Lucas Southworth
He pulls himself off the pavement every time. Or paddles to the shore of whatever water he's been dropped in. Or peels himself, half buried, from the deep, ragged farmland mud. He pushes himself to his knees. Brushes dirt from his shoulders and legs. Brushes off pine needles and leaves and dust. He rises, again, to his feet. By now, he's lost count of the number of times he's fallen, lost the will to count. His falls last for hours or days or years. Long enough that each time he expects to fall forever and is surprised when he finally lands again. For a second or half second or quarter second, he stays on his back on the ground, stares through the latticework of branches or at a building towering into the sky above or at the soft safety of the clouds beyond. He has no reason to be afraid, but in that brief brief moment he can't turn his head or lift an arm or swivel a foot at the ankle. He expects pain. There's never been any. But the instinct is in him, embedded God knows where, the idea that to fall means to collide and to collide means to hurt and, possibly, die. When pain doesn't come, when his breath steadies and slows, when it's clear he still has life, is alive, he gasps and sighs. Disappointed, relieved.
This time, he's landed next to a sidewalk, almost parallel to it. He's in the suburbs, because nobody can mistake the suburbs as anywhere else. He assumes pain as he always does, predicts death, and when neither comes, he stumbles up. He steps like a sailor acclimated to the sway of the sea, the land no longer stable but surreal. He closes his eyes. Feels the falling in his temple, behind his eyes. He fixes his jaw to keep the feeling from fluttering to his stomach. The house in front of him is the same as the next and the next and the next. Different toys scattered in each side yard. Trampolines and miniature airplanes and swing sets and all kinds of balls. Ways, he realizes, children pretend to rise and fall. He stands there alone, out in the open. A man who has just dropped out of the sky can't hide in a place like this. The wind has tangled his hair, reddened and burned his face. His clothes cover him in tatters. The residents might call the police or might emerge from their silent houses and ask questions. He takes a step back onto the sidewalk as if to wait on neutral land. He does not know why he falls, is sure he'll never know. But if they get to him before the world cracks and he falls again, they will ask why. When he can't tell them, they'll concoct stories he wishes were true. He fell from an airplane, they'll decide. He's in the army. He got separated from a hang glider. Their eyes deceived them, some trick of light maybe, some collective illusion. Unlike the adults, the children, bring magic into it, willingly bend the rules.
For a long while, it seemed that understanding would put a stop to it. He spent each stint on the ground looking through books, researching. The few scientists that halfway believed him asked what he saw as he plummeted. He told them he could barely open his eyes. When he did, it was either too dark and cold to see or so bright the light entered his eyes and choked him by filling him up. Maybe he falls around the earth or through it. Maybe from one world to the next or one universe to the next or one time to another. The only thing he's sure of is that he's still human. He feels that as he's always felt it, especially in the way he wants to fall whenever he's still and wants to be still whenever he falls. The most human thing: to crave, at the same time, to move and stay. When he falls, it's as if he drops down the center of a tower, stopping at one floor for a while before hurdling to the next. Time has turned vertical for him, but still points one direction. He has never risen, never landed in a place he's landed before, never met someone and then, later, met them again. Nor can he, when he looks up, see the ladder of his past lives above him. One curious thing he's noticed is that sometimes, as he falls, he sees blurs, some descending slower, some faster, some hanging in the air, golden. The word angel comes to him. Apparition. Ghost. But none of those words are exactly right. When he's falling, there is no word.
The suburb is so new it feels like a museum display. Flat and far from the city. With the trees barely more than saplings, the sun pours down with nothing to stop it. The grass is the same length in every direction, the blades unnaturally straight and thin. On the bland facades, the dark squares of windows frame the dark rectangles of doors. And everything is quiet, and still, as if rabbits and birds and even the people living here haven't quite moved in.
Then the front door of the house to the left opens and a woman's face appears from the shadow. She's holding a bucket and a bag of trash in one hand. A mop in the other. She has not noticed him yet, but he knows the wide-eyed instant she does. He takes another step back as if to indicate she is welcome to ignore him. That he is not a threat.
Then a child shoots past her legs and into the front yard.
Sarah, the woman shouts.
Sarah points at him and up over his head and over the roof of the house across the street. He came from there, she says. She's in front of him now. Shoeless. Her socks with cartoon characters on them. The brown ribbon in her hair strikes him as a strange color for a little girl.
The woman drops her mop and bucket and garbage. She catches up to her daughter in eight steps, scoops her, gets in between.
She's right, he says, I fell into your yard. I'll be here until I fall again.
He almost expects the ground to open right there. It's happened before. Mid-sentence, he suddenly looks up to see the person he's been talking to above him, growing smaller and smaller. But that doesn't happen.
His hands hang like knots at each end of a thick, dangling rope.
I haven't eaten in an hour or day or year, he says.
The mother's face softens. Come to the back where the neighbors won't see, she says.
The mother and daughter go through the house while he goes around it. A high fence encloses the backyard and a sign on the gate warns him of a dog that's no more than ten pounds. He bends down to pet it. Life hot under its fur, blood rushing, heart beating in line with its panting. The mother puts a plate of leftovers on the table in the middle of the deck. His stomach reminds him how empty it is.
She goes inside while he eats and takes Sarah with her. But the child peeks out again.
You saw me fall? he asks.
I was looking for my dad out the window, she says.
Keep watching me, he says, and some day you'll see me fall again.
Is falling the same as fearing? he wonders. Is fearing the same as falling? It does not hurt him and he does not seem to die, but he remains frightened. Dreadfully scared. When he falls, he has the same stomach-in-the-throat sensation he'd had when jumping fifteen feet from the bridge to the lake near where he grew up. The same weightlessness and boneless paddling as if he is trying either to swim upstream or stop himself mid-air. Sometimes as he falls, he'll shout into the dark or howl at the light just to hear the rush of air reach into his throat and suck the scream and extinguish it. The horrible soundlessness. He's nowhere as he falls. He's alone. But then he opens his eyes against the wind and sees those shapes in the distance. They are human shapes, he thinks, falling past him, holding still. Can they hurt him? he wonders. Should he be afraid of them too? This is another way he knows he's human: that fear of what he does not and cannot know. A prickling on the skin at the surface, and spreading below it in another way, a formless dread.
Sarah convinces her mother to let the falling stranger stay. The house has a guest room, it has two guest rooms, actually, and after one night in the backyard in a tent, the mother leads him inside, and he sleeps the second night as if doing the opposite of falling. He wakes under blankets, one of the greatest pleasures, and when he comes out in the early morning, he finds Sarah asleep on the carpet in the hallway by his door, her blanket pressed against her cheek.
She believes him, she tells him later. She's going to watch him closely because she wants to see him fall again. It's magic, she whispers to her mother. It's real.
In one of the few moments when Sarah's in another room, the mother tells him her husband is in a hospital in a different city. He's not getting better and he might be getting worse. They are here so Sarah can play in the neighborhood, go to school, have something like a normal childhood. But they are ready to go if they need to see him one last time before he dies.
Hearing that kind of thing doesn't so much ignite the falling man's fear as expose a glow among the embers. He becomes aware of his humanness again: the frailty, the feeling in his stomach not unlike the feeling of falling, the bile. The guilt that he never feels pain, the longing for it. Usually, he'd want to move on, want to stomp on the ground until he breaks through and falls again.
In bed the next morning he stretches his legs until his feet hang over the bottom edge. He locks his hands and cradles his head and studies the ceiling. Off-white, stucco. He lets himself remember upward. All the other beds he's been in stacked one on top of another, all the way to the one he had as a child. He hears Sarah breathing outside his door. The dog, locked in dream, whimpers next to her. If her mother wants normal for her, they won't find it in him. And yet, his presence seems to comfort Sarah. His magic as she calls it. He has no magic, as far as he knows. Or he has no control over whatever magic brought him here. But for once, that magic, or whatever it is, might help, and he hopes to stay, just for a while.
Acclimated to the solid ground now, he walks lightly, as if the ground is ice and he wishes not to crack it. He takes a shower, shaves. The woman has given him one of her husband's old shirts, a pair of pants with knees worn thin. Sarah waits for him outside, and she takes his hand to lead him down the hall. Her feet are bare, her pajamas striped and wrinkled, one corner of the blanket in her other hand dragging on the floor.
He has not seen or heard the mother this morning, and, in the kitchen, he asks Sarah if she's hungry. She nods, still wide-eyed, and watches from the table while he cooks a few eggs.
Nobody understands their own life, not really. That is human. So why does he believe he should have the luxury to understand his? Is it only because his is so singular, so strange? He falls, he lands. Falls and lands. Sometimes he has money with him from the last place. Mostly he has to rely on help from whoever he meets. Everyone is a stranger, always. He is a different person each time, a stranger to himself. He used to love disappearing up to his room or walking off through town and down one of the paths into the woods. He used to follow them deeper without thinking, even lose them until he had no sense of how far he'd gone. He always found his way back, as if something inside him had recorded it. If that didn't work, he listened for his father's whistle which seemed to travel miles. Like a blade over the meadow and the lake and through the trees. Back then he could return whenever he wanted, whenever he was called. Now he just keeps falling farther and farther away. Or further and further. Or both. He's no explorer of time and space. He's not a wanderer. For he has no power to drift or change direction or stay. When he falls he must be accelerating at 9.8 meters per second until he reaches 53 meters per second. He should be subject to these laws like anyone else. But sometimes he swears he's going slower. Sometimes faster. Like those golden blurs he sees. This also scares him. He falls and lands. Falls and lands. And so he falls and falls and falls.
He's told Sarah much of this over the last few days, and he tells her more between bites as they eat. He assumes she doesn't understand, since he doesn't, but he likes the way she listens and watches him as if they're both somehow caught between real and make believe.
I'll go with you, she says. I'll come.
He notices that strange, brown ribbon, knows now that she chose it from the pile, tied it herself.
You should, he says smiling. Any minute now, any day.
When the mother doesn't return after another hour, he starts to guess what might have happened. Sarah wants him to go on the trampoline with her, and he does, bouncing up and coming down, the feeling of falling in his stomach but different, exultation replacing dread. They laugh, and she is so happy, and the fact that he is making her happy almost makes him cry. Watch this, he says. He lands on his back and springs back up high enough to lean forward in the air and land on his feet. He does it again, back then feet, back then feet. The trampoline smells of plastic and rubber. He breathes hard. So human, he thinks, to be fully devastated and euphoric at the same time. To be, at the same time, in one moment and very far away.
The mother finally comes home.
Thank you for watching her, she says. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I've been on the phone with his doctors all morning. I've been driving with nowhere to go.
She studies him and shakes her head. A man from the sky, she says.
And that's the moment he hears a crack. They are still in the backyard, Sarah still on the trampoline. He shouts her name. She tangles herself through the net and jumps down. Though he promised, she cannot come with him. He knows there's nothing else he can do except show her there's something else.
And then one foot breaks through the crumbling grass and dirt, then the other, and he looks up at the mother and daughter, reaches for them. He expects Sarah to scream, but in the second or half second or quarter second he sees her before the dark or light takes him, he notices she's smiling. Grinning. She says something to him, yells it, and although he can't hear, he can read her lips. Your friends, she says, your friends. He glances around him then, as the air starts to whip up, as his arms start to flap, as his stomach grows light, and he finds those golden blurs. He's no longer frightened because this, it seems, he can choose. He decides they're the shape of people he's known before, still with him, accumulating from one fall to the next. That small one there, getting closer now, gaining, that's Sarah. He can see her shining face with that same grin. And he smiles back, as much as he can mid-fall, the force of the air getting stronger against his face. Your friends, she mouths, your friends. And, suddenly, he is no longer alone.