Summer Unbinds the Airframes

Every year on this day, the river flats trembled with fireworks. This year was different. This year the sky made no sound.

On the levee, the model-airplane club worked in silence over their fuselages. From the radio came the broadcast of the Asian final. In some very distant country, a commentator was shouting himself hoarse. Here, a promo for night-game coverage cut in, and talk of the stadium lights coming on crossed the river with the summer wind.

Three years ago, the city had stopped setting off fireworks. Noise. Fire. The elderly. Pets. Every reason was right. What replaced them was the Silent Program. In wide-open spaces, countless autonomous drones arranged themselves into constellations, and only people wearing the special glasses saw flowers open in the night sky. It made no sound. Particles of light scattered, scattered, and vanished.

A joke, said the club president. In his hands, a thirty-year-old radio controller had been polished smooth as persimmon skin. Fireworks are sound, he said. Without sound, they are only pictures.

No one answered. Of the fourteen gathered, only two wore glasses. Last year there had been five. Even with resale prices falling, the number of buyers kept dwindling. The young never bought them at all. To them, fireworks were images without sound; not seeing them cost nothing.

I was the youngest. I worked in aerodynamics and came to this levee only on weekends. Whether I should be irritated that I could not see skies designed by others without others’ glasses, or should feel nothing at all, I had still not decided.

One of the two with glasses looked up and drew a small breath.

It is beautiful, really.

I looked at his profile. He says it every year. And every year, after saying it, his face turns a little sad. Saying a beautiful thing is beautiful seems to carry some guilt. I sometimes wonder: does he know, exactly, the price of what he can see?

Cheers rose from the radio. In a distant country, it seemed, the go-ahead run had scored. On this side of the river, no one was watching the ball. Still, the tremor of those cheers came down onto the levee grass. I realized that everyone gathered here had, for an instant, given his heart to a game he could not see. Is giving your heart to what you cannot see a loss, or a luxury?

Then it happened. The transmitter on my lap lit its receiver lamp, though my fingers had left it.

The airwaves should have been crowded. The Silent Program occupied the band; the control waves of the drone flock stitched through the night air; the radio relay waves split the sky overhead; and our hobby band remained, barely, at the edge. There, a pattern ran. Sine waves began to align. As if someone had drawn staff paper across the sky.

Hey, I said. My voice was shaking.

On the levee, all fourteen model airplanes lit their receiver lamps at once. No one had turned a switch. Even airframes with their batteries removed had wing servos humming faintly. A dry sound. Like a cicada shell touched by wind, almost too faint to hear.

Then, before the eyes of us who had no glasses, the model planes began to slide.

One, then another. With no propellers at all, only electric gliders kicked at the levee grass and lifted into the dusk. Control was somewhere. But the transmitters, on fourteen laps, kept silent. I looked up at my plane. The wing I had made rode a wind I did not know and circled over the middle of the river.

This is— The club president stood.

The two with glasses looked up at the same time and did not cry out. The sky they could see and the sky I could see were now crossing at the same height. The coordinates where the drone flowers opened and the circles traced by the model planes overlapped exactly. The autonomous flock had apparently picked up our band as an empty lot and woven the old hobby signals into its staging. Or perhaps this was not staging, but a greeting.

On the radio, the final whistle blew. Something ended in a distant country; something began here.

The fourteen faces looking up became black silhouettes. The model planes kept climbing, rising quietly toward altitudes never permitted in ordinary practice. There was no sound. The night of the Silent Program was complete in itself. Yet deep in my ears, I thought I could almost hear, far above, membrane wings tearing the air. Soundless fireworks and lightless airplanes were recognizing each other in the same darkness.

Can you bring them down? the president asked.

I gripped the transmitter. The band was still quiet; that alignment of sine waves, after returning our wings to us once, had withdrawn somewhere. A test run? An accident? Or the moment the sky itself let go of human hands? I could not tell.

The man with glasses said quietly,

Next year, I wonder if our airframes will enter that sky too.

Was it envy, or an announcement? High above, the fourteen machines kept circling. Unlit wings parted the particles of soundless flowers, forming into formations we did not know.

I kept my finger on the transmitter switch and looked up. Bring them down, or see them off? The end-of-summer sky does not wait for an answer.

And I wondered: was I truly the only one to whom this sky felt beautiful right now?