by Joe Hill
—something. Aubrey could not quite imagine what. I left my client on a cloud?
Below, the parachute rustled across the field, expanding and shrinking like a lung.
When Axe told them what had happened, they were going to figure him for hysterical. A bloodied, badly injured man who raved that he’d landed on a cloud was going to be met with worry and words of comfort, not belief. They were going to reach for the explanation that made the most sense. They were going to assume that Aubrey had come unclipped in some kind of freak accident, possibly after striking the side of the plane—that would explain Axe’s injuries as well—and fallen to his death. Even to Aubrey this seemed a more plausible story than what had really happened, and Aubrey was actually on the cloud looking down.
It was a dreadful idea, but there was also something wrong with it. He tried to see it—spotting the flaw was as tricksy as trying to find a mosquito that whined in one ear but disappeared when you spun around looking for it. He almost had to stop searching for it, stop thinking altogether. Had to let his eyes go unfocused.
A dry, throbbing pain was building in his sinuses, behind his temples.
He reviewed his last glimpse of Axe Body Spray in the instant before the drogue chute yanked him off into the emptiness—and then he saw it. His mind’s eye focused in on the stupid, glaring lens of the GoPro mounted atop the jumpmaster’s helmet. The whole thing was on video. No one needed to take Axe’s word for what had happened. All they had to do was watch the recording. Then they’d know.
Then they’d come for him.
5
SOMETIME LATER HE ROSE TO his knees and looked around.
The great wheel of cloud still held the pie-plate shape of a UFO, with that great dome rising in the exact center, its dominant feature. The rest was far from smooth; the surface bubbled up, ruffled into dunes and hillocks.
Aubrey searched the blue sky until he felt dizzy and had to lower his gaze. When his head stopped swimming, he realized he was still on the very edge, a bad place to be. He slid inward on his butt, putting distance between himself and the precipice.
At last he decided he was going to have to risk standing up. He pushed himself to his feet, legs still trembling.
Aubrey Griffin stood alone on his island of cloud.
It came to him slowly that the harness was uncomfortable. The straps made a tight, painful V at his crotch, squeezing his balls. Another strap was tight across his chest, making it hard to breathe. Or was that the skimpy air?
He unbuckled the harness and stepped out of it. He was going to drop it into the cloud when he saw the coatrack.
It was to his left, on the edge of his vision: an old-fashioned coatrack, with eight curved hooks, made out of sculpted cloud.
He eyed it carefully, feeling dry of throat, aware his heart was beating much, much too fast.
“The fuck is that?” he asked no one in particular.
Of course it was perfectly obvious what it was. Anyone with eyes could see what it was. He told himself it wasn’t really a coatrack, that it was just a deformity in the cloud. He circled to inspect it from every angle. It looked like a coatrack no matter where he stood—a coatrack of cloudstuff, but a coatrack nonetheless.
Experimentally, he hung the olive-colored harness from one of the hooks. It should’ve dropped, scattering veils of fog.
Instead it dangled from the hook, rocking in the breeze.
Aubrey said, “Ha!”
It was not a laugh but the actual word, a sound of surprise, not hilarity. There was no reason to be surprised, really. The cloud was holding him up, and he weighed 175 pounds. What was a canvas harness that couldn’t be all of two pounds? He unbuckled his helmet and stuck it on another hook.
The ache that had begun in his sinuses was now a skewer of pain that shot from his left temple to the right. That was the skull fracture, he thought, the one he’d picked up when he smashed his head on the side of the plane. That’s all any of it was: the vivid fantasy of a brain with splinters of bone poked through it.
Beneath that notion, though, was a very different idea. Another one of those mental mosquitoes was whining around his head—the inside of his head rather than the outside. He was thinking, How does a cloud know what a coatrack looks like? A notion so absurd it sounded like the caption to a New Yorker cartoon.
He sucked at the thin, cool air and for the first time wondered what the temperature would be like in six hours, when the sun went down.
But by then he would be on CNN. He would be the biggest news story in the world. There would be a gnat swarm of TV news helicopters whirring around to get live footage of the man who walked on clouds. The GoPro video would be running on every channel in an hour, would be all over the Internet.
He wished he had not been such a shrill and pathetic panic case in the Cessna. If he’d known he was going to be on a video seen worldwide, he thought he could’ve at least pretended to have nerve.
Aubrey had wandered a few steps from the coatrack, reeling along in an only half-aware way. He paused and looked back. The coatrack was still there. The coatrack meant something. Was more than a coatrack. But in his headachy state, he could not work out its full importance.
He walked.
At first he walked like a man who suspected he was on rotten ice. He would slide one foot forward to be sure the cloud would remain solid underfoot, kicking puffs of mist ahead of him. The surface held, and after a bit he began—not even knowing he was doing it—to walk normally.
He stayed at least six feet from the edge at all times, but initially did not wander toward the bulge in the center of the cloud. Instead he found himself circumnavigating his desert island in the sky. He scanned for airplanes and paused once when he saw one. A jet drew a line of white smoke across the brilliant blue. It was miles away, and after a moment he stopped paying attention. He understood he had no more chance of being noticed than if that plane were passing overhead while he walked across the campus of the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he had been an undergrad.
He was light-headed, and he held up now and then to catch his breath. The third time he stopped, he bowed his head, gripped his knees, and inhaled deeply, until the vertiginous, about-to-fall-over sensation passed. When he straightened up, he was seized with a sudden, perfectly sensible realization.
There wasn’t enough air up here.
Or at the very least there wasn’t as much air as he was used to. How high was he? He remembered Axe telling them they were at twelve thousand feet right before the Cessna lost power. Could you even breathe at twelve thousand feet? Obviously. He was breathing now. A phrase, “altitude sickness,” rose to the top of his thoughts.
He was a long time circling his vast platter of fog. For the most part, it was flat: a bit lumpy here, dipping a bit there. He climbed to the top of the occasional dune, descended into a few shallow ditches. He lost himself for a while in a confused series of gullies on the eastern rim, wandering through narrow crevasses of white fluff. In the north he paused to admire a mass of cloud boulders that bore a close resemblance to the head of a bulldog. On the western side of the cloud, he crossed a series of three swells that looked like enormous speed bumps. But in the end he walked for almost an hour and was surprised at how featureless his hubcap-shaped island really was.
By the time he made his way back to the coatrack, he was dizzy and weak and sick of the cold. He needed something to drink. It hurt to swallow.
In Aubrey’s experience, dreams had a habit of making jumpy, improbable leaps. First you were in an elevator with your sister’s best friend; then you were boning her on the roof in front of family and friends; then the building began to sway in a violent wind; then cyclones were touching down all over Cleveland. Here on the cloud, though, there was no narrative at all, let alone a whirl of frantic dream incidents. One moment staggered into the next. He could not dream his way off the cloud and on to something better.
He stared at the coatrack, wishing he could send a picture
of it to Harriet. Whenever he saw something beautiful or improbable, his first impulse was to take a snap and send it to her in a text. Of course, if she started getting photographs of clouds from her missing-presumed-dead friend, she would probably think he was texting her from heaven, she would probably start screaming her—
And at that moment Aubrey Griffin remembered it was the twenty-first century and there was a smartphone in his pocket.
It was in his cargo shorts, under his jumpsuit. He had switched it off when the plane was taxiing down the runway, as one would on any flight, but he still had it. Now that he was thinking about it, he could feel it digging into his thigh.
He didn’t have to wait for them to download the footage on Axe’s GoPro. He could call them directly. If he had a strong enough connection, he could even video-chat with them.
He snatched at the zipper of his jumpsuit. The cold air knifed into the opening, going right through the T-shirt underneath. Aubrey wrestled the phone out of his pocket—and it flipped right out of his sweaty hand.
Aubrey cried out, sure it would drop through the cloud and vanish. It didn’t, though. It landed in a cup of hardened fog, shaped almost like a soap dish.
He snatched the phone back up, shaking helplessly now from the shock of sudden hope. He squeezed the button to turn it on, his thoughts running ahead to the next bit: He would call Harriet; he would tell her he was alive; she would begin to sob with relief and incredulity; he would start to cry, too; they would both have a happy cry together; and she would say, Omigod, Aubrey, where are you? and he would say, Well, babe, you aren’t gonna believe this, but—
The screen of his phone remained stubbornly black and blank. He pressed the On switch again.
When it still didn’t light up, he squeezed the On button as hard as he could, clenching his teeth as if he were engaged in some activity that required brute force—loosening a rusted lug nut on a flat tire, for example.
Nothing.
“What. The actual. Fuck?” he said, squeezing and squeezing until his hand ached.
His dead phone offered no explanations.
It didn’t make sense. He was sure it still had a full charge, or close to it. He tried a force restart. Nothing.
He pressed the glass face to his brow and begged it psychically to be good to him, to remember how well he’d treated it over the years. Then he patiently tried again.
Nope.
He stared at it, his eyes dry and sore, hating Steve Jobs, hating his phone service carrier.
“This is not fair,” he told the useless brick of black glass in his right hand. “You don’t get to just die. Why would you just stop working?”
The reply he heard in his mind came not in his own voice but in the voice of jumpmaster Axe: What the hell, man? We just stall out? And Lenny the pilot’s reply: I don’t know! Everything just died.
A bad thought began to take shape. Aubrey had a Shinola watch, a Christmas gift from his mother, a thing with a leather strap and honest-to-God moving hands. It didn’t have apps, didn’t connect to his phone, didn’t do anything except look good and tell the time. Aubrey pushed back the sleeve of his jumpsuit to stare at it. The hands read 4:23. The second hand wasn’t moving. He stared at the watch face without blinking until he was convinced the minute hand wasn’t moving either.
The cloud had done something to the Cessna when they flew over it. It emitted some kind of electromagnetic force that could zap the battery in a light aircraft, or a watch, or a smartphone.
Or a GoPro camera.
The idea was so woeful he wanted to shout in dismay. The only thing that stopped him was fatigue. Shouting up here in the cool, dry air seemed like a lot more effort than he could manage.
He saw clearly now: No one was going to upload a video of him lost on an island of cloud, a Robinson Crusoe of the sky. He was not going to go viral. News helicopters were not going to crowd around the man who walked in the heavens. If they got close, their cameras would record nothing and the helicopters would drop like cement blocks. But no one was going to come, because his jumpmaster’s helmet cam had fried along with the battery under the plane’s hood. The video might have recorded a few unpleasant minutes of Aubrey growing nauseated with anxiety, but it had certainly lost power well before they took the plunge.
The unfairness of it toppled him. He dropped heavily onto his rear, arms crossed over his knees. But even just sitting up required too much effort. He curled on his side, going fetal. Clouds puffed and settled around him. He decided to shut his eyes and wait awhile. Maybe when he opened them, he’d discover he had passed out before even getting on the plane. Maybe if he took deep breaths and rested, when he next lifted his head there would be green grass beneath him and concerned faces—Harriet’s among them—bent over him.
It was just cool enough to make him a tiny bit uncomfortable. At some point, nestled in a soft, slightly elastic nest of cloud stuff, he reached out absently, found the corner of a blanket, drew a thick quilt of churning white smoke across his body, and slept.
6
THERE WAS ONE GOOD MOMENT, just as he woke, when he didn’t remember any of it.
He gazed into a bright, clean sky, and he felt that the world was a kind place. His thoughts turned naturally to Harriet, as they often did when he first awoke. Aubrey liked to imagine rolling over and finding her beside him. He liked to imagine her bare back, the sharp, clean lines of her shoulder blades and spine. It was his favorite morning thought.
He rolled over and looked out across barren cloud.
The shock of it jolted through him, knocked the lazy, rested, in-no-rush-to-get-up feeling right out of him. He sat up and found he was in a large bed, a four-poster shaped out of white cotton. Blankets of creamy smoke had been pushed down around his waist. Pillows of vanilla custard were mounded beneath his head.
His coatrack kept a lonely watch a few feet away, helmet and harness dangling where he’d left them.
It was close to dusk now. The red coal of the sun stood off to the west, almost level with him. His shadow stretched to the far edge of the cloud island. The shadow of the bed was harder to see, a shadow cast by a ghost.
He did not give the bed much thought, not then. It was like the coatrack, just on a larger scale, and at the moment he was still too drowsy to manage much in the way of amazement. He slipped from under the blankets and crossed to the trailing edge of the island, keeping only about four feet between himself and the drop.
The country below was drenched in crimson glare. The green fields were shading to black. He did not see the runway, did not recognize any of what was below him. How fast was the cloud moving? Fast enough to have left the headquarters of Cloud 9 Skydiving Adventures far behind. He was surprised, and also surprised at his surprise.
Aubrey studied the darkening map of Ohio below. Or at least he assumed it was still Ohio. He saw forest. He saw ruddy rectangles of sun-roasted earth. He saw aluminum roofs flashing in the dying furnace light of the day. He spotted the broad, dark stroke of a state highway almost directly below, but who knew which one it might be?
He thought he was still being carried north and east, at least based on where the sun was going down. What was ahead? Canton? They might’ve skirted by Canton while he dozed. He couldn’t even begin to estimate how fast the cloud was moving, not without some way to keep time.
It unnerved him, looking over the edge of the cloud. With the help of a therapist, Dr. Wan, he’d made good progress, had come to feel he was well past his fear of heights—one of a dozen neurotic anxieties she’d been working on with him. At the end of their sessions, she would push open her office window and they’d both stick their heads out to peer at the sidewalk six stories below. For a long time, he could not look without being nearly overcome by vertigo, but eventually he got to the point where he could nonchalantly lean on the sill and whistle Louie Armstrong numbers into empty space. Dr. Wan was a big believer in “testing the anxiety,” in steadily diminishing its power by confronting it. Bu
t a sixth-floor office was one thing and a platform of smoke located almost two miles above the ground was another.
He wondered what Dr. Wan would’ve made of his plan to attempt skydiving. He hadn’t told her because he suspected she would be skeptical of his ability to do it, and he didn’t want skepticism. Besides, if he told her he was going to jump out of a plane, she would’ve asked why, and he would’ve had to say something about Harriet, and for the purposes of therapy he was over his Harriet fantasies.
He turned and considered his four-poster bed of cloud, his coatrack, and his likely fate.
It did him no good to disbelieve his situation, to argue with his circumstances. He was here, and he accepted he would go on being here, no matter how hard he tried to talk himself into denying the reality around him.
And that was fine and that was right. Aubrey was a musician, not a physicist or a journalist. He didn’t know if he believed in ghosts, but he liked the idea of them. He had enthusiastically participated in a séance with June and Harriet once (holding Harriet’s hand for half an hour!). He was pretty sure Stonehenge was a landing pad for aliens. It wasn’t in Aubrey’s nature to ruthlessly interrogate reality, calling bullshit on every unproved notion and improbable hope. Acceptance was his natural state. Running with the situation was the first rule of a good jam.
His throat felt cracked and sore, and it was killing him to swallow. The fatigue was returning already, and he wished he had a comfortable place to sit and think. Could his exhaustion be a simple matter of altitude sickness? Aubrey’s mind, which had a knack for generating worst-case scenarios, snatched at a new idea: He was standing on some lighter-than-air cloud of radiation. Whatever had killed the electrical power in the plane and his phone would soon wipe out the electrical impulses that governed the beating of his heart. The cloud might be producing as much atomic poison as the overheated reactors in Fukushima that had made a few dozen miles of Japan into a zone inhospitable to human life.
