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They’ve earned an evening’s rest, Ichabod feels. The crabby Russian professor had been more than she seemed.
“When I’m old,” says Lieutenant Mills, “I’m just gonna sit.” She leans back on the couch. Ichabod hands her a second beer. “Just gonna buy a rocking chair and sit in it. Every day. No stilt-houses. No flying pots. No weird brooms. Netflix, maybe.”
“Boring.” Miss Jenny waves a hand from her place on the carpet. “I’m gonna start jumping out of planes. Go full Old Bush.” Ichabod cocks his head, trying to decide if it’s worth asking, and she snorts. “That nineties president who goes parachuting for all his birthdays.” He raises an eyebrow— shooting what?— and she sits up, ignoring the lieutenant’s groan. “Oh man, you don’t know what parachuting is! Crane, some people jump out of airplanes for fun.”
He stares, trying to decide if this is one of her tests. Emojis, the lieutenant has reassured him, are popular but not yet taught as a foreign language in schools. The Chinese government can sometimes change the weather, but the sun-and-cloud app cannot.
Miss Jenny snorts at him and pulls out her phone. “Look, there are pictures.”
Ichabod takes it and scrolls through, Lieutenant Mills peering over his shoulder. Here is an old man falling from the sky, strapped to a soldier and an enormous flag. Here he is waving gleefully down at the camera; here he is crying out as his brittle bones land.
“Imagine being the guy assigned to him,” says the lieutenant. “‘Ex-president wants to jump out of a plane. He’s ninety. Go.’”
Ichabod puts it together. “The flag slows them down. It pulls on the air.”
He earns a nod. “The army uses it to drop soldiers in war zones, and to save pilots when something goes wrong. Other people just think it’s fun.”
“This is a diversion,” he says, to confirm.
“For crazy people,” says the lieutenant, with the warm not-smile she saves for her sister.
He thinks of little Eliza, the curate’s daughter, who fell from a tree when they were six. Before the farmhands carried her away he’d seen blood and the white of bone. (“Compound fracture,” offers the medical textbook he read last week, along with courses of treatment). She’d gone to the Lord, the curate’s wife had said at the funeral two weeks later, face gray against her mourning wear. She’d gone to the Lord. He thinks of the Tarrytown General Hospital again, with its quiet and its tasteless pills.
The conversation moves on.
He devotes monsterless days to learning. The librarians know him. The internet exhausts him less than it used to— he is grateful to Miss Corinth for many kindnesses, but most of all for explaining JSTOR. He googles the new words he hears each day (parachute, Nina Simone, Model T) and follows them through Wikipedia’s web. There are small ends to pursue: his citizenship application, the preservation of his Archive, his text message correspondences. Newspapers still take letters. He now types faster than the lieutenant does, which is a shamefully deep source of pride.
He muses with Miss Jenny about careers, as they’re called here, although never seriously. He is a Witness. Along with many complicated things, he knows a simple one: that this is not going to let go of them. More will be asked of them before it’s done. He can see that Abbie knows this in the same quiet place he does, and that she hates it. It is all right for her rest awhile in the normal world, if he keeps watch.
At night, he translates. Along with much else, the internet contains people— writers, researchers, dishonest students— who will pay well to write in Latin and occasionally Greek. Lieutenant Mills finds them. There is, she says, An App. He earns what she claims is a fair portion of their rent. Recently, she sends him the drafts by email. He has learned to operate the printer himself on the four out of five occasions it functions as it should. This part he does during the day, as a precaution against the fury of trying and failing in some tiny, crucial way. There are more tiny, crucial ways to fail than he would have believed two years ago. He is used to the dreary routine of trying and struggling and finally asking for help. I have planned battles, he restrains himself from saying as a Mills sister pushes three buttons without looking and the printer hums. I know the proper greeting for every soul in the Balliol dining hall and in Fraunces Tavern. You cannot saddle a horse.
Most nights, he walks the mile into town to work in the Archive. The lamp there is electric, but right-colored. He writes the texts out properly and then types them in the morning. Latin has held firm these two hundred years, being dead.
When he runs out of pages, he reads. He does not reach for new things in these quiet hours, but for the friends of his boyhood: Ivanhoe and Arthur and Robinson Crusoe. Tom Jones is still printed here, and still satisfyingly rude. Shakespeare is still printed here. He goes through Paradise Lost out loud, his voice filling only a corner of the room. These new people, he supposes, have few qualms about taking Satan as Milton’s hero. After the late walk home Ichabod dreams of him, of dropping through a vast vacuity ten thousand fathoms deep.
Weeks go by. A vampire emerges and is dispatched at midnight by sharpened wooden bullets. The sisters make jokes about sparkling and the mouth of Hell. Miss Jenny takes him home while the lieutenant files paperwork alongside her Captain Reynolds. They drive past the outdoor vending window of a Taco Bell and tarry in the parking lot, savoring chalupa supremes with righteous soldiers’ hunger. Ichabod is contemplating what sort of shared experiences FBI training might have entailed. He fails to immediately notice that Miss Jenny is silent.
“I left,” she says, staring across the street at the shuttered high school. “Abbie was going to stay here and be the perfect little cop, and I was going to run off and have adventures. And I did, my god, I did. And I then I came back for one job.” Laughter, of a sort. “One job.”
Ichabod doesn’t know what to say and so says nothing. (“You can do that,” Abbie told him once. “It is an option. Just so you know.”) They eat. The paper wrappings instruct him to Live mas.
When he thinks about the night of Arthur Bernard, the night he left the army, he remembers a shattering. The shuddering relief of having done it battled with grief and terror and pure shock— was it possible, truly, that England was over for him? That his nurse’s voice was over for him, that the Bodleian’s peace was over, that to the men he’d led he was a traitor? Memories had sawed back and forth: that final hating twist in his father’s face scraped against the warmth and strength of his father’s arms on the first May Day Ichabod could recall. He’d been carried out through the cold to hear the dawn bells. “Listen,” his father had said in the almost-dark, and above the birdsong had come come the sound of chiming. The passions had wrung him not in succession but all at once.
“You’ve done it,” Katrina had said as she sat with him in that hallway. He remembers knowing he’d fall apart if she let go of him. He remembers the look and smell of her dress. She’d stain it, sitting on the floor. He’d said something to that effect. She hadn’t moved. “You’ve leapt, my dear, and we need do that only once in this life. You’ve set your whole soul free.”
For years he’d believed her.
No monsters come for twenty-seven days. The lieutenant goes to work and comes home, engaged and sometimes happy. She sprains an ankle in a chase but catches her suspect anyway. Inspired, Ichabod tries jogging once when he’s sure no one is watching. It’s horrible. The immigration office sends no word. Ichabod googles Syria and Batman and skydiving, Lion King and skydiving and Black Lives Matter, skydiving and the Smiths and what jack-o’-lanterns are for. The Sleepy Hollow Chronicle prints his letter regarding unjust voter registration restrictions, and also the one about Twitter. Their favorite bar hangs the clippings on the wall. He dreams about Lucifer again. He translates a long article that’s actually good. He googles skydiving.
On the twenty-eighth morning he joins Lieutenant Mills for breakfast and informs her that he has made a skydiving appointment for next Saturday. This has the remarkable effect of divorcing her from both her coffee and her phone.
“You get that it’ll be a plane,” she says, after a moment.
“Indeed.”
“A really tiny plane. And it’ll fly up in the air.”
“So my research has informed me, yes.”
“And then you and some stranger will jump out and free-fall toward the hard ground.”
“As I understand it, the parachute plays an important intervening role.” He smiles, but she looks past it.
“Crane.”
“It is by all accounts a remarkable experience.” The pens in the pen cup are disorganized. He fixes the ones that are point-up.
She waits until he looks back up at her. There is a long beat. She gives her not-smile and something inside him unknots.
“Well,” she tells him, taking another slurp, “the pictures should be gold.”
They argue about selfies and then about tea.
On the appointed morning, Miss Jenny accompanies them to Super Chute Paradise.
“Crutches don’t stop me from driving,” the lieutenant reminds her.
“You think I’d miss this?” Miss Jenny is the only occupant of the car who is smiling.
Super Chute Paradise is a hut with a plane out back. The man who greets them has a reasonable length of hair, which Ichabod always finds comforting, but also a worryingly cheerful grin.
“Hey, bro! You Ichabod?”
“Indeed,” he says, looking around. On one wall are photos of people mid-fall. Most look happy. Some do not.
“Awesome! I’m Zane, and I’ll be your jump guru today. Let’s get your stuff filed, and then we can learn the rules of the sky.” He bounces away. Ichabod finds he’d been assuming there would be some sort of military officer involved.
“Zane is good at this,” soothes Lieutenant Mills, clearly spotting the whites of his eyes. “I’m sure he does this all day, every day— just goes up and jumps down with people. Don’t think any of them’ve died yet.”
Ichabod stares at Zane, who is now squirting a water bottle at the squealing girl behind the desk. “This is a profession?”
“Better than temping.” Miss Jenny is perusing a hiring poster on the wall.
“Okay,” says Zane, who has retrieved some papers. “Here’s our waiver. Just look through, initial in the blanks, and sign here.”
It’s a legal document asking that he acknowledge all the ways he could die. He stops reading after the first page and signs with the same flourish he gave to to the Articles of Confederation.
“Awesome!” Zane collects it and beams at him. “Let’s go.”
There’s a blur of instruction outside. He’s given a suit that reminds him of prison. Zane smiles at him and spouts inanities while the two of them crouch in various undignified positions. The Mills sisters are inside the hut, the lieutenant having prevented Miss Jenny from following with her camera. At some point Ichabod remembers that this man and his instructions stand between him and death. He switches from contempt to frantic attention just as Zane says it’s time to go.
He’s standing by the plane then, with the Millses beside him. It’s smaller close up. Smaller, across some dimensions, than he is. The lieutenant is giving it the sort of glare she usually saves for things she’s about to shoot.
“Bet they inspect these a lot,” she says to the woman in a bright-orange vest who is standing nearby. She seems to be responsible for herding them, or perhaps the plane. Ichabod has never seen someone less interested in an undertaking so horribly interesting to him. She shrugs at the lieutenant and assesses them over her coffee cup.
“You-all from the city?”
“No ma’am,” says Lieutenant Mills, with what Miss Jenny calls her good-cop smile. “Van Tassel Senior High ’04.”
“Hmph,” says the woman, and there is a silence. “This your girlfriend?” she asks Ichabod.
“Roommate,” says Lieutenant Mills. She’s still smiling, but it’s scarier. “That’d be, what, Bill over at the FAA who covers you guys? When would you say he was here last?”
Zane saves his colleague by returning with a figure in goggles, yellow earplugs, and an enormous purple muffler.
“Gene’s our pilot!” Zane says. “He’s ready to go!”
“Ready, son?” the figure shouts past Ichabod. He climbs into the front seat (Zane helps) and begins pushing buttons, loudly half-singing some song that involves the word “war.”
“You don’t have to do this, Crane,” Abbie says. “It’s supposed to be fun.”
“No refunds,” observes the bored woman, and as the lieutenant turns on her Ichabod pushes himself aboard.
The plane starts with a roar like a motorcycle’s but bigger. He peers out through the tiny window: between them, Miss Jenny and the bored woman are steering the lieutenant away. Wheels move. Ichabod sees the runway stretch out before they turn onto it. They are rolling. They are driving as fast as a car. They are driving faster.
“Absolutely nothing,” warbles Gene.
“Woooo!” says Zane.
The plane takes flight.
It’s not so different from riding in an extremely terrifying truck, which Ichabod did sometimes last year. He stares out the window as the hut recedes to a square and then a dot. The roads become lines. Sleepy Hollow becomes a map of itself, lakes and parks all rendered in perfect detail.
It gets colder. The plane shakes harder as it climbs. Ichabod has leisure to consider that, should anything go wrong, the orange will make his body easier to spot. They’ve looped back past Sleepy Hollow toward the jump field, and he’s staring down at blank forest. Gene continues to sing. It is possible a mistake has been made.
“Ready, bro?” Zane asks then, and Ichabod is not, but it’s the battlefield sort of unready, the sort where one’s legs obey without the cooperation of the mind. They are standing. Zane is buckling them together. He is checking the harnesses and checking them again, burbling encouragingly all the while. Ichabod recognizes the tone of voice. He’s used it.
They are by the door and the door is opening and this is truly going to happen to him, isn’t it. He stands at the edge, Zane behind him. He stands in the cold wind and tries to lock the absurd scale of it into his mind. Here is a miracle worth telling, he thinks. Here is a miracle worth seeing. There is nothing between him and all that space, all that land and sky. There is no door in the way. There is no time between him and the moment he chooses to jump.
At some point, a photo is taken— well, several. The ones with the floppy-mouthed screaming afford the Mills sisters great mirth, and who is he to begrudge them? But the one he prints for himself is taken later, after fear has resolved into wonder. It’s his own face in silly goggles, in an orange suit, in or a mile above his foreign home. It’s Ichabod Crane, falling and falling and still alive.