Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (22 page)

On holidays, the wealthy march through our aisles on their way to cargo, bearing as gifts food stamps, bottles of brandy, and gleaming silver trays laden with baby potatoes and redolent, dressed turkeys. They claim, when asked for donations, that they don’t support charity or handouts, they don’t support something for nothing.
Give a man a
fish,
they say,
and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed
him for a lifetime
(an expression I have never understood, though I suspect what it means is this:
Throw a man overboard, and you don’t have
to feed him at all). Still, they always come back from cargo empty-handed.

My mother used to tell me this story: once, she would say, long before you were born, the world was nothing but cloud. Nimbostratus and cumulonimbus. Stratocumulus and altostratus. Lengthy rolling cords of cloud spun one about the other. Isles and wheels and braids of cloud billowed and drifted through space. A wadwork of clouds bottled earth and breath and ocean, corking everything, sealing it in, and the world looked from a distance like a swollen mass of cotton.

Into this hold of vapor there flew a plane.
The plane,
my mother would say,
in which you’re sitting here beside me, the very plane in which
I’m telling you this story.
This plane had soared through many galaxies, passing flights of strange and wondrous things as it traveled, and as it flew across the reach of space, weaving and dipping past moons and stars and planets, it left behind it a trail of condensation—protracted, white, and, it must be noted, very much resembling a filament of cloud.

Now, as the airplane approached this world of ours, the clouds grew curious. For the first time in the history of all things cloud, a stranger neared: not a comet, not the moon, but one of their own. This was
a cloud,
they could see—a cloud that had crossed the inter-stellar medium, with baffling courage and otherworldly vigor, bearing at its head what appeared to be a drop of mercury. Heaven only knew its port of exit. Heaven only knew its port of call.

The approaching cloud was flying quickly, and it might, the clouds realized, pass them by, so with their gusty voices, they called to him.
Hey,
they cried, and
here,
they cried, but to no avail. The thread of cloud unreeled itself nearer—and with a sudden shifting tone flew past. The clouds, puzzled, knit their brows, and the sky went rippling away.

It may be,
suggested a voice,
that we’re out of earshot.

Or perhaps,
said another,
that bead of mercury has lodged itself in his ear.

The other clouds thought this a splendid hypothesis, for squall as they might, the thread of cloud simply hastened away.

Clouds are almost nothing in the sky, just drops of condensation riding the wind, but things of breath and water can be quite resourceful when the times demand. And so, gathered one and all, a concurrence of clouds, stratus and cirrus and altocumulus, concocted a plan. So that the passing stranger might hear them, they would pluck the bead of mercury from his ear.

From the brawniest of thunderheads to the smallest wisps of haze, the clouds began to coalesce, swelling and sluicing and splashing about one another. They curled and foamed into a vast grasping hand and then heaved themselves higher into space, growing thinner and thinner as they reached away.

Just as the airplane was sailing out of reach, two fingers of cloud— index and thumb—plucked it from its course, and a palm of cloud crooked around it and drew it along the wire of its wrist toward home. When the clouds again dispersed, they found matters not at all as they had left them. For unwittingly, as they had drawn away—past the winds, past the moon, and through the void—they had uncorked the bottle in which was kept the world: the blue-green, vortical ocean. The trees and the fields and the mountains. The ripe, breathing land and all the lights scattered across it.

And the ball of mercury the clouds had carried home was not a ball of mercury at all. It was, it seemed, alive.

And so, my mother would tell me, the airplane on which we ride, and in which your head is resting on my lap, circles this planet, leaving behind it a streak of cloud—and since cloud is one thing and earth another, fated to remain distinct, we soar here over the fields and the oceans, waiting for the day when we might land. The clouds have become just a part of this world, melting above it in the sky. The condensation trail—hanging like a blur across the lens of night—has dispersed, but never quite vanished, becoming what we call the Milky Way. And the world, my child—the sunken, wayward, rolling world—is but a misunderstanding of vapors.

My mother would tell me this story often, when the sun had crept from out of the sky. My head in her lap, I would gaze at the ceiling, listening to her voice and waiting to fall asleep.

The woman who lives in front of me, the one with the black hair that drapes itself over the crest of her chair; the woman whose face (eyes, cheek, turn of lip) I can’t recall; the woman whose face, when I see it, seems to bypass my eyes altogether, drawing itself into focus like an image hidden inside me all along; whose fingers rise from the nape of her neck and drift through her hair like upswept wisps of smoke; this woman, who sends my heart blowing through me like a bomb—I believe that she’s bearing my child.

I’m not sure. It happened four months ago, and we haven’t spoken since. When she passes by, I turn my head as if I’m looking out the window. I watch the ailerons lift and subside as the plane banks into the wind. I watch our shadow flit and gutter over the clouds. When she sees me coming, she feigns sleep. I won’t rest my feet in the bay beneath her chair, and she won’t recline for fear of touching me. We are like children who wrap their hands over their eyes and believe that the world has gone blind, as if we both wanted this, and I don’t know why. She never hurt me, I never hurt her. We just don’t talk.

It was happenstance, a chance event, an up and a down in a clear blue sky. The sun hovered overhead, blazing from its apex and blinking like a star from the wing. We were flying through the first lashings of a fit of wind shear. Wind shear, as a rule, is no menace. Its effects are modest—the quick shiver of cutlery on a tray table, perhaps, or the flutter of an overhead light. On rare occasions, someone standing in an aisle will stumble and steady himself against an armrest. This was different, though. The doors of yawning luggage compartments fell shut in a series of heavy whoompfs. Loose window shades slid down their chamfers. A sound like metal striking metal came from somewhere underneath the plane, and luggage caromed noisily above us, slamming from wall to wall and rupturing zippers and buckles in a muffled white explosion of socks. When the wings began to pendulate (throwing the passengers to the floor and the ceiling, slinging the fuselage around like a rubber ball fastened to a paddle), she was walking past. I turned my head.

She staggered from seat to seat in the aisle—once, twice—without moving forward. I could feel at this point the jog and back-sling of my body against the seat belt. I could hear her drawing breath, a series of rapid hiccups. She slipped then, and in a glissade of pebbly limbs she fell into the chair beside me. “Are you all right?” I asked. She nodded. The pupils of her eyes were like two tadpoles skittering nervously through standing water. She held her right hand pressed to her heart.
I could call someone,
I thought to say—but as the first syllable rose from my throat, her torso fell rigidly, sharply forward. She tucked her head between her knees. “Hello?” I said. My finger grazed the ridgeline of her back.

Across the aisle, a tray table swung down from its cove and, striking level, shuddered on its hinges (ours—I checked—were secured behind their latches).

“You should buckle up,” I said. No response. The cabin was still reeling, and each time it rose she skipped slowly forward in her chair. Reaching over her, I grasped the pin frame of her seat belt. I threaded it through the hollow of her body—which, collapsed upon itself, resembled the thick maroon curtain at the head of our cabin that had fallen seconds before in a heap to the floor—and I buckled her in. With the back of my hand, I could feel tiny, quick breaths budding in her abdomen. The turbulence subsided.

I waited with my hands clasped in my lap, and soon she lifted her head—sitting upright and breathing calmly, slowly, through her nose. Her eyes were closed. Just before she opened them, both of her brows flexed gently downward, and a ripple of thin muscles passed over her eyelids. I had never noticed such a thing before. She looked at the seat belt fastened across her lap, and then, quizzically, at me. “Sorry,” I said.

I heard the faint pop—like a bead of water striking the sink—of her lips as they disjoined. “No matter,” she said, and she unbuckled herself, standing as if to leave.

“Wait,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“So where were you going,” I asked, “before?” (This is precisely the sort of thing I find myself saying if I’m not careful.)

“I was thinking,” she said, “that I ought to find a place to sit down.” She sat down. “It’s never been this bad before—has it? The turbulence, I mean.”

And then, from the blue, we were talking.

She said she was a tribologist—she studied interacting surfaces in relative motion. We discussed wing drag and crosswinds and friction. We discussed many things, as shafts of windowed light kicked toward the ceiling, and she touched, once, the bay of my neck.

A stewardess, happening by, addressed us in a voice murky with suspicion. Would we, she asked, like to make any duty-free purchases—a carton of cigarettes, perhaps, despite long-standing proscriptions against open flames and smoking itself, or a matching set of stuffed bears, aviator and aviatrix, with soft brown fluff and bomber jackets? Since we were now leaving international waters, she explained, this could be our last opportunity. My partner declined for the both of us, and the stewardess reluctantly left. Her lips were pressed together like thin white loaves, and her head swiveled to watch us as she walked away.

Later, when the woman yawned, shivered, and her pupils, in the shade of some deep and private vision, dilated, I asked her if she would like a blanket. Without a weight of this sort, some heaviness to lie beneath, I sleep with unpleasant dreams—I’m floating away, turning to spirit, untenanting my body, unhappening my history. I kept, at that time, a thick woolen blanket under the seat, and I spread it over her lap and across my own. With lowered eyes we settled in beneath it, and I don’t think it surprised either one of us when I found her hand folding over my knee, or when she found mine cupped at her stomach, or when hers drew up and mine drew down, and there came an ungathering, an unbuckling, an unravelment and extrication.

It culminated with her skirt collected at her waist, my trousers at my knees, and—so as not to disclose anything to the stewardesses— the blanket covering the both of us (though I thought this a practical solution at the time, I’ve grown suspect; we were probably about as hush-hush as a pair of loosed flares). I remember two things: the rasp of the seat cushion against my skin and the pucker and slow deflation of the sun at the horizon.

That evening she slept with her head on my lap, and I with mine on her back. When I woke, the western sky was a deep violet behind our plane. The first stars were glimmering ahead, whistling their light from across the universe. I stood up, laying her head on a pillow, and left to wait in line for the washroom. When I returned, the pillow lay tucked atop a heap of blanket, rumpled and unattended. She sat sleeping in her regular seat, directly in front of me. Her temple and fingertips converged unconsciously upon an armrest, and I stood above her from behind. Watching her features in quiet seclusion, her unstirring lips and calm, closed eyes, I decided it best not to wake her.

When the body is inactive (during sleep or rest or untold hours spent idling in a chair) the fluids in its joints thicken and swell, producing a suspension of glairy threads that come to resemble the gel within a grape. My life is testimony to this. Sometimes my legs are like shafts of cast iron, fused and bolted at the knees; sometimes my spine is a sickled thing, bowing sharply forward; sometimes my ankles spread fibrous, tangled roots through my feet and into the floor, and they coil and sprout around spars and trusses, branching away beneath the cabin. When I stand, it sounds like marbles dropping in the washroom. I stroll the aisles of our cabin when I can, working my stagnant muscles, often ducking into vacant seats to avoid oncoming stewardesses.

The features of our vessel—the seatscape and the aislescape, the windows, the walls, and the people—are long established and well recognized. Very little changes. Turning left as I leave my seat, I approach the anterior of our craft and the rimpled maroon curtain bounding us from the first-class cabin. Along either edge of the aisle, a transparent rubber capillary, in the bore of which runs a string of tiny lightbulbs, delineates the walkway. In times of emergency— power failures, blown fuses—these lights have proven themselves helpful. I used to be able to watch them for hours, tiny bulbs blinking dimly on and off, as my head dangled over the lip of my seat and my legs stretched up its backrest. I have always been fascinated by things like this, by holding patterns, spiral rolls, events that loop in on themselves in a seemingly endless fashion, like the play of the moon across the sky, or the unceasing flow of water from a broken faucet.

An older couple, married, sits beneath the wide-scope television screen at the front of our cabin. Often when I pass them they are playing cards, pasteboard aces, knaves, and nines fanned across the face of their trays. Blackjack, poker, gin rummy. The husband has been ill—I can hear him breathing, a heavy, rustling wheeze, from my seat above the wing—and soon, walking past, I’ll see his wife playing patience. Elsewhere a man reads a limp-covered novel and pulls thoughtfully on the crook of his lower lip. Two women complete a crossword puzzle in erasable ink. A small boy with sprangled ears and a tuft of leaning hair harasses his older sister, creeping his hand like a spider over the seat cushions until it is poised at her pants leg and, when she notices, retrieving it by means of the other, which picks it up and runs to his lap. The girl soon complains to her father, seated behind them, who yawns and, with an unconvincing glare of disapproval, tells his son to stop the foolishness and stay on his side of the seat. Yawning is a widespread phenomenon here. People yawn, others see them yawning and, in turn, yawn themselves, still others see the second-order yawners yawning, and so on—until a single yawn, like a scattering ripple, has spread itself throughout the fuselage, and our collective radius of hearing has tripled. The passengers in first-class never yawn at all. Reports suggest that each of them is furnished with a fresh supply of oxygen, stored in large metal canisters with snaking, transparent outlet hoses and shell-shaped rubber face masks.