Duration 2.27
Crasstranger Fallqueue was well acquainted with both meanings of flight, having had to escape from concentrated and vehement political persecution by hijacking a plane. Variously disguised as an acrobat who juggled eggs and as a blind ornithologist, he eventually made a home in Wales and settled on the Lleyn Peninsula. The VUE is now his persecutor.
Crasstranger could have successfully flown the aircraft he hijacked. It could be said that his family had prepared him for it. They had experienced a fair share of underplanned flying, mostly unwillingly, from tenth-storey prison-windows. It wasn't too difficult to make defenestration look like ambitious mimicry of birds. The family passion for aeronautics was a useful cover for assassination. Crasstranger's grandfather, a language schoolteacher, had earned the first Slovak degree in aeronautical engineering and had pursued a wish to fill the skies with aircraft, a wish that was only fulfilled by his pupils on Saturday afternoons. Crasstranger's uncles had outwitted one another in competitive flying stunts, and his father, developing a motorised parachute, had littered his speech with artificial sibilants to encourage lightness of body by lightness of speech. Crasstranger considered that his father's linguistic mannerisms indicated a worthwhile course to develop in any attempt to identify with birds and he urged VUE victims to express themselves by singing, not flying. Crasstranger now earned his living as an aeronautical journalist and as a flight historian. His knowledge of the facts, figures and feats of air pioneering were rarely contested. He well knew, for example, that the man who threw himself off the Eiffel Tower in April 1911 was not the patriot airman Nathan Isole Dermontier, nor the Welsh baritone called Van Riquardt, but was in fact an Austrian clothing manufacturer called Reichelt testing a parachute-coat of his own design. Any amount of historical inaccuracy, misguided heroic identity and misrepresentation could not disguise what was for Crasstranger a supreme example of the folly of aspiring to emulate the birds.
The Falls Biographies
