He trod across a vast, creamy meadow, through a profound hush and peace. That silence was unnerving. One didn’t realize how much bustle and noise the world made until one was miles away from it, away from any other human.
Aubrey had just reached the milky white dome at the heart of the cloud, when a black flash filled his head, staggering him. A hand flew to his head and he put a knee against the side of the dome. The pain (the pearl) subsided, leaving a sore space in his mind. He waited, temples throbbing, for another black psychic blast, a human bowling pin preparing to be knocked off his feet by that rolling obsidian pearl. Nothing.
Aubrey thought he knew what would happen if he went on. He began to haul himself up the side of the dome. It was a steep climb, and he had to dig hands and toes into the cloud itself. It had a clammy, custardy texture to it. He might’ve been climbing a lump of semi-solid pudding.
Aubrey climbed two yards and was hit by another pulverizing black crash. It was like a branch snapping into his face. His eyes watered. He stopped, went still. That obliterating mental explosion was worse than unconsciousness. It was unbeing. For an instant, Aubrey was gone.
“What don’t you want me to see up there?” he said.
The cloud did not reply.
He decided to keep climbing, just to see what would happen—how intent it was on psychically kicking the shit out of him if he persisted. He made another handhold and another and
A dark weight dropped on his conscious mind like a falling chandelier.
But when his wet, leaking eyes cleared, he found he had continued to ascend, even in those blank moments when it seemed to him he simply ceased to be. He was midway up the dome, no longer climbing but crawling on all fours, as the curve became more gradual. The apex was maybe another ten minutes of struggle away, assuming his host didn’t decide to squash his mind like a man splitting a tick between his thumb and index finger.
He shut his eyes and rested, face damp from the effort of pulling himself up the slope.
Aubrey felt it then. Something held in the very center of the cloud (the pearl), like a marble held in one’s mouth. It hummed, very faintly, a low, muted drone, although Aubrey detected it right away. Maybe that was another survival skill—he had acute, sensitive ears, could hear a single off-key violin in a fifty-person string section. And with that gentle thrumming noise, he sensed a kind of ache. Could one person sense the ache in another? He was seized by a disconcerting, nonsen sical idea. He stood before the closed, locked door of a dark house. A family mourned within. A dead grandfather lay stiff in the sheets of his bed.
Aubrey wondered if he dared knock on that door and ask for directions home.
He believed that if he continued to climb, he would soon be met with another black thump, this one maybe as bad as the one that had swatted him the night before when he’d asked the cloud to take him home. He turned and sat on the side of the hill and looked upon his domain, a great white fiefdom of fluffy, barren cloud. From up here, maybe four stories above the rest of his island—but still far from the peak of the dome—he could no longer make out his cumulonimbus bed, his chair, his coatrack. They were lost against the pale background, impossible to make out amid the other irregularities of the cloud.
The castaway sat while the chill breeze cooled the sweat on his face.
Perhaps a mile off, he spied a jumbo jet, a 747, climbing into the higher ceiling of cloud above. He leapt up and waved his arms, pointlessly. He was no more visible to them than his bed was visible to him. Nonetheless he yelled and leapt.
The third time he jumped, he lost his footing and went sliding back down the dome on his ass. At the bottom he tumbled face-first into the drifting paleness. His face thumped on something fluffy and soft in a way that was different from the cloud’s spongy softness.
He felt around for it, frowning to himself, found it, and lifted it out of the haze—a stuffed purple horse with a silver horn and twee little wings behind its forelegs. Harriet had gone out of the plane with it, but hadn’t kept hold of it, and so he wasn’t alone on the cloud after all.
There was also the Junicorn.
9
JUNICORNS WERE HARRIET’S IDEA, SOMETHING to sell along with T-shirts and their locally produced CD, and it turned out to be an inspired business decision. Dudes bought them for their girlfriends; girls bought them for themselves; parents bought them for the kids. They sold so much horse, June said, they were practically heroin dealers.
Aubrey was in the conservatory at the Cleveland Institute of Music and had arranged access to their recording studio. On their little sheet of liner notes, Harriet was credited with one song, June with two. There were a pair of covers. Everything else was Cornell-Griffin-Morris. Aubrey brought in the melodies and figured out the arrangements and worked out the choruses, but as far as he was concerned, Harriet’s additional lyrics and June’s piano fills qualified them for equal credit. He was very good at talking himself into believing these were genuinely collaborative works. In some ways he believed it more than anyone.
“Am I the only one who thinks it’s stupid we’re called Junicorn when Aubrey is the musical genius?” Harriet asked one day when they were recording in the spacious studio with the exposed rough wooden beams. “We oughta call the band Griffin. We could sell stuffed Griffins.”
“Don’t give him ideas,” June said, and tinkled a bit of one of her songs, “I Hallucinate You,” on the piano. Either that or it was Coldplay’s “Princess of China.” All June’s songs sounded like other songs. One of them sounded so much like “Shadowboxer” that June had once embarrassed herself by forgetting her own lyrics and singing Fiona Apple’s lines when they were onstage. No one in the crowd noticed, and Harriet and Aubrey pretended not to notice either.
They rolled to the gigs in June’s battered old Volvo, but the boxes of Junicorns came along behind them in a dismal red Econoline driven by Ronnie Morris. The Morris brothers went to all the gigs as roadies, hauling the gear and the merch. They had learned that if you were with the band, there were frequently offers of free beer and always decent odds of meeting skanks. Along with the instruments and Junicorns and boxes of T-shirts, Ronnie and Brad almost always brought along the Pen Pal.