Strange Weather by Joe Hill
His phone finally plinked with a message at four-fifteen in the morning.
I’m a horrible person I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have done that it wasn’t fair to you. I need to be alone for a while. I’ve had a boy in my life since I was nine and now I need to figure out who I am without one. Please don’t hate me. Please never hate me my friend Aubrey.
Beneath that was an emoji of a heart being torn in two.
Three weeks later he was putting his bags down in a flat in the East End. He didn’t hear from Harriet again until March, and then it was another text:
June is really really sick. Can you call?
14
HE THOUGHT HIS CLOUD HARRIET would be gone when he woke, but she was cuddled against his chest, the gossamer specter of a girl with the blind, smooth features of classical statuary. Her hair streamed and curled in the breeze, feathers of white silk. His cock was chapped from screwing her. It had been a little like fucking a pail filled with cold porridge.
He didn’t tell her that, though. Aubrey liked to think he was a gentleman. Instead he said, “You’re a good kisser.”
She gazed at him adoringly.
“Do you understand me?”
She knelt on the bed, hands on her thighs, studying him with a rapt and vaguely idiotic devotion.
He took her hands of smoke and squeezed, squishing them a tiny bit out of shape.
“I have to get down to the ground. I’ll starve up here.”
Her hands spilled out of his as effortlessly as water dribbling through his fingers. She seemed, briefly, diminished and disheartened. Her slumped shoulders implied he was a buzzkill.
“You must care about me,” he tried again, “or you’d let me fall. But you have to understand. I’ll die if I stay up here. From exposure or hunger.”
Cloud Harriet gazed at him with a blind look of desperate concern, then spun away, dropped her slender legs over the side of the bed. She cast a sly, beckoning glance over her shoulder and nodded out across the cloud, to point his attention to what waited there.
A palace of cloud, like something from the Arabian Nights, loomed beyond: a soaring mass of minarets and arches, courtyards and walls, staircases and ramps. The magnificent structure swelled high into the sky, dazzling in the early-morning light, as opalescent as a pearl (the pearl!). It had sprung up overnight and crowded around the towering dome at the center of his floating island.
He rose to follow her and staggered and nearly went to one knee. He was weak, felt as light as a cloud himself. He was a long way from starvation—that would take weeks—but his hunger left him dazed, and when he moved too quickly, his head swam.
She took his hand, and soon they came to a moat. His heart lunged. A ring of open sky encircled the castle. He could see folds of green earth a couple miles below, ravines and shadowed, fir-covered slopes. She tugged his arm and led him across a wide drawbridge of smoke and through the palace gates.
When they were on the other side, he pulled his hand free and turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. They had entered a grand hall, with lofty arched ceilings the color of snow. It was like standing beneath a giant’s wedding dress.
He got so dizzy turning around and around that he almost fell again. Harriet caught his elbow and steadied him, then guided him to an immense white throne. He sat, grateful to be off his wobbly legs, and she sank into his lap, all cool, slender waist and round hips. He shut his eyes and rested his head on her chill, comforting shoulder. It was a relief anyway, to be held.
But when he opened his eyes, he discovered he was holding a cello of cloud. Her smooth, perfect ass, slender waist, and pale bosom had become the body of the instrument.
His Harriet of the troposphere now sat a yard away, in a silky pale gown, watching him with the adoration of a dog regarding a man holding a hamburger.
Aubrey reached into the cloud at his feet and drew a bow, whip thin and the translucent white of a fish bone. He was hungry and from the first stroke played the music of hunger: Mahler, Symphony no. 5, the third part, a meditation on doing without, on realizing what wasn’t and couldn’t be. A cloud cello did not sound like a wooden cello. It had the low, haunting sound of the wind beneath the eaves, of a gale blowing across the spout of an empty jug, but for all that the song was distinct.
Sky Harriet rose from her stool and swayed and turned. He thought of a sea frond pulled by the tide, and when he swallowed, his throat clicked.
She revolved like a ballerina in a music box, a stem of a girl, with a complexion of unearthly smoothness. It was as if he spun her himself, as if she were a lathe powered by song. She lifted from the cloud beneath her feet and rose on spreading wings of hallucinatory beauty and began to sail in circles above him.
He was so entranced he forgot to play. It didn’t matter. The cello played on without him, standing before his knees while the bow floated there, stroking strings he’d been able to feel but not quite see.
The sight of her drew Aubrey to his feet. He reeled, reaching for her. He wanted to be held—to fly.
She dipped, caught his hand, pulled him into the great heights beneath the palace roof. He left his stomach behind. Air whistled, and the cello yearned, and he cried out and seized her to him, her hips to his. They fell, swooped, rose again, his blood heavy and his head light. He was already hard.
His Harriet of the mists carried him to a landing at the top of a dizzying staircase. They collapsed there together. Wings became honeymoon sheets, and he took her again, while the cello played a lewd, strutting cabaret number below.
15
JUNE GOT BETTER, JUNE GOT WORSE. There was one good month when she was getting around on aluminum crutches, her head wrapped in a scarf, and she was talking about adjusting to her new reality. Then she stopped talking about adjusting and took a bed in the cancer ward. Aubrey brought her a ukulele, but it never moved from its spot between the spider plants on her windowsill.
One day when Aubrey and June were alone together—Harriet and June’s brothers had gone down to the gift shop to get candy bars—June said, “When we’re all done here, I want you to move on, as quickly as possible.”
“Why don’t you let me worry about how to deal with my feelings?” Aubrey said. “This may come as a surprise to you, but I can’t just . . . be done with you without a thought. Like you’re an umbrella I left at a hotel.”
“I’m not talking about me, dummy,” June said. “I expect you to grieve for me for at least a decade. I want a prolonged period of grim desolation and at least a little unmanly crying in public.”
“So what are you—”
“Her. Harriet. It’s not happening, dude. You played in our shitty band for almost two years hoping to tap that.”
“It already happened.”
June looked away, past her dusty ukulele, out the window at the parking lot. Rain pricked at the glass.
“Oh. That.” June sighed. “I wouldn’t make too much of that, Aubrey. She was having a really bad week, and you were safe.”
“Why was I safe?”
June looked at him blankly, as if the answer were glaringly obvious. And maybe it was. “You were going away for six months. You don’t start a relationship with someone who has his suitcases packed and one foot out the door. You were safe, and she knew there was nothing she could ever do that would make you hate her.”
Ever since June was first diagnosed with lymphoma, she’d been parceling out nuggets of gentle wisdom, pretending she was Judi Dench or Whoopi Goldberg playing the tragic mentor in a heart-affirming movie about what really matters in life. It wore on him.
“Maybe you should try to sleep,” he said.
“I was pissed off at her, you know,” June told him, as if he hadn’t spoken.
“Because we got drunk and fooled around?”
“No! Not because of that. Because of everything before that. All those nights she put her head in your lap on long, dark rides. Introducing you to people as her love muppet. You can’t do things like that t
“Okay,” he said, in a tone that meant it wasn’t.
“No, it’s not,” she said. “It was very unfair to you.”
“I’ve had some of the best and most important conversations of my life with Harriet.”
“Of your life. Not hers. You wrote that song about wearing each other’s favorite sweaters and she sang it, but Aubrey—Aubrey. Those were your lyrics. Not hers. She was just singing the words you wrote for her. You need to break up.”
“We’re not together.”
“You are in your head. You need to break up with imaginary Harriet and fall in love with someone who will love you back. Not that real Harriet doesn’t love you. She just doesn’t love you like that.”
“Where the fuck is the real Harriet?” he fumed. “I think she walked all the way to Hershey, Pennsylvania, to get this candy bar.” She was always going off on these quests with June’s brothers, determined to find June the weird chocolate or weird soda or weird T-shirt that would make another day with cancer less depressing.
June sighed in a very heavy sort of way and turned her head to look out the window. “Why are there so many romantic songs about the spring? I hate the spring. The snow melts, and everything smells like thawing dog shit. Don’t you dare write any romantic songs about springtime, Aubrey. It would kill me, and dying once is bad enough.”
16
FOR A LONG TIME AFTERWARD, he lay panting, happily exhausted, and slicked with cool sweat. His head was spinny from the combination of hunger and exertion, but the sensation was not entirely disagreeable, came with the endorphin rush that might accompany a whirl on a fairground ride.
She had slipped away—melted in his hands when his orgasm was complete—flowed across the floor in a shuddering blanket of fog. He liked to think it had been good for her, too. When he looked about for her, he saw her waiting through a high archway, at a ghost-colored table.
He wriggled back into his jumpsuit and walked into a grand dining room. He looked upon the immensity of the table, set with spectral goblets, a cottony-looking white turkey, and a bowl of cloud-fruit.
Aubrey was famished—more than famished, almost shaky with hunger—but the sight of the smokefood wasn’t promising. He couldn’t smell it. It was sculpture, not dinner.
She carved him a slice of nothing, put it on a platter of sky, next to a prickly-looking cloudfruit. She regarded him with an almost childlike desire to please.
“Thanks,” he said. “Looks delicious.”
He used a pale knife to cut a long, canoe-shaped slice of the cloudfruit. Aubrey speared it with his fork, considered it in the muted light, then decided what the fuck and took a bite.
It crunched and splintered, not unlike rock candy. It tasted of rain, coppery and cold. He had been in error. Close up, it did have a scent. It smelled faintly like thundershowers.
He tucked in.
17
IT STARTED TO HURT ON his second slice of phantom turkey breast—a sharp, lancing strike of pain through his abdomen. He grunted, clenching his teeth together, and bent over in his smoky chair.
His mouth had a silky residue in it, a bad flavor like he’d been sucking on a handful of grimy pocket change. Another sewing needle pushed itself through his intestines. He cried out.
Sky Harriet, sitting catty-corner to him, reached for Aubrey in alarm, taking his hand in hers. With her free hand, she passed him a goblet of white smoke. He drank the froth in desperation, two big swallows before he realized it was just more of God knew what toxic foam. He flung the goblet away.
Bumblebees crawled frantically through his insides, stinging haphazardly.
He lurched to his feet, accidentally tearing Sky Harriet’s hand off. She didn’t seem to mind. He hurried through the archway as he was stricken with another shooting burst of pain. His bowels cramped. Oh, God.
Aubrey went down the stairs in a kind of controlled fall, a fast, reckless stumble, not at all sure where he was going. It felt as if his intestines were wrapped in a throttling coil of steel wire, drawing ever tighter with each passing moment. He had never before felt so desperately close to filling his pants. It was like losing an arm-wrestling match, only with his sphincter.
He flung himself through the gates and raced across the bridge spanning the moat. A toilet abided beside his Cadillac-size bed. He ran the last five steps with his jumpsuit around his knees, shackling his legs. He sat.
There was an eruption. He groaned. It felt like he was passing a lump of glass splinters. His guts squeezed again, and he felt the shock of pain down into his knees. His feet tingled, the circulation draining out of them. The third time his bowels convulsed, he felt a stab of pain behind his breastbone. An intense wavering shock radiated through his chest.
His high-altitude Harriet watched from a few yards away, her Greek-goddess features set in an expression of transcendent mourning.
“Excuse me, please!” he cried, straining at a fresh mass of stainless-steel slivers. What he really wanted to scream was Get the fuck away from me! Or maybe, You just killed me, bitch. But he didn’t have the courage for cruelty, it wasn’t in his nature. “I need to be alone. I’m sick.”
She dissolved into gossamer streamers, a silken waterfall that was absorbed into the cloud at her feet.
18
WHAT A THING TO ASK of her, I need to be alone. There was no alone. For that matter, there was no her. There was only the cloud. He knew, from the first moment he looked into her face, she wasn’t looking back at him. Not with her eyes anyway.
Maybe, in a sense, all of the cloud was looking back at him. If “looking” was really the right term. “Monitoring” was perhaps more accurate. Monitoring what he did, but also what he thought in some fashion. How else did it know what his idea of an end table looked like? Or a lover? His ideal lover?
And when he spoke to himself in the language of conscious thought—did it understand that?
The idea made him woozy with anxiety. But he wasn’t sure it did—that it could read him with such precision. He had a notion it was turning through his thoughts the way an illiterate child would flip through a magazine with a lot of pictures in it. He wondered if it was possible to keep anything to himself, if he could push the psychic eye of the cloudmind out of his head if need be. Much might hinge on the answer to that question.
The pain was letting up, although his insides felt torn and raw. He didn’t think that what he’d eaten was going to kill him directly. If it was any kind of concentrated poison, he never would’ve even made it out of the palace. But it wasn’t food either, and he couldn’t afford what it had done to him. He couldn’t afford to be carved up from the inside, not when he was already enervated, exhausted by a walk of ten steps. Anything that required physical effort cost him calories he didn’t have to waste.
Which turned his thoughts back to Sky Harriet’s visit in the night, and then their second, more strenuous exertions before the banquet of broken glass. Was she— But there was no she, he reminded himself. He forced himself to begin again. Was the cloud trying to exhaust him? Was it trying to use him up, deplete whatever reservoirs of fuel he was running on? But if it wanted to wipe him out, it seemed to Aubrey it would be so much easier to simply turn to insubstantial smoke and let him fall.
No. He didn’t think it meant him any deliberate evil. It wanted him to have things that would make him happy, that would comfort and reassure. It would do its best to give him everything and anything he longed for, denying him only a single desire: It would not let him go.
Perhaps it couldn’t even entirely help responding to his unconscious wishes. Proof of this hypothesis was close at hand, quite literally. While he wasn’t paying attention, a roll of cottony white toilet paper had materialized on a rod, rising out of the cloud. He collected a fistful and wiped and had a glance. Blood. The great wad of smoke stuff was saturated with it.
He cleaned himself as best he could. He had blood down the insides of his thigh
Aubrey hobbled to his bed and pulled himself into it. He fumbled for the blankets, and his hand found the stuffed Junicorn. He clutched it to his face. Held it to his nose and smelled detergent and dust and polyester. The Junicorn was bedraggled and worn, which made it all the more precious. He was grateful for anything that lacked the smooth, chilly perfection of the objects made from the cloud, grateful for anything he could hold on to that was real. You knew what was real not by its qualities but by its imperfections.
He stared blearily at the great white egg rising from the center of the palace, considering that one consistent, improbable feature of his cloud island. The one consistent feature he had noticed anyway. Sudden uncertainty gnawed at him. It seemed to him there’d been at least one other irregularity that was not quite irregular enough to be completely accidental, but he could not for the life of him summon what it might’ve been.
So. Leave it. Come back to it later.
For now he considered the dome, the pearl, at the heart of the palace. When he’d tried to climb it, it had brought a black, glassy sledge down upon him, hard enough to knock all the thought out of his head. He had surrendered, gone back down, and what had happened then? It had dreamed a girl into being. The girl he wanted as he’d never wanted anyone else in his life.
We shouldn’t fight, the cloud had all but said to him. Here. Let me have my secrets and you can have Harriet. Let what’s buried stay buried and—