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.
The line outside the washroom is often staggered and unruly, stretching halfway through the cabin. Those who’ve reached the front wear haggard and uneasy faces. They stare guardedly at the sign wheeling between VACANT and OCCUPIED above the doorknob, and their fingers thread through their hair, as matted and tousled as rain clouds gnarled by the wind. Returning to my seat, I pass a woman who, shifting and shrinking, attempts to extricate herself from beneath a lowered tray table without upsetting the edifice of food and beverages on top. With a sudden wresting of her hips she prevails. Then— standing atop her toes in the aisle, opening the overhead compartment—she retrieves a cosmetic kit from her purse and steps into the line that angles to the washroom.
I once knew a man who developed a nervous disorder that prevented him from relieving himself while in a moving vehicle—not, as you might imagine, to the benefit of his health and well-being. He disgorged one day the last of what he’d swallowed into a white, wax-lined sick bag and refused to eat again. He soon died of massive internal bleeding as his body slowly cannibalized itself. The sweat of a malnourished man smells of effluvium and burning carbon. He was my friend, but most were glad to see him go.
As I return from the washroom and take my seat, I watch the televisions awaken. From panes of mirrored green, inside which the strait of our cabin tapers to a point, each resolves into focus. I find myself viewing a film depicting a rolling heath bathed in falling snow. A man is shown walking through the drifts, his footprints trailing away behind him. He stops, addresses the camera, and walks on. The man’s teeth are asymmetrical and jarring. The word Civilization appears on the screen, somber above the blowing white snow.
Despite my complaints, were it not for television, I would know nothing of the worlds of fantasy and speculation, of astronomy and of geography. I would know nothing of mulch or antelope, sunspots or Ferris wheels; of aboriginal land claims, internecine warfare, amphibian life cycles; of rain or snow or shooting stars. I would know nothing of precipitation—of headlong descents, things that fall from the sky. This notion—of tumbling things, sheets of rain, flakes of snow, dropping as a matter of will and muffling the land and steeping the ocean—is a lovely one, but incomprehensible to all but an adept few, the meteorologists, who spend their lives engaged in highly abstruse and deeply philosophic debates, self-contained and mysterious, like nested sets of boxes, about the whys and wherefores of falling things.
Sometimes I close my eyes and envision our cabin coated in a layer of descending snow. It sits white and heavy atop seats and blankets and the queue to the washroom. It billows from ashtrays and seat pockets, whiffs in heaps against the curtains, rises from the floor and overspreads the aisles. It settles on my tongue. It melts flake by flake beneath the overhead lights and blows itself hollow beneath whistling air spouts. It covers me, envelops me, and leaves me cocooned—a tight, breathing body in a meniscus of white.
I sometimes—often—dream that I am standing in a field. Beneath my feet, and to all sides, runs an uninterrupted plane. I turn a circle, scanning the rim of the horizon. There is nothing: no trees, no hills, no knobs of land; no curtains, no people, no walls. Above me, I see two narrow rows of blinking lights. They end at the crown of my head and spire from there past a bank of clouds, aisling into the sky. Bet
ween the glint of the furthest lights, a point appears, dark against the clouds. The point grows larger, falling straight for me, and I recognize it. My mother. I awaken.
We share certain of our dreams in common: (1) the dream of walking (our feet strike something solid, unmoving—or, since nothing real is idle, balanced in its motion, moving first about itself and then about the sun—the earth below us, and the petals of our lungs quaver as we breathe, and the heaviness of release suffuses our bodies); (2) the dream of rising (we step from the portal of the plane or from the cusp of some derelict tower, a zigzaggery of corroded nails and plankwork, and we ascend—awakening, always, before we kite into the stars); (3) the dream of chasing (we follow something best left uncaught—a thug, a monster, a wanton, spectral hope—and find ourselves unable to stop); and (4) the dream of appearing naked in public (either that or in our underwear).
The dreams we share are of our fears and desires, what we feel, what we know. Myself, I know nothing—only this: from moment to moment the slow drift of emotion. I suspect, though I do not know, that the things I feel are like a clustering of bubbles, empty but for what I send into them, and that as I stray through the weeks and the years, the breath of me will change—that pain in time will become pleasure, and what I now call joy will one day weigh like strange regret upon my heart.
A bullet comes from a discharged gun, rending the air as it approaches your temple. You stand in the line of fire, twiddling your thumbs, cooling your jets. You watch with lazy eyes. The bullet is in motion. To reach you, it must first cross half the distance, the distance between gun and temple, muzzle and target. Having reached the midpoint of its journey, the bullet must cross half the distance that remains. Then half again. And again. The bullet draws closer, slowing as it approaches. Soon it is only a lash’s remove from your skin. It has long since ceased to spin, and you watch it hovering there. It reposes on a cushion of air, silver scalloped ejection scars scored along its length. The bullet is halving incalculably small distances—one, then another, then another—and it moves nearer your temple with every passing snip of time. It will never reach you.
Your mother steps through the portal of a plane in flight. You watch until she drops from sight, and then you watch the clouds throwing off spumes of vapor. Somewhere down there, your mother is nearing ground. But she hasn’t hit—not yet.
Motion within space or time is a mathematical impossibility, for it demands an advance across distance, which is infinitely divisible and must be traveled one division at a time: there is always a smaller division, always more distance. To die is to pass from one point, life, to another point, death, through the distance which is dying. Motion such as this is an impossibility—and while the happening of the impossible can hold true within life, it cannot hold true within dying, a process of ceasing impossibilities. Death, then, that target toward which the bullet of life is racing, is impossible—if only for the dying. A falling body is a logical proposition, and thus cannot reach ground.
The last flicker of consciousness is an object turning in upon itself, a gravitational collapse, exploring its every complexity and possibility within the smallest of forevers. Most often, I imagine, the last thought of the dying is a matter of deployed belief—though the possibilities of exception abound: a man run through by a knife blade, for instance, might die and think forever of the pain; violence, in such circumstances, becomes all the more unacceptable. Still, a dying believer might think of Heaven or Eternal Return or Submergence into the Universal Whole; a dying atheist of Nothing; a disciple of karmic transmigration either Once More or Uh-Oh, depending on the virtue of his life (and he may, between moments, lead a run of tiered and reincarnate lives, each an afterclap of the one before, all an echo of the first). Conjecture becomes more complicated in consideration of the brief glimmers of thought that pass through us when we least expect them. Falling Snow, we may think, or With My Lover, or I Am Light.
It is difficult to overestimate the potential in infinity, the depth of any single thought. We die into our vision of forever. Falling, never landing, we believe our eternity into existence.
Reports persist of curious objects, erratic and puzzling of aim, glimpsed within the sky. Witnesses speak of metallic glints seen rising from rushes of distant cloud or poised like a daylight star against the blue (sometimes, as they startle away, trailing threads of vapor in their wake). At night, winking red lights have been sighted gliding across the face of the moon and passing like wise, cold comets between the stars. Some claim that these two phenomena are one—that red is white, white is red, the same color at a sun’s remove. Others swear they have seen white tinsel points of light dim and darken and wink to red as the night catches the day. Witnesses, however, remain few, and details remain sketchy.
Our archaeologists, excavating a mound of spent luggage in a disused closet, have recently discovered a brittle scrolled manuscript— gone yellow with age, black in places—that seems to record an account of such a sighting. This confirms the evidence of ancient pictographs uncovered behind the hull at the rear of our vessel. Both indicate that our ancestors believed such remote and glimmering lights to be the manifesting spirits of departed friends and relatives, portents of keen significance for those who chanced to see them. Our forebears held that a ghost might become visible by wrapping itself in swathes of surrounding air, and that, wherever spirit met sky, the dead might appear. Our scientists proclaim this an unlikely possibility.
The lights in the sky, some believe, are autonomous organisms— free-floating creatures of obscure intelligence dating from an age when life on this world was a form of behavior, the functional state of heat and light. Those who believe this refer to the lights as critters, deeming them harmless, if not benevolent. Others hold that the lights are frozen pools of cloud, shimmering white by day and flaring red in the darkness with retained sunlight, still others that they are crafts much like our own, peopled by a race of proud and abstracted people, a community of travelers, shy, bewildered, and self-contained. Some insist that the lights are visitors, aloof and unworldly, come from elsewhere to observe us.
So that we might come to identify them—these lights in the sky—and in order to determine the give and density of cloud cover, the material composition of wind and blue weather, the potential of the outside world for supporting human life, we have initiated a program of sky exploration. Our scientists and engineers, working in tandem, are perfecting the technology that will allow us to send a man into the sky and safely retrieve him. The latter of these two propositions, that of safe return, is of no small concern. Last year, we ejected the first of our stratonauts—a man girded by belt and hook to a hundred-yard line of elasticized rope—from the plane’s front portal. Plunging the length of his tether, he bounced up and back and was snuffed into the outer port turbofan engine. Not, you may think, an auspicious debut to our fledgling sky program. I saw him emerge from the other side in a spray of bone and viscera. The engine sputtered and stalled, and it hasn’t worked properly since. Our scientists and engineers decided to rethink their methods.
Our stratonauts now undergo a rigorous training regimen. They sleep in the overhead compartments, eat their meals (high-fiber cereals, peanut flour, and lots of potatoes) while spinning in brisk circles, and spend hours each day trying to squeeze themselves into the crisper of our onboard refrigeration unit—all of which, our scientists insist, will prepare them for the hardships of sky exploration. Journalists report that our sky program will recommence in a few short weeks. Hopes run high.
Talk has circulated of efforts to initiate a ground exploration program as well. Our experts, though, have been unable to formulate a viable down-to-earth strategy. Recently, they invited the general public to submit their ideas for consideration. To date, however, only one suggestion has come to light—this a proposal to outfit terranauts with parachute-cum-trampoline suits—and the prospects do not look encouraging.
The protesters onboard deem the sky program a needless expend
iture of manpower and resources. Yesterday they staged a demonstration. Marching heavily through the aisles, hoisting placards and chanting unpleasantries, they were soon confronted by the stewardesses, and they dispersed to their chairs, buckled their seat belts, and decided to hold a sit-in. Our energies, they insist, could be better employed coping with present troubles. We needn’t go searching for more. The underclasses are hungry, they say, and shouldn’t remain so for the sake of our restlessness, our fidgeting curiosity. And, they point out, there are regions of our own vessel we have yet to fully explore: the stewardesses’ lounge, for instance, the rear luggage compartment, and the room behind the metal door anterior to first class—dustproof, lightproof, and always securely locked.
It’s early morning. A bend of sunlight has commenced its slow rise, a sliver of red at the line of the horizon. I am among the first of us to have woken. A child slips out of her seat and onto the floor, landing limply, like a dropped shoelace, with a whish and muted pat. She opens her eyes and, without twisting her neck, looks numbly to both sides. Yawning, she drifts back into sleep. The days and nights are of uneven duration here, depending upon our direction of flight, but still, in the end, we find comfort in habit, sleeping when it’s dark and rising when it’s light.
I can see the face (its features become placid, deep-settled with sleep) of the woman who lives in front of me. She’s there, beautiful, through the fluting between the seats. I’ve promised myself that I’ll talk to her today. In five months’ time she may have had a child. I will be the father, she the mother. Every day she passes me in the aisle, and I think I’ve noticed her gaining weight. When I talk to her, I won’t say that. It will be: you’re my favorite person here, and I’m sorry I don’t know how to speak with you, where to start or who you are, but in truth, you terrify me. I’ll have to see where it goes from there.