The Flying Man Hypothesis by Joshan Esfandiari Martin

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Read by Cliff Chapman

I came home to find broken branches lying in front of our building. It couldn’t have been the men who pruned the trees along our street, for it was March, and they never began their surgery until May. They are diligent sorts and always take the offcuts away. The branches were also torn rather than sawn, with curling ends of sappy young bark. It was a right mess.

 

I looked up the street. Most buildings had at least one tree outside, large lindens that reached up to the fourth floor. None had branches piled on the pavement below. As far as I could tell, none had been pruned.

I went up to my flat and unpacked my suitcase. I put my tuxedo in the bin. I sat with my head in my hands for a while. I had bruises all down my left side. There was a pond of purple blood swelling at my ankles. The flat was silent.

My mother hated cut flowers. They bring a hex on you, she said. They are all but dead already. When someone gifted her a posy she’d demurely take it with that witch’s cast of mind that recognizes evil in any gesture. Later, when the guest had gone, she’d put the flowers in the trash. The trash was where all our bad karma was interned, a genizah for the unpropitious, waiting to be taken away and buried by the bin men. Jackdaw feathers, spilt salt, and latterly all the photos of my father went this way. So I had learnt this queer suspicion of cut and dying plants from childhood.

Placed raggedly before the porch, what omen could these branches be?

*

The wedding had been a disaster. I drank too much because in general I drink too much. At some hour the world had started turning; I could feel it turning. Was it nighttime, or maybe I’d gone blind? My heart was doing logarithms.

Here’s a theory about the soul:

A man suspended in midair, cut off from all sensation, would still know he exists. He would be aware of his existence. Ergo the self, the soul, is independent of the body. So goes Avicenna’s ‘flying man hypothesis’! But as I tailspun round a hotel bed, in unreasonably damp clothes (I don’t know why), my report on his conjecture remained inconclusive. It was difficult to take notes.

Avicenna. Persian philosopher. Twelfth century, and persuasively bearded.

In the morning I puked thoroughly.

Normally one hears birdsong outside my flat. Now there was nothing. I rubbed witch-hazel into my bruises. Wanted a cigarette. I said some unchristian things into the mirror, and headed to the corner shop.

He said he’d seen the whole thing. The woman from the top flat had thrown herself out of the window. The sound as she fell through the branches was like machine-gun fire, so he said. Incredibly loud. But when the body hit the pavement it was soundless, Like on the moon! which I thought an odd remark. She had jumped from the window, but the tree had broken her fall. She hit the ground, had survived, and was taken to hospital.

I knew this woman. She had a husband, and two young daughters.

I rang the ambulance myself, he said. Lucky about the tree, he said.

She would have seen this, would she not? It was right outside her kitchen window. There would have been no way to avoid falling through the branches.

I inspected the pavement. There was no blood. A crushed bird’s nest at the curb. Some fag ends further down the road. In general this is a clean neighbourhood.

Many people dream of flying, I suppose. In my dreams it is always difficult. I do not soar through the air. I do not glide over valleys or dales, but levitate just a few inches off the ground, and I have to concentrate very hard to stay up. Gravity remains a force I must painfully resist. At length I fail, my arse hits the ground, and I wake from the dream sweaty, and fearful of a coronary.

They were a nice family, the fourth floorers. Hello on the stairs and that kind of thing. The girls liked recycling and spend hours at the bins sorting through their junk. Careful people. Of that, I am a little jealous.

There was no answer to their buzzer. I left it. No sense making a meal of it in their crisis hour.

*

Lying on the bed smoking.

Imagine falling.

I am scared of heights, which is to say if you place my body at a height, its instinct is to jump off. This is what I’m scared of – my body’s desire to plunge. The vertigo seizes you, tries to wrestle you off the precipice. Moses and the Angel, with Moses as your will to live, and the Angel as your will to fall.

The phone is ringing, but I can’t take it yet.

There’s a flip side to this vertigo thing. Suicides fasten bricks to their ankles to drown themselves. Even if they want to die, their bodies don’t. You have to be sly to fool your treacherous flesh.

Where was the blood? Wouldn’t a dropped woman shed some blood?

So this is it: people throw themselves out of windows because bodies fall. Nothing a body can do to save itself. You cut the air, and for all your waving you will not fly. That’s Newton. That’s Galileo. That’s Time’s pure fucking arrow. Unless of course there’s a tree. Did her arms reach out to grab the branches? Was it automatic?

The phone again. God, it must’ve been bad.

So you’re alive?

Yes Gerry.

You don’t deserve it.

I confess now, I don’t have any memory.

Well it’s seared onto everyone else’s.

I want to apologize for everything. I feel like I want to apologize to the world for the world.

Not good enough this time.

Is Carice ok? How’s married life?

You ruined the day. Completely. I’m just lucky to be with such a forgiving woman.

I don’t deserve forgiveness.

You’re a shit of the first water.

I know, I know. I know it in my heart.

And her mother is actually very frightened of you now.

It was bad. It was bad to do the thing I did. I know that. Whatever it was.

*

My father believed in toughening children up. Climb the climbing frame he said, but I could only ever get half way. In a park when all the other children had gone home, he exhorted me with homophobic aspersions and a one-sided row. I couldn’t answer because I was shaking and crying, and it wasn’t even that high. I just couldn’t do it. With all my will I wanted to, but we are less than our will. In the end I was a body that could not move forward, and once up, could not go backwards. Stuck, until through tiredness I fell the small matter of some feet, and into the well of my father’s disappointment and suspicion. It was a repeat performance. Many times. And I’m loath to think what it may have done to me.

*

Consider this the last call of our long friendship. It’s finished. I will not drag your pandemonium into the next phase of my life.

There was a suicide at my flat today.

A desperate gambit. Even from you.

Ok Gerry. Ok.

He put down the phone. I hung on, hoping the dull tone would be broken by a reprieve. But on it went. The etiolated drone of a dead line, until a recorded voice came on and told me: please hang up, and try again.

I heard them coming up the stairs in the evening. I waited a respectful time, then knocked at the fourth floor. One of the daughters opened the door. Her face mooned sullenly at the jamb.

I’m so sorry to hear about your mother. I came to ask if…

Who is it darling?

The bottle man from downstairs.

She opened the door wider. To my surprise the mother was standing in the hallway. She was leaning on a crutch looking quite well.

That’s just our name for you. The girls always see you putting bottles out.

I came to see if you, well, the girls were all right.

She gave me a queer sort of look … My husband will be back soon, she said rather pointedly.

Mummy tripped in the bedroom. But it’s all right, I know to clear up after myself now. No harm done.

Apart from my ankle.

Apart from Mummy’s ankle. Such a lot of bother.

I’ll …start recycling those bottles, eh?

The daughter gave me a suspicious furrowing as she closed the door. She

knew I wouldn’t. She knew what kind of man I was.

*

Over the next two days I saw things. The woman upstairs kept falling past my window. She always wore the same housecoat, so I could tell it was her. But she never hit the pavement. When I looked down, her body had always vanished. At night I was restless, dream-filled, and more than once I woke up falling out of bed. It seemed to justify calling in sick at work, and I began to sleep on the futon in the spare room. When the headaches came, I finally went to the doctor.

You’ve broken your nose.

It doesn’t hurt.

It can be like that. You’ve probably got concussion. When did you break it?

I don’t know. I don’t know that I did.

Well it’s started to re-fuse. To correct it, we’d have to break it again.

Can I get something for headaches?

Some sedatives. You don’t remember the event?

I’ve fallen out of bed a couple of times.

It says here you drink moderately. Should we revisit that?

 *

I have a drinking buddy who likes to climb out of windows when he’s drunk. He can give no rhyme or reason, and rarely remembers unless he falls. He once fell three stories onto his nose and now sports a Caesarean conk.

Best place to land, on your nose, he explained. Fleshy.

I have no idea how I came to this.

You have become the victim of a copycat instinct. Fancy a drink?

I can’t until the woman from upstairs stops falling past my window.

 *

That came a week later, the same day I received a bill from the wedding hotel for damage to their swimming pool. I was pleased to begin paying penance. The envelope also contained my bowtie which had been retrieved the filter system. Five

star hotel. Service second to none. Mainly through boredom, specifically my enforced holiday from alcohol, I decided to let them break my nose again. They gave me some gas so I wouldn’t mind, and as the chisel made a first crack against my septum I had one last vision. Past the surgeon’s window, for a blink moment, I saw someone fall. I know it was me…and not as the nurse later tried to impress, merely the window cleaner on his pulley. It was me, and for that tremolo second I was screaming blue murder.

To be haunted by falling is not much. The word says it all. We fall in love. We fall out of love. We fall for a trick. We fall short, behind, and apart. In the end, we are all heirs to Adam’s big one. A moral to this tale would be unbecoming, not to say distinctly old fashioned. I simply note that it is not a special or surprising thing that these events took place. We are all vexed by the test of our own existence. We are all hoping to be Avicenna’s perfect man.

With a bandage round my face and quite pleased by my newly frightening aspect, I stepped once more into the world. I went to the pub. And I had a drink. Falling finally, with a drinker’s poise, off the wagon.

(c) Joshan Esfandiari Martin, 2013

Joshan Esfandiari Martin is a writer and film director living in Berlin.

Cliff Chapman is Leicester born, Manx raised and available with a number of bonus features including: theatre; voice acting; audiobook directing; idents; music videos, short films and commercials. He is represented by Meredith Westwood Management and is easily won over by red wine.