The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  He stopped a moment, completely motionless, and eased his fingers, outstretched like a specimen of a starfish, away from his face until they too disappeared. It was a surprising relief that they reappeared when he drew his wrist back in towards his body. If he squinted, he could make out the shape of a rainbow through this thick fog, although it seemed a more solid curve—maybe it was the roundness of a far-off English hill, and he had dreamed himself back home.

  He took a step back, and another, straining to hear the sound of footsteps, whether they were his own or someone else’s, and found his back up hard against something solid. He slid down, crouching, and prepared to wait.

  In the dream, Ted Parker was making his way down from the top of the bridge. It had become an endless climb and Joy was so far ahead of him she was already home. The night had ended and the dawn had come up through greys, silvers, until at some point all its color and shape had faded completely and he was left in this blanketing mist, wondering how many more steps he needed to take until his feet reached the ground, reached the grass, reached the shore. One foot carefully in front of the other—he had no sense of how far he’d come, even if he was still heading down or had tricked himself somewhere and made a turn, to ascend again. If he could just get a glimpse of the horizon, of the coast, he could orient himself with the east and know the way home.

  He stopped a moment, listening for his own breath, his own sigh, but the whiteness seemed to have leached all the sound from the world as well as its color. He eased his fingers away from his face, their five points flexed like a starburst, and he flinched when they brushed against something smooth, solid, impenetrable. He turned, his back hard against it, his eyes scouring the white space above him for anything—a glimpse of the sun, a star, a lantern on a porch or on a ferry—anything that wasn’t cloud. He made himself breathe slowly and evenly: If this was happening when I was awake, he thought distinctly, I’d be scared by now. He counted beats as he breathed: in, two, three; out, two, three. Slow, easy, gentle, like dancing with Joy on the unfinished half of the arch. I’m sitting on top of the world, he sang to his breathing’s waltz, but the song made no sound.

  He could see it now, above him, as he looked up—the arch, closed and complete, it seemed; a heavier shape against the whiteness that encased him. He laughed; no sound either. Back on the ground after all, but who knew where? Whether it was from fear or anticipation, every bone in his body ached.

  In the dream, Dan Kopek was outside the plane, the great metal cylinder long gone so that he stood, clumsy but secure, on a cushion of cloud, and wondered how he was supposed to get home now. His arm pushed forward, fingers spread like a firework’s flare and as wide as they could go. He watched as he moved them away from himself, saw them swallowed by the white. It felt cold, and clean, and almost wet—he’d have to remember to tell Charlie—and while some sections twirled around him like long, languid ribbons, others billowed, inviting comparisons. There was a boat. There was an angel. There was the great big curve of Gramps’s bridge; a little knot of clouds down below even made the complementary geometry of the city’s famous Opera House. Dan laughed, swallowing hard when he realized he made no sound. Some dream, he thought; some trip. He tried to pull a chunk of the whiteness away from itself, but his fingers slid straight through.

  He began to walk, in his regular gait at first, and then more cautiously, more tentatively, his hands still lost somewhere out in front of him. Was he walking up, or down, or through? Was there a right direction? Was there a wrong one? He blew, gently at first and then more vigorously as a tiny space seemed to open out in front of him. He was sure there was someone nearby. He was sure that wherever this was, it was familiar. He was sure something was about to happen, and he hoped he’d be able to see whatever it was through the viscous, continuous white.

  In the space below the southeast pylon of the bridge, Charlie had tried to make herself invisible, speaking only when spoken to and standing back from the digging and the shouting. Every so often, she’d dart forward, grabbing a shot of a hand, a find, a moment. Another yell, and the fill in the first of the honeycomb of holes shook free. Just like Gramps said, she thought, clicking frame after frame. Here was the beginning of the lattice through which great steel cables had anchored the bridge’s two halves to the ground.

  “Long way to go down yet,” said one of the workers, and Charlie nodded.

  “A hundred and eighteen feet long, and a hundred feet down,” she said, and then: “My grandfather worked on it. I grew up with all his stories.”

  The man smiled at her. “Must add something to being here, knowing we’re digging down to where he was all those years ago. Never know what else we’ll find while we’re here, eh? They found an old brick from 1789 when they were digging round here for the bridge in the first place.”

  And Charlie smiled in turn. “I know—the old observatory, I guess.”

  She zoomed in on the man’s hand as it rested against a curved block of sandstone. The grain of his skin mimicked the grain of the stone. It was a nice assignment, and it was exciting to see things coming up to the surface again—Gramps’d be even more excited when she told him. She raised her lens—the grain of stone, of skin, lay over the harbor’s surface as well, ruffled into the water by the breeze.

  “What’d be great,” she said, “would be finding some way of being able to dig back through time as well as space, don’t you think? So you got moments, not just relics.”

  “I’ll take the relics,” said the man, laughing. “I mean, a moment’s made an impression if it’s left anything behind for us, snooping around years later, looking for evidence and leftovers. A bit of plate, an old brick, the dregs of a fire. We’re lucky to dig that stuff up—and if we could find the kind of thing you’re talking about, I don’t know what sort of camera you’d need to make pictures of it.”

  Behind her lens, Charlie focused tight on the man’s face—right into his eyes—snapping the shot just as he finished speaking. As close as she could get, and she’d no idea what thought lay behind his gaze. On the bridge, two trains passed each other up in the air, their clatter swelling the stream of cars, the voices on the site, the boats on the water. For a minute, it seemed as if all the noise that had ever happened in this place had come back in one deafening roar—machines and tools and men and activity; there was even something like a shot, which must have been a car backfiring somewhere. Charlie almost wanted to cover her ears. Then the trains passed, the traffic dulled; the calls and conversations on the site settled down. She panned back through the last dozen or so shots she’d taken. A couple were good: the symmetrical patterns of the man’s hand and the stone, the shadowy space of the first gaping hole that had taken the bridge’s weight. But the eyes told her nothing at all. Her finger moved automatically towards delete, but she paused, looking up as she felt a cold wind from the south and saw a bank of cloud shift and obscure the sun. Keep it, she thought. See what it looks like tonight.

  Her hand cupped around the display, her head bent in towards it, she caught a movement from the corner of her eye, and she raised her camera to catch whatever it was in one smooth, reflex action. But it must have been the swing of a tool or the wave of an arm; the site was busy, but there was nothing unusual.

  “See that fog come in on the weekend?” she heard someone call below her. “Real pea-souper; I could hardly see to take a step in front of me.” Pointing her camera towards the sky, Charlie turned away from the conversation about sea mist and shot at random, to find waiting for her when she looked at her day’s work that night a perfect image of the bridge, high and curved, a billowing bank of cloud above, and the blurred streak of a bird, a shadow, cutting down towards the harbor. Must have had it on a slower speed than she’d meant to; she’d let way too much light and movement in. But when she looked through her shots again the next morning, there was no sign of a dive, or a fall.

  Tired, she’d thought. I’ve got to stop working when I’m tired.

  That
was weeks ago now—before Gramps, before everything else. Now, she was more tired than ever before, and the bridge lurked, a mighty and complicated mess.

  From above, from some angles, it looked like a dance: the breeze came in from the east and as the whiteness thinned here and there it showed, from a bird’s-eye view, the bright spot of William Dawes’s scarlet coat, the grey dot of Ted Parker’s hat, the blue gash of Dan Kopek’s bag. Three men, stepping in and away, with no sense of each other and no fix on where they were. Three men, breathing deep and counting the space between in and out: one, two, three; one, two, three.

  Three men asleep in their own pieces of space and time.

  In the dream, William Dawes watched as the clouds arranged themselves into the now recognizable topography of Sydney’s harbor, and there at the heads a great ship, long-awaited, rose up, all sails and provisions: letters, tea, candles, vinegar, shoe leather, new people. Everything Sydney’s heart desired.

  In the dream, Ted Parker watched as the clouds arranged themselves into the cords and struts of his bridge, white shapes of men moving on white lengths of steel, and the luminous-white sparks of rivets sailing off every so often like secret shooting stars.

  In the dream, Dan Kopek watched as the clouds turned back into the clouds he’d watched through the plane window as he left London; there was the plane’s wing, made of cloud itself, and the inside ledge of his window. Leaning forward, he hunted for his own reflection—and when his forehead tapped the hard, thick surface, he pulled back.

  There was noise then, high and distinct and separate from the silence. It was air rushing, and each man turned towards its sound—they were facing each other, if they’d been able to see, for a moment, through the white.

  From above, from the cloud, something was falling, quick and straight. It’s my comet, thought William Dawes, at last.

  It’s the next part of my dream, thought Ted Parker. I’ll get to see what happens.

  It’s the story about Gramps, thought Dan Kopek, flying off the bridge and down into the water.

  One, two, three.

  The whiteness closed around the end of the movement. The three men paused, stretching and yawning.

  The silence held.

  Dawes

  BY MIDMORNING, the thick mist William Dawes had woken to had burned off, leaving a heavier than usual saltiness that made him lick his lips as if he was parched. He sniffed at the last of the heavy air, trying to place where he’d smelled that smell before. What he should do, he thought, was devise a way of measuring such fog—a funnel, a piece of string, a bottle, and some scales. He’d try it tonight.

  In the columns of his meteorological journal, Dawes ruled off his usual notes of times and temperatures, set the journal’s loose sheets of paper square, and sat for a moment in the cool dark room of his observatory, blinking a little and flexing his fingers in time with the ticking of the pocket watch. The pages made quite a stack now, days and days quantified in terms of heat and wind and thunder and water. More than a year of full records—more than a year without a comet. And almost exactly a year since the bright flares of the aurora australis had lit up the sky like the cataclysmic interruption feared by Gulliver’s Laputans. Perhaps that at least would come around again this season.

  To his right, on his desk, other journals lay ready for words transcribed from his conversations with the natives—they were beginning to talk, so long after the British arrival, and under the most dismal circumstances. There was a pox among these natives, yet not among the settlers. A few had been brought in—so ill, so diseased—to be nursed, but mostly the white men had only bodies to deal with, lying on beaches, floating in the water, washing ashore. The Governor had sent special recovery parties rowing around the harbor, to bring them in, to bury them.

  The sickness had brought in Boorong, a bright young girl who’d been steered towards the vicar so that he could find out, as the Governor put it, what these people think; what these people believe.

  But the vicar was not a man with any “facility for languages,” so she’d been passed on to the obliging Lieutenant Dawes, always ready to pick up the tasks that others couldn’t manage. Can you map this town? Can you draw this coast? Can you name this plant? Can you explain this weather? Can you count these steps and measure this plain, this gorge, this track? Can you count these steps and tell us where we are? “Can you talk to her, Lieutenant Dawes, discover her beliefs, and share with her our own? Can you introduce her to God?”

  His facility for languages.

  He wanted to ask about the harbor, its trees, its rocks, its habits. And he wanted to ask about mawn—that word he’d heard at the end of his long-ago dance, tripping and falling against the sense of something swooping down from the clouds and into the harbor. He’d waited for it ever since, like that comet, and once or twice with such a sense of anticipation that he’d taken himself down to the waterline and stood there as if it would appear at any moment. Once or twice too he’d caught the tail end of a splash—“A fish,” said the surgeon; “Just a fish,” said Tench—and wished he’d turned a little earlier.

  Dawes folded a sheet in half and in half again, down to a long narrow strip. She’d be waiting for him, his student, his new teacher. Leaving the observatory, he looked over towards the settlement’s new magazine, a thick-walled room of gunpowder being built nearby, its bricks stamped with the year’s date. As the colony’s engineer, on top of everything else, Dawes was the officer in charge of artillery and fortifications.

  “Does it make you feel safe down here, sir,” the surgeon had joked as the magazine’s walls thickened and raised, “sitting here with your own cache of powder?”

  He passed the hospital, the barracks, the place where lawbreakers’ lives were taken, each place now well-established, and each more than a little scruffy and patched. And he wondered which words he and his charge might exchange, what glimpses they might have had of each other’s worlds by sunset.

  But the exchange was not supposed to be about this place, what was here, or anything that swooped or splashed; it was to exchange Anglican belief for antipodean. And so Dawes heard himself making sentences about the authority of God as it was invested in the King, and the authority of the King as it was invested in the parliament, in the Governor, but not in a way that should imply that anyone other than the King—or God, for that matter—was like God, was godlike. And then there was the star and the birth and the water and the wine and the bread and the body and the cross.

  “. . . Which brings us to the resurrection,” he said at last, drawing a deep breath and leaning back a little.

  “Re—” She started to shape the syllables, turning each into a distinct word. And she laughed as she faltered between them, tapping at her own chest then. “Boorong,” she said instead. “Mr. Dawes,” confirmed William Dawes. They tilted their heads slightly towards each other, these two polite envoys.

  Tell me something, thought Dawes. Tell me anything—any word, any phrase. He smiled, pointing through the doorway towards the sky. “A god?” And as he spoke the air rattled with an eerie noise, a grating metallic thunder.

  The change was immediate, the smile gone and a kind of blank fear in her eyes. “Mawn,” she said, and like the girl he’d danced with, she made a beak from her hand, held it high in the air, and then swooped it down so it grabbed at her throat. “Mawn,” she said, but softly, as if she didn’t want it to hear her. Were they scared of it happening, of some terrible presence sweeping in—or was it what they hoped would happen, swooping through and wiping the British away like the sun burning off a salty mist?

  “This mawn,” said William Dawes, “this . . .” He made the same swoop with his hand down towards his own neck. “You see it?” Pointing to his eyes. “You hear it?” Pointing to his ears.

  “Naa,” she said, pointing to her eyes, “naa.”

  “You see it,” said Dawes slowly, pointing to his own eyes: “Naa?”

  And she smiled. From his pocket, Dawes took his
notebook. “Naa?” he repeated, pointing from his eyes out across the room. “To see?” He and the girl nodded in unison. It seemed a nicer word than this swooping, clutching, frightening mawn. The girl nodded again as he leaned forward and wrote.

  A breath of wind caught a page on the table between them, lifting it quietly, gently, and easing it down towards the ground—his hand shot out, two fingers grabbing at its edge as it hovered on the air. He put it back, square and careful. A pause, and then the same thing again—the page rising, floating, fluttering, and Dawes’s fingers snapping it in, putting it down. And a pause, and again—and this time, he heard something as well. She was giggling, her face and her eyes lit up. He put the page down and put the Bible he was supposed to be consulting on top of it as a weight, feeling the next puff of air that was after his paper. Across the table, the girl was quiet, and as Dawes looked up he saw her lips pursed and blowing, softly, softly, before—caught—she pressed her lips together and gave him her biggest smile.

  There was no more thunder.

  “It floats,” he said, smiling himself. “It flies.” Flapping his fingers like a bird’s wings. And the girl laughed again, nodding.

  That night, Dawes began his daily conversation with Portsmouth.

  Dear Miss Rutter, of course, and then, We began to talk properly today—naa, the first word: to see. It’s the Governor’s hope that I can talk about religion—of course, more importantly, about ours. But I have to say we spent most of today laughing, so I will have to be more careful with my parables and apostles in the morning.

  He had imagined it sometimes, coming back to New South Wales, a married man and a teacher; he had even imagined his wife, Mrs. Judith Dawes. But he’d never imagined who he might teach. Now, against the darkness of his little room, he saw who was sitting at his rough school benches. Students like Boorong, with bright smiles and bright eyes and lists and lists of new words that they could teach him—whatever he might teach them. Students who laughed as they made the objects in his world fly.