The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

Monsieur Fry, that there’s no purer embodiment of surrealism than the departure from land onto a borderless plane of water. One sails over the bodies of millions of creatures, many of them unknown to man—even over mountains uncharted, mountains higher than the highest peaks in Tibet—entirely without consciousness, without the slightest knowledge of their existence. One might, for example, while sitting in the ship’s dining room and eating iced pineapple, sail over a great underwater current propelling a fleet of leviathans and their children, thousands of tons of oily flesh moving invisibly and inaudibly along that unbound underwater river like giant corpuscles through the bloodstream of the world.”