The Weight of Air

by David Poses

  Thick brown liquid spreads across the scuffed floor. The guy gapes as if he’s watching a friend bleed out. The manager steps over the spill and unlocks the cabinet. Calling to someone to get a mop, he grabs two more bottles and tries to give them to the customer, but he says “I’m all set” and trudges out of the store.

  In the next lane, two women coo at boxed items in the cabinet o’ vice: a Frisbee with a bottle of Cuervo, Jack Daniel’s and a flask, two martini glasses and a chrome shaker with Bombay Sapphire.

  “We should totally put on ball gowns and make martinis.”

  “Totally.”

  “Shaken, not stirred.”

  The double standard is maddening. Alcohol can shut down more of your organs than all other substances combined, and alcohol withdrawal can kill you. No other drug is that addictive or dangerous.

  Illegal drugs are involved in more overdose fatalities because potency is unknown. If those drugs were legal and regulated, potency would be measured and printed on labels—and heroin overdose would be as easy to prevent as alcohol overdose.

  Alcohol isn’t legal because it’s safer. Alcohol is safer because it’s legal.

  thirty-three

  Mom leaves a dozen messages before I call back and tell her about the firing.

  “Everything happens for a reason,” she says. “First it was Jane and now this. I’m sure you’ll find someone and something else up there. You’re too smart and handsome and capable not to. I keep hoping Daniel will go to Maine and work at Hyde School after he graduates. That place was so good for him.”

  “Is he thinking of doing that?”

  “He’s not thinking. That’s why he needs to be back there. Your grandparents said he reeked of alcohol and got up to go to the bathroom twelve times when they took him to dinner for his birthday. When was the last time you talked to him?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “The other day, I was thinking—you’ve been clean for five years. He can’t stay clean for five minutes. Maybe you can talk some sense into him. Will you call him?”

  “Sure.”

  If I don’t do it now, I won’t later, and I don’t want Mom nagging me about it. I hang up with her and call my brother.

  “David, I’m doing bong hits with Jason on my new glass six-footer. Listen.”

  I hear the buds ignite and water bubbling in the chamber and coughing. Although I’ve never been there, I can see the cloud of pot smoke in Daniel’s apartment in Deerfield Beach. When he gets back on the phone, I tell him what Mom said about his birthday dinner with our grandparents.

  “Jesus Christ. I went to the bathroom twice to smoke cigarettes.”

  “I’m just telling you what she said.”

  “Well, not to be a dick, but—”

  “Dick butt.”

  “I’m serious. If you called to give me a speech.”

  “Have I ever given you a speech?”

  “No, but you did make me order a douchebag at a Chinese restaurant in front of Nana and Poppa, though. How old was I? Five?”

  “Young enough for me to hornswoggle into ordering a douchebag.”

  “You loved torturing me. But then you gave me all those CDs for my birthday. Did you stop listening to music or something?”

  “I switched to mp3s. I found a ton of Radiohead bootlegs. And now that Jane’s not around, I can listen to them anytime.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I had a girlfriend for three years and she cheated on me and we broke up, I’d be lying in bed, completely depressed—but you’re all upbeat and shit.”

  “Nah. It happened for a reason. Everything happens for a reason.”

  “You sound like Mom.”

  From the kitchen, I hear rain pinging on the metal lawn chairs and pouring from the gutter downspout. I grab the last pint of Häagen-Dazs from the freezer and force ice cream down my throat, staring at my keys, thinking through the route to Brooklyn—I-95 to 295, to something else, then Framingham Service Plaza, the weird bookstore in Tolland, 84 to 684 to the Hutchinson River Parkway. I see bridges over highways, cylindrical concrete structures holding them up, steel guardrails surrounding them—in place, I assume, to stop a person like me from plowing into an immovable object.

  Long days of nothing intensify the pain. I cycle through other ways to off myself: hanging, drowning, overdose on over-the-counter medication. I end up dialing into AOL, looking at guns and gun store websites. My life isn’t going to get better.

  I type “Maine methadone clinic” in the search bar. Two results. Bangor, two hours away. Portland, same distance. I call the Bangor clinic.

  The guy on the phone says to make an appointment for a urine test. “If there’s dope in your system, we’ll put you on a program and taper you down. You’ll feel better once you’re off the smack.”

  “I’m off the smack. I could piss heroin if I could find it around here, but if I could find it around here, I wouldn’t need to drive to fucking Bangor every day.”

  “Ayuh,” he says. “I hear ya, but them’s the rules.”

  Though I’m more restrained with the woman on the phone at the Portland clinic, the result is the same. “I understand,” she says, not exactly brimming with understanding. “But it’s the law.”

  Methadone is a safe alternative to heroin. If I can’t get on the former, I have no choice but to track down the latter. In Switzerland, heroin can be dispensed at clinics. The government calls it harm reduction. We’d do that too—if US drug laws had anything to do with health or safety. Drug use isn’t a moral failure. Punitive drug policy is.

  Would Andrea have invited me to the party if we hadn’t bumped into each other in town? Her backyard is teeming with drunk Workshops employees, celebrating the illicit bounty she smuggled from Cuba. Rum. Coffee. Cigars. I watch from a distance at first, where the grass meets Lake Megunticook’s shoreline, staring at the rippling reflection of a waxing gibbous moon.

  A little before midnight, the crowd starts to thin. I summon the nerve to approach the hostess.

  “Great party. Thanks for the invitation.”

  “Well, we didn’t really get to hang out.” Andrea smiles and says something about a Workshops job fair tomorrow and all these people to interview. She takes a swig from a bottle of high-proof rum. “You should come to dinner after. We’ll make sushi.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” she says with drunken seriousness. “But only come if you wear something made of Q-tips.”

  “Will you also be . . .”

  “I’ll wear a skirt that rustles like chiffon.”

  In the morning, I pick up a fruit smoothie and write a note, wishing her a speedy recovery from the hangover I assume she’s nursing. I leave it on her desk at work and spend the rest of the day fashioning hundreds of Q-tips into a necktie. When I show up at her house for dinner, Andrea runs a finger over the cotton swabs of my labor.

  “Wow. You actually did it.”

  “I aim to please.”

  “And you’re so nice, bringing me a smoothie.”

  “My mom says I’m handsome too.”

  Andrea laughs and shows me to the kitchen where her two housemates are cursing at an uncooperative sheet of seaweed. As we attempt to construct California rolls, Andrea mentions an upcoming photography book contest in Manhattan. The books are in her office. Lyman is making her drive them to the city.

  “I keep telling him my Jetta’s too small,” she says. “Wait. You have a Cherokee. Wanna take a road trip this weekend?”

  I accept with muzzled enthusiasm and offer my mother’s condo as a lodging option—she’ll be in Florida.

  Over the next few days, I craft the perfect mix tape for the drive. “Olsen Olsen” by Sigur Rós, “Everyday I Write the Book” by Elvis Costello, “Into Temptation” by Crowded House, “Everloving” by Moby. The tape is in the deck on Friday morning when Andrea hops in the passenger seat.

  “So,” I
say, backing out of her driveway, “tell me everything about yourself.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything. Your past, likes and dislikes, secrets, sexual fantasies—just kidding!”

  Andrea tells me about growing up in southern Maine in an achievement-oriented family and falling in love with art in college. With a fire in her big brown eyes, she describes her work across a variety of media: a desk covered in cake frosting with “blow jobs from a dirty virgin” in icing; a wall in a gallery, with hundreds of pieces of chewed gum stuck to it—pussy goblins, she calls them. She moved to Brooklyn after graduating without ever visiting New York City before. She spent a year there working at the Brooklyn Museum. Then two years ago, she applied for a job at the Workshops.

  I immediately drop the heroin bomb—the version of the story everyone else in my life believes. Five years sober. Don’t look back. Positive thinking. Mind over matter. Blah blah blah.

  At a gas station in Connecticut, Andrea gets out of the car to stretch while I fill the tank. Her tight gray sweater rises up, revealing a sparkly green thong at the top of her jeans. I look at the books in the back of my Jeep and think they could have fit in her Jetta, easily. She knows that, right? She wanted me to go to New York with her.

  Within minutes of arriving at my mom’s house, we tear each other’s clothes off and have the most intense, most explosive sex in the history of the world. Lying in bed, we stay up late and compare notes on art and movies and books and music. We share our dreams—what we want to be, where we want to travel.

  In the morning, we fulfill Andrea’s photo book mission and I take her to the city’s finest magical and secret locations—the twenty-five-foot waterfall on Fifty-First Street; the arches outside the Grand Central Oyster Bar, where we can hear each other whisper from opposite sides of the crowded hall; Track 61; Tomoe Sushi; frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity.

  We can’t keep our hands off each other, and I can’t get enough of the passion in her voice, the sparkle in her eyes, the way she laughs to the point of hiccupping. Everything about her turns me on.

  High on the newness of love, I don’t give heroin a single thought.

  thirty-four

  As spring turns to summer, we’re together all the time. Andrea shows me her favorite photography (“there’s Nan Goldin and then there’s everyone else”), and her favorite painter, Ida Applebroog. I introduce her to my favorite music, Radiohead and Sigur Rós, and filmmakers, Bergman and Buñuel.

  We explore Maine’s coast, cook decadent meals, and have lots of kinky sex. Andrea teaches me to drive a stick shift, and I tell her about Ali the cab driver. I give her my copy of Cat’s Cradle, and she gives me Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, which I read cover to cover. We write love notes back and forth. Every glyph is a work of art in her confident, lowercase block print.

  I can’t afford an original Nan Goldin for Andrea’s birthday, so I write a passionate plea to her: “If you have any scraps lying around, your trash would be Andrea’s treasure.” When I can’t track down her address, I find a way to reach Applebroog and repurpose the letter. Soon a FedEx package arrives containing a note and a small original painting.

  I make a Jell-O mold with cigarettes and dismembered Barbie dolls, and present it with the Applebroog on Andrea’s twenty-fifth birthday.

  “No fucking way,” she says, misty-eyed, studying her Applebroog. She wraps her arms around my neck. “I can’t believe you made this happen.”

  “Power of positive thinking.”

  Every day, Andrea takes photographs and paints while I embark on a new novel, Pilgrim, a dark comedy:

  Lying on the couch, unable to find the TV remote, and unwilling to get up and change the channel, David watches a documentary on plate tectonics. When the narrator speaks of the San Andreas Fault and California’s inevitable detachment from the mainland, our protagonist experiences an epiphany. Some divine force wants him to buy property on the California-Nevada border, and dig down to the earth’s crust and jump-start a geological event that’ll dislodge California.

  Hilarity and high jinks ensue as David moves to Pahrump, Nevada, and assembles a crew of misfits and dignitaries. He encounters other oceanfront property prospectors, including the Van Dorsten brothers, Keating and Kipling, fresh off their discovery of 3,200 acres of Minnesotan land in southern Manitoba. They have experience, corporate sponsorship, and the support of Dudley Baumgartner, amateur podiatric surgeon, mayor of Pahrump, and father of Lolita, a middle school geography teacher, who schools David on the ways of love and the irrefutable fact that state lines aren’t perforated.

  By the end of summer, Camden feels too small for our big dreams. We fantasize about moving to far-flung places and living as artists. I’m going to be a writer. Andrea is going to be a painter. We call ourselves “an unstoppable force.”

  One night, as we’re flipping through an oversized National Geographic world atlas, one of Andrea’s friends calls. He’s looking for a roommate to share his Brooklyn apartment in the nice part of Sunset Park. We agree to split the rent.

  Before the move in September, Andrea secures freelance photo-editing opportunities with several magazines. I get a job at as an art director/ copywriter at a boutique ad agency. These gigs are temporary. They won’t stop the unstoppable force.

  We spend one night in the loud, sweltering Brooklyn apartment and start planning our escape. Soon we find a place in Piermont, a small town twenty miles north of Manhattan, on the other side of the Hudson River. It’s much more conducive to our artistic leanings—except that after eight months, I am still not writing and Andrea is still not painting.

  On a Monday in May, my mom calls before her usual nine o’clock. She says my grandfather was rushed to the hospital with chest pain.

  Mom takes the next flight to Florida. She tells me to stay put until we find out more. The next day, as he lies unconscious in a hospital bed, Mom says not to come. “He won’t know you’re here. And who knows when he’ll wake up.”

  Looking out the window, I see leaves on the trees, flowers, birds. Life is everywhere. Life is strong. Life endures. He’ll be okay, I tell myself.

  Twenty-four hours later, “when” becomes “if.”

  On Thursday, Herbie is moved to hospice. Mom pleads with me not to get on a plane.

  “You don’t want to see him this way. His body is filling with fluid and . . .”

  “I need to see him.”

  “David. He wouldn’t want this to be your last memory of him.”

  I start to cry and can’t stop. I drive to Tower Records and buy a Disc-man and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony on CD. I ship them to Florida via overnight express. He’ll wake up when he hears Mahler.

  Andrea comes home and holds me. I tell her about the hundred-degree movie theater with the broken air conditioner, where Herbie and I watched Amadeus on opening night. We turn off the air conditioner and close the windows and watch Amadeus in the sweltering apartment.

  Mom calls in the morning. “Your package came. He has the headphones on and the music playing.”

  “Is he awake?”

  “David.”

  Reality is a wrecking ball through Sheetrock. It winds up and swings and doesn’t stop. Over and over and I’m hollow inside—nothing to absorb the blow. There is no next time with my grandfather. There’s only a wrecking ball. A few hours later, while listening to Mahler’s Eighth, he takes his last breath.

  Herbie used to complain about cemeteries. He thought the land should have been used for something happy—a golf course or playground. Per his instructions, there is no funeral or obituary.

  Weeks after his death, I’m still choking on tears. When I catch myself thinking about heroin, I can’t remember the last time I thought about it. The urge is a craving: an intense want, not need. I don’t tell Andrea. She still believes the lie. It bothers me, but I’m too afraid of losing her to come clean.

  As cravings come and go, with increasing frequency and intensity, I think about mo
ving farther north. Andrea and I take day trips around the Hudson Valley and fall in love with a cosmopolitan village surrounded by mountains and the Hudson River. I’m not sure it’s far enough away, sixty-five miles north of the city.

  In August, we make an impulsive decision to rent a small oceanfront house—sight unseen—in East Blue Hill, Maine, for $400 a month. Two hours northeast of Camden, the town has eighty-three year-round residents. We’ll get part-time jobs at a coffee shop and live like royalty. I’ll write. Andrea will paint.

  Our friends think we’re crazy when we share the plan. Days before the move, two planes crash into the World Trade Center. Nobody thinks we’re crazy anymore.

  I print a resume and a few short stories and hand-deliver them to R. Nathaniel W. Barrows, publisher of Blue Hill’s local newspaper, The Weekly Packet. He speaks with an underbite, wears the same hat as the Captain from the Captain and Tennille, and reads my stuff in his office of mahogany, brass, and leather, and old paintings of sailboats in gilded frames and ships in bottles.

  “This is a well-educated town, but if I print articles with ‘corybantic’ and ‘alacrity’ . . .”

  “In high school, I sometimes used ‘Cory Bantic’ as a pen name.”

  “Point is, folks will be offended if they need a dictionary to read my paper.”

  “Got it. No gimcrack—don’t be a sesquipedalian.”

  “And don’t be so extreme. Your writing is big words or slang. Serious journalism is centered.”

  R. Nathaniel W. assigns an article about an old farmhouse that burned down last week. He says to contact firemen, police, and the property owner, and then write the piece and give it to Betty, the editor and lead columnist.

  No one at the fire station or police station will talk to me. The property owner won’t talk either. I write the article anyway and give it to Betty, who takes off her glasses, puts on another pair, and makes a popping sound with her lips while reading.