Carry the Sky

by Kate Gray

  “And Mukutu knew,” Kyle said, “that if a bomb blew up over Cape Town, if the epicenter were right here,” Kyle stood up and pointed to the middle of his biggest landscape, “he knew that there would be nothing left. Within an hour, nothing.” Kyle bent down, and from inside his backpack he pulled a gavel. It was brown and shiny, like the one Mr. Francosi used to start the debates for the debate team.

  Gavel in his right hand, papers in his left, he said, “Mukutu knew that his brothers and sisters, mother and father, didn’t have a chance. Everything would be destroyed, shattered, wiped out, melted, eviscerated, gone.” Kyle raised the gavel over his head, and before I could say, “Stop,” he brought the gavel down on the city he created. He raised and lowered the gavel, and made pieces fly, pieces of plastic and cardboard and little metal cars. I felt the beat of the gavel in my chest. He bashed in the lake. He bashed in the shack. He bashed in streets and shadows and road signs.

  The Second Formers cheered. Some yelled, “Oh no, Mr. Bill,” and the high pitch of “No” hurt my ears. They filled the room with clapping and voices and whistles, all for Kyle. The Second Form was his. Kyle was the center.

  Kyle pounded and pounded the table. Each pound was harder than the last, and his neck was red.

  “Shattered,” he shouted. “Shattered.”

  Song / Phoenix

  What I didn’t tell Kyle about his falling-brick, falling-body question is G, the Universal Gravitational Constant, 6.672 x 10-11 N2/kg2. Newton is amazing. Actually, it was Cavendish.

  That Kyle, Mr. Different, there’s something different about his different.

  After class on the way back to the dorm, the leaves have fallen in turbulence. No scientific way to predict how they fall. The bench by the lake under the birches is free. Good view. The lake is wave drag. Those birch leaves in the sun, they smell like ironing.

  No one else could, so I did what I could for Kim: ironed what she used to iron. Shirts, skirts, napkins. It’s not like my parents weren’t able to iron, or exert the force required. None of that. It was grief. Too much emotion through too small a vessel.

  The last year or so, Kim was too weak. Too many episodes. Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, such a stupid, rare disease. Purpura, bleeding into her skin. Her blood not making platelets. Her body throwing clots wherever. Her cane tapped on the sidewalk. She was eighty-something, not her real age, twenty-something. I could always find her. Just listened. Mom worked less and less. No painting. Less money. After college, I came home.

  Every morning, two flowers in a Coke bottle on the kitchen table. Every morning, Mom and me and coffee. Black.

  “How’s Kim?” I say.

  “In bed.” Mom doesn’t look up from the dishes she’s washing. Last night’s burger plate, Dad’s beer bottle, the morning’s coffee pot already gone. Dad downed his cup, left to join the paint crew. Not only houses any more. Big jobs. Industrial. Face masks and ventilators.

  In Korean, she says, “Too much tired,” and she puts her hands on the counter, her shoulders rounded beneath her white T-shirt, the one I gave her from Stanford.

  “She’s amazing,” I say, “the way she bounces back.”

  “Not much now.” Mom leans forward on her hands.

  Outside the window in front of the sink, agave leaves stick up. A century plant has green buds high in the air, and a jade has grown thick in the fifteen years we’ve been here. The lawn is nothing but lava rock and cactus.

  Not much any more are the evenings my parents spend on the front deck, listening to Elvis, drinking beer, laughing in Korean. We spend our evenings putting pillows under Kim’s swollen knees, gently rubbing her skin with all the blood bubbles, taking her to the hospital when her heart rate gets too high.

  She shouldn’t have died that fall, 1980. Too much blood, nowhere to go. Getting out of the car, her cane. Phone ringing inside the house. Mr. Japanese-Man, her boyfriend, might be calling. She had to get there, had to answer the phone. She tripped, and I didn’t catch her. Flat on the sidewalk. Clots, enzymes, autopsy said she threw a clot to her brain. Inherited rare disease, TTP, I could have it, too.

  That paisley blue and gold shirt, button-down, with a navy skirt. Lots of pleats. The ironing board is wooden, thin legs that cross. I iron everything on the green dot, red dot, orange dot cover. Unzip the skirt and pull it around the board. Hold the waist with my right hand, fold the one-inch pleat along the crease, put a finger on it, press the steaming iron with my left. With a few minutes free time, I can iron anything. Skirts are cake.

  Hot on a fall day. The window over the sink bright with agave leaves, the afternoon sun. Turn the skirt. Fold the pleat, press Kim’s outfit. Nose the iron into the seams by the zipper. Smell the steam. Hear the sound of release. Water turning to steam is amazing. At sea level, the temperature that water converts to vapor is 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Move higher in elevation, the temperature needed to boil falls. At 8,000 feet, the boiling point is 198 degrees. Kim loved little facts.

  She looked younger than eighty, younger than twenty, lying there in the pleated skirt and paisley shirt. The funeral home smelled of plumeria and jasmine. White flowers. Kim’s face so cold, so smooth. No blood bubbles any more. Dark eyebrows, no lines between her eyebrows. No more laughing at stupid jokes. Mom and Dad and I were done with sitting on benches in the hospital, always the pages announced overhead, the doctor’s names too loud.

  “Mr. Song,” someone calls. The lake in front of me, the student behind me. Kyle, I presume.

  “Mr. Not-Dressed-for-Dinner,” I say. I don’t even turn my head.

  “Can you show me?” he says. He sits down on the bench next to me, his backpack still on so he’s pitched forward. His hand is stuffed with paper, brown package wrap, and colored construction paper, and a few sheets of gift wrap.

  “Exactly what, young sir?”

  “How to fold,” he says. He spreads the paper on the bench between us.

  “An airplane?”

  “No,” he says, “something real, like a bird or dinosaur.”

  That thing in my chest happens. That Taiko strike to my sternum, my ribs vibrate. Did he see me put the dinosaur in the tree?

  “Origami,” I say. “It’s an art, Mr. Harney. Not just anyone can do it.”

  “Why not?” He looks at me with small eyes, animal eyes.

  “Why do you want to do it?” My ribs are loud with the drumbeat.

  His greasy mop of hair, he turns his face away from me. “For Carla,” he says.

  My ribs can’t hold the drumbeat. Carla. My forehead is part of the drum. The waves on the lake are cresting, white caps. The sky holds in the sound. The leaves are falling around us, falling unpredictably.

  “The Sixth Former?” I say.

  “Sure,” he says. “She likes origami. I’ve seen her collection of bugs and dinosaurs and birds and things.” He picks up a piece of the brown package wrap, hands it to me.

  “Young man, origami is not for impressing girls.”

  “Okay, can you just show me?”

  I take the brown package wrap. I exhale while the Taiko mallets strike. Young man, big dreams. The mallets soften. To him a Sixth Form girl is the Holy Grail. No pounding in my ribs.

  “Do you have a notebook in your backpack?” I say.

  And he twists his body to pull the backpack off. He pulls an enormous three-ring binder out, and papers fall as he lifts it. Papers tumble in the wind and land around our feet. The wind picks them up, and we’re trying to step on the papers flying around us. We run to ones turning cartwheels on the lawn. I get a foot on one, and another flies off. He stamps on one, and falls forward to catch another. We’re playing Twister, on all fours. We move one limb toward the other so we can grab more than one paper at a time. We both are crawling on the ground and we look at each other. Kyle’s eyes are child eyes. Papers come up with leaves in our hands, and we rise up off the lawn.

  The binder is worn in the creases. On the cover, he’s drawn silos, water towers of nu
clear power plants. Spiraling lines of the vapor escaping from the towers. Hard, dark lines in pencil, dug in, smudged. Around the towers are bodies, masses of arms and legs and faces melting, piles of bodies, cars upended. His notebook is nuclear holocaust, the point of detonation.

  The binder goes on top of the pile of paper he wants to fold. The piece of brown package wrap in my hand goes on top of the drawing on his binder. Each fold I show him, the angles, the different basic patterns. He watches, and his eyes grow bigger than teenage eyes. They get big like a camera lens, like he’s recording. And we sit past the warning bell for dinner. And the light on the lake goes purple. We sit on the bench, and I fold, and he folds, and the light from the dorm behind us goes on, and we make cranes.

  The part Kyle likes the best is folding down the wings and pulling on the head and tail to expand the body. He likes blowing on the body to fill it out. Enough air to fill enough space. We make real things. Cranes. No gravitational force needed. Cranes spill over the blast zone of his binder. Out of the annihilation, out of the mess of papers, before a lake perfectly calm at night, cranes rise.

  Taylor / All the Sky Gray

  Can’t breathe. Get away. Phone call from your mom. Your body. Found. Near where your jacket was. Run out my screen door, the slam behind me. Sky gray. Run around the cove where the boathouse is. Run across the lawn between the dorms and the lake, far enough away that no one sees me. No one hears me. Stop. Double over. My hands on my thighs. Can’t breathe. Can’t stop. Off again. Pumping arms, legs high, lungs burn, no air. Fifty meters, one hundred, into the middle of the cornfield.

  Geese take off. Honk. The field explodes. Birds shoot up. The sky isn’t gray now. It’s tangles, birds going ballistic. My mind runs faster than my legs, and they give out, and I’m down, collapsed like those buildings blown from the inside, collapsing on themselves. That’s how I go down. Cornstalks hit my face, and scrape my ear, and my palms try to stop me, but cornstalks poke.

  “Miss Alta,” somebody yells. Somebody sees me. In the middle of a cornfield with geese crazy, I’m face-planted in cornstalks, and no kidding, somebody sees me.

  No way.

  I ball up, wrap my arms around my knees and tuck my head in. Maybe I’ll blend in, and they’ll go away. Maybe they won’t see my Tim’s windshirt. My arms pull in tight, and I can’t keep the cry in any more. It comes out like air leaking, and I rock. The sound is high and little. The sound is like dying.

  Somebody reaches me, and knees go on either side of me, and arms go around the ball of me, and I let somebody pull me in. “Ms. Alta,” somebody says, and it’s Carla, and the high sound in me keeps coming out. I let her rock me, and she’s warm. I’m in her arms, and her legs squeeze, and pretty soon the high sound goes low, and my whole body bucks, and she holds on. Carla’s wool sweater smells like wet cardboard, it’s been out in the cold, and she’s kissing my hair, kissing my ear, and I bury my head in her shoulder, and we’re warm, and I say, “Sarah.”

  She says, “Shh, it’s okay,” and she kisses my shoulder, my back. My head slides down her shoulder, and I brush my face on her chest, and my arms come around her, and we’re holding on. My eyes close, and I see Sarah’s body all bloated on the shore, under the water, snagged under the surface, and there’s wool and Carla’s hair in my mouth and the two of us. Warm.

  A sound like gagging comes behind us. Over my shoulder I see Kyle. Kyle is here too, and he’s gagging behind us, and I turn. Kyle with Carla in the cornfield? Kyle seeing us. Kyle repulsed and gagging at the sight of us.

  Kyle is two hands around his neck, his thumbs digging in the front of his neck, his tongue way out. His gagging is a dry cough, hacking, and his eyes roll back, and then he keels over on the corn. His hands are locked on his neck, his elbows high in the air, and his legs kick out. He’s totally choking himself.

  I’m on my feet and over to him. “Kyle,” I say, “Kyle,” and I kneel in the mud next to him, grab his arms, and Kyle twists on the ground. I pull back, try to get his hands off his neck, but he twists and his face is getting red, and he makes different sounds, like flat tire sounds, like flap flap, and I’m trying so hard to get his hands off his neck that I pull him toward me in the mud, and I rock back on my knees and stand up, and Kyle comes off the ground. I’m lifting him off the ground, and he won’t let go of his neck.

  “Kyle,” I say, “let go,” and he does.

  His eyes bug out, and his arms stay in my hands, but the rest of him crashes to the ground. He lands on his knees. And then he’s panting like a dog, his tongue out and his head down. His arms are up in my hands, and I’m standing, and it looks like he’s almost praying, begging me for something. He looks up at me from far away on the ground. His eyes, looking up into my eyes, hold no disgust for two girls hugging in the mud. His eyes have the geese and carry the sky.

  I say, “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything,” Kyle says. “Too much.”

  “What is, Kyle?” My hands let go of his forearms and take his hands. His shoulders go lower.

  “Pain.”

  “You’ve got too much pain?”

  “Everybody,” he says.

  And it’s the three of us, Carla sitting on the mud, me standing, and Kyle kneeling. The gray sky almost touches us. The geese are settled into the next field. It’s the three of us in all the sky gray.

  And way too much pain for one little boy.

  And Carla starts talking. “Shit, Kyle. You totally scared me.”

  “Sorry.” Kyle slumps back on his feet.

  Carla starts talking really fast, like she’s a little girl and trying to tell a big person that there’s a fire. She tells me how she got to the edge of the cornfield and took a runner’s stance, hands on mud, how she said the start commands for a race, ‘Êtes-vous prêt? Partez!’ and sprinted into the field, blew right by Kyle, how he blended in like a moth. But then he stood up and scared the shit out of her, how he asked her why she scared the geese, and she said she didn’t know why, just wanted to. And he called that “gratuitous stimulation” and went all machine-talk on her.

  “‘Gra-tu-i-tous-stim-u-la-tion’ and moved all choppy like he does,” she says. I can really see his head jerking with each syllable. He kneels while she tells the story.

  And she keeps talking, says that she told him to cut it out, and he did. She asked him what he meant by the gratuitous thing. And he said that kids in the dorm jump him just for fun, just for the satisfaction. Gratuitous.

  Carla is breathless telling this part, and the sky is clear of the geese, gray with clouds so low they keep the sound close.

  She says he raised his shirt and there were bruises all over that the boys gave him. They wait till he’s asleep, and then they come in his cubicle and jump on his bed. He’s sleeping on his stomach, and they pinch him all over. And he says that he doesn’t let the kids see it hurts. Mr. Song can’t know, or the kids will do him worse. They said so to him. He said he can take it.

  And maybe he can take it, this little boy in the brown field. But he shouldn’t.

  “Show her, Kyle,” Carla says. “Show Ms. Alta your legs.”

  “Will not.” His hands press his sweats to his ankles.

  “Show her.”

  “No.” With one hand he grabs a handful of cornstalks, tosses it.

  “Why not?” Carla’s voice goes louder. She leans toward him.

  “You’re making stuff up,” Kyle says. The way he’s kneeling makes his head about the same height as Carla’s, the way she’s sitting in the mud. He’s looking at her, and his face is blank the way the sky is blank.

  Carla’s face is a painting. It’s a Warhol, a stencil, a white face against red, then a red face against yellow, then a yellow face against blue. There’s a red thing coming from her taking over. It’s like the field and the sky and the geese have a film over them. Brown field goes red field. Gray sky goes red sky.

  “Fuck you,” she says. “I saw them.”

  Her words land on him, like
she pushed him, and he rolls back, his feet coming up, and then he curls up on his side, on the mud in the cornfield.

  “Cut it out,” I say. I step in front of Carla, my legs blocking her, and I face Kyle, curled up like a potato bug in the field.

  His arms go over his head. “You can’t be like them,” he says. “Go away.” He tucks his legs up.

  My knee lands in the mud. On one side of me, a little boy lies, holding everything in. On the other side of me, a girl sits with her fists on her knees. Her face flashes red, white, yellow. She is a canvas, flattened. The red hot thing comes out her eyes.

  “I’m not like them, Kyle,” she says. “I’m not like them.” And she’s crying. I don’t think she ever cries. And inside me two forces pull apart. I know what it means to be torn down, the coaches yelling, picking at every catch, calling us names, demeaning. They toughened us to care less about the body and more about the win. The boys in the dorm, they care nothing about Kyle. They tear him down to feel more about their bodies. If I tell Mr. White and the boys are punished, Kyle will be pummeled. If I don’t tell, Kyle will be pummeled. What I know now, I’ll keep. I can keep him safe.

  “It’s turbulence,” Kyle says. “They do what they want. You can’t stop them.”

  And it’s the three of us, one girl, one boy, and me, the one who is supposed to tend. And geese in the next field. The cold of November is the mud where my knee rests, where Kyle’s shoulder curls, where Carla sits. There is no other world than this, me with a body rising after ten weeks in a river, Carla with all the want red in her eyes, and one little boy with pain marking him inside and out.