I read Pamela’s journal the next morning, while enjoying a cup of coffee. A lot of the notes were typed on expensive paper, with a red line down one side, and a plastic coating over the three holes.


    The front page was hand written, on cheap printer paper, hole-punched, with an index card glued onto it. The index card read:


    Talk w/ Carolyn Shoemaker - - - best I can remember.


    redwood hospice—


    Jan 11


    The pages that followed were typed using a typewriter, with ink splotches here and there, and finger prints on the page. Pamela’s typing was accurate, but typos popped up every few lines. Getting comfortable, I shifted around in bed, and began to read.


    Just before she met Gene, Carolyn was 20 and living in Los Angeles. The West Coast had just seen a big rainstorm, and the rain only lasted for two hours over LA, but the amount of rain was enough to cause mass flooding because the landscape there is both incredibly flat and incredibly dry.


    Some areas of California, just outside Los Angeles, the bedrock is very shallow, and as a result, the rainwater can’t drain very deep into the ground. The ground is already saturated. In other areas, the desert ground is so compacted that rainwater just flows along the topsoil because it can’t find anywhere to sink into the ground. No cracks, holes, or passable soil. So all the rain water collects and flows downhill, away from the mountains, and into the city, because it has nowhere else to go.


    “I caught a connector from Detroit to Deboise,” she told me. “There was a moment during the storm when, in a swirling mass of clouds, I saw lightning shoot up into the sky until it was lost in the darkness, and in that radiant light, I saw the rain, and it was falling upwards too.”


    Before I could interject she went on: “I have a distinct sense of what I’m supposed to see, and what I’m not. It’s a kind of intuition that I’ve had since I was a kid. These days it applies mostly to work. If I hear a conversation going on in the background, I can tell without fail if it’s a private conversation. I see a document, and I know if it’s confidential, even if it’s unmarked. My intuition is finely attuned to that specific distinction, but when I saw that rain, I felt as if the rain were part of a confidential document, or a private conversation between two strangers.”


    Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    “When I saw the rain falling upwards, I thought that the plane might be falling. It would have to be falling very rapidly for the rain to fall upwards from our perspective. But that couldn’t be. Surely I would feel it if the plane were losing altitude that fast. I got up.”


    “The flight attendant appeared in my path. ‘Go back to your seat!’ she said. ‘Go back to your seat and put your seatbelt on.’”


    “‘I’m going to throw up,’ I said.


    “She let me pass, and I shuffled through the hallway, past people’s knees and the lumpy shapes of carry-on bags.


    “On my way to the front of the plane, I stole a glance out the window, past the silhouettes of men and women sitting in their seats, clutching their things, drinks shaking in their hands. There was lightning again, and the rain lifted, same as before. I got to the dark empty space between the attendant’s little desk and the lavatory, and I knocked on the cabin door. A flight attendant opened it and gawked at me. Light was dim in the cabin. The pilot sat behind the control panel. The copilot faced the side wall, riffling through a small metal box.”


    “‘You can’t be here.’ The flight attendant made a shewing motion. I could barely hear her over the rain.”


    “‘Where’s the bathroom?’ I had to yell. She waved toward the laboratory door and tried to shut the door.


    “I squinted into the cockpit. She shifted her weight to lean in front of me. Making eye contact, she motioned with two fingers. ‘It’s right there.’ Then she gripped the door with both hands and pulled it shut.”


    “The plane lurched again and I feigned a fall, grabbing the door. The flight attendant lost her grip and stumbled backwards. I had a clear view of the control panel. I saw what I needed to see, before I was pushed back and the door shut in my face. The flight attendant was outside with me now.


    “‘Seatbelt light’s on for a reason!’”


    “She pushed me into the lavatory and shut the door behind me. I was alone again, and I sat down hard on the closed toilet seat. Inside the captain''s cabin I had caught a glimpse of the dials. Searching my memory of the image I found what I was looking for. I was not an expert on planes, but I recognized the units and the general range of numbers I should look for. We were something around thirty-five thousand feet in the air, but more importantly the number has remained steady. We weren’t falling. The ran was going up, and up, and up, like it didn’t care about gravity at all.”