Love and Hydrogen

by Jim Shepard

  That group will have found itself well on the other side of anxiety. The far shore. That group will climb into their B’s as though they were rowboats on a lake. That group will finish what rations are delivered in those final days and deliver itself to St. Immolation.

  This group is hurtling upward, wingtip to wingtip, to engage the biggest bomber stream any of us has ever seen. The roar beneath us will never stop. We reach that part of the sky that turns from turquoise to green to dark blue—fifteen thousand meters up— before our engines stop and we tip and falter and prepare to fall onto the bombers’ heads. We bank and dive like swallows. My cockpit is clear of fumes but still I’m weeping. There’s Wörndl, a good thousand meters below me, drawing helixes from the contrails of his spiraling wingtips. There’s Ziegler, right behind him, rocking from side to side like a boomerang from hell. Flights of Thunderbolts, sluggish specks, struggle upward to meet us. No one’s speaking. Our ears are on the slipstream. Our thumbs are on the cannon triggers. Our hearts are in the dive. We have become the inexplicable. We have become the unbelievable. We are our own descendants, the children we have always wanted to be.

  JIM SHEPARD

  LOVE AND HYDROGEN

  Jim Shepard is the author of five previous novels, the story collection Batting Against Castro, and Project X, a novel to be published in hardcover simultaneously with this collection. He teaches at Williams College and lives with his wife, two sons, worrisome dog, and tiny, tiny daughter in Williams-town, Massachusetts.

  ALSO BY JIM SHEPARD

  Flights

  Paper Doll

  Lights Out in the Reptile House

  Kiss of the Wolf

  Nosferatu

  Batting Against Castro: Stories

  Project X

  AS EDITOR

  You’ve Got to Read This

  (with Ron Hansen)

  Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs

  (with Amy Hempel)

  Writers at the Movies

  A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL, JANUARY 2004

  Copyright © 2004 by Jim Shepard

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division

  of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and

  colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  “The Gun Lobby” and “Eustace” appeared originally in The Atlantic

  Monthly; “Love and Hydrogen,” “Runway,” and “Ajax Is All About Attack”

  in Harper’s; “Alicia and Emmett with the 17th Lancers at Balaclava” and

  “John Ashcroft: More Important Things Than Me” in Tin House; “Glut

  Your Soul on My Accursed Ugliness” in DoubleTake; “The Creature from

  the Black Lagoon” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in Playboy; “Batting

  Against Castro” and “Climb Aboard the Mighty Flea” in The Paris Review;

  “Astounding Stories” in McSweeney’s; “Messiah” in GQ; “Reach for the

  Sky” in The New Yorker; “Descent into Perpetual Night” in SEED; and

  “The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich” in Fiction.

  “Mars Attacks,” “Spending the Night with the Poor,” and “Krakatau” originally

  appeared in the collection Batting Against Castro, copyright © 1996 by Jim

  Shepard (Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York).

  “Piano Starts Here” originally appeared in the anthology You Don’t

  Know What Love Is: Contemporary American Love Stories, edited by

  Ron Hansen (Ontario Review Books, 1987) and subsequently appeared

  in the collection Batting Against Castro (Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, 1996).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shepard, Jim.

  Love and hydrogen: new and selected stories / Jim Shepard.

  p. cm.—(Vintage contemporaries original)

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42671-0

  v3.0