Pres had started after the blimp in late February of 1918, and though now it was only the middle of spring, the past couple of months seemed to him like a cannon through which he'd been shot, from twenty-one years young straight into the sagging net of old age. His hands ached at the joints. His ankles swelled. His back was sour from hunching over the wheel. Last week, while undressing for bed, he'd noticed a dusting of silver in his tall sweep of black hair. He wondered if Claire would look any different to him, if all that time up in the air had changed her somehow. As the car splashed through a series of deep puddles in the road, he imagined her emerging from the blimp a radiant version of herself, tanned as a pancake and sugared with freckles, her eyes the brilliant green of the stripe inside a marble. He wondered what he'd say to her, how it would feel to touch her. She was his fiancée and his best friend, his only friend, and yet he had no idea what to do when he encountered her again. Kiss her? Crush her against him? Maybe she would talk first, he thought. Maybe she would grab him by the ears and cry into his neck and tell him exactly what had happened, why she'd left at all.
     A cloud appeared ahead of the blimp, simply rolled in from nowhere. More than a cloud, it was a vast island, beginning as a thin shore of vapor and quickly thickening to tangled, cottony fields before billowing up into tall forests of green and black thunderheads. Sadness seized Pres so fiercely he began to shake. Not yet, he thought, his eyes fixed on the blimp, which even now was nearing the first wisps of haze. He was close enough to see the biplane parked in the hooded deck hanging below the blimp's cabin. So close he could make out the red and white candy stripes at the tips of its coppery propeller. He reached for the gun on the seat beside him. In his mind, he blasted six large holes in the blimp's gas cells. The helium poured out, making flutelike music as the airship deflated and settled gently to the ground. But even while he scrambled for the hat, he knew that the gun was too small to do any real damage, that he himself was a tiny harmless thing.
     Pres watched as the cloud swallowed the top of the balloon, then its silvery bulk, until only the cabin was visible, sailing along beneath the cloud's pillowy underside. He watched until the blimp was gone.
     For a long while after, Pres kept the car pointed down the same road. Every few moments he checked the cloud cover for punctures or tears, any hole that might afford him a glimpse. How much time passed this way he couldn't tell—an hour? two?—but when the clouds suddenly lifted, revealing nothing behind them but a bare tabletop of blue sky, Pres stopped watching the air altogether and scanned the ground for clues.
     In the past he'd found things thrown down from the blimp, Claire's things. Back in Cayuga he'd discovered one of her shoes stuck in the road like a dart. When he'd pulled it from the ground he saw the impression of Claire's foot still inside, a soft dent where her heel had been. He'd torn the shoe apart looking for a message, anything she'd written beneath the fabric, or maybe carved into the heel. Outside Pittsburgh he'd found her flowered hat floating in a pond, half pecked apart by birds. A few times he'd come upon the smashed remains of cola bottles, Dapper Boy's Pop, Claire's favorite. The bottle tops were always sealed, the caps care-fully twisted back on to the severed necks. Pres believed Claire was using them to send messages to him, that she wrote desperate notes and sealed them inside these bottles, which she then flung from the blimp, hoping they'd find a soft landing. Each time he caught sight of a bottle he slammed the car to a stop and searched for her note—picking through grass, checking bushes and trees—but it always managed to blow away before he came looking.

Pres had met Claire in a wax museum near Buffalo when he was twenty and just orphaned with a pinch of money. She was nineteen. Her job was to stand very still among the dummies and then come to life and scare people. The first day Pres came by, the museum's manager had Claire sitting on a bench among figures sculpted to look like they were waiting for the train. By her feet was a round valise mapped in exotic stickers, and her hat drooped over one eye. To one side of her a young boy in overalls sucked on his ticket, to the other a plump man frowned through a monocle at a pocket watch chained to his vest. Pres had never seen such a pretty girl. Her hair was short, shorter even than his, and it ended at her ear in a soft curling point that made him think of a beckoning finger. She looked so ready to leave, too, so eager, leaning forward with her hands on the edge of the bench, her neck craned to see down the tracks. Her lips were parted a touch in the middle, as if she were kissing the station—her whole life—goodbye. When Pres leaned in close he saw her tongue inside, pink and wet in the flickering light from the lamp on the wall. He wanted to kiss her, but even more he wanted to be the one she was waiting for, who was coming to collect her. He tried to position himself so she was looking right at him, into his face, but every time he tried she shifted her eyes. She did it slowly, rolling them a bit so that she was always looking just over his head or beyond his ear. Only when she couldn't hold it in anymore and burst out laughing did he realize she was a real girl, playing with him.
     Heat fanned out through Pres's face; she was laughing at him so hard she had to hold on to her hat.
     "Enough already, birdie. I knew it was you," he said.
     "Sure, I could tell," she said, and rolled her eyes at him.
     "I did. I saw you shaking. You make a worthless statue."
     "So get out of here so I can keep on being worthless at it," she said, and then she started arranging her pose, settling back into place like a clay figure hardening under a flame. A bolt of fear shot through Pres's chest as he watched her straighten her skirt, place her hands back at the edge of the bench.
     "Fine with me. I got a real job to get to anyway—a serious job," he said a little too loudly, as if she were already out of earshot. "I work at the falls of Niagara on the new patrol. I watch for people trying to go over in barrels."
     She blinked a few times and looked at him like she'd only just noticed him standing there. "Oh, you're still here? Get going already. Someone's coming."
     Pres heard the brush of shoes on carpet approaching from around the corner. "They use young guys like me to spot barrels because we got good eyes, see?" he said, and crossed his eyes at her.
     "Fine, fine, you goon. Now shut it. I need to concentrate."
     "If I don't warn the guy on hook before the barrel gets into the rapids, that's it, it's over."
     "Shhhh," she hissed through the corner of her mouth. "I can't stay steady with you talking. You'll get me fired!" She cocked her head to peer down the tracks again.
     "I mean they're dead. Swept right—"
     She grabbed his hand and pulled him down to the bit of bench between herself and the man with the pocket watch, and then she was kissing Pres. It wasn't a good kiss; she mashed her whole face against his straight on, jammed her nose into his, her forehead into his brow. He could feel the ridge of her teeth behind her lips. But he liked it, the feeling of being pressed into this girl, of having collided with her. He was about to kiss her back when he became aware of someone else in the room, watching them, and he froze. He stayed with his lips to hers, his wrists pulsing against her cool hands, waiting for the person to leave. It occurred to him that whoever was looking at them probably assumed that Claire was kissing him goodbye before leaving on the train, and it felt dizzyingly strange to think of someone standing there, saddened by the portrait of parting lovers who were really only kissing hello.

All that summer, on bright evenings when the ground was lit by wide ramps of moonlight, Pres would drive through the city to Claire's parents' home. Reaching the yard, he would slow the car to a quiet roll and open the passenger-side door and then Claire would creep from the hedge and jump in. The two of them would speed through town with the headlights off, taking the unlit streets, some of them old gravel horse paths, until they reached the forest at the city's northern limit. There, Pres would tuck the car behind a screen of bushes and they'd walk along the railroad tracks through two miles of woods to the clearing which had once been home to an old umbrella factory, but which was now the place where blimps were made.
     A high gate blocked them from getting close to the hangar, but through gaps in the trees they could see the fireworks of construction blazing across its translucent walls—arcs of bouncing blue sparks, sizzling loops of flame. Pres and Claire would spread their blanket on the grass by the fence and watch along with the other lovers who'd come from town and who were visible only during particularly fierce bursts of color. Claire often brought snacks while Pres offered up a jelly jar of apple wine bought from one of the men who made it in his tub at the boarding house near Pres's place. As the two of them sipped and ate, they would whisper back and forth, guessing who the other spectators were, who might be behind those two glowing cigarette tips, what woman was being kissed there with her hands above her head, her fingers laced through the fence. Pres figured that all the people at the clearing were from nearby, people they knew, but Claire liked to pretend they'd ventured there from the kinds of places she read about in travel magazines.
     "I bet she's from Spain. See how her hair's pulled to the side? That's a Spanish style." Or, "That man beneath the tree, he's got fat on him like a Russian. They need it because of the tundra."
     She knew things about places he'd never heard of, cities with white and green rivers for streets, countries where for part of the year the sun never dropped below the horizon, where a single day lasted for weeks.
     Pres had trouble visualizing such places. His family had lived in Niagara for four generations, and Pres himself had never ventured more than fifty miles from the city. Since his parents' passing, he'd taken great comfort in knowing that his neighborhood contained all the artifacts of their lives: two streets west of their house was the tannery where his father had worked. Three blocks toward the river, Harbor Lights, the restaurant above which his mother had grown up. Here was the chapel where his parents had married; there, the cemetery where they lay.
     Even then, nearly a year after their deaths, Pres had trouble imagining himself going much of anywhere at all. But sometime early in the summer Claire started using we instead of I when she talked about traveling. We. For Pres, that tiny word transformed the whole future into a hot little secret between just the two of them.

The whole summer seemed full of secrets. In the moonlit forest blimps were being built for reasons which, though clearly explained by the city's naval officers as part of a national "contract," still were hooded in mystery. Every few months another blimp emerged from the woods, glided over City Hall, and moored on the high-school baseball field for a brief celebration. The blimps had summery names: The Mayfly, Honeysuckle Rose, The Raindrop, which boasted a cabled observation basket that could be lowered from the clouds like a periscope. Another—The Roost—had a ladder to hang from its cabin so airplanes could cling to it in midair like trapeze artists. No one knew for sure where the blimps flew off to afterward; some people said to a naval base in New Jersey, but others claimed out to sea.
     The blimps' architects and engineers had come from Germany. In the spring the city's naval officers had moved them into a house on Jemmison Street, right near the city center, but they hardly ever allowed themselves to be spotted in public. They were large, blocky men, as broad-shouldered as umpires. And yet they seemed so helpless, so lost all the time, startled by the passing clatter of a police horse, frightened into apologetic fits of nodding and waving by a simple hello from someone passing on the sidewalk. One of them, a man named Heitmeyer, never went anywhere without a parasol to keep off the sun. Pres knew his name because he'd gone into the diner right behind Heitmeyer one morning and seen him write it in the guest book. As Pres ate his breakfast, he kept glancing over at Heitmeyer, who sat in a booth against the far wall. He was studying what Pres guessed was some kind of blueprint spread before him on the table. Every now and then Heitmeyer took up his pencil and began working on whatever it was, bending close to the paper, creating a little fort around it with his arm. Pres got so curious that he pretended to have to go to the men's room just to catch a glimpse. What he saw, though, when he passed the booth wasn't a blueprint at all, but a drawing, a fanciful sketch of a sky filled with blimps of all shapes and sizes: fleets of blimps layered one on top of the next, stretching up into the atmosphere. An elegant network of ladders and rope bridges and spiraling glass tubes connected the blimps, creating a city in the sky, a floating metropolis protected by a vast, blue moat. How wild to get to live someplace like that, Pres thought. But even as the sketch disappeared behind Heitmeyer's arm, Pres found himself wondering how great it would really be. What if lightning popped one of the blimps? What if they ran out of food? What if someone living up there wanted to come down?
     There were other secrets that summer, too. More people than ever before were going over the falls. For years no one had done such a thing, simply stepped into a barrel and shoved off toward the rapids, but now there were jumps all the time. The jumpers were always local people, not daredevils from Buffalo or Albany, not publicity hounds or stuntmen, but people everyone had known for years: Gideon Wells, who delivered milk and ice and butter every week, and pretty Laura, who kept minutes at City Hall. No one knew why they did it, but all around the city people wondered who would be next.

Claire loved hearing Pres's stories of what it was like to work on the patrol. She loved it so much it made him blush with pride there in the pine-scented darkness. Over and over he told her about Pipe Island where he worked, the slender strip of land at the edge of the falls, shaped like a corncob pipe. He told her about the squat, stone tower at the bowl end of the island, where he spent his days listening to the roar of the drop and scanning the river for barrels. He even taught her how to spot jumpers. First thing, he explained, laying his head on her leg, was to watch the shore. Barrels were cumbersome, and the brush along the riverbanks was leafy even in winter. More often than not, people could be spotted before they got within a hundred feet of the water. It happened all the time, he said. He'd be looking through the binoculars, scanning the American, then the Canadian side of the river, and he'd catch a rustling in the bushes near the top of one of the banks. All of a sudden, a lady in a bathing dress and a frilly swimming cap would be rolling a fat brown barrel down the bank and splashing it out into the river. Occasionally though, the barrels were already in the water by the time he saw them, already rushing toward him.
     I'll bet you think that barrels float, he said, that they bob along like corks. Well they don't, not at all. In fact, he told her, they tumble forward underwater, hardly ever rising to the surface. They come at you like mice moving beneath a carpet, little swells in the current, nothing more. Winter was even worse, he said. The barrels often drifted beneath ice floes headed downriver and were only visible as shadowy spots on the white plates of ice. And once a jumper made it past the patrol, chances were no one would ever see him or her again; the jumper would just vanish into the white curtain of the falls. Poof. Gone.
     Staring up at Claire from the cushion of her lap, the stars visible behind her head, he told her everything. He told her about Dexter, his partner, the boulder of a man who always sat smoking at the tip of the island with his back to Pres and the long, hook-ended metal pole across his lap. Dex, whose son had been killed in the war overseas, in the Argonne Forest. Dex, with that sad look to him, sitting there staring at the passing water all day. Pres explained how, when he did see a barrel coming, he'd ring the bell and Dex would spring to his feet and ready himself, holding the pole tightly in those hands of his, pouched and leathery as baseball mitts. While Pres radioed the crew of the Maid of the Mist, trolling below the falls, and warned them to prepare their rescue gear just in case, Dex would wait like that—pole across his thighs, feet planted at the rocky edge of the island—until the barrel was close enough to be seen, cartwheeling there beneath the surface. Then, in one swift motion, Dex would thrust the pole out into the driving water and yank it back so the hook caught deep in the wood before he finally hauled in whoever was inside.
     "Is this kind of how he hooks them?" Claire said calmly, before lunging at Pres, digging her fingers into his ribs, making him squirm and laugh until he was coughing into her back.
     They spent long hours wondering why people went over the falls at all, the two of them lying chest to chest with their shirts off. For the life of him Pres couldn't figure out why anyone would do something so foolish, why they'd let themselves be so charmed by what amounted to a giant hiccup in the river. He told himself it was nothing more than hysteria. After all, he'd lived not two miles from the falls his whole life and he'd never felt the slightest tug. But even so, Pres found himself deeply troubled, as though his failure to understand the lure of the river pointed to some larger flaw.
     "Maybe they just want to go somewhere," Claire said one night toward the end of summer. "Like an escape. Maybe they don't think about it."
     Pres was now deeply in love with her, and wanted to tell her so, though he refused to say anything until he could compose an adequate description of his feelings, which, frustratingly, he never felt able to do. The best comparison he'd come up with involved an exhibit on hydroelectricity he'd seen at a fair downtown when he was a child. The exhibit was of a clear, life-size figure, a glass man filled with miniature wheels and paddles and belts hung with tiny wooden buckets. When water was poured through a hole at the top of the man's head, the machinery inside him whirred to life and one by one a series of bulbs strung through his legs and arms and head lit up like the points of a constellation until, finally, a large heart-shaped bauble of glass in the man's chest flickered on and shined brighter than the other lights—so bright that Pres was forced to shield his eyes. Best he could figure, that was how he felt for Claire, how he would always feel: aglow.
     Pres brushed his fingers over her thigh.
     "Maybe they just look at the falls too long and get hypnotized, like by a snake charmer," she said. She put her arms out in front of her and stared at the flashing hangar. Seeing her like that—her gaze focused yet eerily vacant, her expression one of muted expectation—sent a slight chill through Pres's chest. He didn't like the naturalness of her pose, the facility with which she'd assumed it. It was the way she'd appeared when he'd first laid eyes on her; when, no matter how he'd tried to hold her eyes with his, they'd looked past him. Even as he was thinking this, though, she tackled him and blew her cheeks out on his belly and all his worrying collapsed into laughter.

Pres woke to find the map illuminated in front of his face. It had somehow tumbled up from the backseat and spread itself flat against the windshield, where the sun, just now rising, lit the paper as if it were stained glass. There had been no sign of the blimp in Gum Junction and he was two days' drive past the city limit, though where exactly he didn't know. He'd fallen asleep while driving again, just passed out of consciousness. Since he didn't feel ready to look out the windshield and find the car hammered into a tree or teetering on the edge of a cliff, the front tires hanging over the drop, he just sat and stared at the map for a while. Each of the forty-eight states was a different hue—Arkansas crimson, Texas mint-jelly green. The map's colorful design was projected onto his chest and face. He found his pen lying against the inside of the door and drew a heavy black check mark where he assumed Gum Junction, Arkansas, to be.
     Neighboring mountain towns like Holly and Bonanza Springs had gotten rich off their mineral springs—they were all marble and peach trees—so Pres had been surprised to find Gum Junction a shabby and cheerless affair, as if the town's own mountain were a sharp knee over which it had been snapped. The only building open the evening Pres arrived was the public bathhouse. When he opened the door and stepped inside, he found a single, steam-clouded room lined with changing stalls, its wooden floor pocked with deep holes fizzing with bubbling water. Inside each hole was an old man. Some, submerged up to their chins, bobbed up and down, their beards and the tips of their long white mustaches dipping in and out of the water. Others were spilling water over themselves from jars of poor, purpled glass. To Pres's eye they looked like a garden of ruined fountains.
     "Excuse me, sir," Pres said to the man nearest him, his voice muffled by the hiss and sputter of the springs. "Did you happen to see an airship pass by here a little while ago? A flying machine?"
     The man was frail, his chest kicked in by time, his shoulders covered in a feathery gray down. "You ought to wet those down, boy," he said, gesturing to Pres's hands. When Pres looked down, he saw that his hands had clawed up from gripping the steering wheel. "Go on," the man said. "It only costs to take it with you."
     "Six cents for the glass," said a man in a hole near the window, his arms great hammocks of flesh.
     Pres knelt down and dipped his hands in the water. It was a hundred and fifteen degrees, easy, and within moments he felt the tightness in his knuckles melt away.
     "Feels good, don't it?" called someone too far back to see, a shadow behind the curtain of steam. "That's arsenic and iron working on you."
     Pres nodded; it felt so good he thought he might cry.
     "What's this airship look like?" said the man nearest him.
     "It's a long balloon with a kind of house attached to the bottom," Pres said.
     "A house hanging from an observation balloon?" said the man near the window. He was smirking in a way that made Pres's heart sink; it was clear that these men were about to laugh at him. He'd been laughed at by so many people in such a number of places that by now he could feel it coming, could sense it rumbling up through a person before it erupted.

Pres sat back and studied the blimp's path for a sign of where it might go next. He'd marked the few places he'd seen the blimp himself with a check on the map, everywhere it had been spotted by others he'd talked to along the road with a question mark, and still the pattern eluded him. He'd chased it down the icy New Jersey coast by trail of rumor, spotted it once near the Virginia border rising from a marine hangar floating out in the middle of a lake and, assuming it was going down to the Carolinas or maybe even to Florida, he'd rushed south and overshot it, getting himself lost for nearly two weeks in the lush jumble of the Smokey Mountains. He finally caught wind of it again near Nashville, where he wound up spotting it near two in the morning—tunneling like a whale through the starry sky, the fins at its tail a spacey blue in the moonlight—only to lose it again above the bubbling hot-springs towns of the Ozarks.
     Pres traced the marks on the map with his finger. Connected, the sightings formed a kind of quivering, larger check mark starting high in the Northeast, dipping through the sunny states, then swooping back up toward the country's middle. But would the blimp continue north toward the Dakotas, or plunge back down for the striped canyons of the Western Desert? What if he couldn't find its trail again?
     Worse than all this, though, was the plain fear that the blimp would make it to the West Coast ahead of him and head off over the Pacific, to Europe or Asia, somewhere he'd never be able to follow. He knew somehow that this was its course, that it was trying to get to the ocean before he could catch it.
     Pres steeled himself, tore the map away from the windshield, and found that he was parked in an endless sea of yellow grass. It stretched out from the car in all directions, no trees, no buildings, just grassland, flat and golden. Fear rippled across his belly: this had to be Oklahoma; so far west already. He started the car and searched until he came upon a trampled path, then drove on into the baking afternoon.

The world was level forever. Pres felt like he was negotiating the arena of a giant board game, his car a luckless charm. Every hour or so a solitary farmhouse appeared in the distance, and at each he stopped to inquire after the blimp. He asked through doorways held open just wide enough to see a wife's frightened eye peering out. He asked men in heavy gloves, rolling barbed wire out against fence posts beside the road. He asked children playing on their porch steps with a spotted frog, tying its feet to the ends of a scarf and then tossing it so high the scarf filled with wind and the kicking frog was swung out over the yard before being rocked back down to earth.
     Eventually, the houses stopped coming altogether and there was nothing to the landscape but Pres and the occasional prairie dog, poking its head up from the ground to look quizzically at him, before ducking back beneath the grass. The expressions on their little twitching faces were hardly different from those he encountered everywhere he told his story. Why are you still chasing her? the eyes seemed to say. Why go on? Even after he stopped mentioning Claire, everyone appeared to know that he was chasing after a woman who'd left him, a woman who probably didn't want to be found.
     But that's not how it was, Pres thought, as the grass changed from yellow to a dry, papery brown beneath the wheels of the car. He might not know why Claire had left, but what he did know, beyond a doubt, was that she wanted him to bring her home.
     Since that first summer on Pipe Island he'd watched a number of jumpers pulled live from their barrels, and it always went the same way. First, the lid would come off with a suck of air not unlike a gasp, and Dex would reach into the barrel and try to loosen whoever was curled up inside. He'd take them gently by the elbows and hoist them up, blue-lipped and blinking into the sunshine. Then, whap! He'd slap them across the face with those enormous hands of his, and again, thwap! After that, Dex propped them on their wobbling feet, still in the barrel, and he and Pres waited for the crying to start. Because even though it sometimes took a while for the sobbing to bubble up through the throat and brim over that trembling lower lip, it always did come, and in fierce, wracking heaves. It was like seeing someone shaken painfully into his skin the way a pillow is jerked down into its case.
     No matter how hard the jumpers had tried to make it over the cataract, once caught they were grateful. Days after the person had recovered and resumed teaching chemistry or policing the streets, Dex and Pres would invariably receive a note or gift, or even a visit at the falls. Joe Greeble had sent them smart, banded hats from his men's store, which they wore even when it was too hot for Irish wool. Mrs. Mishara had met them herself on the rickety hanging bridge to Pipe Island—she still had stitches above her eye where she'd taken a bump in the rapids—and she'd kissed them both and taken their hands and blessed them right there with the same water that had almost killed her.
     When Pres turned his thoughts back to the road, he found that the prairie had become endless desert, the grass cooked down to a fine, pink sand. The sky was powder blue, too bright to look at, and the ground was an endless unfurling of light. A hot wind kept up outside, butting against the car, rocking it on its wheels and eliciting frightened squeaks. Pres realized he must have been staring into the light for some time, as a steady rain of colored spots was falling at the edges of his vision, drops of blue and orange and black. He kept his hat low and drove on, ignoring them until only one lingered in the corner of his eye. He glanced at the spot, figuring it would scatter or vanish altogether, but it remained there on the horizon. He turned the car toward it, and still it stood its ground.
     The air swayed with heat, but as Pres approached, the spot took on shape: it grew a boxy frame, its roof rose to a point. A fence appeared around the site—a sign warned that it was still under construction—but the gate stood wide open, and Pres raced through. He knew what it was, the thing in the distance. A chill climbed the knuckles of his spine. Though he'd seen two hangars so far, he was never able to get close enough for a good look. From a distance, they'd all looked the same to him, like barns made out of glass or wood or even bone-white canvas. But the binoculars hadn't accounted for their sheer size. As he neared its gaping entrance, the hangar's true proportions became apparent and he found himself trying to blink away his incredulity. It was at least fifteen stories tall, the highest structure he'd ever laid eyes on. There were no other buildings around save some shacks out back. No trees in the area, just scattered bunches of desert four o'clocks and some tongue-leafed cacti.
     Pres skidded to a stop just outside the hangar's mouth. High, spidery scaffolding buttressed its walls on both sides, and though there was no one working now, Pres could see pails and rags scattered along the planking. A pair of overalls draped over a banister whipped back and forth in the wind. Pres pulled his suspenders up over his undershirt and slipped the .38 into his pocket.