20th Century Ghosts (26 page)

I sat with the cape spread across my knees, studying it as the first silvery flush of dawn lit the windows high along the basement walls.

The cape was even smaller than I remembered, about the length of a large pillowcase. The red felt lightning bolt was still sewn to the back, although a couple of stitches had popped free, and one corner of the bolt was sticking up. My father's Marine patch was still sewn on as well, was what I had seen from the corner of my eye: a slash of lightning across a background like fire.

Of course my mother hadn't sent it to the dump to be incinerated. She never got rid of anything, on the theory she might find a use for it later. Hoarding what she had was a mania, not spending money an obsession. She didn't know anything about home renovation, but it never would've crossed her mind to pay anyone to do the work for her. My bedroom would be torn open to the elements and I would be sleeping in the basement until she was in diapers and I was in charge of changing them. What she thought of as self-reliance was really a kind of white-trash mulishness, and I had not been home long before it got under my skin and I had quit helping her out.

The sateen edge of the cape was just long enough for me to tie it around my neck.

I sat on the edge of my cot for a long time, perched with my feet up, like a pigeon on a ledge, and the blanket trailing to the small of my back. The floor was half a foot below, but I stared over the side as if looking at a forty-foot drop. At last, I pushed off.

And hung. Bobbled unsteadily, frontward and backways, but did not fall. My breath got caught behind my diaphragm and it was several moments before I could force myself to exhale, in a great equine snort.

I ignored my mother's wooden-heeled shoes banging overhead at nine in the morning. She tried again at ten, this time opening the door to shout down,
Are you ever getting up?
I yelled back that I
was
up. It was true: I was two feet off the ground.

By then I had been flying for hours ... but again, describing it as flight probably brings to mind the wrong sort of image. You see Superman. Imagine, instead, a man sitting on a magic carpet, with his knees pulled to his chest. Now take away the magic carpet and you'll be close.

I had one speed, which I would call stately. I moved like a float in a parade. All I had to do to glide forward was look forward, and I was going, as if driven by a stream of powerful but invisible gas, the flatulence of the Gods.

For a while, I had trouble turning, but eventually, I learned to change direction in the same way one steers a canoe. As I moved across the room, I'd throw an arm in the air and pull the other in. And effortlessly, I'd veer to the right or left, depending on which metaphorical oar I stuck in the water. Once I got the hang of it, the act of turning became exhilarating, the way I seemed to accelerate into the curves, in a sudden rush that produced a ticklish feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I could rise by leaning back, as if into a recliner. The first time I tried it, I swooped upward so quickly, I bashed a head against a brass pipe, hard enough to make constellations of black dots wheel in front of my eyes. But I only laughed and rubbed at the stinging lump in the center of my forehead.

When I finally quit, at almost noon, I was exhausted, and I lay in bed, my stomach muscles twitching helplessly from the effort it had required to keep my knees hitched up all that time. I had forgotten to eat, and I felt light-headed from low blood sugar. And still, even lying down, under my sheets, in the slowly warming basement, I felt as if I were soaring. I shut my eyes and sailed away into the limitless reaches of sleep.
 

In the late afternoon, I took the cape off and went upstairs to make bacon sandwiches. The phone rang and I answered automatically. It was my brother.

"Mom tells me you aren't helping upstairs," he said.

"Hi. I'm good. How are you?"

"She also said you sit in the basement all day watching TV."

"That's not all I do," I said. I sounded more defensive than I liked. "If you're so worried about her, why don't you come home and play handyman one of these weekends?"

"When you're third-year premed, you can't just take off whenever you feel like it. I have to schedule my BMs in advance. One day last week I was in the ER for ten hours. I should've left, but this old woman came in with heavy vaginal bleeding—" At this, I giggled, a reaction that was met with a long moment of disapproving silence. Then Nick went on, "I stayed at work another hour to make sure she was okay. That's what I want for you. Get you doing something that will lift you up above your own little world."

"I've got things I'm doing."

"What things? For example, what have you done with yourself today?"

"Today—today isn't a normal day. I didn't sleep all night. I've just been—sort of—floating from here to there." I couldn't help it; I giggled again.

He was silent for a while. Then he said, "If you were in total freefall, Eric, do you think you'd even know it?"
 

I slipped off the edge of the roof like a swimmer sliding from the edge of the pool into the water. My insides churned and my scalp prickled, icy-hot, my whole body clenching up, waiting for freefall. This is how it ends, I thought, and it crossed my mind that the entire morning, all that flying around the basement, had been a delusion, a schizophrenic fantasy, and now I would drop and shatter, gravity asserting its reality. Instead I dipped, then rose. My child's cape fluttered at my shoulders.

While waiting for my mother to go to bed, I had painted my face. I had retreated into the basement bathroom, and used one of her lipsticks to draw an oily red mask, a pair of linked loops, around my eyes. I did not want to be spotted while I was out flying, and if I was, I thought the red circles would distract any potential witnesses from my other features. Besides, it felt good to paint my face, was oddly arousing, the sensation of the lipstick rolling hard and smooth across my skin. When I was done, I stood admiring myself in front of the bathroom mirror for a while. I liked my red mask. It was a simple thing, but made my features strange and unfamiliar. I was curious about this new person staring back at me out of the mirror glass. About what he wanted. About what he could do.

After my mother closed herself in her bedroom for the night, I had crept upstairs, out the hole in my bedroom wall where the dormer window had been, and onto the roof. A few of the black tar shingles were missing, and others were loose, hanging askew. Something else my mother could try and fix herself in the interest of saving a few nickels. She would be lucky not to slide off the roof and snap her neck. Anything could happen out there where the world touches the sky. No one knew that better than me.

The cold stung my face, numbed my hands. I had sat flexing my fingers for a long time, building up the nerve to overcome a hundred thousand years of evolution, screaming at me that I would die if I went over the edge. Then I was over the edge, and suspended in the clear, frozen air, thirty feet above the lawn.

You want to hear now that I felt a rush of excitement, whooped at the thrill of flight. I didn't. What I felt was something much more subtle. My pulse quickened. I caught my breath for a moment. Then I felt a stillness settling into me, like the stillness of the air. I was drawn completely into myself, concentrating on staying balanced atop the invisible bubble beneath me (which perhaps gives the impression that I could feel something beneath me, some unseen cushion of support; I could not, which was why I was constantly squirming around for balance). Out of instinct, as much as habit, I held my knees up to my chest, and kept my arms out to the side.

The moon was only a little bigger than a quarter full, but bright enough to etch intensely dark, sharp-edged shadows on the ground, and to make the frosty yards below shine as if the grass were blades of chrome.

I glided forward. I did some loops around the leafless crown of a red maple. The dead elm was long gone, had split in two in a windstorm almost eight years before. The top half had come down against the house, a long branch shattering one of my bedroom windows, as if reaching in for me, still trying to kill me.

It was cold, and the chill intensified as I climbed. I didn't care. I wanted to get above everything.

The town was built on the slopes of a valley, a crude black bowl, a-glitter with lights. I heard a mournful honking in my left ear, and my heart gave a lunge. I looked through the inky dark and saw a mallard, with a liquid black head and a throat of startling emerald, beating its wings and staring curiously back at me. He did not remain by my side for long, but dove, swooped to the south, and was gone.

For a while I didn't know where I was going. I had a nervous moment, when I wasn't sure how I'd get back down without falling eight hundred feet. But when I couldn't bend my fingers anymore, or feel any sensation in my face, I tilted forward slightly and began to sink back to earth, gently descending, in the way I had practiced hour on hour in the basement.

By the time I leveled off over Powell Avenue, I knew where I was headed. I floated three blocks, rising once to clear the wire suspending a stoplight, then hung a left and soared on, dreamlike, to Angie's house. She would just be getting off her shift at the hospital.

Only she was almost an hour late. I was sitting on the roof of the garage when she turned into the driveway in the old bronze Civic we had shared, bumper missing and hood battered from where I had crashed it into a Dumpster, at the end of my low-speed attempt to evade the police.

Angie was made up and dressed in her lime-colored skirt with tropical flowers printed on it, the one she only wore to staff meetings at the end of the month. It wasn't the end of the month. I sat on the tin roof of the garage and watched her totter to the front door in her heels and let herself in.

Usually she showered when she got home. I didn't have anything else to do.

I slid off the peak of the garage roof, bobbled and rose like a black balloon toward the third floor of her parents' tall, narrow Victorian. Her bedroom was dark. I leaned toward the glass, peering in, looking toward her door and waiting for it to open. But she was already there, and in the next moment she snapped on a lamp, just to the left of the window, on a low dresser. She stared out the window at me and I stared right back, didn't move—couldn't move, was too shocked to make a sound. She regarded me wearily, without interest or surprise. She didn't see me. She couldn't make me out past her own reflection. I wondered if she had ever been able to see me.

I floated outside the window while she stripped her skirt off over her head and wiggled out of plain girdle underwear. A bathroom adjoined her bedroom, and she considerately left the door open between the two. I watched her shower through the clear glass of the shower cabinet. She showered a long time, lifting her arms to throw her honey-colored hair back, hot water pelting her breasts. I had watched her shower before, but it hadn't been this interesting in a long time. I wished she'd masturbate with the flexible showerhead, something she said she had done as a teenager, but she didn't.

In a while the window steamed over and I couldn't see as clearly. I watched her pink pale form move here and there. Then I heard her voice. She was on the phone. She asked someone why they were studying on a Saturday night. She said she was bored, she wanted to play a game. She pleaded in tones of erotic petulance.

A circle of clear glass appeared in the center of the window and began to expand as the condensation in her room evaporated, giving me a slow reveal. She was in a clinging white halter and a pair of black cotton panties, sitting at a small desk, hair wrapped in a towel. She had hung up the phone, but was playing cribbage on her computer, typing occasionally to send an instant message. She had a glass of white wine. I watched her drink it. In movies, voyeurs watch models prance about in French lingerie, but the banal is kinky enough, lips on a wineglass, the band of simple panties against a white buttock.

When she got off-line she seemed happy with herself but restless. She got into bed, switched on her little TV and flipped through the channels. She stopped on the Think! channel to watch seals fucking. One climbed on the back of the other and began humping away, blubber shaking furiously. She looked longingly at the computer.

"Angie," I said.

It seemed to take her a moment to register she had heard anything. Then she sat up and leaned forward, listening to the house. I said her name again. Her eyelashes fluttered nervously. She turned her head to the window almost reluctantly, but again, didn't see me past her reflection ... until I tapped on the glass.

Her shoulders jumped in a nervous reflex. Her mouth opened in a cry, but she didn't make a sound. After a moment, she came off the bed and approached the window on stiff legs. She stared out. I waved hello. She looked beneath me for the ladder, then lifted her gaze back to my face. She swayed, put her hands on her dresser to steady herself.

"Unlock it," I said.

Her fingers struggled with the locks for a long time. She pulled the window up.

"Oh my God," she said. "Oh my God. Oh my God. How are you doing that?"

"I don't know. Can I come in?"

I eased myself up onto the windowsill, turning and shifting, so one arm was in her room, but my legs hung out.

"No," she said. "I don't believe it."

"Yes. Real."

"How?"

"I don't know. Honest." I picked at the edge of the cape. "But I did it once before. A long time back. You know my knee and the scar on my chest? I told you I did all that falling out of a tree, you remember?"

A look of surprise, mingled with sudden understanding, spread across her face. "The branch broke and fell. But you didn't. Not at first. You stayed in the air. You were in your cape and it was like magic and you didn't fall."

She already knew. She already knew and I didn't know how, because I had never told her. I could fly; she was psychic.

"Nicky told me," she said, seeing my confusion. "He said when the tree branch fell, he thought he saw you fly. He said he was so sure he tried to fly himself and that's what happened to his face. We were talking and he was trying to explain how he wound up with false teeth. He said he was crazy back then. He said you both were."