Cloud Man

Cloud Man
By D.S. Courtney
   
      When I was flying with my boyfriend, Nick, in the open cockpit of his beloved antique aeroplane, feeling a little bored, I idly raised my hand into the clouds as if to test the wind.  As I touched the clouds, a long string of wispy white zipped out in a stream; a piece of cloud was pulling out from the others and wagging his back stream against them to get free.  He entwined himself on my little finger, and as I tried to shake the white fluff of him off, he further entangled my whole hand.
         As we flew out of that cloudbank and passed others,  I kept quiet, because I didn’t want Nick to know.  His protectiveness for his fragile plane silenced me.  Nick must have felt the extra weight somehow though and said, “We’d better land.”
    When we stopped taxiing on the little airfield, I hopped out with the cloud billowing around me.  I told the cloud, “Go away.  Go back to the sky where you belong!”   
         He looked at me closely, “There’s no way I can go back.  You brought me here.”
         “No, you grabbed me!  I couldn’t shake you off!”  I hissed.
He curled away from me--pure white, going gray—like his feelings were hurt, but he didn’t go away. 
         Now the real difficulties began.  How could I get rid of the cloud without Nick seeing him?  We’d certainly be noticed by others around the hangar.  What would that mechanic over there think?  The flag guy? This was crazy!  What was I supposed to do?  Then I had an idea. Impulsively, I climbed halfway back into the plane, and with my free hand grabbed my little flight bag from behind the seat.  On the ground, I scooted forward to the fatter part of the plane while Nick was engrossed in shutting down the sputtering little engine.  Under the cover of the plane, hiding us from the airfield men and Nick, I started pulling wisps of the cloud into my flight bag.
“What are you doing to me?” 
“Hiding you.”
“Ha!  You’re catching on!”
He cooperatively lost volume as I stuffed him in until finally all the white fluff was hidden inside my bag.  I quickly started trotting toward my car, shouting back at Nick, “Thanks.  I have to run—just remembered an appointment I’ve got.”
    Tossing the bag in the back seat, I drove down a county road toward the expressway to Manhattan.  On the expressway, as I moved into the fast lane I thought I heard the sound of the zipper on my bag.  I glanced back in a panic.  There were huge wisps of stringy white escaping, billowing up, growing more and more opaque as the cloud filled the car.  I was peering through, trying to see the road, but weaving back and forth, when I heard the sirens behind me.  I needed to pull over.  What if there was another car in my way?  I opened the window to see, but the cloud gathered instantly around my head.
“Get away from me!"  I shouted at him.
.
    I honked hard, slowed way down and heard brakes screeching behind  me as I tried to edge over to the inside lane.  I still couldn’t see where I was going.  I plowed into something.  The airbag exploded into my face.  For a minute I thought it was the cloud!  I just sat there, stunned.  I heard the sirens coming closer and closer, then winding down.  Police cars came up behind me.  Stopped.  But what could I do?
         Before the policemen could get up to my car, I started madly stuffing the cloud back into my bag, cursing and fuming at him.  He cooperated, losing volume just in time for me to zip the bag shut. 
“Oh, my God, I had run into a guardrail!”
         Sticking his head in the window, the policeman said, “You were weaving all over the road.  Have you been drinking?”
    The driver from the car behind me ran up, shouting, “That woman had some sort of white stuff in her car!”
      The first policeman motioned to his partner.
      “You filled your car with a white substance?”
      They motioned the sergeant to join them.          
      “So, you were driving when you couldn’t see?”
      “Wait...I was trying to see, but...this cloud filled up my ca...,” I stopped.
      “Get out. We’re giving you a sobriety test.”
      They had me breathe.  Looked at the number.  Shook their heads.  I walked a straight line.  Their big hands rubbed their foreheads, knuckled their chins, wiped at their noses.           “Well, you must have had some kind of fainting spell.  Did you fall asleep? Yeh, you were dreaming, right?  A blood sugar drop maybe?”
         “No, there really was...”  My head was clearing fast now; I’d better let them think I had fallen asleep at the wheel. 
         But one policeman remembered the man from the other car.  “That guy saw something white.”  He pointed to the man, now returning to his car.  “We better take his statement.”
         “Go ahead,” the sergeant, told him, then getting into take-charge mode, he ordered the others,  “Now get this car out of the way.”
         They backed up my car and straightened it out on the shoulder.  It looked dented, but fine.  I glanced inside.  All clear---or was it?  My bag was wiggling a little. I needed to get out of there fast.
         “Well, I guess I can drive it.”
         “No, Mam, no way.”
         “Who knows what transpired here!” said the cop.  “No driving until this “white mystery” gets, uh, cleared up.”
         The sergeant pulled in his chin and chuckled at his own lame humor, while his men joined in with loud, pandering guffaws.  I was not laughing, standing there stone-faced.
         “I could call Triple A,”  I offered.
         The sergeant pulled a straight face by clamping his chunky hand over his mouth and pretended to be deep in thought.
         “What do you think, guys, reckless driving?”
         They nodded.  One of them went back to his vehicle with my license and registration to write up the ticket.
         “Where do you live, Mam?”
         “In the city.  Manhattan.”
         “Well, we can’t take you all the way in there.  But go ahead, call Triple A.  We’ll take you to their station; it’s in Moonachie.  They’ll drive you to the bus station.  Think you can manage that?
         I realized I must look completely loony; I still had on my old-fashioned earflap flight hat with the goggles on top.  As I pulled it off, the cop grabbed it, “I better put that with the report, Mam.”
         At the gas station, knowing he would still be at the airport tinkering around with his plane, I called Nick to come get me.  He came right away, before my car was towed in.
“You look awful,” he said.
         Just what I needed to hear.
         “I must have fallen asleep at the wheel.  They gave me a citation!  I have to go to court.”  I said.
          “Oh, that’s nothing.  Don’t worry...as long as nobody was hurt.  Let’s get going.” 
         “But shouldn’t we wait for my car.  I can’t leave without my bag!” I said.
My voice scratched with anxiety as I thought of the white stuff in my bag. 
         But Nick didn’t know I was worried about a cloud.
         “I can’t wait now; I’ve got an interview to do.  I’ll come out and get it tomorrow or the next day.”
         Twenty minutes later as we pulled up to double-park in front of my building; he turned his cool, alert blue eyes fully onto my face.
         “Are you OK?”
         I guess.”
         “You seem kind of roughed up or something. The accident wasn’t that bad, was it?  Come over to my place later, we’ll...”          
         “Oh, Nick, I need to be at home.”
         “OK, call me.  Sure you’re all right?”
         Nick was an international TV news correspondent, a reality man, and I knew he would be astonished if I tried to explain the cloud—this was not not something he would admit into his fact-filled, hard-boiled brain.
In my apartment, I paced back and forth, afraid to go to sleep.  Had this cloud been a waking dream?  My imagination?  Finally, lying on my sofa, I tried to calm down by visualizing the quiet, unoccupied streets of my small hometown, but instead, I remembered heading out of there, wanting my life to be brighter than technicolor.  I had been terrified of missing something.  There was a hole in me that never filled up, made me do wild things, like hitchhiking in France.  I’d never forget the truck driver who exposed himself to me.  I could still feel it now, the way my skin had prickled all over.  But that hadn’t stopped me.  I was always in pursuit of stimulus, wanting more, more, more.  I thought I should experience everything.  Slipping the noose of ordinariness was not something I did purposely: it just happened—like being ensnared by that cloud.  I kept wishing I had gotten rid of him somehow  Or maybe not?  What was that all about?
  Moments later, I was thinking about Nick.  After so many boring guys, I had thought I needed more than a mere man, even an interesting one, until I met Nick...  He lived on the edge.  I loved flying with him, ached with worry about losing him, and lapped up vicarious thrills from his dangerous assignments--in Palestine or embedded with the troops in Iraq.  I was the “loose goose” in our relationship, all nerve endings and bounce.  And I thought he liked it.
He teased me about my crazy advertising job, full of big creative egos, including mine; it was a world of ideas, stress, and arguments.  Extremes.  I thrived on it.  But the next day going to work, I felt like I was floating.  Untethered.  Every time the phone rang I thought it would be the service station where my car was...calling about some white stuff.  The cloud was in my brain, and I was worried about him.  On the bus going home, I was anxious and discombobulated.  At the same time, I laughed nervously to myself about my outlandish problem...the silliness of it.  Half-fearful, I started longing for the cloud, feeling badly that I hadn’t rescued him from the car.
         Back at home, when I had climbed the two flights to my walk-up apartment and looked at my door, I saw wisps of white seeping out at the bottom.  Now what?  I unlocked and opened the door, falling into a soft poof that held me together with the sweet touch of spring air.  I started to cry.  The cloud comforted me.   
         “WH-what are you doing here?”   
         “Oh,” he said, puffing himself up into the shape of a giant lamb. “I stayed in your bag.  Your friend—stupid guy!  He brought me over here today.  It was pretty tight in there!  I really had to scrunch down.  Took me a while to expand!”          
    “But you stayed in my bag? Why?”
    “I’ve  always been stuck in the sky, looking down.  Then you flew up there…I want you.”
             So strange.  Weakly, I let the cloud be; he was soothing.  Of course, he already overflowed the small space.  I chuckled inwardly, imagining wisps of white streaming out around the old, ill-fitting window frames.  But where else could he go? 
    Maybe someone would call the fire department…but what could they do with a cloud?
    My apartment was tiny, just two little rooms chuck full of the stuff of life:  clothes stuck out of the closet, shoes were scuttled on the floor, because I never found them again if I banished them into the dark closet.  My books and papers were stacked unevenly everywhere, and, if I made a big motion, I usually knocked something over.  Since I was tall and long-limbed, my movements tended to be of a sweeping scale.  I often forgot to move like a small person, but I was learning. 
    Now, to add a cloud to the tight space seemed ridiculous.  Still, I watched happily as he lost his lamb form and, in fact, any form, billowing and billowing until he obscured my computer, hid the mirrors, and crowded into the kitchen over the stove and sink, and blew his airy way between the dishes stacked in the dish rack on top of the refrigerator. I saw him having fun, turning himself round and round in cloudy whooshes in the middle of the kitchen where there was a space three feet by three feet, barely enough for one person to turn around. 
    I didn’t feel like laughing, but my laughter flew out of me.  I laughed almost as long as I had cried, and while I was laughing, the cloud mimicked my mood, flying up to the ceiling, bouncing along it and down, puffing in and out like a windblown parachute. Fuzzy-edged curves jiggled and big poufs bounced around the room like a child’s balloon.  After a while, I was tired, wondering idly how I could go to sleep with the cloud filling up all the space between the top of my bed and the ceiling.  When I decided to lie down, it was easy and wonderful; an airy substance filled the space as if there were no mattress.  I floated there with my arms behind my head, pillowed against another billow.  No problem.
    The cloud was amusing, teasing, drifting around, letting corners of real furniture creep out for a peak, then thickening into total whiteness.  He started a game...making wisps that streaked in and out of the slats of my decrepit shutters.  He’d go thin and then thick; he’d twirl between the slats.  He’d move very, very fast and then slow down to a pea-soup creep. Another wisp started chasing the first, then went in the opposite direction, in and out of the slats until the shutters were encased in twirling, tangled cloud bits.  I laughed in delight as I fell asleep.
    The next morning, I came awake slowly and softly, gradually remembering the blur of the day before.  I told myself I must have imagined it all.  Surely, the cloud would be gone now.  That accident had probably made me a little crazy. Slowly turning over, I looked down at the floor where, curled up like a small white bunny rabbit, lay the cloud taking up as little room as possible.
    Realizing I was awake, he quickly pumped up into a super-sized white rabbit.  He happily hopped toward me, and with a giant hop landed beside me on the bed.  I giggled as the rabbit gave me a mischievous look, twitched his nose quickly, and started diaphanously spreading into a shapeless form, hovering over my bed.  Wisps reached down to caress my face, my neck and tickle my ears.  The wisps curled to grasp my T-shirt, pulling it off until I lay naked.  He billowed lightly along my stomach, whirled softly around my breasts, sucked.  He tickled my sides and thighs, stole down to my pubic area, his airy essence entering all the crevices, seeping in, flying about from clitoris to vagina, back and forth, back and forth, flittering around my clitoris more and more often.  With a last flutter, he pushed at it over and over again.  There seemed to be a little rain as a bigger piece of cloud entered my vagina; a sunny warmth inside me grew and grew while the whole cloud rocked backward and forward, pushing, then pulling away, finally pushing and pushing and pushing, until I squealed with joy.  The cloud and I relaxed as I rolled over to fit my body against his perfect softness.  We were both a little wet as if a soft shower had fallen.  My chest was exploding with a wild love, and the minute he enfolded me, I felt complete. 
    Dreamily, I ruminated about the cloud. How could such softness, almost nothingness, be so satisfying, make me feel weightless, soft, and content?  No man had ever made me feel so fulfilled, not even Nick, who was definitely exciting--in an insistent, thrusting way.  Enraptured, I murmured, “You make me feel so good.”
    “Of course.”
    Then the phone rang.  It was as interruptive as a plane crashing from the real clouds.  The thing rang again and again.  What should do?  I looked questioningly at the cloud who had a sad blank look.  No answer.  Finally, as the last ring nearly broke off, I scrambled to pick up.  “Hello.”
    “Hi!  It’s Nick.  How come you didn’t call?”
    “I guess I just sort of…you know, I’d had it.”
      “I was worried.  Are you all right?”
      “I don’t know,” I said. “A little weirded out, I guess.”
      “Should I come over?  You sound like Hell.”
        “No, um...I’ve got company.  I...I don’t think you’d get along.”
        “Who’s there?”  He thought he knew all my friends.
        “I’ll call you,” I murmured.
         I hung up and called my office.  It was late in the day, but I could say I had been too sick to call.
          While I talked I was watching the cloud wind himself into a tight swirl with dark and light whirls of stringy, not fluffy, cloud stuff.  There seemed to be a center, the eye of a storm about to break.  I hung up and stared fearfully into the center, which pulled me in, entranced me, becoming more and more eyelike, beautiful, with dark gleaming pupils surrounded by golden flecks against mink brown, all alight with mischief and crinkles at the corners.  Clearly the eye was smiling now, and suddenly the whole tightly wound swirl broke up into fluff, bouncing up and down around the apartment, laughing at me.  I remembered that the cloud had been capricious from the start, making trouble, bad trouble--like the accident--and other times behaving angelically--like staying cramped up in the flight bag.
    “What do you want?” I asked gently.
    “You.”
      “But you’re a cloud.”
    “So?”
      He showed me his eye again, first twinkling away, and then narrowing to a dark, nasty slit.  I tried to resist this.  I backed off, lying down, feeling too fragile to deal.  I needed the funny cloud.  And he came back, quickly turning into a natural-looking small cloud with a little wind in it, scudding along my floor, pushing all of my shoes before him, making himself a little bigger and shoving them into the closet.  I relaxed as he filled the apartment again, hiding all my things with wafting white drifts tinged with blue.
      Sitting up, I parted the white lushness with my arms, pulled on my t-shirt and went to my closet for my jeans.  Then he started a new game, kind of like the bush game my father had played with us as children.  As we were walking, he’d gently push us into the bushes, shouting, “Join the Bush Club!  You’re joining the Bush Club!”
      “No, Daddy, no!” we’d cry.  He had a roguish sense of humor, but we’d fall down giggling, extricate ourselves and beg for more.  I was always begging for more, more.
         Ðo it again, Daddy!”  I’d plead.          
      As I started moving around the apartment, the cloud gathered himself up against me and with a little whoosh pushed me onto the sofa.  I tried to get up, and was almost standing, when he’d do it again…and again...over and over and over again.  I started to giggle like a child, finally collapsing in a heap of laughter on the sofa.  Meanwhile, the cloud bounced like a gigantic, incredibly light snowball from floor to ceiling, over and over, clearly delighted with himself.  I was feeling better, more whole.  The empty spaces inside my rib cage were gently filling up.  I let him fill me and the apartment, play games, make me laugh all that day and night.  I was like a toddler, who once you’ve done something silly enough to cause hilarity, wants you to do it endlessly, so the cloud and I played, as insouciant as babies, for days.  I lost track.  I laughed, and I heard constant hiccupping sounds from him, cloud laughter.  He was irresistible...
                 One morning, even though the days with the cloud were tranquilizing, hilarious—wondrous, I needed to break away.  While he billowed around nervously, I got dressed.  I wanted to go around the corner to have breakfast at my favorite coffee shop.  When I picked up my keys, he became a tightly funneled whirlwind with the point headed straight at my little flight bag.  He powered the zipper open, crushed himself in.  Here was the side of him I didn’t like.  I sped out the door and turned to lock it.  He whooshed out of the bag, shoving the door wide open and wrapping himself around me so I couldn’t move.
    “OK.  But you’d better behave.”
    As I walked down the street with the flight bag, I tried to talk sense into him.   
          “You can’t have me,” I said.  “I’m a human being.  Yes, you’ve made me feel wonderful, but when we get home I’m going to open the bag, and I want you to go back up to the sky.  Then I’m going to call Nick.”
    The bag wobbled.
    I wondered if people noticed my talking to the bag.
    At the coffee shop, the eggs and bacon tasted OK,  but it didn’t feel like my place anymore.  It’s diverse clientele didn’t interest me.  And, as we stepped back out onto the street the usual, treasured pop of city stimulation didn’t happen.
    Undaunted, at home I unzipped the bag and said, “Go!  Go now!”
    The cloud seeped reluctantly out of the bag.  I strode to the phone, but I should have known--he became a fuzzy white airplane, swooping up, down, doing nosedives, waggling his wings, turning over.  I couldn’t help but laugh.  A jealous cloud? Well, of course.
    Lightly, he reminded me, “Don’t you remember.  I can’t go back.  You brought me here.”
    Gradually, I started going out again.  I couldn’t play sick anymore. Nick was away on assignment, but I had to go to work, and to my court date.  The judge asked me intricate questions, tricky ones.  I repeatedly said I must have fallen asleep.  But what about the white stuff?  I claimed I didn’t know; he didn’t either.  Since there was not a reasonable explanation, I was fined for careless driving and ordered to see a court-appointed psychiatrist—and I was not to drive until the shrink said it was OK.
         I was too rattled to take the subway, and even the cab ride uptown was a bumpy experience.  I felt tumbled, unmoored.  I wanted my cloud back.
         Soon I was seeing the psychiatrist.  He had kind eyes, and big ears, very good for listening.  I told him I had always had a piece of me missing, and now I had found it.
         “Tell me about it—your sadness.”
         “Oh, you know, there was a—um, an empty place, a…a hole, I guess.  I’m not happy—unless…”
         “You were in an airplane, up in the clouds,” he prompted.
         “They felt light, free...I don’t know.”
          ‘How do you feel now?”
         Should I tell him I was being seduced by a cloud?  Should I ask him to help me resist?  Not unless I wanted to be committed.  But I knew he’d never get it--how good I felt, maybe…but not what was taking hold of me, and so I went home.  Frightened.
         And coming home, I’d always find my little ball of nimbus somewhere whispering, “I missed you.”
    I missed him, too, and I let go then, crying hysterically, then screaming at him for appearing in my life.
         “It’s not my fault,” he said.  “I’m a cloud.”
         “No, you’re not.  You’re a hallucination!”
         “No way!”
         “I Googled it—hallucinations, in Wikipedia.”
         “And so?”
         “When you’re high on neuroticism hallucinations can get touched off by the environment!”  I pronounced triumphantly.
         “They don’t know,” he cloud-barked at me.          
         Quickly he wrapped me in his fluff, shaping it into a rocking chair, holding me gently, rolling slowing back and forth until I was calmed.  He was good to me.
         But I was worried about what was happening to me, so finally I told him, “This has gone on too long.  I’ve got to call Nick.”
    I was ready, I thought, and punched in the number with determination.
    “No!  Don’t come here.  I’ll meet you.”   
    When I saw Nick, he hugged me exuberantly, gently took my hand.  Later, at dinner, he probed.
    “Well, I’m glad to see you.  I was afraid you’d disappeared for good.”
    “No, I’m still here.” 
    “What have you been up to?”
    “Oh, just working, it’s busy.”  I didn’t mention the cloud.
    “Did you see that psychiatrist?”
      “He says I’m neurotic.”
      “Well, that we knew!” Nick laughed.
      “I was just traumatized by the accident.”  I tried to brush it off, not even hinting that I had completely blown off the doctor.
         “But you’re OK now?”          
        He was just back from Afghanistan, bursting with news.
        “Well, I wish I could be around for you more.  But I know you really get it, about my work.  Can’t miss an op like interviewing Karzai.”
         The hollow feeling came back.
         “What was he like?”
         “Fascinating…and, well, he was overwhelmed—the southern elements, you know…”
         “Terrorists?”
         “Well, Taliban...Al Qaeda—you name it!”
         “Oh.”
         “You’ve heard it on TV, right?”
         “Oh, I guess I haven’t been…I haven’t had it on in ages.”,
         “Oh, come on, have you checked out?”
         “Um, a little bit.”
         “Hey, that accident business is done, over. Forget it”
         Silence.  Then, “Maybe we should go out to my beach place for a week.  It’s a good time for me to get away now.”
         “How’s your plane?” I asked.
         He didn’t seem to notice that I had changed the subject.  He told me about his last flight up and over the Hudson River.  I joked about the improbable marriage of some mutual friends.  He was normal, a fascinating talker as always. Wound up, he didn’t notice anything different about me.  I was usually the listener anyway, a dreamer, his little “nut case.”  He loved me for it; we had balanced each other, but he didn’t feel like my soul mate anymore. He was always the same I realized, so predictable actually, and suddenly, a few of his stories seemed to go a long way; I wasn’t enthralled.  For a few minutes, he switched on the TV to catch the end of a news segment by a fellow correspondent.  Afterwards, he turned towards me and began softly kissing my neck, my lips, and my breasts.  I pulled slowly away.  I kept pulling away.  I couldn’t stop myself.
         “You really are in a funk!” he exclaimed irritably.
             It was pouring rain and thundering when I grabbed a cab home, and as it squished through the wet city streets, stopped in clogged traffic, moved forward, then sat in traffic again, I twitched with anxiousness to be home.  A hole of need opened wide within my chest, painful, empty like I’d been scooped out.  I couldn’t stand it.
         On the landing in front of my door, I looked for wisps of white.  Nothing.  I entered into emptiness. I panicked.  No cloud?  I walked around looking for him.  Where was he?  Where, where?  The thunder and lightening continued outside, the rain still pouring down in black sheets.  Inside, a little stir of air from above made me look up.  There he was, clinging to the whole ceiling with a very dark underside and little hints of a pinkish-white layer above.  I laughed.
      “Hiding?”
      With that he came rushing and whirling down, surrounding me carefully, and then pumping himself up into a giant Michelin man.  Jolly, he held me in his short arms and began waltzing me around the cramped space, his balloon-like feet swooping around with abandon, miraculously not sweeping anything over.  I laughed until I howled, and the yawning hole filled.
    “You’re ridiculous!”
    “You...need...me,” he retorted in a windy, out-of-breath voice.  “I’d been watching you.  I knew you were on empty when you reached your hand up from that airplane.”
    “Th...that’s impos-si-ble!”  I sputtered through my gusts of laughter.
    “You’re always grabbing for it.”
    “Grabbing?”
    “For craziness...risk.”
      “But I’ve got...”
      “Nick?  Nick is no risk; he’s just a man who happens to risk his life.”
    I faltered and stopped dancing.
    Smiling knowingly, the cloud swirled himself into a round, wise moonlike face.  He showed me his eye, and I saw into it; I saw laughter, softness, menace, whimsy, light, charm, darkness, anger, temper, lamblike sweetness, and complete unpredictability.  The thrill of him shrilled up my bones.
      I nodded, just slightly, hesitantly.
      Seizing his chance, he crowed gleefully, “We’ll go on a real adventure!”
    “Go!  But where?”  I stalled.   
    “Where I came from.  It’s like nothing on earth!”
    “But I thought you couldn’t go back!”
      “Oh, I can’t!  Not without you!”
      “You trickster!”  I squawked, but I was laughing helplessly, embracing his whole moonlike head—and I gave way.
        At first, he just hiccupped and coaxed.  Giggling mischievously, he nudged me with playful head bumps closer and closer to the window.  But his eye became both terrifying and calm, like the center of a storm.  Then suddenly the whole room shook from a wild crash of thunder.  Swooping up the window and howling with happiness, he tailed us onto the next streak of lightening. 
    As I felt myself become diaphanous, I could hear myself shrieking.

                                       THE END