Headlines

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It was an uneventful year. Temperate, drab, and warless—no bombs. For decades the public had longed for peace. Now it was here, and no one knew what to do. The news agencies were cutting staff, the editors on edge. The sales forces had informed the networks that spots on children and churches were out. Books, remarkably, were in. That’s where people went for their disaster thrills these days. Viewers were so at ease, the market research grimly relayed, that they were returning in droves to history, reliving calamities of yore. No bleaker announcement could have befallen the newsmen’s ears. And so it was that they privately rejoiced when people began to float.

The story broke in a Midwestern daily, a Plainsman or a Dealer, one of those obstinately regionalist hangers-on that survive on syndication. Like defunct department stores and banks and arcaded bus stations, an antiquated institution local revenues could no longer support, but which was also too expensive to tear down. Monuments to former eras. Those were the days! When the calamities were titrated just right, diluted by distance (preferably an ocean, a continent, the Geneva Convention), the wars tucked away, canistered, and when you, too, were safely contained, as long as you locked your door and did not wish for change. Pay your taxes; save your rations; if you don’t want to know, don’t ask. That’s how it was in some of these Midwestern towns, renowned for their conservatism, but which in fact had rarely met a deviation to which they could not adapt. That is, until now.

It was this predilection for adaptation, for going with the flow, that initially delayed reporting on the floating woman in an Indiana town, a minor stop on the truck route from Chicago to Detroit. Mutations were not unheard of in the region. A child once had been born with three feet. What do you know, he was the mayor now. It was really no surprise, then, that it took at least four floating women before the Plainsman or the Herald, whichever it was, began to publish the reports. Nor that the coasts took even longer to catch on. 

The first case occurred at the post office. It remained of particular interest because the woman in question had been holding a rather heavy object at the time—an anchor of sorts: she worked with boats—when she lifted off. She’d just accepted the parcel from the bulletproof turnstile through which incoming packages were wedged. Anchors are a real strain on the mail system these days, the postal worker later said; the crazies were preparing for floods to come. He was watching the woman carry the parcel outside, shaking his head, when, right there on the sidewalk, in broad daylight—In full view of the street, he later emphasized—this particular paranoiac shot straight up into the air. It was later reported that the woman was holding not an anchor but fifteen pounds of specialty beans from a relative in Idaho. Nevertheless, up she went, like a hot air balloon, beans and all. 

The floaters, as they soon came to be known, returned to the world slightly changed. It wasn’t clear why; survivor accounts were so consistently banal. No major traumas evidenced. Well, said one, the second ever to lift off, I so rarely get the time to read, so that was nice. She’d been under the perming hood in the hair salon at the time, perusing magazines, which happily kept her company during her two-hour flight. Like other survivors, she’d floated over the town, the library, the freshwater lake where the rich people lived, admiring the streetlights and the tufts of green that struggled valiantly across the arid plains. Soon, twenty or thirty women had caught the affliction. They further attested to the truth of the temperature drop and of the common observation that the vertiginous perspective had a way of making life below seem rather, well, meaningless and small. Their landings were light, almost absentminded—injuries amounted to a sprained ankle at worst—but also inconveniently far from the point of departure, so that the women often had to hitch a boat, a car, occasionally hire a translator, in order to get home. Once or twice, someone landed in a decommissioned zone and was whisked off to the hospital for decontamination. Yet even after the shock of the journey wore off, they were never quite the same. It was hard to put your finger on what exactly the difference was, but it seemed as if someone had walked into their minds and turned off a light. Or else left the wrong light on.

Not until the story reached the national papers did coverage turn from human interest pieces to the question of why people were floating at all. The newsmen got to work. They consulted industry experts, meteorologists, physicists, atmospheric specialists, and of course the marketing department. The physicists pulled rank, pointing to the purple matter levels of the brain. Purple matter was a new discovery, they cautioned, not very well understood, but in short, the breakthrough was this: everyone had it. And if your purple matter levels were in equilibrium with the surrounding environment, you stayed on the ground; if not, you lifted off (or, theoretically, sank). It seemed the weather of the mind mirrored the weather of the world. The implications were groundbreaking. The discovery suggested a natural density for human thought, proxied by purple matter, and from this universal constant (0.8µg/cm3), the floaters, presumably, had strayed. The department head at the University pointed out that witches, too, used to float, back in medieval times. That’s how you knew, you threw them in a pond. Ha ha. The academics paused and frowned, glanced experimentally at the lone woman in their ranks. No way, she said. But thanks. 

Peer-reviewed papers were published, and researchers soldered the connections. Tedious detail was lost in translation, then added back. People were floating, experts said, due to a lack of psychic heft. They had stopped absorbing impressions, processing information and external stimuli, mental activity the product of which had formerly served to weigh them down. Hot air rises; cold air sinks. Et cetera. It was, in other words, an epidemic in air-headedness. With the return of global markets, how will a brain-drained Nation pull its weight? Stay tuned for a special with renowned psychologist Dr. Anvil. This was what happened when human beings ceased to think for themselves: we began to drift. 

The afflicted women, meanwhile, filed no corrections. In fact, they appeared not to pay this slander any attention at all. One got the sense they had more important things on their minds. They whispered to each other from behind their hands. They jotted notes-to-self in notepads. Then compared.

 •

No doubt the newsmen welcomed the epidemic angle. New subscribers were drawn into speculation’s wake. There was reason to believe, they reported, having reviewed the literature for themselves, that medical explanations passed muster. Because of women’s, you know—they waved a hand—lady parts. So reasoned everyone who still believed in science. There were of course the crazies, the deniers, the zealots who yelled at neighbors from across the street, jabbing fingers into the afternoon smog. Just look at this shit! How can you trust the scientists? The general public smiled and shook their heads, pushed their grocery carts along the sidewalk to join the tinned-food line. Of coursethey trusted the scientists. They gestured vaguely, in literally any direction, at the decommissioned zones, which the floating people insisted were tinged with violet toxins, and at the tripedal mayor of the Indiana town where Case 0 had taken place. The scientists told us stuff like this would happen, they said. There was comfort to be found in accurate predictions. 

That floating was correlated with a certain, shall we say, cognitive weightlessness, rather cast a stigma on those who did it. The manifestation of such “ephemeral” thoughts, experts further pointed out, was of course ever so slightly more likely to occur in women in any case. Whereas just a few weeks earlier, nearly everyone in the Nation had dreamed of joining the hundreds who had taken flight, of seeing for themselves what it was like to drift gently through the haze, now there was a fear of being outed as an ignoramus. No one wanted to float anymore. Or if they did, they hoped they wouldn’t be observed. One might welcome taking off from the solitude of the john, perhaps, or during the weekly bath—though this made for vulnerable landing conditions. Really it was only the very old, who saw in this floating fate a tender step toward death, or the very young, still without shame, who publicly expressed a longing to lift off. And yet, as rumors spread through certain whisper networks (the tinned food line, the dump, over windowsills, in kitchens), there were plenty more who, in private, seemed almost to will their own departures. One began even to hear of repeat offenders. 

Meanwhile, husbands everywhere felt vindicated. They flocked to the pubs to gloat. I told you I married an idiot! When someone’s wife took off, everyone bought him a round. They held drinking races. The pints pattered on the tabletops with a hollow syncopation, rather like the deadweight of dud bombs thumping onto the ground, not that this generation remembered the sound so well. It was a distant echo, going, going, gone.

I came home to find my wife bleaching all the apples. Mine too! And mine! There she was at the sink, bleaching the apple, washing it off, bleaching it again. Woman! I said. What in the world are you bleaching that apple for? I bet she gave you the lip-tremble. I know the one. Husband, she says, I just don’t know if it’s safe! What do you know, I told her, it’s safe if they say it’s safe! Give me that. Hear, hear! My wife hasn’t served a fresh vegetable in weeks, she zaps them all to hell… 

The women, meanwhile, took to organizing among themselves. There were a number of downstream tasks to address whenever one of their kinsfolk took off. What to do with all the things she’d left behind? If someone ascended in the grocery line, for example, abandoning her cart, you couldn’t very well wait for her to return. The line shifted neatly around these tombstone carts until someone had the idea to start a separate queue all together. Everyone kept her spot; when the floating women reappeared, it was as if they’d been waiting in line the whole time. The veterans gathered scarfs, purses, identification cards from sidewalks for safekeeping. It was rare that a woman began to float in the car, women being discouraged from driving at all, but of course it happened from time to time, most often when the driver was not supposed to have the car. She might have been leaving her husband, or at least escaping for an afternoon, the teeniest break, only to lift away while idling at a traffic light, seatbelt be damned. Fortunately, even in the cities, which after all were really not so much larger than the towns, the women knew nearly all the cars by sight. They quietly steered the orphaned vehicles back into the garages where they belonged, before the husbands could find out. 

The stigma against floating soon began to cause problems for the newsmen on the coasts, whose colleagues and girlfriends, many of them newswomen, had also recently begun to float. In bed, newscouples lay side by side, not touching, in clear contravention of breeding regulations. Do you think I’m stupid? Darling, of course not. I always knew you thought I was stupid. I respect you so much, Christ, don’t cry. What if I float? You won’t. I will, I will, I’m a fraud. Shh, come here. Not now, I feel terrible, I am terrible, really something feels very wrong, very off… Mm you’re brilliant. Stop, stop, I’m not in the mood. So brilliant brilliant brilliant. Get off please get off no no no no no—Brillllllllllllliant. The newsmen dismounted, sticky and satisfied, slipped down a garden path to sleep. In the morning, they waxed repentant. They made dinner reservations, martinis, made up. They discussed a change of tactics. 

Back behind their newsanchor desks, they admitted that certain elements of the equation did not compute; quite possibly the scientists had gotten something wrong. The airwaves communicated a belated skepticism. Of course weighty thoughts had not simply truanted the inner lives of fellow citizens. Just look at the newswives! The airhead epidemic (or, to be politically correct, cognitive barometric disequilibrium) was concomitant with an observable increase in the rate of mutation, with advancements in physics, with the discovery that gaseous states depended not only, Newtonianly, on physical mass and volume and density and whatnot, but also on the interaction of the purple matter of the mind with the purple matter of the world. For the very first time, this relationship had shifted, and who was to say it wasn’t progress? Evolution had grown profligate, human beings were changing more rapidly than they had in bajillions of years. Three feet were better than two. 

And what, really, was the natural state of a mind? Were some thoughts truly denser or weightier than others? Individuals at high risk for spontaneous suspension were asked to carry reading materials and compasses. Calculate the acceleration along the parabolic path on which you’ve taken off. Also riddles. What burns for a thousand years without generating any heat? Participants were to engage with these exercises only when aloft. The hypothesis was that they might sink back down and so be rescued from the humiliation of the whole town gazing up at the mysteries beneath their skirts. Or not. Because though the subjects with the most difficult riddles and heaviest encyclopedias did indeed tend to sink more quickly earthwards as they read, the results were inconclusive. One could not isolate cause from correlation; those floaters may have simply had more purple matter to begin with. 

In a way, and despite the uproar, people felt more at ease now that a state of crisis had returned. It was something of a relief, the outbreak of calamity, especially a calamity that half the population could spectate while feeling perfectly superior and safe. There were those who felt the floating had rather put their wives, mothers, grandmothers back in their proper place. Before the epidemic, certain activists had been growing bolder, opining on food safety and reproduction, on free movement and the lack of fruit. Now they moved through the streets like enlightened nuns, as if awaiting nirvanic sublimation. They preoccupied themselves with organizing the missing carts and cars and pocketbooks, and with their own departures. Afflicted husbands, now slightly less gleeful, but just as resentful (many now had to do the shopping for themselves) kept abreast of these developments while running up their bar tabs.

No bleach anymore. That’s for sure. Not mine, either. Mine’s got this look though, has yours got that? Yes, yes, I know what you mean. Both of mine, they kind of just stand there and stare into the sink. Same here, but into the fridge. I even told her she could bleach again. Didn’t want to! Christ. They fight so hard and then— 

Whenever someone entered to announce that his spouse, too, had gone, the others no longer bothered to buy him a round. They simply tossed him a quarter, a dime. Join the club. Loose change danced down the counter as if from an upturned purse. 

Truth be told there had been a lot of faffy citizens before the floating began. A dispassionate observer could not deny it. Though she might also be inclined to point out that, among the landlocked, there was also no shortage of dimwitted men. These days, staring into the drain, into the refrigerator, the veteran floaters seemed, if not more intelligent than the average resident, then wiser in some monastic way. They pushed their carts with stony expressions, waited patiently at crosswalks, through the crosswalk signals, forgot to cross. Lingering outside the daycares, they looked through the picture windows at their children playing with antique chunks of Styrofoam in sterilized playpens. There was a nobility to their absentmindedness. They moved through the world like balletic windup dolls released by an unseen hand. Hey, you! Get with the program! You’re holding up the line! It made you wonder what had happened to them up there. 

•

The government had some idea. In fact, they’d grown quite concerned. Every day, thousands were soaring into the air, and so claiming, temporarily and unconstitutionally, the privilege of aerial surveillance. What to do about it? The bureaucrats paced in soundproofed rooms. There were a lot of things that ought not be aerially reviewed. The Doge’s hairline, for example, and also huge swaths of land that were not quite what they appeared to be on state-sanctioned maps. There were decommissioned zones that, having already been decommissioned, were in the process of being decommissioned further still, were in fact being decommissioned into oblivion, because primordial things had been found brewing there, sprouting untaxonomical protrusions. Someone stepped out of the war room and into the hall, peeked through the Venetian blinds. Shading his eyes, he scanned the horizon line. Nadda one. But there are thousands of them. Well, how much can they see up there? The diplomats and generals were gathered on poufs in the plush war room, passing the hookah back and forth. We oughta ban binoculars. They volleyed risk assessments through clouds of smoke. It was unclear whether the decommissioned decommissioned zones were still accreting; whether, like great stars, they grew largest just before a rapid collapse, or if instead, eternally expanding, they’d grow to devour everything— The general passed the hookah to a colonel, who drew a finger across his neck. 

On official maps, the doubly decommissioned zones were represented as protected nature reserves and rendered in green. Along the borders, the government had sketched in extra villages. Needless to say, they existed only cartographically. The public had thus been under the impression that the country was repopulating. They imagined themselves to be living in solidarity with these other villages, a whole network of survivors who watched the same shows on the telly, lined up for tins of ham. It never occurred to them that the Nation was but a far-flung archipelago, adrift in a vast wasteland. But the truth was undeniable from a bird’s eye view. The floaters were a veritable security threat, a potential attack on morale—an impending flotilla, if you will.

The immediate objective was to keep them on the ground at all costs; top priority was repeat offenders, who appeared to be getting the hang of lifting off at will. The government considered clamping them with boots, like those secured around the tires of abandoned or sloppily parked shopping carts, which were increasingly a nuisance to public order. They considered balls-and-chains. The research department politely pointed out that the effect of heavy objects on public levitation remained inconclusive. What’s this bullshit about the purple matter? fumed the Doge. Someone explain it to me without using physics. It was proposed that another war might serve as a distraction; even explain, retroactively, the worrying expansion of the doubly decommissioned zones. In fact the relevant officials had all been ushered back into the war room, where they were already discussing military option B of the standard alphabetical three (the middle road made more attractive by the extremes), when the press secretary called the chief of staff, who called the catering director, who called an unelected advisor, who sent his proxy up the private elevator to whisper into the Doge’s ear. Ahem, it appears the floaters have stopped coming back. 

•

Indeed, one by one, the citizenry was simply floating away. The Downstream Tasks Committee, one of many working groups the floaters had organized among themselves, had put the future to a vote. The answer was nearly unanimous: the only option was to go. Mothers snuck into the daycares, reached into the cribs. Up, up, they said, taking their children in their arms. Yes, you can take your Styrofoam. It was almost a relief to see them leave. How sanctimonious their silence had become! Yeah, take your secrets! grounded people cried up at the soles of shoes. They stood in the streets and shook their fists. Fuck you too! From the perspective of the departing cohort, the tomatoes and bleached apples and cabbages that the crowd hurled their way, vegetative vitriol of all sorts, seemed to yo-yo up and back towards Earth. Then the bystanders shrank and lost distinction, blended into a pool of flesh that seemed to pave the streets. 

Death-worshipers, the floaters thought.

The air thinned and the temperature dropped. Below, constellations of lights appeared: traffic stops blinking red for life, green for risk it; searchlights twirling around the market, the town hall, the great junkyard of the lost-and-found, the heap of trash heaped higher still with the refuse of the dead; and one felt grateful to them, really, to all those landlocked souls who’d gone before. The departing people peered down into the plumes still rising from the cooling craters, and from the eternal firepits still burning, still sending smoke signals in warning to all who remained. A warning they alone had heeded. The wind drew the ash in soft stripes across the silent land, like dirty fingernail tracks on skin. What a meager inheritance! The cities, scattered, were a scant palmful of pearls. Then the great gasp of the ocean appeared, darkly lustrous, as if cellophaned. Where did it come from, this soft graphite sheen, the morbid light emanating from the center of the world? Perhaps it was lit from within, this place pronounced dead; perhaps it had swallowed up the blasts, had swallowed itself, the way the last few signs of home now converged, condensed, vanished. A cool end to all resistance. A whimper, a blip. How neat, how elegant, the final thought arrives, that come the end there is nowhere to return, just the soft shatter of the night.