Most of us believe either the conjectures of the scientists—who rest the weight of their authority upon a firm foundation of past accomplishments, among them the discovery of the constant speed of light, of the constant speed of matter, and of levity, that force which separates all objects from each other and keeps us balanced here between the earth and the stars—or the conjectures of the clergy.
“Ye shall be as stewards above the earth,” reads the Book, “over man and over fowl and over every flying thing that flyeth through the skies.” Our stewardesses, contend the clergy, citing as evidence this and other verses, function as something akin to a surrogate God. Stewardesses, they say, are representatives of the divine will, enacting sacred rituals and preserving the hallowed order. Through the antennae of their silverpoint fillings, of their numinous and cycling breath, they receive the pulse of messages from a higher plane of existence. The stewardesses will neither confirm nor deny these claims. They ignore our hymns and oblations and our fitful sectarian squabbles. They aren’t taking questions. Though civil enough—I’ve yet to see a stewardess strike a child, say, or expectorate in public— they are often aloof. From beneath a veneer of natty buttoned uniforms and thin hazy eyes they project a hint of menace, and just a suggestion of scales. When a believer, his hands damply clasped in prayer, approaches a stewardess and asks of her a sign, a token display of dew or wind or fire, she will offer him an antiseptic smile, a pillow, and a bag of peanuts and direct him firmly to his seat. Still, faith persists.
Central to our theology is the contention that God is steering our course, that we’re not simply wending along the trail of some ancient wrong turn, straying without purpose through the multitude of clouds, wandering here in seclusion; that we’ve aim and that we’ve bearing; that we’re traveling with regard to destination. God, our theists propose, is capably and majestically engaged in a sequence of sacred and arcane transactions—maintaining altitudes, monitoring radarscopes, guiding trajectories, pitches, and rolls. He is heedful of our needs and of our hushed, sunken wishes. Long ago, He spoke with the voice of a thunderclap, addressing our ancestors from thin air, and the intercommunication speakers curling like halos above each seat represent the conviction that He will soon break His millennial silence, extending a golden invitation of voice to His faithful. The occasional believer claims to have heard the ripple and crackle of speech sounding from these devices, but such claims, we have learned, are of dubious authenticity. The button by the intercom, when pressed, evokes only an anxious wheeze of static. Some profess that God’s guiding hand once manifested itself as well in the back-and-forth play of the mandates posted throughout our vessel—that in the days of our grandparents’ grandparents these mandates were signs of His will, lit or extinguished as a measure of divine vexation. No longer. Now, were the signs demanding that we refrain from smoking and fasten our seat belts quenched, we would sob and rend our garments, beat our breasts and wring our hands. Shivering and biting our nails, we would wait for the flames and the sudden, angular convulsions.
Although tensions were once the rule between theology and science, they have diminished in recent years. Our clergy and our scientists both search the gridwork of our travels for a set of present coordinates, and on this path they have each discovered the other. On this same path I have found myself, drifting through the world without holiness or reason—a pinch between remembered and anticipated time.
The wings of a plane appear separate, self-contained, and unattached, but are actually all of one piece, passing through the plane’s body and under the feet of its passengers.
When children are born, the fuselage fills with the scent of human. The bankers order cocktails, the Malthusians mutter of population density, the voyeurs peek across aisles and over seat tops. The barbers knot their bow ties and croon lullabies in groups of four. The accountants huzzah, the cartographers smile, and the tobacconists hand out cigars. When children are born, the stewardesses barrel down the aisles, wheeling carriages fraught with fruit juice and ginger ale and vest-pocket bottles of liquor, asking that we return to our seats, please, immediately, and extinguish all smoking materials. When children are born, their carry-on luggage is found resting securely in the overhead compartments.
Our children enter this world bearing their futures in the form of oblong leather suitcases, green canvas duffel bags, zip-and-hasp purses, and multiform other containers, their luggage tags empty of address and destination. The contents of these vessels often imply the path that a child will travel—anticipating hobbies and humors, predilections and professions—and the moment when a newborn’s luggage is first opened is met with unease and much stirring of the heart by his parents. A child with an erector set will likely be an engineer; with a telescope an astronomer or geographer; with a text on the merits of the Library of Congress versus the Dewey Decimal System a librarian. A child born with a powdered wig will likely be a magistrate, with a stethoscope a doctor, with a whiskey flask a lost and splintered soul. From time to time, a child is found with stores of illicit substances sealed in plastic pouches or small glass vials within jars of ground coffee. These children, our stewardesses tell us, will be placed in remand when we reach the proper authorities—a threat that rings hollow, it would seem, for more often than not such children come of age, marry, and entertain highly successful careers as politicians or wealthy gadabouts. Folklore tells of a child who arrived here with a liberal supply of gelignite, detonating caps, duct tape, and inflammatory leaflets. He was ejected from the plane, they say, and his paraphernalia with him. Those who tell this story speak also of wily pretended innocence, of ducks and snakes who drown in lakes, and of resident natures, inborn streaks of character, that we can’t suppress and can’t evade.
My possessions are as follows: three black ballpoint pens, a ream of narrow-ruled notebook paper, several paperback novels, a thesaurus, an electric razor, a wallet and a walletful of business cards and folded bills and photographs of smiling people I don’t know, a heavy woolen blanket, a pair of socks—one with a snarl of loose thread in the toe—and a pair of cotton briefs, several cassette tapes and a portable cassette player without batteries, a roll of peppermint lozenges, two packs of chewing gum, and the clothes on my back, and on my front, and on my sides. Also: a nervous reserve, a repressed libido, a wandering pain, an overindulgent imagination, a distaste for the word basically, a keen memory, a flawed but burgeoning sense of aesthetics, an affinity for balloons, three facial tissues—as coarse as parchment— plucked from the washroom and folded in my pocket, a song that I don’t know pulsing steadily in my ears (it begins Button, button, who’s got the button—that’s all I remember), a memory perhaps not so keen after all, a history of dreams with blatant lingering symbols, a cold sore, two hangnails, and on some days not a friend in the world.
This craft is a lesson in social gradation, a traveling structure of class distinction. Life here comes in strata. The wealthy reside in first class—privy, I’m told, to multifold luxuries: palatable meals replete with frozen gourmet desserts, stimulating periodicals, daily sponge baths, and access to a masseur, a masseuse, and a sauna. The rest of us sit sequestered from the privileged few before the quill and gather of thick maroon curtains, one in either aisle, behind which, if you listen carefully, you can hear the festal, immaculate sounds of good fortune: quiet conversations, the ting of fine silver, and shameless and manifest snoring. I, like most, live in coach. I dine on a bland lettuce-bed cuisine. I have my own window and a measure of solitude (a rare thing, this, but my mother’s seat has been left empty since she went her falling way), and I consider myself fortunate. I could be closer to the washroom—this I admit—but not without being forced to abide the jostle of hips and elbows, the nods and curt hellos of waiting strangers. I am pleased with my position in society. The disadvantaged and the dispossessed reside within the underbelly of our ship— coughing, uncounted, in cargo. Though we know they exist, we rarely see them. Sometimes we hear the clamor of a scuffle, on
occasion the recurrent bass rumble and spluttering drum of an upswelling personal stereo. Once I heard somebody shouting about somebody else’s clothesline.
On holidays, the wealthy march through our aisles on their way to cargo, bearing as gifts food stamps, bottles of brandy, and gleaming silver trays laden with baby potatoes and redolent, dressed turkeys. They claim, when asked for donations, that they don’t support charity or handouts, they don’t support something for nothing. Give a man a fish, they say, and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime (an expression I have never understood, though I suspect what it means is this: Throw a man overboard, and you don’t have to feed him at all). Still, they always come back from cargo empty-handed.
My mother used to tell me this story: once, she would say, long before you were born, the world was nothing but cloud. Nimbostratus and cumulonimbus. Stratocumulus and altostratus. Lengthy rolling cords of cloud spun one about the other. Isles and wheels and braids of cloud billowed and drifted through space. A wadwork of clouds bottled earth and breath and ocean, corking everything, sealing it in, and the world looked from a distance like a swollen mass of cotton.
Into this hold of vapor there flew a plane. The plane, my mother would say, in which you’re sitting here beside me, the very plane in which I’m telling you this story. This plane had soared through many galaxies, passing flights of strange and wondrous things as it traveled, and as it flew across the reach of space, weaving and dipping past moons and stars and planets, it left behind it a trail of condensation—protracted, white, and, it must be noted, very much resembling a filament of cloud.
Now, as the airplane approached this world of ours, the clouds grew curious. For the first time in the history of all things cloud, a stranger neared: not a comet, not the moon, but one of their own. This was a cloud, they could see—a cloud that had crossed the inter-stellar medium, with baffling courage and otherworldly vigor, bearing at its head what appeared to be a drop of mercury. Heaven only knew its port of exit. Heaven only knew its port of call.
The approaching cloud was flying quickly, and it might, the clouds realized, pass them by, so with their gusty voices, they called to him. Hey, they cried, and here, they cried, but to no avail. The thread of cloud unreeled itself nearer—and with a sudden shifting tone flew past. The clouds, puzzled, knit their brows, and the sky went rippling away.
It may be, suggested a voice, that we’re out of earshot.
Or perhaps, said another, that bead of mercury has lodged itself in his ear.
The other clouds thought this a splendid hypothesis, for squall as they might, the thread of cloud simply hastened away.
Clouds are almost nothing in the sky, just drops of condensation riding the wind, but things of breath and water can be quite resourceful when the times demand. And so, gathered one and all, a concurrence of clouds, stratus and cirrus and altocumulus, concocted a plan. So that the passing stranger might hear them, they would pluck the bead of mercury from his ear.
From the brawniest of thunderheads to the smallest wisps of haze, the clouds began to coalesce, swelling and sluicing and splashing about one another. They curled and foamed into a vast grasping hand and then heaved themselves higher into space, growing thinner and thinner as they reached away.
Just as the airplane was sailing out of reach, two fingers of cloud— index and thumb—plucked it from its course, and a palm of cloud crooked around it and drew it along the wire of its wrist toward home. When the clouds again dispersed, they found matters not at all as they had left them. For unwittingly, as they had drawn away—past the winds, past the moon, and through the void—they had uncorked the bottle in which was kept the world: the blue-green, vortical ocean. The trees and the fields and the mountains. The ripe, breathing land and all the lights scattered across it.
And the ball of mercury the clouds had carried home was not a ball of mercury at all. It was, it seemed, alive.
And so, my mother would tell me, the airplane on which we ride, and in which your head is resting on my lap, circles this planet, leaving behind it a streak of cloud—and since cloud is one thing and earth another, fated to remain distinct, we soar here over the fields and the oceans, waiting for the day when we might land. The clouds have become just a part of this world, melting above it in the sky. The condensation trail—hanging like a blur across the lens of night—has dispersed, but never quite vanished, becoming what we call the Milky Way. And the world, my child—the sunken, wayward, rolling world—is but a misunderstanding of vapors.
My mother would tell me this story often, when the sun had crept from out of the sky. My head in her lap, I would gaze at the ceiling, listening to her voice and waiting to fall asleep.
The woman who lives in front of me, the one with the black hair that drapes itself over the crest of her chair; the woman whose face (eyes, cheek, turn of lip) I can’t recall; the woman whose face, when I see it, seems to bypass my eyes altogether, drawing itself into focus like an image hidden inside me all along; whose fingers rise from the nape of her neck and drift through her hair like upswept wisps of smoke; this woman, who sends my heart blowing through me like a bomb—I believe that she’s bearing my child.
I’m not sure. It happened four months ago, and we haven’t spoken since. When she passes by, I turn my head as if I’m looking out the window. I watch the ailerons lift and subside as the plane banks into the wind. I watch our shadow flit and gutter over the clouds. When she sees me coming, she feigns sleep. I won’t rest my feet in the bay beneath her chair, and she won’t recline for fear of touching me. We are like children who wrap their hands over their eyes and believe that the world has gone blind, as if we both wanted this, and I don’t know why. She never hurt me, I never hurt her. We just don’t talk.
It was happenstance, a chance event, an up and a down in a clear blue sky. The sun hovered overhead, blazing from its apex and blinking like a star from the wing. We were flying through the first lashings of a fit of wind shear. Wind shear, as a rule, is no menace. Its effects are modest—the quick shiver of cutlery on a tray table, perhaps, or the flutter of an overhead light. On rare occasions, someone standing in an aisle will stumble and steady himself against an armrest. This was different, though. The doors of yawning luggage compartments fell shut in a series of heavy whoompfs. Loose window shades slid down their chamfers. A sound like metal striking metal came from somewhere underneath the plane, and luggage caromed noisily above us, slamming from wall to wall and rupturing zippers and buckles in a muffled white explosion of socks. When the wings began to pendulate (throwing the passengers to the floor and the ceiling, slinging the fuselage around like a rubber ball fastened to a paddle), she was walking past. I turned my head.
She staggered from seat to seat in the aisle—once, twice—without moving forward. I could feel at this point the jog and back-sling of my body against the seat belt. I could hear her drawing breath, a series of rapid hiccups. She slipped then, and in a glissade of pebbly limbs she fell into the chair beside me. “Are you all right?” I asked. She nodded. The pupils of her eyes were like two tadpoles skittering nervously through standing water. She held her right hand pressed to her heart. I could call someone, I thought to say—but as the first syllable rose from my throat, her torso fell rigidly, sharply forward. She tucked her head between her knees. “Hello?” I said. My finger grazed the ridgeline of her back.
Across the aisle, a tray table swung down from its cove and, striking level, shuddered on its hinges (ours—I checked—were secured behind their latches).
“You should buckle up,” I said. No response. The cabin was still reeling, and each time it rose she skipped slowly forward in her chair. Reaching over her, I grasped the pin frame of her seat belt. I threaded it through the hollow of her body—which, collapsed upon itself, resembled the thick maroon curtain at the head of our cabin that had fallen seconds before in a heap to the floor—and I buckled her in. With the back of my hand, I could feel tiny, quick breath
s budding in her abdomen. The turbulence subsided.
I waited with my hands clasped in my lap, and soon she lifted her head—sitting upright and breathing calmly, slowly, through her nose. Her eyes were closed. Just before she opened them, both of her brows flexed gently downward, and a ripple of thin muscles passed over her eyelids. I had never noticed such a thing before. She looked at the seat belt fastened across her lap, and then, quizzically, at me. “Sorry,” I said.
I heard the faint pop—like a bead of water striking the sink—of her lips as they disjoined. “No matter,” she said, and she unbuckled herself, standing as if to leave.
“Wait,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“So where were you going,” I asked, “before?” (This is precisely the sort of thing I find myself saying if I’m not careful.)
“I was thinking,” she said, “that I ought to find a place to sit down.” She sat down. “It’s never been this bad before—has it? The turbulence, I mean.”
And then, from the blue, we were talking.
She said she was a tribologist—she studied interacting surfaces in relative motion. We discussed wing drag and crosswinds and friction. We discussed many things, as shafts of windowed light kicked toward the ceiling, and she touched, once, the bay of my neck.
A stewardess, happening by, addressed us in a voice murky with suspicion. Would we, she asked, like to make any duty-free purchases—a carton of cigarettes, perhaps, despite long-standing proscriptions against open flames and smoking itself, or a matching set of stuffed bears, aviator and aviatrix, with soft brown fluff and bomber jackets? Since we were now leaving international waters, she explained, this could be our last opportunity. My partner declined for the both of us, and the stewardess reluctantly left. Her lips were pressed together like thin white loaves, and her head swiveled to watch us as she walked away.