The Weight of Air

by David Poses

  “I told him a hundred times, I says, ‘Mikey, not there. What you wanna do is you wanna go farther south.’ I says Vero Beach. I says Lauderdale.”

  An older Black woman ambles over with a cane. “Bless your heart,” she says. “This here’s what I call the Lord’s work.”

  Head high in her pastel purple coat with matching hat and dress and satiny gloves, she fishes a fat bank envelope from her pocketbook, removes a crisp twenty-dollar bill, and drops it into the jug with a satisfied nod. “There. Now I can say I done did my part.”

  I hold up the Three Musketeers box. “Please take as many as you want.”

  “Ever since I got the diabetes, doctor’s been telling me to lay off the sweets—if you can believe that.” She shakes her head and then turns to the cop.

  “You?” he says, as if he’s known her all his life. “Diabetes? Nuh-uh.”

  “Yes indeedy. It’s dreadful is what it is, just dreadful.”

  She takes a few steps toward Madison and comes back. “My late husband, God rest his soul, he used to tell me, ‘Virginia, you’d lose yo head if it wun’t screwed top yo shoulders.’” Walking away in the other direction, she says, “I’ll tell you another thing—when you go, it’s much harder for the living than it is for the deceased.”

  Close to the subway station with almost $400 in my pocket, I think I hear my name. I turn around and see Dan shivering, his lips chattering. “Coldest day of the year,” he says. “Care to warm up in Barnes and Noble?”

  I follow him into the store and through the departments as he grabs items for Loretta: Breathless on DVD, a Marshall Tucker Band CD, and a heavy, expensive French cookbook.

  “What do you wanna bet that none of this has anything to do with a Burger King campaign?”

  In the checkout line, the guy ahead of us argues with the cashier about an expired coupon. Dan drops Loretta’s stuff into my hands. He says not to move and runs off. He returns with a handful of Kurt Vonnegut books.

  “You’re a bookworm, right? Which is the most famous?”

  “Cat’s Cradle is the best book I’ve ever read.”

  Dan abandons the other titles on a table of discounted hardcover biographies and rolls his eyes as I start to summarize the book.

  “It’s not for me. I’m just gonna wait in the lobby for Kurt to show up and—bam—I’ll have an autographed copy of The Cat’s in the Cradle for Jim for Christmas.”

  “Right, because Kurt Vonnegut hangs out in our lobby so much.”

  “You’re a bookworm and a smoker, and you don’t know Kurt Vonnegut lives in one of those townhouses on Forty-Eighth Street?”

  “Kurt Vonnegut. Lives across the street from the office.”

  “Amy barely leaves the building and she’s seen him hundreds of times. Practically every morning he has breakfast in that—ahem—restaurant in the lobby.”

  Is this actually happening?

  As we walk along Forty-Seventh Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues, I hear a loud thud and rattling change or a tambourine. The sounds repeat rhythmically. Halfway down the block, I see a homeless woman sitting on an upturned milk crate. She’s pounding a ratty coffee cup against the pavement. A stoic expression on her frozen face, she’s wearing nothing but a big, dirty garbage bag with holes cut out for her head and her arms.

  Dan elbows me, side mouthing, “Scam city. Cover your wallet.”

  I drop the proceeds from my fundraising endeavor into the cup and walk faster. Dan chases after me, yelling, “She’s gonna use that money to buy crack. You know that, right? She probably sold her clothes for a hit.”

  Selling her clothes is the least awful reason I can think of for her circumstances. I don’t care if she buys crack with the money. I don’t care if she burns it to get warm for a minute. She needs it. And I don’t.

  The first battalion of ants arrive in the afternoon. Then the electrocutions begin. I don’t want to be at work when my body starts systematically ridding itself of everything besides vital organs, but I really don’t want to be in transit. It’s freezing in the office, and I’m sweating like a fat guy in a sauna. My boxers and shirt are soaked. I don’t have other clothes to change into.

  Loretta comes down the hall with her head bowed, untying a scarf from around her neck. Once it’s off, she uses it to fan herself. She stops abruptly, five feet from my desk.

  “Holy hell, Dave. You look awful.”

  “I think I’m coming down with something.”

  “Go home before you give it to the rest of us.”

  I put my computer to sleep and ease out of my chair. The ants fall to the base of my spine and start over. Loretta sits on the unoccupied desk next to mine, speed dials the car service company, and arranges a pickup for me.

  For three days, the ants and electrocutions intensify, and everything hurts. I piss and puke and sweat and shit and squirm and writhe and cough and sneeze. I’m hot and cold simultaneously, saturating sheets and blankets with foulness when I’m not in the bathroom. I alternate between thinking I’m dying and wishing I were dead.

  By Saturday, I’m able to ingest liquid without my body acting like a sieve. Jane holds cans of ginger ale and guides straws to my mouth and makes toast. She pats me with wet washcloths and dry towels. On Sunday, we lay in bed and watch Mother Night. Does Kurt Vonnegut really live across the street from the office or did Dan tell me in a dream?

  On Monday morning, my thinking is just clear enough to know it’s not quite clear. My throat is raw and sore. My bones hurt. I get out of bed and smoke a cigarette by the window, and I feel a vague pull drawing me out, the invisible thread of karass. I take a shower and get dressed for work.

  ATMs are everywhere on Forty-Eighth Street between Sixth and Second Avenues. Passing each one without so much as a pause is a major victory. A poster for the Lincoln Center Ballet shows a time-lapse photo of a ballerina in the different stages of a pirouette. She’s crouched at the far left, midair in the middle three, and on squared toes on the right. That’s how it works—you have to get really low before you can soar.

  Instead of going straight into the office, I wander up Second Avenue for the first time since I started working at Ammirati. Wads of black gum stain the sidewalk, and trash clogs the gutter. A sign in a gallery window reads, “Exclusive Worldwide Dealer of Kurt Vonnegut Art.”

  The small, dark shop has low ceilings—not what you’d expect from the exclusive worldwide dealer of anything. Nearly every inch of wall is covered with originals and limited-edition prints. Mostly drawings, but also a few quotes. All are signed.

  “What can I do you for?” the proprietor asks.

  “Just poking around. I’m a big Vonnegut fan.”

  He asks where I’m from. I think he thinks I’m a tourist.

  “I work across the street—in the building where Mr. Vonnegut eats breakfast every day.”

  “Ammirati?”

  “Yep.”

  “Copywriter?”

  “Yeah, but what I really want to do is—”

  “Write novels?”

  At the end of the narrow space is a framed quote in Vonnegut’s handwriting: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God—Bokonon.”

  Walking back to work, I remember what my grandfather said when he and Nana returned from two weeks in the Pacific Northwest. “Never go to Vancouver. You won’t want to leave. Nowhere else on earth has mountains and ocean so close together.”

  Loretta dispatches me to the production studio to mount storyboards. I crank them out and listen to John Fahey and briefly consider getting back into therapy, but there’s no reason for me to pay to hear what I already know. I need to stop pretending to be someone else and stop worrying about making everyone else happy. I need to make some changes and accept that all I can control is how I react to what I can’t control.

  In a few hours, I’ll have another clean day under my belt. I resign myself to not stopping in Bushwick on the way home, and I leave tomorrow open for discussion. Hopefully I�
�ll resist, but there’s something freeing about reserving the right not to.

  At six-thirty, achy and exhausted and probably high on toxic fumes, I finish the last board and gather cans of spray adhesive and paint brushes. I open the closet and see a quote handwritten on a picture of Albert Einstein taped to the inside of the door.

  “‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’—Albert Einstein.”

  I wait in the lobby until seven so the company will pay for a cab home.

  On the corner of Forty-Eighth Street and Second Avenue, five minutes pass without a taxi sighting. Weird. I start down Second with my hand in the air. I’m almost at Forty-Third when a taxi screeches across all four lanes of traffic to pick me up.

  The driver turns his head and greets me with a warm smile and a “hello” in an accent that sounds kind of Jamaican but not really. On his ID badge, his first name is Ali and his last name is crazy long, with very few vowels. Taxi drivers generally don’t talk to me, and I don’t talk to them, but this guy is gregarious.

  “New York City, such a wondrous place. Don’t you think, mon?”

  “I think it’s a hellhole. I need to get out of here.”

  Ali looks at me in the rearview mirror. “Move to Camden, Maine.”

  Before I take another breath, before Ali says another word, before I get home and launch a full-scale online investigation, I know I’m moving to Camden.

  “I been there only once, mon. And I get out of the cab for just one minute, but it was breath-tak-ing.”

  “You were there for only a minute?”

  “My dispatcher gave me a special fare on my first day driving a cab. I had to turn around right away.”

  “But if it’s so breath-tak-ing, why haven’t you gone back?”

  Ali laughs. “Twas three weeks ago, mon. I just move here from Senegal, but oh! Camden was mountains, right next to ocean.”

  The first result on an AltaVista search for “Camden Maine” is the chamber of commerce’s website. A picture on the home page shows a dark blue ocean against a backdrop of lush mountains. “Breathtaking” is an understatement. I click on the photo gallery tab: images of high-masted wooden sailboats in a picturesque cove. Islands. A lighthouse. Old, Federalist-style houses. An archetypal New England fishing village. Small and peaceful. The website pegs Camden’s population at five thousand year-round residents, tripling in the summer.

  A list of places of interest includes restaurants, shops, art galleries—and Maine Photographic Workshops, “the world-renowned learning center for photography, film, and multimedia.” I click the link. A new page opens. I recognize many of the photographers’ names: Mary Ellen Mark, Arnold Newman, Joyce Tennyson. Impressive.

  The Workshops operates out of an old grange hall on Rockport harbor, one mile south of Camden. The About Us page says the founder is a former National Geographic photographer. I click a link at the bottom: Employment Opportunities. My heart races as the page slowly loads. Long load time means mucho content, right? I’d move to Camden to wash dishes in the Workshops cafeteria. I’d do anything to live and write there. The page finally finishes loading. There’s one job:

  The Maine Photographic Workshops seeks an experienced in-house graphic designer/copywriter to produce materials for our internationally acclaimed programs in photography, film, video, and multimedia. Qualified candidates must be comfortable on a Macintosh, with proficiency in QuarkXpress, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and related software. Send resume, cover letter, and portfolio to Kevin.

  The salary is $5,000 more than I make at Ammirati, plus medical and dental. I draft a letter, spiff up my resume, and attach PDFs of my portfolio to an email.

  First thing in the morning, Kevin calls. He tells me about the job: producing every shred of Workshops’ marketing material—their course catalogs, promotional pieces, print ads. While he describes the process and flow, everything is “You’ll be doing (this or that),” as opposed to “Whoever we hire will be doing . . .”

  He asks if I have a computer. I claim to own a brand-new Mac G4 and list the specs from J&R Music World’s full-page ad in the New York Times tacked to the corkboard behind my desk. Since I’m already lying, I tell him I have licenses for all the software in the job listing, as well as a license for Adobe’s nine-thousand-font suitcase package.

  “Outstanding. When can you come for an interview?”

  Before I can think of how and when I’ll get to Maine, Kevin says the Workshops will pay for my flight. We settle on next Wednesday. He says to expect a call from Stephanie once the arrangements have been made. Holy shit!

  Looking at pictures of Camden and Rockport online, I strategize about telling Jane. Break up with her now? Wait until I get the job? I will get this job.

  Grant calls. A family friend with ties to the Manhattan DA’s office might be able to get his charges dropped. He sounds hopeful. He says he’ll know soon. Then he hums the riff from “Another One Bites the Dust.”

  Maybe he wasn’t lying to me after all.

  “More news. Sara’s in Florida for her grandpa’s funeral. This time next week, when she’s back in town, I’ll know if I’m free or fucked. Either way, I think it’s cause for a celebration.”

  My brain starts churning out excuses to reschedule my interview. I go outside and smoke a cigarette and tell myself that this job is a matter of life or death. It sounds cheesy in my head, but I know it’s true. I call Jane at work.

  “Is everything all right? You never call me at work.”

  “The craziest thing just happened. I was looking for places in Maine for a GMC trucks shoot, and I found the Maine Photographic Workshops. It’s on the ocean, surrounded by mountains, and they’re looking for a graphic designer/copywriter.”

  “You want to move?”

  “I mean, I saw pictures and thought it’d be amazing to live there. Then I found the Workshops, and you know, the whole ‘everything happens for a reason’ thing.”

  “What about the whole ‘I can’t wait to move to the city’ thing the whole time we were in Vermont?”

  The line is silent for a beat. Jane says, “It sounds interesting, but can we take it one step at a time? Who knows if they’ll even call if you apply.”

  “I applied and they called. I have an interview next week.”

  thirty-one

  Stephanie’s short, bright orange-dyed hair is impossible to miss at baggage claim. I wave and she runs over and hugs me. “I’m so happy to meet you.”

  In the car, Stephanie describes the Workshops staff as a family of artists. “Everyone’s totally unpretentious and laid back. As long as the work gets done, you can pretty much come and go as you please—no set hours, no dress code, no corporate hierarchical BS. And when you see this place . . . my God. It’s magical.”

  “I just can’t believe how lucky I am, the way everything fell into place.”

  “Things don’t just fall into place, David. You make things happen.”

  “I didn’t know Camden existed until a taxi driver told me about it last week.”

  “And you decided to look into it, and you found the Workshops, and you decided to apply. So give yourself some credit. And you impressed the hell out of Kevin, who, by the way, isn’t easily impressed. He hasn’t stopped talking about you. Do you know how long we’ve been looking for—I’ll be stunned if he doesn’t hire you on the spot.”

  Driving through a desolate, snow-covered landscape of trailers, rusted-out cars, and junk piles on Route 90 in Warren, I start to have some doubts. Stephanie mentioned the length of the search, but not the volume of applicants. Do the locals know something I don’t? My brain concocts a story of a grisly murder. Everyone knows Kevin did it, but he can’t be charged because the evidence was destroyed in a mysterious fire.

  Stephanie turns on the radio. “Carnival” by Natalie Merchant crackles in and out as we take a detour through Camden. On the east side of Bay View Street, Penobscot Bay’s chop
py water stretches past dozens of ragged islands, with a faint mirage of the Blue Hill peninsula in the distance. To the west, tall mountains with snow-covered trees. Most of the structures in town were built in the 1800s or earlier. At any second, the frame in my line of sight could be a postcard.

  Kevin opens a drawer, hauls out a stack of fliers and pamphlets and collateral materials, and drops it on his desk as if letting go of a bag of dog shit.

  “For the past ten years, the guy who started the Workshops and still runs it—Lyman—has been paying a local freelancer to design this hideous crap.”

  “I guess he’s big on pastel, two-color gradients, and not much font variety—unless somebody told him to only use Arial and—is that Garamond?”

  “I’m no designer, but look at the formatting. Something is wrong everywhere.”

  “Paper stock’s flimsy too. That doesn’t help the ink saturation. And it’s so flat. How about some die cuts? Or maybe a satin aqueous coating on the images? Something to make it pop. You could reverse emboss the logo or use thermography—you know—when the ink is injected with—”

  “I don’t know what any of that means, but you’d do better in your sleep than this yutz on his best day.”

  Kevin leaves the room to find Lyman. I stare out the window at Rockport Harbor and replay the conversation, certain that I came off as an arrogant, egomaniacal know-it-all. Of course, let me tell you about thermographic ink.

  Lyman has scraggly white hair and male-pattern baldness. Without introducing himself or shaking my hand, he turns a chair around, plops himself down, and rests his hands on the seat back. He draws a deep breath and exhales in three quick bursts—a weird yoga thing?

  “He wants to hire you,” Lyman says, thumbing at Kevin standing behind him. “He thinks your work is good, but he forgets who’s in charge here. Me. And if there’s one thing I absolutely loathe, it’s minimalist design.”

  “I can be less spare with my aesthetic.”

  “You’d better. When I pay to have something printed, I want ink on every inch of the page. White space is throwing money out the window.”