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| Stratocruiser | |
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his is a dream I had each night in Korea, where I was very busy killing in a plane: I boarded an ocean liner as my destiny ordered, and sailed away. The sun came up over the scented tropics, day after day. Then the underbelly of Europe appeared: its black ice, its suffocating manners. And then I was nodding off in the bar downstairs in the Stratocruiser - endless thunder over the Sea of Japan, droning home through a mile-high wall of rain - you wake up just as you think "touchdown", and the fat tyres kiss the wet tarmac, bump, shriek, and touch again. The flak jacket waiting to be invented, your shabby suit hanging at the cleaners with another name carefully printed on the tag - your roles were there all along, shifting slightly in the shadows of a doorway somewhere in South-east Asia, but still yours, and you slip back into the last half of the century, unannounced, unmarked, without a second look. |
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