It did him no good to disbelieve his situation, to argue with his circumstances. He was here, and he accepted he would go on being here, no matter how hard he tried to talk himself into denying the reality around him.
And that was fine and that was right. Aubrey was a musician, not a physicist or a journalist. He didn’t know if he believed in ghosts, but he liked the idea of them. He had enthusiastically participated in a séance with June and Harriet once (holding Harriet’s hand for half an hour!). He was pretty sure Stonehenge was a landing pad for aliens. It wasn’t in Aubrey’s nature to ruthlessly interrogate reality, calling bullshit on every unproved notion and improbable hope. Acceptance was his natural state. Running with the situation was the first rule of a good jam.
His throat felt cracked and sore, and it was killing him to swallow. The fatigue was returning already, and he wished he had a comfortable place to sit and think. Could his exhaustion be a simple matter of altitude sickness? Aubrey’s mind, which had a knack for generating worst-case scenarios, snatched at a new idea: He was standing on some lighter-than-air cloud of radiation. Whatever had killed the electrical power in the plane and his phone would soon wipe out the electrical impulses that governed the beating of his heart. The cloud might be producing as much atomic poison as the overheated reactors in Fukushima that had made a few dozen miles of Japan into a zone inhospitable to human life.
The idea turned his kidneys into cool, stagnant water. His legs felt suddenly wobbly, and he reached thoughtlessly for something to steady himself on, and his hand fell upon the armrest of a fat easy chair.
It had boiled up from the cloud behind him while he wasn’t paying attention. It was a great soft-looking throne, tinged a pretty shade of coral by the last of the day’s light.
He considered it with interest and suspicion, forgot all about lethal doses of radiation for a moment. He lowered himself tentatively into it. He still half expected to fall through, but of course he didn’t. It was the soft, plump easy chair that other easy chairs dreamed of being.
A coatrack, a bed, a chair. What he needed, when he needed it.
When he thought of it.
He held this notion in his mind, turning it over, considering it.
This was not a cloud. He had to stop thinking of it as a cloud. It was . . . what? A device? A machine? Of some kind, yes. Which raised the next obvious question: What was under the hood? Where the hell was the hood?
His gaze drifted uneasily to the vast central mound, the one part of the island he hadn’t explored. He would have to go take a look. Not yet, though. He wasn’t sure if it was strength or courage he lacked. Maybe both. He had slept at least an hour but was still exhausted, and the sight of that huge, creamy white dome oppressed him somehow.
He lifted his head, searching for his next insight, and saw a cherry-colored sky scattered with the first stars. The astonishing clarity of the early night stunned him. For a moment he felt a flicker of something dangerously like gratitude. He was not dead, and the stars were coming out in all their glittering profusion. He watched while the sky dimmed and constellations mapped the darkness.
When the lid of night had fastened itself over the Midwest, he became aware that he was very cold. It was not unbearable—not yet—but it was disagreeable enough to make him turn his thoughts to the immediate problems of survival.
It seemed to him important to take an inventory. He wore a jumpsuit and one Converse high-top. He’d been told to leave his right shoe on the ground but no longer remembered why. It seemed silly now. Why did you jump in only one shoe?
Beneath the jumpsuit he wore knee-length cargo shorts and a tee made out of chunky cables of knitted cotton. It was his favorite shirt, because once Harriet had stroked it and said she loved the fabric.
He was hungry, in a distracted sort of way. That at least could be managed for now. He remembered tucking a granola bar into his shorts earlier that morning, wanted to have something on him in case of low blood sugar. It was still there. His thirst was going to be a bigger issue. He was so thirsty his throat ached, and at the moment he didn’t have any idea what he was going to do about it.
Back to the inventory. He had his harness, and he had his helmet. He unzipped his jumpsuit and shivered at the wind’s cold touch. He worked his hands over the pockets of his shorts, itemizing his finds.
The phone: a dead slab of steel and glass.
His wallet: a leather rectangle with a few cards tucked into its pockets and his student ID. He was glad for the identification. If he were blown off the cloud, or if its miraculous powers of support suddenly gave out, the smashed turnip of his body would have a name. Wouldn’t that shock the shit out of some people, if his pancaked corpse turned up in northeastern Ohio—or southern Pennsylvania!—a hundred miles away from where he’d last been seen, leaping from a plane? He took out his wallet and phone and put them on the end table.
In another pocket he—
—he jerked his head around to look at the end table.
In the summer darkness, the cloud was all silver and pearl, vivid by the light of a quarter moon. After the coatrack and the bed and the chair, he was not terribly surprised to be offered an end table in response to an unarticulated wish, although it was still a jolt, the way it had snuck up on him. But what interested him most is that he knew this end table. There’d been one just like it in between the couch where his mother stretched out and the chair he usually sat in when they watched TV together (usually something like Sherlock or Downton Abbey on PBS). It was where they put the popcorn.
He imagined Harriet calling his mother to say he’d been killed in a skydiving accident, then immediately pushed the thought aside, couldn’t bear it. The vision of his mother screaming and collapsing into agonized sobs was more than he could take right now.
No. What interested him was that this end table—which had a wide circular top and a long beaded column—was a twin of the one he remembered from childhood. The only difference being that it was made out of cloud instead of cherry. And that meant something—didn’t it?
His hand was still burrowed in one pocket of his cargo shorts, and his fingers fumbled at a few small, waxy blocks. He plucked one out and squinted at it in the opalescent light. When he realized what it was, his body responded with a throb of pleasure and need.