China Mountain Zhang

KITES (Angel)

The door is flanked by two, curtained windows with big flower arrangements in them, it makes the place look more like a discreet and expensive restaurant than a funeral parlor. The first person I see is Orchid-long white hair and black satin quilted jacket with, of course, a huge white silk orchid appliqued across the back. Then Ci

Some fliers take on their flying name, like Orchid. Everybody calls her Orchid. I don't even know what her name is. But nobody calls Eleni 'Jacinth' except the marks. Nobody calls me Gargoyle, they just call me Angel. But everybody calls Joh

Ci

"Pijiu?" Ci

We don't have anything to say to each other. So we stand around the viewing room feeling guilty. The dead can feel virtuous I suppose. Dead dead dead. That's for all you people who say 'passed away.'

People die for different reasons; the young ones-the ones with good reflexes die because they take risks, the older ones die because their reflexes or synapses let them down. Not that we don't all cut up and take risks, it's just that the older you get, the less often you get in positions where you have to, or maybe you know that there's another race.

" Kirin was a nice girl," Ci

I didn't really know the deceased all that well. I mean, she'd flown and all but she'd only been riding in the big kites a year or so, and I was out for three months because I tore a ligament in my shoulder. Besides, she was ABC, American Born Chinese, she even had citizenship in China. Opens a lot of doors. ABC don't have to associate with waiguoren from Brooklyn. Especially waiguoren having a bad year. Fu

"Are you flying tonight?" I ask.

"I'm going down to Florida this afternoon," Orchid says. She goes down there a lot to fly.

"You be out at Washington Square?" Ci

"If Georgia can get the Siyue off the ground." Georgia 's my tech.

"You're still flying a Siyue?" Orchid asks, white eyebrows arching all disdainful.

Ci

"Angel," Ci

"Let's see how the race goes."

Ci

"If you come in money," Ci

I laugh.

At Washington Square, Georgia and I have got the Siyue working and I lift the kite over my head, holding it so I can feel the wind in the silk. It hums, a huge insect. I'm wired into the half-awake kite and moving in sensory overlap-I have arms and wings both feeding through parallel synapsis and if I think about which I am trying to move it's like trying to pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time. But I'm lit and my mind is chemical clear. My black silk wings are taut and light above me. I am called Angel, with the soft 'h' sound of Brooklyn for the 'g', and I am burning, waiting for the race. I stand 1.47 meters tall and weigh 39 kilos but I'm strong, probably stronger than you. My joints are like cables, the ligaments and tendons in my shoulders are all synthetic after the last surgery, strong as spider web, far stronger than steel.

If my kite holds together, there is no one who can beat me. I feel it.

I jog a few meters, and then start to run lightly. There is the faint vibration of power as the sensors signal that I've reached the threshold between drag and lift and the system trips into active, and when the power feeds through the kite the full system comes on, and I swing my legs up into the harness by habit because I don't even have a body anymore. My body is the kite. I feel the air on my silk, I balance on the air. The kite is more than a glider, because it needs a power source which is fueled by my own metabolism, but the original kites-hang gliders-were true gliders; a kite does fly. I mean, I'm not a rock. I won't just fall.

I climb in lazy circles, there's two fliers spiraling up above me, one below me. Loushang is Medicine, her kite patterned like a Navajo sand painting even from where I see it underneath. Louxia I can't see, they are between me and the groundlight, so all I can see is the silhouette of a Liuyue kite. I test the kite, my left shoulder aches like rheumatism. It's an old kite, it has aches and pains.

Then they are starting to form up; eighteen kites, two abreast, I am six back, on the outside. I drop into place, and we do a slow circle of the course. Eighteen triangles of bright silk. The course goes from Washington Square Park to Union Square and back, following The Swath. Over the Square the ground is a maze of lights, then suddenly the ground lights end and there's nothing below us but the undergrowth and debris of the 2059 riots. Off to my right I see the bracelet of lights where Broadway goes under The Swath-I never remember to call it Huang Tu

I wonder briefly how many people are synched with me. I used to be self-conscious about the people who are tied in, experiencing what I experience as I fly. Now I don't think of them as separate people much-a teenage boy somewhere in Queens, maybe an old man in the Bronx. If the numbers get high enough, Citinet will sponsor me again. But why sponsor someone with last year's kite? Someone who probably won't win? When they dropped me at Citinet, they told me I was too precise a flier. I made all the rational choices, took no chances. I am too cold, no fun.

I told them no one was going to follow me down into The Swath, fighting to regain control of my kite, until the automatic cutoff kills the synch just nanoseconds before impact. One of them muttered at least then I'd be doing something interesting.

We come back over Washington Square Park for the second time and the kites begin to pick up speed. We glide past the floater marking the start and already I'm climbing, trying to get altitude. Ten kites are in front of me and I sideslip slightly inside, cutting off Medicine, flying to my left. She's forced to go underneath me, ends up flying xialou, my shadow underneath except that my kite is black silk and hers is a Navajo pattern in red, black, white and blue. I see Ci