This New & Poisonous Air

by Adam McOmber

  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.

  Helmer Garrik’s analysis seems unnecessarily artful—as if he’s making an oil painting instead of practicing a science. Black dogs? What use do I have for such poetry? If my son is experiencing amorous desire for his friend, it must be because they share a common trait, chemical or otherwise—they are matched. I have seen the way they lock step and have heard a nearly audible note in the air when they catch one another’s glance. It might even be argued that they form a kind of symmetry when placed side by side. If some yet undiscovered biology is at work, who am I to raise the poetry of dreams against it?

  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 ow
n 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.

  “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.