by Doug Lawson
“No. Such. Thing,” Chundo said, leaning over and poking Deke in the chest with each word. His voice had an edge now, and sparks were leaping from his fingers. I could see Deke wince.
“Amanita phalloides,” Deke said again, a little louder. “Chundo, don’t!”
“Ostriatus, kid. It’s not a goddamn death cap. It’s completely ostriatus. Do you see the partial veil on the stalk? The volva at the base? That’s where the universal veil was when it was smaller. I found it, kid. Barn, I found it!”
Deke looked at me. I looked at the mushroom in his hand and shook my head. “Don’t,” I said. I was sure Deke was right. And I was sure that at least a part of Chundo knew it.
Deke looked back at Chundo, who was chewing aggressively and reaching out for more. Deke swallowed hard and sighed, and before I could say anything else he put the mushroom into his mouth and started to chew.
Chundo’s eyes went wide, and he reached for Deke. And then with a terrible crash, both of them lofted into the air, as everything around us took flight.
We might have saved him. We were four miles or so from the road to Corralitos. We might have gotten to a phone, to a hospital. But it was exactly 5:04 p.m., on October 17, 1989. I can pinpoint it so specifically now because that’s when it hit, the big one that would be called the Loma Prieta quake. It brought down bridges and overpasses. It destroyed buildings and highways up and down the peninsula. It was televised as part of the warm-ups for the World Series in Oakland, and even the pilot in the Goodyear blimp said he could feel the shocks.
Santa Cruz is leveled. In the Santa Cruz Mountains, the epicenter, the force of an underground nuclear bomb whips giant redwoods back and forth like they’re made of rubber. It pitches homes down into canyons, opens yawning crevasses, swallows highways. Aurorae like the northern lights fill the sky for weeks.
When I see him now at Funghi, his restaurant, Deke and I remember many things. I see the world spinning around me as the whole side of the mountain we’re on liquefies. I see Deke cartwheeling in the air, his bright eyes open, his mouth that great O of amazement, his arms and legs spread wide, and chewed pieces of that mushroom are all around him, like tiny fish streaming out from his throat. Electricity crackles, and there are entire trees in the air, roots and all. Huge boulders hurtle by me, spinning off blue and white fire.
Deke says he remembers all of those mushrooms in the air, hundreds of them from all seasons spilling out of our backpacks and orbiting us. The glowing golden chanterelle. The bright red Boletes and Russulas. The blue-black Craterellus, like tiny trumpets singing out the end of the world. And yes, the green glow of Amanita phalloides, those death caps that we both know Chundo knew well.
Most of all, we remember Chundo. The sun across his brow, the half-moon below his feet, flying higher and farther than any of us, his arms stretched wide to embrace the sea. We remember how this man we both loved, despite our better judgment, took a giant step out across that horizon. And without a backward glance for us, how he was simply, terribly, gone.
CATCH THE AIR
FOR A LONG time, my father kept a vintage Travel Air in an old Quonset hangar on his family’s old ranch. It was a beautiful open-cockpit biplane. He’d had it since he was a boy, when he gained recognition for being the first kid to fly solo across the Bering Strait. When I was a kid myself, I remember that he could live with it, out in that hangar, for weeks, along with his record player and his Scotch and the beat-up fiddle that was always his favorite. I’d have to bring him food. He’d blast his music, retool the strut assemblies, replace the vintage electronics, spread thin layer after layer of butyrate dope over the thin fabric wings. He would take that engine apart and put it back together by himself on a whim.
I remember the first time he took me up in that plane. I was six. He had just started teaching me to play that fiddle, and the fingers of my left hand were all sore. I sat in the front, with a headset that was too big and goggles that covered most of my face. I had to stretch up to see through the windshield. He had me put on the beat-up leather jacket, the one that smelled like whiskey.
“You ready, Gordie?” he said through the headset. I gave him a thumbs-up. He turned on the music—I’m betting it was Charlie Parker—and taxied down the rough little runway. He lifted us into the air. I felt my stomach drop.
“What do you want to see?” he asked.
I pushed the talk button. “I want to catch a cloud,” I said. I held up a small spice bottle that I’d smuggled out of my mother’s house that morning. Cumin—it still had some in the bottom.
“Sí, sí.” I heard him laugh through the static. “You got it, kid,” he said.
He gunned the engine and took us higher. The air got cold. Clouds expanded, took on texture and detail, and filled up the sky.
“Deploy the trap!” he called.
I fumbled the top off and held the jar out. The plane banked right, and we dropped down into a wall of gray. Droplets of water condensed across my goggles. I pulled the jar back in and slapped the top on. Then I tucked it deep into the breast pocket of the jacket.
Then we flew across the South Bay, over fields of prunes being turned into rows of flat houses. We swung over the hangers at Moffett, where the Navy had once based blimps to patrol the coast. The music in my headphones soared and dipped, and we did too. We crossed the mountains and swung low over Monterey Bay. There were whales, at least ten of them, swimming north in a pod.
“Let me see it,” my father said, after we landed. “Your cloud.”
I’d forgotten about the jar. I took it out and held it up to the sun. Except for the leftover spice, it looked empty. I was close to tears. I handed it to him, and he held the bottle up toward the sun.
“Clouds are tricky fuckers,” he said. He shook it, and held it up to his ear. “Hah! I thought so.” He handed it back to me. “It’s in there, all right. It’s just gone invisible, to try and trick you into letting it out? Keep the lid on really tight, or maybe just open it up at night, really quick. You know, to smell it? But don’t keep it open long, or boom!” He clapped his hands. The sound echoed from the walls of the hangar. “That sneaky cabrón will be gone in a heartbeat.”
I had that bottle for a long time. I kept it by the side of my bed for years. After an intense dream I’d crack it open just a tiny bit. I’d hold it up to my nose until my heart stopped racing and I was tired again.
I did it so often that now I’ll be sitting in a Mexican restaurant, or at a friend’s house for chili, and the scent of cumin will bring it all back to me. The clouds. Those whales. That water.
And my father and I floating together up there over all of it, before any of his demons dragged him down.
“How hard could it be?” Rory cursed over the radio. “It’s just a big effing gas bag full of hot air. I’m a big gas bag full of hot air.”
At another time, it might have been funny. His gut did hang out over those poorly appropriated hipster skinny jeans like a blimp hitched to a tall mast. And Rory was, well, Rory—an old friend of my father’s, once a member of his band Old Dog Dreaming, and neither of them were short on personality. But we were going down fast and had other things to worry about. One of the cables that adjusted the breather valves was stuck letting out too much hot air, and by then we had drifted out over the water. A sailboat passed by the lighthouse and out into the waves. I could see the morning paddle-boarders down in the harbor, looking up at us wide-eyed.
Nikki and I swapped looks. Her red hair was damp with sweat. Her freckles sketched a crazy archipelago across the pale sea of her cheeks. If she wanted to be in charge, I was thinking, now was a good time to do something. But she shook her head: we both knew this was my problem. I kicked off my shoes, cut the gas, and handed her the burner control.
“Give me a minute,” I said. “And when I hit the seat again, punch the igniter and give it a really big blast. Oh, and put that life jacket on.” There was only one, I remembered. She nodded. I unclipped my harness and pulled my
self around the hot burner and into the envelope, climbing up the struts embedded in the fabric walls like they were a ladder. It was about sixty feet high. My weight pushed the whole envelope over some, and the whole airship started to drift that way, but fuck it, if we went down into the water it wasn’t going to matter much which side hit first.
When I got up to where the valve was, I ripped off a big piece of duct tape and slapped it over the hole. Then I slid back down, dodged the cowling around the engine, and hit the seat.
“Punch it,” I said, and Nikki hit the switch. We were ten feet off the surface of the bay and falling. I heard the hiss of the propane, the whump of the burner.
And then it was quiet. Too quiet.
“It’s awfully quiet?” Nikki said. I could smell the ethyl mercaptan. I looked at her and then down at the water. Things were moving down there in the cold depths.
Nikki reached up with something yellow in her hand. A lighter. She flicked it, and a big blue and orange ball erupted up into the envelope.
“I thought pilots were always prepared,” she said.
“You’re thinking of Cub Scouts,” I told her. I wondered if I had any hair left.
Nikki pulled. The burner fired long and loud. Still we dropped lower. I stretched out my foot and touched the water. It was cold. The airship dipped, and then we were resting on the top of the gently undulating surface.
A gull flapped in and landed on the railing in front of us, looking for food. Nikki turned to me with an ironic expression. “So, once, when I was five?” she said. “I found a bird. A sparrow, I think. It had flown into our big picture window and it just lay there, with its eyes closed. It was plain and brown, but I thought it was beautiful, you know? I picked it up. I held it up to my face. I could feel its tiny heart beating. Its wings were twitching. It was gasping for breath?”
“I think I know the feeling.”
“I was five, right? I leaned over and whispered to it.”
“What’d you say?”
“Don’t be a pussy, baby. It’s what my mom would’ve said.”
“I bet that was pretty effective.”
“It died while I was holding it.”
“You’re telling me this for a reason, I take it.”
“Some birds make it. Some don’t.” She handed me the control. “Don’t be a pussy, Gordon.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said. I pulled. The burner roared, wide open. The water reflected the giant yellow and black stripes from the envelope and in the shadow directly below us I could see a seal looking up at me curiously with big black-lab eyes. We studied each other for a minute. “Good dog,” I told it. “Go lie down.”
And then the burner cut out again, and we were truly sunk.
Who knew why Google wanted blimps? I guessed something to do with free Internet access, drone navigation stations, or maybe detailed GPS mapping: hang a heavy, high-res camera off the frame, pilot it by remote, swoop in low over, well, anything. But it could be much more: I imagined Googlers sneaking into Iran by night via Google Jet, launching Google Blimps for nuclear monitoring. I saw Google’s Homeland Security division hovering over Times Square with volunteer Google Snipers scanning the crowds and always ready. I imagined them as hubs for Google Self-Driving Cars, hanging over traffic on 101 and transmitting real-time routing instructions. I saw them launching from floating Google micro-archipelagos out in the Pacific to trace the swirls and spirals of plastic in those giant trash eddies for future recycling.
The specs, which were crap, said it had to be collapsible, transportable by plane or truck. It had to hold the weight of at least four people. Other than that, we were on our own. My father had known Rory since forever, and Rory knew Larry, who knew Hassan and Patak at Google Labs.
“Blimps!” they said to Rory. I imagined their voices speaking at the exact same time, like hive-creatures who shared a Google Brain.
“Blimps!” Rory told me, a former flight instructor and his ex-bandmate’s kid.
“Blimps!” I said. “Love ’em!” Google gets what they want.
“And Nikki’s the CEO!” Rory said.
Great! I thought. I was sincere. I’d been in bands with passionate, dedicated people half my age and with twice as much talent. I’d worked with some incredible kids on the organic farms where I’d gone for a few years to recover after my divorce. They were younger and smarter than me, ironic and edgy. I’d taught young women to fly who had the focus of eagles and the constitutions of rhinos and who could drink me under the table. (Married one too, for a while.) Nikki, Rory said, was his newest protégée. A dropout from Stanford and a musician too, with a genius-level IQ and multiple patents already. They’d met at an angel funding event: he was the angel, she was pitching something to do with leveraging improved algorithmic processing for gene therapies. Rory had invested heavily without, I suspected, a lot of due diligence, and so now they were on to airships.
She was so young that I thought I was meeting his granddaughter. That hadn’t gone well. And then I realized how much her pale blue eyes reminded me of my ex. That hadn’t put us on a very good trajectory either.
“Well, what do you want to do?” said Rory, looking at Nikki. Nikki looked at me. We stood together in the old barn, up at Rory’s place. My guys had spread the soaked and torn blimp out across the floor to dry. It lay there like a deflated whale.
“We’re close,” I said. I could feel the water dripping off my shorts. “Patch it up, order in new parts. Test down in the valley next? New electronics, new valves, patches—I’m guessing three, four weeks.”
“Four weeks,” Rory sighed. His hair drooped.
“You can do it in two,” Nikki said, staring at me meaningfully. “He can do it in two,” she said to Rory.
“Make it so,” Rory sighed again, looking at Nikki.
Nikki looked at me and cleared her throat. “Make it so!” she said. “Don’t be a . . .”
“I got it,” I said. “I got it.” I doubted that she’d caught the Star Trek reference. Her red hair was up in a towel. She had changed into sweatpants and a Floaters, LLC T-shirt and put on too much eye makeup. She had painfully beautiful shoulders, I thought. She held an unsmoked cigarette burning in her hand, and for a long minute we all watched it. The fire crawled down from the end and then a long gray tip of ash fell off and hovered for a moment in the air between us, spinning on some tiny updraft. Then another gust off the ocean slapped it and tiny pieces scattered all across the wet floor.
We followed Rory out into the driveway, talking logistics. Nikki got a call, looked at it curiously, and went off to her car to take it. Rory drove off in his typical funk. I could see the fog had started marching in across the bay like a cloud beast, devouring the world. The boats had lights on already; they knew they were next. Suddenly I was freezing. I found dry clothes I kept in the Jeep for after surfing.
The window of Nikki’s Mini was down. When I passed the window, she handed me her phone. “Here,” she said. “He keeps calling me Helena. He’s calling from your phone?”
It was a guy saying something in Spanish. “Hola,” I said. “Dad?”
“Gordie? I was just having the best conversation with your wife,” he said. “It’s been too long! Tried all your recent calls until I got her.”
“That’s my boss, Dad.”
“I’m glad you’ve learned your place. It’s the heart of a good relationship. Don’t do what I did—you see where that gets you.”
“You stole my phone again, didn’t you?” I thought I’d lost it in the water when the blimp went down. “And happy birthday.”
Today was a big one, his seventy-fifth. I was bracing for the worst.
“I keep hoping you’ll move away from such a proprietary OS. I have to jailbreak it to do anything interesting. You always did like the pretty things, Gordie, even as a boy. Pretty machines, pretty Helena, pretty cars. Pretty, pretty, pretty.”
It was a bad day. I could hear it in his manic tone, the lighter and more fuck-you-ass
hole ironic thing. His Spanish was slurred. I looked at Nikki and shook my head. It had been a bad week, part of a bad month, part of an awful year that probably wasn’t going to get better and what was worse was that we all knew it. “Is something wrong? Is Encarnita still there?”
“I just wanted to speak with some family. I tried calling you, but then I answered your phone, and that didn’t really help much. Though the level of conversation was quite exceptional, I must say. Then I got creative.”
“Helena’s long gone, Dad. You know that.”
“You don’t need to take that tone. You know, Gordie, I’d really prefer just straight peanuts instead of this healthy nut mix you people keep getting me. Puta madre, these almonds are foul.”
“Nice mouth,” I said. “Tell Encarnita we’re still on for later.”
“What’s ‘later’?”
“Just tell Encarnita I said that.”
“Él dice que todavía estamos en para más tarde,” he said. “She looks downright thankful, Gordie. Are you sleeping with my nurse? Ella tiene un culaso. You know she’s your mother’s third cousin. What would Helena say if we tell her?”
I hung up and handed the phone back to Nikki. “Sorry about that. He’s . . . well.”
She shook her head. “No problemo. I kinda knew.”
I could hear the guys working in the barn, the whump and hiss of a welding torch lighting up, someone banging out a bent strut.
“What’s ‘later’?” she said, looking at the barn. “I probably shouldn’t ask.” Behind her, I could see that her car was filled with the debris of the rest of her life: empty Starbucks cups, a stained Stanford sweatshirt, a pair of heels, a familiar lace bra, a dismantled circuit board. A beat-up acoustic guitar case took up the whole back seat.
“He’s got some land that he can’t get out to on his own. It’s his birthday, so I was going to take him up in the Jeep. It calms him down, sometimes.”
