by Karen Heuler
“Will you take one step with me?” he asked, and his voice had a rich, surprising depth to it. It was a sliding voice, it slipped into your head and loosened speculations.
The sky behind him now was a flat aluminum. It seemed so flat and I seemed so high and yet the effect of it—I could feel my heart beat through the soles of my feet, linked with the strands of the rope—the effect was to make me feel like the centre of the universe.
Of course, that’s why I love the rope: Time is concentrated. Your life is stark, reduced to each minute, each move; every second matters as it never matters on the ground. You are aware of your pulse, the sweat on your skin. Things that have no consequence on earth matter with a vengeance in the sky. You cannot live by default, only by choice.
So when I heard him speak in that sliding voice, I stepped backwards on my rope and said No.
He turned his head half away from me, seeking out the flat gray sky. The wind hooked high around him, he leaned into it, and his wings opened and fluttered so fast they blurred before fitting neatly back together. “Do you think you could dance,” he asked, “this high up?”
I felt the rope under my foot begin to wriggle, shifting in the wind in unpredictable impulses. “Hold my hand,” he said. “I can help you.”
For one brief moment his voice gave me hints of a promise, release from the rope. But even then I noted how my foot relaxed—and how I was starting to lean clumsily forward into the curve of the rope where Gabriel stood. I had lost concentration. He was not offering me grace.
“Are you a fallen angel?” I asked.
He smiled. “Half-fallen,” he said.
That was all we said, that first time, because I backed up along the rope, till I stood firm against the window. He had smiled for a while, watching me, and then stopped smiling. His head turned into the breeze and the sky. He had a quality of waiting that was impressive; I have never waited well.
I was curious whether he would be there the next time, and as I prepared the rope a few weeks later, the thought of him standing in the sky—a sky closer by another ten stories—was always in my mind.
I am very careful about choosing the rope days. No rain, small winds, no sun. The light has to spread out in space without disruption: that means cloudy skies.
A dusty sky this time, brushed here and there with washed-out slate as ranges of clouds lined the distance, mountains to be climbed someday, shifting Everests.
My hair was slicked right to my head, my body taut in tights, my arms outspread for steadiness, and I stepped out again.
Gabriel was there, small as a statue as I took my first step. Still as a statue, a weightless one, barely bending the rope. As I walked towards him, I could feel the line’s resistance alter.
I stopped a yard away from him. “Gabriel,” I called.
“That’s not my name.” He crossed his arms on his chest. “Gabriel’s a name in one of your stories,” he said. “Not mine.”
“Gabriel. Why are you waiting for me?”
“I’ve been watching you. You draw me to you. Your eyes are the colour of the sky today. Please give me your hand.”
“Why? Will you show me the sky?” I asked.
His head dipped sideways. “I can show you the world.”
He glanced down and for a split-second my eyes followed his. My right arm dipped, my balance faltered, I was stricken with a hollow feeling. I threw my eyes up again, past him, to hang my sight on a cloud; that cloud and I became the centre; the rest of the world moved and we stayed steady. My arm regained its balance.
“I wouldn’t hurt you.” His voice tempted me, and I believed him. For that my arms relaxed and I bent to the earth. With an effort I stopped that; I ceased to believe.
“What do you want from me?”
“Please. Take my hand.”
“I’d lose my balance. I’m sure of it.”
“It’s not a question of balance, not really. See? I can look anywhere.” And to prove it, he looked down.
“Please stop looking down. You could cause me to hurt myself.”
He looked back up at me. He had a simple, clear gaze. I admired his features, the purity, the classicism of them. Perhaps such things belonged to his kind, above gravity of all sorts. I had to balance myself, right foot back, shift weight, right foot forward.
“All falling things fall to earth,” he said sweetly, once again gazing down.
I was learning to control the impulse to follow his eyes. I locked myself to the horizon and said, “How marvellous it must be, to step out in the sky.” The clouds were rushing towards me; it was windier than I liked.
“It’s everything you could imagine,” he whispered.
On that we both paused, our eyes ranged in different directions. He blinked and then opened his eyes. “I don’t have terror of any kind,” he said gently. “Just a thought, that goes on forever. A single train of thought. What would I be?” He gestured slightly downwards. “That’s all. I don’t know why it occurs to me, but it does. If there were only the sky, I would be content, I suppose. But if I look down, at them . . . at you, I start to wonder, What would I be?”
I knew I had to get off the rope. His voice was so soothing, so musically sad, I began to feel the sadness myself, a longing for Earth.
“We could help each other,” he said as I backed away. “We want the same thing.”
My heart was bumping into itself; the rapid beats threatened to make me dizzy. He didn’t lean towards me or follow me as I left, but kept his steady stare on my face, as if he were still talking.
When I thought, later, of going up again, and having him there again, and feeling again that longing to rush through the air without check, I grew frightened. He made death feel fond. I had always respected my own willingness to be afraid—that had given me courage, not the fight to overcome it.
But it is a fight somehow. I know very well that the Twin Towers is as high as I can go, and that he will be there. In the back of my mind is a decision I can’t make, a question I can’t even ask. I would have gone up again anyway, I’m sure of it, but I know that this time I’ve come to see Gabriel.
The wind smells of iron and glass. This high up there is a different climate from below. It’s private that way.
If he wasn’t here I could walk from one end to the other, I could bend in the wind and defy the cold that’s different—stripped—from the weather below.
But he is here and I move to him, my arms outspread, walking to him, to hear his voice. I have to continue, despite Gabriel—or despite my feeling that Gabriel has twisted the conditions of my test. He has introduced melancholy; I’ve caught it from him, that yearning to reach not the cause of fear, but the end of fear.
Once again, he smiles at me from the curve of the rope. Again, I stop a yard away. He sighs. “Watching you is lovely,” he says. “You’re so careful, so concentrated. I envy that.”
“Why?”
“This is as far as I’ve been able to get,” he says, his eyes bright and warm. “I can’t go any farther.”
“I don’t understand.”
He holds his hand out, friendliness reaching for me like tentacles. “I need a body to weigh me down.”
The wind has a sound to it, a long sigh. It makes my neck prickle.
“You want to fall,” he says. “That’s why you’re here.”
“No.”
“You’re in love with falling, you dream about it, it’s in your head like a song.”
“No.”
“All the time below is meaningless; this is all that matters. How sweet, how clear, how consequential. We are a pair,” he croons, lifting his wing out along with his hand. “You come up and look there, and there, and there.” He sweeps the sky with his wing. “But this isn’t what matters to you, is it?”
My knees tremble, I can feel a thrill translating to them from the rope. I have always believed that I was superior to fear because I swallowed it whole each time I set foot on my rope. But—it was true, it wa
sn’t the sky or the wind or the clouds that drew me up; it was the bursting out, through, down, the long straight moment that stretched between me and the land. I always went higher to stretch the moment longer. The thought of it makes my mouth dry, my eyes water, it gazes at me, it’s almost carnal in its itch.
The sigh the wind makes is resolute, it gathers in a pitch like a voice around my tongue.
Gabriel, clothed in serenity, holds himself gently on the rope. He moves toward me. He’s close enough now that my hand and his hand would meet if extended.
The rope keeps moving, shaking itself solemnly, and my feet dance with it. The curve of the rope is heavier than it has been; it compels me to Gabriel, like a bright light in a long tunnel.
Gabriel holds his hand out, palm up, a plea for my company, my consent. I want to touch it, to see what density there is in it—light, cold, silky, firm? A cloud pours itself into a dark flower and flows into a wing.
“No,” I say, “no,” and I walk back on the rope to the roof of my world, and I cut the rope so that it falls like a bridge collapsing, and Gabriel opens his wings as if he doesn’t even need them and he stays there, poised where the rope should be, as if I would return, as if a time must come when I’ll return.
THE LARGE PEOPLE
Patricia Sweetman saw a bowler hat on the ground, its rim just barely out of the ground, and she went to it, bent over and studied it. There was dirt in the crease on top, more dirt on the sides, but for all that it looked fresh and unharmed. She reached out and lightly brushed off the dirt, making it neat again, and considered taking it home, to give to someone or perhaps even wear it herself in a style inappropriate for her age.
She lifted it up and saw, underneath, on the ground, like a small hill rising, a man’s head of hair, parted on the side. The part was clean and white, the hair was dark brown. She froze. At first she thought she was mistaken, that she was suggestible, that no one’s head would be stuck in the ground, but then she thought, “Why not?” In this incredible world, why not? With all the weirdoes running around, uncaught and even undisclosed, why not someone who buried a man standing up, though—as she straightened up and looked around, noting the condition of the soil, the sprouting plants, the rooted bushes—though nothing looked at all disturbed. It all felt quite natural.
Of course she couldn’t get it out of her mind, so every day she returned, just to see, and every day the head of the man rose a little higher as if he were indeed another plant anxious to get going now that the earth was warm.
And then she noticed another hat, a cap really, come pushing up out of the soil, and then a beehive hairdo, a baldish head, a scarf tied around the slicked back hair on another head, until in all there were almost two dozen of them, now with their eyes above ground, looking serious and patient, until their chins tucked free and they moved their heads slightly, observing the world with faintly impatient airs.
Sometimes the head with the bowler nodded slightly when she showed up. One of the women winked at her once. Soon their shoulders were above ground and she saw they were all dressed in business attire—even the women wore suit jackets, clean shirts; the men wore ties, except for the one in casual business wear, who wore a sports jacket and polo shirt, but very crisp and pricey looking. By the time their waists were showing she herself wore her best clothes, or really, to be honest, her better clothes because she was retired and her best clothes were out of date. But she was determined to honour them by dressing as they did. And it was interesting, too, how wearing business clothes again made her feel a bit more efficient. Uselessly efficient.
By then, one man and two women had asked her how the land was doing around there, subject to breakage and contaminations, and Patricia wasn’t sure about the way the questions were asked so she said, “Pretty much the same as yesterday,” and they would put down their newspapers (they all had newspapers) and then look into the distance. She followed their eyes and saw a haze just down the road, where the city sat like a blister. Her heart gave a little lurch; she had worked there and missed the sense of importance and irritation the city gave her; if they went there, she would go with them. Why not? Whatever these people were, they weren’t ordinary and she herself had been reading more and more about the organic lifestyle anyhow, so she had the feeling they were topical. For a woman who had once been lower management, being topical felt almost lusty. And the fact that it was all so unusual made her happy. She felt less inconsequential; she felt part of the new order, and she imagined the new order would be fundamentally daring. She could be daring.
When the last one of them shook his feet free from the earth, she had her own briefcase and wore a suitable jacket and skirt. All of them were carrying briefcases and cellular phones and paper cups of coffee that had grown beside them in the last few days, steaming in the morning, the vapour rising from the neatly folded dib in the plastic cup.
They assembled gently on the road. Remarkably, the dirt didn’t cling to them; perhaps it was the peculiar texture of their business wear, which seemed wrinkle-resistant and smooth without being shiny. Their shoes were polished. Their white shirts were spotless. The women—there were six women in addition to over a dozen men—wore skirt suits and low-heeled shoes.
Patricia would have bet that the women carried chai lattes, and that the men were evenly split between coffee black and cappuccino with a double espresso shot. That had been the rule where she worked. But she’d retired five years ago; perhaps the caffeine fashions had changed.
Her own hand was empty. She felt faintly embarrassed and bent down to pluck a daisy from the side of the road. When she straightened up she saw that they were looking at her. She bent down slowly and put the daisy back on the ground.
The last of the large people—for they were well over seven feet in height and were proportionately thicker than normal people, too, giving them a substantial impression, a width that was almost tree-like—the last of them had reached the road. The man with the bowler asked, “Are we all here then?” and someone answered, “Yes, Roland, we’re all here.”
They strode off, in twos and threes, casually rippling together as if they had no weight, and they quickly passed fields, then houses, then strip malls. The city rose ahead of them like rows of mountains, its spires the peaks, the streets the valleys, and around them, shouldering their stride into the city, through the industrial suburbs, were the high-flowering ranks of electrical towers, the granite squat of generators and transformers. Tufts of drying grasses sat disconsolately on broken macadam, with exhausted branches flung nearby. The sky was a pale blue almost white.
Patricia had to jog to keep up with them, their strides were so much longer. The road turned into a street and then an avenue. They walked sturdily and quickly up to the first glass and marble tower, its windows shaded gray like a building hidden behind sunglasses, and here the group divided, half moving forward along the avenue while the rest (including Patricia) went into the building. These marched without comment past the security guards and the main desk, up to the elevators, where they broke apart without a word, standing in front of different elevators—unwilling, she thought, to tax the weight limits. She had followed the bowler hat, who seemed to be in charge. When the doors opened, the elevator’s passengers took one startled glance and scurried out, peering at the massive forms from lowered heads.
The large people stepped into the elevator, allowing room for Patricia, and pressed the button for the 30th floor. She noticed that the man in the bowler hat was looking at her with raised eyebrows. “I’m Roland,” he said.
“Patricia,” she said.
“Ciceline,” the woman who stood next to him said. “Thank you for joining us.”
“Are we going to a meeting?” Patricia said hopefully; she missed the self-importance of meetings.
“We are going to take over,” Roland said evenly. “Things have come to a pass.”
The phrase itself said nothing, and rather than display what might be perceived as ignorance, she me
rely nodded. Taking over would change what had come to a pass and it would all become clearer. She had no objection to it; she was old enough to have seen what had been and what was; and she disliked, sometimes, the world as it was.
The doors pinged open—and all the other doors on the other elevators pinged open simultaneously—and a beautiful kind of orchestrated step forward happened as the large people put their right feet out at once and kept walking, striding, wonderfully moving together into the corridor. Patricia was proud to be part of this movement; and she felt a little smug, too, as if she’d been selected.
They swept past the receptionist and into a meeting room where a dozen men sat around a table with coffee and a tray of bagels in front of them. There was a Power Point presentation going on; the screen read: Projected Highway Miles. The lines on the chart went upwards, in thousands of miles, a figure that astonished Patricia. Thousands of miles per year?
The large people stepped through doorways the way anyone else would step through a hatchway: right foot, right arm, body. They bent down a little, to avoid hitting their heads.
One by one they assembled behind the men in their chairs, who turned, surprised at what was going on. The man at the Power Point looked around the room, trying to figure out whether this disruption was something he was supposed to handle. The men at the table were shifting, looking around, whispering to each other, but uneasily noncommittal. The man at the head of the table rose up and said, “I don’t know who you people are.” Everyone looked at him expectantly.
Roland nodded at another of the large men. “That’s the one,” he said. “Take him out, Anselm.” The large man with the brown hair and the brown suit stepped neatly forward, placed his enormous hand on the shoulder of what Patricia presumed was the president of the company, and took him outside, protesting intensely, his head bent back to look up into Anselm’s impassive face.
The room rustled with indecision. Roland turned off the projector and addressed them: “No more invasions,” he said. “For every mile you pave, a mile of land must be restored.”