The Air We Breathe

by Andrea Barrett

  “So, a shorter exposure time,” Leo said. The tiny singed spots dotting her blue wrapper made him wonder just how well she knew her way around the wiring.

  She nodded. “The low-vacuum ones take less voltage and give a less penetrating ray. So those take a longer exposure, but then I get finer detail with soft tissue.”

  The peculiar sensation he felt as she was talking was, as he’d tell Dr. Petrie later, a compound of admiration, envy, delight, and pure curiosity. He’d been working very hard to relearn his old chemistry, but still he could fit only a few hours of study each day into our rigid routine, and even then he didn’t have the energy he’d had before getting sick. She’d obviously accomplished far more, despite having only nights and weekends to spare.

  He followed her as she moved away from the machine and toward the shallow, glass-topped wooden box mounted on the wall like a picture frame. She’d designed this herself, she said proudly. Irene’s handheld contraption allowed only a single image to be viewed at a time, by a single person. But this—she flipped a switch, lighting up the glass within the frame—let them to look at a film together, or at several films mounted side by side.

  Among the hanging negatives he recognized the dead hawk he’d seen her bring in some weeks ago: skull, spine, wing bones, heart. Another was clearly a rabbit—he could see not only the tiny bones of the feet but also the shadowy outlines of its ears, veined like dragonflies’ wings—while others, empty of organs and threaded through with wire and screws, looked like mounted specimens. “Squirrel?” he asked.

  “Opossum!”

  “Not a Russian animal,” he said as she laughed. Six in a row—or not six opossums, but six images of the same creature, identifiable by the pair of scissors trapped inside. The foggiest images were on the left; the sharpest, to the right.

  “Different tube for each image,” she explained. “I took that last one with the tube that’s mounted now.”

  “Very nice,” he said. Did she know how much she’d already learned on her own, or how inventively she’d arranged her results? His teacher in Odessa, who’d had a great passion for laboratory demonstrations, claimed that the best way to remember ideas was by solving practical problems on our own. Because of him, Leo had learned chemistry not in a lecture room but standing with his classmates at a long bench, surrounded by glassware, happily setting fires and shattering beakers and shooting fumes toward the open skylights. Here Eudora, alone except for Irene, seemed to have been going through the same process, which he now remembered as the most absorbing experience of his life.

  Gently, as if any false word or move might disturb her work, he said, “How did you get the scissors in there?”

  “I didn’t—they’re stuffers, not scissors, which probably my father left in there by mistake. He made this specimen when he was a little boy.”

  Leo leaned closer to the sixth and sharpest image, which wasn’t perfect but still impressed him. “You’ve got this apparatus working as well as a new one.”

  “Almost,” she said. “I think Irene will be pleased.”

  “You haven’t shown her yet?”

  “I wanted to wait until I could reliably get a good image, and then surprise her.”

  “Try it out on me,” he begged. Suddenly the idea of standing there, a living demonstration into which she could peer, was what he most desired.

  She shook her head. “What if I don’t have something calibrated correctly?”

  “But you already do. Obviously.” He pointed at the last of the opossums. “I’ve been feeling better—maybe we can see what’s healed on the films.”

  Not since the day she and Irene had taken radiographs of each other’s chests had she examined the inside of another person. But she knew more now; she’d arrange the exposure as she had with the rabbit, she thought, a soft ray beautifully revealing the blood vessels and the lungs.

  “Fine,” she said, gesturing to him to stand with her behind the shield. “Take off your shirt.”

  She couldn’t help looking, while the tube warmed up, at the pattern of fine black hair on his chest. The transformer rumbled, the tube hissed, one end of the tube glowed purplish yellow, and the air began to smell like rain. When the tube was ready, she arranged Leo in front of the film holder.

  “Hold your breath,” she said, just as Irene had once said to her. She slipped in the film and counted.

  The tube was alive, he thought. A breathing thing—that was ozone he smelled—glowing and probing inside him, the rays streaming from the target and out the side of the tube, passing through him to trace his rounded image on the film.

  Irene was still absent, but Eudora had developed plenty of films with her watching silently, doing no more than nodding her approval. What harm, then, in developing the image alone? In the darkroom, among the comforting eggy stink of the chemicals, she splashed through the familiar steps and was rewarded by ribs, vertebrae, collarbones. Leo’s heart, his diaphragm. She was trembling, she noticed. He was standing very close to her, looking over her shoulder, and she could feel the warmth of his body on her back. On the negative she saw the clouds of his lungs, dotted with the scars of healed cavities and a few more dubious spots.

  “I shouldn’t try to read this,” she said. “Irene will have to make you a better one when you’re due for another consultation with Dr. Petrie.”

  “How could she do any better?” Leo said, his chin near her ear. “The detail—that’s marvelous.”

  “I had a feeling that tube would work well with you.” Her cheeks were hot and she moved away. “Let’s go see if Irene’s back.”

  Still the space outside the darkroom was empty except for them; still it smelled as if lightning had passed through. The machine, cold now, was only a heap of metal and wood, but Eudora’s face was pink and haloed by her electrified golden hair. An idea had developed in Leo’s mind as he watched the image of his chest appear, and now he blurted it out.

  “Would you—we have a movie night coming up in a couple of weeks, would you join us for that? Would you go with me, I mean, that evening?”

  She looked as if he’d slapped her. “You, and—me?”

  “Yes,” he replied, catching himself before he reached for her hand. “I’ve been wanting to ask you. I thought you knew.”

  She stood, staring at the film, for what seemed to him like a long time. “I didn’t,” she said. “Not at all.” More silence, more staring at the film they’d developed together. “I lied to you earlier, about Naomi,” she said. “About what she was doing in your room.”

  She hadn’t led Naomi in there because Naomi felt faint, she confessed; Naomi had entered the room by herself, hoping to see him, or to learn something more about him. Before Eudora completed her awkward story, Leo realized he knew what she meant and he stiffened with embarrassment.

  “She’s so drawn to you,” Eudora concluded. “She doesn’t seem able to tell you herself and I wouldn’t have told you except…”

  “Except what?” Had Naomi, he suddenly wondered, written the anonymous note he’d found inside his Kill-Gloom Gazette?

  “Except it’s Naomi you should be taking to the pictures. Obviously.”

  “But it’s not Naomi I’m interested in. I have no interest in her. None.”

  Then it was his turn to look at the film on the light box. He waited, listening to the air moving raggedly in and out of his lungs—why was he so conscious of his breathing?—until he could add, “It’s you I want to see.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “It’s just the movies. You might come see them on your own, I know you like them.”

  “Naomi’s my friend,” she said.

  He caught himself digging the thumbnail of one hand into the palm of the other. “It’s not Naomi,” he said again. “It’s not ever going to be Naomi.”

  She ran her finger half an inch above the surface of the film, pausing at two different spots before moving on. “All right,” she said—a moment which, later, she’d pause ove
r again and again. “I’ll meet you there. But just to see the pictures.”

  ON THE NIGHT after Eudora X-rayed his chest, Leo slipped stealthily past the nurses’ station and then down through the kitchen and out the back door, just as Ephraim had done on the night he left us. Once he was beyond the buildings, the grounds, so vast and dark, absorbed him instantly. Down the slope he moved, over the lawns and through the meadow toward the woods, passing a fox trotting up the hill. The sky was clear, the stars were blazing, a moist breeze drifted from the disk of ice still floating in the center of the pond. As he walked down into hollows and then back up, the air felt cool then warm then almost cold against his cheeks and he smelled rotted leaves, wet dirt, sap moving beneath bark, witch hazel, thawing carcasses. The moon, which was nearly full, lit the trees around him.

  At dusk he’d heard a chorus of tree frogs, but now the peeping had stopped and whatever had made the slow, clacking sound—a duck, Arkady had said irritably, although Abe claimed that it too was a kind of frog—was also sleeping. A few bats swooped over his head; moths surged around him; a dead duck lay in a puddle. In the moonlight his feet glimmered oddly through the ground fog. The dirty patches of snow, he found, were easier to walk on than the mud.

  At the sugar refinery in Williamsburg he’d felt ancient; the other workers had been eighteen or nineteen or even younger, boys in their early teens skittering through the machines. Up here, where most of us were around his age but where we lived at a middle-aged pace, wrapped in our blankets, endlessly resting, he’d felt younger in some ways, older in others. Now, in the cool piney breeze, he felt how young he really was. Twenty-seven! He might still do almost anything, might even without Miles’s help find work related to the chemistry he’d once studied. He might find a good job, start a family. When he’d leaned over Eudora’s shoulder and seen her holding his ribs in her hand, something had reacted inside him. There were different kinds of chemical reactions, his teacher in Odessa had once explained. Decomposition, displacement, exchange, rearrangement, union…

  From a tree an owl called; was he in love? Was that the name for this sense that, like the trees, the cattails, the frogs peeping, the geese arrowing overhead, he was springing back to life? Or maybe he was simply in hope, which might be the same thing. Something had been growing in him all winter, just now poking a green tip through the surface; a sense that almost anything might after all be possible. He felt—this astonished him—grateful. Not since he was a boy had he had time to think and study and look at the world and himself; and although throughout his stay up here he’d been sick, sometimes terribly so, and had feared for his body, at the same time these past months had been astonishing. Food, shelter, books, the forest, our Wednesday gatherings. The world, unclouded. Eudora. He drew another deep breath and made a modest plan, one step at a time. Study, tell Irene he was ready to work. Work, and then meet Eudora at the movies. There, perhaps…

  14

  BEFORE THE NEXT movie night, though, we had two more Wednesday sessions scheduled, which we were particularly excited about because Irene had finally agreed to take her turn. The rest of us had been flattered that she continued to come to our sessions; she was older than most, better educated than anyone except for Dr. Petrie, and she knew so much about so many things that we couldn’t predict what she’d discuss. Poland, Ian hypothesized before that last Wednesday of April. Madame Curie, Kathleen said; we knew she worshipped the Polish scientist. Eudora, wedged between Naomi and a mute and clumsy Leo—he’d hardly been able to speak to her since their session in the darkroom, and he still hadn’t asked her advice about his own proposed talk—wondered out loud if Irene might describe some of her first experiments with X-rays. Dr. Petrie worried that she’d mention their work correlating her films with the autopsy reports. But instead she announced something we hadn’t even known she was interested in: the work of a German physicist named Albert Einstein.

  In our chairs we shifted uneasily; would this be like our first meetings, when Miles had spoken so abstractly, and at such tedious length, about a subject that meant nothing to us? Right away, though, Irene made it clear why we should be interested. This man, she said, had changed our conception of time and shown that what had once been thought to be absolute was really relative. What could be more important? Here at Tamarack State, time passed so slowly that it sometimes seemed to stop entirely, but outside, she said—outside, where men in trenches were dying daily—clocks were ticking relentlessly and time was speeding down a giant hole.

  We could feel this, she said—that time did not flow at the same speed for all of us, nor did it flow consistently—but until Einstein formulated his theory of relativity no one had articulated what that meant. Around us the walls glowed with the afternoon sun. Kathleen moved her chair so the rays wouldn’t shine on her face; Ian moved to make room for her; the movement passed through our circle of chairs like a puff of wind through wheat. Irene said that while many of us might know the theory already, because she herself still wrestled with the basic idea she thought perhaps some of us did as well. Her violet-gloved hand swooped with her words and one lock of hair detached itself from her loosely pinned braid. Both Celia and Pearl, wondering when she’d tuck it back in, kept losing track of her argument.

  “Einstein,” Irene explained, “published a crucial paper a dozen years ago, in 1905, when he was twenty-six and working as a patent clerk in Berne.”

  Deftly she wove the strand of hair back into place, describing how she’d paid no attention to that work until, during her first winter at Tamarack State, a Hungarian physicist curing in the village had been sent to her for a radiograph. While she was struggling to get the best view of his chest, he’d tried to explain his own work to her and mentioned how much he relied on Einstein’s discoveries. After she’d confessed her ignorance, he sent over some papers for her to read—but these, she said, had only bewildered her further. Yet the central idea was so interesting, and these days so essential, that she wanted to try to explain it.

  “Time,” she said, catching the eyes of first David and then Seth, Olga and Sophie and finally Pearl, “is not something out there, something beyond us that flows serenely like a river, without any reference to us or our doings; it is not a fixed reference against which our own lives move. It is not background, it is not—

  “It is not. That’s the strangest part of what Einstein said: time is not a thing but a relationship. Things moving in relation to each other. All of us grew up thinking that if everything around us disappeared, our world and even the stars in the sky, time and space would still continue on. Einstein says that time and space would disappear together with the things.”

  Eudora, rapt until now, felt Naomi poking her elbow and looked down to see a note sliding from Naomi’s pad of paper onto her lap. Irritated, she looked back at Irene without reading the note but then felt Naomi’s hand again. I’m bored, Naomi had written. Aren’t you?

  Eudora frowned, slid the note into her pocket, and turned away, only to find herself caught in Leo’s gaze. Him on her right, Naomi on her left; where was a person to find any peace? Already she’d begun to fret about agreeing to meet Leo for movie night. Standing there in Irene’s laboratory, his chest revealed on the film they’d made, he’d seemed truly transparent. Nowhere had she seen a speck of interest in Naomi, and when he’d dismissed Naomi’s feelings for him so firmly, it was almost as if the feelings themselves had disappeared. But Eudora was surprised to find, in the space opened up by that, her own curiosity as to what might happen between the two of them. When she’d accepted his invitation, she’d been thinking of movie night as an experiment akin to trying out a new tube on the machine, which might yield interesting results, or nothing at all.

  By the time she turned her attention back to Irene’s talk, Pearl and Sophie had started taking notes. Sophie had a small brown volume on her lap, which Eudora hadn’t seen before, while Pearl was writing on a single sheet of paper folded into quarters. Both were using the stubby pencils
kept in our library, which we were forbidden to take. Before Einstein wrote that paper, Irene was saying, he’d worked on other problems, important but not revolutionary; no one could have expected what he’d do next. He’d written about Brownian motion, photons, a method for determining the size of molecules…

  “I read that paper,” Leo interrupted. “In German, a few years ago.”

  Our heads, as if they were attached to a single string, swiveled together. Miles, who’d been irritable all afternoon, sniffed and said, “German science is nothing to be proud of, these days.”

  “But you wouldn’t really call this German science,” Irene said, impatient with the interruption. “It’s just—science.”

  She turned back to Leo. Obviously he was ready to start the next part of his training, and the timing was right: there’d always been more work than hands to do it but now, with so many doctors and nurses heading overseas, her laboratory might well end up serving the whole village and she could use him right away. Still, she worried about the consequences of him working with Eudora. She’d seen the radiograph of his chest, and while at first she’d been amazed at the quality of the image and delighted to see the old machine so well restored, she’d also been startled to find Eudora experimenting without her. That the subject had been Leo concerned her even more. Twenty years ago, she and her brother-in-law, experimenting eagerly in the first months after the rays were discovered, had in the process of peering into each other’s bodies felt a kind of electricity that had nothing to do with an induction coil.