The Weight of Air

by David Poses

  “It’s cool. I was a heroin addict. I’ve been clean for a year and a half.”

  “Isn’t heroin like the hardest drug to quit?”

  “It’s not exactly easy, but when something’s important, you find a way to make it happen.”

  The Marlboro College campus is an old farmstead with retrofitted outbuildings, halfway up a mountain in Vermont. Brisk air, redolent with pine trees and wood smoke and freshly cut grass. Christine and I walk from the dorm to an introductory session for the only mandatory class for incoming students: Religion, Literature, and Philosophy. When she asks what made me decide to transfer here, I tell her about the conversation I overheard in a café last spring, when I was enrolled at Richmond College in London—my third school in as many semesters.

  “Two Americans were making fun of this tiny liberal arts school where you design your own course of study. All I needed to hear was ‘chaos, Vermont, two hundred students.’”

  Four peacocks appear on the path behind the library, strutting around, fanning their plumage. Christine says their owner, a junior, built the school’s apiary. “He already has a job when he graduates,” she says. “At a zoo in Singapore.”

  We arrive at a small, musty classroom where Jet Thomas describes RLP as “an intensive, yearlong exploration of classic literature.” An older man with a small frame, he speaks with an effeminate, Foghorn Leghorn-esque drawl and rattles off a long list of book titles. Plato. Sartre. Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Aquinas. Heidegger. Is it a joke? Nobody can read that many books in a year.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “If you don’t see one of your favorites on the fall list, maybe we’ll read it in the spring.” He goes around the table counterclockwise, asking our intended areas of focus.

  I identify as a writer. So does Christine, but she adds something about postmodern femininity and Anaïs Nin. The girl next to her, with long red dreadlocks and hairy armpits, wants to explore the aesthetic theories of Kant and Schopenhauer and the problem of musical meaning. A kid with tattoos covering every inch of exposed skin aspires to preserve endangered indigenous languages in Kenya, and a guy in dark sunglasses, dressed in black, draws a connection between mathematical theology and urban architecture in modern China. The last to arrive, a blond kid who could be a J. Crew model, says he’s a writer, interested in stream-of-consciousness fiction.

  Jet says, “All great writers have one thing in common. What is it?”

  Christine says, “They read more than they write?”

  “Much more,” Jet says. “All great writers read much more than they write.”

  A discussion about Aeschylus’s Agamemnon breaks out. I own the book but haven’t read it. I haven’t actually read any book, ever. As my classmates name-drop Clytemnestra and Orestes, I’m slouched in my seat, staring at cobwebs on the faded yellow wainscoted wall.

  After the intro session, I go to the registrar’s office and replace my creative writing classes with film courses—I’ve seen entire movies.

  When I return to the dorm, I hear a loud banging coming from my room. I open the door to find Christine naked, pinned against the wall next to my bed, the J. Crew model behind her, thrusting. I clear my throat. He turns his head.

  “David,” he says, still going. “Good to meet you. Your mom called on the downstairs pay phone.”

  I go downstairs and return Mom’s call.

  “Tell me, tell me, tell me. Is it great?”

  “Better.”

  “So, no more Goldilocks and the Three Colleges? This school’s ‘just right’?”

  “Perfect.”

  I’d transferred to Richmond from Franklin Pierce because of this awful, pervasive feeling—scarily similar to what I’d experienced at SUNY Purchase, which felt no different than both high schools I’d attended, where I was constantly reminded of the feeling I’d had throughout middle and elementary school, when I was plagued by the sensation of being at the bottom of the ocean, naked, surrounded by people in full scuba gear. While they glided effortlessly through the water, kicking their flippers, breathing oxygen from tanks, I was singularly focused on looking like I wasn’t drowning.

  Two weeks into the semester, during Introduction to Film and Video Production, I pick my fingernails until they bleed when we screen our first short films. My classmates present colorful works, with multiple angles and meticulous editing and cuts synched to upbeat music.

  My piece is black and white, shot in one angle. I locked a camera on a tripod, pointed it at four folding chairs against a white wall, and sat in each and talked to the invisible me on either side. Then I spliced the footage together so I appear in all four chairs simultaneously throughout the two-minute shebang. Ambient room sounds hiss behind intentionally indecipherable dialogue: four tracks, run through every conceivable filter, which I rerecorded at half speed and then re-rerecorded in reverse.

  That way, no one would hear me say, “I’m a liar and a fraud. I hate myself and I want to die. I stole my grandfather’s Darvocet a day after I left a halfway house where my friend OD’d and died. I have no fucking clue how I’ve managed to stay clean since then. Watermelon rutabaga. Watermelon rutabaga. Watermelon rutabaga. Watermelon rutabaga.”

  In International Cinema, the first few black-and-white art house snoozefests make clear the difference between “film” and “movies.” Does anybody like this crap or is the entire genre predicated upon people pretending?

  A steamy, double-entendre-laden handwritten letter from Chessa arrives. Still sober, she has no desire to get high and doesn’t go to meetings or believe in God. “You inspired me to pursue my dream when you started taking your writing seriously,” she writes. “I’m going to school to be a professional hairstylist.”

  I reply with lies: “School is great. Everyone loves my writing. I never think about dope.”

  At the end of September, we watch Persona. I recognize Ingmar Bergman’s name from the Woody Allen movies Mom took me to see in the theaters, starting with Radio Days when I was ten.

  Persona begins with a spark of light from a projector. Title cards appear and disappear, interspersed with images of a tarantula, slaughtered sheep, an old cartoon, trees, a fence, snow. A woman’s blurry face comes into focus. Then a boy watching the face on a screen. Ninety-nine percent of the run time involves Liv Ullman and Bibi Anderson. The former doesn’t speak.

  After class, I rent a few Bergman films at the local video store. A month later, I’ve seen all his work, most of the films by Buñuel and Fellini, and a smattering of Ray, Goddard, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Malle. The irony isn’t lost on me—a modified AA-ism is keeping me clean: one film at a time.

  Later in the semester, I meet Jane, a sociology major studying the effect of war on kids. Blond, with porcelain skin and an entrancing smile. Her friends call her Glinda—as in the good witch.

  Jane would be perfect if not for Aaron, her theater major boyfriend with a predilection for jumping on tables in the dining hall and spouting lines from plays I can’t identify. There’s also a timing issue. In January, she’s going to the former Yugoslavia for nine months to work at a youth center in a town ravaged by war.

  One night, after dinner, I stop by the cottage Jane shares with three girls. I find her in her room using a quasi-functional hotplate to cook powdered mashed potatoes from a box and corn from a can.

  The unfairness hurts. Every semester, money grows in my Smith Barney brokerage account, which I didn’t earn. I never have to touch it, thanks to the allowance Herbie gives me. Every semester, Jane incurs more debt while going to school full-time and working at the library for practically nothing.

  Pretending not to have eaten, I ask Jane to dinner. In the car, “I Got You Babe” by Sonny and Cher plays on the radio. We sing along, laughing, and laugh our way through dinner at a local diner.

  A few nights later, at a party off-campus, Jane stumbles up to me at two in the morning, asking for a ride to her cottage. I drive her home and walk her to the door. She kisses me and pulls me inside,
and we make out and fall asleep on her bed.

  In the morning, I pretend to be confused.

  “I must’ve been drunk or high or . . .”

  “That’s funny,” Jane says. “I was pretending to be drunk to get you here and have my way with you.” An hour later, she breaks up with Aaron.

  Over the next few weeks, much torrid, unclothed dry humping ensues, but Jane and I don’t have sex. She says she’s slept with only two guys. I lie and say, “Me too—except they were both girls.” I find it odd when she asks about the girls. I wish I could scrub Aaron from my memory and not have to see him on campus. I don’t want to know about Duane, the kid she dated in high school. Is it wrong to wish he were dead?

  Jane listens to Prince and Elliot Smith and loves Woody Allen movies, especially Stardust Memories, which I haven’t seen but claim as my all-time favorite. She describes her suburban upbringing as “vanilla.” Happy married parents. Close relationships with her older brother and younger sister. Her eyes get misty when I tell her my parents divorced when I was four and I haven’t had contact with my father in almost two years.

  “How awful,” she says, laying a hand on my shoulder.

  “Nah. He’s a bad, bad guy. I’m much better off without him.”

  We’re lying in Jane’s bed. I look down at our clothes strewn across the floor. One of my shoes is on its side. The leather soles, smooth and shiny tan when I bought them, are black and scuffed and worn. The insides stink. They used to be perfect. I should have been more careful.

  The first time we have sex, it’s strictly missionary, but there’s an intensity, more meaningful than other girls I’d been with. I want to open up about my past, but I’m terrified of scaring her away. After a week of rehearsing and revising a speech, I share a picture of myself in hockey shoulder pads and tighty-whities and butterflies in my hair.

  “I got a job as a promoter for Limelight, Tunnel, and USA and started doing heroin. I knew it was a mistake, so I told my parents and checked myself into rehab. Haven’t looked back.”

  “Wow,” Jane says, eyes widening. “I can’t even imagine.”

  “You know what they say—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It’s all about the power of positive thinking.”

  “I think you’re the most real person I’ve ever met.”

  As the semester winds down, we don’t talk about the future—where the relationship is going, or even if it is a relationship. Before Jane leaves for her extended semester abroad, I make a dozen mix tapes. At the end of the second side on each, I splice together hundreds of short snippets—to express the romantic feelings I can’t say on my own. We agree to stay in touch via a new technology the school recently implemented: electronic mail.

  Throughout January, I’m in the computer lab every day, checking my email, sending notes to Jane. At the end of the month, when I still haven’t heard back, I resume contact with Chessa and start hooking up with girls at school.

  Abby is tall and rail thin with short bleached blond hair and black horn-rim glasses. Her teeth aren’t big but somehow they get in the way when we kiss. She wears men’s underwear, which kind of freaks me out. In bed one night, she takes a drag from the cigarette I just lit. When she passes it back, the filter is warm and squishy and gross.

  Courtney has long brown hair, wears traditional women’s panties, and talks too much about hunting trips with her father. Julie tells me, point blank, that she gives the best blow jobs. I find out that she does. Then she starts showing up at my room every night. I don’t want to be around her. I don’t want to be around anyone.

  seventeen

  The letter arrives on my twenty-first birthday. Sent to the registrar, via certified mail, it was written on a typewriter in all caps:

  THIS IS TO INFORM YOU THAT AS OF 3/11, I AM NO LONGER RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY COST OR OBLIGATION WHATSOEVER RELATED TO OR INCURRED BY MY SON DAVID. EFFECTIVE AT ONCE YOU MUST DEAL DIRECTLY WITH DAVID REGARDING ALL MATTERS CONCERNING HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE COLLEGE.

  I try not to show emotion as I tuck the letter back into the envelope and step outside.

  The sky is a smoky gray haze. It snowed a foot last night. Salt particles crunch under my feet. I want to scream but I don’t. I want to cry but I can’t. I get into bed and listen to Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of.”

  Mom calls in a choked-up fury. She got a copy of the letter, which she refers to as “a giant fuck-you” to me.

  “What kind of piece of shit does that to his own kid?” she asks. “You don’t deny your kids—you kill for them. He never got it. I know you will when you’re a parent.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Aren’t you angry, David?”

  “Of course.”

  Mom talks about hiring a lawyer. She says my grandfather will cover the rest of my education and expenses. “Your life won’t change,” she says. “Not one iota.”

  “Can I do something to help?”

  “Thrive, David. Be strong. Otherwise, he wins.”

  A month after the letter, my skin is tighter, my muscles tenser and achier, my stomach queasier. I can’t get out of bed and I can’t sleep. With increasing frequency, I catch myself gnashing my hands together and notice little bits of skin on my bright red palms, like shards of pencil eraser on a page after rigorous use.

  One sleepless night, I get into my car and drive around aimlessly on Route 9.

  I’ve driven this stretch many times—reflective signs before Wilmington, tight curve by the Whetstone Inn, a homemade wooden cross pitched into the ground in front of a tree with a chunk of bark missing, about the height of the average car’s front bumper.

  Cresting the hill before Auger Hole Road, I’m thinking about Nat—a kid I knew in high school. He hanged himself from a rafter on his parents’ front porch, on a Saturday night in eleventh grade. The next morning, his mom found him when she opened the door to get the newspaper. It was Mother’s Day.

  In the sublime calm of headlights and wind and Nirvana’s “Negative Creep” cranked on the stereo, I take off my seat belt and watch the speedometer tilt right—fifty, sixty, eighty-five . . . a hundred miles per hour.

  Two years sober.

  When will this get easier?

  Will it get easier?

  An email from Jane arrives at the end of April. “I’ve been listening to your mix tapes, thinking about you nonstop, trying to get in touch. The internet is unreliable here.”

  I type a long, unabashed response: the letter from my father, the emptiness and loneliness, the urge to stick needles in my arm. I read it, then delete it and start over.

  “Everything is great. I declared dual majors in film and philosophy, focusing on existentialism Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen films. I have a summer internship at an independent movie studio in NYC. Turns out I might be in your neck of the woods soon. Any chance I could swing by?”

  Jane replies the next day. “Really? You’d come here to see me?”

  The day after my internship ends in early August, I take a commercial flight to Vienna and then a chartered jet to Sarajevo, where I’m greeted by a swarm of soldiers with drawn semiautomatic rifles. After searching and interrogating me, they escort me to a door that opens to the blistering midday Balkan sun and to Jane leaning against a rusted, lime green ’80s era European sedan, a cigarette dangling from her lips. I’ve never seen her smoke before.

  We run to each other. A hug turns into a long, soft, wet kiss. It’s awkward at first, like we both wanted to but neither was sure the other would accept.

  Jane introduces me to a tall, muscular guy who doesn’t speak English. I can’t pronounce his name. He drives us a relatively short distance to the youth center, but it takes four hours on cratered roads, littered with debris, lined with bombed-out, pockmarked buildings.

  Jane and Muscles seem perfectly relaxed. One of my mix tapes plays on the car’s shitty speakers. “Sometimes” by James ends. “Wish You Were Here” begins.

  Jane turns around i
n the passenger seat. “Nobody here had heard of Pink Floyd until I played this.”

  When we arrive, I meet the staff and kids and a photographer—Frank, from Amherst, Massachusetts. Jane is working with him on a photo exhibition.

  The few who speak English translate for the others. I’m peppered with questions about the price of Levi’s in America, Converse All Stars color options, Pink Floyd. It’s thrilling to expose Pero to The Dark Side of the Moon, his eyes glimmering when I point out the hidden messages.

  War stories are hard to listen to. Everyone has seen friends and family shot dead, mutilated bodies piled high on roadsides. Bombs dropping and exploding. Barbed wire and land mines. Cold winters without heat or electricity. Desperation. Al lost his parents and siblings over the course of a single day.

  During the war, when all the hospitals closed, the local rodent population helped themselves to whatever medicine was lying around. Rats the size of cats still roam the streets. Elvis speaks of a hunger so intense that he resorted to hunting and eating them.

  I’m ashamed for not appreciating the easy life I lucked into. I decide to leave my Discman and CDs and Levi’s and Converse behind when I go home.

  After midnight, Jane and I retreat to a small room on the first floor. Sweat drips from the bulging plaster walls. It’s a hundred degrees with the window open. We lay on a ripped sheet on a filthy, grooved wooden floor. Jane talks about living in the moment, without regret, “carpeing the diems.” I think she’s building to something. I’m queasy before she confesses to flings with Elvis and Al and Pero. Then I want to gouge out their fucking eyeballs.

  “We never talked about us before I left,” she says. “And Balkan boys are my forbidden fruit. I didn’t know if you’d moved on. Are you okay?”

  “Me? Yeah.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  “Why would I be?”

  “Were you with anyone else?”

  I say no as if I’m offended.

  We have very quiet, very sweaty, very intense sex. After, Jane falls asleep in my arms. I close my eyes but can’t sleep. I can’t stay in this grove of forbidden fruit.