Early news reports say there’s a body on the roof of the elementary school their kids went to. That turns out not to be true, and Steve and Melanie wonder to each other where that story came from.
The other plane went down into a house about seven blocks north, within sight of the bookstore, restaurants, newsstand, and candle shop Steve and Melanie frequent. The three people home at the time, including a fifteen-year-old on the phone when the plane crashed through his bedroom ceiling, and the neighbors and rescue workers who went in to do what they could, all got out just before the house exploded. Only minor injuries on the ground; nobody even hospitalized. All five people aboard the planes are dead.
The phone rings, rings again, callers on both lines. “My God, Mom, are you guys all right?” That’s Veronica, needing details to help her relate to what’s happened: How close was it to her old friend Wendy’s house? Is there really a body on the roof of her old school? They acknowledge, though it’s obvious, that Katy won’t come over tonight; Melanie says to tell her they’ll have macaroni and cheese another day, and hopes that’s true. Steve gets on the phone to tell what he saw and heard.
Katy, who tends toward the dramatic, gets on the phone to ask if they’re dead. Steve assures her they’re not. Katy doesn’t seem surprised that planes fell out of the sky. It’s something any eight-year-old can understand. This is her hurricane, her tornado, her out-of-control fire and her rising flood.
Standing there with the receiver in his hand, ignoring the steady stream of calls coming in on the other line, trying to say what Katy needs him to say, Steve is suddenly enraged that this beloved little girl has to know that things fall out of the sky. “Look at children in the third world, the terrible things hanging over them,” Melanie would say, thinking to make him feel better.
And of course it’s true. Terrible things loom over the heads of most of the children of the world. Governments start wars and then send out for lunch. We’re their waiters and waitresses trying to survive on their tips. Then we attempt to explain to our children why this has to be. We attempt to explain to our children who the bad guys are. We think if they believe our stories they’ll be better for it. Fires bloom ever more spectacularly. Dark waters spread. The planes come down. The planes come down. Sometimes we forget how, in so many parts of the world, the planes come down on the heads of the children. And Steve hates it.
We don’t want to hear about this because there is nothing we can do. Get a grip on yourself. It’s just another evening in the world. The sun glows red. The breeze is sharp with jet fuel. Somewhere a cat trapped in a closet is clawing its way out. People make bad jokes about the neighborhood. In his grandbaby’s eyes Steve can see the planes coming down.
How far can you go with this? How much can you handle? What do you imagine you’ll do instead? You look beyond the planes and the metal, and you see dark angels falling out of the sky. You can see the man on the ceiling falling out of the sky. His arms are bent at strange angles. He makes motor farts with his lips and tongue, and despite her horror, Katy guffaws. You can see shadows stacked a hundred miles high falling out of the sky.
Steve tells himself to suck it up. This is the way life is; it’s good for his granddaughter to find ways to cope. That might have been the most important task of being a father. Be reasonable, he chides himself as he tells Katy one more time that he loves her. Be a reasonable adult. But this is a child he loves beyond all reason. One of the many. He switches to the other line, and it’s Joe calling to talk about the planes.
Melanie fixes tuna sandwiches and carrot sticks for their supper by flashlight. Usually they take the phone off the hook during meals so as not to be interrupted, a habit developed when they had teenagers in the house, but not tonight. Friends, co-workers, acquaintances leave messages when both lines are full. People from out of town, not quite sure of local geography, call to find out how close the crash was to them.
A Community TV reporter, trolling for witnesses not already snapped up by the commercial stations, insists they must have seen or heard something; Melanie finally hangs up on him, annoyed to have been suckered into giving him more time than she would ever give a telemarketer.
Everyone seems to have details to share, factual or not, and to want more. All this might be morbid curiosity or an ignoble desire to be part of the action, but it puts Steve in mind of how he sat in a chair the entire day after their son died while friends and neighbors came by downstairs to pay their respects. He thought he ought to go down and see those people but he couldn’t climb out of that chair. Gravity had settled around him like cats, not to be disturbed. He was waiting. Waiting for certain colors to return, for his own voice to sound normal in his head. The world had taken a strange turn on its axis and he was waiting for it to make a small adjustment so he could live on it again.
That has never entirely come about. Not all the missing colors returned, and those that did have ever since had a slightly different quality. The voice he hears in his head when he speaks has never been the same. The world forever shows itself to be capable of strange, wild turns. Steve has had to make the adjustment on his own.
The chair he sat in all day after his son died is now in an attic studio where he draws and meditates. Covered by a throw, it’s probably not recognizable to anybody else. It’s the most comfortable chair in the house—gravity works differently in that chair. He thinks he’ll go up there now. He takes a flashlight. It’s no darker in the attic tonight than anywhere else, and there are no lights outside except from the flocks of helicopters buzzing very low overhead. Steve switches off the flashlight, sits in the comfortable chair, and waits.
Downstairs, Melanie is determined not to worry about Steve up there in the attic alone. The news reports are getting pretty thin, anchors straining to fill air time, reporters reaching for more to say when there is no more to say. The phone still rings continuously like a chain smoker lighting the next cigarette off the last. Melanie has had enough for tonight. Anyone who’s heard about the crashes will also have heard that there were no serious injuries on the ground so should be able to extrapolate that she and Steve are okay. They’d be calling for some other reason, then—to make this thing real, to partake of it by proxy. She unplugs the phone.
She makes her way around the dark, quiet, cooling house, taking it all in. Every once in a while, reality puddles. She learned this many years ago from a young woman whose name is long since lost to her, about whom the only three things she remembers are that she had pale red hair and translucent skin, that she would not medicate her schizophrenia into submission because she valued the way it caused her to understand the world, and that one day she announced cheerfully to Melanie: “Reality flows and flows, and every once in a while, reality puddles.” Melanie moves around her house, waiting for reality to puddle because planes have fallen out of the sky, right here and now.
Hours after Melanie and Steve have gone to bed—to stay warm, and because there’s not much else to do—she to listen to a book on a battery-operated tape player, he to read old ghost stories by flashlight, a woman calls whom Melanie hasn’t heard from in a decade, wanting to talk about the plane crash, wanting more to recount her divorce and remarriage and how she’s started over. Half-asleep, Melanie asks her to call back the next day, but she never will and Melanie will wonder what that was all about.
The power comes on around midnight, hours earlier than had been predicted. Melanie stirs, sleepily proud of the cadre of public servants she doesn’t very often think about. Steve gets up to shut off the lights, turn the furnace down to its night setting, reset the clocks.
Then he goes for a drive. He drives around the neighborhood. There’s a moment when he looks up and an upside down airplane fills his windshield, but he knows it’s not real.
The next morning he searches their property, including the roof, for plane debris and body parts. A reverse 911 call has given instructions about what to do if they find any. He doesn’t. A police officer shows up in the afte
rnoon for an official search. As will be widely reported the next week when the shuttle Colombia falls out of the sky over Texas, people carry off pieces as souvenirs. As if angels had died overhead, and now pieces of them were coming down with the breeze into lawns and gardens, backyard pools. Debris like ideas, like bits of memory.
Their granddaughter Christiana, Chris’ daughter, comes over for lunch the next day. “Hi,” she says, with studied nonchalance. “What are you doing?”
Stirring cheese sauce into macaroni, Melanie hugs her one-armed and answers the way Christiana would answer. “Nothin’. What are you doing?”
“Nothin’.” Christiana stands there, hands at her sides, not looking at her grandmother.
Melanie turns her back and says with studied nonchalance she’s learned from this very child, “So, did you hear about the plane crashes?”
Behind her there’s an intake of breath. “Yeah! A block away from your house!”Christiana so seldom exclaims that Melanie chills.
After lunch, the three of them walk around the neighborhood. The police tape is gone. The streets are no longer cordoned off. The petroleum smell in the air is no stronger than if a spurt of rush hour traffic had just passed. When they join the other gawkers in the next block, there’s nothing to see at the crash site except a metal storage shed tipped on its side and a dark stain on the ground that might have been made by spilled fuel. Melanie finds this eerie. “You’d never know anything happened here,” she keeps saying.
Steve holds Christiana’s hand, when she isn’t too grown up for such a thing, and indulges in a fantasy about a shelter he could build to protect the people he loves beyond reason from things falling out of the sky. He gathers them together, his wife and children, grandchildren, other children he doesn’t quite recognize, children and the shadows of children, children whose names are an incantation he cannot speak for fear that once he begins he’ll never be able to stop.
He’s stocked this room with everything they might ever need: food and water and medical supplies and drawing supplies and walls of books (“Good insulation if the power goes out,” he tells everyone). Plastic and tapes and sheathing and filters to keep the invisible out, even though Steve knows full well there’s nothing you can do to keep the invisible out.
And how strange it is because all his life he’s counted on the invisible getting in. But these are my children, he thinks. These are my children. The little ones crawl across his back like cats, and he’s amazed again at how small they are, or is it because of how large he’s become? He really should do more about that, but at the moment he’s pleased with the way his body spreads and holds them, and in fact feels too small for the enormity of the responsibility. The little ones laugh and call out each other’s names, begging that one to watch this one’s special trick, becoming suddenly so intent on the moment it frightens Steve, because that’s when he’s most aware of how real they’ve become in the world. Then one of them farts and their giggles wash across his body like bell song, and they point and point and giggle again until their grandmother shushes them and their parents shush them with promises of a story from Grandpa, a new old story they’ve never heard before.
But Steve can’t think of what to say. So he sings a few lines he enjoyed when he was a boy, and then starts saying the words even though he doesn’t have the words, he says the words, and they listen and even though he has no idea if they understand or even if they hear but at least they listen, as he says how it is to be here with them, as he says how it’s been, as he says his testimony, of who he was and where he stood and what it was like to be here searching for the words.
After a while he notices Christiana singing. Not full out and with abandon the way Katy might sing, but almost under her breath, almost but not quite to herself. If nobody’s interested, or if somebody’s too interested, she’ll contend she was singing to herself. Chanting, really, like a jump-rope song, most of its sense in the rhythm and not in the words. She skips to the rhythm of her words, glancing haughtily at the snarling dog at the end of an alley, and Melanie says to him, “Isn’t she a miracle?”
He speaks over the breaking of his heart. “Yes.”
“To think she wasn’t in this world and now she is.”
“And to think someday she won’t be.”
Melanie doesn’t chide him or shush him or turn away from him. She takes his hand.
When Christiana notices her grandparents holding hands like the lovers they are, she’ll tease them in the singsong way of young girls wondering about love and sex, scared and yearning and knowing she’s helpless against it all. “Grandma’s got a boyfriend! Grandma’s got a boyfriend! Grandma and Poppy sittin’ in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.”
Christiana thinks boys are gross. Christiana loves to read and doesn’t much like school. Christiana yearns for a puppy or a kitten, which she can’t have in their apartment. Christiana’s daddy has gone away because of a bad thing he did; she misses him, and it’s a relief to have him gone, and she can’t wait till she can see him again. Christiana is alive. Christiana will die.
Snow dusts the ground like flour. Then there are flakes the size of airplane debris, suddenly bleached and transcendent and beautiful. In the midst of this long drought, Steve is warmed by the snow and cold. “There’s the engine,” he points out to Melanie. “Part of the engine.”
“Where?”
“There, in the mouth of the alley.”
After a moment she says, “It could be anything. It just looks like a hunk of metal.”
They’re both thinking that it’s only a few weeks until the anniversary of Anthony’s death. Unlike most of their lives together, Melanie and Steve always do this thing apart. Of course it happened to both of them, but it would be perilous to forget that it happened to each of them as well.
Melanie will mark the day as she always has, by visiting the mountain where they were married and where they scattered his ashes or, if she can’t get there, by walking in another quiet and beautiful place where she can find one pretty pebble to add to the collection Anthony had started. She sees a pretty stone now by the curb, thinks to pick it up, then decides it’s not yet time.
Steve has never been back to the mountain. After his son died, Steve tried his best to imagine what it would be like when they saw each other again, what he would say, what Anthony would say to him. He made up story after story. He really wanted to believe them. But sometimes there’s nothing to say.
For after years of storytelling, he realizes there are places the words simply will not travel. Sometimes there’s nothing you can say. You come up to the final truth of it, when it is so large you can’t get around it, and it won’t let you through, and you find you’ve run out of words, there are no words left to say. So you do the best you can. You make it up as you go along. You say gah dedo longso may. You say whadie fego jungo defae. Mygee geeso reeso de nay. Whadada whadada u. You can hear the planes falling out of the sky. You can hear the man on the ceiling howling on his final approach. You can hear the sky splitting open directly overhead. You call out your characters one by one and you grill them for answers. They speak back to you in tongues, and with all the voices of the living and the dead.
“Huh?” Christiana is beside him. “What’d you say, Poppy?”
He makes a face at her. “Mygee geeso reeso de nay,” he says in a funny voice. She giggles. He loves to make her laugh. “Silly Poppy,” she says indulgently. He knows she knows this is not entirely play. He knows she doesn’t entirely believe that planes really crashed and people really died. Is it his job to help her believe such a thing, or to protect her from that belief? Should he find her a souvenir she could take home and hide under her bed?
Steve rests his hand on his granddaughter’s sturdy little back. Never varying her pace, she leans back into him, and her heart fills his hand, her pulse with his in his fingers, her life lines crisscrossing his. Her hair spreads over his wrist. Then she whoops and tickles him and runs off and runs back.
Lat
er that evening, Christiana comes downstairs from the cheery grandkids’ room where she so much wants to spend the night the way she used to but hasn’t been able to for a while because something might happen to her mom if Christiana’s not there. She stands close against her grandmother, hands at her sides, face hidden, silky black hair sweet against Melanie’s lips. Knowing this child as well as she does, Melanie restrains her impulse to embrace her, another sacrifice for love.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” No answer. “Are you scared?” The tiniest of nods against her belly. “Did you have a bad dream?” The tiniest of head shakes. “Can you tell me what’s scaring you?” No answer. Resisting her characteristic impulse to keep asking, Melanie wonders if Christiana can hear her heart which right now she wills to beat only for this child. The rhythms of their breathing synchronize.
After a while Melanie offers cautiously, “You know what? When I was your age I was afraid of dying.” A shuddering intake of breath. “Oh, sweetheart, that’s it, isn’t it?” No answer. Melanie’s shirt is damp from Christiana’s silent tears. They stand together in apprehension of the awful and awesome Mystery.
“Then when I was older I read a book by a man named James Agee called A Death in the Family.” Christiana is absolutely motionless. Maybe she won’t understand what Melanie is about to tell her, but she loves reading and writing, and the quality of attentiveness between them is worth the try. “One of the things it’s about is how the person who worries about death usually isn’t the person who dies, because we change. We can’t know how it will be for us until it happens. It made me less scared of death.”
The Man on the Ceiling Page 14
