“I’m so sorry to do this, man—” Aubrey began, calling over his shoulder to the guy he thought of as Axe.
His jumpmaster’s name had flown out of his head as soon as the dude introduced himself. By then Aubrey was having trouble hanging on to even the most basic information. In the half hour before they had boarded the single-engine Cessna, Aubrey’s panic was making a roar of static that filled his head. People looked him right in the face and said things—shouted them, really, everyone souped up on adrenaline—but all he heard was unintelligible noise. He could grasp the occasional obscenity, nothing more.
So Aubrey began to think of him as Axe, short for Axe Body Spray, because the guy looked like he’d walked off the set of a commercial featuring hot rods, explosions, and models having pillow fights in their underwear. The jumpmaster was fit and lanky, with golden-red hair cut short and feathered back, and he possessed a coked-up energy that amplified rather than subdued Aubrey’s terror. How absurd was it to have considered putting his life in the hands of someone he didn’t even know by name?
“Whadja say?” Axe yelled.
It didn’t seem like it should be so hard to make himself heard, es pecially to a guy who was strapped to his ass. They were harnessed together; Aubrey sat in Axe’s lap like a child getting cozy with a shopping-mall Santa.
“I can’t do this! I hoped like hell I could. I really thought—”
Axe shook his head. “That’s normal! Everyone gets that!”
He was going to make him plead. Aubrey didn’t want to plead, not in front of Harriet. To his dismay, he uncorked another string of greasy farts. They were inaudible over the drone of the engine, but they burned and stank. Axe had to be tasting every one of them.
It was awful to be pathetic in front of Harriet Cornell. It didn’t matter that he and Harriet were never going to date, never be in love, never lie nude beneath cool sheets in St. Barts with the French windows open and the sound of the waves crashing on the reefs in the distance. He still had his daydreams to protect. It dismayed Aubrey to think this was the last memory of him that Harriet would take with her to Africa.
Harriet and Aubrey were both on their first jumps. (Or maybe it was more accurate to say Harriet was on her first jump. Aubrey had come to see in the last few moments that he was not.) They were going tandem, which meant each of them was buckled to a jumpmaster, men who did this every day. Brad and Ronnie Morris were in the plane as well. This was old hat for them, though, both boys experienced skydivers.
June Morris was dead, and they were all jumping in her memory: her brothers, Brad and Ronnie; Harriet, who had been her best friend; and Aubrey himself. June had been dead six weeks, wiped out at twenty-three by cancer. That was some odds-defying shit right there, Aubrey thought. It seemed to Aubrey you were about as likely to become a rock star as you were to die that young of something like lymphoma.
“There’s nothing normal about it!” Aubrey shouted now. “I have a clinical diagnosis as a quivering pussy. Seriously, if you make me jump, I’m going to fill my pants with hot, creamy shit, man—”
At that moment the sound dropped in the hollow, roaring stainless-steel capsule of the light aircraft, and his voice carried from one end of the plane to the other. Aubrey was aware of Brad and Ronnie turning to look at him. They both had GoPro cameras screwed to their helmets. Presumably all this would be on YouTube later.
“The first rule of skydiving: Don’t take a shit on the jumpmaster,” Axe said.
The mindless thunder of the engine rose again. Brad and Ronnie looked away.
Aubrey didn’t want to glance over at Harriet but couldn’t help himself.
She wasn’t staring at him, although he thought she had only just turned her face away. She clutched a small purple stuffed horse with a silver horn protruding from its brow and twee iridescent wings behind its forelegs: the Junicorn. Harriet and the Junicorn were turned to face the door, a big, loose, rattling hatch made out of clear plastic. Every time the plane tilted to the left, Aubrey was consumed by the sickening certainty that the door would flap open and he’d slide right out while Axe Body Spray hacked a maniacal, coked-up laugh. It seemed like nothing was holding it shut, fucking nothing.
The way Harriet was pointedly not looking at him was almost as unpleasant as if she’d been staring at him with a mixture of pity and disappointment. Aubrey didn’t need Axe to give him permission to stay in the plane. His opinion didn’t matter. What Aubrey wanted was for Harriet to tell him it was all right.
No. What he wanted was to go out the side of the plane with her—ahead of her. But to do that he would have had to be someone else. Maybe that was what he hated most: not his queasy stomach, not his sick farts, not the collapse of his nerve. Maybe what he despised most was being found out. Was anything in all the world more heartrending than being found out by someone you wanted to love you?
He leaned forward and thunked his helmet against hers to get her attention.
She turned her face toward him, and he saw, for the first time, that she was pale and drawn, lips pressed so tightly together that all the color had gone out of them. It came to him with something like relief that she was terrified, too. He grasped at an idea with an almost frantic hope: Maybe she would stay in the plane with him! If they were cowards together, the situation would no longer be shameful and tragic; it would be the most hilarious thing ever.
He had meant to tell her he was backing out, but now, seized by this new notion, he shouted, “How you doing?” Prepared to comfort her. Looking forward to it, in fact.
“I’m this close to throwing up.”
“Me, too!” he cried, perhaps with a dash too much enthusiasm.
“I’m shivering like a leaf.”
“Jesus. I’m so glad I’m not the only one.”
“I don’t want to be here,” she said, her helmet resting against his, their noses almost touching. Her eyes, the cool greenish brown of a frozen marsh, were wide with undisguised anxiety.
“Fuck!” he said. “Me neither! Me neither!” He was close to laughter, close to taking her hand.
She shifted her gaze back to that door of clear, rattling plastic. “I don’t want to sit one more second in this plane. I just want to be out there doing it. It’s like waiting in line for a roller coaster. The wait just about kills you. You can’t stop building it up in your mind. But then, when you’re on the ride, you’re like, ‘Why was I so scared? I want to do this again!’”
A weak, small, oily fart of disappointment slipped free. The enthusiasm, the swell of sweet courage he heard in her voice, filled him with Seattle-grunge levels of despair.
Harriet’s eyes widened. She pointed out the clattering door and shouted with an almost childlike excitement, “Hey! Hey, guys! Spaceship!”