“What’s that?” cried the big lumbersexual spooning her from behind.
Harriet was strapped to a chunky guy with the kind of bushy beard that suggested a closetful of flannel shirts and a second job serving fair-trade espresso in an upscale coffeehouse. When it was time to pair up with a jumpmaster, Aubrey had acted quickly to claim Axe Body Spray. He didn’t want Harriet leaping out a plane with the dude, her ass nestled against the guy’s probable erection all the way down. The Wookiee had paired with Harriet. Unfortunately (and predictably), she and the furry fat guy had been falling around laughing from their first moments together. By lunch the two of them were dueting to an a cappella version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” her chubby jumpmaster singing the male parts in a warm, low, surprisingly soulful voice. Aubrey loathed him. It was Aubrey’s role to be soulful and to surprise Harriet with laughter. He loathed all clever, decent fat men who cozied their way into Harriet’s spontaneous hugs.
“There!” Harriet cried. “There, there! Aubrey! You see it?”
“See what?” yelled her Wookiee, even though she wasn’t talking to him.
“That cloud! Look at that weird cloud! It looks just like a UFO!”
Aubrey didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to go anywhere near that door. But he couldn’t help himself—Axe was edging closer to see what she was pointing at and taking Aubrey along for the ride.
Harriet pointed at a cloud, shaped just like a flying saucer from a 1950s alien-invasion flick. It was wide and circular and at the center it was mounded up in a cottony dome.
“Kinda big for a UFO!” shouted Chewbackish. He was right—that cloud had to be almost a mile across.
“It’s the mother ship!” Harriet cried with glee.
“I saw one that looked like a doughnut once,” Axe said. “Like God blew a smoke ring. Had a big hole in the middle. We’re much closer to the supernatural up here. Everything gets very surreal when you’re falling from twelve thousand feet. Reality gets as flimsy as parachute silk, and your mind opens to new possibilities!”
Oh, fuck you and your flimsy parachute-silk reality—that was Aubrey’s view. Fuck Axe and his promise that the experience would open Harriet to new possibilities (like maybe a post-jump three-way with Axe and Harriet’s furry jumpmaster).
Harriet shook her head with satisfaction. “June would’ve loved that cloud. She believed ‘They’ walk among us. The Greys. The Visitors.”
Fat-and-Furry said, “We’ll get a closer look pretty soon. We’re almost at jump altitude.”
Aubrey felt a poke of fresh alarm, like the stick of a needle, but for an instant anyway the jump was only the second thing on his mind. He leaned forward, hardly aware he was doing it, surprising Axe, who had to lean forward with him. The harness joining them together creaked.
Aubrey watched the cloud for half a minute as they climbed and began to circle toward it—they would pass right above it in a moment or two. Then he looked past Harriet at the guy with the beard.
“Yeah!” he said. “Yeah, man, she’s right. That cloud is fucked up. Look again.”
Harriet’s jumpmaster said, “It’s a fine specimen of a cumulonimbus. Very cool.”
“No it’s not. It’s not cool. It’s weird.”
The Wookiee gave him a glance of appraisal that seemed to mingle boredom with contempt. Aubrey shook his head, annoyed that the guy didn’t get it, and pointed again.
“It’s going that way,” Aubrey said, jabbing a finger to the north.
“So what?” Brad Morris called out. For the second time in the last few minutes, everyone was looking at Aubrey.
“All the other clouds are going in the opposite direction!” Aubrey yelled, pointing south. “It’s going the wrong way.”
2
THE CLOUD HELD THEIR ATTENTION for one shared moment of respectful silence before the chubby jumpmaster explained. “It’s called an air box. It’s a pattern of circular flow. The air pushes in one direction at one altitude, then folds back and shoves everything in the exact opposite direction at a different altitude. When you go up in a hot-air balloon, a current like that means you can float away from your point of departure, then drop a couple thousand feet and float back to the exact same place you took off.” The chubby jumpmaster did hot-air-balloon rides, too, and had offered to take Harriet up sometime for free—an evil suggestion as far as Aubrey was concerned, tantamount to inviting her to a sex club for a lazy night of cocaine and hand jobs. Aubrey supposed most men who went into skydiving and ballooning and other forms of high-altitude devilry did it for the pussy. There were all those opportunities to buckle girls into safety harnesses, to cop a feel when comforting them in a moment of high anxiety, to win their admiration with cheery shows of fearlessness. Of course, to be fair, Aubrey himself wouldn’t have been in the plane if not to impress Harriet.
“Oh,” Harriet said, shrugging with mock disappointment. “Too bad. I thought we were about to make contact.”
Axe held up two fingers, Churchill declaring victory on VE-Day. “Two minutes!”
Harriet bopped her helmet against Aubrey’s and met his gaze. “Yes?”
Aubrey tried a smile, but it felt more like a grimace.
“No,” he said. “I can’t.”
“You can, though!” Axe shouted, finally deciding not to pretend he couldn’t hear. “This whole experience is about the power of ‘can’!”
Aubrey ignored him. Axe Body Spray didn’t matter. The only thing that concerned him was how Harriet took it.
“I really wanted to,” he told her.
Harriet nodded and took his hand. “I have to. I promised June.”
Of course he had promised June, too. When Harriet said she would jump, Aubrey had sworn he’d be screaming all the way down right beside her. At the time June was dying, and it had seemed like the right thing to do.
“I feel like shit—” Aubrey began.
“Don’t worry!” Harriet yelled. “I think it’s rad you came this far!”
“I doubled up on my antianxiety meds and everything!” He wished he could stop explaining himself.
“One minute!” Axe yelled.
“It’s all right, Aubrey,” Harriet said, smiling impishly. “Hey, I better get myself ready, right?”
“Right,” he agreed, nodding feverishly.
“I’m set to go!” Ronnie Morris shouted. “I could use the fresh air.”
Brad Morris laughed, and they slapped each other five. It stung Aubrey that they could make a joke out of the cowardly farts stinking up the compartment. Bad enough that he was pitifully scared, but even worse to be betrayed by his body and then ridiculed for it.