This New and Poisonous Air (7 page)

“Not sure, actually. Would you like to come out and try?” I recoiled, but his hand was already on my wrist. A scream would have raised the household, particularly my father, a light sleeper, so I allowed him to pull me. Amon wasn’t gentle. He jerked my body over the windowpane, ensuring that I could no longer hold my balance. Then using all of his force, he lifted me until I was standing barefoot on his muddied boots, both his arms around me. The sensation of hanging in the air with him was dizzying, and my mind scrambled for some purchase in the rational. “You see? ” he said. “It isn’t death. I have enough lift for both of us.”

“Amon,” I begged. “Put me back. You don’t know how you did this. You don’t know how long it will last.”

“It’s different this time, Roddy,” he said, as he carefully undid the string of my nightshirt and let it flutter to the dark hedges below. “I can sense it.”

I could sense it too. I felt my chest fill with stars. My spine bent against the moon. Amon continued to smile as he kissed the hollow of my neck. We made a careful love that night, not as fierce as our previous endeavors. Perhaps it was because he had to keep both hands on me,
and I had to remain standing upon his boots. Or maybe our tenderness was due to the fact that his hovering in the air seemed a kind of rite. We knew better than to defile it. Watching my nightshirt flutter in the shrubbery below, I remember thinking I had received my own understanding of the universe’s magnificent pattern, one that could finally usurp my father’s.

So began Amon Garrik’s nightly visits to the stone house. He would lift me from my window frame as one would lift a doll from its dollhouse. I rarely slept, as sleep was no longer a worthy experience. My parents became concerned about the shadows pooled in my face, and I learned to use my mother’s powder to cover the darkness beneath my eyes. Amon was learning too—not only to hover in the sky but to walk clumsily, and I walked with him, standing on his boots, facing forward, his hands around my abdomen. We trudged through the night as if stepping through piles of invisible snow, and there was nothing as wonderful as the sensation of tilting with him over an abyss, though of course the abyss was nothing more than my father’s yew bushes and the duck pond with its crowd of decorative French angels.

Then after nearly a month of these sky walks, there was a night when Amon didn’t arrive, and I sat in my nest of sheets until the sun crested the low hills, bringing with it a confirmation of what I feared. Amon’s rising had finally taken him somewhere I could not go. He’d realized that such power was enough in itself, and there was no reason for him to drag me along, to be hindered by my weight. I dressed hastily and ran to the road that led to the Garrik house, fighting tears and wondering what I might say when Frau Garrik answered the door.

In a tall patch of weeds, I found him, shirtless and wearing only one boot. His ruddy hair stood on end, and
his skin was streaked with chimney soot. Most troublingly, Amon no longer looked exactly like the boy I knew. It was some other creature I found burning in the button weeds. His body appeared hollow and weightless, as if a strong wind might lift him back to the sky at any moment. I shook Amon, fearing the worst, and when he opened his eyes, I realized how truly different he was. The world inside him had become larger than the world without. There was a whole landscape in his eyes, and a secondary sun hung in his sky. I was but an insect on a branch in that world. “Roddy—” his tongue was salty white. “Something incredible—”

I didn’t want to know. I feared knowing. “I thought you were dead, Amon.”

“It was a sort of death,” he whispered.

“No poetry,” I said.

He raised himself in the button weeds, and I saw how difficult it was for him to move upon the earth. The gravity irritated him, as he no longer belonged to it. “Listen to me,” he said. “I started out as I always do, taking small steps, intending to make my way to your window, and then I caught a glimpse of something different. There were tears in my eyes from the cold wind. Maybe they were enough for me to see—”

“See what?”

“Our fathers are correct, Roddy, though neither one of the old men knows how right they actually are. There
is
a pattern. But it isn’t one of myth or science. I caught a glimpse of it in the air. Something beyond our fathers’ imaginings, a glittering and navigable geometry that covers everything and passes
through
everything. Cords of light, braces of gold. I learned to make use of them last night. I actually flew, Roddy. No more toddling along like a baby. And the faster I flew, the brighter the pattern appeared to
me, until I realized there were animals with me in the sky, making use of the pattern—not birds or bats, but bright bodies with tremendous faces—things that might have once been mistaken for gods.
I
almost mistook them for that at first, but then I realized they were like me. Beings who’d recognized the great geometry.”

“You flew with these
things
? ” I said, trying to picture the monsters.

“I’ll take you,” he said. “Tonight, I’ll take you.”

“I don’t want to go, Amon.”

He burst into laughter. “Don’t want to go?” he said, grabbing me roughly by the arm as he used to. “We’ll speak to them together. I was
waiting
for you. Maybe they can tell us how to stay permanently in the sky. To live there as they do. We wouldn’t have to worry about hiding ourselves.”

“You can’t fly,” I said.

His god-face broke with surprise. “What?”

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “I don’t
have
to believe you. I think you just went off and did what you wanted. Maybe you went spying on girls in town, and now you’re making up a story to frighten me. There are no things with tremendous faces that live in the sky. Come on, Amon. I’ve been educated.”

As if to prove me wrong, Amon reached into the air, grabbed hold of some object I couldn’t see, and lifted himself off the ground, floating effortlessly up for a moment and then dropping gently back to his feet. I shut my eyes. I would not see a thing like that. Not anymore. Storming away, heedless of the holes in the road, I left him to his madness. For it was madness, and I knew the moment that either of our fathers saw him, he’d be immediately diagnosed. He could not conceal it any longer, not when his eyes looked as they did, so full of nauseating space. He’d be taken to the clinic and studied. When our fathers
spoke of underlying patterns, they didn’t mean glittering architectures. They simply meant underlying principles of organization. But nothing Amon said was organized or logical. Did I believe him about the events of the previous night? I suppose on some level, I did, yet my mind continued its attempts at rationalization. I didn’t want his truths.

That night when he came tapping, I hid beneath my covers and forced him to call through the thick glass, begging me to unlock the window. I should have gone to him when he said he was afraid to travel again in the night alone, but I didn’t. Eventually, he left, and I wish that I’d at least looked out to see him strong and mad one last time. I wish I’d memorized him, laid him out in a high garden somewhere in my mind.

Should I say it came as a surprise when I descended from my room the next morning and found my mother and father sitting at our formal table with Helmer Garrik and his wife, dressed in dark clothes, a bowl of yellow flowers from the hill between them. I immediately believed that Amon and I had been found out, that we were being officially labeled by our fathers as inverts. We’d be separated and given the talking cure for months. I went to my mother and put my face on her shoulder.

“The Garriks are here,” my father began, “because of a terrible event that befell their son, Amon, on our property last night.”

“An event?” I said.

Frau Garrik took hold of her husband’s hand. “Your stableman,” she said, biting the tips off her words, “he shot our boy. Shot our beautiful boy in the head last night.”

The breakfast parlor began to dissolve. No parents. No careful tea. Only a rash of yellow on an otherwise empty canvas.

When I struck the floor, I was surprised, having always believed I would fall when I was
with
Amon. But there was no truth to this. I fell without him. My father gathered me in his arms, and I looked up into the sharp bristles of his mustache, the holes of his nostrils. He was himself a pit of some depth. “The stableman must have been having one of his fits,” he said quietly. “They’re known to cause dementia, though I certainly wasn’t aware of the extent to which he suffered. He’s been telling us all morning that he didn’t shoot a boy, didn’t shoot Amon. He says he shot a large bird or even a kind of dragon out of the sky.

Frau Garrik broke down in wrenching sobs, and Helmer Garrik began calling to me in his stony voice, asking if I understood why his son might have been on our property at midnight, or why he might have been mistaken for a dragon, of all things. My father didn’t allow me time to answer. Instead he carried me up the stairs, telling me I must rest.

I told him I couldn’t. I’d never rest after this, and he closed the door of my bedroom, taking a seat at the foot of my bed. My father looked like an old man in that moment, his silk vest stretched tightly across his paunch, the hair on the top of his head so fine it was nearly invisible in the morning light. He watched his hands as he spoke. “You cared for him, Roderick?”

“I did,” I said, unable to restrain myself. “Very much.”

He nodded, speaking slowly and with care. “In the war, there was a custom. We wrote letters to the dead. Placed them in the coffin near the hands so they might be opened, even in darkness. You’ll write a letter. Tell Amon how you felt. But you’ll tell no one else. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Herr Garrik wants me to bring you to the clinic for a stay. I don’t know that I can refuse him after what’s happened.”

I put my face in my father’s hands, felt his warmth, rested.

I’ve searched for some final passage from his professional journal to finish this, wanting to close with a sense of symmetry. But there are no further passages about flight, and my father certainly wrote nothing else about me. After the events of that day, he was careful to exclude me from his studies. I can almost feel my father next to me as I write this, or perhaps it’s that he is a part of me. The Garriks wouldn’t allow me to attend Amon’s funeral, and when I nearly went mad from this, my father told me what to do. I burned the letter I wrote to Amon Garrik on the hill among the yellow tulips where he first stepped into the air, and as the smoke of my words rose into the clear sky above, I imagined the bright animals with their tremendous faces, somehow reaching down and finding a way to accept those ashes as offering.

TO BECOME HIS BELOVED FRIEND, his minion, as it were; to stand at his side; wear the same flower; sleep in the same bed—all of this he wanted, and yet even before I took up rooms with him, I think Thomas Weymouth understood the impossibility of our union. Perhaps he’d even predicted our parting the moment we met; there was something in his expression at the gallery—a future sadness, a telescoping of years. I was freshly graduated, touring the British Museum in a ridiculous velvet jacket; my hair inspired perhaps by Rimbaud. I’d lost my friend Marie near Raphael’s
Madonna of the Pinks
(one of her favorites—a work she said she could make a life inside of) and had wandered into another set of cold rooms where I attempted to analyze a Flemish portrait of Sir Philip the Good for the benefit of a complete stranger, an older man in an antique robe and formless hat who’d caught my attention.

It was my habit in those days to strike up conversation with anyone of interest, especially those of a dramatic
air. I liked the dolor of the older man’s face, the deep-set nature of his eyes. His clothes seemed to absorb the gallery light, and though he was not a man of fashion, the whole room seemed to bend to his gravity. I pointed to the oil on canvas and said wasn’t it interesting how Philip the Good’s melancholic expression likened him to a medieval city; he was girded by his despair, a self-sufficient microcosm who needed nothing and wanted less. The unknown Flemish painter had captured the self-reliance in the subject’s hooded eyes and the ramparts of his cheekbones. Or was it self-reliance? Perhaps isolation was something forced upon him. As with all people who are truly
good
, I continued, there seemed a barrier between Sir Philip and the world. He retained virtue through seclusion, never venturing into the dark woods beyond his walls.

Lord Weymouth, the stranger’s title I’d later learn, half-smiled as he listened, hands tucked in the sleeves of his odd robe. He gently reminded me that Philip the Good was known to have had a congenital illness which might account for hooded eyes and melancholic mood, but he was also quick to add that he preferred my poetic sense to any such grim reality. “An artful description not only of loneliness,” he said, “but of its physical deformations.”

I attempted to catch sight of Marie’s pagoda sleeves and pastel skirts. “Are you a Medievalist then?” I asked, intending to excuse myself after he answered.

“Hardly an academic,” he replied. “But men with money have time to linger. Endless hours of repose. I’m sure you’ve read about it.”

I glanced at the gentleman’s hand. He wore a heavy ring—not a wedding ring but an artifact, and I wondered despite myself who he might be. It wasn’t as though I was a fortune hunter, but I was wise enough to know that a young man without options should remain alert. It was
fashionable at the time to play Greek after graduating without coming to abominate, of course.

“I’m in possession of a text which may be of some interest to a student,” he continued.

“A student of finance?” I asked, having earned such a degree, which Marie and I were expecting to celebrate that night.

For a moment, actual amusement lightened his heavy face, transforming him from the memento mori he had been. “It’s worth a great deal, I suppose,” he said. “Though I’d never sell it. It’s quite dear to me—the diary of a knight errant and his squire. I rescued it from a disreputable dealer.”