Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (15 page)

Melissa was sitting on the front porch steps, and I knelt down beside her as I left. “I’m taking the boys into town,” I said. I kissed her cheek and rubbed the base of her neck, felt the cirrus curls of hair there moving back and forth through my fingers.

“Shh.” She held a hand out to silence me. “Listen.”

The insects had begun to sing, the birds to fall quiet. The air gradually became filled with a peaceful chirring noise.

“What are we listening for?” I whispered.

Melissa bowed her head for a moment, as if she were trying to keep count of something. Then she looked up at me. In answer, and with a sort of weariness about her, she spread her arms open to the world.

Before I stood to leave, she asked me a question: “We’re not all that much alike, are we?” she said.

The plaza outside the library was paved with red brick. Dog-wood trees were planted in hollows along the perimeter, and benches of distressed metal stood here and there on concrete pads. A member of a local guerrilla theater troupe was delivering a recitation from beneath a streetlamp; she sat behind a wooden desk, her hands folded one atop the other, and spoke as if into a camera. “Where did this object come from?” she said. “What is it, and when will it stop its descent? How did we find ourselves in this place? Where do we go from here? Scientists are baffled. In an interview with this station, Dr. Stephen Mandruzzato, head of the prestigious Horton Institute of Astronomical Studies, had this to say: ‘We don’t know. We don’t know. We just don’t know.’” I led Joshua and Bobby Nauman through the heavy dark glass doors of the library, and we took our seats in the Children’s Reading Room. The tables were set low to the ground so that my legs pressed flat against the underside, and the air carried that peculiar, sweetened-milk smell of public libraries and elementary schools. Bobby Nauman began to play the Where Am I? game with Joshua. “Where am I?” he would ask, and then he’d warm-and-cold Joshua around the room until Joshua had found him. First he was in a potted plant, then on my shirt collar, then beneath the baffles of an air vent.

After a time, the man who was to read to us moved into place. He said hello to the children, coughed his throat clear, and opened his book to the title page: “Chicken Little,” he began.

As he read, the sky grew bright with afternoon. The sun came through the windows in a sheet of fire.

Joshua started the second grade in September. His new teacher mailed us a list of necessary school supplies, which we purchased the week before classes began—pencils and a utility box, glue and facial tissues, a ruler and a notebook and a tray of watercolor paints. On his first day, Melissa shot a photograph of Joshua waving to her from the front door, his backpack wreathed over his shoulder and a lunch sack in his right hand. He stood in the flash of hard white light, then kissed her good-bye and joined Rich and Strange in the car pool.

Autumn passed in its slow, sheltering way, and toward the end of November, Joshua’s teacher asked the class to write a short essay describing a community of local animals. The paragraph Joshua wrote was captioned “What Happened to the Birds.” We fastened it to the refrigerator with magnets:

There were many birds here before, but now there gone. Nobody knows where they went. I used to see them in the trees. I fed one at the zoo when I was litle. It was big. The birds went away when no one was looking. The trees are quiet now. They do not move.

All of this was true. As the object in the sky became visible during the daylight—and as, in the tide of several months, it descended over our town—the birds and migrating insects disappeared. I did not notice they were gone, though, nor the muteness with which the sun rose in the morning, nor the stillness of the grass and trees, until I read Joshua’s essay.

The world at this time was full of confusion and misgiving and unforeseen changes of heart. One incident that I recall clearly took place in the Main Street Barber Shop on a cold winter Tuesday. I was sitting in a pneumatic chair while Wesson the barber trimmed my hair. A nylon gown was draped over my body to catch the cuttings, and I could smell the peppermint of Wesson’s chewing gum. “So how ’bout this weather?” he chuckled, working away at my crown.

Weather gags had been circulating through our offices and bar-rooms ever since the object—which was as smooth and reflective as obsidian glass, and which the newspapers had designated “the ceiling”—had descended to the level of the cloud base. I gave my usual response, “A little overcast today, wouldn’t you say?” and Wesson barked an appreciative laugh.

Wesson was one of those men who had passed his days waiting for the rest of his life to come about. He busied himself with his work, never marrying, and doted on the children of his customers. “Something’s bound to happen soon,” he would often say at the end of a conversation, and there was a quickness to his eyes that demonstrated his implicit faith in the proposition. When his mother died, this faith seemed to abandon him. He went home each evening to the small house that they had shared, shuffling cards or paging through a magazine until he fell asleep. Though he never failed to laugh when a customer was at hand, the eyes he wore became empty and white, as if some essential fire in them had been spent. His enthusiasm began to seem like desperation. It was only a matter of time.

“How’s the pretty lady?” he asked me.

I was watching him in the mirror, which was both parallel to and coextensive with a mirror on the opposite wall. “She hasn’t been feeling too well,” I said. “But I think she’s coming out of it.”

“Glad to hear it. Glad to hear it,” he said. “And business at the hardware store?”

I told him that business was fine. I was on my lunch break.

The bell on the door handle gave a
tink,
and a current of cold air sent a little eddy of cuttings across the floor. A man we had never seen before leaned into the room. “Have you seen my umbrella?” he said. “I can’t find my umbrella, have you seen it?” His voice was too loud— high and sharp, fluttery with worry—and his hands shook with a distinct tremor.

“Can’t say that I have,” said Wesson. He smiled emptily, showing his teeth, and his fingers tensed around the back of my chair.

There was a sudden feeling of weightlessness to the room.

“
You
wouldn’t tell me
anyway,
would you?” said the man. “Jesus,” he said. “You people.”

Then he took up the ashtray stand and slammed it against the window.

A cloud of gray cinders shot out around him, but the window merely shuddered in its frame. He let the stand fall to the floor and it rolled into a magazine rack. Ash drizzled to the ground. The man brushed a cigarette butt from his jacket. “You people,” he said again, and he left through the open glass door.

As I walked home later that afternoon, the scent of barbershop talcum blew from my skin in the winter wind. The plane of the ceiling was stretched across the firmament, covering my town from end to end, and I could see the lights of a thousand streetlamps caught like constellations in its smooth black polish. It occurred to me that if nothing were to change, if the ceiling were simply to hover where it was forever, we might come to forget that it was even there, charting for ourselves a new map of the night sky.

Mitch Nauman was leaving my house when I arrived. We passed on the lawn, and he held up Bobby’s knapsack. “He leaves this thing everywhere,” he said. “Buses. Your house. The schoolroom. Sometimes I think I should tie it to his belt.” Then he cleared his throat. “New haircut? I like it.”

“Yeah, it was getting a bit shaggy.”

He nodded and made a clicking noise with his tongue. “See you next time,” he said, and he vanished through his front door, calling to Bobby to climb down from something.

By the time the object had fallen as low as the tree spires, we had noticed the acceleration in the wind. In the thin strip of space between the ceiling and the pavement, it narrowed and kindled and collected speed. We could hear it buffeting the walls of our houses at night, and it produced a constant low sigh in the darkness of movie halls. People emerging from their doorways could be seen to brace themselves against the charge and pressure of it. It was as if our entire town were an alley between tall buildings.

I decided one Sunday morning to visit my parents’ gravesite: the cemetery in which they were buried would spread with knotgrass every spring, and it was necessary to tend their plot before the weeds grew too thick. The house was still peaceful as I showered and dressed, and I stepped as quietly as I could across the bath mat and the tile floor. I watched the water in the toilet bowl rise and fall as gusts of wind channeled their way through the pipes. Joshua and Melissa were asleep, and the morning sun flashed at the horizon and disappeared.

At the graveyard, a small boy was tossing a tennis ball into the air as his mother swept the dirt from a memorial tablet. He was trying to touch the ceiling with it, and with each successive throw he drew a bit closer, until, at the height of its climb, the ball jarred to one side before it dropped. The cemetery was otherwise empty, its monuments and trees the only material presence.

My parents’ graves were clean and spare. With such scarce sunlight, the knotgrass had failed to blossom, and there was little tending for me to do. I combed the plot for leaves and stones and pulled the rose stems from the flower wells. I kneeled at the headstone they shared and unfastened a zipper of moss from it. Sitting there, I imagined for a moment that my parents were living together atop the ceiling: they were walking through a field of high yellow grass, beneath the sun and the sky and the tousled white clouds, and she was bending in her dress to examine a flower, and he was bending beside her, his hand on her waist, and they were unaware that the world beneath them was settling to the ground.

When I got home, Joshua was watching television on the living room sofa, eating a plump yellow doughnut from a paper towel. A dollop of jelly had fallen onto the back of his hand. “Mom left to run an errand,” he said.

The television picture fluttered and curved for a moment, sending spits of rain across the screen, then it recrystallized. An aerial transmission tower had collapsed earlier that week—the first of many such fallings in our town—and the quality of our reception had been diminishing ever since.

“I had a dream last night,” Joshua said. “I dreamed that I dropped my bear through one of the grates on the sidewalk.” He owned a worn-down cotton teddy bear, its seams looped with clear plastic stitches, that he had been given as a toddler. “I tried to catch him, but I missed. Then I lay down on the ground and stretched out my arm for him. I was reaching through the grate, and when I looked beneath the sidewalk, I could see another part of the city. There were people moving around down there. There were cars and streets and bushes and lights. The sidewalk was some sort of bridge, and in my dream I thought, ‘Oh yeah. Now why didn’t I remember that?’ Then I tried to climb through to get my bear, but I couldn’t lift the grate up.”

The morning weather forecaster was weeping on the television. “Do you remember where this place was?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe down by the bakery?” I had noticed Melissa’s car parked there a few times, and I remembered a kid tossing pebbles into the grate.

“That’s probably it.”

“Want to see if we can find it?”

Joshua pulled at the lobe of his ear for a second, staring into the middle distance. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Okay,” he decided.

I don’t know what we expected to discover there. Perhaps I was simply seized by a whim—the desire to be spoken to, the wish to be instructed by a dream. When I was Joshua’s age, I dreamed one night that I found a new door in my house, one that opened from my cellar onto the bright, aseptic aisles of a drugstore: I walked through it, and saw a flash of light, and found myself sitting up in bed. For several days after, I felt a quickening of possibility, like the touch of some other geography, whenever I passed by the cellar door. It was as if I’d opened my eyes to the true inward map of the world, projected according to our own beliefs and understandings.

On our way through the town center, Joshua and I waded past a cluster of people squinting into the horizon. There was a place between the post office and the library where the view to the west was occluded by neither hills nor buildings, and crowds often gathered there to watch the distant blue belt of the sky. We shouldered our way through and continued into town.

Joshua stopped outside the Kornblum Bakery, beside a trash basket and a newspaper carrel, where the light from two streetlamps lensed together on the ground. “This is it,” he said, and made a gesture indicating the iron grate at our feet. Beneath it we could see the shallow basin of a drainage culvert. It was even and dry, and a few brittle leaves rested inside it.

“Well,” I said. There was nothing there. “That’s disappointing.”

“
Life’s
disappointing,” said Joshua.

He was borrowing a phrase of his mother’s, one that she had taken to using these last few months. Then, as if on cue, he glanced up and a light came into his eyes. “Hey,” he said. “There’s Mom.”

Melissa was sitting behind the plate glass window of a restaurant on the opposite side of the street. I could see Mitch Nauman talking to her from across the table, his face soft and casual. Their hands were cupped together beside the pepper crib, and his shoes stood empty on the carpet. He was stroking her left leg with his right foot, its pad and arch curved around her calf. The image was as clear and exact as a melody.