pieces of red coral, and far above, huge white jellyfish gently pumped through the water, dragging tendrils of rain behind them.
Then he saw it, and everything became clear again. He was in western Arizona. Those were clouds. These were formations of rock, nothing more, and that was the blimp’s silver nose peeking out from behind one of them. He opened his mouth to scream, to laugh, but his throat was too parched. He swung the Ford around toward the stone tower and stomped on the gas. The car gunned forward. Claire’s compact slid off the dash and fell into his lap. He would sneak up on the blimp from behind. He would surprise it! The steering wheel rattled in Pres’s hands as he roared around the back of the rock tower. He could see the blimp clearly now, hovering just above the cracked, red dirt.
Beneath the blimp’s nose, a small crew of men had just finished drawing water from a stone well. Pres could see some of them winding in the snake-like tube of an electric pump from the well’s mouth, while others carried plump, jiggling sacks of water over their shoulders toward the blimp. Pres did not know whether the water was to be used for ballast or coolant or just for drinking, but he knew it wasn’t going to reach the blimp. He grabbed the gun from the passenger seat and fired it out the window at the line of trudging men. The crack echoed off the rock walls. The men dropped their sacks and ran for the blimp’s folding staircase.
The blimp was right in front of him now, just yards ahead. He was near enough to see the men’s frightened faces, the gold stripes at the cuff ends of their tan shirts and pants as they rushed up the steps. The last of them disappeared inside the blimp just as Pres skidded to a stop beneath the massive tail fins. He jumped out and ran between the mooring ropes toward the staircase, which was already drawing up into the cabin. The muscles of his legs burned.
“I’m here!” he screamed as the stairway panel clicked shut above him. “Claire!” He pounded on the hatch with the butt of the gun, smashing dents in the wood planking. He rushed over to a curtained window and raised the gun again, but the hot blast from the blimp’s engines knocked him backward, whipping and cutting at his arms and neck. He tried to shield his eyes from the storm whirling around him. Then came the horrible tearing noise as the mooring rings ripped loose from the ground, each one dangling a crumbling heap of earth. Pres glanced above the crook of his elbow at the blimp. His hands shook with panic as he saw the cabin rise away from him. He grabbed at a nearby mooring rope and clutched it as tightly as he could. The blimp’s nose tilted down slightly, and then it began to glide forward. Pres ran behind it, clinging to the rope, but it soon picked up speed and before he knew it he was being dragged on his belly through the dirt. Pebbles flayed the bottoms of his arms. The friction stung so badly that he thought he wouldn’t be able to hold on. Then he was being peeled up, lifted into the air as the blimp ascended.
Pres crossed his ankles around the rope, tightening his grip. He looked down at the landscape falling away beneath him, at the wrinkles in the red earth, the torched heaps of rock. He glanced over his shoulder and saw his car, his battered Model T, growing smaller and smaller until it vanished in a whirl of sand.
Pres turned back to the blimp. He knew that all that stood between him and death was his grip on the cable, and yet even as he clung to its steel braiding a strange calm came over him, an almost restful feeling. Things were out of his hands now; he was being carried toward the end of his journey by the blimp, which he now saw was called
The air thinned and grew cold and Pres began to feel light-headed. His shoe fell off and tumbled through the sky. Breathing became an effort. Soon he could feel the blood coursing up his arms. But he would not let go. The rope felt a part of him, the blimp too, and for a moment when he gazed up at its body, sunlight gleaming off its silver skin, what he saw floating up there was not a blimp at all but an extension of himself, his own heart, swelled to bursting and released from his chest. His heart, swinging him through the sky. He thought about all the places and wonders he’d seen these past months, and felt a strange gratitude toward Claire for taking him all this way.
He turned back to the cabin and tried to focus on the word
I ONCE LIVED NEXT TO A MAN WHO WAS INDESTRUCTIBLE. HIS name was Gay Isbelle and he cheated death three times—twice before I’d met him, and then once in my company.
It was important for me to be around someone like Gay at that point in my life, someone invulnerable, as I was scared and lonely and hiding from my family, which was, and still is, one of the wealthiest in the country. Their money goes back to the days of gas and steam, and the root of the family name means both “vision” and “light” in a language that will not be revealed here. They had detectives out looking for me, detectives with real means, but in Florida at that time, for a short, wonderful period not too long ago, it was easy to find employment without identification of any shape or sort. It seemed you could open a police station with just a few phony papers to tack on the wall. You could become whoever you wanted; that was Florida right then. I had a book of over fifteen thousand baby names, and I changed mine whenever I felt like it.
Gay and I both lived on the second floor of the Shores Motel, which sat on the outskirts of Orlando, near the trashiest of that neighborhood’s three convention centers. This particular convention center didn’t even have a name; it was simply marked by a sign over the interstate exit that read CNV. CNTR. #16, as though it wasn’t even worth plugging vowels into. It only hosted the most dismal conventions—gatherings for the fan clubs of otherwise long-forgotten stars; reunions for high school classes that graduated three, even four generations back, so long ago that only a few ancient people showed up to wander beneath the wrinkled balloons. Whenever a convention came to Cnv. Cntr. #16, most of its attendees washed into the Shores, and it was during one such convention that I met Gay.
I never found out what, exactly, the purpose of the convention was, but that weekend the motel was full of people with all sorts of pigmentation disorders. I saw a woman by the ice machine with skin spotted like a cheetah’s. In the elevator, a man with a purple face nodded at me. A little boy splashing around in the pool was covered from head to toe in a dazzling flock of red butterfly-shaped splotches. I’d never realized how many different kinds of albino existed, but here they all were: some just a shade too pale, others with flesh as white as lobster meat.
The afternoon I met Gay, I was in the motel’s restaurant bar, a Chinese affair called the Happy Fish, Plus Coin. A young albino woman from the convention was eating dinner in the booth across from me. Her eyes were pink, and her hair was as clear as water; it hung down her back in a transparent braid. I couldn’t stop staring at her. She looked just like my sister Melanie, or what I imagined Melanie would look like as a ghost.
Growing up, most of my brothers and sisters were fiercely competitive, even cruel. But Melanie acted different. Though she was older by a full five years, she took an interest in me; she started protecting me from the others. She taught me things—how to trip someone bigger than myself, how to sneak out of the brownstone (climb out the easternmost kitchen window and lower yourself down onto the patio wall. There, now you know too!). Melanie was small and clever and quick. She never looked pretty in photographs, but in real life there was something especially beautiful about the true expressions of her face—the way only one of her eyebrows arched with her smile, the dimpling of her chin when she scowled. The school she went to forced its students to wear a uniform that included a red blazer embossed on the chest with a gold crest. In all my memories Melanie is wearing that red blazer. She had a friendship with one of our family’s drivers, an older Portuguese man named Julius, and she would have Julius secretly drive us places after school: to Chinatown, or to Coney Island, where we’d walk along the pier and watch the families fishing for crabs with plastic baskets they’d stolen from the supermarket.
Once in a while Melanie had Julius take us to the train station, where she’d buy herself a ticket on a northeasterner, a ticket that she said would take her away for good. This was back when I was eight or nine and she was in her early teens. I’d walk with her to the platform, where she’d kneel down and put her hand on my shoulder or my cheek and say something like “Listen, little man. I’m taking this train all the way to Toronto, understand? That’s in the country above us. When I get there, I’ll find someplace awesome for us to live and then
