There were palm trees all around him, but he was freezing cold. They were trying to pry him from the place he was, folded over himself, unable to extend his arms or legs. They had to take him away in crystalline shape. They seemed to be saying something, but his ears were jammed with ice. Their vests were tropical, and the tarmac was split into bands of white sunlight. He looked upward as they carried him away, because he could not turn his head. Up there the palm trees seemed green and heavy with summer, but he was freezing cold.

Some hours or days later he found himself cuffed to a hospital bed. The shield on the policeman’s cap burned like the sun. Do you understand what it is you’ve done? the policeman said to him. He could hear again, but the policeman sounded very far away. The policeman said: They say only a couple dozen people have ever survived a ride in the landing gear like that. Most of them freeze, or fall out, or get crushed. You must be one of God’s favorites. What did you ever do to deserve it?

He didn’t know what he’d done to deserve it. He didn’t even know why he’d done it. He couldn’t remember. He remembered washing car windows by the airport, scraping off the frost and salt for folded dollar bills, and a torn wire fence. He did not remember climbing into the landing gear. What he remembered was the earth unwinding below him like a bedsheet, patched in yellow and green. All intoxication, whatever had been in his system, had been blown away by the killing wind, and he saw it clearly. The world was vaster and more various than anyone knew. The tears were blown out of his eyes and then the doors sealed him up in blackness.

The voices began crackling in his ears. Plangent voices, lambent voices. Tongues of green glass twiddling his eardrum. He’d been able to make out whole words. Hollywood and piano, superstition and brokenhearted, that came back to him in the hospital bed, in the cold flow of his dreams. He had felt close to death then, but he remembered knowing he must survive, because he had to tell someone that the souls of dead rode the slipstreams of the air. He wanted to tell the policeman, but when he woke again, the policeman was gone. The handcuffs, it seemed, had gone with him. So who was it he was supposed to tell?

He found his clothes in a plastic bag in the corner of the room and put them on. No one seemed interested in keeping him from walking out of the hospital. It was late afternoon, and the sun was sitting on top of the roofs, and he walked toward it, but he could not get warm. At a public square he saw a multitude of half-dressed children chasing the unpredictable jets of a fountain. He shuffled past them slowly in his dirty overcoat. The marrow was frozen in his bones.

Before long he came to a large lawn of summer-yellow grass that tickled his memory. The feet: of the university clocktower stamping out the sun, the Egyptian pattern of the bricks at his feet; he had seen them before. This must be the place he was trying to get to, the place he had wanted to come when he snuck onto the runway in the snow-covered city where he lived.

He turned around and around. Somewhere near here, he knew there was a building, a façade of glass brick, a museum. The memory rose up through his body, beginning at the bottom of his feet. His mother had taken him to the museum when he was young. She had shown him rocks split open like plums and a cabinet whose drawers contained dead birds pinned to boards. He had seen an iceman frozen inside a glacier for a thousand years. Perfectly preserved, she’d said, but he could not see what was so perfectly preserved about the iceman, who looked as if he’d been pressed flat between the pages of a book.

Do you need help? Someone asked him. It was a young woman whose lips and nose were spangled with rings and chains. Are you trying to find the clinic? she said. He had never seen a face like hers, and he became suddenly afraid that he was the iceman, who had been frozen for a thousand years. This was why he could not get warm, and why the face of the young woman before him was a face from the future. He ran from her as fast as his frozen limbs would allow.

On the sidewalk a group of children were licking at ice cream treats shaped like rocket ships. I’m the iceman! he shouted at them. Beware the iceman, children of the future! The children screamed and scattered and some of them dropped their rocket ships on the sidewalk. He bent over and pried a stick like a bone from the particolored sludge. He wondered if his mother had ever bought him ice cream from a cart. He was beginning to understand that she was the one he had come to find, but he could remember so little about her. The memories were slow to come. They were stuck in his frozen feet.

The man behind the ice cream cart was talking to a policeman. The policeman had a cap that had a shield that flashed like the sun. The policeman came toward him, and he ran. They wanted to handcuff him to the bed again. They wanted to stuff him in the cart of ice and put him back to sleep for another thousand years.

He came to a wide street. Sunlight pooled at one end. Cars parked along the side of the road hissed and pinged. They were blue and silver and mirror-colored. In the windows of the shops, he saw himself behind glass, blue and silver and pressed flat as if between the pages of a book. It was just as he feared.

He pulled at the trunks of the cars until he found one that would open. He pushed aside textbooks and running sneakers to make a place for himself and climbed inside. He closed the trunk upon himself and shivered. He searched for, and found, a tiny spot of warmth beneath his ribcage. Maybe he was finally thawing, from the inside out. When it reached his feet, his memories would emerge again.

He could see her sitting at a desk in an office, an office that could not be so far away now. She looked small and shrewd, surrounded by towering bookshelves and haphazard papers. He was sitting in her lap, and she had spread a large map out upon the disordered desk to show him something. With a finger he had traced the lines of latitude and longitude in blue. How safe he had felt then, with the world before him and his mother behind him.

That was what he had come to tell her. How the earth really looked from above. How little it resembled the map—and how much it resembled the hundred thousand lines on the back of her hand—

He knew it made no sense. It made no sense that this was what he had come to tell her, about the way the earth looked from above, because he had made the decision to come before these things had been revealed to him in the landing gear of the airplane. And yet he was sure of it. If fate was real, the order of things didn’t matter. Not if you were one of God’s favorites. The trunk had been opened to him, and it would take him, like the airplane, to the next place he needed to be. It didn’t even matter that she may be dead or gone, because he knew now that he could find her there, somewhere in the air over his head. He waited and waited and before long he heard the door of the car open and close again and felt the engine drum to life.

When the car began to move, he heard again the voices of the precious dead. He listened closely for her. He didn’t want to miss a word. They said, “This Sunday at the Convention Center.” They said, “We’ll match any price on any mattress.” They said, “Eighty-five and lots of sun.”