Thomas Olde Heuvelt: The Day the World Turned Upside Down

Dawnie shifted a forlorn look from the aviator to me. Something in her eyes alarmed me. Something wasn’t right.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked, in an effort to stall for time more than anything else.

“Thermal holds the wing up,” the aviator said, straightening and moving his hand to Dawnie’s back. “Warm air rises up and all that shit. Now that everything’s upside-down, it’s all thermal. Falling crap, that’s what you don’t want.”

“And where do you land?”

“Bridges, roofs, hangars with loading bays . . . even trees will work, but they’ll screw up your wing.”

“I meant at city hall . . .”

“Holy fuck! Look at that!” the aviator said, turning toward the river flowing past over our heads, looking solid. “That’s like magic.” He had shrugged off his harness and started stripping off his clothes, as if he was planning on going for a swim. Suddenly I was sure. There was no evacuation center, no municipal rescue-squad, no protocol. The man was a flying predator. He had been circling around like a hawk and had spotted his prey. He would fly off with Dawnie, and I would wait, but no one would come back.

In his underwear, the aviator started climbing the iron frame around the bridge pylon toward the river. He had all the time in the world. We had nowhere to go, and he knew it. But just then, Bubbles jumped up from the water in the 7-Up bottle with a significant slosh, and Dawnie and I exchanged a glance. In an instant, I slipped into the harness and fastened the straps. The aviator had reached the lead-grey surface of the water and carefully lifted his arm. Gesturing frantically, I urged Dawnie to hurry. The aviator’s hand slipped through the surface . . . and water from the river started trickling down his arm in small rivulets.

“Awesome . . .” he breathed, his gaze following the water drip onto the bridge below . . . when he suddenly caught sight of us and yelled, “Hey, what the hell are you doing!”

“Hang on!” I shouted, hurling Dawnie on to my back, grabbing the hang glider’s frame, fastening carabiners and fastening Dawnie, hoping-praying-begging let the belt around her pants carry her, small arms around my neck and the aviator jumping down right behind us and me running with my breath in my throat and my eyes closed and one second to think: Are those carabiners clipped on right? And then we plummeted from the bridge and started spiraling down like madmen.

And a yank and a dizzying nose dive, and the world contracted. The hang glider righted itself and we were flying. I screamed, realizing I had never flown before, not without wings and not with them. The aviator screamed on the bridge, already far behind us now. And Dawnie . . . she didn’t scream, but held on tightly to my back, her hands covering my eyes as she herself gazed around in delight.

It is relatively easy to fly a hang glider if the need arises, but landing while there is no ground to land on? That’s a more complicated matter.

I was afraid to fly more than a small distance beneath the Earth’s surface. That turned out to be simple, since the thermal from the fires hovering between the splintered rooftops and the smoke did indeed continue to lift the delta wing up. By moving my balance on the bar to the front, I dove down and prevented us from slamming into the Earth, and after some experimenting I could steer the delta wing by shifting my weight to the left and right.

For the first time since your it’s not you, it’s me, a new feeling washed over me: a sense of freedom, at least temporarily pushing my desire to be someone else and somewhere else into the back of my mind.

After a while, a flock of geese came flying in our tail. I wondered where they had come from; they were just there, suddenly. I set a course for you and the geese winged along beside us.

The dead Earth was a thing of fabulous beauty.

We saw lovers, hugging each other in trees. We saw children, pulling small buckets of food and folded notes back and forth on clotheslines between upside-down windows. We saw people finding each other on the jumbled strings of assemblies they were building, forging the umbilical cord of a new society. And after a while we had left the city behind and all we saw were trees, their branches drooping sadly and their leaves fluttering away into the bottomless depths of the atmosphere, making it seem as if the Earth was weeping green tears.

We were very close to where you lived when Dawnie pointed and said, “There’s where we can go and see Mommy!”

Suspended in the air in front of us was a seemingly endless rope ladder, undulating calmly in the sultry breeze. As we neared it, I saw that the ladder hung from a trapdoor in the roof of a caravan, dangling from the face of the Earth by iron chains. A higgledy-piggledy board walkway connected it to a small, ramshackle, upside-down house from which enormous amounts of flaxen rope moved toward the peculiar trailer in spun cobwebs, as if some kind of machinery in there was perpetually working.

I circled the rope ladder and decided to crash in the apple orchard around the house. Slender tree trunks, lots of branches, and a lower boundary consisting of a thick canopy: It was iffy at best, but I guessed we wouldn’t find a better place.

“Hold on to me very tightly,” I told Dawnie. “And whatever you do, don’t let go!”

Next thing, everything was jolting and swishing around us. Branches whipped, leaves swirled, shrieking birds burst off in flight. The delta wing snapped and tore and suddenly we stopped, the twisted frame pierced by branches. They broke, and we fell down through a nauseating air pocket, surrounded by the sickly smell of apples, before the canopy caught us and I managed to grab onto a tree trunk.

A window in the caravan popped open and a frail woman looking older than the Earth itself leaned out. “My goodness!” she yelled. “Are you all right?”

“I . . . think so . . .” I stammered. And promptly Dawnie rolled off my back and ended up dangling in the vacuum beneath the apple tree, her face a mask of bewilderment, a thousand thanks to the carabiner on her belt. I hoisted her up, unclipped her and put her in the crown of the apple tree. We had survived the impact with no more than a few scratches and some ripped clothes.

“You’d better hurry inside,” the woman said. “You two look like you could use a cup of tea.”

A little while later we shuffled across the rickety footbridge, fastened to large hooks drilled into the Earth, toward the hanging trailer, careful not to get entangled in the rustling cobwebs of flaxen rope. Inside, my jaw dropped to the floor in surprise. The small caravan was literally crammed full of flax. The woman who had hailed us from the window now sat in a rocking chair and was twining the flax together in thick strings. A second, almost identical old lady was knotting the strings into a rope ladder and feeding it through the trapdoor in the floor.

“Be careful,” the second woman said worriedly. “You don’t want to fall through that. You have no idea how deep it is.”

“Of course they do, Junilla,” her sister argued. “They’ve just come from down there.”

“But do they know how deep it is?” The little lady gazed at me expectantly, and I shrugged to be polite. “That’s my point, Leonilla,” she said, resolutely fastening a knot. “No one knows.”

They gave us steaming cups of herbal tea. Then the woman named Junilla turned to Dawnie like only old ladies can, her industrious hands never missing a beat. “What have you got there, sweet thing?”

Shyly twisting her body back and forth, Dawnie showed her the 7-Up bottle. The woman peered curiously inside from behind her thick lenses and Bubbles looked out through the thin plastic with unwavering melancholy.