This New and Poisonous Air (6 page)

YOUNG MEN MOST COMMONLY REPORT dreams of flight—
this passage taken from my father’s professional journal.
A recent patient was subject to such realistic floating that, upon waking, he leapt from his bed and repeatedly attempted to rise, nearly going as far as jumping from the second-floor landing before he was finally restrained by his mother. Reveries of this kind are not, as some would have it, connected to the sexual nature of flying. Though the dream does
appear
to imitate the excitability and anxiety found in the adolescent male, it would be wrong to imagine some bit of poetry here, or worse yet, a symbol. I assert that general biology is the culprit. The quickening of the young male’s physiology creates a variety of tremors and flexations in sleep which in turn signal the body that it is in motion—a simple constriction of the bowel can therefore cause a poor boy to take wing.

My father’s journal lies open on the desk beside my own, and there are moments when I take comfort in copying his words, going as far as imitating the low crawl of his script. His thoughts about flying remind me that I am no longer a young man. Instead of rising in dreams, I fall—calamitous head-over-foot plummeting through a hundred ornamented living rooms, nighttime cafés and sweat rich mattresses. I fall through the branches of apple trees. Plunge through oceans, duck ponds, my mother’s bath water. I have fallen through glass and fire. Fallen with bombs on spired cities. Fallen away from Amon Garrik a hundred times over again.

It’s true that I can no longer recall the expression on the face of my boyhood friend the first time he left the ground. I remember well enough the scene—a sunlit morning. Amon and I were lying in the low hills above my father’s stone house, the university a dark island in the distance. Yellow tulips nodded against the verdigris of the hill, and flat-bottomed clouds trundled like hay carts overhead. Bread was baking in the house ovens, and its yeasty scent perfumed the air, mingling with the bright smell of the flowers. Amon was red-cheeked because he’d been in some argument with his father, Helmer Garrik, my own father’s rival at the university. Amon thought the whole endeavor of analysis absurd, especially his father’s brand—a mythic exploration of man and symbol. “As if the self is a fixed and organized museum,” Amon ranted, tearing the head off a tulip and tossing it down the hill. “I can assure you, Roddy, there are no marble hallways in my skull for old men to walk down. No busts of labeled complexes either. Nothing’s as pattered as that.”

I clasped my fingers behind my head, enjoying the warmth of the sun on my bare arms. “So, what is it you want?” I asked. “For men like our fathers to close shop?
What’s the harm in it, Amon? Old men need something to struggle at.”

He glared at me. His combination of pale hair and dark eyes could be frightening. “If a pattern doesn’t exist, and one continues to search for it, that’s mad, isn’t it Roddy? And the idea that I am the son of a madman is—” Amon stopped speaking and stood abruptly, as if about to be sick. I thought his tirade might have driven him to dry heaves, but then he made a scrambling motion in the air and lurched forward, stumbling down the hill. Before I could stand to help him, he’d brought his left leg up and didn’t bring it down again, as if preparing to mount some invisible staircase. Our stableman was prone to epileptic fits, and on a number of occasions, I’d witnessed his contortions and would have thought the stableman possessed, had my father not been there to explain the illness. I feared one of those fits was taking hold of my friend, but then, without lowering his left foot to the ground, Amon stepped off with his right so that both feet were no longer touching the dewy grass. The clouds ceased their westward trek. The hill was silent.

I’ve tried to come up with a comparable experience to describe what I witnessed—not only for myself but so I could put it down in this journal—and the only event that comes close to seeing Amon Garrik levitate is seeing my father in his coffin, his body impossibly stiff and painted among the silken folds. The lack of motion in my father’s normally animated face was so unbelievable that my mind attempted an adjustment. I actually saw his brow lift, his lips purse because I knew they
must
move. They’d always moved. Likewise, seeing Amon step off the ground and stand in midair, my mind attempted a correction. Such defiance of gravity wasn’t possible and therefore I couldn’t be seeing it. I imagined the shadow of his boots had taken
on some unknown weight and become a part of his foot, that the shadow was, in fact, pushing him off the ground. Then in the next moment, Amon was falling face first into the grass. His face. I try to remember the look on it. Though what, I might ask myself, is so important about remembering an expression? The events that occurred during the months following the day on the hill
should
carry more weight. But without a memory of Amon’s expression when he first discovered his miraculous ability, I have no notion of his emotional experience, and it’s necessary for me to believe that I
knew
him, both inside and out. The question that I should really put to myself—the more frightening question—is whether I remember Amon’s face at all, not the general outline but the specifics of his features. Neither of us had the sort of money necessary to have photographs made, and our warring fathers who daily stepped on one another’s egos, would have never loaned us money for such a purpose. I therefore have no visual record of my friend. I tell myself that I
do
remember his face. How could I forget? I begin one attempt at recovery, and then another, until I’ve made a hundred Amons, each closely resembling the next except for some significant feature, making me believe that none of the boys I’ve pictured is an accurate representation. I’ve simply made a desperate series of simulations, only to watch them fall, one by one because they don’t live up to my friend’s actual presence.

I know he had fine hair on his cheeks which he referred to as his Viking’s beard. Amon Garrik was vain about his heritage and refused to trim the growth, though his mother threatened a number of times to do it as he slept and, in the process, to forget to be scrupulous with the razor. Beyond the ruddy down, Amon had a rather plain face, often tanned and primitive, despite the fact that
he was the son of an academic. We’d met at a university party, in the dean’s torch-lit fall garden—two small men in tailored jackets—and when he introduced himself, I actually laughed.

“What’s the joke?” he asked, sharply.

“Your surname,” I responded, lips red with punch. “You’re Helmer Garrik’s son.”

“That’s right.”

“My father pitches the name around our house and shoots at it like a clay pigeon.”

“I hate Herr Garrik, too,” Amon said, hands folded behind his back, a picture of fastidious organization. “He’s a fraud.”

“You hate your own father?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “Don’t you hate yours? I thought that was the modern condition.”

I paused, unsure if Amon was making a joke. “He angers me,” I said. “But he
is
still my father.”

“Does he ask you terrible questions?”

“Terrible? ”

The light from the nearest torch played across the damp flagstones between us, drawing us closer as if we were boats on a burning lake. “Embarrassing things,” Amon continued. “Sexual fantasies, odd dreams. Just yesterday Herr Garrik asked how I felt about horses. This came out of nowhere during breakfast. I said they were fine though I had no particular interest in them. Then he asked me to
describe
a horse! As if I couldn’t.”

I search for some correlation from my own experience. “My father once asked me to describe a type of bird, I suppose. I can’t remember which. One from America.”

Amon’s breath smelled of alcohol and cinnamon from his spiced drink. “We could be fast friends, Roddy,” he said. “I’m sure of it. We walk a common thread.”

For the remainder of the hour, we discussed our fathers’ theories, Amon spitting on Herr Garrik’s more mystical leanings while I described my father’s biological and chemical approach until our mothers came to gather us into waiting cars, not daring to speak or even look at one another. And after that night, Amon and I began to seek each other out, sensing, like animals, if the other was near. Amon’s father attributed such ability to an awareness of the Earth’s magnetic fields which were said to cover and connect every surface. Some individuals were more attuned to the magnetic fields and could therefore make use of them, pluck them like harp strings.

My father wrote specifically of Amon and me only once, making no reference to Amon’s rising. He knew nothing of it at the time. No one did. He wrote:
Neither of the boys has developed symptoms per se, though neurotic illness often cannot be sharply differentiated from health, and the boys are both intelligent enough to fashion a cover. I’ve heard Helmer Garrik say in one of the follies he calls lectures that inversion has the dynamic characteristics of a dream. The behavior of the invert corresponds to unconscious memory and motivation in the same way that the dream relates to its latent content. A dream of a black dog represents the dreamer’s will to power, and the invert’s desire for another man represents his inability to process a buried trauma. Here again, I find myself in opposition to Helmer Garrik, but for once, I am also second-guessing my ideas, perhaps because Roderick is involved.

 

I find it strange that Amon and I could have even
appeared
symmetrical to an astute outsider such as my father. If anything, we ruptured symmetry. After the night in the burning garden we became almost immediately and unthinkingly physical. There was nothing we would not attempt in the deserted barns and forest clearings around the university. We developed a certain mania in each other’s presence, breaking from our learned structures and tearing at each other, biting and pushing until we were each spent, and then just as quickly going at it again. It seems foolish for me, an old man, to sit and recall these pleasures and nearly as obscene for me to write them down in detail, especially when, quite possibly, someone will read this piece of writing, as I’ve been reading my own father’s journals. What could I hope to gain by setting down the specifics of my entanglements with Amon? Joy recollected is indeed no longer the emotion itself. Nor is lust. Nor passion. Suffice it to say we were not gentle with each other. When we wanted to call out and draw attention to ourselves, we instead bit into one another’s flesh.

After that day in the hills when Amon inexplicably stepped into the air, we were distracted from our bodies and drew closer because of it. We ran experiments, having learned inductive reasoning from our fathers, and attempted to recreate the circumstances that led to Amon’s “miracle.” We added and subtracted elements but never found the desired effect. Amon was unable to climb off the ground even an inch. He punched hay bales in our
barn from frustration until his knuckles were bloodied, and the stableman had to wrap them.

I pointed out that it might have been Amon’s anger at his father that day which produced the effect, and so he attempted to conjure similar feelings the next windy day on the hill—to enlarge himself like a sail with his emotions. Still nothing came of it. He worried it might have been a specific quality of anger that could not simply be reproduced via force of will, but I persuaded him against such a theory. Amon was an emotional person and there were days he vented continually, cycling through entire operas of sorrow and rage. Certainly, he would have landed on the right formulation in all of that.

He wanted to leap off the cliff that overlooked the river in an attempt to force a reoccurrence, but I wouldn’t allow it, arguing the jump met too few of the requirements necessary for recreation, and there were sharp rocks in the river, only one of which would need to make contact with his skull in order to ensure that he never rose again.

I suppose it could be argued that I intentionally sabotaged these experiments, fearing that a repeat of Amon’s levitation would draw a line between us. He would go where I could not follow, and I couldn’t bear that. I’d only recently found him and needed to keep us both on the ground.

One night, after weeks of discrete satisfaction, I heard a tapping on my window glass. My bedroom was on the second floor of our stone house, and the tapping roused me from sleep. Perhaps still half inside a dream, I pictured a grotesque bird outside my window with claws on the tips of its wings, scales on its chest, and Amon’s head sewn to its neck. The thread was drawn taught against his skin and caused it to pucker in places so his flesh gaped. I could see through to the dark inner-body beneath. The abomination leered at me through the drapery, and when
I realized that the vision was not entirely a product of my dreaming, I jumped from my bed, shaken. Amon was actually outside my second-story window, though of course he hadn’t become half bird. His body was as solid and consistent as ever, and for once he seemed pleased. I pulled open the window and glanced downward, sickened by the height and the possibility of a fall, but Amon stood midair without fear, boot heels locked, hands clasped behind his back. “Good evening, Roddy,” he said. “I thought you might be lonely.”

“How—” I answered, unable to find the necessary words to complete my thought.