Volante

by Sharon Mollerus

On a lush spring day, Wendell and Harriet married in a church on a hill with a golden steeple that pierced the clouds like a pointing finger. There were six bridesmaids and six groomsmen, four parents and eight grandparents, sixteen greats and three double-greats, and other guests, friends and relatives, 144 in all, who gathered after the ceremony on a windy meadow for a grand outdoor reception. The couple spent their honeymoon at the Pacific Deepwater Spa, where they swam after a jelly with 32 illuminated tentacles and measured the glowing spit trail of the giant red mysid. They tanned and massaged and loved, trembling with their new self-conscious coupleship.

When they returned, they moved into a square studio in a sprawling suburban complex with, as advertised, shopping, schools, parks and churches all located within a five-block radius connected by camera-monitored glass tube tunnels. Wendell went back to his engineering job overseeing the construction of mile-high-rise buildings, and Harriet took up her new position at the local high school teaching Historical Facets and Social Amalgamation.

Wendell dreamt of journeys, of skimming the whole round earth, wet and dry, and soaring beyond it to the moon or perhaps Mars, while Harriet imagined bundles of babies and a multilevel log house cradled across a grove of leafy trees with burrowed hallways connecting the rooms. On Fridays, after Wendell’s four-day work week and while his wife was teaching school, he went to the station and took a single terrene-train as far as he could go out and still arrive home for supper. On some of his trips he went to the coast and dipped down underwater, gliding along the seabed like a bat ray, or he drove inland, scrambling like the brown recluse spider over the raw desert floor. Other times he would plunge down a dead volcano on a barren island, shoot up mountain peaks through icy crags or wind along foaming rivers cut deep into red rock canyons. Then there were the treks that shot straight up or veered diagonally into the sky, where he gazed through protective lenses at the lonely unhampered sun, severed from the earth by the cloudtops. Some of his tours were fairly straight, jagging back like a ricochet; a few went in a smooth round loop; but most formed a U-shaped projectile. When bored of all these, he would plug in a random coordinate mapped with no other purpose than his timely return.

When Wendell came home, he always brought Harriet a souvenir from his jaunts. If he’d been gliding over the coastline, he’d get out and bring her a seashell on a necklace or a dolphin calf to keep in the pond in back. On a desert hike, he might pick up a tall saguaro cactus with its arms outstretched to the sky or a hundred-year-old tortoise with a back hard as paving stones. From his upper atmospheric travels, he brought back cloud sprays in a temperature-controlled jar or meteor bits pinned to a slate plate.

On Friday evenings, after a week of work and excursion, the two drank glasses of desert flower liqueur or seaweed sake or red rock tequila and made love. On one of these evenings, Harriet became pregnant; it made her glow and vomit. After baby Bliss was born, they moved to a two-bedroom flat in town.

“It’s nice,” she told him, “but sometime I’d like to get something higher.”

By higher he understood maybe a cathedral replica or an orbit-habitat. Since both were out of reach, he didn’t think more of it. Here Bliss had her own room with a crib swinging from the ceiling and a freefloating mobile of stars and crescent moons which rotated as tiny night lights on a timer.

Some time later, Wendell had a ten-day business trip to make a bid on a shopping center on Luna. The thought of his first trip to the moon made the blood slosh from his heart through his veins and back like the surf in a strong squall. The reservation was made, his space suit was in order and packed, and every night he was studying the geography of this new country, the dark plains called the maria and the higher terrae. If they got the contract, he would stay over during the week to oversee the construction. To Harriet, he was a rubber band, stretching long and thin and bouncing back each time, she hoped, without sagging or breaking. When he returned from Luna with the contract, he brought Harriet an anorthosite rock and a package of the local green cheese which was perfect for spreading on wheat crackers. That Friday night they drank moondust vodka and conceived a second child, a boy.

Over the next months Wendell made frequent trips to the moon, and Harriet visited the obstetrician and shopped for blue blankets and baby shoes for Dustin. Her husband thought she enjoyed the shopping more than the buying, and she thought he liked the traveling more than the destination. They would need another room soon, and she reminded him that she wanted to be higher. He almost suggested a move to the moon, but then his trips would be oriented backwards. Maybe she was right that he loved the traveling, but only moving out from the world, not back in.

By higher Harriet must mean a high-rise, he thought, though they weren’t generally as suitable for children. He purchased a tiny three-bedroom apartment in the middle of a residential mile-high-rise he had worked on. With his new contract at Mare Vaporum, he had received a large bonus and a special relocation rate. The roof had a comfortable bubble playground and rose gardens. Top cloud views were scarce and pricey in the market, so he felt lucky to find this one located just above the altostratus clouds, promising nearly constant sunshine. The building’s schools were rated excellent. He expected Harriet would be very pleased.

She wasn’t as excited as he had hoped. She just said, “It’s so bright, and I can’t see any trees.” He didn’t know why she suddenly needed trees; there were only a few in the park where they lived before and none around the houses. Harriet answered that they gave out more oxygen, but they both knew air was manufactured readily enough. She didn’t tell him she wanted the trees so they could all settle together within the leaves. A while later, when he had been gone for a stretch of three weeks, and despite the fact he brought her native rock chocolates, angered, she told him she’d rather live in a sea-floor stalactite cavern than where they were now, which he dismissed as hyperbole due to the stress of raising their two small children.

Making up was delightful, with the kids tucked in bed and shots of certified lunar crater-aged whiskey. Wendell sped home without detours after his next trip and brought her a pail of soft ashes from the Mare Foecunditatis and a rabbit blown from black volcanic glass. They conceived again and had a hermaphrodite, Jean, and Harriet said they needed more rooms for modesty in raising their children. Their apartment in the clouds, which never showed darkness or raindrops, could not be expanded. As Wendell left town on another trip, she was to shop for larger accommodations below the clouds.

With her three children in tow, Harriet followed the realtor around to look at ranch houses on grasslands, castles perched over sea cliffs, underwater dome homes, houseships anchored to docks, brownstones in town, adobe dwellings over plateaus and the usual mall-condos located in shopping hubs with the rotating golf course forming the outer ring. But they were all wrong for her and the children, and she asked if he had a large tree house in a grove of trees, something both rooted and touching the sky, with clouds wisping through the leaves. She wanted at least a dozen rooms connected by a maze of tunnels. The realtor frowned at her, and, after a half-hour of searching through his 3D projections with the children whining and pulling on the furniture, he nodded, tapped his screen, and asked them to come back the next day for a tour. He led them by group terrene-train down a roiling river to a tree house in the varzea forest; the house was a vast structure perched in a stand of samauma trees buttressed with hale triangular roots. The property was located on the east bank on the edge of the terra firma forest and had been vacant since the last owners passed on eight years ago, having lived there together into their hund-twenties. Harriet purchased it for a tenth the cost of the cloud-rise, sent a moving company to transport their belongings, and hired gardeners and pest control engineers to fully restore the house. The log home was bound to the trees by the woody vines which drew sunlight from the clearing for growth and wound around the house. There were seventeen rooms nestled in the samauma trees which, to please Wendell, she named after the seventeen seas of the moon, which are, on the contrary, deserts. Their rooftop bedroom she called Mare Serenitatis; the children’s rooms were Lacus Somniorum, Mare Humorum and Mare Tranquillitatis; and the kitchen was the Mare Nectaris. The entryway was also the exit, and she called it Lacus Mortis.

By the time Wendell arrived by terrene-train the next week, all the wood panel floors were polished and the leaves were washed soapy green. As he stepped in, the liana tendrils reached around the front door behind him, delicate as caressing fingers. They had supper, read to the children, and Wendell carried each of them through the tunnels to their rooms. Then the couple went up to the Mare Serenitatis, a roofless room slung over a canopy of branches under the glittering stars, and they drank sweet palm wine and made tender love over the round rolling earth.

The rooms were many in the house and hard to subdue, despite Harriet’s careful housekeeping. She no longer taught, but instead kept up on the woodwork and bug-baiting while the older children went to school. A group of beetles took up residence in the room next to Bliss, and Harriet washed them down a chute. A woodpecker tried to make an extra tunnel for a nest, and she shooed him and stopped the hole with pitch and chickenwire. The ants, each with a heavy leaf stolen from her bedroom, marched down a long snaking line into the lower tunnels. She flicked them off the tree one by one and sprayed the return route with insecticide. The baby Jean followed her from room to room as she reclaimed her home from the jungle day by day.

Harriet cleared the guestroom, and her sister and her husband came with their two children for an exotic visit. They lived in a barren townhome on the tundra with no trees to shade the midnight sun and wanted to see leaf-shadowed light and watch the river below thrashing down its course. They stayed for a week and left before Wendell returned.

Wendell was still away when Jean was grabbed by a vine and flung down the trunk into the mossy forest bed. Harriet took the baby by emergency-terrene to a medical outpost where hir bones were set and blood replenished. The trees were starting to creak in the grip of the vines as the creeping foliage filched its hosts’ water and light. Wendell came home and said that it was all well and good to keep the beetles out, but the proliferating lianas were the real threat to the home and especially the children. He had to hack at them and squeeze through their mesh to get out the door in the morning. Harriet said she would keep the baby closer to her, but without the vines unwanted things might get in the house. Wendell thought, one day I won’t be able to get back in. Harriet thought, one day you won’t be able to leave.

As Wendell was slashing his way out of the house with a machete one day, a woody creeper coiled around his neck and reeled him out across the river like a fishing pole in reverse, dropping him in the rapids. He bumped and flailed in the current, in wonder at the thrill and beauty of his last ride. His clothes ripped and fell away as he tumbled through the whitewater, his knees and elbows and four cheeks scraped raw, and it ended all at once when he split his forehead open on a large rock. Flushed out to the end of his adventure, the traveler’s soul was released to fly free as he’d always wished and his body left as nutrition for the large fish and reptiles in the tropical river forest.

As the vines tightened their grip on the house, Harriet could no longer leave. She lived on canned and frozen goods ordered in, while the trees claimed back most of the rooms for their former inhabitants. The tunnels were chewed up by woodpeckers, and the outer rooms were scavenged by ant colonies. While the family stayed in the inner core three rooms, Harriet’s rooftop domain and the two beneath, the main tree was separating from the others in the grove as it shrank, losing leaves and branches from the clutch of the choking lianas. As the children were growing, they had more trouble climbing through the stems and leaves to school each day and went to live with their friends’ families in town. Finally, the children’s teachers said the diet and the bugs were unhealthy, the creepers were a hostile presence, and they had the house condemned for social unsuitability. The tree still held Harriet up between two outstretched branches at its crown.

With the children gone, she had only to watch the upper world, the stars reeling over her, the rainwater which she cupped in her palms to drink, and the sun which she gazed on from under a cloak of sewn leaves. Like the previous couple, she lived in the house somewhere into her hund-twenties, with only the canopy loft left to her, pacing the top boughs with her arms outstretched and the clouds entwined in her fingers. The children were not certain when she passed on, although they sent up pictures regularly of the double-great-grandchildren. One equatorial winter day, as Jean stood waiting at the base of the tree, leaning on his cane, he caught the letter he had just sent up by pulley as it floated down through the leaves unopened. The tree claimed her body as Harriet’s soul squeezed past the grip of the earth.

2005