The Waingarten Procession

Nathan's job as a reporter takes him strange places...but nowhere as strange as Waingarten

The Waingarten Procession

The thing Nathan liked about doing freelance during his leave of absence was the ability to develop his own stories. Quirky, offbeat, definitely 'noncommercial' pieces, that would never ordinarily get priority. On the other hand it was really helpful if the newsroom would cover expenses, so Nathan shaved and put on a jacket and went to see Cohen in his office, in person. "I want to do the Waingarten Procession," he told Cohen. "Human interest piece, okay?"

Cohen's silence seemed skeptical. Fair. Let me paint the picture. "After World War II, Waingarten is home to the biggest helium extraction facility in operation in the US. The famous Waingarten Gas Plant, right? We're talking heavy industry. Whole town full of jobs. Prosperity. All that. Real American Dream shit."

Cohen looked mildly interested! You're selling it, Nat, he told himself. Keep going! "The good times roll. Until the late seventies. Recession. Gas crisis. Reagan takes office, etc. etc. Domestic natural gas production drops like ten billion cubic feet per year--"

Cohen glanced at his phone. Too much history, Nathan! Bring it back; bring it home. "So there's an economic angle in this, okay? Anyway, the gas plant closes, but the helium operation hangs on. Barely. Things look bad. Dire." Come on, Cohen. You can't be a rock in the face of this. Families without dinner on the table? Little Timmy with no presents under the tree at Christmas? Be human. For once.

Cohen looked like he thought things were tough all over.

Time to hook him. Nathan had pictures. Low quality ones, printed off the Internet, but that sort of added to the effect, he thought. He laid them out, one at a time, across Cohen's desk like the flop in a hand of hold'em.

First pix: Scene from a rooftop, taken from one of those cheap disposable cameras they used to sell in drug stores, back before everyone had one on their phone. The view was looking down on three giant goldfish, each the size of a dump truck, with bulbous, sensuous lips and wild, protuberant eyes. The school floated serenely past sad, washed out shop fronts and empty bays -- Waingarten's foreclosed-on Main Street, USA. Bang.

Next one: Same street, a year later. A year dirtier. Uglier. Maybe more than a year; this looked like an early digital camera, pointed up at an awkward child, 60' tall, with an idiot grin, and head as big as body. The gigantic image loomed over a mass of grim-faced Lilliputians crowded on the sidewalks to observe its floating, mindless toddle. Boom!

Last: a low-angle shot from some early iPhone of the Waingarten Marching Band in full, faded regalia, and behind them, filling the street and the sky, a towering Friendly Alligator with tiny t-rex forearms and a broad, mischievous smile full of teeth, each white fang as tall as a teenager. From this angle the tether lines pulling great, green carnivore down to earth were clearly visible.

Now the reveal: "Waingarten cooks up a plan," Nathan tells him. "The most late-80's thing ever -- they're going to revitalize the commercial helium industry by offering Macy's style Thanksgiving Day parades to everyone! Any town, anywhere can have their own giant balloons. That's their plan. They'll even finance the balloons! You can pay them off over a decade -- hell, issue municipal bonds! -- and then all you, Mr. Mayor of Anytown, USA, have to buy is--"

"The helium," Cohen guessed.

Yes! "The helium," Nathan confirmed. "So this plan... it's..." How to say it?

"Insane?"

Correct. "Completely insane. It goes exactly as well as you'd think," Cohen's interested expression, as he looked up now, authentically curious for the first time since Nathan had walked in. Editor? hooked! Nathan? On fire! "They don't sell a single one. The extraction facility folds in the early 90's. It's been gone almost thirty years now, but here's the thing: they built a bunch of these... These giant balloons. To show people what they were capable of, right? They didn't get rid of them. No. They keep'em in these underground storage spaces at the old facility. Silos? I guess? Until their annual summer parade."

Do you see it, Cohen? The story? See it now? "They still do it! Every year! Haul'em out. March'em through town. Whole place comes out for it. It's weird, Cohen. These pictures--they don't do it justice! I've talked to people who've been there," sort of. On the Internet. "They say..." the people who'd been there had lots of things to say; not many that made a whole lot of sense. "Anyway, yeah. They say it's weird. The Waingarten guys couldn't use any licensed characters so all their concept balloons are--"

Cohen wasn't exactly listening anymore. He was studying the pictures, his eyes moving fitfully between them, his mouth pulled into a tight little frown that suggested mild gastric distress. The word was distasteful, or off putting, but maybe it seemed cruel to say that. "Weird," he agreed. The balloons are weird.

Yes! "Hella weird," Nathan said. "Look at them. And that's not even... I mean they have some really 'effed up stuff. The guys they had working on them were not exactly artists. They were gas engineers or something. So they're designed for structural--" Stop it, Nathan. You're selling past the close.

Cohen looked up with an I can't believe I'm saying this expression. "You want me to underwrite this?"

Oh, fuck yes. "Airline ticket to Akron," Nathan told him. He had printed out pages for this, too. "Rental car. There's a hotel in Waingarten that's less than a hundred a night. I stay one night -- maybe two. Whole thing with meals and taxes is less than a grand. Hell, maybe less than five hundred bucks!" How can you say no?

Cohen was reluctant to nod. "What are we talking about?" The story.

"Five hundred words before editing. Pictures of the parade. Local color." Flyover geek show for the website, but not heartless stuff, Cohen. Sympathetic economic angle. Heartstrings! This is gold, Cohen. Clickbait gold.

Silence. Decision time. The men faced each other across the desk.

"How's Jennifer doing?" Cohen wondered.

Eh. "She's fine." Not really what he was asking though. "She's... staying with her sister for a bit. Give me space while I work on the book." Cohen had to be glad to hear Nathan was working on the book, right? Jen had packed up her clothes and her things from the bathroom and stood in the doorway before she left. You need to get off social media, Nathan, she'd said, worried about him. Caring. But past believing she could save someone dedicated to swimming out toward the dark horizon instead of back to shore. "We're taking some time apart," he admitted.

"I am sorry to hear that," Cohen told him, sincerely. Cohen, of course, knew about the heat he took in his regular, political beat. Torrents of death threats, doxing, endless social media stalking and abuse. Cohen also probably knew that his leave from the newsroom had been suggested by his EAP-network therapist. "You sure you want to do this?" Work on this, Cohen meant, when you're supposed to be working on yourself? Your book?

God, yes. Nathan considered telling him that working on the book--corruption, privilege, the unwillingness or inability of our institutions to rein in the worst of us--was not making him feel any better. And also, having an apartment right above a cozy, quiet bar was turning out to be a really bad idea, but he didn't. "It's a good story, Cohen," he said. "You know it is."

Cohen looked at the balloons, all of them smiling their wide, plastic smiles up at him. "Sure," he said, finally. Looked up again. "You're on a LoA so your expenses--"

"Submitted through the website. I know the drill, Chief."

Cohen nodded once. A final thought before parting: "Call me," Cohen said, "if it's going to go over a thousand dollars."

###

Nathan collected his rental and drove out, into the desiccated landscape, preparing himself for Waingarten. It had been a bumpy, miserable flight; the man next to him had been a nervous talker and Nathan was too polite to simply close his eyes and sleep. Now he was tired and distracted and needed to be thinking about what not to write about.

No small town cliches, for one thing. Cohen hated that shit. None of this 'they're terrible people. Insular. Stupid from generations of brain-drain.' Or, if not stupid, then painting them all as basically racist. That might be a challenge; depressed midwestern town? He was likely to hear about immigrants stealing jobs. None of that would fly. Cohen was absolutely not going to publish a 'they're desperate. They're all addicted to opioids. Meth. Etc.; piece. "It's not 2017," Cohen would tell him (had told him). "No one cares."

I care, Nathan thought, as he drove, but Cohen was paying for this. He needed to deliver something the man wanted. Stick to the facts, then? This many floats, this much helium, etc. etc. How many years, how many people show up. But who cares? No one cares about the facts.

Readers are hungry for meaning. What does the Procession mean to the good people of Waingarten? That's the story, right?

Well that depends, Nathan. What does the Procession mean to the good people of Waingarten? Probably hope, right? A stubborn hope that the good-times would come again. Maybe a superstitious ritual? Parade those creepy giant balloons down Main Street often enough the cargo-cult magic will bring it all back? That could make for a solid piece, but anything you can guess after the first paragraph is filler. If that's all this is, then it was going to be a photo essay, not an article.

So maybe you'll get lucky and it means something else. What? In the nothing bland greenness of tilled fields and power line poles vanishing at the horizon ahead, he let his imagination run wild. It's the wicker-man, Nathan. But instead of fire (or bees) every year they tie an outsider to one of the great, inflated monsters and then release the tethers, sending him screaming up into the endless blue as the townsmen, sporting grotesque cartoon masks, dance to celebrate the solstice. Wait. Equinox?

Whichever.

Head in the game, Nathan. Reality. This isn't going to sell because it makes fun of the flyovers, it's not going to sell because it's a well-told-tale of economic and cultural abandonment. The truth is, it's not going to sell at all (beyond what it's already sold -- to Cohen, because he feels a little guilty about keeping you on the dystopia beat until you're a functioning alcoholic), but if it were going to sell, it would sell because you got past the obvious. There's something creepy here, he told himself. Something dysfunctional under the surface.

How did he know?

The balloons. The balloons are creep AF.

That's the story.

What the fuck is up with that? Who thought the grinning trickster alligator or the mindless, sexy goldfish were a good idea? Where did those prosaic, insane designs come from and what desperation led sober men to give them form?

###

First though, before digging deep, there were boxes to check. There was no way to do this without an interview with Mr. Philips--the official Grand Marshal of this year's (and the last seven years) Parade. Philips had required some tracking down. Four phone calls to his secretary before the man had finally agreed to talk, and only then to give Nathan the bare minimum so he'd fuck right off. "We are proud of our heritage, Mr. Bennet," he said, a quote Nathan had seen in the (very few) other media profiles that had been done over the years.

"We don't expect people who haven't been through what Waingarten went through to understand, and I don't want to sound rude or dismissive, sir, but over the years we've learned that the Parade is for Waingarten and there's simply not much point in trying to explain it to anyone else. We're a very welcoming community--almost any day of the year! But tomorrow's really a just-for-us thing and if you stay... Well, I'm afraid you're likely to be a little confused and maybe a little disappointed. And you're not going to find any of us in much of a mood to talk. So go ahead and do what you have to do, but you'll have to excuse me, I have a lot to do tonight."

The other checkbox interview was Mrs. Elizabeth Brune, who ran Waingarten's Economic Vitalization Committee and was going to be up in the reviewing stand with Mayor Orton (who, his office informed Nathan, was completely unavailable to talk to reporters). Brune was willing to have a (phone) conversation about Waingarten's plans to repurpose some of its undeveloped land for 'organic produce' which would be sold at market in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, creating a vibrant new revenue stream for the town's agrarian sector, but when he asked her about the parade she was surprised. "You're here?" In person? She sounded shocked. "Our parade is not a tourist attraction, Mr. Bennet. I'm afraid you've been misinformed. Low-chemical, non-GMO veggies are Waingarten's future. Our little parade is all about our past, and let me warn you--it snarls up traffic, something fierce, so if you want to leave, I suggest you go tonight."

He left messages for two more names he got off the town's updated-in-2016 website, and then he called a couple of other people who weren't listed anywhere and didn't even have public social media. One rang through to voicemail, but the one he really wanted -- Walter Mayers--picked up. "So you came after all," Mayers said.

"I did, Mr. Mayers. And if you're still willing to talk to me, I'd like to talk about the Procession."

There was a long silence and he almost worried the man had hung up, but then Walter's voice came back. "Let's talk tomorrow," he said, "afterwards. If you're still around, we'll see."

###

People gathered. First a few, then more, and finally, as the sun came fully up, the entire town stood in somber quiet on the sidewalks of Waingarten Ave. There was no music, only a tense air of expectation.

Nathan got looks. They weren't glad to see him, but it didn't feel hostile or threatening. They had bigger things to think about than some stranger loitering amongst them.

There was a murmur; heads turned. The crowd leaned forward to see. At the far end of the street muted colors danced above the rooftops: half-seen shapes ponderously approaching the turn where they would come fully into view. Nathan felt his throat tighten and brought his camera up. The first thing around the corner was a clock -- an old fashioned alarm clock with twin bells and curlicue hands. Eyes at two and ten, a giant grin from three to nine. It bobbed back and forth, shifting as the gas filling it pulled it skyward while the men and women holding the tethers kept it earthbound.

Nathan stared at it; finding it hard to get his head around. It was big. The length of a school-bus across? Larger? It seemed to take up a full third of the avenue. And as he looked at the broad smile, and the bright, cartoon eyes, he found himself unsure of exactly what emotion the artist had meant to evoke. Was the clock full of good cheer?

Was it in pain?

Was it dancing back and forth, because its canvas frame acted like a sail in the faint wind, or was it struggling as tiny people held it down? It was getting closer now; in a minute it would be right in front of him, its shadow falling over him, and he found the idea of that somehow, vaguely sickening. When he looked into its face, it felt, as improbable as it seemed, like it was looking back at him.

Behind it, an orange dinosaur had come around the bend. A high-viz mini- Godzilla with a stubby tail and hook nailed haunches. It was grinning too. They all were. But Orangezilla's smile looked sad.

And another thing: despite what they called it now, this wasn't a parade; it was still, very much, a procession--the balloons dragged their tethers along the cracked asphalt and as they passed the men of Waingarten stepped off the sidewalk and took up the ropes, joining the slow, nearly silent march.

The clock was on top of him now, looking down with its massive, emotive eyes, and he realized he understood its painted, immobile expression: Please, its eyes begged, Help me.

Nathan looked away. The dinosaur was in pain too, straining to escape into the sky, pulling and jerking on its harness, but more and more Waingarten men left the crowds to hold it in place. When it tried to turn (pushed by the faint breeze, surely), they dragged it forward.

Behind it, a disembodied head bobbed and bounced. Behind the head, an improbable sprig of broccoli, its mouth open in what was surely meant to be a guffaw laugh, but read more clearly as simple screaming. They struggled and twisted, pulling up, trying to pull away, but more and more hands came forward to hold them down. Hands after hands, every Waingarten adult stepping in, finally, to do his or her duty.

Nathan watched, snapping his camera on instinct as much as anything else. He saw the fish. A yellow bird. A penguin in a bow-tie. There was an old boot with an old man's creased face. Murmurs as the procession went by. Nathan could feel the people looking toward him; why?

Were they following the balloon's eyes?

They played their parts, stepping off the sidewalk to join the procession. Guiding, hauling the difficult balloons along their assigned route, a dozen people each required to keep them from soaring away. More required to bring them along. The air was muggy and still, and yet the great inflatables seemed to thrash in a breeze Nathan couldn't feel.

Now there were only a few left; the sidewalks were nearly empty. A boy in blue pants with a lollipop sucker the size of his head found Nathan in the thin crowd, his expression was unmistakable: Please, mister! Please! PLEASE! Don't let them take me!

"Are you going to just stand there?" A man in a gray shirt asked with controlled anger, "Or are you going to help?"

Two women stared at him with something like condemnation, but, "He ain't from here," someone else said quietly.

The man who'd accosted Nathan knew that; didn't care. "He can help," he said with a voice that sounded just a little threatening. "He came out to see this; I don't care where he's from. He's part of it. He can help." The man held the tether out in his clenched fist. "Come on."

Nathan stared at it and felt them all looking at him with waves of shaming judgment. "Sorry," he said. To them, obviously, but also to the balloon boy towering over him. He took the rope and felt it jerk upward from a sudden gust and buoyancy.

"Come on," the gray man repeated, more gently. Mollified now that Nathan had made his choice. "The field's not far. You can walk it with us."

Nathan kept his head down, and pulled. He stared ahead -- not behind, and definitely not up, not even when he felt the vast, hollow thing he was towing shudder as if it were sobbing.

###

The parade field lay at the far end of town, where Garten Avenue turned into State Road 60. The road continued on past small copses of trees, open grass, unkempt tangle, but the procession stopped here. The assembled townspeople were breaking down, packing up. Nathan arrived soaked in sweat; the thick humid air had made pulling the thing more difficult than he would have expected and he was thirsty and desperate to be done. He could still feel them watching him and he was willing to finish the job, just to have it be over.

He saw several flatbeds for the balloons, but there were also three tanker trucks of a different design and set out between them a gas powered compressor running with its chug-chug-chug noise so loud that conversation was thankfully unnecessary. No one seemed much in a talking mood, anyway. No one met anyone's eyes, or looked to where the balloons were brought, at last, when their march was done.

Nathan saw the mercy: The balloons being drained, the buoyant gas inside them drawn out by the compressor's hoses, so that they lost their shape, collapsing in on themselves, becoming flat and inert.

They were filling the trucks, he thought. The whole town stood watching as the compressor did its work. The boy with the lollipop, his boy... his balloon, was last. "Blue-boy's over here," Grand Marshal Philips said. He had a clipboard. "Hook him up."

Nathan was relieved to let go of the tether and stand back. The others, even the man in the gray shirt turned away, but Nathan promised himself he wouldn't. He watched as the great, lumbering shape rotated toward him, and then, breaking his promise, he averted his eyes as its face turned into view. He just didn't want to see it. For some reason. When they connected the hose to its socket, the whistling outrush of gas sounded like a low, continuing shriek.

Christ, I need a drink. Christ. What was that?

It was a parade. A stupid small town ritual. Meaningless.

It was nothing.

The sun was starting to go down. He watched Blue Boy's head starting to invert, the strong body struggling to hold its consistency as the compressors drew and drew and drew. Mr. Philips had a moment, he came over. "Did you get whatever it was you came for, Mr. Bennet?"

Nathan looked at him, his face nearly hidden in the long shadows, "I don't know," he said.

Philips nodded. He looked satisfied. "That's almost half a million dollars worth of industrial helium, Mr. Bennet. Wholesale prices." He shook his head. "Maybe that's not a lot of money back where you come from, but out here, it's the difference between another year and everything we've worked for drying out and blowing away." He took a step forward. "I don't give a shit about what you think of us, and I don't even care what you write about us, but while you're here, as a tourist, I trust you'll keep your goddamn opinions to yourself. No one here needs to hear it."

Nathan stared through the late afternoon, trying to get a read of the man's emotion; to see past the hard lines of his face. He couldn't see anything but annoyance that could possibly flare into anger if pressed.

"You're not... ashamed?" He asked before he caught himself and realized how ridiculous that sounded.

"Of what, Bennet?" Philips demanded to know. "What do you think we should be ashamed of? They're balloons." He took a minute, looking over where the men were starting to fold the canvas, to haul it back onto the trucks for next year. "Get walking back. Go back to your hotel. Sleep it off. Tomorrow this won't..." he didn't say the rest, but his eyes did: mean anything at all. "If you want..." Philips wasn't completely heartless, "go have a drink at Franklin's. Keep to yourself, and don't give anyone any trouble. Like I said, no one cares what your opinion of us might be."

A drink, Nathan thought, sounded like a wonderful idea. But he didn't have any intention of keeping to himself.

###

Over decades the brickwork had adopted the colors of dry, windblown dirt. Pray for rain, Waingarten. Nathan watched a pride of teenagers across the road in the Dairy Queen parking lot lazing languidly in the twilight, stretched out on their flatbeds and rooftops. Young and carefree and infinitely far away. Now that the parade was over, they could get on with their lives and dramas.

Over here, in Frank's Grille, the adults sat in near silence. For them, the procession wasn't quite done; they still had their own thoughts but little interest in the stranger at a far booth. Lampposts up and down Garten Avenue still had the posters up, with their red banners warning that this was the Parade Route. No parking, no standing. Violators to be towed.

One drink, Nathan promised himself, and not a stiff one. If you go through that, soda water. He was on his second, but so far that was holding steady; waiting was hard. Boredom let things in that the liquor could stand against. He wouldn't have to wait long, though. Walter Mayers was arriving, nodding to a few of the old men as he went past and finding his way to Nathan's table. "Well, hell," Walt said.

"Didn't think I'd come?" Nathan made him for mid-30's. A peer, agewise, but Walter presented as older. Tired. A little worn out, a little dried up. Sad. Waingarten.

"Hoped you wouldn't." Walt sat across from him.

Nathan had cold-called him before he'd even sat down with Cohen, when the idea of doing this was still inchoate. Yes, Walt had said, my grandfather was the gas plant foreman. Yes, my father ran the parade. And yes, I didn't want to have anything to do with any of that. "Are you willing to talk? Not Chamber of Commerce stuff I can get off the website."

"Mr. Bennet," Walt had said, "If you came all the way out here and walked in our parade, I guess I can tell you how I feel about it. What'd you make of it?"

Nathan shook his head. "Honestly? I have no idea."

That was good enough for Walter. "What do you want to hear?" Then he answered his own question. "The beginning I guess. I was three when the gas plant closed. Don't remember much of that. Just everyone being worried. I was a little older when," and he took a breath, "they came up with the procession. In kindergarten when they collected the designs."

Nathan leaned in: Tell me about that.

Walter remembered. "A man -- an engineer -- came to our class," he said. "He told us they were going to make balloons, like the ones on TV, on Thanksgiving, but they couldn't use Superman or Snoopy or anyone like that. They needed... new ideas. They wanted our ideas. The children of Waingarten..." Walter laughed very softly, very dryly. "He told us to draw our 'imaginary friends.'"

Writing in his notebook Nathan printed the words: Imaginary friends.

Crayons. Construction paper. Prim young teachers moving between the smart rows of desks, ready to help or guide or direct, while the men from the plant, wearing their business suits and ties, watched from the sidelines.

"Why'd they go to you?" Nathan asked. Instead of professional artists?

"Why would they have said?" He shook his head. "Probably that we were free. And that the older kids would have been..." he struggled for the words. "Too self conscious? I guess. But I think they needed innocence." He looked Nathan in the eye, his face full of dark, sad humor. Childhood innocence. "So no professional cartoonists or whatever. They needed the children of Waingarten. That's what they would have said if they were telling the truth."

Nathan didn't write anything down.

"My dad was there," Walter remembered. Which was weird. "He'd never shown any interest in anything I'd drawn before. He'd been so tied up with the plant we barely saw each other -- he was home after I was in bed, gone on the weekends. But there he was, in Miss Carmichael's class, watching me work with my crayons. I remember thinking they all looked so serious."

"Serious, how?"

"Serious like they needed this," he thought. "Like they were counting on us, but couldn't say it. Didn't want to show it. Didn't want to spook us." He remembered the teachers finally collecting all the drawings, stacking them, squaring them, handing them over to the slightly awkward engineer man who studied them, nodding at each one, while the executives watched in silent urgency. "Finally he said something like, 'this can work,' and they all looked so relieved. They could exhale after holding their breath for an hour. I wanted to see what my father thought, but he didn't look at me. He was talking to the head of finance, as they walked out together."

"So that's where the balloons came from," Nathan said. He hadn't read that before, in any of the material.

"Yep. That's where they came from."

"Do you remember what you drew?" Nathan wondered.

"I drew a jellyfish, Mr. Bennet," Walter told him. "I'd never seen one--only on TV--and I thought they were the coolest things in the world. And it was easy to draw, so." Nathan wrote that down, too.

"Are you going to put that in your article?" Walter asked.

"Is it okay if I do?"

Instead of answering Walter asked another question. "So you've been through it, Mr. Bennet -- the Procession. You were a part of it." He didn't call it a parade now; he used the older word, the original one. Interesting. "And I guess you've got the history. More than a lot of people here, actually. So tell me. What do you think of it? I mean as an idea."

"I guess..." Nathan paused. Getting the right word seemed important. "As an idea? I guess I'd call it 'optimistic.'"

That got another laugh. Walter was nodding. Appreciating that. Appreciating Nathan, maybe. "You ever done anything really, really stupid, Mr. Bennet?" Walter asked.

Nathan thought about that, Jennifer. "Yes."

"I mean that got a bunch of people hurt--not you. I'm talking about people who depend on you. Families that rely on you. Anything like that?"

No. Nothing like that.

Walter didn't think so. "You cover things though. I mean, in the news, right? As a reporter. You cover people who do stupid shit and get people... hurt, right?"

Nathan wasn't sure what to say; the question felt a little aggressive and a little desperate. "Yes," he decided.

"I looked you up," Walter told him. "Googled you. You did a story on that apartment building that caved in on itself--"

In the Bronx. Nathan nodded.

"Full of people." Walter said. "Kids, even."

"There were children there," Nathan confirmed. It had fallen at 4:00 AM. No one who had been home made it out; the bodies were unrecoverable; rendered into dust. The lack of carnage, the lawyers had told the next of kin, would make it hard to recover adequate damages. No little bodies. No visceral impact. Nathan had put that in his reporting.

"The men who built it--they knew they were cutting corners?"

Nathan had spent weeks trying to answer that question and it was still impossible to be sure. "You want my best guess? I think..."

Walter already knew, "They thought they were doing what they had to do."

"I think so," Nathan said. "I think they... knew it was a risk, but..." they cut the same corners other people cut. And cutting corners cut time. Cut costs. Kept their teams--people who depended on them--employed. They...

"Hoped for the best?" Walter's dry laugh. "They were... what was the word you just used? Optimistic?"

Nathan nodded once. And finished his glass. He might need a third after all.

"Would you say," Walter wanted to know, "that those builders -- the men who built that building, and all that -- that they're bad men?"

"Yes," Nathan said, without hesitation.

"Even though they didn't set out to hurt anyone? Even though they thought they were doing good--building cheap apartments for poor people to live in? And they made a bunch of decisions that kind of make sense if you look at them from the right direction? They didn't--"

"None of them lived in the building," Nathan said. "None of the people who lived there understood the risks that had been taken. The people who got hurt trusted them to do the right thing."

"And they didn't."

No, they didn't.

"So they were bad men," Walter said. Now it wasn't a question; it was agreement.

Nathan nodded.

"You made that pretty clear in your article," Walter approved. "I loved my dad. I'm not as sure about my grandfather," Walter said, "but I think I loved him, too. The men that put this together were Optimists, Mr. Bennet. They could've let Waingarten lay down and die -- it would've been sad, but it would've been right. Times change, you ought to change with them but they refused to do that. They put everything we had -- money that could have been a life raft or an escape pod for most of the people here--into the Procession. And they put more than money into it. Something, I think, even more precious." He shook his head. Now this is what we've got. Now it's who we are." Walter had one more point to make. He'd make it in the form of a question. "Did you see a Jellyfish, Mr. Bennet? In the parade?"

Nathan thought about it. No. I don't think so. He shook his head.

"You're goddamn right you didn't," Walter told him. "I found my drawing in my father's things, after he passed. In his safe. They never made a balloon out of it. He wouldn't let them."

###

Philips was right about the morning. The whole thing seemed ridiculous in fresh sunlight. That, Cohen could believe. The rest, not so much. "Half million dollars of helium?"

"Back of the napkin says that's right," Nathan told him. "400,000 cubic feet give or take." Multiplied by the market rate.

It didn't make sense though, "I thought the extraction plant..." shut down? Cohen was trying to connect dots that wouldn't connect.

"It did," Nathan had looked that up, too. His research, if nothing else, was meticulous. "Shut down. Stripped and sold for parts. Certainly all the heavy machinery, but most of the rest of it, too. Even the fixtures. All gone thirty years ago."

"Then I don't understand," Cohen's annoyed expression: I can't publish this; none of it makes any sense.

"From what I can tell," Nathan told him, "every year they march those balloons out to the field and drain them into the trucks. And then next summer, they're ready to go again--all filled up." He shrugged. "I asked." The email exchange had been in the material he'd submitted to the fact-checkers. "There's supposedly natural vents that open into the storage silos. Where they keep the balloons. They say it's a process called 'natural capture.'"

"'Natural capture?'" Cohen was at a loss. Whatever his opinion of Nathan, he knew the man wasn't credulous.

"I tried to get a hold of the engineer Walter Mayers told me about," Nathan said. "No dice. Killed himself in '95. Hanging. No one else wants to answer my emails."

Cohen shook his head. He clearly hated to tell Nathan it was a complete loss, but... "What about Walter? You don't think he'd understand the... I don't know, the economics of it? The physics?"

Nathan sat at the desk thinking about how to answer. He could tell the truth, "Walter... left town," Nathan told Cohen. "A few days after we talked. I think... he'd been living with whatever happened -- is still happening -- in Waingarten, for a long time. I'd like to think telling me helped him finally decide what to do. He didn't leave a forwarding address."

That was the truth. It just wasn't the whole truth.

"So what you're telling me," Cohen said, "is that I have -- at best -- half a story here and everyone who could finish it is either unwilling, dead, or vanished? Do I have that right?"

Nathan took a deep breath and let it out. He thought about other things he could say and decided not to. Sometimes it's best to let something lay down and die, Walter had said. "Sorry, Cohen." He turned his hands up, empty. Is what it is.

Cohen shook his head, letting it go, himself. "It's fine. It's -- look, it was a long shot. You brought it in under a grand. I can't complain. Now that you're back, you can work on the book?"

"I think I can," Nathan said.

"Then it was a thousand bucks well spent," Cohen assured him. "Go. I have calls to make. Do something productive -- Call Jennifer! And stay the hell out of the bar. Okay?"

Nathan promised he would. All of that. On the elevator ride downstairs he opened his phone. It was true Walter left. True he didn't want to be found. But the whole truth was that he'd sent one last message to Nathan; a picture.

A picture of the overgrown fields and high grass around the ruins of the old extraction plant. A picture that captured edges of the dull metal silos embedded in the earth, encircled in weeds ,and now, in the deep summer, wildflowers. It was a picture of late afternoon, when the sun was low. A picture of the ground, but also the sky, and in the sky dozens of shapes rising. Shapes Nathan recognized. A boy with a lollipop, an orange, grinning dinosaur. A carefree spring of broccoli, a cheerful cartoon alarm clock. On and on, many already too small to make out as they disappeared amongst the scattered clouds.

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