Jagannath

Herr Cederberg

Herr Cederberg preferred leaving the office to have lunch outside. He would sit on a bench next to the fountain on Mariatorget, reading the newspaper with a sandwich or two, especially now that the weather was nice. It was June, and the flowerbeds were full of giddy insects that every now and then buzzed over to Herr Cederberg to make sure he wasn’t a flower. Other office workers populated the adjacent benches with their lunch boxes, and some even stretched out on the lawns, drinking the first summer sun like pale lizards.

Herr Cederberg was vaguely reading an article on the national economy when feet crunched by on the gravel, and a girl’s voice mumbled,

“…like a bumblebee.”

Another voice tittered. He didn’t have to look up to know they were talking about him. He was already very aware of his swelling thighs and bulging stomach, and that his feet were not quite touching the ground. The most common simile was pig, followed by panda, koala, and bumblebee, in no particular order. Herr Cederberg looked up from his newspaper. Two rosy and adolescent faces quickly looked away and leaned towards each other. The one who had giggled continued:

“Oh, I love bumblebees, they’re so neat. You know how the laws of nature says they shouldn’t be able to fly, right, but they fly anyway?”

“Yeah, but how?” asked the first girl.

“Because they don’t know they’re not supposed to!”

The girls burst into shrill laughter. Herr Cederberg couldn’t summon the energy to say anything. They had no idea of their own idiocy and wouldn’t for years to come, if ever. He looked at the fat little insects bumping around in the tulips, their wings, if one could see them in slow motion, oscillating in a beautiful figure-of-eight pattern. He imagined himself fluttering his arms in the same fashion, slowly ascending into the sky.

Herr Cederberg had long ago converted his garage into a workshop. His first passion had been for model planes, but the last few years he had been experimenting with different types of kites. His finest work to date, a Balinese dragon, covered the ceiling in bright red and gold.

He surveyed the little space. There was plenty of material to work with. He rolled up his shirt sleeves, took off his jacket, and started sketching a framework.

Herr Cederberg finished the machine on an early morning in the second week of August. At first glance, it resembled a stubby winged canoe on wheels. The cockpit had a corduroy seat with a safety belt. A pair of bicycle pedals stuck out of the floor. It had felt a little banal to use pedals to power the wings, but they turned out to be the perfect method for creating the oscillating pattern he wanted. The chassis was covered with a layer of oilcloth, painted with black-and-yellow stripes. Herr Cederberg realized he hadn’t given the craft a name.

After a long blank moment, he patted the chassis and said, “Bumblebee.” He blushed at his own lack of imagination.

It was time to go. He folded the wings along the sides and pushed Bumblebee out of the garage, toward the forest.

Herr Cederberg stood sweaty and winded on the edge of a cliff in the forest outside the suburb. Far below lay the lake and the dark green sea of the pine forest. Next to him, the craft sat with its wings extended and a couple of wedges under its wheels to keep it from running off the edge. Herr Cederberg put his goggles on and crawled into the cockpit. He fastened his seatbelt and waited.

The morning wind was too gentle, but after midday it finally picked up speed. A low pressure front was heading in, and the chubby cumuli fused and inflated as they wandered the horizon. When the draft finally arrived, Herr Cederberg tore the wedges off and cheered quietly as the craft rolled forward, lifted its nose, and slid out over the edge. He pedaled as fast as his legs could manage. The wings were sluggish at first, but picked up speed, and when an updraft shot up along the cliff Bumblebee really took off. The air rushing by made Herr Cederberg’s cheeks flutter. He rose higher and higher at a steep and determined angle.

The low pressure front came in straight ahead. The cumuli had gained height and metamorphosed into an enormous cumulonimbus, an anvil-shaped mass that stretched up into the higher layers of the atmosphere. Herr Cederberg looked down at the ground. He looked up at the cloud. Then he smiled and pedaled faster.

At first, the suction of the cumulonimbus felt like a faint increase in wind. Then suddenly, it was as if someone had grabbed the craft, as the cloud greedily started sucking in all air in its vicinity. Herr Cederberg saw the dark belly of the cloud stretch out like a bruised ceiling. The wind howled in his ears. The cloud ceiling soon filled his entire field of vision.

The forward motion turned into a violent updraft, and the air darkened around him. Bumblebee began to shudder and shake. A wing abruptly tore away and pulled half of the oilcloth with it. Herr Cederberg clung to the edges of the cockpit with whitening knuckles as the cold and dark closed in around him. Ice crystals flocked to his eyelashes and moustache. The other wing fell away into the fog. Herr Cederberg unfastened his safety belt and kicked away from the cockpit. The craft’s remains disappeared under him. The fog brightened slightly. He closed his eyes.

Some time later, the light became almost unbearably bright, and the wind quieted down. Herr Cederberg opened his eyes again. He was floating just above the top of the cumulonimbus cloud. Above him, a hard little sun shone in a sky colored dark violet. Little cirrus clouds powdered the stratosphere. White hills billowed away in all directions. The cold was deep and quiet. Herr Cederberg oscillated his arms, like a bumblebee.