They had come and been stranded here and died, but the important thing was they had come, not by parachute but by balloon. They’d wound up on the cloud somehow, and at least two had planned to leave, and how were they going to do that? And was it odd that the cloud had disinterred the bodies but the gravestone remained, that big square, featureless block? He thought it was. He also noticed, for the first time, that the monument wasn’t much shaped like his idea of a traditional gravestone, or anyone else’s either. When the cloud generated something—a bed, an end table, a lover—it always worked from a template seized from the minds of its guests, but this wasn’t a template of anything. It was camouflage, and not very good camouflage at that.
Aubrey walked a woozy line between skeletons and stood before the gravestone that wasn’t a gravestone. He kicked it, once, twice, harder each time. Ivory shards of cloud stuff flew. When that wasn’t good enough, Aubrey dropped to his knees and tore with his hands. It didn’t take long.
At the center of the odd, cube-shaped monument was a wicker basket, large enough to hold a family of five. It was filled to the brim with silk the colors of the American flag. The wood of the basket was so old and dry it had lost most of its color. The silk was just as bad off, worn and bleached with age, the blues paler than the sky, the whites paler than the cloud.
He pulled it out in a big, shivering mass. That pile of silk—Aubrey remembered that balloonists called it the envelope—was no longer attached to the basket or the rusted-out burner but had been deliberately folded up and put away. A dozen slender ropes ran from rings around the skirt of balloon silk, but they were wound up into a neat bundle, all the iron D-rings carefully collected into one place.
With the silk removed, Aubrey could see that the basket was badly damaged. The bottom had been torn away, pulled right out. The basket itself was square in design, but the rattan had come apart at one corner, nothing holding it together. It had taken a savage blow, and Aubrey was gripped with a mental image of the balloon striking the hard cloud at high speed and dragging across it for a couple hundred yards, the wicker coming apart in a series of shattering cracks.
“They would’ve left me,” fat Marshall wrote forlornly, but no one had ever been going to depart in the wreck of the hot-air balloon. If someone had tried to fire up the burner, the balloon would’ve torn it right off what little remained of the basket.
Aubrey pinched some of the slippery old silk, rubbed it between his fingers. He unfolded it with care, spreading it out before him. He was aware of strenuously keeping his own mind blank, his head as clean and empty as the high blue sky. It took him almost twenty minutes to lay it all out, the immense envelope of silk, big enough to cover a small single-story house. In several places along the pleats, it had worn away to threads. In others the fabric was as thin as a daydream. At last he sat with the bundle of cords in his lap, the cords that had been deliberately disconnected from the balloon. When it was stretched out before him, it was funny how much it all looked like a parachute.
They would’ve left me.
Aubrey was too tired to climb back onto the Junicorn, but it didn’t matter. When he looked around, his ride had vanished.
He dragged himself between the dandy balloonist and the dead woman. He could’ve pulled a cozy blanket of cloud out of the smoke beneath him, but he was sick of mist and haze. Instead he drew the silk of the balloon over him, tucking it in around him, and holding the bundle of cord to his chest. The gun was digging into his leg, but not painfully enough for him to unzip his jumpsuit and pry it free.
How long did a bullet keep? he wondered.
19
“DYING LOOKS LIKE A LOT of hard work,” Harriet said at the reception after the memorial, looking very smart in a white blouse and a trim gray jacket. “When you’re healthy, you think, no matter what, you’d want to keep fighting. Squeeze every last drop out of your life. But cancer, dude. That shit fucks you up. It must be such a relief to just let it take you off. Like the best nap ever.”
They were at the Morrises’, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon on the back porch with June’s brothers.
The bigger one, Brad, leaned against one of the screens, the glare of the afternoon on his shoulders. Ronnie had plopped into one of the deep lawn chairs, sending up a puff of dust and pollen to whirl and glitter in a shaft of golden light. Harriet was perched on his armrest.
“There’s no sense in it,” Aubrey said, from one of the other chairs. “Who gets to have a full life and who doesn’t.”
Ronnie was already drunk. Aubrey could smell beer on him from three feet away, could smell it in his sweat.
“She did more in one day, without leaving her hospital bed, than people who live three times as long.” Ronnie tapped his temple meaningfully. “She did stuff in here, where time is more elastic. The stuff you think is all you ever know of the world. So if you can imagine a thing, it’s like you lived it. She told me once she’d been having an affair with Sting since she was fifteen. In here.” He gave his temple another profound tap. “She remembered hotel rooms. She remembered sitting at an outdoor café in Nice with him when the rain began to fall. That was her gift. She was predisposed to two things: imagination and cancer.”
Aubrey thought this was a jarring association, the sort of wisdom you only ever heard from the mouths of drunks. Imagination was a cancer of the heart. All those lives you carried around in your head that you wouldn’t ever get to live—they filled you up until you couldn’t breathe. When he thought of Harriet slipping on to the rest of her life without him, he felt like he couldn’t breathe.
“What about her list?” Harriet asked. “What about all this stuff she wants me to do for her? Jumping out of a plane, surfing the coast of Africa?” Harriet was beginning to cry again. She hardly seemed aware she was doing it. She cried easily and beautifully. “What about this list of regrets she left me with?”
Ronnie and Brad shook their heads. Harriet looked at them with wide-eyed wonder and hope, as if they were about to reveal some startling bequest that June had left behind for her beloved best friend.
“It’s not stuff she wished she did,” Ronnie said. “It’s stuff she wants you to do, ’cause of how much fun she had doing it herself. In her head.” Tapping his temple again. If he didn’t give himself a headache with the beer, he would with all the tapping.
“What are we doing first?” Aubrey asked.
Harriet looked at him blankly. He had the uneasy idea she’d briefly forgotten he was there.
“We’re jumping for her,” Brad said. “Already made the booking.”
“We’re jumping with her,” Harriet corrected him, fondling the little Junicorn she’d been carrying around all day.
“When do we go?” Aubrey asked.
“Oh, Aubrey,” Harriet said. “You don’t have to go. You’re scared of heights.”
“I haven’t thought about heights once since I got on my antianxiety meds,” he told her. “Thank God. I don’t want to be too scared to share the most important things with the most important people in my life.”
Harriet said, “You’ve already done a lot for June. You made our band worth listening to. She loved the shit out of you, you know.” Leaning across the space between them to rap her knuckles on his thigh. “She told me that all the time in the last couple of months.”
“She felt the same way about you. You were her favorite thing to talk about.”