The Cloud Shadow

Dahlia Carstairs was thirty-four years old and she had not flown a plane in four months, which was exactly the kind of fact she could hold in her mouth like a stone and refuse to spit out. The medical hold said her heart had done something funny during a routine check, some flutter the cardiologist wanted to watch for a while longer, and so here she was in Junín de los Andes, drinking coffee she did not want in a café she did not like, arguing with a man she could not seem to avoid.

Sherman Doyle was thirty-seven, and he sat across the table from her the way he did everything, which was carefully, with his pen out and a little notebook open, as if the conversation were a recount he intended to audit later.

"You're wrong about the doors," Dahlia said, stirring coffee she wasn't going to drink. "The side door on the loading dock isn't locked. It can't be. Half the town's kids go in there."

"I walked the whole building last Tuesday," Sherman said, and he tapped his notebook like this settled it. "North door, chained. East door, chained. Loading dock, welded shut from the outside, probably sometime in the nineties when they stripped the copper. The only way in is a window on the second floor with a broken latch, and that window is thirteen and a half feet off the ground."

"You counted the feet."

"Thirteen and a half, if you want the truth. I gave you the exact number."

Dahlia laughed before she could stop herself, and she hated how easy he made that, how he just sat there being ridiculous and precise and patient until something in her chest unclenched without her permission. They had been circling each other for weeks now, ever since the recount brought him to town and the grounding brought her nowhere at all. He was in Junín monitoring some election dispute for the province, staying at the same hostal, eating at the same two restaurants, and every time their paths crossed they ended up in some argument like this one, about doors or weather or whether the hill behind the factory was taller than it looked.

"So if nobody can get in," she said, "then how do the kids get in?"

"The window. Like I said. But you can't reach it without a ladder, and if you brought a ladder, everyone in town would know by morning, and you'd lose the bet before you'd started."

"What bet?" she said, and then she heard herself say it, and she saw the little flicker of satisfaction cross his face, the one he probably thought he was hiding, and she understood that she had just walked straight into something.

Sherman closed his notebook. He did it slowly, the way a man lays down cards.

"I bet you can't spend one full night in that factory," he said. "Alone. From dusk to dawn. No lamp except what you bring, no leaving once you're in, no phone call to come get you early. You stay until the sun comes up over that hill, and you walk out the same window you came in."

"And when I do that, what do I win?"

"Whatever you want. I'll pay for a month of your dinners. I'll admit in front of the whole café that you're braver than I am. Name it."

"And if I can't do it, if I climb out at two in the morning because the wind is moaning through the roof like a lost dog, then what?"

"Then you fly me somewhere," he said, and she stared at him, because he knew, everybody in town knew by now, that she couldn't fly anywhere, that her license was sitting in a drawer gathering the soft gray dust of a medical hold. He watched her understand it and he didn't flinch. "The day you're cleared. Anywhere within three hundred miles. You take me up in a rented plane and you show me the lakes from above, and you don't charge me, and you don't complain about it."

"That's a rotten bet," Dahlia said. "You're betting on my own misery."

"I'm betting on you," Sherman said, and there it was, that thing in his voice he did sometimes, plain and unadorned, that made her go quiet and look at her cup. "I think you'll last the whole night. I think you'll love it, actually. I think you've been going crazy with nothing to test yourself against, and I'm handing you a test, and you're going to hate me for it and then you're going to thank me."

The café was nearly empty. Outside, the wind was coming down off the mountains the way it did every evening, pushing cold air through the gaps in door frames, and somewhere down the street a dog was barking at nothing. Dahlia looked at his face, this meticulous, stubborn man who checked doors and counted feet and wrote things in notebooks, and she felt the numbness in her chest crack a little, like ice on a pond in the first warm week.

"Dusk to dawn," she said. "Tonight."

"Tonight," Sherman said, and wrote something in the notebook, which made her throw a sugar packet at him.

He drove her to the edge of town at sunset in his rental, a gray little sedan with a rattling door, and they stopped where the road ended and the scrub began, and the old chain factory sat against the hillside like something the town had tried to forget. It was a big angular building, steel beams gone brown with rust, the tall glass of its single large window catching the last orange light so that it glowed like a furnace with the fire gone out. The hill behind it rose dark and enormous, and the wind moved through the grass in long slow pushes.

"The ladder is behind the juniper, ten meters north of the corner," Sherman said. "I put it there this morning. The window latch is broken, it lifts from outside. There's a crate inside to climb down from." He paused, and then he said, quieter, "You can still say no, you know. Nothing happens to you if you say no."

"I know that," Dahlia said. She got her pack out of the trunk, with the propane lamp and the blanket and the thermos and the sandwich she had made with unnecessary care. "That's the whole point, Sherman. Nobody's making me do anything. I want to."

He nodded, and she climbed out into the cold, and the last thing she heard before the wind took it was him calling that he'd be at the café at seven, and if she wasn't there he'd owe her a month of dinners.

Getting in was easier than she expected. The ladder was where he said, the window lifted with a rusty grunt, and she dropped down onto the crate and then onto a floor layered with dust and the flat ghosts of old production lines, pale rectangles painted on the concrete where machines had stood for decades. The factory was enormous and dark and quiet in a way that had weight to it, the way a church is quiet, and she stood still for a moment and let it have her.

She lit the propane lamp, and the mantle hissed and then bloomed white, and the shadows fell back just far enough to make the place livable. Cold metal smell, and oil that had dried into the concrete fifty years ago, and under it something green, the hill coming through the broken window. She walked the floor with the lamp held out in front of her, running her hand along rusted machinery, and she realized she was smiling, alone in a dead factory in Patagonia, and she didn't care who would have laughed at her.

The storage locker was against the far wall, a steel cabinet the size of a refrigerator, one door hanging open and one shut, and she only opened the shut one because it was there, because that was what the night was for. Inside, on a single shelf, folded with a care that had outlasted everyone who could have explained it, lay a flag. Hand-sewn, heavy canvas, cream colored, and completely blank. No emblem, no stripe, no star. Just stitches, hundreds of them, tiny and even, somebody's patient months made into a flag that said nothing at all.

Dahlia held it up to the lamplight and turned it over twice, looking for a mark, a name, a single letter, and there was nothing. Whoever made it had made a flag for no country and no cause, and had hidden it in a locker in a factory full of chains, and she stood there in the white hissing light with the blank cloth in her hands and felt something move in her chest that had been still for four months.

"Well," she said out loud, to nobody, to the building, to the hill. "Now I have to know who you were."

She was still holding the flag when she heard the sound, a soft scrape high up and to the left, and her whole body went tight before her brain caught up and told her that nothing in an abandoned factory scrapes like a boot on a window ledge. She picked up the lamp anyway and turned it toward the second-floor window, and there was Sherman, halfway through it, one leg in the air, looking exactly like someone who had not thought through the second half of his plan would look.

"You," she said.

"Hold this," he said, passing his own pack down before she could answer, and then he dropped onto the crate with a grunt and stood up brushing dust off his jacket, and the audacity of it was so pure that she could only laugh.

"You told me the window was the only way in," she said, "and then you came through it in the dark."

"I came to check on you," he said. "That's all. You've been up here an hour and I couldn't sit in that café looking at the clock."

"So you climbed a ladder in the dark to check on me in a building you consider dangerous enough to bet me a month of dinners I couldn't sleep in."

"It sounds worse when you say it out loud," Sherman admitted, and he looked around at the factory with the lamp light on his face, the rusted beams going up and up into the dark, the pale ghosts of the production lines under their feet, and she watched him do the thing he did, counting, measuring, filing it all away in that notebook in his head.

"Well, you're here now," Dahlia said. She held up the flag. "Look what I found."

He took it carefully, the way he took everything, and turned it over twice, and ran his thumb along the stitches, and she saw his face do something complicated. "Hundreds of stitches," he said. "Even ones. Somebody sat somewhere for months making a flag with nothing on it."

"That's what I said. Who does that?"

"Somebody who needed the doing more than the flag," Sherman said, and she felt that land somewhere under her ribs, because she had spent four months doing nothing at all and it had not helped, and she hated that he had found the sentence before she had.

She took the flag back and folded it, or refolded it, since her fold was worse than his, and put it in the locker, and then they stood there in the hissing light and the enormous quiet, and the silence between them was doing something it had never done in the café, which was exist comfortably.

"I haven't flown in four months," she said, and then wondered why she had said it, because he already knew that, everyone in her orbit knew that, the medical hold, the flutter, the paperwork.

"You told me," Sherman said. "In the café. You told me twice."

"I know I told you. I think I keep telling you because you're the only person in this town who doesn't look at me like I'm made of glass when I say it." She turned the lamp so the shadows moved on the beams. "A flutter. Do you understand how small that is? A hiccup in the wiring. And some doctor in Buenos Aires writes a word on a form and I stop existing."

"You don't stop existing," Sherman said. "You came through a window tonight."

"See, that's what I mean," she said, and she was smiling and she didn't want to be smiling, so she looked away at the dark end of the building where the machinery stood in rows like sleeping animals.

He opened his notebook, because of course he did, and she saw the light catch the page, and there were lines on it, columns, and she leaned over before he could close it and read the word catwalk written at the top with a number after it.

"What's that?"

"Nothing," he said, too fast.

"Sherman. What's that."

He closed the notebook and put it in his pocket and looked at her, and she knew that look, she had been collecting that look for weeks across tables and sidewalks, and it was the look of a man deciding something. "The central catwalk," he said. "It runs the whole length of the building at the top of the trusses. I walked the building last Tuesday, before I dared you, and I went up it as far as thirty-five feet and turned around. I told myself it was about safety. It wasn't. I turned around because I was afraid of it, and I have been annoyed at myself ever since."

"So the notebook number is how high you got."

"It's how high I didn't get," he said. "Thirty-five feet, on a ladder bolted to the wall, and I turned around at thirty-five and told myself a lie about it." He paused, and she watched him make himself say the next part. "I dare you to climb it. The whole thing, to the top catwalk, and walk its length and touch the far wall. And I'll go up behind you, because I'm not letting you go up there alone at night with a flutter in your heart and a propane lamp."

"You're daring me," she said slowly, "so that you have a reason to climb it yourself."

"I'm daring you because you'll say yes," Sherman said. "You always say yes. And then I don't have to be brave on my own behalf, I only have to be brave following you, and apparently that's the only kind of brave I have."