Friday
I want to explain what happened with the button, because by the end of Day Six it had become a thing, and I feel like I need to document how a piece of plastic from my pajamas became the most talked-about object on a floating sky island.
After the gathering, the silver-wing woman had picked it up very carefully and held it at different angles in the torchlight. Then she had passed it to Solen. Solen had looked at it for a long time and then looked at me. Then it had gone around the circle, person by person, each of them turning it over in their fingers and saying something to the person next to them.
I stood in the center of the gathering space with my hands behind my back trying to look like a person who had fully intended to donate a button to an ancient sky civilization.
When it finally came back to Solen, he held it for a moment and then extended it back toward me, palm up, in what was clearly an offering gesture. Like he was returning something that belonged to me.
I did the gesture back at him, pushing his hand gently back toward his chest, which I hoped communicated "please keep it" and not something offensive.
Solen looked at the button. He closed his fingers around it. He nodded.
That was it. I had given a button to the most important person in the village and he had kept it, which meant it was a gift, and a gift from me specifically, which meant I was now the person who had given Solen a gift at a formal gathering, which by my calculations put me significantly higher on the social food chain than I had been that morning.
I went to sleep feeling genuinely good about things.
By midmorning of Day Six the button situation had developed in directions I had not predicted.
Three village kids came to find me before I had even finished breakfast. Not Feyn's usual group. Three different kids, younger, who I had seen around but never interacted with. They stood in front of me and the middle one held something out.
It was a stone. Small, rounded, pale gray, ordinary.
They were looking at me with the focused expectant energy of people waiting for a specific reaction.
I looked at the stone. I looked at them.
I realized what was happening.
The button had been treated as a remarkable object. An object from outside their world. And now these kids had brought me a stone from their world, as an exchange. They wanted to know if I found their stone as remarkable as they had found my button.
I took the stone and looked at it with exactly the level of attention and consideration I had seen the silver-wing woman give to the button. I turned it over. I held it up to the light.
It was a normal stone.
But I looked at it like it was the most interesting thing I had encountered in five days, which was not completely a lie because the situation surrounding it was interesting, and I said "wow" in a tone that communicated genuine appreciation.
The three kids looked at each other and then looked back at me, and the middle one made a short sound that was clearly excited.
Within an hour there were six more kids.
Within two hours I had a small crowd.
I want to make something clear: this was not manipulation. Or at least, not entirely manipulation. The genuine part was that I did actually find the things they were bringing interesting, not because the objects themselves were remarkable but because of what the act of bringing them meant. They were curious about me. They wanted a connection. That is a real thing, even when the object being used to make the connection is a regular rock.
The less genuine part was that I started to understand the rhythm of what they wanted. They wanted me to look at the thing seriously. They wanted a considered response. So I gave that, for each object, regardless of what the object was.
By midday I had accumulated the following: eleven rocks of varying sizes and colors, two pieces of bark with interesting textures, a dried seed pod that rattled when you shook it, a feather, and a piece of something crystalline and pale blue that actually was genuinely interesting and that I kept separate from the rest.
Rowley came over and looked at my collection.
"Where did all this come from?" he said.
"People brought it to me," I said.
Rowley picked up the seed pod and shook it. "Why?"
"Because of the button."
Rowley thought about this. "So they are doing the same thing you did. Bringing you something from their world."
"Yes."
"That is really nice, Greg."
"I know."
Rowley put the seed pod down and picked up the pale blue crystal. He looked at it and his face did the thing it does when something has genuinely surprised him.
"This one is incredible," he said.
"I know," I said again.
Rowley put it back carefully. Then he smiled. "I am glad the button worked out."
I did not tell Rowley how close I had come to standing up there with nothing and backing out at the last second. Some strategic information you keep to yourself.
The routine situation Mom had been trying to establish actually started to happen on Day Six, which I had not expected because routines in our family are not something that form naturally. They have to be imposed, usually by Mom, usually against significant resistance from the rest of us.
But something about the village created conditions that were unusually agreeable for routine formation.
Morning: food at Solen's building, which had become a natural gathering point for our family plus Rowley and increasingly a rotating group of village kids.
Midmorning: Rowley and Feyn disappeared somewhere on the islands to look at things. Mom continued her language exchange, which had progressed to the point where she could hold a basic conversation if it was slow and involved a lot of pointing. Dad walked the perimeter.
Afternoon: things that varied by day. This was where I was doing most of my social work.
Evening: family dinner, sometimes with village participants, always with Manny being quietly uncanny in the background.
It felt almost normal. Which should have been fine. But there was something about how easily it had settled into a routine that was slightly off, like a puzzle piece that fits but when you look at the picture it makes, something is not quite right.
I could not identify what specifically bothered me about it. So I put it aside.
Rodrick's percussion situation had escalated significantly by Day Six.
He had four students now, four village kids who came every afternoon and sat with him on the main platform and did rhythms on whatever surfaces were available. Rodrick had graduated from hollow sticks to a setup that included a stretched-skin drum one of the kids had brought, two flat stones that worked like percussion blocks, and the hollow sticks that started the whole thing.
It was actually not bad. I will say that without enthusiasm because Rodrick does not need encouragement.
The issue was that Rodrick had also started singing.
Rodrick's singing voice is exactly as good as you would expect from someone who has been in a garage band for three years and has never once taken a lesson or listened to feedback. It is loud. It is confident. It is occasionally on the right note by coincidence.
The village kids did not know it was bad because they had never heard him before, and they had no frame of reference for what singing was supposed to sound like by whatever musical standards existed on this island. So they were responding to Rodrick's singing the way people respond to a confident performance, which is to say they were engaged.
Dad came to find me while Rodrick was mid-song on the main platform with four kids drumming along.
"Should I stop this?" Dad said.
"Probably not," I said. "They are enjoying it."
"He is teaching them the words to one of his own songs."
"The one about the car?"
"I think so."
We listened for a moment. The drum rhythm was actually solid. Rodrick hit a long note and landed on it with more accuracy than I expected.
"It is fine, Dad," I said.
Dad looked pained but did not intervene.
Later that evening I heard two of the village kids singing the melody of Rodrick's car song to each other while they walked between the platforms.
Some things travel across language barriers easier than others. Apparently bad rock music is one of them.
Late afternoon, something small happened that I have been thinking about since.
I was sitting near the edge of the first island, not at the scary tip where Dad liked to stand, but at a gentler curve where you could sit on the grass and let your feet hang off into the air without it feeling completely terrifying. The water below the clouds was not visible from here but sometimes you could see the edge of the lower islands.
Manny came and sat next to me. This was unusual because Manny generally did not seek me out. He was self-contained. He went where he went for his own reasons.
He sat and looked out at the sky.
I waited for him to say something. He did not.
After about two minutes I said, "What are you doing over here, Manny?"
He pointed at something in the sky. Not at a specific island or a bridge. More at the general space between things, the open air between here and the horizon.
"What?" I said.
He kept pointing.
I looked. There was nothing there. Sky. Light. The distant shapes of far islands. The drifting particles that moved against the wind.
Wait.
I looked at the particles more carefully. I had stopped really noticing them after Day One because they were constant and my brain had filed them under "background." But looking at them now, they were moving in a pattern. Not random drifting. A slow circular drift, like something stirring them.
It was subtle. It was the kind of thing you would only catch if you had been staring at the sky for a couple of minutes with nothing else to look at.
"Do you see the particles?" I said to Manny.
Manny put his hand down. He looked at me.
"Manny, do you see them moving in a circle?"
Manny was quiet for a second.
Then he said, "It is okay, Greg."
That was it. He got up and walked back toward the village.
I sat there for another minute looking at the particles. They were still moving in their slow circle. Or maybe I had been staring long enough that my eyes were creating a pattern where there was none.
I got up and went to dinner.
It is okay, Greg.
He is five. He talks like that sometimes. It does not mean anything.
Day Six: button diplomacy successful, routine established, Rodrick infects sky island with car song. Manny said something that was probably nothing.
Probably.
[SKETCH: Greg sitting cross-legged on the platform with a small collection of rocks, bark pieces, seed pods, and the pale blue crystal arranged in front of him. A line of village kids waits to one side, each holding their own offering. Greg has his most serious examining-face on, currently holding a completely ordinary rock up to the light like it is a rare gem.]