Prologue

Dream record — J, childhood

People are generally reasonable about impossible things while they are asleep.

A dead relative sits down for dinner. The house grows an extra floor. There is an ocean where the supermarket used to be. Most of the time everyone carries on. Someone still puts the kettle on.

Then you wake up and become very particular about what can happen.

Which is fair enough. There are roads to cross.

The wall had been coming down on people when he remembered he didn’t have to let it.

He put out a hand. A man’s hand, broad enough to cover his whole face. At school he still had to use both hands to carry the big box of paints. Here, he held up a wall with one and forgot about it.

Below him, people were running. There had been shouting and something very loud, and he had been afraid a moment ago. Then he was in the air, where none of it could reach him. He knew this part.

The people could come up too. They just didn’t seem to remember.

Suddenly they floated from the street, some still running for a few steps before noticing. He brought them over the wall and put them down where it was safe. There ought to be somewhere safe. A field appeared beyond the buildings, with plenty of room.

The soldiers who had been chasing them stayed behind. One dropped what he was carrying and hid under a cart. Another ran into a house. That was fine. They could stay there until they stopped being bad. He wasn’t going to follow them in.

He wanted the street fixed as well. The wall went back up, taller than before, with windows all the way to the top. He tried making it smaller. Now the people in the field were taller than the houses. One bent to pick up a roof, and he wished she wouldn’t, because he had just put that there.

He tried to put everyone back where they belonged.

The field folded. The wall became the lid of something. There was a street on the other side of it, quiet now. He listened for a moment to make sure the screaming had stopped, then let go and flew above the roofs, leaving things alone.

After a while, he tried to get down.

Going up had been easy. It always was. A small push, the ground sliding away, that brief objection from the stomach before the rest of him decided it could live with the arrangement. Now he was higher than the chimneys, drifting sideways, and the trick of pointing his feet at the ground had only turned him over. Worse, he was forgetting how he had righted himself before.

For a while he hung upside down, looking up at the street, trying to remember.

A woman watched him from a rooftop garden. He recognized her the way he often did here: complete recognition first, details later. She looked older than him and younger at the same time. Maybe they were the same age. He couldn’t have said. That wasn’t the kind of thing he knew how to measure well.

The blue point of light sat at the edge of his vision, bright enough that he did not need to look at it directly. He had seen it in dreams before. He let his feet drift.

“Having trouble?”

“No.”

She waited.

“A little.”

He managed to right himself. Beyond her, sheets moved on a line between two trees. There was something comforting about the sheets. Someone had gone to the trouble of washing them.

He drifted toward the roof and caught the low wall with both hands. His feet continued past him for a moment, then remembered that falling was optional here.

The woman moved a pot out of the way.

“Thank you.”

“You’ve broken that before.”

He looked at the pot. A pale line ran down one side. He had no memory of breaking it. The hands that held the wall looked larger than they should have been. Longer. He turned them over once, as if the answer might be written on the palms, then let the thought go. Thoughts like that never stayed long up here.

He hauled himself onto the warm stone. Somewhere below, people were talking through an open window—dishes, a chair scraping, someone laughing at something he had missed. He liked this place. He wished he could remember how to arrive on purpose.

The woman was looking at his hands.

“What does it feel like?”

“What?”

“Being up there.”

He glanced at the sky.

“Flying?”

She nodded.

He started to answer, then stopped. He could describe the rooftops. He could tell her how far away the ground looked. None of that seemed to be what she was asking.

“Like falling,” he said, “until you get used to it.”

“Do you get used to it?”

“Ummm… not the landing.”

She smiled, but kept waiting. This was the part she always waited for.

He looked out across the roofs. They went farther than he remembered. Somewhere in the distance, sunlight caught a broad strip of water. Buildings stood along its edge, small from here, windows just visible. He wondered what it would be like to live in one of them. Then he wondered why a thought like that felt both possible and far away.

“Here,” he said, and held out his hand.

She looked at it.

“You can just come with me.”

“For how long?”

He almost said as long as she wanted. Something in the way she asked made him think first.

“I dunno.”

She put her hand in his.

They stood beside the wall for a moment. He tried to remember what he had done before. Trying was usually where it went wrong. It was much easier when he forgot there was anything unusual about it.

The sheets stilled.

One breath.

Two.

Three.

Hold just long enough to forget the ground.

Then float.

And remember to breathe.

One of her feet left the roof.

She looked down quickly and gripped his hand.

“That’s it,” he said, although he had no idea what either of them was doing.

Her other foot lifted.

For a little while they rose beside the trees. A leaf brushed her ankle. She watched it fall away, then turned toward the street.

He heard her laugh—a short, startled sound. She put her free hand over her mouth as though it had come out without permission.

He began laughing too. The sound felt deeper than it should have, as if it belonged to someone else and had only borrowed his throat.

Below them, on the same roof, a woman stood at the laundry line.

Same clothes. Same hair.

She had stopped with a wet shirt raised toward the line, looking up at them.

He tightened his grip and looked at the woman beside him. She was watching the leaf turn in the air beneath her feet, still laughing a little.

He opened his mouth.

A sound came from somewhere close. Three dull notes, repeated.

The roofs lost their sharp edges.

“Oh, man,” he said.

The sound came again. He knew it. He knew there was something he was supposed to do.

His hand shifted in hers.

“Where are you going?”

“I think I’m waking up.”

She looked at him then. The wind lifted her hair across her face. She pushed it aside impatiently, trying to see him.

“What does that feel like?”

He started to answer.

The blue light flared once at the edge of vision. The larger hands, the deeper laugh, the easy height of the roofs—all of it folded at once, and what remained was smaller, lighter, and suddenly very aware of the ordinary weight of a body that had forgotten how to fly.

His hands were small again. One was caught under the blanket.