THE
SKY DISK
By
The Plaid Adder
Comments: plaidadder@gmail.com
They saw him
often at the edge of the field, though after a few days none of them gave him
more than a reflex glance. He was always too far away for them to distinguish
the expression on his face, or even its features; it was just a smudged oval
under a shock of black hair topping a work shirt and jeans. So
each of the builders painted a different expression on the blank framed by hair
and collar. Most dismissed him as another curious local. Some had him
enchanted, frightened, astounded, angry. One gave him
the sullen stare of a boy who had learned contempt for out-of-staters before
his alphabet; another drew in eyes bright with fascination.
The artist, of course, saw in the small
still figure that blotted the very corner of his vision field the creative
spark, a spark that perhaps was being fed into flame by these daily visits to
the site. In his overactive dreams, he had already seen the boy become himself,
leading another group of artisans into a stranger's field to try and nail down
a dream with pine planks and mirrors.
"We
should take the kids to see it."
Only half-hearing his mother's voice,
Sammy looked out the kitchen window. The bottom left pane was missing, and in
the warm weather no one had bothered to paper it over. So he could stick his
head out of the opening and see his older brother Jake sitting at the base of
the wall, pulling up blades of lank, long grass and slowly tearing them to
pieces. Sammy liked looking down at Jake, knowing himself
to be invisible, hoping to catch his brother in something secret. But his face
was hidden from that angle; Jake's head was only a circle of black, unkempt
hair between the plaid shoulders of his work shirt.
"Don't see why. What the hell is
it, anyway? You read me the damn article and I still don't know."
Sammy had taken much longer to learn to
talk than Jake, so much longer that for almost a year the town doctor had
diagnosed him as deaf. For that year, no one had spoken directly to him, and he
had learned to talk by listening to conversations that he had had no part in.
His parents had never lost the habit of talking around him as if he wasn't
there. Sammy no longer remembered what Jake had said to him that year, the
strange monologues that for so long had been his only real exposure to language.
And he did not remember, and no one else but Jake had ever known, that he had
spoken his first words to his brother. When Sammy began talking to his parents
the stories stopped; and Sammy did not understand why he knew now that
something was missing.
"It's--I dunno. An
art thing. The paper said there'd never been anything like it."
His mother had the tired sound in her
voice. No one ever bothered to send him outside during arguments, and he had
learned to recognize and hate the tired sound. So he left the kitchen and
walked through the loose-hanging screen door onto the porch. The decaying wood
creaked even under his weight as he descended the steps.
"They've been building the thing
practically in our backyard for a year now, I just
thought we might want to see what came of it. It's not far. It's a Sunday. And
for the first day, it's free. After that, people'll have to pay."
Sammy sat down and leaned against the
side of the steps. Jake stood and walked toward him, scratching his shoulder.
Sammy looked up expectantly. He had yet to learn not to look at Jake's face for
clues about anything. It was permanently set in a plaster cast of indifference,
and their father was always complaining that nothing could shift it.
"Always that look on his face, like he don't give a good God damn and never
will," Sammy had heard him tell their mother. "And it won't go away,
even when you whack him." But Sammy was seven, and still expected to
glance up someday and find everything explained on his brother's face.
"They're talking about that thing
on the field," Sammy said.
He knew that would get Jake's
attention. He had folowed Jake down to the edge of the field a few times, but
he found watching a bunch of strangers nailing boards into a simple round
platform tedious. And since Jake watched the men and the glint of glass in the
sun and never spoke, Sammy stopped following him. But he wanted to see it now
that it was finished. Jake had told him one day, without changing his habitual
expression, that when they were done it would be something magic with mirrors.
Jake nodded, and his eyes began
drifting away. To refocus them on himself, Sammy blurted out, "Why do you
break things?"
For a sliver second there was panic in
Jake's pupils before they turned, smoothed and black again, on Sammy's.
"Who says that?"
"I heard 'em say Miss Hamill says
you break things. Why do you break things?"
Jake's left hand rubbed his right
elbow. "What do you care?"
"It made 'em mad."
"Tough." He began walking
toward the thin pine forest that separated their little yard from the field.
"You going down there again?" Jake kept
walking. "Ma wants Dad to take us there."
Jake stopped and turned, staring
somewhere above Sammy's head. Sammy turned to look at whatever it was, but saw
only the sagging, shingle-molting roof of their house. By the time his eyes had
gone down the peeling walls with their one-eyed windows to the weeds and
abandoned hunks of rusted metal at the concrete base, Jake had disappeared into
the pines.
That Sunday
their parents did put Jake and Sammy in the back of the ailing pickup truck and
bounce over the half-graveled road to the field. Jake said nothing, moved only
when the truck jolted him. Sammy felt a strange joy listening to the rush of
the wind past his ears and thinking of the magic and the mirrors. He had no way
of understanding the joy of completion, how rare and fine it is to see
something finished for once, the special elation we reserve for moments of
triumph over the unresolved. He glanced at Jake, but the familiar mask offered no
explanation.
A crowd clustered around it in the
center of the field. Many of the local families had come and were standing
clumped on its fringes; thin mothers in faded dresses that hung too loose on
their angles, their children staring up at it with varying degrees of
bafflement and fear in their faces, the fathers standing apart and silent, or
with a hand on the mother's shoulder, or lifting up their smaller sons and
daughters to give them a better look. None of them tried to push their way
through the clutch of city people who had come out to see the opening. Sammy
stared at them, at their strange hairdos and black clothes that were too hot
for such a warm spring day, at the thin streams of smoke from their thin
cigarettes and the delicate curves their arms traced in the air as they talked.
Intermingled with them were the tourists, sleek women with perfect tans and men
in sunglasses with styled hair who had driven their shiny cars through the
streets of the town to stay at the little inn.
Sammy finally looked up at the finished
project. "It's just a dish," he said. "Just a
big wood dish on stilts."
"Wait till we get inside,"
Jake said.
Sammy eyed it skeptically as they
approached. It still looked to him like an ordinary round platform surrounded
by high wooden walls that sloped outward like the
sides of a saucer. He supposed the mirrors were inside. A set of steps led up
to a doorway in the wall.
"...by spreading a coat of epoxy
over the entire surface of each panel and affixing the mirrors," the artist
was reading off a piece of paper as they reached him. "The Sky Disk was
inspired by a dream I once had. I dreamed that I was living in the sky. I hope
that through my work here, you will all be able to enjoy in reality what I
found only in my dreams." He looked up nervously to a scattering of
applause. One of the workmen opened the door, and people began taking off their
shoes and filing in.
Jake elbowed his way through the crowd
and was one of the first inside. Sammy stayed close behind him, but had trouble
with his laces, and was the last one in before the door closed behind him.
Sammy stood rooted, staring across the
floor at the panel opposite him. On it he could see his reflection and Jake's
and everybody else's, but behind the images was nothing but blue sky and
clouds. He looked down; the mirrors below his feet covered the floor in the
same blue sky, dotted with the blobs of foreshortened reflections. Above the
glass-lined walls nothing but sky was visible; when Sammy raised his gaze his
eyes passed from reflection to reality, ignoring the seam. The trucks and
browned grass and scraggly pine trees that he knew were beyond the walls had
disappeared. Panicked, he spotted Jake in the center of the floor and ran to
him.
Jake was turning slowly in a circle.
"See?" he said when Sammy laid a frightened hand on his shoulder.
"I told you. The magic's on the inside." He held Sammy's shoulders
and turned with him. "Look. It's all gone. Everything's gone."
Their mother found them standing side
by side in front of one of the wall panels. Sammy was reaching out to touch his
reflection. He had been afraid at first of falling into the bright blue forever
and ever. But with his fingers against the glass holding his other self in
place he felt safe, safe enough to love the Sky Disk and to cry when he had to
leave it. Jake was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching himself
fall unperturbed into infinity. When his mother tapped him, he turned slowly
and followed her out with pinpoint pupils and silent steps.
"Don't cry, Sammy, he admonished
his brother as the truck rattled up the road. "Only
babies cry. You're not a baby."
"I wanna go back," Sammy
quavered, wiping his arm across him face and smearing dust and tears. "I
don't wanna go home."
Jake smiled. Sammy, quietly astounded,
heard him say, "Now you see." Sammy shivered a little as the truck
pulled into the driveway and Jake bent closer to whisper in his ear,
"We'll go back tonight. It'll be better tonight, because it'll just be
us."
The truck's engine spluttered to a
halt. "What are you two whispering about back there?" his mother
asked.
"Nothing, Ma," Jake answered.
They climbed out of the back of the pickup. Sammy followed his mother into the
house, stopping only once to look back at Jake. He was staring at the leprous
rust patches on the side of the ancient Dodge with a face Sammy had never seen
before.
At around
midnight they slipped on warm clothes and left the house with their father's
flashlight. Sammy had followed his brother into the darkness before, to hunt
bats or annoy owls. But something was different about this night. Jake was too
intent, his quick steps winding too fast between the trunks, muffled in pine
needles. Even the air under the boughs moved with a strange current. Jake
stopped twice, eyes shining impatiently as he waited for SAmmy to catch up.
Jake led him to the edge of the field.
"There it is," he breathed, training the dying beam on the wooden
walls of the disk, a giant, flat-bodied, stick-legged insect perched in the
middle of nowhere. Sammy glanced at Jake's face, but the light winked out as
the battery gave up the ghost.
"Jake," Sammy whispered. He
didn't answer. "Jake, what are we gonna do now? We got no light."
"That makes it better," Jake
murmured. "Come on." He pulled his brother across the field, now
palely lit under a full moon and a sky full of stars.
They climbed the steps and stopped,
temporarily baffled by the door. Jake found the catch and released it, and they
walked in, pulling it shut behind them.
In the star- and moonlight their
reflections were black with silvered edges. The moon shone white and perfect at
their feet; the stars reflected in the walls had been caught and flung from
panel to panel, and points of ice-white light were scattered over walls and floor
in constellations that had never existed. Sammy hardly noticed their glittering
chains; there was too much black. Everything receded into it--the glass, the
seam between wall and sky, even the reflections. Sammy could not see himself,
only a specter with a silver nimbus floating insubstantial on the thin skin
separating Sammy from the void. He held his arms out to look at them; the light
traced their outlines in shades of gray. The color had been drained even from
his flesh; the universe had been swallowed in black.
"Let's go back," he
whispered. "I'm scared. I wanna go back."
Jake ran across the floor and up one of
the walls, stuck to the glass like a fly until he lost momentum. He laughed.
"Jake!"
Without giving back a real echo, the
glass walls reflected his cry so that it vibrated in his ears like struck
metal. Jake scurried into the center.
"We're in the sky, Sammy,"
Jake said. "We don't ever need to walk anywhere ever again. If we want to
get somewhere, we'll float. Just float." He spread his arms and wandered
across the face of the heavens.
With Jake's voice filling the space,
the blackness lost its grip on Sammy's mind. He reached out to touch his other
brother, the sky boy invisible except in the glass. He saw the stars in the
mirrors, and how from the center Jake was reflected in every panel.
"That's Jake," he whispered to the sky boy. "He'll take care of
you. He won't let you get lost."
And because the boy looked so thin and
cold among the frozen stars, Sammy spread himself out against the glass, trying
to warm him with human heat.
Jake's wide black eyes shone with a ecstasy that no one saw, or could have seen. It had all
fallen away, from him, everything rusted or rotten, gone spinning down to the
vanished earth, leaving him sole possessor of the empty universe. Sammy had
melted into the darkness as another shadow, and Jake stood alone, divested of
every scrap of human junk. He lifted his arms above his head and became aware
of the flashlight as it shifted slightly in his hand. He laughed, and hurled
the last piece of trash into the abyss.
Because of the epoxy, no shards flew.
There was only a smash and splinter, and from its center a blacker spider shot
thin crack legs out to the edges of the black panel.
Sammy jumped back, startled, and Jake
whirled around. LIke the other images, the cracked panel had been copied in
every other panel, so that a hundred greedy spiders stretched in a web around
the wall, choking off the stars.
Jake grabbed the flashlight with one
hand and his brother with the other and had pushed the door open almost before
Sammy had time to begin to cry.
"C'mon, we gotta get outta
here." The world swam into spilled ink before SAmmy's flooded eyes as he
ran where he was pulled, legs working automatically as the black ring of
spiders closed in on his mind. Jake repeated, "You better not tell, Sammy,
you better not tell," but the words no longer meant anything. By the time
they reached the edge of their weedy yard he was weeping hysterically.
Jake yanked him around to face him.
"Dammit, why do you have to be such a crybaby? We can't go inside till you
shut up."
"You killed it," he
stammered. "Why'd you kill it?"
"I just wanted to get rid of the
flashlight," Jake answered slowly.
"You killed it," Sammy
repeated. "It was good, and you killed it."
Partly to muffle the sobs, partly to
stifle his own thoughts in touch, Jake clutched Sammy to him and stroked his
hair. The smell of Jake's shirt and the feel of his arms drove the other
blackness from behind SAmmy's closed eyes, and slowly his body stopped shaking.
When Sammy had swallowed back his last sniffle, Jake released him.
Jake knew that there were dirt stains
on his Sammy's face; Jake's shirts were never really all that clean. But the
moonlight left them invisible, touching only a white glistening under each eye
and shining streaks on his cheeks where the water was still drying.
"Maybe they can fix it," he
said quietly.
He crept up the steps, using the few
good boards that would not betray him with moans. Sammy followed. He made the
right steps and nothing creaked, though his breath was still audible as it
caught in his chest.
Everyone had a
theory about the disaster. Most sighed, shook their heads, and said,
"Kids." In these contexts, of course, the word "kids" means
not kids but teenagers, those shallow-eyed, empty-hearted, pot-smoking vandals
from hell that haunt the dreams of responsible parents.
The artist himself wasn't sure, but
then he was no longer sure about a lot of things. He had been sure of
transforming these earthy lives with the dazzling beauty of the Sky Disk; he
had seen the blue slashed by the misshapen images of labor-numbed fathers and
defeated mothers of hungry children. The smashed panel was only an echo, one so
appropriate that he could not get angry with the shadow that had quite
deliberately thrown the rock.
He supposed that the dream was the only
thing he had ever really been sure of, and now even his dreams were confusing
him. Because for two weeks after the incident, he dreamned every night of the
boy from the edge of the field, flying toward him like Icarus out of a pure
blue sky.
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