What I will remember is this: That there was a Della. That in a place now gone dark, within some vale or crimp of lost time, I knew her. And that something of her life passed into and through my own, effecting a conversion. My memory of you will be like the envelope of a bubble—rising out of sight from the collar of its wand, transporting the breath of me to some far place.
My memory of you, Della, will be like the last, quiet pulse of an echo: were I to follow it, I could not say what towards.
I took our son last week—but you know this—to see the fireworks. From the shelf of a low hill, we watched people stroll from the car park and settle in beside us. Families clustered around ice chests and blankets, around collapsible chairs and grills with glowing coals. Wiry adolescents threw frisbees and packed-foam footballs. As night fell, the heat that billowed from the ground made a chain of lens-shaped clouds over the lake. The first two fireworks were launched from their cannons with a deep, bass whoompf, erupting above us in showers of red and white. The next one descended in shimmering blue scarves, and another sprayed out from its axis like the leaves of a green palm tree.
Eric sat beside me, teasing a blade of grass into dozens of separate fibers. “I keep thinking,” he said, “about that time when the spark almost hit me.”
For the first time in weeks he was volunteering to talk, and I almost couldn’t believe it. I swallowed before I spoke. “I’m surprised you remember that,” I said. “You couldn’t have been older than three or four.”
“I do, though,” he said. He let the grass fall to the ground. “You were holding me on your shoulders. We were watching the fireworks and something went wrong with one of them.”
“It exploded too soon.”
“Right. What I remember is the sparks. They were raining down into the trees and the lake, and then one must have caught the wind. It fell right beside us. When I looked down, the grass was on fire.”
“Just a tuft,” I said. I smiled and found myself laughing. “You screamed so loud, my ears were ringing for hours.”
“I know,” said Eric. His lips spread into a thin smile. “I was terrified. I didn’t calm down until you poured your drink on the fire.”
“I remember,” I said. The grass had been brown and withered, and the fire had gone out with a sound like the flurry of a cymbal. “That wasn’t me, though, actually. With the soda. It was a man with a ball cap and a mustache. I didn’t know him.”
“Oh,” said Eric, and his voice died a little. He lifted a finger to his temple. “Strange that I thought it was you.” A firework leaped from the shaft of a cannon with a lurid shriek, and he gave a start. A shiver snaked its way along his shoulders. The sky shone green for a moment—I could see it flashing from his cheek—and behind us a small girl began to clap.
Eric pressed a hand to his chest. “Where was Mom?” he asked after a moment. “When the grass caught fire.”
“She was sitting on top of the ice chest,” I said. “The spark couldn’t have fallen more than a few feet behind her, but she didn’t notice. When I tried to tell her about it afterward, she wouldn’t believe me. You had fallen asleep by the time we packed the car, and she carried you home in her lap.”
“Hmm.” Eric eased himself into the grass and propped his head on his wrist. A firework burst above us, and I watched its flares reflect from the surface of the lake, cascading through the water like a school of luminescent fish. Another shattered into sharp blue lines that gleamed from the bellies of two low clouds.
“It looks like lightning,” Eric said. He lay gazing into the night, his free hand twisting the wing of his shirt. “What do you call it— you know—the kind that doesn’t strike ground.”
“Search me,” I said.
“We’ve been studying it in science class.” He closed his eyes for a minute. “Cloud-to-cloud. That’s it. There’s cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground.”
“What’s the difference?”
I could see him frowning in the yellow light of a firework. “What do you think, Dad?” he said. “Cloud-to-ground is the kind that sets trees and houses on fire. You know, that zigzag shape. Cloud-to-cloud is just a flash in the sky.”
“Interesting,” I said.
He sighed. “To you it’s interesting. To me it’s just work. Do we really have to talk about science class?”
“We can talk about anything you want.”
“Good,” he said. “What I want is not to talk at all. Can we do that?” He lifted himself onto his elbows. “Let’s just watch the explosions for a while.”
It is a week later now, and all the lights are out. Eric sits in his porch chair and pivots his head to follow something above me—the wind or the stars or the stray smoke of some inward vision. An expression slips into his eyes, timid and wistful, like a fish or a turtle come to surface in a well. “Forty-eight,” he says, skittering a hand through his hair.
I turn toward him. “Forty-eight?” I ask.
“The katydids,” he says. “You count the times they shrill in twenty seconds: forty-eight. Then you add thirty-nine and it gives you the temperature.” He taps his finger on his wrist, calculating. “Which would be eighty-seven, I think.”
“Like lightning,” I say, trying to listen. “You count the seconds between the lightning and thunder, then divide by five. That’s how far away it is.” The candlestick burns quietly above a pool of setting wax. I am speaking for a moment as if I were elsewhere, without weight, form, or presence. “The lightning,” I say. “In miles,” I say. “Your mom taught me that.” Then I attempt a joke: “But you don’t like to talk about lightning, do you? I forget.”
Eric shuts his eyes. He doesn’t laugh, but I can tell he is listening. “Dad?” he says.
“Yeah?”
He twiddles at the ruptured plastic tag of his shoelace, then scratches his cheek.
A moment later he says it again: “Dad?”
“What is it, Eric?”
It is then that the power flickers on. We notice it first from a distance. All of a sudden we can see the shape of the city on the land: all the streetlamps and buildings and windows. It is as if the earth and the sky are reaching into one another, exchanging their lights, like clasped hands interthreading fingers. I can hear a rattling sound coming from the air conditioner, and from the living room the voice of a television commercial: Isn’t it time you considered training for a career as a medical assistant ? “Yes!” says Eric, and he hops to his feet and claps his hands. I have not seen such a clear display of emotion from him in months. “Thank you, God!” he says. “Finally!” A light from inside the house sends the shadow of his body slanting in a long line over the lawn. Then, just as suddenly as it returned, the current shuts down and the million lights of the city vanish. The fan in the air conditioner whirs to a slow stop.
I shrug and clap my leg. “Looks like a false alarm.”
Eric gives a soft goddamnit. “I am so sick of all this,” he says. He sits down again, shifting in his chair, and the candlestick hides his face from my view.
“Eric?” I prompt.
“Why can’t I just watch TV?” he snaps. “Is that too much to ask?” He leans forward and jerks his head, then punches himself in the arm, a tiny thudding sound muffled by his shirt. It rises in me— the instinct to say “Don’t hit yourself”—but I know better. He would squeeze shut like a snare. Instead I ask, “Are you okay?” and he gives a strangled laugh.
“I’m okay when I don’t have to think about it,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “God, I know. Sometimes I wake up at night, and I feel—peaceful. I feel peaceful, and so I think that it must not have happened yet. Isn’t that crazy?”
“Not crazy.” He shakes his head. “The same thing happened to me the first few weeks, but then it stopped all of a sudden. It won’t last forever.” He sighs. “But to tell you the truth, I liked it better before it stopped. I just want something to be easy for a change.”
One star, more brilliant than all the othe
rs, hangs like an ornament at the horizon, swelling brighter and then dimming, swelling brighter and then dimming.
“And it’s easy to watch TV?” I say.
“It’s easy to watch TV,” he agrees.
The katydids are out there calling their names.
The tiny red light of an airplane passes through the sky. It soars past a low cloud, the North Star, the bold white W of Cassiopeia—vanishing and reappearing, winking in a long ellipsis. Inside, its passengers read glossy periodicals, summon stewardesses, and unbuckle their seat belts. They gaze from the panes of double windows and float away in a tight red arc.
“Two hours, twenty minutes,” says Eric, illuminating his watch face. He stretches and gives a deep yawn, then throws back his head, tightens his lips, and another shudders through him like a ripple through a pond. “Look, I’m going to turn in,” he says, standing. “Nothing to do out here anyway.” He excavates a particle of dirt from beneath his thumbnail.
I watch him tuck his hands into the big loose bowls of his pockets—they swallow him up to the forearms—and dig soil from the lawn with the toe of his boot. After a while, he stops short.
“Well,” he says, and his chin gives a little jerk. “Good night.”
“Good night,” I respond.
He steps to the door and it whispers open. Do you need the candle? I think. Can you see your way? But the door slides shut behind him.
A cicada is perched at the edge of the porch, shrilling its drums and fanning its wings, mirroring the candle in its small black eyes. The wind is hissing through the grass and the stars are guttering in the sky. Sometimes, Della, it feels as if I am living inside a mirage. Sometimes it feels as if I myself am the illusion—a wavering in the air, an apparition in a weave of bodies. The pulse of your flashlight is thirty years gone. Such a long time it’s been sailing past moons and planets, past stars and dark matter and stray comets. It’s been coursing through the gulf of space, its beam like a long silver road. It passed Alpha Centauri as you dressed for your first dance, Sirius as you left home for college. It passed the faint white globe of Tau Ceti as you lifted your veil and braided your fingers through mine.
It’s going, Della. It’s on its way.
One fine day, it will burst through the sky of a black world, flashing from trees and houses and lakes. Doorknobs and fenceposts will cast thin sharp shadows. Turtles will poke from their shells, and bears will stumble from the mouths of caves. Men and women will throw open their windows, trembling and blinking as they step through their doors. On that day there will be banquets and celebrations. The people will dress in their finest robes. The feast will be grand, the conversation merry, and everyone will watch the sky. How I wish you and I could be there as well.
The Passenger
I was just a passenger, and like all passengers, fundamentally unconcerned with landscape and plot, enveloped only by the simple movement of it all, the cumulate graph of those coherent points where we ate, slept, went to the bathroom, and awaited movement again.
—Scott Bradfield
And I’ve got the sun in the morning
I get the cold every night
If I had to do it all again
I’d have been born in flight.
—Bill Morrissey
My mother gave birth without benefit of midwife, bed gown, or epidural anesthesia, and with the added discomfort of a safety belt firmly secured across the dome of her midriff. My newborn body, dangling umbilically above a pool of broken water, floating for a moment between one fact and another, found itself then drawing breath—discrete, unanchored, and folded to her shoulder. By this window she released me into the world, and seated here I have spent my days. When my mother died, I was left her empty seat and her carry-on luggage—quiet condolences, moist, extended hands, and the fevered conviction that she was just waiting in line for the toilet. When my mother died, they put her in the sky. She fell limply through the air, through a pass between the clouds and toward the green. She had asked that it be so. When I die, she told me, let me go—let me wing my way straight to the ground. From this window, I watched her scarf flapping red, straining to loose itself from around her neck. It swam like an arm against the drop. She tumbled out of sight.
All of this was long ago. Before I lost my mother, I had been given to speculation. Was there a place for us outside the confines of this cabin—how would the human body comport itself in the sky? Would it fall, I wondered, and if so, which way: into the clouds or into the stars? Or would it take up position where you left it, grow steadfast in the air, a buoy above the passing clouds and a perch for chirping birds? Like a nail puncturing the wall of space, like the fossil of a whisper, would it simply, faithfully, hang there? My mother opted for descent. Perhaps it’s all a matter of appetite.
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 wall
s, 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.