All He Ever Wanted

Sol Crabbe blinked. He blinked again and stretched stiffly, joints popping like an old man’s. It was dark. There was a weird yet familiar smell, like a hospital. Where was he? This was a peculiar place. He didn’t recognise it. He’d awoken here, wherever here was, and he had no idea how that had happened.  He was sitting - perhaps lolling fit better - in a high backed armchair, that felt like it was upholstered in vinyl or faux leather. 

Sol’s mind snapped back to boyhood, when he’d often slept over at his grandma’s house. Before he’d gone to bed, the old lady sometimes told him he might wake up in the morning and wonder where in heaven or earth he was. He’d scoffed at his grandmother’s bygone-age brainlessness, gone up to bed, and lain down in the single bed parallel to his grandfather’s. His grandmother, he knew, would decamp to sleep in the spare room. The spare bed had to be aired before anyone slept in it, she’d say.

Grandma had known he’d be coming, so she’d aired the double bed in the spare room for herself, leaving her single divan for him, next to his grandpa’s. He hadn’t known what ‘airing the bed’ meant. He’d had a vague vision of sheets and quilt thrown back, exposing the mattress and bottom sheet to the air. Little had he known it was all about warming the mattress, so the cold didn’t seep upward in the night and get into his grandmother’s bones. Now, he guessed Grandma had probably heated it with an electric blanket, all the rage back then, in the nineteen seventies.

Sol and Grandad had exchanged stories as they’d both grown drowsier. Sol loved his grandfather’s schoolboy tales, especially the one about the boy who had stood up to a cruel and tyrannical teacher, seizing the man’s pocket watch and dashing it to smithereens against the wall. Grandad had told that tale over and over.  Sol had never tired of it.

Sol had wondered what was going on when Grandad suddenly reared up from his bed, walked across the floor and yanked open the curtains, the sixteen panes of the old 19th-century window glowing deep blue in the moonlight, the silhouette of the rooftops and chimney pots stark beyond. Grandad liked to sleep with the curtains open. Thinking back fifty-five years, Sol’s seven-year-old self remembered Grandad saying, “I’d rather have the curtains drawn.” Sol’s sixty-two year old, present self doubted this, because to him, ‘drawn’ meant ‘closed’ and Grandad had demonstrated the exact opposite. Nevertheless, he still shivered a little, recalling the old man’s creaking tread on the boards, then the dusky room’s exposure to the terrors of the night. Why do away with the safe barrier of the curtains, protecting them as they did from prying eyes, human or whatever else might be out there? Had Grandad been looking to let something out, or entice something in?

And Grandma had been right. Sol had awoken in the bright radiance of morning, blue sky and fluffy clouds beyond those sixteen panes and their chimney pots, so benign and harmless now, fears and goblins banished by the bright gold of daytime, and wondered where this place was, until he heard Grandad sloshing and shaving in the bathroom, smelled the strange yet familiar coal-dust scent of this old house, and realised where he was. 

Back in the here and now, still stretching his stiff muscles, Sol knew something was there, starting to take shape in the gloom. There was a pool of dim, yellowish night light. A long cartouche, that his eyes told him must be white, lay at its centre. There was a low, rhythmic hiss as something rose and fell, rose and fell.

This was a hospital room; a private space for a single patient, with a single bed. Sol’s sudden awareness of this simple fact dawned alongside the realisation he’d known it all along. How he’d known it, he couldn’t fathom, not at that moment. Sol strained his eyes to discern more of the sheet-covered shape in the bed, its face hidden in shadow. It looked male, though he couldn’t say how he knew. The chest rose and fell, in the wan glow, in time with the periodic hissing. Whoever this guy was, he looked to be in a bad way. Now, Sol found he could make out the long, white panel above the bed head, with outlets for oxygen, mains and things he didn’t recognise. A polythene tube snaked from the oxygen source down to a mask over the man’s face, obscuring his features.

Sol Crabbe’s puzzlement at being where he had found himself was a good deal more profound than that of your average confused amnesiac. Just a minute before coming to his senses in a medical facility of whose location he had no idea, Sol had been at the controls of a Cirrus Vision Jet, a state-of-the-art single jet engined aircraft, on a corporate flight from Nice in the south of France, to London City airport, with a single occupant in the passenger cabin. The flight was right on the endurance limit of the small luxury private jet. The airplane boasted the best safety features available, including a full auto land system linked to a database of all known airfields, and a parachute that could support the mass of the entire airframe, if all else failed. One moment, Sol had been running through his checklist after levelling off in the cruise; the next, he’d been here.

With a shock tempered by the suspended disbelief of the dream world, Sol realised that a third party was present in the hospital room. As he turned his head toward the figure to his right, also seated in a hospital visitor’s chair, Sol realised he had seen this man before.

It wasn’t just the trademark white dinner jacket, without blemish or crease. Nor was it the blood-red carnation in the buttonhole, although that too had been there on the two previous occasions Sol had seen this man, the second encounter very recent indeed.  It was something quite different; a thing that couldn’t be linked to any one of the five natural senses. Perhaps you could call it charisma, or maybe aura. It was like knowing someone was there, before you saw them. The man who had never told Sol Crabbe his name, the old man who had not aged a day in the forty years since Sol had first seen him, turned and smiled, revealing unchangedly perfect white teeth. 

“It’s time for me to enact your final wish, Solomon,” he said, quietly, his perfect and precise English accent just as Sol remembered it. “Behold.”

The light grew brighter in the hospital room. The man in the spotless white dinner jacket gestured toward the bed before them. Sol’s gaze followed the outstretched hand.

The man in the hospital bed was unbelievably aged. Bald, sunken-cheeked, his bony, beak-like nose reminded Sol of pictures he’d seen of Rameses II’s mummy. Yet, this was no ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Right here in the twenty-first century, this old man was dying, there could be no doubt about that. He looked like he’d been dying for a long time. Maybe he’d hang on a while more; maybe his next breath would be his last. And those breaths certainly did not look easy, nor pleasant. Now, over the hiss of the oxygen, Sol could hear each pained, wheezing inspiration, followed by the hurried, shaky, nasal exhalation, expedited in a rush to hasten the next life-sustaining breath. But, what was the point, Sol thought, of prolonging such a wretched existence? Were he ever to attain such a state, Sol felt sure, he’d rather someone put a pillow over his face than have him endure this.

With a start of disbelief and a quickening pulse, he leaned forward. Surely it could not be… yet it was. Sol Crabbe collapsed backward into his hospital chair. He had recognised the face of the corpse-to-be. It was his own face, as he might perhaps look in thirty years’ time, gasping to hold onto his last vestige of life, upon his death bed.

“After the ball is over…” 

Solomon Arthur Crabbe, twenty-four hours a first class honours graduate of Trinity, Oxon in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, twenty-one years old and already disillusioned with life, gazed over the parapet of Magdalen Bridge into the golden orb of the rising sun, Nat King Cole’s wistful lyrics blowing through his mind on the morning breeze. It had been quite the graduation party, lasting all night, as every good ball should. Spectacularly gowned girls and tuxedoed boys, all of them reluctant young adults now, melted and floated away, in pairs, in groups or dejectedly single, toward halls, digs and flats. Heading for what? Sol mused. Careers in accountancy, banking, insurance, salary increments guaranteed until sixty-five, then an adequate inflation-proof pension, with Saga coach holidays to break up the uncountable days of gardening and daytime TV, until you were too sick and feeble to keep that up, and then….

“It doesn’t have to be that way, Solomon,” said the man next to him, on the bridge. Sol turned his head toward the newcomer. The man who had spoken to him wore evening attire like everyone who had attended the ball, but there were two stark differences. First, the man’s age. He was seventy if he was a day, with bald pate and  white hair either side. Then, there was the immaculate state of his attire. He wore a perfectly white dinner jacket, with a blood-red carnation in the buttonhole of his left lapel. No way, thought Sol, had this fellow been to an all-night bash. His white tux was straight from the dry cleaners. This was some kind of wind-up. Sol was about to ask the man who had put him up to this - he already had a shortlist of suspects - when the man raised a hand, as if he’d known Sol was about to speak. “Listen to me, Solomon.” The eyes bored deep into his, hypnotic, commanding, irresistible. “Listen. It does not have to be as you imagine. I know your greatest want, Solomon. I know it because I have known you since you were a tiny baby. Since before that, in fact. I know what it is, that you most desire. I know that your greatest wish in all this world is to be an aeroplane pilot. That can be within your reach, Solomon. I can make it so. With your agreement.” The man held out his right hand.

The expected questions queued up in Sol’s mind. Who are you? On what authority? As his brain framed each, the old man’s blue-grey eyes grew that little bit more knowing, almost condescending, until Sol gave up the struggle. With a sharp nod, keeping eye contact, he grasped, gripped and pumped the old man’s surprisingly strong, proffered hand.

Sol Crabbe’s flying career had gone along on rails, if you can accept the oxymoron. Before the sun had set on his early morning chat with the strange man in the white dinner jacket, he had received a telegram from his Uncle Ivor, whom he had not seen since early childhood. Uncle Ivor had offered to pay for flying lessons, and for commercial pilot training at Hamble College of Air Training. Happy to be going back to school, with a healthy stipend to assure him plenty of pocket money as well as his tuition and board, Sol had thrown himself enthusiastically into his new career and new lifestyle. Unlike some of his classmates, he had aced the training course on the notoriously difficult, single-propeller De Havilland Chipmunk, an unforgiving sky horse that counted periodically spraying its front seat pilot with hot engine oil among its foibles. Trainee pilots always sat in the front seat in such aircraft, with the instructor in the rear.

Sol’s outstanding progress had been noticed by British Airways’ talent spotters. He’d he soon found himself type rated on the Boeing 737-236, BA’s variant of that venerable medium and short haul airframe, and on the then-new Airbus A320. Sol had racked up four thousand hours in total as first officer on the two types, mainly running short hauls between London Heathrow and various European airports. In contrast to many of his Hamble-trained colleagues, Sol found he could transition easily between the conventional, cable-linked controls of the old 737, and the fly-by-wire sidesticks of the A320, a control philosophy completely alien to some traditional stick-and-rudder pilots. It rarely crossed Sol’s mind that his success might be at least in part due to the man he had met in the early morning light on Magdalen Bridge.

Leopards, it’s said, don’t change their spots, and neither do driven young men. Seven years into his flying career, twenty-six years old Sol Crabbe felt railroaded, stuck in a rut, condemned to eke out his first officer’s salary in the right seat of smelly, poorly maintained BA flight decks, playing second fiddle to autocratic captains whose competence, in his estimation, was at best the equivalent of Sol’s own. So, he’d looked wider. First, he’d discovered the air freight market, where he’d expanded his type rating portfolio to include the Boeing 747-400F and, after just over a thousand hours on type, had been promoted to Captain. For years, he’d flown long haul, heavy cargo flights all over the world, crossing the pond, sometimes traversing the Pacific in the B777-200LR, and then that old itch had started to bug him again. Of course, he’d forgotten much of how he’d got here in the first place. Those old oil-spewing Chipmunks were gathering dust in memory chests he never opened these days, right at the back of his mind. The old boy on the bridge, in the white tux with the red carnation, was an even more distant memory, if indeed it was still a memory at all.

Years later, Sol scratched that itch by leaving air freight for something more comfortable and far more lucrative. By then, he’d had his fill of heavies, with their interminable preflight procedures, the painfully slow fuelling and loading, not to mention the endless reschedules and delays. Dispatch always prioritised passenger flights over freight, because boxes of cargo didn’t complain about being made to hang around on the tarmac for twelve or fourteen hours at a time. Of course, dispatch cared little for the two pilots rostered for every cargo flight, who had to work nights anyways because airlines preferred to move freight around when airports were at their quietest, and often sat for hours on flight decks before being stood down to avoid exceeding rostered hours, only to spend a short, sleepless night on a crew room sofa, before rebounding, even more tired than before, for a barely legal and highly dangerous departure.

At last, after almost two decades in the left seats of air freighters, during which he counted himself fortunate he’d never been on an accident flight, Sol Crabbe had made his next and final career move into the business aviation market. Corporate private jets tended to move during civilised hours, with departure and arrival times that didn’t make your eyes red. Sol’s type rating portfolio grew to include the Learjet, the Dassault Falcon, the Bombardier Challenger 300, and that Rolls-Royce of biz jets, the Gulfstream G500. All of them he loved to fly. They responded like fighters, unlike the lumbering, overweight behemoths he remembered from his passenger and freighter days.

Contemplating retirement, not quite sure he was ready for the vacuum, Sol had spotted an ad that looked too good to be true. An Italian business mogul wanted to hire a pilot to fly him around in his Cirrus Vision Jet. Sol did some fast Googling and found the guy was in his seventies, and didn’t travel much. The ad promised a fixed salary and free accommodation, in a hilltop luxury residence close to the most beautiful stretch of Italian coast. Sol had applied and been hired. The work had been as easy as he’d expected, a couple of flights a week at most, with turnarounds in Europe’s best five-star hotels.

Over the Alps, Mont Blanc and the clifftopped Matterhorn both within his sunlit, panoramic field of view, Sol had been leafing through Apple News when he’d found some rather disturbing information about his employer. Female domestic staff, it was alleged, had been trafficked in from Africa and Asia, and had been treated dreadfully, assaulted and attacked, by the CEO and some of his underlings. That CEO was gently snoring now, a few feet away, in the leather-upholstered passenger cabin of the Cirrus.

Sol felt the presence in the empty right pilot’s seat before he turned to look. When he did, he came face to face with the man he’d met on Magdalen Bridge, more than thirty years before. Instantly, he recognised the white dinner jacket and the deep red carnation. Again, the man smiled, showing two rows of perfectly white teeth.

“Hello again, Solomon,” he said. “It’s time for me to grant you your second wish. I’m sure you remember, from those heady days after you graduated, with rivers of Beaujolais and champagne, your loud and clear declaration of your wish to live forever.”

Sol Crabbe’s thoughts coalesced and reconnected, as everything began to make sense. This white-tuxed apparition had known Sol wanted to be a pilot, and so it had been. It had also known he’d wanted to live eternally, and that wish had been granted too. But at what cost? Again, he gazed upon the living, dead, suffering wreck in the hospital bed.

“Put me back in that airplane, with that old pervert in the cabin behind me,” Sol said, looking white-tux straight in the eye. “I know what to do.”

White-tux nodded. “In most cases, the third wish is the same as yours.”

The hospital room dissolved. The vertical wall of the Matterhorn loomed large, ahead of the Cirrus. Sol disconnected the autopilot.