Chang-Rae Lee: Aloft

I now see that Jack is indeed just climbing out, having probably made some final checks of the depth and grade. It's crazy, but we're going to try to do the finish lining ourselves. I tell him lunch is on and he gives me a nod.

"Is it ready?" I ask.

"Ready as ever," he tells me. "Maybe Monday, we'll give it a go?"

"Okay."

He shows me the soiled palms of his hands and heads for the side door to the laundry room, where the utility sink is. But instead of going in too, I step down the ladder to the bottom of the hole. Unlined as yet with concrete and tiles, it's a huge dark shoebox, the earth cool and still moist in the corners and along the deep end. And as scary and unnervingly quiet as it is to be even this far below ground, I do like the smell, which is loamy and fat and sweetly vernal, not at all of extinction, and I breathe in as deeply as I can bear. I've found myself coming down here at least once or twice a day, standing and sitting and then leaning back against the steeply ramped dirt, gazing up at a perfect frame of firmament for flights endless, unseen.

Now where's Jerry? somebody says, the barely audible sound traveling just above and far enough away from me that I don't immediately answer. It's okay. No problem. They'll start without me, you'll see.

I would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Hunter College Research Foundation, for support during the writing of this book.

I also wish to thank Frank and Richard Branca for the helpful aeronautical consults, Richard Purington and Ann Dickinson for the quiet, cool writing cottage, and my colleagues in the Council of Humanities at Princeton for their friendship and inspiration.

I am indebted, as ever, to Cindy Spiegel and Amanda Urban.

And to my sweethearts, Annika and Eva, for being just as they are.