The Blue (The Complete Novel) (20 page)

            “There’s still something you can do,” she says. And my heart rises into my throat with hope, that suddenly, with the belief that a phantom could tell me from thin air that there is something I can do. And I think she’ll tell me to search the bodies. Read something to her, maybe identify some last sentimental text from their wallets. Anything to make them feel connected one last time to their loved ones. And it will be a favor I’ll have to do with no reward any longer. Just out of the goodness of my heart. And I’ll keep it a secret forever that I’ve eaten part of the their loved ones. Because that wouldn’t be the memory she’s after. They want something more perfect from me. A vision of who they were. Not what they are. But she doesn’t want me to do anything with the dead and buried and cut-open people behind me. She asks me to use the raft. The word strikes through my brain like a match lighting tinder. I almost cut her off but then respond with just the word: “Raft?”

            “There’s a raft in the floor compartment. It will inflate with the string.”

            And like that, I drop the receiver. Even as she calls to me, her voice steadily getting louder, I ignore her and move into the dark chest of the plane. The body and the open thigh stare up at me, and behind me I hear Voley following. But it’s much too dark. So I head back to the stove, lift it by the handle, and as much as I want to keep talking to the woman on the radio, because the act of communicating makes me feel like we’ve still got some crazy shot at life, I continue to ignore her and head back to the plane. I scan the floor, looking for the compartment she mentioned. But I don’t see anything. And I start to realize—it must have been in the front, crushed with the nose. Still, I take a walk, the metal creaking underneath me, up and down the aisle, all the way to the back of the plane, searching for anything. But there’s nothing on the floor. And then it hits me.
Under the body.

I decide that it would be easier to drag him closer to the front because the plane is still sloping down on a slight angle to the crumpled cockpit. I grab his feet, one under each of my arms, and lift them up, testing my new strength. It hits me that my new strength has come to me from the flesh of the man I’m tugging, but that only makes me pull harder. And as much as I try, I can’t move his heavy frame. Come on you son-of-a-bitch! I shout, startling Voley. Sorry boy, I tell him, and then I try again. The body moves an inch, and then his hip snags on the edge of one of the chair legs near the aisle. With another groan I crawl past the open leg and sit cramped, barely any light reaching me from the stove, and try to unwedge his pants where they’ve snagged. Finally the cloth is free, and I get back to the door. Voley is still there, half in the plane, half out, watching me cautiously now, wondering what the hell I’m up to, if I’m losing my mind. The faint voice droning on outside tells me that the lady is still trying to get through to me. Persistent, I tell myself. She’s not giving up easily. I lift the legs again and tug, this time lowering my body so that I can jam my feet into the legs of the chairs, using them as leverage. The body comes forward another few inches. I breathe deeply, hoping this is all worth it, that the compartment is under him and not lost under the ice, the raft destroyed. Then it dawns on me. I can roll him to the side and check the floor. That way I don’t waste all of my energy for nothing.

            I step up on the seat of the chair to my right, standing high in the darkness, close enough to the ceiling that I have to bend my head down. Then, I lie flat, my belly on the seat and my feet hooked up along the wall. And curling my arms under his side, gripping as tightly as I can, I throw my whole body into the shove—pushing him up onto his side. My legs kick out behind me, clanking against the wall and the window. But I push them against the hard frame and they give me just enough firmness to roll him. He hangs in the air, waiting to crash back down as soon as I let go, but there it is. A metal ring lying flush with the floor boards. I drop the body and take a few deep breaths. Then, I listen in. Waiting for the sign of the static or the voice or the wind or the returning rain. But I hear nothing. And it hits me that the radio must have died.

I stand up, suddenly overwhelmingly thirsty again, as if the food is making my body use up all of my liquids, like my body hasn’t had to use its digestion process in so long that it needs much more water than normal now. I climb over the chairs, down and out of the plane, and Voley backs away as soon as I step out onto the ice. He dances a little bit, looking up at me, waiting to know what’s going on. But before I can give him even a grunt, I hear it again. The radio. No voice, just the static. Enough to know it’s still working. And I tell Voley, We’re going back on the water boy. We’re going to cut up everything we can, put it in the god damned bag, and get back on the water. And we’re going to find a mountain to stand on. You hear me boy? My voice raises up in sharp excitement, a pitch of feeling I haven’t had in a long time, and Voley seems to recognize it instantly. He runs, his perfected three-legged stride, in circles, and then he barks. I kneel down and slurp up some of the ice melt at my feet. It’s right when I’m ready to go back to the body, to start pulling it, inch by inch, until I can get to the compartment and open the floor up, that the voice comes in again. The woman.

            “Hello? Please respond. Please respond. This is Pike’s Peak Visitor’s City.”

            I wait, trying to decide if she can be of any more help to me. Part of me runs through irrational fears. Fears about whether or not she can track me. Whether or not she wants me dead. To use me as a pawn and then to kill me. If the radio has some kind of beacon in it, or the plane, and now that they know I’m here, they’re coming after me. They’ve already sent their ships. For a moment I want to throw the radio into the ocean. But the fears subside, and I know there’s nothing anyone can do to get close to me. For all I know, the locked ring of the pack still surrounds this patch of open sea for a hundred miles in every direction. And beyond that will be an endless stretch of fog. And that’s what I’m really setting out into. The same shit we came in from. Nothing different, and still no way to navigate or steer. Just useless drifting until the body meat runs out. And it’s all this that runs through my head, telling me there’s nothing to lose by talking to her, getting as much information as I can, before setting off into the water. Part of me even remembers her strange promise—
a very steep reward
. I start to wonder what she meant. What the reward could have been. And it drives into me that I need to know. That I need to believe it’s true. That somehow, there is something I can do to help her. Something I have left to trade with.

I walk over to the radio, Voley still running around with the excitement of my cheers, and sit down. I pick up the receiver and hit the button. Still here, I say. Then I click back. She’s still talking. Talking to me at the same time. I wait until she’s done. Static rolls through the night. Then I hit the receiver again. Still here, I repeat. What can I do? As soon as I click off, she’s back.

            “You’re on the ice, you said?” she goes on. I click back to tell her yes and wait. She doesn’t say anything for five seconds, and I think it’s over. Being on the ice has suddenly become a deal breaker for her. She asks if I see any mountain ranges, and I tell her no, not for days.

            “Ice starts to the east of the Rockies. You’re anywhere between there and the edge of Kansas,” she says. It goes through my head but it means nothing. I conjure up images of the vast spaces on the maps I’ve seen, the unfamiliar and endless stretches of nothing out in the West, so unlike the clustered places of the East. Her voice has faded from its initial enthusiasm, as if she’s now talked it over with the others on her end, and come to realize there’s no way in hell that I can find them or do anything at all for them. Everything is too spaced out and empty and hopeless.

            “I’ll take the raft,” I tell her, hoping she hasn’t given up hope for some reason. But I know it’s meaningless now. Her voice confirms it for me. She says there’s hardly any chance I’ll reach them. That it’s more likely I’m too far east now, too close to the edge of Kansas, and if that’s the case, waterspout alley will take me. I ask her about the Great Plains, and I tell her what I’ve heard. That the suction takes you. She tells me it’s true. That the graybeards take you all the way to Tennessee, and if I drift in too much, there’s no getting out. And nobody makes it to the other end alive anyway, she says. I want to curse her. For raising my hopes. For existing somewhere that’s safe and telling me that I can help her, promising me a steep reward when there’s nothing I can do to come through on it. But I click on and tell her I’ll do it anyway.

            “We can send a gas-powered boat out for you if you see a landmark—a mountain range on the Rockies. If you do, we’ll try to locate you by it. We have drawings of most of the horizons for two hundred miles outside of Visitor’s City. If not, you’ve gone through the ice pack and you’re too far east,” she says. And then I have to ask, because I realize that maybe, just maybe—even though my gut tells me for sure I’m at the edge of Kansas now—that there is a chance I can drift through the rain sea, just far enough to describe a mountain range to her. Something that she’ll recognize. That the people from her invisible Visitor’s City will know, and they’ll come rescue us. And that all of this will happen before the radio dies.

            Before I ask her all the questions I need to ask—where she is, what it’s like there, if there’s blue sky there too—I ask her what it is. What’s the equipment? Before she even answers me, her voice changes again. The tone of apprehension from before. She asks me something very slowly. Like it’s the most important question of all.

            “Did you see the metal case in the cockpit?” she asks. And right away I know. The static rolls over me, telling me I have to respond, but I can’t. I turn around and look at the cockpit. But there’s nothing there. It’s been pounded feet down into the snow. Impossible to reach. Buried until the sea claims it. And then, all at once, the tension slips away, as simply as it began, and I tell her yes, I saw it.
            “That’s what we need,” she says. And then, as if the battery could die at any minute, she tells me the plan. How I have to get the raft free, and get the metal case tucked into the corner where no water will hit it, under the raft canopy. That’s the most important thing, she says. It will help them finally get the link they need to the global satellites. A way to reconnect to the rest of the living world. To connect with other continents. I do my best to hide the fact that I’ll never see the metal case. Because if she knows it’s gone, they’ll never send me a boat. It goes through my head—I’ll bring the other cases. And tell them I brought the wrong ones. How did you confuse red and black plastic with metal, I can hear them ask me. And I’ll tell them I was dying of hunger. Half-delirious. But then, if they press me further, I’ll kill them. And that will be the end of it. Take their secret place, secluded somewhere in the frozen waste. Safe voices calling out into the void.

            Once she’s done telling me the plan, and everything that’s riding on me, and how it all depends on the current, and if I can drift by a mountain range, and not get caught in the pack again, and not hit bad weather, and if the battery doesn’t die, and I can provide them with a good description of the mountain tops, and they can get the gas-powered boat out to me through open water, I ask my questions. What’s it like where you are? I ask. And she gives me a quick rundown of Visitor’s City. The old visitor center of Pike’s Peak turned into a safe haven on top of the mountain. Running power. Even water. And then I tell her to stop, because it hurts me. It hurts me too much. Is it raining there? I ask her. No, she says. Sometimes, she corrects herself. The weather changes though. It’s not constant here. Never constant in the pack. We’ll know more if we get that equipment. And that fast she’s done telling me the painful truths about her refuge. The conversation is back to me, the precious cargo I won’t be carrying. But I can’t let her change the conversation too fast.

            “Where were you before?” I ask. I click off, waiting. Static, and then she responds with her own question.

            “What do you mean?” she says. I wait until it’s white noise again and then press in.

            “Before Pike’s Peak,” I say. And it’s enough for her to know what I’m asking.

            “Leadville,” she says. “We migrated a decade ago from Leadville.”

            “
New Leadville?
” I say, trying to conceal the tremble in my voice.

            “It would have to be. Old Leadville’s been washed into the sea for almost twenty years. Hey—how old are you, you sound young?”

            And I drop the receiver. A rush of shock flows through me. One last chance to drift, aimlessly over the rain sea. We’ve finally reached it, I say to the stars, to Russell. Right on the doorstep. But we can’t go in, can we? I ask him. My hands find the warmth of Voley and I stroke his fur, gently working down to his shoulder blades and massaging them until he rolls onto his side. Content like he hasn’t been in a long time. And the dead silence is occasionally broken by the voice of the woman. Hello? she keeps saying, trying to confirm that I’m still here. That her precious cargo has a one-in-a-million shot still. Better than nothing, so she hangs on, trying to get me back on the line. Finally I click on again. Going to work on getting the raft out, I say, And turning off the radio to save the battery. I’ll be back on before the morning. I wait for her reply, just to be sure she won’t disappear forever. And she doesn’t. She says good idea, and that they’ll be waiting, doing a work-up on the elevation maps and the ice drift. And with that, I reach down and push in the knob to turn off the radio. The yellow light dims and fades and then darkens to gray black.

            It’ll be like flipping a coin, won’t it? I ask Voley. But he’s too comfortable with the pilot stove and a full stomach, and no sign of the rain or wind or snow. It’s too much for me to take in—that I’m so close and I’ll never get there. That somehow it’s harder now that I know I’m camping on a floe with a plane that crashed on its way to Leadville. That Leadville is still real. Some unknown number of miles to the south and west of us. I start to think of the pack, and if I’ll get stuck in it again as I drift out to sea, or if the swells will start up again with another storm. She had said the weather changes, after all. Anything could sink me before I hit waterspout alley or see another mountain top. But there are just so many things I have to work through, and my mind can’t seem to handle it all at once. It’s the task of cutting up the rest of the body and putting it into the bags with ice that starts up in my head right before I hear the rumble. I wait, making sure I really heard something. Sky or ice? Then it comes again, this time with an echoing tremor. And I know, the ice is starting to crack apart.