If there’s a God, he’s a bastard. Why else would he fill the skies with buzzing, whirring, flapping, beautiful, loop-the-looping stunt-beasties? And give us the brains to be amazed by them? And then not give us wings?
I dream about flying every night. Not swooping through the sky like an eagle or a superhero or an angel, but real-life flying. Clumsily flailing around about 5 feet off the ground, shitting myself with panic, desperately fighting vertigo and thinking: “F--k! This is just like my dreams. I can fly. I can really, really fly ... ” And every morning I wake up to my lead-footed reality, nailed to the mattress by gravity, cursing the bearded bastard in the sky.
I’m a sucker for works of fiction in which humans soar. Like Superman. And Peter Pan. And the Bible. And The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where it turns out humans can fly, and the only thing stopping them is that they know they can’t.
What if we could switch off gravity just by ceasing to believe in it—the same way millions of human beings have switched off God?
I have a theory. The day the last human being stops believing in God is the day the entire species starts flying. Not metaphorically—literally. Like birds, bats, dragonflies, angels and Kryptonians. And Moby in that video that used trick photography to make it look like he was hovering around the Bronx. Yes, I know this is unscientific, faith-based, superstitious bullshit. But hey, God started it.
There’s a new comic book called Bizarre New World. On the cover, a fat dude in a trucker cap flounders around the sky, looking terrified. It’s the story of a painfully ordinary bloke who one day stands up and stretches and yawns and floats up to the ceiling. So he designs a natty one-piece, skin-tight lycra uniform and goes off to fight crime. Except he doesn’t. He does what you or I would do: He panics. Then he goes home and panics some more. Then he draws all the curtains and walks upside down on the ceiling. And all the change falls out of his pockets.
He soon discovers he hasn’t also gained invulnerability. This kinda takes the edge off the flying thing. If he’s struck by lightning, he dies. Hit by a goose? He dies. Sucked into the engine of a passing 747? Dies. Clobbered by a giant firework? Dies. Spotted on radar while inadvertently flying near a sensitive military instillation? Flying ability suddenly turns itself off? Falls screaming to the ground and dies. Whack, wham, splat. Game over.
In Bizarre New World “the world’s first real flying man” asks his son for advice. “What would you do if you could fly like Superman?”
“I’d rather have X-ray vision,” the kid says. And they both start snickering.
This is true to life. Almost every woman to whom I’ve offered the classic superpower choice “flight or invisibility” has unhesitatingly chosen flight. And almost every man has chosen invisibility. And then—when pushed—gone off on some deranged, impracticable and puerile fantasy about robbing banks, eating for free and sneaking into women’s changing rooms.
This tells you pretty much all you need to know about men. Leaving aside the practical issues (where are you going to hide this money you’re stealing, exactly?), what species of lowly, grunting mud-beast would choose food, lucre and illicitly glimpsed titties over the ability to fly?
Not that the men who choose flying are any more ethereal. On the Bizarre New World website, which asks fans what they’d do if they could fly, one dude says: “Mostly, I’d fly around the city and see how many people have pools.”
And another: “I’d find an agent, and then I’d take my act to Leno. I’d rake in the big ones and buy my own island. Then live out my days in peaceful bliss, until the money ran out, and then I’d think of a lame David Blaine-type media hype to build more income.”
Me? The first thing I’d do is fly up to heaven and punch God on the schnozz. And then go find an agent.