by Nick Arvin
George tried to imagine a balloon of that size, nearly thirty times larger than this, but his mind failed him. He put his hand out and felt the waxy fabric. It smelled of linseed oil. Beside them stood the balloon’s gondola, a large basket wrapped in a pattern of stars and stripes. It had no oars or anchor. George looked at it for a moment, considering. Then he pulled a pouch out of his pocket and removed from it a small gray black-flecked stone. It fell—gravity normal, George noted—and landed in the basket with a soft pat of sound.
George returned to his seat and watched the balloon gently swell. It gained volume more quickly than Blanchard’s had, but still the process was slow. Artillery shells seemed to be landing not far away now on the other side of the hill. Several crows were roosted in a tree across the road and calling loudly, as if they desired to compete with the noise of the battle. Nathan wandered nearby. He had put his drawing away, and he appeared fidgety, perhaps unsettled by the shelling—he rubbed the back of his neck; he yawned; he took out a small knife and used it to work at his nails. George said to him, “It’s quite a thing, isn’t it?”
Nathan only glanced at him, nodded.
As the balloon began to near its full shape, Professor Lowe suddenly decided the windlasses were positioned too near the balloon, and a spasm of activity followed. Then everyone stood around again. George sat in the grass. Beside him, Nathan stood packing a pipe. He set it in the corner of his mouth and reached into his trousers for a match. George, preoccupied with his own thoughts, watched these gestures without concern, but a thick, bearded sergeant strode over in two paces, seized the peddler by the neck with one hand and with the other wrenched the pipe from his mouth. “You fool,” he said. “Do you want to fire the hydrogen?” He threw the pipe on the ground and shook Nathan by the neck.
A few of the men laughed. Nathan, released, stumbled back and gasped. “I’m sorry,” he said. His features were slack and pale.
Someone called, “Let’s fill him with gas and drop a match in!”
Nathan stooped to pick his pipe out of the grass. Hurriedly he stuffed it into his pocket and limped backward a few steps. The sergeant glared after him, then spit on the ground. “Get out of here,” he said. Nathan sighed, picked up his knapsack and began limping away. George felt sorry for him.
Confederate artillery shells suddenly seemed to be landing in great, simultaneous numbers just on the other side of the hill. The men either stared agape in that direction or ignored it entirely. Long ash-gray clouds expanded over the trees. Then, suddenly, the barrage ended and into this abrupt silence came the noise of Union cannons replying at a pace of redoubled irritation. The balloon tugged impatiently at its tethers.
George looked around and saw Nathan hobbling with his knapsack near the tree line some distance off. Then he swerved and disappeared into the trees, and suddenly, with a sharp skip of the heart, George apprehended what Nathan had been trying to do. He had not seen the youth smoke today or yesterday but only just now, beside the inflating balloon. George got up, looked a moment at the place in the trees where Nathan had disappeared, then went after him, moving as fast as he could.
He pushed ahead through the underbrush and between the trees. After a short distance he found the knapsack, abandoned under a bush. A minute later he saw Nathan ahead, moving through a copse of pine, with quiet, cautious steps and quite without any sign of a limp. George ran a few paces and called, “Nathan, wait! I’d like to talk to you!”
Nathan stopped, his back and shoulders tense. He glanced once, quickly, at George, then looked ahead again as if judging his distance to the top of the hill.
George continued toward him. “Nathan, I just want to talk with you.”
“My name is not Nathan, old man,” the Confederate called without looking back. He crouched on one knee to do something George could not see.
“I don’t care what you’ve done, or where you go,” George said.
“What do you want, George?” The Confederate stood now with a knife in his hand, and started down the hill toward George. He moved slowly, cautiously.
George extended his hands in a gesture of appeal and felt them shaking badly. “I thought—” He nearly said, I thought we were friends, but the words seemed idiotic, the notion of a child. He said, “Maybe I can help you.”
“How?”
George looked around at the trees. “I don’t know, but—” He looked at Nathan. No, not Nathan. “What is your name?”
“I like you, old man, but you’re a ridiculous idiot. You shouldn’t have followed me. Now, if I let you go, I don’t know what you’ll do.”
It was awful, how he still seemed so terribly familiar, this man. Something in George badly wanted to be sympathetic to him. Why had he come here? Had he hoped to stop this spy, to aid him? He found nothing to say.
The Confederate said, “You want to help me, go throw a match on that balloon.”
“Oh. Oh, no.”
“That balloon is a weapon. Sure as a musket or a cannon. It kills men. I hate it. As surely as I am locked to the face of this earth, I hate it.”
The Confederate was nearing, his face livid, his gaze steady and cold. George began to back away but his foot caught on something and he stumbled. “I don’t understand,” he said. For a moment he hoped the Confederate would break suddenly into his smile, or laughter: it was a misunderstanding, a joke.
Instead, from the young man came a small, tortured, animal-like sound. He stepped closer and said, his voice low, “You think it’s just some trifle up there in the sky, don’t you? Can you imagine what it is to look up toward heaven and see there your hated enemy gazing down on you? Anywhere you go, still he’s up there, peering at you. Can you imagine how naked it feels, how helpless? This thing like—like the eye of God himself, seeing everything. But Union soldiers are not God! They’re men, only men, like ourselves. Why should they have this?”
The Confederate crossed the last distance between them with sudden fluid speed and gripped George roughly by the shirt. George, his hand tremoring badly, felt in his pocket for a weapon and drew out the can tool. He was holding it awkwardly, and as he fumbled, the Confederate saw it and laughed; his breath was hot. He shook his head as if bemused by his own foolishness, then smiled and, in a single, flashing movement, raised his knife and brought it down.
Mme. Blanchard, the lady who slept peacefully aloft among the clouds and stars, was killed, famously, in 1819 during a nighttime flight over Paris when the hydrogen of her aerostat was ignited by the explosions and spraying stars of a fireworks display. George was there with her now, cowering beside her at the bottom of a boat-shaped crashing gondola, surrounded by thundering noise on all sides, the balloon burning hot above him, until reason told him he could not be over Paris and it was not fireworks that were exploding. Instead it seemed to be the arrival of an Armageddon that beat overhead and trembled him even as he struggled to return from a clinging darkness into consciousness. He lay on his back and above him the trees were frantically shattering and splintering, shedding leaves and branches in a rain of foliage that dropped all around him. Nearby explosions vibrated in the earth and were followed by the patter of falling dirt. An artillery barrage, George realized. Grapeshot embedded itself into trees with a sound like the pounding of scattered hammers. Boughs broke suddenly and swung to point downward.
George felt like he had been seared above the left ear with a hot iron. It took some moments to separate the pain from the noise and havoc. He pushed himself up, then touched the wound on his head and in doing so drove needles there. He caught his breath and, more carefully, tested it again. There was some swelling, a little blood—the Confederate spy must have struck him with the butt of the knife. The man was gone now. Meanwhile the clamor and chaos continued, fracturing George’s already dazed thoughts. He stood for a minute and collected himself. He felt a great anger which quickly centered on himself and became a humiliation. He could not blame the Confederate—indeed, he had been a fool to chase after a spy
that way. He could not see why he had not been killed outright. Pity on an old man, perhaps. Or maybe it seemed George could do no harm even if he wanted to. He was feeble and he was absurd. He picked his hat off the earth and placed it gently on his head. He left the can tool lying there. He started downhill, staggering through the trees.
As he came to the clearing, he saw the crew on the ground working frantically to let rope off the windlasses. The balloon was now well aloft. He stared up at it and his head throbbed and drove pulses of red and black before his eyes. A few soldiers simply stood around, also looking up at the balloon, none of them apparently concerned for their safety even as the Confederate barrage raged on. George wandered toward them. So many artillery rounds screamed through the air that it seemed impossible the balloon would not be immediately destroyed, but nothing touched it. It hung like a large mocking orange over the battle, over the explosions and shrapnel and the shuddering of suddenly riven earth and the tearing apart of trees, of men—George recalled the bandaged men along the road yesterday, the sick, sweet odor of the hospital tent. Young men were dying, now, by the thousands, on the hillsides and meadows and among the forests, lives cut short and littered about. He saw the raw fury of shot and shell directed toward the balloon and realized that until now he had never truly envisioned this object within the context of war. What would Blanchard, with his plumed hat and his flag and his scientific instruments, have thought?
What would Madeline have thought?
No. It was very similar to that balloon he had seen as a boy, and yet it resembled that wondrous balloon not at all. Everything had been reordered. Each roar of explosion struck George with the power of the rebels’ hatred. The balloon would try to call death down upon them and seeing it they saw a species of aerial demon, picking without emotion or mercy those who should die this day. Of course they hated it. It was a terrible thing.
The sky turned slowly around the balloon like a wheel around its hub. Dizziness, George told himself, just dizziness. He looked down, blinking. Someone dressed in black had come up beside him. Lowe. George stared at him. Lowe held his hat between his two hands, peering at the balloon. George said, “I thought you were on the balloon.”
Lowe shook his head. “Not today. One of my men is guiding the balloon, and General McClellan sent a junior lieutenant from his staff to go up and make sketches of the enemy deployment. The army has cavalry waiting in reserve. If we can detect a point of weakness, they’ll be able to go in and maul them.”
After a moment George said, “I ought to go home.”
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Lowe said.
The balloon had apparently risen out of range of the Confederates—their fire suddenly dropped away to the intermittent sibilance of a high, passing shell, the report of its landing far off and seemingly harmless. Then the artillery barrage ceased altogether. George would not look at the balloon. He looked at the windlasses. He might somehow cut one of the tether ropes, but he could not conceivably cut all three before they would stop him. He asked quietly, “How can you do this?”
“It’s less dangerous than it seems,” Lowe said, misunderstanding. “Ours is a relatively small target at a relatively great distance from the enemy. These balloons probably pay for themselves just in the ammunition that the Confederates waste upon them.”
It occurred to George that Lowe had never imagined himself on the Confederate side, looking up at that baleful, invincible object—except perhaps to consider such matters as how the rebels would attempt to disguise their artillery and mask their troop movements. Nor had Lowe stood beside Madeline watching little Tad lift away under a magnificent yellow orb.
But, George realized—while a single cannon somewhere near began thundering mechanically, like a hall clock marking the hour—such sentimentality had no place here. George had no place here. A war was a place for practical men like Lowe, for men not yet overwhelmed by the relentless accumulation of years and memory. Of course it had been a mistake for George to come here. He should have understood that from the first. They did not send old men to war for reasons quite beyond the obvious ones.
Lowe said, “If you’ll wait a little, I’ll find a supply wagon that’s going back. You could ride with them some of the distance.”
“No,” George said. “I’ll walk.”
“You’ll walk?” Lowe studied him. Then he shrugged. “Tighten that line!” he bellowed to the men at the nearest windlass.
Without conscious intention George’s gaze followed that line, curved like a sagging strand of spider silk, up to the balloon. A lone bugle somewhere proclaimed itself, but otherwise the battle now stilled, as though all the combatants, like George, found their attention drawn skyward, as though the balloon made children of everyone. It appeared so small, so precarious and forlorn in all that sky, as unmistakably human as a ship at the horizon’s edge of the sea.
The ground crew were still paying out line, and the orange balloon still grew smaller and smaller in the blue all around. George removed his hat and touched his head: the bleeding had stopped. He started up the road. This evening there would again be a round, nearly full moon in the darkened sky, and he resolved that he would walk until he could not anymore. But then suddenly he wheeled around to look again at the balloon.
The Accident
We met in a kind of accident. Maybe call it an instance of happenstance. Outside a supermarket. The sky had dimmed, milky overhead lights illuminated the parking lot, and cars crept up and down the aisles looking for open spots. I came out of the store laden with bags, one of them filled with fresh corn on the cob, and as I opened my car’s trunk that bag split and a dozen ears fell and rolled. I first saw her as she bent to the pavement, helping. I protested, but she kept at it, and when the corn had been collected and secured she told me she was Kathy.
Sometimes I grow furious, or hysterical, thinking of it. Of how it began, with her kindness. The beginning of a long mistake.
I mean, I’m still trying to figure this out.
I arrived with flowers and refrigerator magnets. When she saw the flowers, she hesitated. When she saw the magnets she—fleetingly, but distinctly—winced. Certain hesitations in her voice on the phone earlier came back to me.
This was ten months and eighteen days after our meeting in the parking lot.
The magnets featured small plastic corncobs, with green leaves and bright yellow kernels. Kathy flattened her expression, and then she even crafted a semblance of pleasure. “You’re very thoughtful,” she said. She was always and mercilessly kind.
And I recited the lines that I had composed when I bought the things. “I have some for my fridge, too. I thought it would be fun to knock them off and help each other pick them up.”
She smiled a little more. To stop her from conjuring a phrase or joke that would somehow simultaneously satisfy her standards for kindness and honesty—I didn’t care to know how it could be done—I said, “Come on. We’ll be late.”
Wearing loose brown pants, small silver earrings, and a white, white blouse, she walked to the car, her stride a little stiffened. We traveled into the small, stark, varying world the headlamps lit and stopped at one red sign, then another, turned at a flashing yellow light, and moved along a broad street lined with chain restaurants and parking lots lit sickly orange. Kathy broke open the package of magnets and examined them inthe fluctuating light of the streetlamps.
In the months after we met I had cooked dinners for her that ended with flaming desserts, had let her pull me onto dance floors, had tiled her shower for her. She taught me how to shave her legs, and sometimes, digging in my pockets for keys or change, I found tightly folded tiny pieces of paper, each with a word in her handwriting. “Lover.” “XOXO.” We were giddy with ourselves, I suppose, and we both knew how to act giddy. But giddiness is transitory, and as it wore away, I began to find holes opening in our conversations that Kathy waited for me to fill, and I had no idea how. At the time I felt only confused, but in retrospect I can say th
at the essence of it was that I didn’t know myself well enough to know what I wanted to talk about, and the things she wanted to talk about I found uninteresting. She believed I didn’t understand people, and I believed she made decisions with too much sentimentality, and we had no knack for saying things like these—which were true enough—to each other.
But I didn’t see any of that clearly at the time. That night, as I recalled how she had winced at my gift, I only felt sure that she believed our relationship had reached a tepid finish, and though I knew that there were gaps between us, in the silence in the car I began to think that I could love her, did love her, that she would be wrong to bring it to an end—ludicrous thoughts.
She said something about work while we drove, about the weather as we stood in the line marked by the velvet ropes. Then we entered the darkness and sat below the great glowing screen, and mercifully we didn’t have to try to talk.
It’s too long ago now, I don’t remember the name of the movie, or even the stars, only that it displayed all the glories of Hollywood in summer—actors and plot the backdrop to a choreography of violence and explosions, of hurtling forms, of damage composed in obsessive detail. I appreciated the fact that such stuff required a craft of its own, and I welcomed the diversion of the imagery of blossoming flames and trembling weaponry. In the seat beside me Kathy moved her soda from hand to hand, crossed and uncrossed her legs, and when I glanced at her she seemed especially beautiful in the reflected light of the screen. Vehicles smashed, men beat each other with blunt objects, skyscrapers buckled and fell, while she—I guessed—rehearsed ways to tell me that we were done with each other. She would surely be relieved when this was over, the deeply unpleasant but finally necessary murder of something small and out of place, a spider or a mouse. Kind of her, I thought, to be anxious about it. She might have just stopped returning my calls. She was too kind even to go into it before this movie, which I had told her I was looking forward to. She really was kind.