Fear of flight

Inga was a Lufthansa pilot. She took off in the echo of Lockerbie and landed in the dust of 9/11 never to fly again. She knew how those hijacked pilots felt. She understood them down to their very bones and fibre, and never again would she be responsible for hundreds of lives. Inga longed for pre-Columbus days, to see the world as flat and not as an arc through a cockpit window, to know nothing more than the truth of the stars.She came to Australia to train pilots in the simulator at Tullamarine. When the parent company went to the wall, her contract was cancelled but she decided to stay for the length of her visa, and sent home to Germany for some money.We met in a cafe in St Kilda. Inga was writing and I was writing and we began to talk."What's that?" she asked."A poem. I like poems and short stories, and you?""An exorcism. My own." I must have looked blank.Inga pushed her pad across to me. I was surprised, used to writers being private about their work, at least in progress. But her action was deliberate. I saw her need to share and began to read. To Inga, the skies were filled with families, breaking apart and coming together again. Relationships of love or business and they were all hers, a multitudinous personification of responsibility, which she picked up, took with her and put down safely. The emotions that were spilling were strong but not particularly original, rather sentimental and cloying. She was stretching for ideas in English that were not in her reach. Her sentences were constructed in the Germanic manner and she chose her words from some twisted Thesaurus. The strength was in the form. I read one page then looked up. A tear dripped off the end of her nose."Will you help me," she said, and I saw her needs were two-fold. We arranged to meet again.It was on St Kilda pier in the late afternoon. I could see her leaning on the railings staring down into the water and she didn't break her reverie even when I was standing right alongside."What do you see?"I asked."I see movement that stays the same."At the moment, Inga was in love with Port Phillip Bay, every skerrick of broken shell, every piece of driftwood delighted and, of course, the water with its reflections. I began to enjoy her long silences. When she did speak it was always to the point and always interesting. We continued to work on her piece for a while, clouds and tears and love and loss."Stream of consciousness," I said. "Epic, free verse."I was talking garbage, just trying to be kind. What she was feeling was beyond her. Inga just didn't have the means of expression necessary to convey what she needed to say. She wanted me to correct it, to make it perfect English but if I had done that, the thing that made it interesting would have disappeared. She just didn't understand. Her need for perfection stood in the way. I tried to explain, but Inga just stared at me and we didn't talk about it anymore after that.Ideas and ways to possibly help would sometimes occur to me."Have you ever read Janek's Primal Scream?""No.""Okay."She wasn't reading anything, nothing at all. She wasn't listening to the radio or watching TV or going to the movies. We would walk and watch other people enjoying themselves and Inga got pleasure from that. I wasn't afraid for her but I did often wonder how she filled her hours. There's always a book. No matter how far you fall into the blackness, there's always a book. But no. Nothing except herself and I was at once the guide and the observer of this, her re-birth.Time to introduce Inga to a bigger horizon. There might be a slight curve if you looked out to sea but only slight and the ground was firm. She came to stay with me in Aireys.We were standing on the deck."Here. "I put some bird-seed into her palm. "Now hold your arm out," and I whistled.A male king parrot flew in and landed on her shoulder. …