Elizabeth Hand: Errantry: Strange Stories

Mostly, though, the room held Leonard’s stuff: tiny cardboard dioramas, mockups of space capsules and dirigibles. It smelled overpoweringly of nail polish. It was also extremely cold.

“Man, you must freeze your ass off.” Robbie rubbed his arms.

Emery picked up one of the little bottles. “You getting a manicurist’s license?”

Leonard gestured at the desk. “I’m painting with nail polish now. You get some very unusual effects.”

“I bet,” said Robbie. “You’re, like huffing nail polish.” He peered at the shelves, impressed despite himself. “Jeez, Leonard. You made all these?”

“Damn right I did.”

When Robbie first met Leonard, they were both lowly GS-1s. In those days, Leonard collected paper clips and rode an old Schwinn bicycle to work. He entertained tourists by making balloon animals. In his spare time, he created Mungbean, Captain Marvo’s robot friend, out of a busted lamp and some spark plugs.

He also made strange ink drawings, hundreds of them. Montgolfier balloons with sinister faces; B-52s carrying payloads of soap bubbles; carictatures of the museum director and senior curators as greyhounds sniffing each others’ nether quarters.

It was this last, drawn on a scrap of legal paper, which Margaret Blevin picked up on her first tour of the General Aviation Gallery. The sketch had fallen out of Leonard’s jacket: he watched in horror as the museum’s deputy director stooped to retrieve the crumpled page.

“Allow me,” said the woman at the director’s side. She was slight, forty-ish, with frizzy red hair and enormous hoop earrings, wearing an indian-print tunic over tight, sky-blue trousers and leather clogs. She snatched up the drawing, stuffed it in her pocket and continued her tour of the gallery. After the deputy director left, the woman walked to where Leonard stood beside his flight simulator, sweating in his polyester jacket as he supervised an overweight kid in a Chewbacca T-shirt. When the kid climbed down, the woman held up the crumpled sheet.

“Who did this?”

The other two aides—one was Emery—shook their heads.

“I did,” said Leonard.

The woman crooked her finger. “Come with me.”

“Am I fired?” asked Leonard as he followed her out of the gallery.

“Nope. I’m Maggie Blevin. We’re shutting down those Link Trainers and making this into a new gallery. I’m in charge. I need someone to start cataloging stuff for me and maybe do some preliminary sketches. You want the job?”

“Yes,” stammered Leonard. “I mean, sure.”

“Great.” She balled up the sketch and tossed it into a wastebasket. “Your talents were being wasted. That looks just like the director’s butt.”

“If he was a dog,” said Leonard.

“He’s a son of a bitch, and that’s close enough,” said Maggie. “Let’s go see Personnel.”

Leonard’s current job description read Museum Effects Specialist, Grade 9, Step 10. For the last two decades, he’d created figurines and models for the museum’s exhibits. Not fighter planes or commercial aircraft—there was an entire division of modelers who handled that.

Leonard’s work was more rarefied, as evidenced by the dozens of flying machines perched wherever there was space in the tiny room. Rocket ships, bat-winged aerodromes, biplanes and triplanes and saucers, many of them striped and polka-dotted and glazed with, yes, nail polish in circus colors, so that they appeared to be made of ribbon candy.

His specialty was aircraft that had never actually flown; in many instances, aircraft that had never been intended to fly. Crypto-aviation, as some disgruntled curator dubbed it. He worked from plans and photographs, drawings and uncategorizable materials he’d found in the archives Maggie Blevin had been hired to organize. These were housed in a set of oak filing cabinets dating to the 1920s. Officially, the archive was known as the Pre-Langley Collection. But everyone in the museum, including Maggie Blevin, called it the Nut Files.

After Leonard’s fateful promotion, Robbie and Emery would sometimes punch out for the day, go upstairs and stroll to his corner of the library. You could do that then—wander around workrooms and storage areas, the library and archives, without having to check in or get a special pass or security clearance. Robbie just went along for the ride, but Emery was fascinated by the things Leonard found in the Nut Files. Grainy black-and-white photos of purported UFOs; typescripts of encounters with deceased Russian cosmonauts in the Nevada desert; an account of a Raelian wedding ceremony attended by a glowing crimson orb. There was also a large carton donated by the widow of a legendary rocket scientist, which turned out to be filled with 1950s foot-fetish pornography, and 16-millimeter film footage of several Pioneers of Flight doing something unseemly with a spotted pig.

“Whatever happened to that pig movie?” asked Robbie as he admired a biplane with violet-striped ailerons.

“It’s been deaccessioned,” said Leonard.

He cleared the swivel chair and motioned for Emery to sit, then perched on the edge of his desk. Robbie looked in vain for another chair, finally settled on the floor beside a wastebasket filled with empty nail-polish bottles.

“So I have a plan,” announced Leonard. He stared fixedly at Emery, as though they were alone in the room. “To help Maggie. Do you remember the Bellerophon ?”

Emery frowned. “Vaguely. That old film loop of a plane crash?”

“ Presumed crash. They never found any wreckage, everyone just assumes it crashed. But yes, that was the Bellerophon —it was the clip that played in our gallery. Maggie’s gallery.”

“Right—the movie that burned up!” broke in Robbie. “Yeah, I remember, the film got caught in a sprocket or something. Smoke detectors went off and they evacuated the whole museum. They got all on Maggie’s case about it, they thought she installed it wrong.”

“She didn’t,” Leonard said angrily. “One of the tech guys screwed up the installation—he told me a few years ago. He didn’t vent it properly, the projector bulb overheated and the film caught on fire. He said he always felt bad she got canned.”

“But they didn’t fire her for that.” Robbie gave Leonard a sideways look. “It was the UFO—”

Emery cut him off. “They were gunning for her,” he said. “C’mon, Rob, everyone knew—all those old military guys running this place, they couldn’t stand a woman getting in their way. Not if she wasn’t Air Force or some shit. Took ‘em a few years, that’s all. Fucking assholes. I even got a letter-writing campaign going on the show. Didn’t help.”

“Nothing would have helped.” Leonard sighed. “She was a visionary. She is a visionary,” he added hastily. “Which is why I want to do this—”

He hopped from the desk, rooted around in a corner and pulled out a large cardboard box.

“Move,” he ordered.

Robbie scrambled to his feet. Leonard began to remove things from the carton and set them carefully on his desk. Emery got up to make more room, angling himself beside Robbie. They watched as Leonard arranged piles of paper, curling 8x10s, faded blueprints and an old 35mm film viewer, along with several large manila envelopes closed with red string. Finally he knelt beside the box and very gingerly reached inside.

“I think the Lindbergh baby’s in there,” whispered Emery.

Leonard stood, cradling something in his hands, turned and placed it in the middle of the desk.

“Holy shit.” Emery whistled. “Leonard, you’ve outdone yourself.”

Robbie crouched so he could view it at eye level: a model of some sort of flying machine, though it seemed impossible that anyone, even Leonard or Maggie Blevin, could ever have dreamed it might fly. It had a zeppelin-shaped body, with a sharp nose like that of a Lockheed Starfighter, slightly uptilted. Suspended beneath this was a basket filled with tiny gears and chains, and beneath that was a contraption with three wheels, like a velocipede, only the wheels were fitted with dozens of stiff flaps, each no bigger than a fingernail, and even tinier propellers.