Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  Those who are from south of here, he doesn’t look too closely at the quality or accuracy of their IDs or documentation.

  They work hard. They are here on time. They simply want to help their families and themselves.

  He works with the crew as they get through the breakfast rush, talking the new people through their jobs, helping at the cash register when they need it, hauling trash out, working the grill, going out to the drive-thru line and greeting customers with small samples of the store’s new coffee drink. He hands the cups through open windows, very carefully; the wind wants to knock these drinks to the ground.

  Only later does he have a minute to check his phone. Text messages from his brother.

  His mother is sick. Hospital. He needs to go there. He needs to go there right away.

  Rows of small, plush beds of many different sizes.

  Aisles adorned with grooming supplies, the brushes and scissors and soaps and sprays, all hanging carefully from long hooks.

  Food stacked in bags and boxes and cans, ever more expensive as the aisle moves right to left, food raised and processed and bagged with a care beyond comfortable description.

  A few hours of driving north, and still the car is bouncing, shifting, pushed against by the wind.

  The restaurant manager’s mother is very old. She’s lived longer than he or his brother ever thought was possible.

  A good woman. Who did her best for them. He’s not close to her. She hasn’t ever allowed that to be possible. But she’s a good woman. Who deserves to see her sons right now.

  He finds he is replaying the fight in the bar. The beating, really. It wasn’t a fight.

  But his stomach doesn’t turn. His hands don’t shake. He simply replays it. Again. Not meaning to. It’s just what his mind has decided to do.

  He’ll travel north a few hours more. To the city where he grew up. The vast suburb to the much older city from the documentary. As a kid, he was only told the stories. We live in the South End. Across the highway is the North End. Do not go there. Do not play there. Do not let your friends dare you to enter that place.

  This was even before the area had been abandoned. A hundred thousand people still lived there then. Schools were still open. He once drove with his mother through the North End to the old church cemetery where her mother and father were buried. What they drove through was a worn-out, emptied place, storefronts dark and boarded up for street after street after street.

  But once the last of the schools finally closed, once the last factory shut down and the police left and even the city mayor walked away from his job, then the city died.

  Yet many of the streetlights still operated. The traffic lights blinking green, now yellow, soon red.

  The documentary said some few thousand people still live there. In homes they’ve owned their entire lives. Or in homes they’ve simply taken over for themselves. Still others have gone there to salvage things of value. Copper tubing, aluminum gutters. They strip down homes and buildings, scavenging items of some value to buyers in the South End.

  Why would someone live there?

  Hours later, he still drives on the highway. The fight no longer plays in his mind. A memory worn down, details steadily blurred, edges smoothed away by constant repetition.

  In a moment, he can see it, as he comes up over a slowly building rise in the otherwise flattened landscape. Ahead there are the clouds. A line of gray that lifts upward at a sloping, intermittent angle, three miles it goes, disappearing into the sky, having started so low to the ground that it’s as if the clouds spring forth from some unidentifiable source within the earth. In thirty minutes more, he’ll reach those clouds. Passing into a place that, starting some fifteen years ago, has been enveloped, that lives under an almost constant rain, that has not seen any sunlight since the manager was in his teens.

  He’d been a boy, really. Just thirteen. Waking up one day to a storm that poured water all across their yard.

  The rain did finally break. Days later. Just a mist continued to fall.

  But the clouds, they still hung there, in the sky. And never left again.

  Shoes priced in the thousands. Jackets priced for thousands more. Purses, watches, outerwear, all priced like collectible items of the future, treasures of cultural significance, not utilitarian objects of need.

  He wakes up. Nearly dead. Drugs again. Getting worse.

  He has a moment where he stares. At the air conditioning unit barely lodged inside the motel wall.

  He will have to leave. Everything and everyone.

  He will have to leave. If he’s going to continue to live.

  I will have to leave. Right now. This moment. Get up. Go. And leave.

  He can think of only one place.

  He dresses. Gathers a very few things. Soon, he crosses the overpass.

  Entering the city that’s been abandoned.

  PART 3

  Permanent Dusk

  The boy talks about his day. Telling his mother about a game they played at school. A game on the playground after they’d done art, and he hopes that tomorrow they’ll be able to sing.

  He loves when they can sing.

  First grade.

  His mother nods. Smiling down at him as they walk. About a mile they walk. From the bus stop to their small home.

  And still the boy is talking.

  CHAPTER 16

  Arrival

  Scientists seek funding for further study of the cloud mass. Politicians use its existence to their relative advantage. Those few news reports that still cover what happened discuss this only as a phenomenon unexplained. It started many years ago. There’s not much more to say.

  The people who live under the clouds, they have simply found a way to adapt. Or they’ll soon choose to leave.

  His daughter sits in the backseat making dandelion bracelets from the weeds she picked at a gas station a few hundred miles behind them. He watches her in the rearview mirror. Carefully bending each stem, interlocking them, the yellow flowers evenly spaced along the natural chain that she’s created.

  She’s making four of them.

  “I want to keep one for Mom,” she says.

  Five days since the buildings collapsed. But still he hasn’t told them.

  I’m sorry, but your mother has died.

  He drives. Wind pushes hard against the driver’s side of the car. He feels like he’s leaning the car into the wind.

  They are heading north. To the city where his parents live.

  Back on the highway in the delta, it took ten or twelve hours to navigate the labyrinth of abandoned and destroyed cars. The horror of slowly driving through that maze of abuse numbed all three of them.

  Cars and trucks wrecked.

  Dried mud and debris covering all that they could see.

  Bodies twisted inside and across the vehicles.

  He and his kids drove along in silence. Sometimes just a few miles an hour. The smell of rot and chemicals dissipating only after half a day of driving.

  Although some part of him wondered if the smell actually faded or he and his children simply grew accustomed to the scent.

  Sometimes they’d drive ten minutes, twenty, then realize there was no way through the cars ahead of them. Having to back up to find a different path, in doing so once more witnessing the same row of bodies bent sickly, dirty, in the shoulder of the road.

  Finally, they reached the end of the damage. Suddenly, with no hint it was coming, they reached the end of the car wrecks. The northernmost edge of the flood. A hundred and fifty miles from the Gulf.

  They kept driving. Unable to stop in a few small cities already overloaded with refugees from the storm. They slept one more night in the car, then finally reached a city not overwhelmed with refugees. The three of them went to a massive store in a strip mall to buy fresh clothes. Then checked into a hotel room across the street. They took turns showering. They washed clothes in the laundry room of the hotel.

  “We don’t usually
let the guests in here,” the manager said to him. Pausing. Looking him up and down. Seeing his armload of filthy, dirty clothes. Seeing the man’s children standing behind him. Knowing. Knowing where they had been. “But, sure,” the manager said. “Of course.”

  Other people, like them, did the same. Buying clothes at the huge store across the street. Using the laundry. Eating full meals in the chain restaurants all around them.

  The father and his children passed these other people in the hotel lobby. In the bright, chain restaurants nearby. But no one spoke of what they’d seen. No one did anything more than nod.

  An experience still unspeakable.

  Finally, late that first night in the hotel, his kids got into bed. Sharing a big queen bed, they curled up tightly, their father reading a book to them for almost an hour. Then they fell asleep, slowly sprawling out, sleeping through the morning, to the afternoon, still sleeping as the sun finally set once more, and he felt for the first time since his daughter was born the need to check on them. Are they sleeping, or have they somehow suddenly died?

  He held a finger under his daughter’s nose. Then his son’s. Breath across his fingertips. He touched each of them on their backs. Feeling their hearts beating quietly. Slowly. In the silence of this hotel room.

  Crying now.

  Safe.

  Now he could finally cry.

  This went on for some time. Just the sound of his breathing in the otherwise silent room. Rough. Broken. Crying as quietly as he could.

  Then he got into his own bed. And slept for hours and hours and hours.

  The North End of these twin cities underneath the clouds died many years ago. Inattention. Fiscal abuse. Mismanagement. Fear of change. Broken industries. Polluted land and water and air.

  In many ways, the North End of the city was dying long before the clouds enveloped it.

  But the South End of the city grew. Flooded with people who fled the decay in the north. Attracted by the promise of safety, low taxes, the aura of normalcy and the new.

  They sit side by side, twin cities created by a wide highway dug deeply into the ground. A trench, with walls reaching sixty feet down.

  Now, there’s only one overpass left to cross it.

  A dislocation and separation made normal by time. And forgetting.

  The doctor and his wife sit silently. They ride a bus heading north on the highway. Sitting in seats near the back. One small backpack each in the rack overhead. His wife has a purse. He has a wallet and his papers in his pocket.

  That’s all they own. In all the world. Forty years since they were born. This is the sum total of their lives.

  She holds his hand. Or he holds hers. It’s not clear how it started. But for a hundred miles now, they’ve held hands.

  He wonders, worries, thinks constantly, about what he could do better.

  She does too.

  The bus’s restroom smells of urine and excrement and the sour byproducts of decomposition.

  He wishes it didn’t smell bad. He wishes none of this were so. They worked so hard. Studied for years. Found jobs that made a difference in the lives of people they knew and never met.

  His nose again recoils at the scent of the toilet near them. Sometimes, when the air in the bus drifts this way, his wife will cough. Cover her mouth.

  There’s a city they’ve been sent to. A city where they are now allowed to live. This was a part of the bargain she made. The price of killing those four men.

  He knows she did not like it.

  He knows she wants something so much more for both of them.

  But, now, he knows what stands in the way. Her history. His. They have to escape their history.

  He’s breathless. Broken. Hopeful. Numb.

  It changes with every mile.

  She holds his hand. He holds hers.

  There’s hope in that.

  More hope than he can define.

  She leans toward him. Says near his ear, the first time she’s spoken in a hundred miles, “What will we do? How will we live? Do you understand what we have done?”

  He nods. Instantly. Immediately. Yes.

  “Of course,” he says aloud.

  Exiled. In trade for freedom. Exiled, to a city where the gangs have no presence. And no interest.

  She holds his hand. More tightly than before.

  The things she’s done, he doesn’t picture them. The four killings. Her life before they met, now revealed. He does not picture this.

  As long as she will hold his hand.

  He can see the wall of clouds ahead of them. A storm front stationary, simply awaiting their approach.

  Rain begins to spray against the windows next to their seats. The bus is shaking now, lightly, then loudly, its massive length bending some; they can see the passengers in the front of the bus shifting left as he and his wife shift right, the bus seemingly squeezing itself through an opening much too small.

  It gets dark outside. As if evening suddenly fell.

  She says, looking out the window, “I think we’re almost there.”

  The area to the south is known as the South End, a tan, suburban landscape of new and low buildings, massive houses built on winding streets, subdivisions without sidewalks, vast and plain apartment complexes spread across land that’s been bulldozed flat and cleared of trees.

  And across the fissure of the highway cut through this place in the North End, is a city once home to more than a million people. A city where now just a few thousand people live, wandering an emptied urban landscape. Miles and miles of a right-angled grid of streets and homes and offices. Gothic hospitals, ornate museums, grand churches, and a cathedral. The few residents walking from place to place within the North End find escape, or they find routine, or is it just that they find silence?

  He assembles his carousel in the rain.

  As always, they’ve set up in a shopping center parking lot near a highway.

  It’s midday. The carnival won’t open for hours. He wanders away from the rides. The rain is not really drops. It’s a mist. A dampness that, if you don’t focus on it, you wonder if it is falling or rising from the ground.

  Feels like home. His home. Far to the west of here.

  Imagine weeks of this. People don’t understand. Driving cars a hundred miles an hour along roads slick with a mist that’s been falling, blowing, seeping from the trees, for days and weeks and months.

  Forty days without sunlight. Sometimes, it’d go fifty.

  There was a hopelessness in that rain. A sense that no matter what you did, you would not escape.

  He’s standing next to the highway trench, leaning forward on a steel guardrail as he looks down at the eight lanes spread out sixty feet below him. Cars move, small trucks, massive semis en route from places a thousand miles from here, pulling huge boxes, silver tankers, some pull equipment wrapped in canvas and plastic, protected, and the words on trucks and the cargo they pull is indecipherable as the carousel operator leans over the highway wall. Staring down.

  Vehicles move east and west.

  People, in all of those cars and trucks. This strikes him. A thought. That he’s never had. All these people. Each with their own lives.

  He’s never much considered this.

  He fled home. He left everything he could behind. But the world he found, the one he lives in, he feels when he feels anything that this life has been created just for him.

  It’s not beautiful. It’s in no way perfect. Very little of it does he like. Instead, it’s a life he slowly steps through, scenes fashioned palely from the ether of his solitary experience.

  But, still, he managed to escape.

  His face and hands, his wrists and neck, they’re coated in the cool, damp mist. His hair too. Water drips past his wide-open eyes.

  He stares down into the highway. At the faces. Faces of the drivers he can only barely see.

  He feels no anger.

  He feels no pain.

  He wants nothing to go badly.
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br />   He just stares down into the highway. Glimpsing faces. A crew of men heading to a job. Passengers on a bus. Women on cell phones driving semis pulling fuel. Women and their kids in a minivan or SUV. Fathers and their children in cars indistinguishable from one another.

  He’d like to never fight again.

  He’d like to never inflict damage of any sort.

  He’d like for the willingness to harm to dissipate. Disappear.

  That he’s never killed a man, the epileptic’s right, it’s more luck than anything.

  And as always, he thinks of the girl. Pictures her in the small cabin of an old fishing boat. On sheets printed with cowboys riding ponies, cowgirls riding horses. Sex that wasn’t like anything he’d done in the back of a car or out in the woods.

  He wonders where she is now.

  He wonders what she does.

  It’s been two years. Since he saw her.

  He wonders how he could talk to her.

  He wonders if she’d answer his call.

  He says her name to himself. Then he closes his eyes. The noise from the highway rises wildly past his ears. It’s everything, louder now, with his eyes closed; it nearly dizzies him. He holds tight to the highway rail. He won’t be knocked aside.

  But the noise of this highway is as loud as anything that he’s ever heard.

  A man still picks up garbage. In an old, municipal dump truck he repaired and maintains himself, he drives through the old neighborhoods in the North End.

  He doesn’t call out. Doesn’t honk his horn. Yet, somehow, everyone knows that it is trash day.

  In the airport, she follows her analysts as they walk through a tunnel that bypasses normal security. Access to and egress from the private jets that land.