by Joe Hill
He trod across a vast, creamy meadow, through a profound hush and peace. That silence was unnerving. One didn’t realize how much bustle and noise the world made until one was miles away from it, away from any other human.
Aubrey had just reached the milky white dome at the heart of the cloud, when a black flash filled his head, staggering him. A hand flew to his head and he put a knee against the side of the dome. The pain (the pearl) subsided, leaving a sore space in his mind. He waited, temples throbbing, for another black psychic blast, a human bowling pin preparing to be knocked off his feet by that rolling obsidian pearl. Nothing.
Aubrey thought he knew what would happen if he went on. He began to haul himself up the side of the dome. It was a steep climb, and he had to dig hands and toes into the cloud itself. It had a clammy, custardy texture to it. He might’ve been climbing a lump of semi-solid pudding.
Aubrey climbed two yards and was hit by another pulverizing black crash. It was like a branch snapping into his face. His eyes watered. He stopped, went still. That obliterating mental explosion was worse than unconsciousness. It was unbeing. For an instant, Aubrey was gone.
“What don’t you want me to see up there?” he said.
The cloud did not reply.
He decided to keep climbing, just to see what would happen—how intent it was on psychically kicking the shit out of him if he persisted. He made another handhold and another and
A dark weight dropped on his conscious mind like a falling chandelier.
But when his wet, leaking eyes cleared, he found he had continued to ascend, even in those blank moments when it seemed to him he simply ceased to be. He was midway up the dome, no longer climbing but crawling on all fours, as the curve became more gradual. The apex was maybe another ten minutes of struggle away, assuming his host didn’t decide to squash his mind like a man splitting a tick between his thumb and index finger.
He shut his eyes and rested, face damp from the effort of pulling himself up the slope.
Aubrey felt it then. Something held in the very center of the cloud (the pearl), like a marble held in one’s mouth. It hummed, very faintly, a low, muted drone, although Aubrey detected it right away. Maybe that was another survival skill—he had acute, sensitive ears, could hear a single off-key violin in a fifty-person string section. And with that gentle thrumming noise, he sensed a kind of ache. Could one person sense the ache in another? He was seized by a disconcerting, nonsensical idea. He stood before the closed, locked door of a dark house. A family mourned within. A dead grandfather lay stiff in the sheets of his bed.
Aubrey wondered if he dared knock on that door and ask for directions home.
He believed that if he continued to climb, he would soon be met with another black thump, this one maybe as bad as the one that had swatted him the night before when he’d asked the cloud to take him home. He turned and sat on the side of the hill and looked upon his domain, a great white fiefdom of fluffy, barren cloud. From up here, maybe four stories above the rest of his island—but still far from the peak of the dome—he could no longer make out his cumulonimbus bed, his chair, his coatrack. They were lost against the pale background, impossible to make out amid the other irregularities of the cloud.
The castaway sat while the chill breeze cooled the sweat on his face.
Perhaps a mile off, he spied a jumbo jet, a 747, climbing into the higher ceiling of cloud above. He leapt up and waved his arms, pointlessly. He was no more visible to them than his bed was visible to him. Nonetheless he yelled and leapt.
The third time he jumped, he lost his footing and went sliding back down the dome on his ass. At the bottom he tumbled face-first into the drifting paleness. His face thumped on something fluffy and soft in a way that was different from the cloud’s spongy softness.
He felt around for it, frowning to himself, found it, and lifted it out of the haze—a stuffed purple horse with a silver horn and twee little wings behind its forelegs. Harriet had gone out of the plane with it, but hadn’t kept hold of it, and so he wasn’t alone on the cloud after all.
There was also the Junicorn.
9
JUNICORNS WERE HARRIET’S IDEA, SOMETHING to sell along with T-shirts and their locally produced CD, and it turned out to be an inspired business decision. Dudes bought them for their girlfriends; girls bought them for themselves; parents bought them for the kids. They sold so much horse, June said, they were practically heroin dealers.
Aubrey was in the conservatory at the Cleveland Institute of Music and had arranged access to their recording studio. On their little sheet of liner notes, Harriet was credited with one song, June with two. There were a pair of covers. Everything else was Cornell-Griffin-Morris. Aubrey brought in the melodies and figured out the arrangements and worked out the choruses, but as far as he was concerned, Harriet’s additional lyrics and June’s piano fills qualified them for equal credit. He was very good at talking himself into believing these were genuinely collaborative works. In some ways he believed it more than anyone.
“Am I the only one who thinks it’s stupid we’re called Junicorn when Aubrey is the musical genius?” Harriet asked one day when they were recording in the spacious studio with the exposed rough wooden beams. “We oughta call the band Griffin. We could sell stuffed Griffins.”
“Don’t give him ideas,” June said, and tinkled a bit of one of her songs, “I Hallucinate You,” on the piano. Either that or it was Coldplay’s “Princess of China.” All June’s songs sounded like other songs. One of them sounded so much like “Shadowboxer” that June had once embarrassed herself by forgetting her own lyrics and singing Fiona Apple’s lines when they were onstage. No one in the crowd noticed, and Harriet and Aubrey pretended not to notice either.
They rolled to the gigs in June’s battered old Volvo, but the boxes of Junicorns came along behind them in a dismal red Econoline driven by Ronnie Morris. The Morris brothers went to all the gigs as roadies, hauling the gear and the merch. They had learned that if you were with the band, there were frequently offers of free beer and always decent odds of meeting skanks. Along with the instruments and Junicorns and boxes of T-shirts, Ronnie and Brad almost always brought along the Pen Pal.
The Pen Pal was how Aubrey thought of Harriet’s boyfriend. When Harriet was nine, her father had taken her to San Diego on a business trip, which he stretched into a long weekend so they could catch a baseball game and visit the zoo. On their last morning, Harriet’s dad took her down for a wander along the waterfront and bought her a soda. When her Coca-Cola was gone, Harriet tucked a note into the bottle, with her address in Cleveland, a dollar bill, and a promise that there would be more money if whoever found the bottle would be her pen pal. Her father launched the sealed bottle a good hundred feet out into the sea.
Two months later, she received an envelope from someone named Chris Tybalt. He had returned her dollar bill, along with a photo of himself and an informative note. Chris was eleven, and his hobby was building and launching model rockets. He had gone to Imperial Beach, just south of San Diego, to launch his new CATO rocket, and the Coca-Cola bottle had been sticking out of the sand. He let her know that his favorite president was JFK, his lucky number was sixty-three, and he had only four toes on his right foot (accident with a firecracker). The photo, standard school issue, with a cloudy blue backdrop, showed a boy with reddish-blond hair, dimples, and braces.
They wrote letters for another three years before they met in person, when the Pen Pal was on his way across country with his grandmother. Tybalt spent a weekend at Harriet’s house, sleeping with his gram in the guest room. Harriet and the Pen Pal launched a rocket together, an Estes AstroCam that snapped a picture of them from six hundred feet up: two pale spots in a green field, a dreamy beanstalk of pink smoke leading down to their feet. By Harriet’s sophomore year in high school, they were “dating,” had switched to e-mail, and agreed they loved each other. He applied to the Kent State aeronautics program just to be near her.
Aubrey thought the Pen Pal looked like a freckled junior investigator from a young-adult novel, and never mind he was in his early twenties. He played golf with unnerving grace, looked like he’d never had acne, and had a habit of finding injured birds and nurturing them back to full health. June’s brothers loved him because he was easy to get drunk, and when he was drunk, he would try to kiss them—he called them bro kisses. Aubrey desperately wanted him to turn out to be a closeted homosexual. Unfortunately, he was just Californian. When Harriet and the Pen Pal talked about what they would name their children—Jet if it was a boy, Kennedy if it was a girl—Aubrey felt that his own life was hopeless.
There was room for Harriet in Ronnie Morris’s van, but she always went to the shows with June and Aubrey in the Volvo. The Pen Pal insisted.
“Chris says I have to,” she told Aubrey on one of these rides. “He says he doesn’t want to be our Yoko Ono.”
“Ah,” Aubrey said. “So we’re keeping lovers apart. Riding in the backseat with me is almost a form of punishment.”
“Mmm,” she said, closing her eyes and rolling her head around to get comfortable in his lap. “Like a weekly spanking.”
June cleared her throat in the front of the car in a funny way, and after a moment Harriet made a low sound of discontent and sat up, then shifted around. Harriet had a Junicorn of her own, and she made a pillow of it, dozed off with a foot of space between herself and Aubrey.
10
IN THE LATTER PART OF the afternoon, the wind picked up, whipping the surface of the impossible island into a series of rough wavelets. His island, like a cutter, was beating right into the blow, tacking this way and that. Aubrey smelled rain.
His cloud vessel fought its way toward lowering, ugly clouds, straight into a downpour like a black scarf, miles across. The first rattling pellets hit Aubrey sideways, tearing at his coat of cloud. He flinched, hugging his stuffed Junicorn protectively, as a mother caught out in the rain might’ve protected an infant. He retreated, looking for cover. An umbrella handle of white fog protruded from a bucket of cloud, next to the coatrack. He grabbed it and threw it open, and a vast spreading canvas of hard cloud opened above him.
Now and then he turned the umbrella aside to shut his eyes and open his mouth. Icy pellets of water stung his lips, tasted cold and good, tasted like licking the blade of a knife.
More rain fell into a claw-foot bathtub of dense cloud. A great pool of water, suspended in a chalice of ice. A deep puddle hanging in smoke.
They were three hours in the pelting rain before his vast ship of cloud veered off to the east and raced away from the storm. Aubrey lay flat in the day’s last dazzle of sunlight, head hung over the edge of the cloud, to watch the mile-wide shadow of his sky island racing across the green map of the world below.
By then his belly hurt from all the water he’d drunk, using a dipper as big as his own head to collect the rain from his deep tub. By then he had taken a nearly thirty-second piss off the side of the island, a golden parabola leaping into the brilliance of the afternoon. By then Aubrey Griffin had forgotten he was terrified of heights. It had, for the moment, slipped his mind.
11
THE ONE TIME SHE SLIPPED into his arms was the night they played Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine, a gig at a gastropub right off the slopes. The Pen Pal wasn’t along that time. Harriet said he had to stay at school and study, but Aubrey learned from June that there’d been a fight: ugly sobbing, terrible things said, doors slammed. Harriet had come across e-mails from a West Coast girlfriend the Pen Pal had never bothered to mention. He swore they weren’t still together, but he hadn’t seen any reason to get rid of the photos. The half-naked selfies weren’t the worst of them. The one that had really turned Harriet’s stomach was a picture of Imperial Beach from five hundred feet up, shot from an AstroCam, the Pen Pal and his West Coast Sally staring up at it together. The West Coast Sally called him “Rocket” in her e-mails.
Aubrey was sick at the news—sick with excitement. In three weeks he was due to fly to Heathrow Airport. He was doing a semester at the Royal Academy of Music, beginning right after Christmas break. He had already put half a year of savings into the flat he was renting, money he couldn’t get back, but he had a wild notion to stay, to make an insane leap, grab at a moment with Harriet.
She was stiff and uncommunicative the whole twelve-hour drive to the show, where they were opening for Nils Lofgren. Privately, Aubrey calculated that the pay would not quite cover the gas money, but they had free rooms in the resort, meal vouchers, and the lift tickets were on the house. In happier times Harriet and the Pen Pal had made plans for a full day of skiing. In a sign of how things were now, she had not even brought her skis, muttering that she’d pulled something.
“Actually, it was Rocket who pulled something, wasn’t it?” June asked as they were loading the car. Harriet replied by slamming the trunk.
Harriet spent the drive up chewing her thumbnail and glaring out at snowy rises, firs humped under powder. It had snowed heavily all the week before, and they might’ve been driving through a tunnel in the clouds, sculpted white cliffs rising along either side of the road.
That night they played to a room packed to the walls, people older and wealthier than they, looking for some good noise on a Saturday night after a hard day of skiing and exercising their credit cards. The room was hot and stank of hops, wet wool, wet hair, and woodsmoke. Harriet wore a pair of low-slung blue jeans, and when she crouched over her acoustic, Aubrey could see the top of her emerald thong. She was especially good that evening, careless and funny, her usually clear voice pleasantly hoarsened, as if she were recovering from a cold. They played and they drank, Belgian beer with a pink elephant printed on the label. Aubrey was on his fourth and feeling dizzy when he discovered that it was 8.5 percent ABV.
There was no room in the tiny elevator for all of them and Aubrey’s cello, so Aubrey and Harriet rode up together, leaving June behind with her brothers. When they got out on the third floor, Harriet looked one way, then the other, squinting at the white-numbered doors. She swayed and took Aubrey’s arm.
“Where’s my room?” Harriet asked. “Do you remember?”
Aubrey asked to see her key card, but it was just a featureless black rectangle, revealing nothing.
“We’ll call down from my room,” Aubrey said, but they never did.
12
THE STARS CAME OUT, a swarm of bright sparks in the wintry dark. It felt like winter up here, ten thousand feet above the soil. Aubrey ate the last of his granola bar and huddled in his piles of blankets with the Junicorn, pushing it into his face, trying to smell Harriet on it, remembering the way her hair smelled that night in Maine, like pine trees, like juniper.
Thinking about Maine, remembering the way they yanked at each other’s clothes, kissing almost desperately, Aubrey felt the need for Harriet as intensely as he had ever wanted water. And in the deepest part of the night, she pushed the blankets back and climbed carefully, almost shyly, to his side: a Harriet made of cloud, pillowy white breasts, cool flowing silk for hair, lips of dry fog, tongue of cool vapor.
He sobbed gratefully, drew her to him, and fell into her, a long, sweet plunge without a parachute.
13
IF AUBREY WOKE UP FIRST, he believed his whole life might have been different. He didn’t know what that would’ve been like, to awake bathed in sunlight, amid the pillows and piles of white sheets, with Harriet naked beside him. How he would’ve liked to see the light on her bare back. How he wished to wake her with a kiss on her shoulder.
But when he clawed his way up out of sleep, Harriet had already left. She didn’t answer the knock on her hotel-room door. She wasn’t at the breakfast buffet. He did not see her all the rest of the time they were at Sugarloaf, except once, briefly: She was in the courtyard in front of the resort, shivering in a too-flimsy denim jacket, eyes streaming while she had it out with someone on the phone. The boyfriend, he was sure, and he felt a great throb of hope
. They are breaking up, he thought. She is breaking up with him, and now it will be our time.
He was watching through the tinted front windows of the hotel lobby, and he would’ve gone to her—wanted to be close to her if she needed him, if his silent presence would help her get through it. But he’d arrived in the lobby with June, who was in a lot of pain. She was having nasty cramps, she said, or maybe a reaction to something she’d eaten. She was hanging on to Aubrey’s arm, and after they had both looked out on the scene in the courtyard for a moment, she tugged him toward the reception desk.
“Let her be,” June said. “I need you more than she does. I’m bleeding so bad it’s less like menstruation, more like afterbirth. I could not have more stuff spilling out of me without giving it a name and buying it diapers.”
June was in such a bad way that she asked Aubrey to do the driving. By the time Aubrey got his cello downstairs, Harriet was already gone. She had split with the Morris brothers. June said it was because Harriet had an obliterating headache and wanted to sleep on the bed in the back of the van, but Aubrey was disturbed. It felt less as if Harriet had departed, more like she’d fled.
“I think that pink-elephant stuff we drank last night might be aggravating my period,” June said. “It sure isn’t helping. We all drank way too much. I wish I could have last night back. I bet Harriet does, too. Like Reagan said: Mistakes were made.”
Aubrey wanted to ask what she meant by that, wanted to know what June knew, if she was talking about more than beer, but he lacked the courage, and soon June was asleep and snoring in a very unlovely way.
When he was back in his apartment, he texted Harriet almost a dozen times, beginning with Wow! So THAT happened, continuing on to I really want to give this a chance, and finishing with Are you there? Are you okay? She didn’t reply, and her silence made him sick with dread. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even get into bed. He paced his little bedroom, his stomach upset, playing games on his phone so he wouldn’t have to think. Finally he dozed off on his threadbare secondhand couch, which smelled faintly of rancid pizza.
