All This Life

“Don’t touch anything until I’m back,” the man said. “Then I’ll show you how to measure barometric pressure.” He ran off toward the bathroom.

Sara poked the balloon and said, “I wonder if this could make it to Spain.”

“Why Spain?”

“We can go up, up, and away,” she said.

Back then, Rodney’s goal in life was to impress Sara. Making her laugh was his chief mission, and so he said, “Want to watch me fly?”

“Don’t be crazy.”

He strutted to the huge balloon and jumped into the middle of the flat gray thing. It took his weight no problem, kept hovering a few feet high.

Sara said, “Quit it.”

He said, “Spain.”

He reached for the rope and untied it.

“Get off there, Rodney.”

He hovered a bit higher.

“This isn’t funny,” she said.

“Hey!” said the man, running toward them. “Son, be careful!”

And Sara said, “Please don’t.”

They kept screaming at Rodney in alternating sentences, but he wasn’t listening. He smiled at her. He loved every second at first because this was all a joke. No big deal. Nothing to worry about. Rodney knew they’d all laugh once he was back on the ground learning about barometric pressure.

The balloon was fifteen feet in the air.

Rodney didn’t feel any fear. He was a kid impressing his girl. Swept up in making her laugh. Sara wasn’t saying anything anymore, only staring up at him, open-mouthed.

There weren’t any clouds in the sky. He was up there by himself. He felt like a test pilot, brave and fearless. Someone reckless with liberty. The sun shone so violently that he couldn’t even see its shape; it seemed to run and bleed like lava. It made everything a harsh blinding hue, and Rodney squinted into it, not bothered by the opaqueness but feeling welcomed by it, seduced.

There was also the unmistakable smell of burning hair, a scent that normally meant he was in the kitchen watching Uncle Felix fry fish, singeing the coils from his knuckles and hands. He despised the stink, but up on the balloon, he didn’t mind it. It represented something else: The things that burned this high in the air were boundaries, limits, and a free Rodney flew, floated, soared. The sky was ready to take him wherever he wanted to go.

This must have been what it was like when they realized the earth was round, not flat — to understand that there were no edges to fall from, no end to the world. It would spin and spin forever, and they were all so lucky to be here. Rodney for the first time felt a great appetite to experience life outside of Traurig. He didn’t care if it was Spain or not. All he craved was flight.

Lost in fantasy, there was no part of him that pondered the balloon tipping over. It wasn’t even possible that he’d fall out of the sky, that his skull would jostle and crash. He’d never heard of aphasia or brain traumas or closed head injuries. Rodney had no idea that mouths could curdle and wobble and warp and never work right again.

How could any of those impossibilities be plausible when he was drifting on a balloon, feeling a warm breeze?

At first, it was a simple shimmy, a slight waver, a blip of turbulence that barely registered.

A few seconds later, though, the balloon buckled, shaking from side to side. Rodney tried to dig his hands into it for some grip. He looked down at Sara and she was the last thing he saw.

The falling was fast. It seemed to Rodney that he was on the balloon and then on the concrete.

He had two separated shoulders and a broken jaw and a broken nose and a broken wrist and a broken eye socket and three cracked ribs and a shattered ankle and a ruptured kidney and a traumatic brain injury. Everyone in town called him lucky once he was out of the hospital and limping around. All patched up on the outside, but they couldn’t see the tornado unleashed in his head.

•••

LYING ON THE front yard’s hot dirt, fresh from Hank punching him in the cheek and in the chin and in the solar plexus, Balloon Boy looks around for his dad and uncle. They both lie in close proximity, moaning and attempting to peel themselves off the dirt.

“I’ll bring the damaged pole,” Rodney’s father says.

“Be gentle with it, Larry. Maybe it can be saved,” says Uncle Felix.

Larry lays the broken fishing pole across his palms, carrying it like an injured animal.

Slowly, the three remaining members of the Curtis clan limp into the house. They lurch through the front door, onto the concrete floor, which Kathleen used to have covered with a knockoff Persian, the rug running the whole square room, concealing the cold cement underneath. Uncle Felix rolled up and torched the rug in the backyard once she’d left.