The Best American Short Stories 2015 (49 page)

The air is full of flying things.

My father watches. A dull pain uncoils itself along the base of his skull. He has not eaten anything all day, and his brain, despite the pain, feels sharper for it. He slides his notebook from his pocket and starts a few simple sketches—a duck, a finch, a filigree of alder leaves against the sky—before dropping the pencil, his right hand spasming in a way that makes him want to weep. Glancing at the horizon, he catches a ribbon of ice glinting out from behind the distant mountain ridge: it is bluish, glittering, a faint iridescence like a butterfly's wing. When he looks again, it is gone.

The sky is an angry bruise-colored violet by the time my mother makes her way down to the lake's edge. Clouds hang low along the horizon. My father has lain here for hours now, half-shaded by a row of tall cedars. A patch of skin across his left foot stings: sunburn, probably, though most of the feeling in both feet he lost to frostbite years ago, the skin there smooth and white as a cadaver's.

My mother stands over him, smiling. “Resting?”

“Thinking,” he says, and she turns away too quickly.

An eagle emerges from a nearby cove, gliding in before flapping its enormous wings—once, twice, spiraling down across the open expanse of lake, sending the house sparrows into a frenzy. The eagle, my father has read, is nearly seven feet across the wingspan, though to see it glide across the cove is to believe it larger still. It is a bird of such grace and power it seems to come from another world. According to the great Darwin, the eagle is the result of centuries of careful genetic winnowing. He is the outcome of a thousand intricate survival games: Does this wingspan help the eagle fly higher or longer? Does this particular curvature of the beak aid or hinder the tearing of flesh? Does the chick with the slightly larger cranial socket hunt more efficiently, or does it die when its head gets stuck in the burrow of some woodland animal it has chased into the underbrush?

The sky is darkening in earnest now, turning indigo and velvety, dense as cream. A cloud drifts out from behind the ridge of trees to his right and my father tries to watch them simultaneously, eagle and cloud, but in the last faint wash of daylight, his eyes refuse to focus. He squints, raises himself on one elbow. Suddenly, the eagle plunges. It drops from the sky like a cannonball, so fast my father barely has time to sit up before the bird is flapping its enormous wings, skidding to an awkward suspension as it scoops one talon into the water and takes off again. Its victory scream is high and loud. Against the rising moon, the outline of a small pike wriggling in the bird's talons is neat and black as a stamp. Up the eagle rises, up, up.

The sky snuffs itself out like a candle.

My father grabs the nearest bit of driftwood and drives it into the pebbles, lights the end on fire. He snatches up his notebook, turns to a fresh page, and draws the eagle coasting, then dropping, then braking against the air—then, as his makeshift lantern sputters and spits, draws the eagle lifting again, the sudden parasol of those wings.

When my mother calls him in for dinner, she has to say his name three times before he stands. His body is stiff from hours of inertia. His foot burns. His mouth is so dry his lips have cracked, the bottom one—when he runs his tongue along it experimentally—weeping a few drops of blood.

But: his mind. His mind vibrates like a plucked string.

My mother sits across the table from him, smoothing the napkin across her knees. She pretends not to notice how quickly he eats, moving his fork mechanically back and forth until his plate is clean. When dinner is done, he gets up immediately and goes to the little desk by the window and sits down. Opens his notebook to a new page.

Supplies needed for the construction of a balloon
, he writes.

When my mother goes to bed, she leaves the candles burning. My father does not raise his head as she steps past him, putting her feet down deliberately, rattling the door in its casing. In bed, she tosses and turns; it is after one by the time she finally blows the candles out. She lies there in the dark, listening to the scratch of the pen against paper. She counts the minutes as they pass.

When she wakes, she is still alone. Light leaks in around the half-closed door; she gets up and crosses the room, pulling a sweater on over her nightgown to fend off the early morning chill.

My father sits at the desk, scribbling furiously. He does not turn, and my mother stands there only briefly before slipping out the back door. Here, in her own home on the edge of a lake so wide she can't see to the other side, she no longer has to sit outside in order to breathe. On the nights she finds herself unable to sleep, she simply leaves. Walks along the trail until she comes to the main road, then up the hill to where it crests against the sky. When she reaches the top of the hill, she turns around and looks back at the cabin, the glint of moonlight off its windows giving it away, like a telltale heart.

She would like to know how it feels, is all.

The next few months are a slow grind of activity. Each day my father cycles through exhilaration, exhaustion, frustration. Each day he arrives at the conclusion that he has embarked upon the most significant journey of his life, one that will write his name beside Darwin's in the history books. Each day he decides he has finally gone mad. He sits on the stony beach with a stack of notepaper, writing letter after letter. He is gathering what he will need to coax his expedition into the realm of possibility: information, interest, hazy promises of involvement, financial and otherwise. Without the necessary funds, the idea will never leave the page. He writes everyone from every expedition he has been a part of since he became a member of this strange club, the club of explorers. He writes John Manley, who once shot and killed the largest polar bear any member of their party had ever seen.
Nanook
, he called it, after the native people's word for the bear. He said he had been waiting his whole life to kill a bear that big.

Dear John
, my father writes.
I write to tell you that I have discovered my Nanook. It is attaining the North Pole by way of a balloon
. He writes the head of the science department at the university. He writes the great explorer Adolphus Greely, recently returned from an expedition to Ellesmere Island—the trip for all intents and purposes a disaster, all but six of the twenty-five-man crew dead.
Dear Mr. Greely
, my father writes.
Before I begin my application for your counsel in earnest, may I express to you my utmost admiration for the bravery demonstrated by you and your crew on your most recent Polar Expedition. This is no easy road, he writes. God help all of us who have chosen to journey it
. He writes the celebrated British balloonist Henry Tracey Coxwell, the architect and pilot of such spectacular specimens as
Mars
and
Mammoth: Dear Mr. Coxwell
, my father writes.
It is with great respect for your many accomplishments in the field of aeronautics that I write to you today in search of guidance pertaining to all things balloon
.

He writes Alfred Nobel, whose generosity has made him a coveted contact among adventurers Arctic and other.
Dear Mr. Nobel
, my father writes.
I have not had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, but I understand we hold a similar passion for invention close to our heart. I have a number of ideas pertaining to the recent and unfortunately failed ventures to the North Pole and ways in which I might, with my breadth of experience in the region in question and my extensive knowledge of the conditions related to said region, improve (considerably) upon these failures and, indeed, triumph where others have failed
.

He writes the president of the United States, reasoning that in the off chance some excitable underling may, as he sifts through the mail, find my father's letter and scent the crisp odor of adventure, it will be entirely worth the effort.
Dear Mr. President, I am writing to inform you of a thrilling new development in the field of Arctic exploration, a field in which our brave nation might and indeed by all rights should, I believe, excel. Sir
, he writes,
it is my humble opinion that if given the opportunity I can and shall lead us into the future
. Under his signature he writes “Seasoned Arctic Explorer.” At the last minute, he adds: “
and
Inventor.”

This is what my father sees when he looks out over the lake: balloon after balloon, rising toward the heavens. A fish flips out of the lake.
Balloon!
In the arc of the fish's body as it leaps out and reenters there is a fluidity that sends him back to his notebook, sketching furiously. That he is entirely unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of ballooning gives him little pause: he knows the terrain, he knows the cold. He is intimately acquainted with the brutal physics of heat loss and hope. Over the years, he has lined the cabin walls with stacks of books—a vast assortment of weathered encyclopedias, primarily, collected along his journeys and carried back at the expense of more practical acquisitions: canned goods, a sharp knife, warm clothes for my mother, who has darned and re-darned her skirts so many times the mending yarn now blots out the original fabric entirely. No matter. The latest spoils yielded a reasonably well-preserved and fairly recent edition of the
Britannica
, which he flips through with growing impatience.

When he finds what he is looking for, he hesitates only an instant before ripping the page from the spine. The prize? A drawing of the late Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard's balloon—the specifics of its construction antiquated by now but still useful. The drawing itself is quite elegant, a bit of fancy my father had admired in passing and then promptly forgotten—its beauty, he had thought, the indulgence of a fool.

My father bends over his notebook. He begins to sketch.

Here is the envelope, here is the burner, here are the drag ropes, here is the basket. The observation platform in Blanchard's diagram is spare but functional; placed below the burner, it will allow two men to stand watch and take notes on the weather, the clouds, the view as they peer down from their perch. The basket will need to be lined with something warm—sealskin? Something that repels water would be helpful. Rope that can double as ballast. His pen flies over the pages, making a scratching sound as he draws. He turns the page, fills it; turns to another, another.

On her weekly trips to the dry goods store in Coolin, my mother collects stacks of old newspapers and practices her reading at night, one laborious page at a time. My father takes the papers she has already read and draws preliminary sketches across the brittle pages, scrawling through headlines with abandon.
MAN DEAD AT TWENTY
becomes
M N DE D AT TW NTY. STORM APPROACHES COEUR D'ALENE
becomes
T RM AP O CHES C UR D'ALE E
. He uses three entire newspapers in a single afternoon, going through a dozen sketches, two dozen, calculating and recalculating various heights and weights before settling on the proper dimensions for one of the ballast ropes, which he then meticulously copies down into his notebook. My mother watches him take a stack of fresh papers out to the beach and wipes her hands on her apron, takes a loaf of bread from the stove. She puts it in the window to cool, leans forward. Presses her forehead to the glass.

A chipmunk knocks a pinecone down from a nearby tree. My father squints:
balloon!
They will need more ballast than anyone has ever thought necessary. If the balloon is to stay afloat for a matter of days rather than hours, and if it is required of the balloon that it be able to be controlled tightly once they approach the yawning territory of ice and bitter winds, then they will need to harness not only the power of the sun and the air currents but also that of gravity. Sand, my father reads, is the usual thing, but when he draws a sketch of the basket he includes three five-pound sacks of sugar. They can use it in their coffee, pitch what's not needed over the side. He has heard that the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, tales of whose recent forays into Greenland have begun to assume the size and heft of myth, takes coffee on every expedition, never mind the vehicle of motion: sled, boat, foot. My father finds the thought of coffee in the air appealing: it is as though, flying, he need not be any less at home than he is on the ground. He sips the coffee my mother has made him and starts a preliminary list:

• Coffee, five pounds
  

• Sugar, twelve pounds
  

• Meat, ten pounds
  

• Fowl, ten pounds
  

When his hand begins to cramp, my father closes his eyes. (His right hand he has abandoned, the work too fine, the degree of control required too high.) The sun burns through his lids, producing a shimmering red glow.
Balloon!
Hot air fills the envelope. The hydrogen hisses like a snake.

If he rounds the bottom of the basket, will it bounce lightly along the ground rather than smash to smithereens? If he can control the drag ropes the way he controls the ropes that guide the sled dogs, keep them from tangling up in one another, what is to stop him from landing the balloon lightly as a feather? Anyone who knows ice knows it must be treated like a beautiful woman: gently, warily, with a firm but respectful hand. He flips the newspaper over and wets the nub of the pencil against his tongue.

A dragonfly lights on his knee, wings quivering as it cleans its front legs.

Balloon!

A letter from Henry Tracey Coxwell arrives. My father takes the envelope down to the lake and opens it there, his heart fluttering girlishly. The letter is brief but cordial. In it Coxwell expresses his enthusiasm for my father's venture and outlines the specific ways in which he would like to be of service: the names of a few potential crew members, a wealthy benefactor acquaintance with a taste for the exotic, a seamstress willing to purchase reams of silk on credit. My father stands a minute, pressing the letter to his lips. It is sunset, and the air has taken on an exquisite shimmer, a wash of blues and violets and pale petal-pinks.