The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  While I was up there, I looked down and saw—why had I never noticed before?—letters painted on the bricks, now faded, at the top of many apartment buildings. For instance, on a former tenement not far from my apartment: Emil Talamini Real Estate PA6-3367. The letters were so faint that you could barely see them. Two buildings away, another, a whisper of white paint: Haddad Carting We Take It Away! In cursive, no less. Holiday Handbags. And another, barely perceptible, facing the handbags: Rubin’s Fine Suits for Men and Boys, 850 Second Avenue. In fact, I began to notice many more of these faint impressions, like grave rubbings, advertisements for the past. Egyptian Gardens. Franklin Furs. It was like an aerial archaeological dig, these ghostly invitations to businesses, and probably buildings, that didn’t exist anymore, phone numbers to heavenly phones—heavy, black, with thick plastic dials. I loved Talamini, Haddad, and Rubin as if they were my ancestors.

  I nodded to them on Avenue A, lifting my face to the sky. Talamini, Haddad, and Rubin looked down at me from it, smiling. Around them was a strong, clear blue like open water, waveless. On a good sky day like that, I wanted to make a box. Put Talamini, Haddad, and Rubin in it, up to their necks in tympanic blue. Put the phantom Egyptian Gardens in it. Put a primitive telephone as big as an anvil in it.

  But even on a bad day, I knew the sky was there. I could hear it, feel it on my skin, taste it. Alone in my cubicle at work, watching the helicopters take off and land, the yellow water taxis cross the river, I moved my empty shoulder blades back and forth, back and forth, as the nubs grew. I perched on my bad chair, my legs folded under me. My chest bowed out. Secretly, I stroked the tufts growing there. I pushed at the tender spot on my left thigh until it bruised. Hungry as I always was these days, I ordered in BLTs with double fries and chocolate milkshakes for lunch. The food tasted salty, sweet, promising. I licked my pale fingers when I was done. I had stopped shaving my balls; the hair was growing in, red, feathery. It itched. I liked the itch. Now I was glad I worked at The Hudson Times, because it was so close to the river that the sky was big, open. All day, the enormous sky hummed and crackled that much closer to me, just outside the window.

  But down on the street, there was a lot going on that needed my attention. Root issues: body, home, ground. Carsten affectionately called me a luftmensch, a sky man, a man who lives on air. He liked to get me to eat more by saying, “A second helping for the luftmensch.” But I didn’t live on air. (And Carsten’s cooking, I discovered, was excellent. Meat is good. I gained a pound the first week he and Caroline moved in, and kept gaining.) On the contrary, I felt more strongly than ever that I had to get my body into that house across the river, that the broken temples and chipped winged horses and shadowy streets of Wall Street, the weightless electronic rows of dead people from a vanished city, my old apartment that was now overflowing with cables and monitors and a reluctant dotted line—all these, I knew, were dragging me down and killing me. At night, as Caroline and Carsten slept peacefully, entwined in each other’s arms on the air mattress in the living room, I cracked open the freezer door and counted the icy silver packages inside, though I knew perfectly well how many of them were in there. I counted them anyway, over and over. I was almost there.

  I left a message for Carl. This was my bid, I said, for when the clock started ticking again. I named a number. A sky number, maybe. But I was different now. If I could get cancer, why couldn’t other extraordinary things happen to me? My ideas about limits, about what was possible, had changed.

  Over a big meal at my little Formica table, Caroline tried to explain to Janos what their art was about. Janos looked bemused, but willing. He had even turned his phone off for dinner. He often came over these days; the center of gravity in our relationship had tilted toward my apartment. Also, I think he warmed up to Caroline and Carsten because they were Europeans, like him. I sat at one end of the table, hungry as ever, restless, but also happy that everyone was together. The lamb was superb that night.

  Caroline was patient, slicing into her meat. “We’re really just surfing the edges, these places”—she steepled her hands—“where bio-mimesis, data, and chaos meet. Math is an organism; art reproduces itself; music and image can grow of their own volition. In real time, no less. New life forms are everywhere. Robotics—”

  “It’s the future!” said Carsten. “These will be like cave paintings in a hundred years! I hope they still have the technology to view them!” He looked both despairing and titillated by the prospect. “There’s a collective in Norway doing things with bacteria and artificial life that you would not believe. They nearly took down the government last year.”

  “But how do you make any money?” asked Janos.

  “Oh, you know,” said Caroline. She laughed, adjusting her rimless glasses.

  Carsten lit a cigarette.

  I tried not to slide my gaze over to the freezer, though it was a peculiar thing to know that, not three feet from where we sat, there were probably enough ice-cold bricks to get that dotted line out of its corner and swinging into the future. I poked at the potato gratin with my fork.

  “Are you getting tired?” asked Janos tenderly. The three of them appraised me. I caught Caroline and Janos exchanging a glance. So they’d been talking about me when I wasn’t there. E-mailing? Text-messaging in German? On the phone when I was at work? Carsten began to clear the table, stacking the dishes in a big messy pile, his cigarette stubbed out in the mint sauce.

  I shrugged, putting down my fork. I was tired. My bones ached. “No, no, I feel great,” I said with as much brightness as I could muster. “Is there dessert?”

  “Listen, Gabriel, the transfusion—” Janos began, seeing his advantage.

  “Stop it. Stop it about the fucking transfusion. Not now.”

  Caroline touched Janos’s hand, raised an eyebrow. As much as I loved them, I hated their guts at that moment.

  In the ensuing silence, Carsten produced a tarte Tatin, like magic, from the refrigerator.

  “He cooks when he’s nervous,” said Caroline. “We can’t get our thing right. There’s a deadline.”

  “I’m not nervous,” said Carsten, putting down the dish with a clatter. “I have a point to make. Now listen, all of you.” Carsten, impassioned, mapped out what had been on his mind, by way of Leibniz and phenomenology, using the salt and pepper shakers and a few pieces of dirty silverware. “This is existence,” he said, slamming the ketchup bottle down in front of him. “This”—tented fingers on the surface of the table—“is consciousness.” His wandering eye, excited, wandered farther. The evening brightness fell across the open bottle of wine, the empty dessert plates, the uncut tarte Tatin, the paper whites sprouting in the brown dish in the center of the table (Caroline had bought them), their bulbs like knuckles in the shallow dirt, and our four faces: it was a gilded still life of precious ordinariness. I knew it, too. Even without the paper whites, with only the ketchup bottle, I would have known it. “We are puckers in the energy field.” He kissed his fingers together, unkissed them. “Like that. Poof. All life is artificial life in some sense.”

  Janos nodded, laughed. “Yes, all right, but even a pucker has to eat, right? Even a pucker gets old.”

  Carsten elaborately fell out of his chair onto the floor and kicked his feet. We all laughed. Later that night, I heard him and Caroline out on the blow-up mattress. A soft guttural noise from Carsten. A delicate sound from my sister. I stayed awake, listening, comforted, pushing at that spot on the inside of my left thigh; the spot was slightly swollen. I had to admit that I’d been feeling better since they had arrived. Maybe Janos had been right to call. Their noises and cigarette smoke and ridiculous concerns, like someone banging on pots and pans at a campsite, must have been keeping the lion at bay. I was sorry when the guttural noise, the delicate sound, stopped for the night. There was a shout in the street, then nothing. I rested my fingers on my clammy chest, above my heart. The tufts were definitely thickening. And I liked my old blood. I didn’t want new bloo
d, a stranger’s blood.

  I got off the train in midtown. The regular doctor in the regular office, with issues of People from two months ago in the waiting room, talked about my numbers. They weren’t rising, he said. They weren’t falling, either. That place on my thigh, near a lymph node: they had to keep an eye on that. He apologized for the side effects of the yellow pill; it was, he said, the best they could do. I said I understood completely. I said I was trying to reduce my stress. I said that I was reading up on my illness. I said that my partner had made an appointment for me to see a special doctor soon, the top man in the field. The regular doctor nodded approvingly, palpating the lump on my thigh. “He’s brilliant,” he said as he measured the lump. “Good for you.” Then he smiled at me the way a stranger smiles at another stranger on a subway platform. And, in fact, half an hour later he passed right by me on the subway platform. He was walking quickly, head down—a lunch date? an assignation? an appointment with his tailor? Since getting sick, I had begun to be a little psychic, but my newly burgeoning psychic powers failed me now. I couldn’t read anything off the regular doctor, and he didn’t notice me as he hurried to the other end of the platform.

  James, a tall Asian man with four dark blue bands tattooed on his right arm and with perfectly clean, bare feet, lifted the big white lid. On the wall behind him was a hologram of a rainbow, and underneath it was written, in big iridescent block letters, SPIRIT LIFE COLOR. He helped me step into the tank. The salty water lapped at me: warm, geological, indifferent. Even at these prices, many other people had lain where I was lying now, leaving no impression on the shallow oval of sea.

  James closed the lid. He rapped on it once, making my salty world ring. “Okay? You ready to ride?”

  I rapped back as hard as I could. “Yeah!” I shouted. The salt began nibbling my skin; my spine extended. I floated up. Inside, it was darker than dark ever is: no stars, no stray light from distant cities. Closing your eyes was redundant. There was a faint, pervasive, clashing scent of eucalyptus and damp wood and chlorine. I missed being in Sarah’s tub in the drafty house behind the house. I moved my toe, which already felt far away, in the warm water. I would tell her soon. Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, Irene. I added up my frozen money as my feet waltzed away and my ears became enormous echo chambers, like caves where waves swirled. I was upside down, inside out. A collection of random points. One toe. A rib. They might connect, make a really long, curving backbone. A long, curving prow of nose. Long arcs of arm bones, lightening. In the oval of salty water, DNA came undone for a while, refashioned itself. Like taking apart a chandelier to be cleaned and reassembled. Like the schools of mathematical fish, coalescing and disintegrating. Shhhhhh, went the caves that were my ears. It was trippy in that humid pod. My fingers clenched, reached in the dark water for some other shore. The salt brocaded me.

  In the tank, I felt optimistic. My yeses and nos fell away, leaving a blurry radiance. Everything seemed salty, possible. And, oh joy, my elbows were crooking up, the bones of my fingers fusing. It was only a matter of time. I’d be well, better than well. But as I floated in a soup of undone DNA, divine in my metamorphosis, Alice tapped me on the shoulder. Her kinky brownish-blackish hair streamed behind her where she stood before the house on Pineapple Street, at the gate with the blue flowers twined around it, regarding me gravely. Because of the perspective, Alice looked larger than the house. Behind her, the crooked house shimmered, wavering in its outlines. Was she in wind or in water? I was pierced, shot; my insides jack-knifed. Homesickness. The house, shrouded in its white tent, bride-like, was waiting for me at the altar. But Alice’s enormous shadow fell across it. And that expression on her face: she knew something I didn’t know. The breath left my body.

  I banged on the inside of the lid as hard as I could. I slammed the panic button with my elbow. “James! James!”

  James’s strong, tattooed arms appeared immediately, the square of light very bright. He lifted me out, dripping salt water, wheezing. He wrapped me in a towel.

  “Whoa,” said James, gripping me tightly, sopping though I was, a wet terry-cloth bag of bones. “Whoa, Gabriel. Breathe. Breathe, man. Come on.”

  I gasped. “I had . . . I think I had a vision.”

  James laughed a rich baritone laugh. “Second vision in that tank today. Must be the eclipse coming.”

  I shivered. James pulled the towel tight. He placed my fingers on my wrist. My pulse thrummed fast, light, avian. “Feel that? You’re okay.”

  The acupuncturist put the needles in slowly, gently, precisely. Several in my spine. One each on the backs of my knees. One on the bottom of my left foot. A few, like a crest, running up the back of my head. At intervals he turned the needles. I felt like I was being tuned. The swollen lump on my thigh ached. I could hear them outside the window, calling for me. Caw, they said. Brrr. Cheep. Whoosh of feathers. Along the slender wires of the needles, I could feel a humming: the cerulean paths were opening. I didn’t need to waste my money on borrowed blood when I could feel this so deeply in every nerve ending, this opening and blossoming that ran from the soles of my feet to the top of the sky. It was painful, but there was an ecstasy to it.

  I arranged the objects on the windowsill to balance the energy, sort of like the acupuncturist’s needles. The headless porcelain milkmaid (I had never been able to get her head back on, no matter how much glue I used), the silver and gold swans, the Steuben starfish, the intertwined platinum letters FG, an imposing pair of grape shears ornamented with silver clusters of testicular grapes, the ancient copper Buddha, a small bronze bell, three cloisonné brooches, an imitation Fabergé egg encrusted with semiprecious stones (real? I couldn’t tell), a gold handled letter opener shaped like a miniature samurai sword, and a transparent clock, very modern, very strange to look at, to see its mechanical heart beating. The windowsill had gotten a bit crowded. I might have to start another one.

  The milkmaid’s jagged head rested in one of the cozier piles of more ordinary though still significant things that had developed around my apartment, on a bookshelf, on top of the refrigerator, on the back of the sofa: collections of shiny objects, feathers, small animal bones, cheap unraveling knit hats, and so on. This treasure had come not from Fleur’s house but from the street. I thought these things might become part of a box one day, but I hadn’t been able to interest myself in a box since I’d gotten out of the hospital; really, they were all emblems of my luck. I told my fortune from them. My vision for finding small things on the ground had sharpened considerably. Right on the sidewalks and streets, I’d discovered, were so many glittering stray things, and each item had my fate in it, yes or no. Well or ill. Living or dying. Thumbs up or thumbs down. One second to spot it, two seconds to see if it was a good sign or a bad one, two more to snatch it up before the juju drained out.

  You’d be amazed how many talismans of fate are lying around city streets: single lost earrings, half-flattened pen tops, inscrutable and intriguing bits of metal, cowrie beads on a string, coins, lone keys, crosses, a curvy initial in gold plate (T), an intricate silver flower no bigger than your littlest fingernail, a star made out of rhinestones on a string covered in rhinestones. I grabbed all the yeses I saw shining on the concrete. I got incredibly good at it, incredibly fast, pecking at the pavement with lightning speed. I figured that between the flattened pen tops and the Steuben starfish, I had the range covered. Fate, manifested in seemingly innocuous objects, had no haven: I would find it and drag it from the immaterial to the material world.

  My system covered events of all sizes as well. Three sunny days in a row meant I might be getting better, ditto finding a nickel heads-up on the street, or seeing a license plate with my initials on it. I wished on stars, eyelashes, wishbones. I threw coins into fountains. I decided, though I knew this was dicey, that if the smiley, dark-eyed Hispanic girl at the Starbucks near work waited on me, then I’d have a good day, but if it was her generally unsmiling, heavyset twin, who worked at the same Starbucks, then it wo
uld be a bad day. Sometimes I’d dump the latte made by the unsmiling twin into the gutter and go back in, hoping to get the smiling twin. (It didn’t count if I asked for her.) Oh, I’d say in an abashed way, can you believe I dropped it the second I walked out of here? I must have been distracted. Winking, brushing at my pants, roguish smile.

  I moved the black plastic pill bottle to the back, behind the headless milkmaid. I picked my way through the jungle of cables and made myself a maitake-extract protein shake and drank it down while glancing at the New York Times online. A picture of a sad polar bear on a tilting ice floe, a picture of an Iraqi soldier running from a burning building—nothing good. Slight chance of snow. It had been a snowless winter so far, another bad sign. In the lower right-hand corner of the screen, the coming eclipse moved through its phases, back again, then re-eclipsed. In the corner of my living room, the dotted line, mute and motionless, hung in the middle of the television screen. Caroline and Carsten had gone to meet with some people in Greenpoint who were doing amazing work with noise, they said. I walked over to the windowsill and picked up the little bronze bell, rang it. Hello, universe. Hello.

  No answer.

  I put the bell back in its place. The protein shake tasted like damp, crumbling cardboard. I sat down on the sofa and watched the moon cover the sun, pulse of darkness, uncover it, pulse of light, cover it, uncover it. The gears in the transparent clock went tick tick tick. The moon covered the sun, pulse of darkness. Then it uncovered it, pulse of light.