The Body in the Clouds

by Ashley Hay

  He yawned.

  Working his fingers into random pages of Gulliver, Dan’s eyes kept straying towards the window, towards the night and the clouds, and towards the partial reflection of the two Russians who sat in front of him. Gulliver was leaving Blefescu, Gulliver was showing off his diminutive sheep and cattle to astonished Englishmen at home, but the Russian woman was singing softly, her head bent in towards her father’s, and somehow the softness of the notes cut through the mighty noise of the plane’s movement and filled the space inside Dan’s head that had been pushed empty by the dream. The song was low and sweet; it sounded like a lullaby. His eyes were heavy again, and then Gulliver was on the spare seat next to him, closed.

  He could feel pressure under his arms, and hands grasping at his shoulders, then he was lifted clear of the water and laid out on a barge, coughing, hacking, with bits of him beginning to hurt. Pain around the top of his legs as if bands of iron had been fitted there. And shards of metal, it seemed, sticking into his body at all angles.

  “Strike me,” said someone behind him, “it’s bloody Kelly. You’re a lucky bloke, mate, a bloody lucky bloke. Seven in, one out.”

  Kelly? thought Dan, somewhere above the dream. But it was Charlie’s grandfather who went off the bridge and lived, and Charlie’s grandfather is Joe Brown.

  There was a blur of wind, and he saw himself tucked into a bed in a high, clean room, the arch of the bridge just visible through the window, and the sheets pulled taut around him. His boot leather, which had burst from its soles and pushed up his legs like two too-tight bracelets, had been taken off. The tatters of his clothing, shredded by his impact against the water, had been peeled from his skin. The pain in his back had been defined more properly as a couple of broken ribs. And in front of him, newspapermen jiggled their pencils back and forth as they asked their questions. Dan felt his mouth move and heard an unfamiliar voice, softly, gently Irish.

  “I’m often working near the edge of the bridge, and on many occasions I’ve thought to myself, ‘Now, if you ever fall, Roy, you had better make sure that you hit the water feet first or head first.’ So when I slipped and fell today, I concentrated on saving my life. That’s all I thought about. It was the only thing in my mind: the desire to live. I knew that I was very near death. I hit the water. I went under. There was a roar of water in my ears. My lungs felt as though they would burst. Then I came up to the surface. I was alive, marvelously alive.”

  “And can you tell us what happened?” Pencils poised in the air.

  He was talking about the morning, about the sunshine, about the cloud and the rain that had come suddenly from nowhere. He was talking about the shoes he wore to work—rubber soled, he said, reliable in the dry but downright dangerous in the wet. Which didn’t matter mostly—if the rain was too heavy, no one could work. The company didn’t like them using rivets when the weather was bad, too easy to break them—too easy to waste them. Anyhow, he’d been lining up a rivet when he lost his footing—as easy as that—and lunged in as many directions as he could, trying for something, anything, that he could grab on to, and feeling himself stagger backwards into nothing, into space, into the fall. Such an easy movement that it must almost have looked like he meant to do it.

  “And then I hit the water . . .” The voice paused—Dan was gazing towards the window and its snatch of arch. “Didn’t go under very far, and it only seemed an instant from the moment I fell to the time that I was struggling on the surface.”

  Dan felt a broad smile move slowly across his face and counted the spread of its beam: one, two, three seconds. “Struggling and alive.” The newspapermen glanced up, their pencils busy.

  “When I hit the water and went under I felt afraid for the first time. During the fall I kept saying to myself that I must fight for my life, but when I was submerged I almost felt that all was lost.” There was a heavy silence. “And then I was on the surface again, striking out automatically for the buoy. With almost a shock I realized I was alive. I could have shouted, you know, could have shouted for sheer joy.”

  And Dan was back in Charlie’s yard, back in a childhood summer, sitting on the steps, looking up at Gramps, who’d never sounded Irish in his life.

  “You should’ve been called Joy, love,” Gramps was saying, his fingers tousling Charlie’s hair again, “after your lovely grandmother.” And Charlie, almost asleep, was smiling, and swaying a little, and Gramps was picking her up, carrying her inside, and sending Dan back to his side of the fence and his own bedroom. As he crawled under the covers, as his heavy head hit the pillow, his eyes closed in that night and opened in the white-noise hum of the plane.

  Concertinaed into the toilet cubicle, Dan leaned on the narrow plastic bench and stared at himself in the mirror: his brown hair—thin at the best of times—was stuck to his forehead like clammy string, and when he pulled himself up to straighten his posture, his ribs twinged as if he might really have fallen from a great height the day before. He splashed cold water onto his face, his neck, rubbed his wet fingers through his hair. “Just a dream,” he told his reflection. His mind was skittering—it felt the way he’d heard people describe panic. Must be the flight, the tiredness, the jet lag, going home. The face in the mirror was too pale—too many summers without proper sunlight; too many days in offices. He splashed again, shook the drops out of his hair; Caroline’s name looped through his mind like a mantra. And then if Charlie’s bloody picture hadn’t been in front of me, I’d never have . . .

  Backing out of the little booth, he bumped into someone behind him—“Sorry, sorry; izvi’nite, izvi’nite.” The Russian woman. Dan felt a drop of water fall from his hair onto the tip of his nose and hang there.

  “You are all right?” the woman asked.

  “Yes, yes—it’s hard to sleep on a plane,” said Dan. “And your father?”

  “He only sleeps,” she said with a tiny smile. “Is better. When he’s awake, he asks where is he, where is my mother. I say, I’m her. I say, I’m here. Doesn’t matter—is easier.” She sighed, rubbed her neck. “It will be good to be there. Australia. Sydney.”

  “You have family there?”

  “The doctor. We are coming for the doctor,” she said. “What is it, Australia? Sydney? I don’t know what is there.”

  “Australia? Sydney?” Dan shrugged. “Sydney is a big city. Australia is a big country. Not as big as Russia . . .”

  “But what is there?”

  “There are beaches in Sydney, and there’s the Opera House, and the Harbour Bridge . . . I’m sorry; I’ve been gone a long time, more than ten years. I don’t know what to expect myself.”

  “A big country, and empty?” the woman asked.

  “Dry,” said Dan. “Not like your country. I flew over Russia once—lots of rivers cutting through forests. Didn’t look like there were any people down there.”

  “Many people, in your country?”

  “A lot less than yours,” said Dan.

  The woman nodded. “Is nice to meet an Australian,” she said, sounding out all the syllables of the long word with particular care. “A long way to fly.”

  “My friend’s . . .” He heard himself falter and pause. “My grandfather used to tell this story about a man from Moscow who walked all the way across Russia to the Pacific and then sailed down to Sydney—in the twenties, I think. Much easier”—he gestured through the one blind left raised to let in the night; the moon was out there, golden, and the tops of clouds—“much easier to go this way.”

  “And good for my father.” She nodded again. “Good for him to go to your country.” Another pause, then, “I see you read Gulliver.” Dan frowned, puzzled. “On your seat—your book. My father says Gulliver went to Australia. I don’t know if it was a happy ending.” She smiled. “For us, maybe. Is a children’s book, yes?”

  “I read it when I was little,” said Dan. “It was a present when I was coming away.” Defensively.

  “Perhaps I will read it.” The woman smiled a
gain. “I should . . .” She pointed over the rows of seats, the sleeping heads. “To see how he sleeps.”

  “Good luck,” said Dan. “I hope you like Sydney—and for your father too.” The world was burnished through the window; he crouched down, watching the shapes the clouds made, soft and gently moonlit, as the plane skated above them and the woman felt her way hand-over-hand along the aisle.

  Thirty thousand feet. At ten thousand feet, people started talking nonsense, making dumb mistakes and miscalculations—that was outside of a plane, of course, with the only oxygen available to them what little was in the air. Higher again, at around sixty thousand feet, an unprotected body’s gases would expand—swelling, stretching, rupturing—and then a little higher the body’s fluids could begin to boil. What had Icarus done about that, or was that what had done for him, wrongly attributed to the warmth of the sun? Way out in the night, Dan saw the blink of another plane’s light, and took in a long breath. Yes, that was as close as those things were supposed to be. Over there; on its own.

  He filled a paper cup with water, drank it, and then drank another to wash away the last of his dream. Back in his seat, with Gulliver open again, he thought about how he had claimed Gramps as his own grandfather when he told the Russian woman about the long walk across her country. Is easier, he thought, echoing her abbreviation. It wasn’t like he’d have to undo the misunderstanding, as he had with Caroline. “Did you think he was my grandfather?” He’d feigned surprise. “No, no, a friend of mine’s—he’s Charlie’s Gramps.” And he hadn’t even blushed.

  Gulliver was on his way to the Brobdingnageans, north of New Albion. Dan leaned back, his head angled so he could see the corner of the Russian woman’s face, the side of her father’s face next to it, whenever he glanced up from his page. The old man’s skin was sallow, almost jaundiced; it looked as if he’d already been dried out and preserved, like a Catholic saint reclining for eternity in a glass coffin. It was impossible to think there was any blood flowing. A dab of the face washer, and there was that softly sung lullaby again. Dan shifted his head to see if the old man reacted, but there was nothing: no movement, no blink, no nod.

  Four or five times he read the same page of Gulliver’s Travels—four or five times Gulliver’s storm-tossed ship almost sighted Brobdingnag. Each time, at the end of the last sentence on the page, Dan would look up, look between the seats for a moment, and then look back down to the book’s words, his train of thought broken.

  In the end, the realization came from nowhere. There was no change, no movement, no signal; there was only a moment when Dan thought, clear and sharp, The old man has died—and squirmed at the thought, and at not quite knowing what to do about it.

  Because what had changed? The man’s skin was still a papery yellow. His eyes were still closed. His daughter still sat, dabbing with her flannel and singing her soft song. What had changed that made Dan think anything was different? Nothing he could see, yet the more he stared, the more he concentrated, the more it seemed that he was staring at a body, not at a person, and he began to wonder if he had been watching, but not paying attention, at the very moment of death, and if he might have seen something happen that he hadn’t recognized or been able to name. Almost forty years old, and he’d never seen a dead body before. It seemed impossible somehow, given how many turned up on his television set every night, real ones, made-up ones, even hideously malleable animated ones with drawn lines and technicolor blood. It seemed impossible to have reached his age without coming into contact with a corpse. Macabre word. Come to think of it, he’d never been to a funeral either—he had been thought too young to go to his dad’s.

  He’d been so small when his father died, although he could remember the day of the funeral, his mother in a new black dress that looked uncomfortable, and being left with a friend of hers who told him that his father was in the sky, in heaven. “No, he’s in the ground,” Dan remembered saying, and he had sat for a long time watching the way a breeze made the leaves of a hedge move, wondering how you would draw the wind. He couldn’t remember seeing his father in the hospital, although he knew he had been taken there—there was that smell, that disinfectant smell. He could remember that. And how carefully he’d watched his mother those first weeks after it had happened, as if by paying attention to her every breath, her every movement, he could make sure it didn’t happen again.

  The soft Russian singing paused for a moment, and Dan watched as the daughter adjusted the rug high around her father’s neck. Had she noticed? Or was Dan wrong, and the man still had some shallow pulse, some vague quiver? The woman pushed her father’s hair back from his head, and Dan was sure he caught the tiniest twitch of the man’s eyebrow in response. Of course he wasn’t dead. Of course she wasn’t sitting there singing to a body. And of course there was nothing odd about his never having seen a cadaver. Who did these days? Who had to?

  He had no idea how long he sat there, his chin propped on his hand as he stared at snatches of the two people in front of him, waiting for a sigh, a yawn, an exclamation. In the end, he dragged his gaze away and fished around in his bag for one of the magazines he’d bought, flicking idly through its pages to register a headlined word here, a piece of a picture there. There was a photo of the spot in the Botanic Gardens where Charlie’s grandad always took them for picnics—Dan supposed it was a pretty popular view, straight across the harbor and past the Opera House to the bridge. There was a photo of the beach he and Charlie had played on when they were little, the blue of its water so saturated the page itself looked almost wet. It seemed as much an omen as the great big billboard picture of Charlie’s he’d seen in the Underground. Of course the old man was just sleeping. And there, tucked away at the back of the magazine, was a black and white picture of the harbor taken from way up in the air—sixteen thousand feet, the caption said. The points and pokes of land were almost solid black, and the pale color of the water had been polished to silver white by the early-morning sun and the length of the film’s exposure. In the middle of the shot, like the most delicate filigree or tracery—like Gramps’s gold to airy thinness beat—the curve of the bridge, still recognizable from so high up, from so far away, threw a perfect shadow of itself across the water. Dan smiled. Somewhere in his place in London, he had a card with this picture on its front.

  They’d been sitting under the bridge when Charlie had given it to him, five, maybe ten minutes before he’d caught his cab to the airport and London. He folded the magazine to a single page’s width, smoothing his hand across the picture. “Bird’s-eye view,” Charlie had said, “up there with Icarus—in case you forget what it looks like.” Safe at 16,000 feet—wings still intact, she’d written on it. You can use this to guide yourself home if you get lost. Funny how he remembered the lines; he hadn’t thought about the photograph itself since he’d tucked it into his pocket and come away.

  The seat in front of him shuddered a little as the Russian woman turned, pulling her legs up underneath her and changing the angle from which she was soothing her father’s face.

  Dan looked up to follow the movement, and there was the old man, exactly as he had been.

  Exactly.

  Yes, thought Dan, he is dead. There was no question, no emotion, no catching the moment of a soul sneaking out. The man was no longer a man; the daughter must have known; and Dan saw, just for a second, what the nothing after death really was. Nothing. He saw the daughter push up her sleeve, check her watch, and he thought, She’s waiting, she’s waiting for something before she tells anyone. His own watch told him they were almost four hours out of Singapore—almost halfway to Sydney.

  The plane was dark and still, most people asleep or staring at their screens. Maybe if the plane is more than halfway to Sydney, thought Dan, quite distinctly, it will keep flying with a body on it. If the plane is less than halfway, maybe they make it turn back.

  The woman’s hand kept up its rhythm, down to the water bottle, up to the forehead, down to the water, up to the
face.

  What a place to die, thirty thousand feet up in the air and stuck in this cold metal tube, thought Dan, although it hardly mattered, he supposed, in the instant of its happening. Whatever it was, it must have been peaceful, or I’d have noticed. He felt his shoulders flinch a little: that goose, that grave. Wouldn’t I have noticed?

  At last, when a flight attendant came through the dimness with brimming beakers of water, Dan reached over and took two. “The old man in front,” he said, “I don’t think he’s—I think you should . . .”

  She leaned over, placed her hand on the old man’s shoulder and pulled it away almost immediately. “Excuse me,” she said to the daughter, “are you all right? I’ll try to find you a—” And she disappeared back along the aisle. In the space between the seats, Dan watched a tear run down the woman’s face; it had reached the line of her jaw by the time a voice came over the intercom asking for a doctor. She was Caro in the cab, on their way to the restaurant from the Ferris wheel on his birthday. She was his mother, years ago, before his father died—but never, Dan realized now, never that he saw afterwards. There was more in this quiet stream of tears, thought Dan, than any loud or elaborate sobbing. This was pure hopelessness, or exhaustion, or resignation.

  On the other side of the empty seat, Cynthia stirred a little in her sleep, her feet shifting under their blanket.

  He expected more noise, more activity; he expected them to turn the lights on in the plane, or to make some official announcement. But everything was very quiet, very slow somehow. A man came from another seat somewhere, pressed his finger to the Russian man’s wrist and shook his head, and someone unrolled some kind of first-aid kit. The Russian woman pushed herself farther back into her seat, pressed herself against the window, away from the commotion. There was movement, but only for a few minutes, and then the body—not the Russian man anymore—was picked up and carried towards the back of the plane, wrapped in a blanket. They must have somewhere they put them, thought Dan. They must be prepared.