Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (3 page)

I would like to cobble such few sentences into a tower, placing them in the world, so that I might absorb what I can of these things in a glance. But when we say
I love you,
we say it not to shape the world. We say it because there’s a wind singing through us that knows it to be true, and because even when we speak them without shrewdness or understanding, it is good, we know, to say these things.

The dishwasher thrummed in the kitchen, and the thermostat ticked in the hallway, and the tumble-drier called from the basement like a tittupping horse. Caroline lay on the silver-gray carpet, winking each eye in turn as she scrutinized her thumb. Her hair was drawn through the teeth of a barrette, and the chest of her shirt was pulled taut beneath one arm. Lewis could see her heartbeat welling through the gate of her ribs. It called up in him the memory of a time when, as a schoolboy, his teacher had allowed him to hold the battery lamp during a power failure. He had lain on the floor, balancing the lamp atop his chest, and everywhere in the slate black schoolroom the light had pulsed with his heart. Like a shaken belief or a damaged affection, the life within such a moment could seem all but irreclaimable.

The seconds swayed past in the bob weight of the grandfather clock.

“Come here,” said Lewis, beckoning to Caroline, and when she’d settled into his lap, he told her this story: In a town between a forest and the sea there lived a clever and gracious little girl. She liked to play with spoons and old buttons, to swat lump-bugs and jump over things, and her name was Caroline.

(“I don’ like
spoons,
” said Caroline.
Spoons?
said Lewis.
Did I say
spoons? I meant goons.
Caroline giggled and shook her head. “No-
o.
”
Prunes?
“Nuh-uh.”
Baboons?
Caroline paused to consider this, her finger paddling lazily against her shirt collar. “Okay.”)

So then: Caroline, who played with buttons and baboons, had all the hours from sun to moon to wander the city as she wished, scratching burrs from her socks or thumping dandelion heads. The grown-ups offered her but one caution: if ever the sky should threaten rain, the clouds begin to grumble, or the wind blow suddenly colder, she must hurry indoors. The grown-ups had good reason to extend such a warning, for the town in which they lived was made entirely of soap. It had been whittled and sliced from the Great Soap Mountains. There were soaphouses and soapscrapers, chains of soap lampposts above wide soap roadways, and in the town center, on a pedestal of marbled soap, a rendering of a soapminer, his long proud shovel at his side. Sometimes, when the dark sky ruptured and the rains came daggering across the land, those of the town who had not taken shelter, the tired and the lost, the poky and the dreamy, would vanish, never to return. “Washed clean away,” old-timers would declare, nodding sagely.

One day, Caroline was gathering soapberries from a glade at the lip of the forest. Great somber clouds, their bellies black with rain, had been weltering in from the ocean for hours, but she paid them no mind: she had raced the rain before, and she could do it again. When a cloud discharged a hollow growl, she thought it was her stomach, hungry for soapberries, and so ate a few. When the wind began to swell and chill, she simply zipped up her jacket. She bent to place a berry in her small blue hat, and felt her skin pimpling at the nape of her neck, and when she stood again, the rain was upon her.

Caroline fled from the forest. She arrowed past haystacks and canting trees, past empty pavilions and blinking red stoplights. A porch gate wheeled on its hinges and slammed against a ventilation tank. A lamplight burst in a spray of orange sparks.
Almost,
thought Caroline, as her house, then her door, then the glowspeck of her doorbell came into view. And at just that moment, as she blasted past the bakery to her own front walk, a tremendous drift of soapsuds took hold of her from behind, whipping her up and toward the ocean.

When Caroline awoke, the sunlight was lamping over her weary body. Her skin was sticky with old soap. Thin whorls of air iridesced all around her. She shook her head, unfolded in a yawn, and watched a bluebird flap through a small round cloud beneath her left elbow. That was when she realized: she was bobbing through the sky inside a bubble! She tried to climb the inside membrane of the vessel, but it rolled her onto her nose. She prodded its septum with her finger and it stretched and recoiled, releasing a few airy driblets of soap that popped when she blew on them.
Bubble, indeed,
she thought, indignant, arms akimbo. Caroline (though a clever and a gracious little girl) could not think of a single solution to her dilemma, for if her craft were to burst she would surely fall to earth, and if she fell to earth she would shatter like a snowball, so she settled into the bay of her bubble, watching the sky and munching the soapberries from her small blue hat.

There is little to see from so high in the air: clouds and stars and errant birds; the fields and the hills, the rivers and highways, as small and distinct as the creases in your palm. There is a time as the morning brightens when the lakes and rivers, catching the first light, will go silvering through the quiet black land. And in the evening, when the sun drops, a flawless horizon will prism its last flare into a haze of seven colors. Once, Caroline watched a man’s heart sail by like a kite, once a golden satellite swerving past the moon. Preoccupied birds sometimes flew straight toward her, their wings stiff and open, their beaks like drawn swords, yawing away before they struck her bubble. On a chilly afternoon, an airplane passed so close that she counted nineteen passengers gaping at her through its windows, their colorless faces like a series of stills on a filmstrip. And on a delicate, breezy morning, as she stared through a veining of clouds at the land, Caroline noticed that the twists of color had faded from the walls of her bubble. Then, abruptly, it burst.

Caroline found herself plummeting like a buzz bomb from the sky, the squares of far houses growing larger and larger. Her hair strained upward against the fall, tugging at her scalp. Her cheeks beat like pennants in the wind. She shut her eyes. As for what became of her, no one is certain, or rather there are many tales, and many tellers, each as certain as the last. Some say she spun into the arms of a startled baboon, who raised her in the forest on coconuts and turnip roots. Some say she dropped onto the Caroline Islands, striking the beach in a spasm of sand, and so impressed the islanders with the enthusiasm of her arrival that with a mighty shout they proclaimed her Minister of Commerce. And some say she landed in this very house, on this very couch, in this very room, where I told her this story and put her to bed.

The human voice is an extraordinary thing: an alliance of will and breath that, without even the fastening of hands, can forge for us a home in other people. Air is sent trembling through the frame of the mouth, and we find ourselves admitted to some far, unlikely country: this must, I think, be regarded as nothing short of wondrous. The first voice I remember hearing belonged, perhaps, to a stranger or a lost relation, for I cannot place it within my family: it sounded like a wooden spool rolling on a wooden floor. My father had a voice like cement revolving in a drum, my mother like the whirring of many small wings. My own, I’ve been told, resembles the rustling of snow against a windowpane. What must the mother’s voice, beneath the whisper of her lungs, beneath the little detonations of her heartbeat, sound like to the child in the womb? A noise without design or implication, as heedless as growth, as mechanical as thunder? Or the echo of some nascent word come quaking through the body? Is it the first intimation of another life cradling our own, a sign that suggests that this place is a someone? Or do children, arriving from some other, more insistent landscape, need such testimony? If the human voice itself does not evince a living soul, then that voice raised in song surely must.

Things go right, things go wrong
hearts may break but not for long
you will grow up proud and strong
sleepy little baby.

Of all the forms of voice and communion, a song is perhaps the least mediated by the intellect. It ropes its way through the tangle of our cautions, joining singer to listener like a vine between two trees. I once knew a man whose heart percussed in step with the music that he heard; he would not listen to drums played in hurried or irregular cadence; he left concerts and dances and parties, winced at passing cars, and telephoned his neighbors when they played their stereos too loudly, in the fear that with each unsteady beat he might malfunction. Song is an exchange exactly that immediate and physiological. It attests to the life of the singer through our skin and through our muscles, through the wind in our lungs and the fact of our own beating heart. The evidence of other spirits becomes that of our own body. Speech is sound shaped into meaning through words, inflection, and modulation. Music is sound shaped into meaning through melody, rhythm, and pitch. A song arises at the point where these two forces collide. But such an encounter can occur in more than one place. Where, then, is song most actual and rich—in the singer or in the audience?

Dream pretty dreams
touch beautiful things
let all the skies surround you
swim with the swans
and believe that upon
some glorious dawn
love will find you.

A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.

And if you see some old fool
who looks like a friend
tell him good night old man
my friend.

Lewis stood with a washcloth before Caroline’s highchair, its tray white with milk from a capsized tumbler. A streetlamp switched on outside the kitchen window, and as he turned to look, another did the same. The sun had left channels of pink and violet across the sky, in which a few wavering stars were emerging. He could hear the rush of commuter traffic behind the dry autumn clicking of leaves, motor horns calling forlornly, a siren howling in the distance. The highchair stood like a harvest crab on its thin silver stilts. Lewis sopped the milk up from its tray and brushed the crumbs from its seat, rinsing his washcloth at the gurgling sink. All around the city, he thought, staring into the twilight, streetlamps were brightening one by one, generating warm electric purrs and rings of white light. From far above, as they blinked slowly on and off, they would look like rainwater striking the lid of a puddle.

In the living room, Caroline sat at the foot of the television, several inches from the screen, watching a small cartoon Martian chuckle perniciously as he fashioned an enormous ray gun. Lewis knelt beside her and, just for a moment, saw the black egg of the Martian’s face shift beneath his gleaming helmet—but then his eyes began to tingle, and his perception flattened, and it was only a red-green-blueness of phosphorescent specks and the blade of his own nose. He flurried his hand through Caroline’s hair, then pinched a dot of cookie from her cheek. “Sweetie,” he said to her, standing. When his knees cracked, she started.

A set of cardboard blocks, red and blue and thick as bread loaves, were clustered before a reclining chair. They looked like something utterly defeated, a grove of pollard trees or the frame of a collapsed temple. Earlier in the day, Lewis had played a game with Caroline in which he stacked them two on two to the ceiling and she charged them, arms swinging, until they toppled to the carpet. Each time she rushed them, she would rumble like a speeding truck. Each time they fell she would laugh with excitement, bobbing up and down in a stiff little dance. She rarely tired of this game. As often as not, actually, she descended upon the structure in a sort of ambush before it was complete: Lewis would stoop to collect another block, hear the drum of running feet, and down they would go. Now, as she peered at the television, he stacked the blocks into two narrow columns, each its own color, and bridged them carefully at the peak; satisfied, he lapsed onto the sofa.

Propping his glasses against his forehead, he yawned and pressed his palms to his eyes. Grains of light sailed through the darkness, like snow surprised by a headlamp, and when he looked out at the world again, Caroline had made her way to his side. She flickered her hands and burbled a few quick syllables, her arms swaying above her like the runners of a sea plant: in her language of blurt and gesture, this meant
carry me,
or
hold me,
or
pick me up,
and swinging into her Lewis did just that. She stood in his lap, balancing with one smooth-socked foot on either thigh, and reached for his forehead. “Lasses,” she said. Lewis removed his glasses, handing them to her, and answered, “That’s right.” An ice-white bloom of television flashed from each lens as Caroline turned them around in her palms. When she pressed them to her face, the stems floated inches from her ears; then they slipped past her nose and hitched around her shoulders, hanging there like a necklace or a bow tie. Lewis felt himself smiling as he retrieved them. He polished them on the tail of his shirt and returned them to their rightful perch.

He looked up to find Caroline losing her balance, foundering toward him. Her foot slid off his leg onto the sofa and her arms lurched up from her side. “Whoa,” he said, catching her. “You okay?” She tottered back onto his lap, her head pressing against his cheek. He could feel the dry warmth of her skin, the arching of her eyebrows, the whiffet of her breath across his face. Then, straightening, she kissed him. The flat of her tongue passed up his chin and over his lips, and, stopping at his nose, inverted and traveled back down. Lewis could feel it tensed against him like a spring, and when it swept across the crest of his lips, he lightly kissed its tip. Caroline closed her mouth with a tiny pecking sound. She sniffled, brushed her nose, and settled into him. “Glasses,” she said, and her warm brown hair fell against his collarbone. Lewis blinked and touched a finger to his dampened chin. His ears were tingling as if from a breeze. His head was humming like a long flat roadway.