Aubrey stared at the place where Axe had been, as if he might reappear.
After a time he discovered he was trembling helplessly, although he had left his panic behind, on the airplane. What he felt now was bigger than fight or flight. It was shock, perhaps.
Or maybe it was just the cold. In the world below, it was the third day of August, an afternoon of dry, wilting heat. Pollen coated cars in a layer of mustard-colored grime. Bumblebees droned their sleepy trancesong in the dry, baked grass. Up here, though, it was a cool morning in early October, as crisp and chilly and sweet as a bite of a ripe apple.
He thought, This isn’t happening.
He thought, I was so scared something snapped in my mind.
He thought, I struck my head on the side of the plane, and this is my last giddy fantasy as I die of a skull fracture.
Aubrey riffled through these possibilities like a man dealing cards, but only in a remote, half-aware sort of way, barely registering them.
There was no arguing with the brisk chill in the air or with the whistle of the breeze, which was producing a sharp, clear E note.
For a long time, he remained on all fours, peering off the trailing edge of the cloud, wondering if he could move. He was not sure he dared. He felt that if he moved, gravity would notice him and drop him through the cloud.
He patted the mist ahead of him, stroked it like a cat. It firmed up into a lumpy, pliant mass at the first touch.
Aubrey crawled, his thighs quaking. It was very like moving across a surface of soft clay. When he’d gone a yard or so, he looked back. The path he was making across the cloud melted after he’d started on his way, turning back to slow, curdling fog.
When he was five feet from the ragged, trailing southern edge of the cloud, he sank to his belly and lay flat. He squirmed a bit farther on his stomach, his pulse whamming so hard that the day brightened and darkened with each beat of his heart. Aubrey had always been scared of heights. It was a good question, why a man with a dread of heights, a man who avoided flying whenever he could, would agree to jump from an airplane. The answer, of course, was maddeningly simple: Harriet.
The cloud tapered off at the edge . . . tapered off but did not give way. The very end of the cloud was only an inch thick but the firmest, hardest stuff yet, as hard as concrete, with no sense of give at all.
Aubrey peeked over the edge.
Ohio lay beneath him, an almost perfectly flat expanse of variegated squares in shades of emerald, wheat, richest brown, palest amber. Those would be the famous waves of grain mentioned with such admiration in “America the Beautiful.” Ruler-straight ribbons of blacktop bisected the fields below. A red pickup slid along one of those black threads like a bright steel bead on an abacus.
He saw, to the south and west, the runway of baked red dirt, behind the hangar that housed Cloud 9 Skydiving Adventures. And there was the Cessna, just touching down. Either Lenny had gotten the plane going again or he’d done a fine job of gliding it in.
A moment later Aubrey saw a parachute, a vast, straining tent of gleaming white silk. He watched it sink to the ground and settle in a field that had been planted with something: green rows separated by lines of dark earth. The chute crumpled in on itself. Axe was on the ground then. He was on the ground, and he had been aware enough to pull the rip cord. Axe was down, and soon help would reach him, and he would tell them—
—something. Aubrey could not quite imagine what. I left my client on a cloud?
Below, the parachute rustled across the field, expanding and shrinking like a lung.
When Axe told them what had happened, they were going to figure him for hysterical. A bloodied, badly injured man who raved that he’d landed on a cloud was going to be met with worry and words of comfort, not belief. They were going to reach for the explanation that made the most sense. They were going to assume that Aubrey had come unclipped in some kind of freak accident, possibly after striking the side of the plane—that would explain Axe’s injuries as well—and fallen to his death. Even to Aubrey this seemed a more plausible story than what had really happened, and Aubrey was actually on the cloud looking down.
It was a dreadful idea, but there was also something wrong with it. He tried to see it—spotting the flaw was as tricksy as trying to find a mosquito that whined in one ear but disappeared when you spun around looking for it. He almost had to stop searching for it, stop thinking altogether. Had to let his eyes go unfocused.
A dry, throbbing pain was building in his sinuses, behind his temples.
He reviewed his last glimpse of Axe Body Spray in the instant before the drogue chute yanked him off into the emptiness—and then he saw it. His mind’s eye focused in on the stupid, glaring lens of the GoPro mounted atop the jumpmaster’s helmet. The whole thing was on video. No one needed to take Axe’s word for what had happened. All they had to do was watch the recording. Then they’d know.
Then they’d come for him.
5
SOMETIME LATER HE ROSE TO his knees and looked around.
The great wheel of cloud still held the pie-plate shape of a UFO, with that great dome rising in the exact center, its dominant feature. The rest was far from smooth; the surface bubbled up, ruffled into dunes and hillocks.
Aubrey searched the blue sky until he felt dizzy and had to lower his gaze. When his head stopped swimming, he realized he was still on the very edge, a bad place to be. He slid inward on his butt, putting distance between himself and the precipice.
At last he decided he was going to have to risk standing up. He pushed himself to his feet, legs still trembling.
Aubrey Griffin stood alone on his island of cloud.
It came to him slowly that the harness was uncomfortable. The straps made a tight, painful V at his crotch, squeezing his balls. Another strap was tight across his chest, making it hard to breathe. Or was that the skimpy air?
He unbuckled the harness and stepped out of it. He was going to drop it into the cloud when he saw the coatrack.
It was to his left, on the edge of his vision: an old-fashioned coatrack, with eight curved hooks, made out of sculpted cloud.
He eyed it carefully, feeling dry of throat, aware his heart was beating much, much too fast.
“The fuck is that?” he asked no one in particular.
Of course it was perfectly obvious what it was. Anyone with eyes could see what it was. He told himself it wasn’t really a coatrack, that it was just a deformity in the cloud. He circled to inspect it from every angle. It looked like a coatrack no matter where he stood—a coatrack of cloudstuff, but a coatrack nonetheless.
Experimentally, he hung the olive-colored harness from one of the hooks. It should’ve dropped, scattering veils of fog.
Instead it dangled from the hook, rocking in the breeze.