“It’ll be nice,” he said. “Like a portrait of us made of wax.” They were lying in his bed, cupped together to keep warm. Outside, the tree branches creaked with ice.
“I don’t know. The figures always turn out sort of weird-looking,” said Claire.
“They might come out all right,” said Pres, though he agreed that Flatt often mixed too much fat in the wax, which made the faces look eerily translucent. “I’m sure you’ll look beautiful.”
“I’d feel too guilty,” said Claire. “I don’t think I’m going to go back and work there again in the spring, and Earl puts a lot of effort into those dummies. He sticks in each hair himself with a needle. He orders the glass eyes special from a hospital.”
The wax museum had closed for the winter, and in the meantime Claire was working at a gift shop in town. The shop’s staple was its glass figurines, which the owner, Becca, fashioned in an upstairs workshop; glass men and women in all manner of activity: walking hand in hand, dancing, bowing to one another. Becca had taken a liking to Claire, and was teaching her how to craft the figurines herself. For the time being, she had Claire sculpting glass infants, as they were the simplest figurines the shop sold. Claire’s hours there were surprisingly long; usually she didn’t get home until after dark. It felt to Pres as though they were spending less and less time together every day. He tried to ignore the smell of the torch gas on her skin as they lay in bed.
“It’d be romantic,” Pres said. “We can go back when we’re old and see ourselves when we were just starting out.”
“You have to stick your face in plaster for an hour. Plus, it’s creepy. It’s like having yourself stuffed and mounted.”
“Jesus. You make it sound so morbid. Fine, forget it.”
“No, we can do it if you really want to.”
He turned away from her. “Drop it,” he said, surprised at his own anger. Next to the closet was a box of her clothes. She’d moved some things over in anticipation of their wedding, but it had been sitting there, sealed, for over a week. Just looking at the box made Pres’s face go hot. He thought about Earl, waiting for her to come back to the museum in the spring, standing there on opening morning, smiling, scanning the street for her, checking his watch.
She laughed and pressed herself to him. “Oh, come on, don’t be a grump,” she said.
“Get off,” he said, pushing her away.
“Are you serious?”
“Did you hear me?” he said. “Leave me alone. Get lost!”
She turned away from him. After she fell asleep he moved closer to her, hoping she might find him during the night, but she stayed away and he drifted off alone, staring at the population of lopsided glass babies on the night table.
“My feet are hurting now. They’re coming back.” Dex flexed his toes, which Pres had earlier cut loose from his frozen shoes with a scaling knife. “When my son, you know, Dennis, when he was just five or six, some girl gave him a doll like this one.” Dex turned the doll over in his hands. “For weeks he dragged it with him everywhere.”
Pres had seen photographs of Dennis. He was a large, solid boy with a heavy brow like Dex’s. An image of him came to Pres then: he saw Dennis standing at the edge of a wooded shore, on the rocks leading down from the forest into the water. Dennis wore his fatigues and carried his duffel bag on a sloping shoulder. Behind him, other boys in fatigues wandered through the pines, calling out names. Some were dragging duffel bags on the ground. Dennis peered out across the water at Pres, confused and frightened and wanting to come home.
“It was peaceful,” said Dex. “Being washed along on the current like that.”
“Washed away,” said Pres. “You’re lucky you came to your damn senses.” He took the doll from Dex and tossed it back into the river, where it quickly vanished beneath the dark water. Pres waited to see it sucked over the long fangs of ice hanging from the lip of the falls, but it never reappeared. He wondered if the doll would end up as part of the blue yodel the city was having that winter. A blue yodel was what people called it when a number of fish swam too close to the falls and were swept against the ice piled up at the cusp. The current held the fish there until they froze, and then slowly, as the ice pushed forward, they were rolled over the edge of the falls and worked down through the glassy stalactites in spiraling columns. All sorts of fish hung in the giant icicle closest to Pipe Island: perch and rainbow trout, sturgeon. None of them looked old, or sick. They were large fish with wide red gills. It seemed to Pres that they could have easily escaped the current had they wanted to, but there they were.
He looked at the falls. The afternoon sun had burned off the mist, and Pres saw the cascade of Horseshoe Falls curving toward shore, a bow of light sparkling across its apron. For a moment he could almost imagine how a fish, or a person, might be drawn in, romanced by the sheer rumbling beauty of it. There was something romantic about just offering yourself up like that, about surrendering so fully to magnetism.
He thought of Claire—Claire running her wand through a spout of blue flame and then touching it to the end of a glass pod, teasing out a foot, another foot, then the top of the baby’s head—and he suddenly understood that what had caused his anger the night before was worry. Having the dolls made would be like one more promise to each other that they’d endure. But how many promises did he need from her?
Below the falls, the ice floes had been pounded into a great arched bridge spanning the whole river, and people from town were strolling across this new promenade of brilliant ice. Children sledded from the center down to the bank on either side, and here and there, girls sold hot chocolate and apple cider from propped-up cardboard booths. Pres decided he would take Claire here after work. He’d buy her a candied lemon and tell her he was sorry for acting so ridiculously.
A shadow enveloped the island. Pres looked up and saw a blimp passing overhead, floating in the direction of the baseball field.
“That’s a pretty one,” Pres said. “Some I’m not fond of, but there’s real beauty to that one.”
“Pretty until wartime,” said Dex. But Pres could tell that Dex found the blimp attractive too, with its white fins and silver body. He considered leaving early and going to the festival—he knew Claire would take off work and go with her friends—but then he thought better of it. The baseball field would be crowded and loud. The naval officers had recently begun letting people from the audience climb aboard and tour the insides of the blimps. A few celebrations ago they’d invited a group of men and women up to play tennis on the blimp’s fins. At the most recent, they’d even offered to give a few lucky people short rides over the city.
Pres heard voices from below, and when he glanced down he saw everyone on the ice bridge waving and cheering at the blimp. He turned and waved at it too, until it disappeared behind the trees.
Pres drove on through Arizona. The heat was terrible, the day a clay oven; he could feel his sense of things evaporating inside the car. The land was ringed with all the colors of sunset and the sky showed a deep green. Though the ground around him seemed static, bleached and splintered towns kept sliding past, one after another, and eventually Pres became quite sure that the car, while anchored in one place, was actually dragging the towns to it, reeling in the land’s fabric with its spinning wheels. But the texture of the land was nothing like fabric, he thought. It was pocked and pitted like a fruit skin, and in his mind he was suddenly an ant crawling across the rind of an enormous blood orange. Then he was a tiny crab scurrying across the ocean floor. On all sides lay tremendous pieces of red coral, and far above, huge white jellyfish gently pumped through the water, dragging tendrils of rain behind them.
Then he saw it, and everything became clear again. He was in western Arizona. Those were clouds. These were formations of rock, nothing more, and that was the blimp’s silver nose peeking out from behind one of them. He opened his mouth to scream, to laugh, but his throat was too parched. He swung the Ford around toward the stone tower and stomped on th
e gas. The car gunned forward. Claire’s compact slid off the dash and fell into his lap. He would sneak up on the blimp from behind. He would surprise it! The steering wheel rattled in Pres’s hands as he roared around the back of the rock tower. He could see the blimp clearly now, hovering just above the cracked, red dirt.
Beneath the blimp’s nose, a small crew of men had just finished drawing water from a stone well. Pres could see some of them winding in the snake-like tube of an electric pump from the well’s mouth, while others carried plump, jiggling sacks of water over their shoulders toward the blimp. Pres did not know whether the water was to be used for ballast or coolant or just for drinking, but he knew it wasn’t going to reach the blimp. He grabbed the gun from the passenger seat and fired it out the window at the line of trudging men. The crack echoed off the rock walls. The men dropped their sacks and ran for the blimp’s folding staircase.
The blimp was right in front of him now, just yards ahead. He was near enough to see the men’s frightened faces, the gold stripes at the cuff ends of their tan shirts and pants as they rushed up the steps. The last of them disappeared inside the blimp just as Pres skidded to a stop beneath the massive tail fins. He jumped out and ran between the mooring ropes toward the staircase, which was already drawing up into the cabin. The muscles of his legs burned.
“I’m here!” he screamed as the stairway panel clicked shut above him. “Claire!” He pounded on the hatch with the butt of the gun, smashing dents in the wood planking. He rushed over to a curtained window and raised the gun again, but the hot blast from the blimp’s engines knocked him backward, whipping and cutting at his arms and neck. He tried to shield his eyes from the storm whirling around him. Then came the horrible tearing noise as the mooring rings ripped loose from the ground, each one dangling a crumbling heap of earth. Pres glanced above the crook of his elbow at the blimp. His hands shook with panic as he saw the cabin rise away from him. He grabbed at a nearby mooring rope and clutched it as tightly as he could. The blimp’s nose tilted down slightly, and then it began to glide forward. Pres ran behind it, clinging to the rope, but it soon picked up speed and before he knew it he was being dragged on his belly through the dirt. Pebbles flayed the bottoms of his arms. The friction stung so badly that he thought he wouldn’t be able to hold on. Then he was being peeled up, lifted into the air as the blimp ascended.
Pres crossed his ankles around the rope, tightening his grip. He looked down at the landscape falling away beneath him, at the wrinkles in the red earth, the torched heaps of rock. He glanced over his shoulder and saw his car, his battered Model T, growing smaller and smaller until it vanished in a whirl of sand.
Pres turned back to the blimp. He knew that all that stood between him and death was his grip on the cable, and yet even as he clung to its steel braiding a strange calm came over him, an almost restful feeling. Things were out of his hands now; he was being carried toward the end of his journey by the blimp, which he now saw was called The August. The name was printed in fine gold lettering over the cabin’s rear window.
The air thinned and grew cold and Pres began to feel light-headed. His shoe fell off and tumbled through the sky. Breathing became an effort. Soon he could feel the blood coursing up his arms. But he would not let go. The rope felt a part of him, the blimp too, and for a moment when he gazed up at its body, sunlight gleaming off its silver skin, what he saw floating up there was not a blimp at all but an extension of himself, his own heart, swelled to bursting and released from his chest. His heart, swinging him through the sky. He thought about all the places and wonders he’d seen these past months, and felt a strange gratitude toward Claire for taking him all this way.
He turned back to the cabin and tried to focus on the word August. It was just the right name, Pres thought as a falcon whirled past him. As a child, he’d always thought of August as a time of rousing, the month when everything was rustled awake from the bright dream of summer. And that was just what he was going to do for Claire. He looked at the curtains blocking his view inside the cabin. They were purple and velvety, but they did not look so heavy to Pres. He could push them aside with one hand.
I ONCE LIVED NEXT TO A MAN WHO WAS INDESTRUCTIBLE. HIS name was Gay Isbelle and he cheated death three times—twice before I’d met him, and then once in my company.
It was important for me to be around someone like Gay at that point in my life, someone invulnerable, as I was scared and lonely and hiding from my family, which was, and still is, one of the wealthiest in the country. Their money goes back to the days of gas and steam, and the root of the family name means both “vision” and “light” in a language that will not be revealed here. They had detectives out looking for me, detectives with real means, but in Florida at that time, for a short, wonderful period not too long ago, it was easy to find employment without identification of any shape or sort. It seemed you could open a police station with just a few phony papers to tack on the wall. You could become whoever you wanted; that was Florida right then. I had a book of over fifteen thousand baby names, and I changed mine whenever I felt like it.
Gay and I both lived on the second floor of the Shores Motel, which sat on the outskirts of Orlando, near the trashiest of that neighborhood’s three convention centers. This particular convention center didn’t even have a name; it was simply marked by a sign over the interstate exit that read CNV. CNTR. #16, as though it wasn’t even worth plugging vowels into. It only hosted the most dismal conventions—gatherings for the fan clubs of otherwise long-forgotten stars; reunions for high school classes that graduated three, even four generations back, so long ago that only a few ancient people showed up to wander beneath the wrinkled balloons. Whenever a convention came to Cnv. Cntr. #16, most of its attendees washed into the Shores, and it was during one such convention that I met Gay.
I never found out what, exactly, the purpose of the convention was, but that weekend the motel was full of people with all sorts of pigmentation disorders. I saw a woman by the ice machine with skin spotted like a cheetah’s. In the elevator, a man with a purple face nodded at me. A little boy splashing around in the pool was covered from head to toe in a dazzling flock of red butterfly-shaped splotches. I’d never realized how many different kinds of albino existed, but here they all were: some just a shade too pale, others with flesh as white as lobster meat.
The afternoon I met Gay, I was in the motel’s restaurant bar, a Chinese affair called the Happy Fish, Plus Coin. A young albino woman from the convention was eating dinner in the booth across from me. Her eyes were pink, and her hair was as clear as water; it hung down her back in a transparent braid. I couldn’t stop staring at her. She looked just like my sister Melanie, or what I imagined Melanie would look like as a ghost.
Growing up, most of my brothers and sisters were fiercely competitive, even cruel. But Melanie acted different. Though she was older by a full five years, she took an interest in me; she started protecting me from the others. She taught me things—how to trip someone bigger than myself, how to sneak out of the brownstone (climb out the easternmost kitchen window and lower yourself down onto the patio wall. There, now you know too!). Melanie was small and clever and quick. She never looked pretty in photographs, but in real life there was something especially beautiful about the true expressions of her face—the way only one of her eyebrows arched with her smile, the dimpling of her chin when she scowled. The school she went to forced its students to wear a uniform that included a red blazer embossed on the chest with a gold crest. In all my memories Melanie is wearing that red blazer. She had a friendship with one of our family’s drivers, an older Portuguese man named Julius, and she would have Julius secretly drive us places after school: to Chinatown, or to Coney Island, where we’d walk along the pier and watch the families fishing for crabs with plastic baskets they’d stolen from the supermarket.
Once in a while Melanie had Julius take us to the train station, where she’d buy herself a ticket on a northeasterner, a ticket that she sai
d would take her away for good. This was back when I was eight or nine and she was in her early teens. I’d walk with her to the platform, where she’d kneel down and put her hand on my shoulder or my cheek and say something like “Listen, little man. I’m taking this train all the way to Toronto, understand? That’s in the country above us. When I get there, I’ll find someplace awesome for us to live and then I’ll send for you, secretly. You’ll get a letter in the mail with no return address, and when you open it, it’ll just be a train ticket. That’ll be your cue….”
She’d give me a long hug and hand me something of hers—one time she gave me her watch; another time a pen with a tiny cityscape inside, complete with a ferry that slowly sailed from end to end—and then she’d board the train car and I’d stand there at the platform and watch as the train huffed to life and then made its way down the long tunnel and out of the station. I’d watch until the train was just lights, a swirl of vapor, nothing.
After that I’d walk through the station to the taxi stand, where Julius would be leaning against the car waiting for me, brushing lint off the bill of his driver’s cap. He’d wink at me and nod to the passenger door and I’d get in and together we’d drive alongside the train tracks to Ruppendale or East Hunting, whichever suburb Melanie had actually bought a ticket to. If she didn’t get off at one, we’d drive on to the next, and as we did, no matter how often this happened, part of me always became frightened that this time she wouldn’t get off the train, that today she’d keep on going and ride it farther than Julius and I could follow. But she always did get off somewhere nearby, and when we pulled up to the station she’d be waiting for us, sitting on a bench in those high gray socks and that red blazer of hers, its crest like a wax seal stamped over her heart.
My father moved Melanie out to the West Coast just before my tenth birthday. I was at school and never got to say good-bye. When I got home, my other brothers and sisters were packing her belongings into boxes. She works for our uncle now, and spends most of her time on a plane, traveling between offices. It’s large, but it has pontoons and can land as gracefully as a seagull on the water. There’s a plane waiting for me, too. My real name is painted on both engines.