In the little flight office inside the airplane hangar, there’d been a glass dish on the reception desk full of individually wrapped Starburst candies. He’d furtively gone through them, picking out all the pale pink strawberry-flavored pieces. He had a weakness for them and had imagined they might come in handy—if he started panicking on the plane, he could stick one in his mouth and let sweetness infuse him. Plus, with his mouth full, he would be less likely to say cowardly, desperate things.
But of course the Starbursts had been in the pocket of his shorts, beneath the jumpsuit and harness, where he couldn’t get at them, and besides, by the time they were in the sky, three hours later, he was so distracted by his own alarm that he’d forgotten about them.
How many did he have? Three. There had been five, but he’d chewed two to calm his nerves while he read over the preflight waivers.
His throat ached for one, and his fingers trembled as he unwrapped it and popped it into his mouth. He shuddered with physical pleasure. It wasn’t as good as a bottle of water, but it would keep his thirst in check for now, and he had two more for later.
If his kingdom of clouds could provide him with an easy chair and an end table, couldn’t it give him a pitcher of water?
No. He didn’t think so. If it could’ve, it would’ve already. It was responsive to his immediate needs, providing as soon as the thought occurred. So it was—what—telepathic? Well, wasn’t it? How else could it know what an end table looked like? It had offered up not just any piece of furniture but Aubrey’s own Platonic ideal of an end table. That had to mean it could, in some way, read his memories and beliefs like a reference guide: Life Among the Humans.
So why couldn’t it give him water? he wondered, sucking thoughtfully on the last sliver of his Starburst. Wasn’t cloud stuff just water in the form of a gas?
Perhaps—but not this cloud stuff. When it hardened into the shape of a bed or a chair, it was not turning into snow.
In Dr. Wan’s waiting room, there were magazines on a coffee table: The New Yorker, Fine Cooking, Scientific American. Aubrey’s thoughts flashed to a photo he’d seen in an issue of Scientific: what looked like the ghost of a brick, a semitransparent cube of palest blue, improbably resting atop a few blades of grass. It had been something called aerogel, a block of solid matter that was lighter than air. Aubrey had an idea that the stuff beneath him now was similar in composition but vastly superior.
The last of his fruit chew melted away, leaving his mouth sticky sweet. He wanted water more than ever.
He thought he should try to visualize a pitcher of water anyway, before ruling it out. God knew it would be easy enough to imagine a jug of fresh water, blocks of ice clicking off each other inside the sweating glass. But before he could so much as close his eyes and concentrate, it came to him it was already there, sitting on the end table. It had fashioned itself while his thoughts were elsewhere—a perfect pitcher, made of fog, not glass, with a tumbler right beside it.
He lifted the pitcher by the handle and poured. A bubbling trickle of vapor and little cubes of hardened smoke poured slowly, dreamily into his cup.
“Well, that’s fucking great, thanks,” he said, surprised at his own bitterness.
The pitcher, ashamed, melted in his hand and drifted away. The cup puddled into fog and foamed silently off the end table, rejoining the cloud.
Aubrey shivered, fumbled about at his feet, and drew a blanket of billowing fumes across his legs. Better. He had lost his train of thought, tried to recall where he’d been and where he was going.
An inventory. He had been making an inventory. He had completed his examination of his physical supplies. Now he turned his attention to his psychological resources, whatever they might be.
He was Aubrey Langdon Griffin, single male, only child, twenty-two going on twenty-three. He was an accomplished Rollerblader, could speak with great fluency about MLB and the NBA, and could play the cello like a motherfucker.
Aubrey had never, in all his life, been so struck with his own near-total lack of survival skills. In grade school he’d had a friend, Irwin Ozick, who could make a compass with a needle and a cup of water, but right now if Aubrey had a cup of water, he’d drink it, and besides, how the fuck was a compass going to help him? Did it matter what direction he was moving in? After all, he couldn’t steer the goddamn thing.
“Can I?” he wondered aloud.
It had offered a bed when he was weary. It provided a coatrack when he had something that required hanging. It responded.
Could he turn it back around toward Cleveland?
No sooner had this notion occurred than he was pricked with another, more thrilling possibility. Could he just close his eyes and concentrate on descent? Why not just wish it down?
He closed his eyes and drew a long, chilly breath, and with all his heart told the cloud—
But he had not even completed mentally announcing what he wanted when he felt something push back. It was more a physical sensation than a psychological impression. His mind was filled, suddenly and forcefully, with the image of a smooth black mass, glassy and dense. It drove itself back into his thoughts, crushing ideas just as a boot heel might stamp a beer can flat.
He recoiled in his chair, hands flying to his brow. For a moment he was blind. For a moment there was nothing but the black block (no, not a block . . . a pearl) filling his head. His ears popped from the pressure. An unpleasant tingle shot through his nerve endings, a rashy sensation of prickling heat.
When his vision cleared, he was standing again. He didn’t recall leaping to his feet. He had lost a slice of time. Not long, he believed. Seconds, not minutes.
The dark, thought-flattening block (the pearl) had withdrawn but had left him feeling drained and woozy. He reeled unsteadily to the bed, climbed under the thick, snowy covers. The stars wheeled against the immense, crystal blackness of the night. The sky was a glassy black circle (a pearl) pressing down on him, squeezing him flat.
He shut his eyes and fell and fell and fell into the bottomless darkness of the unconscious.
7
HARRIET AND JUNE PLAYED THE open mics on Saturday nights in a pub called the Slithy Toves. Mostly they shared a mic and played ukuleles together and looked good in sweaters and pleated skirts and cute hats. June wore a top hat, purple velvet, with a little brown taxidermied woodcock peering down from the brim. Harriet wore a shockingly loud plaid bowler. They did covers of Belle & Sebastian and Vampire Weekend, mixed in with a couple of their own tunes. Now and then June ran behind a piano and played.