Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (21 page)

If you were to seat yourself along the trailing edge of the port wing—your shoelaces dangling over eight miles of wind and air and a sensation as of something small and heavy (a stone, a clock, a paperweight) falling through the hollows of your legs—and if you were to look from this place to the left and then up, you would see a window and behind it me. I might wave hello. I might tell you of the things I’ve seen, the fleeting images of blue and white that emerge from beyond my window and are lost somewhere behind me. Familiar and forgiving, they sometimes afford me a sense of contentment. If I spoke, though, you couldn’t hear me. You would sit there shrugging your shoulders. It is early afternoon—and will be for quite some time, since our path today approximates that of the sun—and beneath me the shadow of our vessel slips like a length of limp rope over valleys and ridges and frothy, anviled crests of cloud. When darkness falls, I will press my cheek against the window and look up. I will see glancing streaks of meteor and the moon’s hollow eyes. I will see the stars and their implicate white hunger. Sometimes there are stars beneath the clouds as well, sometimes nothing but a rolling blackness.

Across the aisle from me, two old men are sleeping, snoring with open mouths, their heads resting on thin gray pillows and their seat-backs fully reclined (as fully, that is, as circumstances allow—as fully as a back-bent thumb, or the leg of a capital
A
). Elsewhere, people napping next to windows have drawn shut the flimsy plastic shades, as thin as a pane of dried paint, that wobble when we hit a belt of turbulence and produce a sound not unlike the thrum of fingers across an ashtray lid, and not unlike swallowing. Some of us, sleeping, cover our eyes with thick nylon visors. We receive these every few weeks, pouched together with a set of twilled gray socks, a pinky-sized toothbrush, and a tube of grainy mint toothpaste. No one wears the socks. One of the men across the aisle hasn’t shaven in what must be weeks. His sideburns stretch across his cheeks, silver and frizzled, and he mutters in his sleep, something about investment securities. The man beside him breathes through his lips and scratches at the prominence of his chin. A few of us read airline periodicals. A few look out windows. Ruddy-faced men wearing print ties and starched white shirts roll their sleeves to the elbow and stare at the lambent screens of laptop computers, typing vaguely, enigmatically.

A wide-screen television overspreads the front wall of our cabin. Six others crane down from above the aisles. Together, they resemble the legs of some overgrown plastic insect stuck fast through the roof of our plane, its antennae juddering in the wind. The televisions are a jumble of films and documentaries and airless situation comedies. The woman who lives ahead of me is listening to them through her headphones. This is all I can see of her—these headphones and the dark swoop of hair pinned atop her head. A few errant locks drape themselves over the back of her seat. They are like ropes from a church tower. If I pulled one, it would set bells ringing. She could call me Quasimodo.

Our craft arose from a world of balloons, developing gradually into the vehicle we now ride through a fortuitous and baffling series of evolutionary advances. Though direct evidence of the earliest of these advances is scant, our scientists continue their research—rifling through luggage, prying sheetrock from the walls, and peering keenly through convex lenses into seat pockets, sink drains, and the sediment of ashtrays. They scribble equations onto their notepads in the belief that by examining closely the world in which we find ourselves, they can determine the path along which we’ve traveled. The process is analogous to following with one’s eye the path of a contrail as it recedes into the distance (although no analogy is exact: contrails tend to peter out too quickly for close study and aren’t, I’m told, scientific enough).

Our forebears—after a complicated series of random events within, first, a hostile atmosphere of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor; then a life-supporting cushion of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen; and finally a primordial soup of carbohydrates, nucleic acids, proteins, wicker, and fat—found themselves suspended in a swaying wickerwork gallery beneath the envelope of a hydrogenfilled linen balloon. Buffeted relentlessly by heaving winds, they had little control of their craft and even less shelter. They drifted through the pipe and wail of the sky, through a tangle of clouds and sharp wind. Our ancestors knew none of the comforts of modern life—not cushioned chairs or thermostatic regulation, foil-wrapped peanuts or tumbledown television shows. Life was ugly and brutish and often quite chilly. Hour after hour, they would stare into the changing clouds—a repose of shallow haze, an unfolding of cauliflower blooms—and into the frail pleated shell of their balloon.

Utilizing an aluminum framework, our predecessors constructed the dirigible—which, steam-driven and rigged with bags of lifting gas, saw them steering their way through the sky. Next came the powered glider with its lightweight gasoline engine and its stubby, wire-braced wings, which were overspread by the fabric of the now-lapsed balloon. Soon thereafter followed the all-metal monoplane, the DC-3 (streamlined, piston-engined, variable-pitch-propellered), and the jet aircraft in which—but for a few minor adjustments for the sake of comfort and convenience—we now ride. Most of these final developments have been realized within living memory: a new in-flight magazine appears every month, a new television roster biweekly, and peanuts with ginger ale approximately every two hours—but no one can recall the all-embracing evolution of our vessel from one thing into something wholly other. Days go by, people age, children are born, and very little seems to change.

Most of us believe either the conjectures of the scientists—who rest the weight of their authority upon a firm foundation of past accomplishments, among them the discovery of the constant speed of light, of the constant speed of matter, and of levity, that force which separates all objects from each other and keeps us balanced here between the earth and the stars—or the conjectures of the clergy.

“Ye shall be as stewards above the earth,” reads the Book, “over man and over fowl and over every flying thing that flyeth through the skies.” Our stewardesses, contend the clergy, citing as evidence this and other verses, function as something akin to a surrogate God. Stewardesses, they say, are representatives of the divine will, enacting sacred rituals and preserving the hallowed order. Through the antennae of their silverpoint fillings, of their numinous and cycling breath, they receive the pulse of messages from a higher plane of existence. The stewardesses will neither confirm nor deny these claims. They ignore our hymns and oblations and our fitful sectarian squabbles. They aren’t taking questions. Though civil enough—I’ve yet to see a stewardess strike a child, say, or expectorate in public— they are often aloof. From beneath a veneer of natty buttoned uniforms and thin hazy eyes they project a hint of menace, and just a suggestion of scales. When a believer, his hands damply clasped in prayer, approaches a stewardess and asks of her a sign, a token display of dew or wind or fire, she will offer him an antiseptic smile, a pillow, and a bag of peanuts and direct him firmly to his seat. Still, faith persists.

Central to our theology is the contention that God is steering our course, that we’re not simply wending along the trail of some ancient wrong turn, straying without purpose through the multitude of clouds, wandering here in seclusion; that we’ve aim and that we’ve bearing; that we’re traveling with regard to destination. God, our theists propose, is capably and majestically engaged in a sequence of sacred and arcane transactions—maintaining altitudes, monitoring radarscopes, guiding trajectories, pitches, and rolls. He is heedful of our needs and of our hushed, sunken wishes. Long ago, He spoke with the voice of a thunderclap, addressing our ancestors from thin air, and the intercommunication speakers curling like halos above each seat represent the conviction that He will soon break His millennial silence, extending a golden invitation of voice to His faithful. The occasional believer claims to have heard the ripple and crackle of speech sounding from these devices, but such claims, we have learned, are of dubious authenticity. The button by the intercom, when pressed, evokes only an anxious wheeze of static. Some profess that God’s guiding hand once manifested itself as well in the back-and-forth play of the mandates posted throughout our vessel—that in the days of our grandparents’ grandparents these mandates were signs of His will, lit or extinguished as a measure of divine vexation. No longer. Now, were the signs demanding that we refrain from smoking and fasten our seat belts quenched, we would sob and rend our garments, beat our breasts and wring our hands. Shivering and biting our nails, we would wait for the flames and the sudden, angular convulsions.

Although tensions were once the rule between theology and science, they have diminished in recent years. Our clergy and our scientists both search the gridwork of our travels for a set of present coordinates, and on this path they have each discovered the other. On this same path I have found myself, drifting through the world without holiness or reason—a pinch between remembered and anticipated time.

The wings of a plane appear separate, self-contained, and unattached, but are actually all of one piece, passing through the plane’s body and under the feet of its passengers.

When children are born, the fuselage fills with the scent of human. The bankers order cocktails, the Malthusians mutter of population density, the voyeurs peek across aisles and over seat tops. The barbers knot their bow ties and croon lullabies in groups of four. The accountants huzzah, the cartographers smile, and the tobacconists hand out cigars. When children are born, the stewardesses barrel down the aisles, wheeling carriages fraught with fruit juice and ginger ale and vest-pocket bottles of liquor, asking that we return to our seats, please, immediately, and extinguish all smoking materials. When children are born, their carry-on luggage is found resting securely in the overhead compartments.

Our children enter this world bearing their futures in the form of oblong leather suitcases, green canvas duffel bags, zip-and-hasp purses, and multiform other containers, their luggage tags empty of address and destination. The contents of these vessels often imply the path that a child will travel—anticipating hobbies and humors, predilections and professions—and the moment when a newborn’s luggage is first opened is met with unease and much stirring of the heart by his parents. A child with an erector set will likely be an engineer; with a telescope an astronomer or geographer; with a text on the merits of the Library of Congress versus the Dewey Decimal System a librarian. A child born with a powdered wig will likely be a magistrate, with a stethoscope a doctor, with a whiskey flask a lost and splintered soul. From time to time, a child is found with stores of illicit substances sealed in plastic pouches or small glass vials within jars of ground coffee. These children, our stewardesses tell us, will be placed in remand when we reach the proper authorities—a threat that rings hollow, it would seem, for more often than not such children come of age, marry, and entertain highly successful careers as politicians or wealthy gadabouts. Folklore tells of a child who arrived here with a liberal supply of gelignite, detonating caps, duct tape, and inflammatory leaflets. He was ejected from the plane, they say, and his paraphernalia with him. Those who tell this story speak also of wily pretended innocence, of ducks and snakes who drown in lakes, and of resident natures, inborn streaks of character, that we can’t suppress and can’t evade.

My possessions are as follows: three black ballpoint pens, a ream of narrow-ruled notebook paper, several paperback novels, a thesaurus, an electric razor, a wallet and a walletful of business cards and folded bills and photographs of smiling people I don’t know, a heavy woolen blanket, a pair of socks—one with a snarl of loose thread in the toe—and a pair of cotton briefs, several cassette tapes and a portable cassette player without batteries, a roll of peppermint lozenges, two packs of chewing gum, and the clothes on my back, and on my front, and on my sides. Also: a nervous reserve, a repressed libido, a wandering pain, an overindulgent imagination, a distaste for the word
basically,
a keen memory, a flawed but burgeoning sense of aesthetics, an affinity for balloons, three facial tissues—as coarse as parchment— plucked from the washroom and folded in my pocket, a song that I don’t know pulsing steadily in my ears (it begins
Button, button, who’s
got the button
—that’s all I remember), a memory perhaps not so keen after all, a history of dreams with blatant lingering symbols, a cold sore, two hangnails, and on some days not a friend in the world.

This craft is a lesson in social gradation, a traveling structure of class distinction. Life here comes in strata. The wealthy reside in first class—privy, I’m told, to multifold luxuries: palatable meals replete with frozen gourmet desserts, stimulating periodicals, daily sponge baths, and access to a masseur, a masseuse, and a sauna. The rest of us sit sequestered from the privileged few before the quill and gather of thick maroon curtains, one in either aisle, behind which, if you listen carefully, you can hear the festal, immaculate sounds of good fortune: quiet conversations, the ting of fine silver, and shameless and manifest snoring. I, like most, live in coach. I dine on a bland lettuce-bed cuisine. I have my own window and a measure of solitude (a rare thing, this, but my mother’s seat has been left empty since she went her falling way), and I consider myself fortunate. I could be closer to the washroom—this I admit—but not without being forced to abide the jostle of hips and elbows, the nods and curt hellos of waiting strangers. I am pleased with my position in society. The disadvantaged and the dispossessed reside within the underbelly of our ship— coughing, uncounted, in cargo. Though we know they exist, we rarely see them. Sometimes we hear the clamor of a scuffle, on occasion the recurrent bass rumble and spluttering drum of an upswelling personal stereo. Once I heard somebody shouting about somebody else’s clothesline.