Somehow, falling always felt right. Nothing in life was ever as freeing and natural as that strange, weightlessness with the air whipping past in a deafening rush. Most falls didn’t reach that level of intensity, of course. Most of the time, falling only lasted for a brief moment. Whether it was leaping over a handrail, dropping out of a tree, or simply tripping on the rug, every fall was welcome. The best falls were the long ones. Skydiving was the only way to truly achieve the full experience but that was a pricey hobby at the best of times. Even then, there was only a minute or so of freefall and then the parachute would be deployed and the rest of the decent would be much less ideal. Of course, without the parachute the fall wouldn’t last much longer than a few minutes and then, well, then there wouldn’t be any more opportunities to fall again.

Nowadays there were places with huge, vertical wind tunnels that could simulate such a freefall. There you could spend much longer, floating in that simulated freefall. Unfortunately, it simply wasn’t the same. Even with eyes shut tight it didn’t quite feel right. It was obvious there wasn’t any real downward motion, just air pushing you up. A cheap substitute with unsurprising shortcomings.

The best falls were at night, or through fog, so that there was no telling how far away or nearby the ground was. Nothing but vague hints here and there, suggesting the ground was there, somewhere, but indistinct and unfathomable.

Contrary to what many people thought, this love of falling was not a self-destructive urge. No matter the thrills, a safe landing was always the desired outcome. Pain, injury, and worst of all, death, held no special place or honor and were always to be avoided.

All of those thoughts drifted through Jamal’s mind as he fell. He’d passed through one cloud layer already but another one was further on below, sandwiching him between the clouds with only a thin strip of clear sky running like a ring of blue and gold all around him. Turning over in the air and controlling his position while falling was something he’d learned to do years ago and such maneuvers were second nature to him now. Rotating so he was facing upwards, Jamal scanned the underside of the clouds. Sunlight caught along the smooth, roiling edges of the clouds, giving clear definition to what would have normally appeared as an undefined, gray mass. The golden light gave the clouds the appearance of being the canopy of a forest that had entered Autumn. Wisps of cloud pulled away at the edges like leaves being blown off in the breeze.

Turning back to face downward, the clouds there had much the same appearance. Jamal could envision himself falling in the band of open sky between two opposing forests, each one stretching out to the horizon as far as he could see. He wished this moment could last forever, and yet already he was nearing the tops of the second cloud layer. Soon he’d be passing through it and no one but he would know of this magical space between the clouds.

Just like that, the clouds enveloped him once more and the golden forests were gone. This second layer of clouds lasted only a few seconds and when he was through it was into a world of cold and dim light. The fields below were shades of brown and dull yellows with very little green.

Jamal pulled on the cord that would release his parachute. The familiar zipping sounds of cloth and cords spilling out and trailing behind was followed by the sturdy yank and abrupt deceleration. He gripped the toggles on either side of him that allowed him to maneuver the parachute and guided himself down towards the landing site. Glancing upwards the clouds looked like nothing more than an unremarkable blanket of clouds. He had hoped to spy even a hint of the golden light but he was without luck in that regard.

A few moments later and he was back on the ground. Water from the past few days of rain, combined with the morning dew, made for a particularly soft and wet landing. He’d have to dry out his parachute before he could properly fold it back away so he didn’t bother to wrap it up right away. Instead, he quickly gathered it up and hung it over his arm while he walked back towards the hangar. The airplane would be coming back in to land soon to take the next group of skydivers out.

As he walked, Jamal began to notice that he was the only one back on the ground. Although he’d jumped with a good half dozen other people, none of them were in sight. Looking up towards the clouds he couldn’t see any parachutes. Had they found an updraft and been carried back into the clouds? Come to think of it, he didn’t remember seeing any of them in the space between the clouds either.

Minutes passed and still no one else appeared. Jamal hurried back to the hangar, unhooking and leaving his parachute on the hangar floor where they would normally inspect and fold their parachutes. He looked around but saw no one in the small office connected to the hangar.

“Hello?” Jamal called out.

His voice echoed loudly in the enclosed space but no reply came.

The door to the office wasn’t locked and Jamal grabbed the radio headset. The radio was off, which was worrying. There was supposed to always be someone on the radio whenever a plane was in the air, and if whoever was supposed to be on the radio had to step away they still left the radio on.

Jamal flicked the switch to turn the radio on but nothing happened. The light to indicate it had power didn’t even come on. He flicked the switch a couple more times with the same results. Ducking under the table, he traced the power cord to make sure it was plugged in, which it was.

“Hello?” he called out again with the same results.

He waited in the office for several minutes, hoping someone would come and explain what had happened but he waited in vain. The waiting was getting to him so Jamal walked back out towards the runway to see if he could see any sign of the plane.

It was quiet outside and not only could he not see any sign of the plane, but he also couldn’t hear it either. That was the most unusual part since the plane was fairly noisy and didn’t fly so high that people on the ground wouldn’t hear it.

This was now beyond the sort of joke where he’d expect people to jump out and shout surprise. There weren’t any other airports close by enough for the airplane to have diverted to it, and there still should have been some sign of the other skydivers. Jamal pinched himself, almost in jest, but when he didn’t feel any pain he gave his face a good, solid slap. He didn’t feel any pain from the slap either. He felt the contact with his body in both instances, but there was no pain. He tried progressively more and more painful things and yet never could he feel any pain. What was more, he couldn’t seem to cause any damage to his body either. No matter what he tried, he was impervious to pain and injury.

There were no vehicles in the parking lot. Even his own little Nisan was missing. With nothing else to go on, Jamal began to walk. Maybe it was all a dream and he’d wake up, or perhaps there was some other explanation that he hadn’t quite seen yet. Whatever was going on, though, he needed to find other people. Town was a few miles up the road from the small runway and he began walking along the narrow road leading out from the hangar.

The clouds above still sat above, fairly close to the ground. There were only a few hundred feet between them and the ground. Out along the horizon the clouds even touched down as though he were in a dome of clouds. He’d never seen clouds do that before, though he didn’t think it was necessarily something to be concerned or surprised by. As he drew closer to the point where the clouds met the ground he began to feel anxious. He’d never seen clouds sit so still and yet so crisp. It was only from a distance that clouds seemed to have well defined edges. Up close there was a much broader area of gathering mist.

These clouds, however, didn’t have such a transitional boundary. Their edges were dense and well defined even up close. They weren’t entirely static, but their movements were incredibly slow. It was with significant hesitation that Jamal walked into the clouds. Inside was cold and moist like any other cloud he’d passed through. Visibility was only a few feet and he focused on the ground right in front of him to make sure he didn’t trip or wander off the road.

Water condensed on every exposed surface while he walked and before long it was dripping off his ears, nose, and every other downward facing bit of cloth, hair, and skin. Even though it was cold he didn’t shiver or feel particularly uncomfortable. It was more like he was simply aware of the temperature, but otherwise unaffected by it. Jamal was little comforted by that since it only served to bring even greater attention to the weirdness of his situation.

At last, he stepped out of the cloud. There was no warning or gradual thinning of it. Just as it had been a near solid wall of mist on his way in, so it was on his way out. He took a moment to shake the accumulated water off of himself and then moved to resume his walk towards town. However, he stopped almost at once when he realized he was looking at the hangar in the distance rather than the town.

Somehow he’d gotten turned around inside the cloud and come right back to where he’d started. Jamal turned around and went back into the clouds but, after several minutes of walking, came back out in the same spot as before. By his fourth attempt ending the exact same way he knew it wasn’t a simple matter of him getting turned around. Something else was going on, though what it was he wasn’t sure.

With nowhere else he could go, Jamal made his way back to the hangar. It was still devoid of anyone else but at least it was dry and familiar. He spread out his parachute to let it dry off, if that was even possible in the cool and humid air. He tried the radio a couple of times but without much hope and even less success. As the hours passed he began to wonder when night would come. With the clouds so dense they acted as a great light diffuser. On days like this it didn’t matter how high the sun was in the sky, the amount of light on the ground would be the same right up until the sun set. Then night would come on in only a few minutes.

He waited, and waited, and waited, but still the day lingered. Jamal didn’t grow tired but he knew it had to be near nighttime. Hours continued to pass, and eventually days must have passed, yet the clouds and the gray light never wavered. Jamal tried again to get out through the cloud barrier that surrounded the hanger. He gave up on the road and tried going across the neighboring fields, always with the same, frustrating, results.

In a fit of desperate inspiration he cut a length of cord from his parachute and tied a rock to either end. He held one end in his right hand and then threw the other end with his left. The rock soared into the clouds, eventually landing with a muffled thud. Satisfied, he placed the other end onto the ground and followed the cord into the clouds. When he reached the stone he’d thrown he began pulling the other end back to himself, careful not to lose track of which direction the cord was pointing him in. After several rounds of this he finally broke through the clouds only to find himself facing the hangar once again.

There was no way out, as far as he could see. His entire world was reduced to the few square miles surrounding the runway. As the days went by with no sign of any change or hint at what he could do to change anything, Jamal gradually became less and less concerned with escape. He busied himself around the hangar as best he could. He tinkered with the electronics, using some tools he’d found to disassemble things and then putting them back together. Nothing ever worked, either before or after he’d pulled it apart and reassembled it, but it gave him something to do at least. Yet eventually, even that lost its interest.

There were no working clocks anywhere to be found and it was the uncertainty of the passage of time that bothered him the most. He tried to build devices that could keep time, even rudimentary mechanical devices that could give him an idea of how much time was passing but none of them ever worked. The best he ever managed was a series of ramps angled and stacks such that he could toss a round stone to the highest one and then have the stone roll down from one ramp to the next. Jamal counted the seconds it took for the stone to reach the bottom and so could keep a rudimentary sense of time, but only so long as he stood there tossing the stone up and counting, over and over.

After a few days of counting off the seconds he gave it up. He never grew tired or sore, not physically anyway, but mentally and emotionally it was draining t stand there second after second, minute after minute, counting and counting and counting, knowing there wasn’t any point to any of it.

What did it matter how much time had passed? He had nowhere to go, wasn’t expecting anyone, and since the sun never set and the weather never changed it didn’t matter what time it was.

Jamal supposed it was perhaps a few weeks, or possibly several years, since he’d come to this strange place that the idea finally settled onto him that he had died. How or when he’d died was beyond him. Besides not seeing anyone else on his way down, everything about the jump had seemed normal until he’d landed. He was pretty sure he hadn’t hit the ground.

Maybe he’d died in midair? What if that first layer of clouds had been the only real layer of clouds? Had something happened in there? Was that space between the layers of clouds actually him crossing over? But then, what was this place? It wasn’t heaven, and neither did it seem like hell. He’d never even been a particularly religious person, but every version he’d ever heard seemed to make it sound like a person would recognize where they were. Was he perhaps haunting the hangar now? If that was the case, he had no way of knowing if anyone else could see or hear him since he clearly had no way of seeing or hearing them.

Eventually, even the reasons for why he was there stopped mattering. Nothing in this place ever changed, nothing new ever happened. Try as he might, Jamal couldn’t do anything to change his situation. Even the parachute he’d cut up for pieces, eventually, returned to the state it had originally been in without any damage. All of the electronics he pulled apart and reassembled, often having pieces left over, eventually reverted to their original state as well with all of the extra parts gone from whatever drawer or box he’d stashed them in.

It took a lot of time, uncounted time, but Jamal finally stopped trying. He didn’t attempt to escape, didn’t seek for means of counting time, or even look for ways to keep himself entertained. He just lay there on the floor of the hangar, staring upwards, waiting for eternity to end.