by Joe Meno
ANNOUNCER: WGN Chicago and the Pennsylvania Coal Company are proud to bring you the continuing adventures of the Airship Brigade. Pennsylvania Coal Company, the one with the blue flame. Episode One Hundred: Mysterious Islands in the Sky. Young Alexander Lightning, teenage boy and supreme commander of the Airship Brigade, has found himself captured, along with his closest companions—his best friend, Hugo, Tor the Man-Ape, the intelligent Doctor Jupiter, and his darling daughter Darla—all held hostage on the strange floating cloud city of Xenon. Their miraculous airship, the X-1, has suffered incredible damage, seemingly beyond repair. Young Alexander, terrified for his life, finds himself trapped, his wrists harshly bound, as he is forced to face the Evil Cloud Emperor’s unimaginable wrath.
EMPEROR: Your puny world has caused me turmoil for much too long. After I am done disposing of you, Alexander Lightning, I will turn my Inviso-ray machine on your helpless planet.
ALEXANDER: As soon as I get myself free, you’ll pay for what you’ve done. Earth will never fall victim to your cruel plans.
EMPEROR: Brave words, Alexander Lightning. Without you to protect it, your world will soon be decimated. For one precise blast from my Inviso-ray will leave your planet in absolute panic, rendering all things on your puny earth completely invisible. Chaos will reign supreme, and soon, with my cloud army, I will easily conquer what remains, plundering what I please.
ALEXANDER: Do what you must with me, but leave our planet alone!
EMPEROR: Kidnapped scientists of earth, prepare the Inviso-ray.
SCIENTISTS: Yes, Emperor Xenon. We will do as you command.
ALEXANDER: Why do those scientists obey your commands?
EMPEROR: It is mind control, dear boy. Using this telepathic helmet, I can command anyone I wish to do my bidding.
DARLA: Do you really think he has the power of mind control, Father?
DOCTOR JUPITER: It’s possible, my dear. You saw how easy his cloud-army did away with our airship using their powerful ray cannons. I’m afraid their technology is much more advanced than ours.
TOR: Tor frightened. Tor no want to see jungle destroyed.
ALEXANDER: Mind control or not, friends, Tor is right. We can’t let the emperor go through with his evil scheme. I think I have a plan.
EMPEROR: Guards! Escort our prisoners to the Coliseum of the Unfathomable.
GUARD: Yes, Your Majesty.
EMPEROR: Now you will see what we do with uninvited guests, my dear boy.
HUGO: Where do you think they’re taking us, Alexander?
ALEXANDER: I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s for ice-cream sundaes. Look, they’re bringing us into a coliseum.
(The roar of an angry crowd erupts from the record.)
DARLA: Yes, look, look at all of the people. Who are they?
DOCTOR JUPITER: I’m afraid they’re not here to cheer us on, my dear.
HUGO: This is all my fault. If I hadn’t been trying that stunt with the X-1…
ALEXANDER: Nobody blames you for what happened, Hugo. It was an honest mistake. Who knew what was going to happen when we followed that mysterious air current?
DOCTOR JUPITER: It now seems it was just a trap to bring us here all along.
(A terrible shriek echoes from the distance.)
DARLA: Gosh, Alexander, what was that?
ALEXANDER: I don’t know. We mustn’t be afraid. We’ve faced worse before, I’m sure of it.
DOCTOR JUPITER: Yes. Just remember the Enchanted Sands of the Mad Sultan.
DARLA: And the Blind Bandits of the Himalayas.
ALEXANDER: And the Air Pirates of Monrovia.
EMPEROR: Prepare the Unfathomable!
ALEXANDER: That doesn’t sound very encouraging. Doctor Jupiter. Do you have any ideas?
DOCTOR JUPITER: I’m afraid not, Alexander.
ALEXANDER: Tor, do you think you can free yourself from these terrible cloud manacles?
TOR: Tor not think so. Too strong for Tor.
ALEXANDER: Well, if we can’t use our brains, and we can’t use our brawn, all we have left is our bravery.
DARLA: What are you going to do, Alexander?
ALEXANDER: Just use a little earth gumption, that’s all. Tor, as soon as they open that monster’s cage, I want you to try and distract it. Doctor Jupiter and Darla, see if you can find a way out of here. Hugo and I will do our best to put a stop to that Inviso-ray machine.
DOCTOR JUPITER: I will do all I can, Alexander.
ALEXANDER: We’ll see how terrible this Unfathomable creature really is.
(The Unfathomable howls, drawing closer still, as a thematic swell of violins marks the end of the episode.)
ANNOUNCER: Will Alexander Lightning face the Unfathomable and survive? Will the Evil Emperor of Cloud City complete his terrible scheme? Will the Airship Brigade free themselves and save the earth in time? Tune in tomorrow night for the exciting conclusion to Mysterious Islands in the Sky. Tomorrow’s episode brought to you by Ovaltine.
FATHER AND SON, sitting on the sofa together. Father and son, listening to the needle slide through the final silent groove, skipping for a second, before the record arm abruptly retracts. The fifteen-minute episode is now over. Father and son with a secret between them, still imagining the world above, the mysterious islands in the sky, the Unfathomable. Jonathan leaps to his feet and flips the record over, replacing the arm, and, sitting there staring at the spinning shellac, both of them silent. They manage a kind of stillness, a dreamy quiet where their thoughts of their own individual futures—as clear as the voices from the radio program—beam as bright and undamaged as rays from any distant galaxy. Father and son listen to the radio show, listening to each other think.
“Dad, will people ever live on the moon?” the son asks.
“I think so,” the father says. “I’m quite sure of it. Would you like to go visit there one day?”
The boy nods, without having to think. “As long as I don’t have to go alone,” he says.
“No,” the father says. “One day, you and I’ll go. We’ll make a regular trip out of it. How does that sound?”
To Whom It May Concern,
There is no such thing as a Good War.
To Whom It May Concern,
You loved your son too much to tell him how much you loved him.
To Whom It May Concern,
You did not fly to the moon. It was a dream you were too afraid to ever pursue.
AT A HALF HOUR past midnight the nursing home is eerily quiet. Between waking and sleeping, between memory and dream, Henry’s eyes slip open, a startled breath escaping from his lips, a single word appearing along the brine of his teeth: Moon. Moon. Of course, he thinks. He is falling, falling, falling, the moon slipping farther and farther away. He is drifting helplessly toward earth. Henry struggles for a second breath, unsure where he is exactly. His arms and legs feel cold and stiff. He turns and sees someone sitting in a chair, breathing deeply beside him. Henry does not recognize the other man’s face. He begins to panic, stirring beneath the stern white sheets, but no sound escapes his mouth. He cannot talk. He cannot yell. All he can do is blink.
BESIDE HIS FATHER, Jonathan has fallen asleep. At first he does not notice that he is still holding his father’s hand. The television is still flickering silently. Jonathan squints, placing his palm against his eyes, and then he looks down at his father’s tiny, wrinkled hand. He kisses it. His father is not quite awake, not quite asleep, his eyes blinking nervously, his breath slow, aggravated, but deep.
“The moon,” his father suddenly whispers, sure of the importance of these two final words. The old man’s eyelids twitch a little, the lashes short, his father’s lips muttering, murmuring oblique words as he dreams.
“The moon?” Jonathan asks, but his father does not respond. He watches Henry’s face, his lips, for another word, another sign, but nothing else comes. Finally, Jonathan stands, yawning, then switches off the television. He stretches, pulls on his jacket, whispers goodnight to his
father, and steps quietly out of the room.
JONATHAN FINDS HIS Peugeot parked in its spot at the far end of the empty nursing home parking lot and sits in the driver’s seat, silent, tired, more sad than he has ever been in his adult life. He looks up at the glare of the yellow streetlights, rising there just above his car. There is something moving there, a flash of something that appears and then disappears just as quickly. Jonathan blinks, leaning over the steering wheel, staring up toward the small circles of fluorescent illumination, and there, there is actually something moving up there: moths, dozens of them, a cloud of gray and brown, the dust from their wings making tiny flecks of darkness somewhere among the bright shape of white and yellow light.
Twenty-one
ON THURSDAY MORNING, ONLY A FEW HOURS LATER, Jonathan awakes to find his daughter Thisbe standing over him, crying. Lying on the sofa, Jonathan is incredibly confused at first, looking up into his daughter’s wide, panicked eyes, her small pink mouth slightly agape. When Jonathan sits up, asking her what is the matter, he is aware of the world spinning, the entire den trembling, his daughter’s face slipping out of focus, becoming soft and fuzzy.
“It’s Mom,” Thisbe says again. “She left us. For good.”
Jonathan scratches at his beard, sighs, and then tries to understand.
“What time is it?”
“Six. In the morning. I got up because I heard Mom’s car leaving. You know how it makes that one sound?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it made that sound. And when I got up, she was gone.”
Jonathan nods. “Let’s not get excited. Let’s take a look around first.”
Together they climb the stairs, then walk quietly down the hallway. They stare into the master bedroom without saying a word. Both of the bedroom closets are standing open, as are a few of the dresser drawers. Most of Madeline’s clothes and shoes are gone, plastic hangers lying on the floor or resting uselessly on the bed. Her suitcases have been taken as well. Jonathan stares at the empty space where his wife’s clothes should be, at the spot where the suitcases ought to be standing, his eyes trembling with tears, his pulse pounding loudly in his head.
“What are we going to do, Dad?” Thisbe asks. “What are we going to do?”
At first Jonathan does not answer. He only stares at the unmade bed, at the empty dresser, at the bedroom which he has not slept in for almost three weeks now, and finally, finally his heart decides it has had enough. Enough. Jonathan throws on some clothes, grabs his keys, hurries out to the garage, gives the car a start, backs up, and decides he is going to do something about what is happening to his life. You bet he’s going to do something: he is going to find his wife. He is not going to wait around, hiding. He is not just going to sit there and watch things fall apart anymore. Where can she be? Logically, there’s only a certain number of places. He drives down the Midway, then to Lake Shore Drive. His first thought is Madeline must be at work and that the Volvo has to be parked in the lot at the research facility, but when he arrives there, he finds it is not. At this hour of the morning, the lot is empty. He thinks about heading inside, down to her lab, to try to talk to a few of her colleagues, but the doors are locked and no one seems to be around. He knocks on the glass doors once, then twice, then hurries back to his car. The Peugeot speeds away, or as close to speeding as it can go, back onto Lake Shore Drive, circling the shady streets of Hyde Park, looking for the familiar-looking Volvo in the parking lot of any restaurant that might be open this time of the morning—maybe the Pancake House—but there is nothing. He travels past a few motels, then a hotel, but again, there is nothing. Nothing. Jonathan searches alone in the early morning light, until the sun begins to travel past the clouds of the easternmost sky. It is now glaringly obvious to him that Madeline is not, will not be returning.
BY THEN IT IS almost nine a.m. At this time of the morning, there is an unbelievably long line in the drive-through of McDonald’s. Jonathan waits patiently, wondering how much longer all of this can go on, how much longer before he decides to just give up and disappear as well. When it is his turn to pull up to the plastic brown speaker, a tinny voice asks, “Welcome to McDonalds’s, may I take your order?” but Jonathan has no idea what he is even doing there. He orders a number three breakfast meal and pulls up to the drive-through window, staring up at the early morning sky, the clouds like mountaintops, like a vast and rumbling sea, the view from the Peugeot’s window exactly like a map of oceanic topography. The kid from the drive-through window, the same kid with his abundance of unhealthy purple zits, announces the amount due. Jonathan searches in his wallet, hands the boy a few bills, collects his change, and waits for his meal. The tiny glass window of the drive-through swings closed and Jonathan glances up at the sky again. Suddenly a switch is thrown somewhere in his brain. His heart immediately reacts. The clouds overhead, white, stunning, slowly moving, have begun to sharpen, the inexact edges become angles, the feeling, the awful stuttering of his heart, his hands now going numb. He tries to tap on the drive-through window but no one is there. All of a sudden his legs have disappeared, his toes going cold, his feet, his breath is now far away, a distant sound beneath the rapid, upset beating in his chest. A cloud seems to separate itself from all of the others at that moment, and Jonathan is unable to fix his sight anywhere else. He cannot remember the last time he took his phenytoin. As he struggles to breathe, a car behind him begins to honk. In this moment, a flash of single images echo in his brain: Madeline, his daughters, his father, the empty lecture hall, the model of the squid at the museum, his father, who would tell him exactly what to do at this moment, Madeline, whom he would like to cry to, to ask forgiveness from, to be saved by, his mother, his daughters, then Madeline again. Jonathan begins to cry in desperation, twitching, his tongue curling up into the back of his throat. He falls forward against the steering wheel, the scream of the Peugeot’s horn the uninterrupted message of his terrified heart. Madeline, he thinks, reaching for a hand that is not there. Where are his arms now? Why can’t he say anything? Where are the girls? Why doesn’t anyone hear him?
Jonathan, adrift in that unquestionable profundity, can taste salt in his mouth. He struggles to stay awake but, seeing the great cloud bearing down upon him, he knows there is no escape. As its enormous shadow falls upon his face, he tries to shout, but the cars honking their horns are much too loud. The pimply-faced boy leans out of the drive-through and taps on Jonathan’s window. Jonathan can see the boy’s fingers there, separated by the thick pane of glass. He can even make out the boy’s greasy fingerprints, which are now smudged along the Peugeot’s window. A stranger’s fingerprint, that small detail, that impractical, momentary beauty, makes Jonathan smile. The boy from the drive-through window is now dialing 911. He is tapping on Jonathan’s window and telling him this, but Jonathan cannot hear anything but his own heartbeat. He has collapsed now, lying sideways, falling into the emptiness of the passenger seat. The cloud hangs there in the air, crossing the seam of the old windshield as Jonathan does his best to keep breathing. As he loses consciousness, Jonathan begins to recall the dull words of Dr. Roberts—the discouraging neurologist from his childhood, the gray-bearded specialist whose aversion therapy was so painfully unsuccessful—attempting to explain his incredible findings in a 1961 article in the New England Journal of Medicine:
…and although epilepsy is a common neurological disease, our understanding of why it occurs is often lacking. In the case of subject 23-2400, we know the occurrence of petit mal–type seizures are caused by a specific visual trigger: the unlikely shape of a cloud. Distinct from other similarly diagnosed patients however, the effects of light and motion do not provoke any reaction in the patient, nor do tests of other comparable shapes, noted in trials 13A, 13B, and 13C, in which visual representations of a mountain, a river, and a lake were introduced. The initial experiment 12F has been repeated in three successive trials with precisely the same results: when presented with an illustration of a cloud, the autono
mic nervous system is instantaneously engaged, heart palpitations, sweating, then tremors occur, concluding with the patient losing consciousness. The obvious question for us as researchers has become one of specificity: What is it about this particular shape that causes such a strange reaction in this patient?
Upon initial study, it appears that the subject’s response is a divergent, sympathetic nervous system reaction, an exception to the Fight or Flight response as first described by Walter Cannon in 1915 and the General Adaptation Syndrome as later noted by Hans Selye in 1936. Ongoing research suggests that the cloud itself represents an autonomic fear of complexity, and that this unusual neurological response to a terror-stimulus is simply the survival instinct of a species that inhabits a world which has, over such a short period of time, become much too complicated. Further studies may prove that this reaction is actually an inheritable trait passed from one generation to the next, as the less aggressive of the human species who chose flight over fight are now more likely to reproduce, resulting in what Richard Aldwin has named “the heredity of cowardice” (Aldwin, 515). The longer human beings exist, it seems, the less likely we are to choose to be brave.
The emergency room is mostly empty at this time of day. The paramedics—young handsome men in blue jumpsuits—joke with Jonathan, who has begun to recover. They ask him if he has taken any narcotics recently. Jonathan tells them he wishes he had. His heart is still beating much too quickly. He adjusts the oxygen tube that they have inserted in his nose, trying to breathe deeply. The paramedics roll him on a gurney through the automatic sliding glass doors, leaving him in a little curtained bed in the back of the emergency room. A young nurse with cold hands takes his pulse and his vital signs and says everything looks pretty normal. Someone is screaming behind another curtain nearby. Jonathan closes his eyes, his heart slowly returning to its usual beat, his breath coming easier. He begins to feel the blood in his hands and feet again. His legs do not feel so distant. Before a doctor can come in and evaluate him, Jonathan stands, buttons his shirt back up, finds his brown jacket lying on the floor, and quietly exits through the sliding glass doors. He unsnaps the plastic bracelet from his wrist and puts it in his pocket. He hails a cab and takes it back to where the Peugeot is parked in the McDonald’s parking lot. He sees he has been given a ticket for leaving his car unattended, abandoned there by the paramedics in a corner of the lot, but he does not remove the orange paper from his windshield. The radio in the car crackles with static and Jonathan switches it off, preferring the sudden silence and his own labored breathing.