Chang-Rae Lee - Aloft

ACK CALLED ME EARLY this morning and said to turn on CNN. I asked him what for and he said, "It's your Englishman."

I thanked him and hung up, and after some tense moments of searching for the remote I was looking at a low-quality video of a helicopter surveying rough water somewhere in the South Pacific, with the caption at the bottom of the screen reading, Around-the-World Balloonist Feared Downed. The voice of the reporter spoke about Sir Harold Clarkson-Ickes's control team having made last contact with him some twelve hours before, but said that yet another intense weather system had developed directly in his path and engulfed him. It was hoped that Sir Harold would have emerged from the storm a couple of hours earlier, perhaps blown significantly off course but with his pod intact and communications still functioning. At the moment, though, they had no word and were considering him to be downed some 500 kilometers east of New Zealand. A desperate search-and-rescue mission was in progress, but as yet there had not been any sign of the floatable high-tech carriage or the silvery-skinned balloon.

I watched for another hour or so through a couple news cycles but the story wasn't changing and I decided to take a drive in the Impala. In fact I started to head out to MacArthur so I could get up in the nice weather and feel as though I was doing something for Sir Harold instead of just sitting there like snuff-show sleaze waiting for the gruesome signs of his death. But after I got to the field and took the tonneau cover off Donnie, and removed the cowl plug and pitot tube and wheel chocks, and climbed inside to check the electronics and test the play of the ailerons and rudder, I suddenly felt completely ridiculous, like I was some dopey kid pretending to be a salty air ace, dreamily preparing to set out and look for the poor bedraggled explorer himself (which I'm not sure I would do had Sir Harold splashed down right smack in the middle of the Sound, out of dread of actually spotting the deflated balloon floating forlornly in the water like a tossed condom, but also because I can't bear too much traffic anywhere, and especially up there), all of which seemed too utterly safe and symbolic even for yours truly. And I realized perhaps, perhaps, while taking off my headset, that the crucial difference between me and Sir Harold was not only a few extra zeroes in the bank account or that he possessed a genuine thrill-seeking Type-T personality (whereas mine, as Rita once snidely suggested, was really more Type-D — i.e., Down-filled-Seeking), but rather that one of us would always be peeking about while venturing forth, checking and rechecking for the field, no matter how fair the air. So for the first time ever I buttoned Donnie back up without flying her, and went about idly cruising around the county under the dusky-throated power of 327 cubic inches of prime American displacement, the sound of which can almost make you think you might actually be accomplishing something, if unfortunately these days in a selfish world-ruinous sort of way.

At one point I passed near enough to Ivy Acres to consider (and feel the obligation of) stopping in to check on Pop, but I knew he'd be in the same unsettled mood he's been in since what happened to Bea, and I decided to keep on rolling. Bea, I should report, has made it, but not in a good way. In fact I can say without hesitancy that it couldn't be worse. After I and the staff and then the actual licensed medical personnel took our turns not getting out what was lodged in Bea's throat, she was rushed to the hospital, where the ER doctors finally removed the foreign object from her airway (a diamond-shaped patch of renegade turkey sternum that had somehow slipped through the boneless-breast-roll machines) and got her heart pumping again. Soon thereafter they put her on a ventilator and apparently it was touch and go that night. But she is now, a week later, finally breathing on her own, though it seems that she is no longer saying or thinking or feeling very much, or at least showing any signs of doing so, now or in the near future.

The near future being all Bea — and a lot of the rest of us—

has left.

What's a bit shocking is how thoroughly fine Pop seems to be with the whole thing, or how far he's already moved past it. I drove him over to the hospital and we had a decent enough visit with Bea but the next day before I was to pick him up again he called to tell me he didn't want to go. I said no problem, that I could take him whenever.

"Don't bother yourself," he said, his voice uncharacteristically hoarse, like a smoker's. "I don't want to see her anymore."

"You don't mean that," I said.

"Yeah, I do."

"You're just exhausted by all this. Sounds like you're coming down with something."

"Probably. I don't feel good."

"I'll come over and have someone take a look at you."

"Forget it."

"Let's talk tomorrow," I said. "You'll feel different I bet."

"I don't want to see her anymore, Jerome. I'm not kidding you. It's over between us."

I didn't quite know what to say to that last bit, which made it sound as though he and poor Bea had a falling out, a lovers'

quarrel, rather than the atmosphere-obliterating airburst that it was, and is.

"Okay. Maybe in a few days."

"No way. She's not for me."

"She's not herself right now, Pop. You know?"

"Not herself? Did you take a good look at her, Jerome, with her arms and legs as stiff as pipes? Who else do you think she might be? Esther fucking Williams?"

"I'm sure she'll get physical therapy soon. Maybe when she gets out of the hospital and they bring her back here, to the Transitions ward."

"Hey, buddy boy, I know the whole story. The nurses' aides will have to cut her toenails and fingernails and sponge-bathe her, too, but probably won't do a good job of it, so she'll start to smell bad and they'll resent having to deal with her even more than they do now So they'll treat her worse and worse until the last dignified remnants of the old Bea get so fed up that she won't open her mouth to eat or drink."

"You have to stop thinking like this, Pop."

"I'm not thinking!" he says, loudly enough that his voice distorts through the handset. "I don't have to think. I've got eyes.

And I've seen enough of what happens to the dried-out hides around here to know none of it is pretty. So don't expect me to put on a brave face and make the best of it, because that's all horseshit. I'm not a pretender, Jerome, I think you know that.

I've never run my life that way and I'm not going to do it now.

So listen to me. Bea is gone, gone forever. You can do me a big favor and not mention her anymore. Because if she ever does come back here from the hospital I'm not going to talk to her or visit her or go hold her hand or do anything else like that. She's kaput, okay? Dead and buried. I'm done with it, I'm finished."

"So what are you going to do now?"

"Whatdya mean, what am I going to do? I'm busy as hell. I'm gonna sit here and grow my nose hair. I'm gonna grind down my corns. If I'm lucky I won't slip in the tub and break my ass.

What's this I hear about Theresa maybe being pregnant?"

"Who told you that?"

"Jack. He visits me every week, you know."

"I didn't know that."

"He's no emotional deadbeat."

"She told him?"

"He thought she looked like she was showing at the party.

And now they're getting hitched sooner, right?"

"I guess."

"So what else is there?"

"Not much," I said, though at that moment I surprised myself by nearly asking for his advice, which wouldn't be advice so much as an opinion on what he would do and the blanket idiocy of any other course, probably to the tune of me putting my foot down and telling her that if she didn't jettison the baby and start treatments asap, she and Paul would have to pack up and leave and expect no support from me because I wasn't the kind of guy who would stand by tapping out the inexorable count-down of life while his daughter was ensuring her own doom, or something like that.