A Sliver of Sky

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We have been sitting watching it for eight hours now, that thin sliver of sky. Grandfather has wrapped himself in old sacks, the dusty canvas sends out little puffs of chaff every time a raindrop hits it. His hat is pulled down low over his face, and his eyes are shut in meditation. Above us the clouds are storm purple and the sky is swollen and leaching light in the dusk. The slates of the roofs glisten in the downpour, and the angular arms of aerials and old water tanks, are welded black against the clouds with each flash of lightning.

I lean my head back against bricks, and let the water slide over my face as I gaze at the giant, rectangular frame of the hoarding above us. The steel supports are raised up high so that it hangs weightlessly over the street, and its solar cells mirror back the clouds above and are spattered with rain. Inside it though, there is a rectangle of deep blue sky with small Cirrocumulus drifting in it.

Daylight from the hoarding creates a haze of warmth and brightness around the frame. It lights up the street, so that when I lean forward over the roof edge, I can see the rusting bellies of overturned cars, the mulch of unwalked on leaves and the bare silver bones lying in the gutters. From the wet window of night I look out over the rooftops into the frame, and I can almost taste the foreignness of the air blowing across from it.

I glance at Grandfather but his eyes are still shut, although his chin is up beneath his brim, as if he is laying his old skin against the breath of that faraway sky, leaning his cheek against the distance, in anticipation maybe. The light shifts inside the frame, the clouds move high and fast, and then – a judder runs through me – in that other sky the sun comes out from behind a cloud and casts a brilliant square of gold on the rain wet roof at my feet. The rain here falls through the light from there, and a shimmer of colour wavers around me, a rainbow blooms spectrally, and I can hear the hiss of raindrops as they evaporate in the sudden heat of the alien sun.

I turn back and look at Grandfather, his eyes are open beneath the beaten leather of his cap, and he’s smiling. I’ve come to know that smile well in the time we’ve been acquainted, which is only a week, though it feels much longer. One week of constant travelling, pushing the old man further and harder every day. I call him Grandfather, because that’s what I was told to call him. I don’t know his real name. Grandfather is very old, and his name is an honorific. He calls me Son, which is an honorific too, one I do not deserve. I call him Grandfather with great respect, with great respect, for I have seen what this journey has cost him. Also I know at the end of it he will pay the ultimate price, commit the ultimate crime, for at the end of this journey, Grandfather will die. And death is not permitted any more, because there are too few of us.

*

“Do you remember this before the sea level rises?” I ask Grandfather, as I pull on the oars, dragging us through the water. The flat expanse of the lagoon reflects back the herringbone clouds in the blue sky; and the black rotten stumps of salt strangled trees are the only things we must steer around. We drift silently over land that was once green and fertile, and in the distance the ashy towers of the old city stab themselves into the sky.

“I remember many things, from many life times,” he says, “I even remember you, you helped me then too.”

I don’t reply. It makes me uncomfortable to hear him talk like this. Such beliefs are not encouraged any more, only the myth of the Sky Burial perpetuates them – and those who believe in it. He smiles at me from his seat in the bottom of the boat, and then grimaces as his sharp bones grate on the wooden boards. I’ve tried to make him comfortable, have padded the hull with rags and leaves, but we’ve been travelling for five days now, and it isn’t getting any easier.

Often I wake in the night and look across at him, lying curled in the prow, or sitting upright, unmoving in meditation, and I feel what he is doing, what we’re doing is a sin against nature. Life is precious, life must be preserved at all costs, that is our doctrine now, and any other is outlawed. Since the Exodus – since we fled from the rising water, disease, famines and droughts – human life has become the most valuable commodity on the planet.

“Another night out here, and by tomorrow we’ll reach the city,” I say.

Grandfather nods.

We sleep under a tarpaulin with the soft tapping of a warm rain on our backs, and in the early morning, beneath a flat blanket of grey cloud, we enter the outskirts of the city. The water is up to the roofs, ridge tiles break the surface, breaching like angular grey whales. Often our way is obstructed by debris, the rusting, waterlogged hulks of cars, tangles of cables lying in the water to snare us and catch on the oars. I see signs of the contagion everywhere. Yellow and blue stripes of paint on the sides of taller buildings – yellow for typhoid, blue for cholera, the dirty water diseases. Sluggish rainbow pools of oil drift alongside us, and our small boat bobs dangerously in the currents that suck and eddy along the flooded streets.

Grandfather sits up in the prow and looks intently at everything we pass. Sometime he nods and says,

“Yes, yes, I remember this.”

And once, when I’m about to steer us left down the empty canal of a street, he shakes his head and says, “No, this way,” and points us on ahead.

I row us in silence into the heart of the city, where the skyscrapers rise up and the great rectangular frames of the sky-hoardings hang over the streets. I let the oars rest and stare up at them, letting us drift. The frames span the wide thoroughfares and every one of them is empty, and I can look right through them.

“What were they for?”

“Windows,” Grandfather tells me, “in each you could see a far off forest, or ocean or planet.”

“But why?” I ask, craning my head back as we pass underneath them.

Grandfather grins at me, “People like to travel,” he says, “if you can’t fly, go there this way!”

He laughs to himself, like a madman, like a child, and I want to hit him, and tell him it’s not a joke.

“You have many questions, don’t you?” he says.

“Yes, Grandfather, I suppose I do.”

“And to get answers is the reason you’ve come on this journey, isn’t it?” he says, looking at me, daring me to say something, to reveal myself, but I do not.

“Yes,” I say cautiously.

“Then your journey will give you the answers, I shall not,” he says and closes his eyes.

We make slow progress, but by midday, the hull of the boat is dragging on the ground beneath it, and we are forced to get out. Grandfather takes our bag on his back, and I take Grandfather on mine, and I carry him piggyback, wading through brown water that churns around my knees. The road beneath the surface is littered with debris, and I inch my way forwards trying not to trip over rubble, or lance myself on shards of metal or glass. Every half an hour or so, I set Grandfather gently down, and take a rest. Sometimes I smoke a precious cigarette, and then I pick him up again and we go on, climbing steadily uphill, along the deserted, echoing gorges between shattered buildings.

“Not far now, Son,” Grandfather says, and points along a side street, “go down there.”

I don’t ask how he knows the way, because he is Grandfather, because he is who he is. The Sky Burial Cult has access to knowledge others do not, (although we have tried), hidden ways – paths that only the bravest will endeavour to travel. And here am I, with Grandfather on my back, treading them with him. His guide, his protector, his guard. But I will only go so far, I will only let him go so far. I have my orders.

About mid afternoon we climb beyond the water. I lower Grandfather to the ground and he stands unsteadily gripping my arm.

“Are you okay to walk a little way?” I ask him.

His head is level with my chest, and I can look down into the close-cropped white bristles of his hair.

“Yes,” he says, “we go along here.”

Then he leads me, his arm through mine – onwards into the narrow streets of the oldest part of the city.

After an hour of walking, I carry him again.

“Thank you,” he says, “thank you my Son.”

And I feel the bitter twisting of guilt, at the exhaustion and gratitude in his voice. Anger too, at the pointless waste of it.

We go on, stopping more and more often as I tire too of my burden, and eventually as evening comes, he lifts his arm and points us down a narrow alley.

“Are you sure this is right Grandfather? It looks like a dead end.”

“Yes, yes,” he says, excitement in his voice.

The walls of the buildings rise above us as I stumble in, old fire escapes sticking out like broken spines. I lay a hand against a wall to steady myself and it slides greasily on the silty surface and I almost fall, banging my knee against a doorframe.

“I’m sorry Grandfather, but you’ll have to walk from here,” I say, and I lower him to the ground and turn to face him. His eyes are burning like he has a fever.

“Can you manage it?”

He laughs delightedly like I’ve made a joke, and nods, and reaches past me and knocks on wood.

There is a square of blue, peeling paint on the rotting surface of the door, but it’s not the dark blue of cholera, it’s the pale, azure blue of the sky.

“In there?” I ask.

Grandfather nods, and I batter my shoulder against the wood until it gives way and I fall into the fetid space of a damp stairwell.

Inside, we climb slowly through the musty air, letting the light of our torches lick over the tidal-wash of silt on the walls, until we are climbing above the level of the flood. On the fourth floor, I turn my ankle on rubble, and when I look down I see the bones strewn across the landing.

“Shit!” I scrabble backwards like a rat, snapping things beneath my heels.

“Only bones,” says Grandfather, “nothing to be frightened of. No ghosts.”

He chuckles, but I shiver. I don’t believe in ghosts, I do believe in death however.

“Come,” he says, “come, we must go up.”

“Where are we going?”

“The roof.”

“No,” the word is out of my mouth before I realise it, “we’re going back.”

Now I know where it is, we needn’t go on, others can come back and destroy it. Grandfather shakes his head. I can feel the panic rising in me.

“I’m taking you back,” I say.

He doesn’t answer, just turns and begins to climb the stairs. I hasten after him with bones, dark as charcoal, crunching beneath my feet. Vertebrae and clavicles tumble like dice down the empty flights.

“Grandfather!” I call.

And down the stairway from the floor above, I hear my name.

“Policeman,” he whispers.

For many slowly creeping minutes I stay there, listening to the drip, drip of water down the walls, and to the slow, dragging footsteps of Grandfather as he climbs on without me, and I cannot move. I simply cannot move. I turn my torch out, so that I don’t have to see those bones, and I stand in the dark letting the weighty, solid nature of that name sink into me, until I can go on again.

When I finally reach the roof, I find Grandfather looking up at the massive frame of a sky-hoarding, arcing over the street. It’s not empty, like all the others we have seen, but alive with a swollen, saturated, distant blue. He looks across at me and his smile ploughs furrows that button his eyes deep into his face. I have never seen such joy.

“You wont stop me,” he says, he who I’ve carried, he who is too weak to walk.

“I must,” I say.

He shakes his head.

“Out of the many who wanted this honour, we chose you. I chose you. You wont stop me. You don’t want to.”

“Come away from the edge Grandfather.”

“Do you think you can stop me from dying?”

“No one need die.”

“But yes, there is need!” he says and he strikes his thigh with his palm for emphasis. “That’s what your people don’t understand. There is a need for endings. There is a need for another kind of life! Another body! This one is worn out.”

“We can repair it.”

“There is nothing wrong with it.”

“You will die.”

“Yes!”

And again his smile is lit with a joy I don’t understand.

Thunder rumbles in the distance, clouds are scudding by low and fast above us. Grandfather opens his arms wide, and for a moment I think he’s going to jump, but instead he lifts his face into the first heavy drops of rain.

“Grandfather please …” I say, and I move towards him, pulling sacking from our bag, which I wrap carefully around his thin shoulders. He gathers them to him gratefully.

“Just bones now – ” he says, ” Stay with me Son, stay a little longer and you will understand.”

*

On the roof, Grandfather struggles to rise, the sacking falls from his shoulders, and I get up and help him. Rainbow colours waver around us.

“Please,” I say, “please reconsider, you don’t have to do this.”

“But I do. Will you help me climb?”

I look out at the sky hoarding and at the narrow rungs of the service ladder scaling its side.

“Son,” he says, and he grips my fingers, “I will do this without you, but if you stand at the edge with me it would help.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No, not afraid, but – it would be easier – if I was not alone.”

A thousand thoughts and a thousand feelings pass through me then, roiling and scudding like the thunderheads above us. I look at Grandfather, look deep into his old, familiar eyes, and I look at the sky frame, and both are empty of clouds, and I can see only blue.

“I’ll help you,” I say, although it means I cannot go back, although it means I have failed. “Come on, let’s get up there.”

The warmth of another sun warms our faces as we climb the rungs. Grandfather goes first, stopping often, leaning weakly against me as I take his weight against my chest and let him rest. Then we go on again, one step, then another, slowly, until I am half dragging, half pushing him up above me, like a sack. On the platform, he lies down, and closes his eyes.

“Very high isn’t it?” he says, “I didn’t think of that.”

I sit beside him.

“Are you afraid of heights, Grandfather?”

He nods weakly, and I don’t know why it’s funny, but it is, and I laugh, I laugh until I cry. I cry wrenching, lonely sobs, and all the time Grandfather’s hand grasps mine, and the steady warmth of an alien sun casts its displaced light on us.

“What will happen?” I ask.

“I will fall, I expect, gravity will take effect. Now help me, help me to my feet.”

I hold him beneath his arms and haul him up, so that we’re both standing with our backs to the night, looking into the frame. The air in the other sky is cool and thin and fresh, and when I lean out over the edge, looking down, there are only clouds and I can see no land. Grandfather touches my arm,

“I will tell you what I’ve learnt Son,” he says, “in case it’s of use to you. Everything is as insubstantial as the clouds, everything passes just like the clouds, and just as the clouds were once rivers, oceans, tears – so will we become something else too.”

He shrugs, “It’s not much,” he says, “but it’s everything.” He lays his hand lightly on my shoulder, “My friends will meet you at the jetty when you return. They are expecting you. Tell them these were my last words, and that I sent them my love.”

“Yes, Grandfather but…”

I still don’t really understand what’s going to happen. Even when he pulls himself up onto the frame and stands on its edge facing me, I don’t get it. And when he lets go and lets himself fall backwards into the blue sky, lets the air take him – I rush to grab him, to claw for his hand, because in that moment I still do not understand. And it’s only when I see that he’s not falling downwards, but up, up into the sky and that he is smiling at me – well it’s only then that finally, finally I do. And long after Grandfather is nothing more than a dark speck moving away from me into the endless blue, I smile back at him.