Bubble Boy

At twenty to seven on Wednesday morning, two hundred yards into the woods above Starfighter Lane, the first hard frost of the year had whitened every leaf on the slope except the ones under Agent Dale Raymond Buckley.

Those stayed brown. For twenty-eight days a Level 9 containment field had sat on them, warm and purple, and the frost had drawn around it with great care, the way police draw around a body. It was a very neat circle. It was the only neat thing in the clearing.

Inside it, a hand’s width off the ground, Buckley floated upright in the position he held most mornings, which was the position of a man standing at attention in a jar. He was thirty-eight, the youngest agent of the forty-seven left in the Homeland Extraterrestrial Division, and the only one who had ever been right about anything, a distinction that had so far earned him a month inside a ball in the woods and a reputation, back at headquarters, as a man who was probably on vacation. He had lost the fourteen pounds he had been meaning to lose and nine he had needed. His black trench coat hung off him like a tent on a broomstick. His hair had become a single object. He wore his sunglasses, because it was dawn and he was on duty, and because a man who takes his sunglasses off inside an alien containment field has admitted something.

Outside the field, on the frost, sat the raccoon.

She had a torn left ear and the manner of someone who has been doing a favor for a month and would like it entered in the minutes. Beside her lay the wrapper pile. Every granola bar that had reached him had been unwrapped on her side of the purple and pushed through it one patient inch at a time, and every wrapper had stayed behind with her. Beside the wrappers sat a dozen bars she had not been able to be bothered with. Her friends had drifted off in October. She was the one who stayed. Some mornings she brought a bar. Some mornings she sat on it.

“Day twenty-eight,” Buckley said.

His voice was mostly gravel. He had counted every dawn. He counted everything, because the day a man stops counting is the day he has decided to live somewhere.

“Recycled air. Tastes like feet and regret.” He cleared his throat, which in there took a while. “Pants fell down on Day Three. Could not pull them up. The field restricts upper-body movement.” The report voice was holding, and then it was not. “My underwear’s been on full display for almost a month. Nobody has come. Not HQ. Not park services.” He looked out at the bare trees. “Not even a jogger.”

The raccoon washed a paw.

That was not strictly true. On Day Sixteen, at dusk, a small witch had come up through the woods with a pillowcase and a flashlight and stopped dead at the edge of the clearing. He had been sitting that evening with his knees drawn up under the coat, a tactical position, and the witch had walked all the way around him twice with her flashlight. Then she had reached into the pillowcase, stood on her toes, set one candy corn on the very top of the field, and run back down the slope shouting to somebody on the lane that the woods had the best decoration on the whole street.

The candy corn was still up there. For twelve days it had sat on the crown of the purple, directly over his head, and on sunny mornings the light came through it and put a small orange dot on his forehead. It had not appeared in any of his reports.

“You’ve been the only constant,” he told the raccoon. “You and the granola bars.”

The raccoon chittered.

“I’ve named you Deputy Director Pruitt.” He had been saving it since Tuesday. “Because you also provide me with nothing.”

She looked at him the way the real one sounded on the phone.

Then the field changed its note.

For twenty-eight days it had hummed one steady note, and slow rings had run across its surface every four seconds. Now the rings stopped. The hum dropped. The purple stuttered, went thin as a soap bubble, came back, and stuttered again. Through the wall, for the first time since October, he felt cold.

“Oh God,” Buckley said. “Oh God, it’s happening.”

The field let go.

It let go the way a balloon lets go when a child finally finds the knot: all at once, and with feeling. A month of recycled air left the clearing in one sustained, wet, echoing blast, the galaxy’s largest raspberry, delivered to the whole of the woods from a height of three feet. Every bird on every branch between the ridge and Starfighter Lane went up at once. Down on the lane a car alarm started, considered the matter, and stopped. The raccoon was gone before the sound was, one torn ear and a tail into the leaves.

Buckley dropped.

He fell the full hand’s width, which after four weeks without gravity was a long way down, and landed face-first in the frozen leaves. The candy corn came down after him, bounced once, and stopped an inch from his left eye. He lay there. The birds kept going. Eventually, into the ground, he spoke.

“Freedom smells like leaves and dirt and oh—oh that’s—that’s my own smell.”

He breathed in again to confirm it. It was confirmed.

Then his stomach, which had processed nothing for a month but granola and its owner’s atmosphere, made a noise like a garbage disposal trying to get through a tennis ball. It paused as though finished and started again with new ideas. It did not stop.

He rolled over.

Above him the November sky was one even white lid, the sort Bakerfield had all winter, with nothing written on it. A single tear ran down out of the sunglasses and cut a clean line through the dirt on his cheek. He did not wipe it. He was, for the record, in pain.

“I’m coming for you,” Buckley told the sky, “you little green son of a bitch.”

His pants were around his ankles. The American-flag boxers lay open to the frost, the white sky and the returning birds, and he did not even notice anymore.