Aubrey said, “Ha!”
It was not a laugh but the actual word, a sound of surprise, not hilarity. There was no reason to be surprised, really. The cloud was holding him up, and he weighed 175 pounds. What was a canvas harness that couldn’t be all of two pounds? He unbuckled his helmet and stuck it on another hook.
The ache that had begun in his sinuses was now a skewer of pain that shot from his left temple to the right. That was the skull fracture, he thought, the one he’d picked up when he smashed his head on the side of the plane. That’s all any of it was: the vivid fantasy of a brain with splinters of bone poked through it.
Beneath that notion, though, was a very different idea. Another one of those mental mosquitoes was whining around his head—the inside of his head rather than the outside. He was thinking, How does a cloud know what a coatrack looks like? A notion so absurd it sounded like the caption to a New Yorker cartoon.
He sucked at the thin, cool air and for the first time wondered what the temperature would be like in six hours, when the sun went down.
But by then he would be on CNN. He would be the biggest news story in the world. There would be a gnat swarm of TV news helicopters whirring around to get live footage of the man who walked on clouds. The GoPro video would be running on every channel in an hour, would be all over the Internet.
He wished he had not been such a shrill and pathetic panic case in the Cessna. If he’d known he was going to be on a video seen worldwide, he thought he could’ve at least pretended to have nerve.
Aubrey had wandered a few steps from the coatrack, reeling along in an only half-aware way. He paused and looked back. The coat rack was still there. The coatrack meant something. Was more than a coatrack. But in his headachy state, he could not work out its full importance.
He walked.
At first he walked like a man who suspected he was on rotten ice. He would slide one foot forward to be sure the cloud would remain solid underfoot, kicking puffs of mist ahead of him. The surface held, and after a bit he began—not even knowing he was doing it—to walk normally.
He stayed at least six feet from the edge at all times, but initially did not wander toward the bulge in the center of the cloud. Instead he found himself circumnavigating his desert island in the sky. He scanned for airplanes and paused once when he saw one. A jet drew a line of white smoke across the brilliant blue. It was miles away, and after a moment he stopped paying attention. He understood he had no more chance of being noticed than if that plane were passing overhead while he walked across the campus of the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he had been an undergrad.
He was light-headed, and he held up now and then to catch his breath. The third time he stopped, he bowed his head, gripped his knees, and inhaled deeply, until the vertiginous, about-to-fall-over sensation passed. When he straightened up, he was seized with a sudden, perfectly sensible realization.
There wasn’t enough air up here.
Or at the very least there wasn’t as much air as he was used to. How high was he? He remembered Axe telling them they were at twelve thousand feet right before the Cessna lost power. Could you even breathe at twelve thousand feet? Obviously. He was breathing now. A phrase, “altitude sickness,” rose to the top of his thoughts.
He was a long time circling his vast platter of fog. For the most part, it was flat: a bit lumpy here, dipping a bit there. He climbed to the top of the occasional dune, descended into a few shallow ditches. He lost himself for a while in a confused series of gullies on the eastern rim, wandering through narrow crevasses of white fluff. In the north he paused to admire a mass of cloud boulders that bore a close resem blance to the head of a bulldog. On the western side of the cloud, he crossed a series of three swells that looked like enormous speed bumps. But in the end he walked for almost an hour and was surprised at how featureless his hubcap-shaped island really was.
By the time he made his way back to the coatrack, he was dizzy and weak and sick of the cold. He needed something to drink. It hurt to swallow.
In Aubrey’s experience, dreams had a habit of making jumpy, improbable leaps. First you were in an elevator with your sister’s best friend; then you were boning her on the roof in front of family and friends; then the building began to sway in a violent wind; then cyclones were touching down all over Cleveland. Here on the cloud, though, there was no narrative at all, let alone a whirl of frantic dream incidents. One moment staggered into the next. He could not dream his way off the cloud and on to something better.
He stared at the coatrack, wishing he could send a picture of it to Harriet. Whenever he saw something beautiful or improbable, his first impulse was to take a snap and send it to her in a text. Of course, if she started getting photographs of clouds from her missing-presumed-dead friend, she would probably think he was texting her from heaven, she would probably start screaming her—
And at that moment Aubrey Griffin remembered it was the twenty-first century and there was a smartphone in his pocket.
It was in his cargo shorts, under his jumpsuit. He had switched it off when the plane was taxiing down the runway, as one would on any flight, but he still had it. Now that he was thinking about it, he could feel it digging into his thigh.
He didn’t have to wait for them to download the footage on Axe’s GoPro. He could call them directly. If he had a strong enough connection, he could even video-chat with them.
He snatched at the zipper of his jumpsuit. The cold air knifed into the opening, going right through the T-shirt underneath. Aubrey wrestled the phone out of his pocket—and it flipped right out of his sweaty hand.
Aubrey cried out, sure it would drop through the cloud and vanish. It didn’t, though. It landed in a cup of hardened fog, shaped almost like a soap dish.
He snatched the phone back up, shaking helplessly now from the shock of sudden hope. He squeezed the button to turn it on, his thoughts running ahead to the next bit: He would call Harriet; he would tell her he was alive; she would begin to sob with relief and incredulity; he would start to cry, too; they would both have a happy cry together; and she would say, Omigod, Aubrey, where are you? and he would say, Well, babe, you aren’t gonna believe this, but—
The screen of his phone remained stubbornly black and blank. He pressed the On switch again.
When it still didn’t light up, he squeezed the On button as hard as he could, clenching his teeth as if he were engaged in some activity that required brute force—loosening a rusted lug nut on a flat tire, for example.
Nothing.
“What. The actual. Fuck?” he said, squeezing and squeezing until his hand ached.
His dead phone offered no explanations.