I was standing near the runway waiting for my mother. She had never been away so long before and I wanted to wait for her at home—so we’d be able to wave to each other. But suddenly I saw two geese out on the runway.’

      The reporter would gape at him with fear and adoration. Of course he wouldn’t tell her that he had ordered the geese to go there himself.

      Gieles crossed his arms. ‘By now everyone knows how dangerous geese can be for airplanes. Do you know Captain Chesley Burnett Sullenberger? The pilot who parked his plane on the Hudson on January 15th, 2009?’

      The reporter would nod enthusiastically and exclaim, ‘But of course I know him! Who doesn’t? Now we finally have our own Dutch Sully!’

      ‘Gieles!’ he heard his father call. ‘We’ve got to go!’

      Gieles took off his glasses and hid the game board behind a partition where his old toys were stored.

      His father was already outside, in the barn. He was standing at a workbench that had a row of fox tails hanging above it. The fox tails were russet with white tips. Killing birds was painful for Willem, but he had no problem hunting foxes and rabbits. After he shot a fox he would cut off the tail and dip the raw flesh in denatured alcohol to keep it from rotting. Then he would tie off the tail with a piece of string to allow the flesh to dry and have fur hats made from the pelt. Everyone got a hat, even his fellow bird controllers. But no one ever wore them.

      His father held one of the tails under his nose and turned it around as if it were a glass of wine. Then he hung the amputated body part up again and walked out of the barn.

      They got in the car and headed for the demonstration of the robot bird, listening in silence to the monotone radio conversations between the cockpit and air traffic control. Every plane was directed through the air space affably and efficiently by an unknown voice. ‘Eight-zero-nine, you can land.’

      Gieles had downloaded the conversation between Captain Sully and air traffic control. Spectacular! ‘We can’t do it. We’re going to be in the Hudson.’

      Not a hint of emotion. As if Captain Sully had said, ‘Hey, I’m stuck in traffic. I’ll be getting home a little late,’ while he and a hundred and fifty-five passengers were flying straight to their deaths. And then the air traffic controller had said drily, ‘I’m sorry.’ (‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll put your dinner in the microwave.’)

      A couple of hundred metres further on they passed Dolly’s house. Gieles remembered the smell of her messy bed and thought of Super Waling’s story. It got him agitated. Her tongue in his ears and nostrils.

      Imagine Gravitation or Dolly pushing her tongue into his ears. How would that feel?

      He had sent her a photo of himself posing in front of his father’s service car. In another one he was standing with his geese. He had plastered his hair down with gel. The sunglasses did the rest.

      Gravitation had reciprocated with a photo of herself pressing her rabbit against her pale white upper body. He regarded this provocative pose as a sign of approval. Something like: You look pretty good.

      His father was leaning against the car window in his leather jacket, peering into the sky. Then he looked down at the road. He did that all the time, even when he wasn’t on patrol. His eyes went up and down, from the sky to the road, from the road to the sky. He possessed the rare talent of being able to see things from a bird’s perspective. Why does a bird do what it does? That one question formed the basis of his thinking and defined his behaviour. According to his mother, his father had been a bird in a previous life.

      They passed the fence that was under camera surveillance and for which Willem Bos had a special pass. In the distance they saw a couple of seagulls flying against a pale sky hung with grey clouds that looked like ice floes.

      Willem Bos held the walkie-talkie to his mouth. ‘Gulls in midfield. I repeat: gulls in midfield.’

      ‘Runway free,’ came the reply after a pause. ‘Situation under control.’

      The car’s dashboard was a bag of tricks. Press the button and a panic-stricken starling shrieked across the farmland. That farmland, according to Willem Bos, was a very big problem, apart from the infinite number of invisible intersections in the sky. When the runway was built, the experts had condescendingly shrugged their shoulders over the fact that agrarian areas tend to attract birds.

      Standing in the midfield between the two runways were his father’s fellow bird controllers and the robot man. Unlike his father, the bird controllers were dressed in green. They looked like forest rangers. The robot man was wearing a faded turtleneck and jeans and was standing a couple of metres away from the group.

      Willem Bos parked next to the other yellow cars and walked up to his colleagues, sauntering like a cowboy. They greeted him and gave Gieles a few brotherly slaps on the back.

      Then Willem Bos walked up to the robot man and introduced himself, and Gieles shook the man’s hand in turn. He forgot his name immediately. Lisping and inhaling deeply through his nostrils, the robot man launched into a description of the invention he had worked on for three hundred and fifty hours.

      ‘Just show us the bird,’ Willem Bos interrupted. He had crossed his arms. The robot man was disconcerted by the interruption but quickly recovered and went to work. He opened a chest in the trunk of the airport service car and took out his invention. They all shrank back. The robot was a gigantic bird of prey with cold eyes and a hooked beak. Its dark brown wings spanned at least a metre and a half.

      The robot man held the monster over his head, making his own body look even punier. One of the bird controllers whistled through his teeth. ‘Whoa,’ he said, deeply impressed. ‘You can hardly tell it from the real thing. A perfect white-tailed eagle.’

      ‘A golden eagle,’ corrected the robot man. ‘Notith the tail.’ He turned the bird halfway around, still holding it over his head. ‘It hath a black terminal band,’ he lisped.

      ‘We don’t get any golden eagles around here,’ said Willem Bos. ‘Plenty of buzzards, goshawks, kestrels and falcons. But no golden eagles.’

      The robot man began sweating under the weight of his invention.

      ‘I saw a white-tailed eagle once,’ said one of his father’s colleagues, rubbing his moustache. ‘Above the dunes. But that was a long time ago. We’re talking about the end of the seventies. And from that distance it could have been a great spotted eagle. You can never be sure.’

      The other bird controllers nodded in agreement. ‘I once mistook an escaped turkey vulture for a buzzard. But you don’t expect to see big ones like that out here. Buzzards can be very aggressive.’

      The bird controller now turned to Gieles. His colleagues knew the anecdote by heart. ‘I know this farmer. He was out haying once on his land and suddenly this buzzard attacked him. The buzzard planted its claws into his hair and scalped him right then and there. Pieces of scalp this big.’ He created an implausibly large shape with his hands. ‘Really. Pieces that big.’

      ‘Okay,’ said Willem Bos, looking up into the dark sky. ‘Get going with that thing.’

      ‘It’th