This New and Poisonous Air (4 page)

DAVID MILLER AND HIS SISTER, Kitty, almost didn’t go to the theater on the night she disappeared. After getting into a fight with a boy at school, Kitty lay on the leather sofa at the Miller house, staring at the shadows of moths caught in the beveled globe of the ceiling fan, whispering oaths about how she’d never again make another mistake with her heart. David sat rocking in the corner chair, still dressed in his grassy baseball jersey and wearing cleats in the house despite his mother’s wishes. He felt restless from an evening of pitching drills and tried reasoning with his sister, saying the movie wasn’t a love story—it was about men looking for a diamond in the jungles of Peru. Cheeks flushed and a pillow clutched to her chest, Kitty said that looking for diamonds in the jungle was just like looking for love, and if the stupid king of baseball was too dense to understand metaphor, she didn’t want to go anywhere with him anyway. He grabbed her legs and pulled her roughly off the sofa, wrestling her to the floor. This
was enough to finally rouse her, and as she adjusted her tank top, she said, “All right, David. Let’s go see if they find that stupid rock.”

He was relieved, though he’d never show Kitty how much. He knew he was, in fact, the stupid king of baseball and saw the world as a series of outlines. Kitty knew how to fill in the blanks. To him, she was like one of the statues at St. John’s, long-limbed and tormented—a series of miraculous meditations.

 

We understood David’s love. On Tuesday nights at women’s basketball games, we rooted for Kitty Miller, admiring the sharp curve of her ponytail and the way her eyes caught light from the blond gymnasium floor. At seventeen, she was still an arrow of time, pointing us toward our own graceful moments of youth. She took care of our children, served plates of egg casserole at church brunches, and helped the Founder’s Daughters fold paper flowers to decorate empty shop windows. Despite all of this, we knew she was biding her time. Girls like Kitty weren’t meant to grow old among our factory corridors and sawdust diners. Eventually, when she found a way, she’d leave. We’d seen it happen to other promising sons and daughters, though we thought, like them, she’d end up in some city, calling home twice a month to assure her mother and her brother that she was fine.

What we never imagined was that Kitty would be taken. How could such a thing happen to our girl? But Kitty rose halfway through the movie when the adventurers had assembled the collected pieces of a parchment map and found the entrance to the cave where the diamond was hidden. Wind blew across the cave mouth, and one of the adventurers, gaunt with exhaustion, said the noise sounded very much like regret. We wanted to stop Kitty,
to pull her back. If nothing else, we wanted to save her for David’s sake. But farmers and factory workers, teachers and clerks, we were each trapped in our roles.

The Orpheum Theater was our landmark after all, a sweet flycatcher in an otherwise unlovely town. How did the building become more than mere mortar and brick? If we had to guess, we’d say its transcendence was a product of our desiring. Everything that is desired is, in a sense, made flesh. We snuck off for afternoon matinees when we should have been building toolboxes at the plant and stayed late for midnight shows rather than making conversation under the dinner-plate moon at the reservoir. Our mothers hadn’t been able to warn us about work not doing itself because they too had spent their time in the Orpheum’s thrall, sometimes barely remembering to feed us. When visitors came, they were drawn to our theater, if not to sit for a movie, then just to marvel at the abundance of its Oriental bric-a-brac: silk-tasseled mirrors, brass elephant heads, brèche violette pillars, and foreign deities that peered from every corner of the stonework. The auditorium was a walled courtyard, complete with an accurately constellated sky and a procession of clouds projected on the black ceiling by a magic lantern machine, and the pale glow that fell on us night after night was like a hunter’s jack-light, pulling animals helplessly from the brush.

David thought his sister needed to use the theater’s restroom, but when she simply remained standing at her seat, blocking the view of those behind her, he touched her hand and whispered, “Kit, you feeling okay? ” Her gaze drifted from the tense scene at the jungle cave to the black door beneath the movie screen, the one we told ourselves was the entrance to a storage room or simply an unmarked exit. We said these things to avoid saying the door was a way of climbing inside the Orpheum’s
skin. “We can leave if you want,” David said. “Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea.” Without responding, Kitty began to walk down the center aisle, a bride in khaki shorts and a tank top that revealed arms and legs as smooth as stone. Of course, David stood to follow her, and we don’t know which of us dropped the white candy at his feet. All those brittle pieces, like so many broken teeth. It was awful to watch such a sure young sportsman fall. By the time David had righted himself, his sister had already opened the black door beneath the screen and stepped inside, closing it softly behind. David tried the knob. “Kitty,” he whispered, “Come on, Kit. This isn’t funny.” When she didn’t respond, he turned to look at us, searching our faces for the possibility of help. On the screen, a man with a sweat-beaded brow held the diamond as big as his fist, unaware that he was about to be struck by a poison dart.

In the weeks before her disappearance, the Orpheum had started to become for Kitty what it was for all of us—a kind of gentle mystery, easing us along, never providing enough clues to disturb us from our sleep. She was seventeen after all, old enough to begin her awakening, and David was a sturdy vessel for her confidences. “The air inside that place goes all the way through me, but it doesn’t feel cold,” she told him, as they sat on the bench at Ray’s Creamery, both eating piles of vanilla ice cream with plastic spoons. The Orpheum loomed across the street, an arabesque palace, the evening sun turning its gold leaf a livid shade of red.

David swatted a fly away from his sunburned leg. “It’s called air-conditioning, Kit. What they won’t think of next, right?”

“Have you been listening to me at all?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Then don’t make stupid comments, David. I’m talking about atmosphere. That place has started to make me feel like it’s filling me with air from another planet. Like I’m a balloon, full of some other world. Maybe you have to be older to understand.”

“A balloon, really? That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard you say. Maybe you just have to turn your brain back on and realize it’s just a plain old movie theater.”

“It’s not,” Kitty replied. “At least not to me anymore.”

He turned his dusty baseball cap backward, considering the shade of his sister’s eyes that balanced somewhere between blue and green. “Okay, balloon-girl” he said. “I give up. What is it?”

Across the street, the gaudy plastic vines wound around the theater’s marble pillars. “I’m not sure,” she said, “but I think all the movies they’ve shown there over the years have given it ideas.”

David gave her a half-smile. “So what kind of ideas does a movie theater have?”

“It thinks that it could do better,” Kitty said quietly. “All those stories are so ordinary. It wants to show us something truly marvelous.”

“Come on,” he said, though his tone betrayed unease. The Orpheum was better off left to silence. “I think town council should tear that shack down and give us stadium seats and cup holders.”

“I’d chain myself to the doors,” Kitty said. “People who do stupid things like that don’t understand history.”

He squinted at a particularly malicious-looking stone monkey that peered from one corner of the Orpheum’s jade roof. “The nut that sells the tickets—old white braids—would beat you to it,” he said. “She’d shoot Mike and Ike’s out of
every hole in her body to fend off the bulldozers.”

“Don’t be disgusting, David,” Kitty said. “May Avalon is just—lonely.”

“Have you heard some of that weird music she plays on her record player?” he asked. “I mean, who even
has
a record player anymore?”

She scraped her spoon against the bottom of her ice cream bowl. “The thing about old music is that none of it sounds the way it’s supposed to anymore because we just don’t have the right ears to hear it.”

After pretending to consider this, David licked his finger and stuck it deep in Kitty’s ear. She screamed and leapt from the bench. “There you go, Kit,” he said. “Now, go float away.”

Poor Kitty went to the bathroom to wash, and we kept our distance from the scene. If David Miller was right about anything, it was that the ticket seller, May Avalon, would chain herself to the theater to save it. In a sense, she already had, manning her glass booth for nearly sixty years, a wooden woman on the prow of a sunken ship, submerged but unable to drown. With her white hair still in girlish braids, she pushed the button to dispense pink tickets without giving our faces so much as a single glance. Old songs drifted from her antique record player, music from the vaudeville age that conjured images of singing puppets, garish blackface and fluttering Chinese silk. We knew her history well enough—had heard it repeated by our parents and grandparents. If the theater was a body, May Avalon was not its heart but its liver, performing a hundred mysterious functions, and her despair was nearly as much a landmark as the Orpheum itself.

May had lost her only love to the theater years ago—a towheaded buck dancer named Common Woolbrink who traveled the vaudeville circuit, performing on the flamelit
stages of small towns across the Midwest. Unlike his shabby costume, Woolbrink’s dancing was said to be a modern marvel. His colorless eyes recognized the world anew every time he looked out over an audience, and he danced with such vigor that he required an oak platform on which to perform for fear that he might break through the pinewood stage. If women watched him too long, they fainted. Men were driven to riot.

What burned him into our town’s collective memory was not his dancing but his death—stabbed eleven times with a hunting knife on the steps of the Orpheum by a man named Roy Elkhart who said Woolbrink had lied at a game of cards. May Avalon, then just a girl, held the boy’s head in her lap and ran her fingers through his hair like she was his mother, watching blood pool on the concrete. She undid the clasps of his red dancing shoes, and after they took his body away, sat holding them to her chest, not five feet from where she’d spend the rest of her life selling tickets. The Orpheum transitioned from vaudeville house to movie palace, and May remained. “Picture shows are safer than live acts,” one man was quoted as saying in
The Monitor
. “They can’t be pig-stuck—no matter how much we hate the act.”

If Common Woolbrink’s death was the Orpheum’s first real tragedy, then Kitty Miller’s disappearance was to be its last. One week after she and her brother sat eating ice cream at Ray’s, she was gone, and David Miller, T-shirt torn and blood on his cheek, pulled the first piece of concrete from the crumbling steps, aiming it at the Orpheum. He threw his stone, not at the glass ticket booth, nor at the grand marquee that sprouted birds’ nests like untrimmed hair. Instead, he aimed at one of the Egyptian crocodile gods that flanked the theater’s entrance, using the smooth motion he’d learned from a summer of
practices, believing that at least those toothy, moon-eyed gods provided a face for the Orpheum’s mysteries. But we knew the sculptures were little more than monster masks, products of the 1923 renovation. If anyone was to blame for Kitty’s disappearance, it was not the gods but us—we who’d been losing control of our house of dreams for years.

David was too young to know about the others, but what happened to Kitty had happened before. There’d been the black girl who’d come on the bus, no more than thirteen, carrying a backpack full of clothes with a doll tied to it. She looked like the kind of child who’d been hollowed out by life. When she went to the Orpheum, we assumed she intended to wash herself in its bathroom sink and then lose her worries in a movie for a while. May Avalon even gave her a free pass, something the old crone was loath to do for any of us. The girl left her backpack in a pool of soda, and we put the dirty thing in the garbage when the lights came on.

There’d also been the young man who slicked his hair and tucked his shirts and affected melancholy even when working at the toolbox factory. We knew his sort. When he talked about the movies, he said he still dreamed of being part of them, an idea that was tedious, and when he disappeared behind the black door, we told ourselves he’d run away to live some other life. Having a family and watching movies weren’t good enough for him.

And finally, there’d been Lon Stellmacher, the Stellmachers’ retarded son who was such a burden to his parents, he made Beth look old before her time and forced Carl to put away all his hearty ambitions. Poor Lon almost didn’t make it down the aisle because he had trouble seeing in the dark. When he stumbled against a row of seats, a few of us reached out and put him back on his way. Beth and
Carl blamed themselves for letting him go to the Orpheum alone, but we didn’t place such blame. Even watchfulness and care have their limits.

David Miller didn’t know that we’d been observing disappearances for years, never quite thinking of them as sacrifices. We knew only that our parents had done the same as us, and their parents before that. Any one of our grandparents could have stopped Roy Elkhart before he stabbed Common Woolbrink eleven times, but instead they stood by and marveled at the way his wounds opened like mouths in his red coat.

David didn’t call for our help on the night Kitty slipped behind the black door. Instead, he merely stared at us there in our threadbare seats, still dressed in our work clothes, the expression on his face becoming a kind of mirror. On the day-bright streets, he knew most of us by name, but in the Orpheum, we were different, a single organism, immense yet paralyzed, and our beautiful theater, with all its rich trappings and pictures of youth, was nothing more than a funeral hall, holding services, night after night, for the same powdered corpse. Perhaps what frightened David the most was not our empty faces but the fact that so many seats in the Orpheum remained empty too, like invitations to sit for a show.