by Joe Hill
The idea turned his kidneys into cool, stagnant water. His legs felt suddenly wobbly, and he reached thoughtlessly for something to steady himself on, and his hand fell upon the armrest of a fat easy chair.
It had boiled up from the cloud behind him while he wasn’t paying attention. It was a great soft-looking throne, tinged a pretty shade of coral by the last of the day’s light.
He considered it with interest and suspicion, forgot all about lethal doses of radiation for a moment. He lowered himself tentatively into it. He still half expected to fall through, but of course he didn’t. It was the soft, plump easy chair that other easy chairs dreamed of being.
A coatrack, a bed, a chair. What he needed, when he needed it.
When he thought of it.
He held this notion in his mind, turning it over, considering it.
This was not a cloud. He had to stop thinking of it as a cloud. It was . . . what? A device? A machine? Of some kind, yes. Which raised the next obvious question: What was under the hood? Where the hell was the hood?
His gaze drifted uneasily to the vast central mound, the one part of the island he hadn’t explored. He would have to go take a look. Not yet, though. He wasn’t sure if it was strength or courage he lacked. Maybe both. He had slept at least an hour but was still exhausted, and the sight of that huge, creamy white dome oppressed him somehow.
He lifted his head, searching for his next insight, and saw a cherry-colored sky scattered with the first stars. The astonishing clarity of the early night stunned him. For a moment he felt a flicker of something dangerously like gratitude. He was not dead, and the stars were coming out in all their glittering profusion. He watched while the sky dimmed and constellations mapped the darkness.
When the lid of night had fastened itself over the Midwest, he became aware that he was very cold. It was not unbearable—not yet—but it was disagreeable enough to make him turn his thoughts to the immediate problems of survival.
It seemed to him important to take an inventory. He wore a jumpsuit and one Converse high-top. He’d been told to leave his right shoe on the ground but no longer remembered why. It seemed silly now. Why did you jump in only one shoe?
Beneath the jumpsuit he wore knee-length cargo shorts and a tee made out of chunky cables of knitted cotton. It was his favorite shirt, because once Harriet had stroked it and said she loved the fabric.
He was hungry, in a distracted sort of way. That at least could be managed for now. He remembered tucking a granola bar into his shorts earlier that morning, wanted to have something on him in case of low blood sugar. It was still there. His thirst was going to be a bigger issue. He was so thirsty his throat ached, and at the moment he didn’t have any idea what he was going to do about it.
Back to the inventory. He had his harness, and he had his helmet. He unzipped his jumpsuit and shivered at the wind’s cold touch. He worked his hands over the pockets of his shorts, itemizing his finds.
The phone: a dead slab of steel and glass.
His wallet: a leather rectangle with a few cards tucked into its pockets and his student ID. He was glad for the identification. If he were blown off the cloud, or if its miraculous powers of support suddenly gave out, the smashed turnip of his body would have a name. Wouldn’t that shock the shit out of some people, if his pancaked corpse turned up in northeastern Ohio—or southern Pennsylvania!—a hundred miles away from where he’d last been seen, leaping from a plane? He took out his wallet and phone and put them on the end table.
In another pocket he—
—he jerked his head around to look at the end table.
In the summer darkness, the cloud was all silver and pearl, vivid by the light of a quarter moon. After the coatrack and the bed and the chair, he was not terribly surprised to be offered an end table in response to an unarticulated wish, although it was still a jolt, the way it had snuck up on him. But what interested him most is that he knew this end table. There’d been one just like it in between the couch where his mother stretched out and the chair he usually sat in when they watched TV together (usually something like Sherlock or Downton Abbey on PBS). It was where they put the popcorn.
He imagined Harriet calling his mother to say he’d been killed in a skydiving accident, then immediately pushed the thought aside, couldn’t bear it. The vision of his mother screaming and collapsing into agonized sobs was more than he could take right now.
No. What interested him was that this end table—which had a wide circular top and a long beaded column—was a twin of the one he remembered from childhood. The only difference being that it was made out of cloud instead of cherry. And that meant something—didn’t it?
His hand was still burrowed in one pocket of his cargo shorts, and his fingers fumbled at a few small, waxy blocks. He plucked one out and squinted at it in the opalescent light. When he realized what it was, his body responded with a throb of pleasure and need.
In the little flight office inside the airplane hangar, there’d been a glass dish on the reception desk full of individually wrapped Starburst candies. He’d furtively gone through them, picking out all the pale pink strawberry-flavored pieces. He had a weakness for them and had imagined they might come in handy—if he started panicking on the plane, he could stick one in his mouth and let sweetness infuse him. Plus, with his mouth full, he would be less likely to say cowardly, desperate things.
But of course the Starbursts had been in the pocket of his shorts, beneath the jumpsuit and harness, where he couldn’t get at them, and besides, by the time they were in the sky, three hours later, he was so distracted by his own alarm that he’d forgotten about them.
How many did he have? Three. There had been five, but he’d chewed two to calm his nerves while he read over the preflight waivers.
His throat ached for one, and his fingers trembled as he unwrapped it and popped it into his mouth. He shuddered with physical pleasure. It wasn’t as good as a bottle of water, but it would keep his thirst in check for now, and he had two more for later.
If his kingdom of clouds could provide him with an easy chair and an end table, couldn’t it give him a pitcher of water?
No. He didn’t think so. If it could’ve, it would’ve already. It was responsive to his immediate needs, providing as soon as the thought occurred. So it was—what—telepathic? Well, wasn’t it? How else could it know what an end table looked like? It had offered up not just any piece of furniture but Aubrey’s own Platonic ideal of an end table. That had to mean it could, in some way, read his memories and beliefs like a reference guide: Life Among the Humans.
So why couldn’t it give him water? he wondered, sucking thoughtfully on the last sliver of his Starburst. Wasn’t cloud stuff just water in the form of a gas?
Perhaps—but not this cloud stuff. When it hardened into the shape of a bed or a chair, it was not turning into snow.
In Dr. Wan’s waiting room, there were magazines on a coffee table: The New Yorker, Fine Cooking, Scientific American. Aubrey’s thoughts flashed to a photo he’d seen in an issue of Scientific: what looked like the ghost of a brick, a semitransparent cube of palest blue, improbably resting atop a few blades of grass. It had been something called aerogel, a block of solid matter that was lighter than air. Aubrey had an idea that the stuff beneath him now was similar in composition but vastly superior.
The last of his fruit chew melted away, leaving his mouth sticky sweet. He wanted water more than ever.
He thought he should try to visualize a pitcher of water anyway, before ruling it out. God knew it would be easy enough to imagine a jug of fresh water, blocks of ice clicking off each other inside the sweating glass. But before he could so much as close his eyes and concentrate, it came to him it was already there, sitting on the end table. It had fashioned itself while his thoughts were elsewhere—a perfect pitcher, made of fog, not glass, with a tumbler right beside it.
He lifted the pitcher by the handle and poured. A bubbling trickle of vapor and little cubes o
f hardened smoke poured slowly, dreamily into his cup.
“Well, that’s fucking great, thanks,” he said, surprised at his own bitterness.
The pitcher, ashamed, melted in his hand and drifted away. The cup puddled into fog and foamed silently off the end table, rejoining the cloud.
Aubrey shivered, fumbled about at his feet, and drew a blanket of billowing fumes across his legs. Better. He had lost his train of thought, tried to recall where he’d been and where he was going.
An inventory. He had been making an inventory. He had completed his examination of his physical supplies. Now he turned his attention to his psychological resources, whatever they might be.
He was Aubrey Langdon Griffin, single male, only child, twenty-two going on twenty-three. He was an accomplished Rollerblader, could speak with great fluency about MLB and the NBA, and could play the cello like a motherfucker.
Aubrey had never, in all his life, been so struck with his own near-total lack of survival skills. In grade school he’d had a friend, Irwin Ozick, who could make a compass with a needle and a cup of water, but right now if Aubrey had a cup of water, he’d drink it, and besides, how the fuck was a compass going to help him? Did it matter what direction he was moving in? After all, he couldn’t steer the goddamn thing.
“Can I?” he wondered aloud.
It had offered a bed when he was weary. It provided a coatrack when he had something that required hanging. It responded.
Could he turn it back around toward Cleveland?
No sooner had this notion occurred than he was pricked with another, more thrilling possibility. Could he just close his eyes and concentrate on descent? Why not just wish it down?
He closed his eyes and drew a long, chilly breath, and with all his heart told the cloud—
But he had not even completed mentally announcing what he wanted when he felt something push back. It was more a physical sensation than a psychological impression. His mind was filled, suddenly and forcefully, with the image of a smooth black mass, glassy and dense. It drove itself back into his thoughts, crushing ideas just as a boot heel might stamp a beer can flat.
He recoiled in his chair, hands flying to his brow. For a moment he was blind. For a moment there was nothing but the black block (no, not a block . . . a pearl) filling his head. His ears popped from the pressure. An unpleasant tingle shot through his nerve endings, a rashy sensation of prickling heat.
When his vision cleared, he was standing again. He didn’t recall leaping to his feet. He had lost a slice of time. Not long, he believed. Seconds, not minutes.
The dark, thought-flattening block (the pearl) had withdrawn but had left him feeling drained and woozy. He reeled unsteadily to the bed, climbed under the thick, snowy covers. The stars wheeled against the immense, crystal blackness of the night. The sky was a glassy black circle (a pearl) pressing down on him, squeezing him flat.
He shut his eyes and fell and fell and fell into the bottomless darkness of the unconscious.
7
HARRIET AND JUNE PLAYED THE open mics on Saturday nights in a pub called the Slithy Toves. Mostly they shared a mic and played ukuleles together and looked good in sweaters and pleated skirts and cute hats. June wore a top hat, purple velvet, with a little brown taxidermied woodcock peering down from the brim. Harriet wore a shockingly loud plaid bowler. They did covers of Belle & Sebastian and Vampire Weekend, mixed in with a couple of their own tunes. Now and then June ran behind a piano and played.
Aubrey saw them perform lots of times. He was in a consort that made chamber music out of video-game soundtracks and they played the Slithy Toves too.
One night his group (they were called Burgher Time, a joke absolutely no one got) was scheduled to go on right after Harriet and June’s duo, Junicorn (a joke absolutely everyone got—Harriet’s last name was Cornell). He was in the dark, at the edge of the stage, already had his cello out so he could rosin the bow. Junicorn was finishing their worst set ever. Harriet fucked up the opening of “Oxford Comma,” and the thing turned into an incoherent mess. It didn’t finish so much as stagger to a halt. Then they had a little whispered fight after it became clear that Harriet had forgotten her banjo, which they needed for their cute showstopper (they played a Monty Python number, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” coaxing the audience into a sing-along). There was a good crowd, but no one was listening. Harriet had angry red blotches on her cheeks and was trying not to brush her eyes, didn’t want anyone to see how hard she was fighting not to cry. When June had finished chewing her out in a whisper that was probably audible out in the street, she sat down behind the piano, unable to look at Harriet or the crowd. They argued about what to play without making eye contact, Harriet hissing over her shoulder. A drunk in the crowd began to howl suggestions.
“Play some Kiss!” he shouted. “‘Lick It Up’! Hey, girls! Girls! ‘Let’s Put the X in Sex’! C’mon!”
Finally Harriet and June agreed on “Wonderwall.” The noise of the crowd dipped into a brief lull, and in that moment of near silence everyone close to the stage could hear June say, “F-sharp! F, F, as in ‘Don’t fuck it up.’” The people closest to the stage tittered.
Harriet began to strike the chords of an acoustic guitar while June found the melody on the keys. They sang, both of them sounding fragile and heartsick, but the crowd didn’t really start to listen until Aubrey began to play offstage, drawing bow across string, deepening the melody with an almost tidal sound of yearning. The girls themselves didn’t notice at first, didn’t realize they’d just become a trio. But they knew when they were winning the crowd back, and they straightened, their voices strengthening and twining together. The chatter fell away, and the song filled the room. The drunk wailed, “I want some fuckin’ Kiss! ‘Lick It Uuuuuuuuup’!” and then was silenced when someone else said, “You’re gonna be lickin’ up whatever’s on the floor, you don’t shut your fuckin’ mouth.”
When they sang the final chorus, their voices were brave and happy and they knew they’d been saved, and that was when Harriet heard the cello. She turned her head and saw Aubrey in the wings. Her eyes widened, and her eyebrows flew up, and she looked like she wanted to laugh. When the song was over and people began to hoot, she didn’t linger to enjoy the applause but bounced off the stage, took off her bowler, and put it on his head. She kissed him fiercely on the cheek.
“Whoever you are, I want you to know I will love you forever. Maybe longer,” she said to him.
June played three bars of “Lick It Up,” then jumped to her feet, slid across the top of the piano like a cop in an eighties action show sliding across the hood of his Ferrari, and shouted, “Hey, who’s in the mood for a threesome?” And then she was planting a kiss on Aubrey’s other cheek.
She was joking, but the funny thing was, by the summer they were one. That May, Aubrey declined a seat with the Cleveland Orchestra so he’d be free to play East Coast gigs with Junicorn.
8
HE WOKE TO A RAGGED, cold wind and his belly cramping with hunger. A sharp stab of pain lanced him in the throat every time he swallowed.
Aubrey huddled, dazed and weak, beneath the sheep fluff of his cloud blankets. They were feathery soft to the touch and held a capsule of lovely, cozy warmth. His head, though, was exposed to the elements, and his ears were full of sick pain from the chill.
He found his granola bar, pulled back the wrapper, and allowed himself a bite: sticky coconut, salted almonds, a sweet caulk of chocolate. He was half frantic to gobble the rest, but he folded it back into the wrapper, returned it to his pocket, and zipped up his jumpsuit to put an extra barrier between the bar and himself. Maybe he did after all have a single survival skill: his restraint, which he had honed over the course of a hundred nights spent in the backseat of June’s car with Harriet. Sometimes Harriet dozed off with her head on his thigh, murmuring, “G’night, love muppet,” her mouth almost against his stomach. His self-control was second to none. As badly as he wanted to eat, he h
ad wanted Harriet far more, but he never kissed her, never stroked her face, took her hand only when it was offered. Except for that one time at Sugarloaf, of course, and then she had initiated the touching and the kissing, not him.
He sucked on a Starburst to get some liquid into his throat. He made it last a long time, while he woke up and his wits returned to him. The sky above was clouded over, a rumpled argent landscape of lead-colored hills and pewter valleys.
When he cast aside his blankets and stood, the wind took a swipe at him and his weak legs almost buckled. The gusts threw his hair every which way. He staggered to the trailing aft end of the cloud.
Masses of hill lay below, thickly forested. He spied the pale brown thread of a little stream. Patches of green, squared-off farmland. Some roads scrawled here and there. Who the fuck knew what he was looking at? Maryland? Pennsylvania? Canada? No. Probably not Canada. He didn’t believe he could’ve crossed the vast expanse of Lake Erie while he slept. It was hard to say how fast they were moving, but slower than the cars he saw gliding along the roads below.
“Where are you taking us?” he asked, shivering, feeling feverish.
He half expected the glassy blackness—the pearl—to stamp itself into his mind again, but nothing of the sort happened.
What had that been? he wondered. But he already knew. It had been an answer, an emphatic no. It was refusal in the cloud’s own psychic language.
The castaway cast his woozy gaze around his island. He soon found himself staring again at the central mound, as big as St. Paul’s dome and shaped much the same.
He drew a soft, downy robe of fog out of the smoke at his feet, and a scarf, too, a ten-foot streamer of haze. He swooped a hand through the cloud and came up with a hat. When he was all bundled up, he set out for the center of the cloud, looking like a snowman brought to life.
