When we talked, I always tried to control the conversation, but Art was slippery, could work death into anything.
“Some Arab invented the idea of the number zero,” I said. “Isn’t that weird? Someone had to think zero up.”
Because it isn’t obvious—that nothing can be something. That something which can’t be measured or seen could still exist and have meaning. Same with the soul, when you think about it.
“True or false,” I said another time, when we were studying for a science quiz. “Energy is never destroyed, it can only be changed from one form into another.”
I hope it’s true—it would be a good argument that you continue to exist after you die, even if you’re transformed into something completely different than what you had been.
* * *
—
He said a lot to me about death and what might follow it, but the thing I remember best was what he had to say about Mars. We were doing a presentation together, and Art had picked Mars as our subject, especially whether or not men would ever go there and try to colonize it. Art was all for colonizing Mars, cities under plastic tents, mining water from the icy poles. Art wanted to go himself.
“It’s fun to imagine, maybe, fun to think about it,” I said. “But the actual thing would be bullshit. Dust. Freezing cold. Everything red. You’d go blind looking at so much red. You wouldn’t really want to do it—leave this world and never come back.”
Art stared at me for a long moment, then bowed his head, and wrote a brief note in robin’s egg blue.
But I’m going to have to do that anyway. Everyone has to do that.
Then he wrote:
You get an astronaut’s life whether you want it or not. Leave it all behind for a world you know nothing about. That’s just the deal.
* * *
—
In the spring, Art invented a game called Spy Satellite. There was a place downtown, the Party Station, where you could buy a bushel of helium-filled balloons for a quarter. I’d get a bunch, meet Art somewhere with them. He’d have his digital camera.
Soon as I handed him the balloons, he detached from the earth and lifted into the air. As he rose, the wind pushed him out and away. When he was satisfied he was high enough, he’d let go a couple balloons, level off, and start snapping pictures. When he was ready to come down, he’d just let go a few more. I’d meet him where he landed and we’d go over to his house to look at the pictures on his laptop. Photos of people swimming in their pools, men shingling their roofs; photos of me standing in empty streets, my upturned face a miniature brown blob, my features too distant to make out; photos that always had Art’s sneakers dangling into the frame at the bottom edge.
Some of his best pictures were low-altitude affairs, things he snapped when he was only a few yards off the ground. Once he took three balloons and swam into the air over Happy’s chain-link enclosure, off at the side of our house. Happy spent all day in his fenced-off pen, barking frantically at women going by with strollers, the jingle of the ice cream truck, squirrels. Happy had trampled all the space in his penned-in plot of earth down to mud. Scattered about him were dozens of dried piles of dog crap. In the middle of this awful brown turdscape was Happy himself, and in every photo Art snapped of him, he was leaping up on his back legs, mouth open to show the pink cavity within, eyes fixed on Art’s dangling sneakers.
I feel bad. What a horrible place to live.
* * *
—
“Get your head out of your ass,” I said. “If creatures like Happy were allowed to run wild, they’d make the whole world look that way. He doesn’t want to live somewhere else. Turds and mud—that’s Happy’s idea of a total garden spot.”
I STRONGLY disagree.
Arthur wrote me, but time has not softened my opinions on this matter. It is my belief that, as a rule, creatures of Happy’s ilk—I am thinking here of canines and men both—more often run free than live caged, and it is in fact a world of mud and feces they desire, a world with no Art in it, or anyone like him, a place where there is no talk of books or God or the worlds beyond this world, a place where the only communication is the hysterical barking of starving and hate-filled dogs.
* * *
—
One Saturday morning, mid-April, my dad pushed the bedroom door open, and woke me up by throwing my sneakers on my bed. “You have to be at the dentist’s in half an hour. Put your rear in gear.”
I walked—it was only a few blocks—and I had been sitting in the waiting room for twenty minutes, dazed with boredom, when I remembered I had told Art that I’d be coming by his house as soon as I got up. The receptionist let me use the phone to call him.
His mom answered. “He just left to see if he could find you at your house,” she told me.
I called my dad.
“He hasn’t been by,” he said. “I haven’t seen him.”
“Keep an eye out.”
“Yeah, well. I’ve got a headache. Art knows how to use the doorbell.”
I sat in the dentist’s chair, my mouth stretched open and tasting of blood and mint, and struggled with unease and an impatience to be going. Did not perhaps trust my father to be decent to Art without myself present. The dentist’s assistant kept touching my shoulder and telling me to relax.
When I was all through and got outside, the deep and vivid blueness of the sky was a little disorientating. The sunshine was headache-bright, bothered my eyes. I had been up for two hours, still felt cotton-headed and dull-edged, not all the way awake. I jogged.
The first thing I saw as I approached my house was Happy, free from his pen. He didn’t so much as bark at me. He was on his belly in the grass, head between his paws. He lifted sleepy eyelids to watch me approach, then let them sag shut again. His pen door stood open in the side yard.
I was looking to see if he was lying on a heap of tattered plastic when I heard the first feeble tapping sound. I turned my head and saw Art in the back of my father’s station wagon, smacking his hands on the window. I walked over and opened the door. At that instant, Happy exploded from the grass with a peal of mindless barking. I grabbed Art in both arms, spun and fled. Happy’s teeth closed on a piece of my flapping pant leg. I heard a tacky ripping sound, stumbled, kept going.
I ran until there was a stitch in my side and no dog in sight—six blocks, at least. Toppled over in someone’s yard. My pant leg was sliced open from the back of my knee to the ankle. I took my first good look at Art. It was a jarring sight. I was so out of breath, I could only produce a thin, dismayed little squeak—the sort of sound Art was always making.
His body had lost its marshmallow whiteness. It had a gold-brown duskiness to it now, so it resembled a marshmallow lightly toasted. He seemed to have deflated to about half his usual size. His chin sagged into his body. He couldn’t hold his head up.
Art had been crossing our front lawn when Happy burst from his hiding place under one of the hedges. In that first crucial moment, Art saw he would never be able to outrun our family dog on foot. All such an effort would get him would be an ass full of fatal puncture wounds. So instead, he jumped into the station wagon, and slammed the door.
The windows were automatic—there was no way to roll them down. Any door he opened, Happy tried to jam his snout in at him. It was seventy degrees outside the car, over a hundred inside. Art watched in dismay as Happy flopped in the grass beside the wagon to wait.
Art sat. Happy didn’t move. Lawn mowers droned in the distance. The morning passed. In time Art began to wilt in the heat. He became ill and groggy. His plastic skin started sticking to the seats.
Then you showed up. Just in time. You saved my life.
But my eyes blurred and tears dripped off my face onto his note. I hadn’t come just in time—not at all.
Art was never the same. His skin stayed
a filmy yellow, and he developed a deflation problem. His parents would pump him up, and for a while he’d be all right, his body swollen with oxygen, but eventually he’d go saggy and limp again. His doctor took one look and told his parents not to put off the trip to Disney World another year.
I wasn’t the same either. I was miserable—couldn’t eat, suffered unexpected stomachaches, brooded and sulked.
“Wipe that look off your face,” my father said one night at dinner. “Life goes on. Deal with it.”
I was dealing, all right. I knew the door to Happy’s pen didn’t open itself. I punched holes in the tires of the station wagon, then left my switchblade sticking out of one of them, so my father would know for sure who had done it. He had police officers come over and pretend to arrest me. They drove me around in the squad car and talked tough at me for a while, then said they’d bring me home if I’d “get with the program.” The next day I locked Happy in the wagon and he took a shit on the driver’s seat. My father collected all the books Art had got me to read, the Bernard Malamud, the Ray Bradbury, the Isaac Bashevis Singer. He burned them on the barbecue grill.
“How do you feel about that, smart guy?” he asked me, while he squirted lighter fluid on them.
“Okay with me,” I said. “They were on your library card.”
That summer, I spent a lot of time sleeping over at Art’s.
Don’t be angry. No one is to blame.
Art wrote me.
“Get your head out of your ass,” I said, but then I couldn’t say anything else because it made me cry just to look at him.
* * *
—
Late August, Art gave me a call. It was a hilly four miles to Scarswell Cove, where he wanted us to meet, but by then months of hoofing it to Art’s after school had hardened me to long walks. I had plenty of balloons with me, just like he asked.
Scarswell Cove is a sheltered, pebbly beach on the sea, where people go to stand in the tide and fish in waders. There was no one there except a couple old fishermen and Art, sitting on the slope of the beach. His body looked soft and saggy, and his head lolled forward, hobbled weakly on his nonexistent neck. I sat down beside him. Half a mile out, the dark blue waves were churning up icy combers.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Art bowed his head. He thought a bit. Then he began to write.
He wrote:
Do you know people have made it into outer space without rockets? Chuck Yeager flew a high-performance jet so high it started to tumble—it tumbled upwards, not downwards. He ran so high, gravity lost hold of him. His jet was tumbling up out of the stratosphere. All the color melted out of the sky. It was like the blue sky was paper, and a hole was burning out the middle of it, and behind it, everything was black. Everything was full of stars. Imagine falling UP.
I looked at his note, then back to his face. He was writing again. His second message was simpler.
I’ve had it. Seriously—I’m all done. I deflate 15–16 times a day. I need someone to pump me up practically every hour. I feel sick all the time and I hate it. This is no kind of life.
“Oh no,” I said. My vision blurred. Tears welled up and spilled over my eyes. “Things will get better.”
No. I don’t think so. It isn’t about whether I die. It’s about figuring out where. And I’ve decided. I’m going to see how high I can go. I want to see if it’s true. If the sky opens up at the top.
I don’t know what else I said to him. A lot of things, I guess. I asked him not to do it, not to leave me. I said that it wasn’t fair. I said that I didn’t have any other friends. I said that I had always been lonely. I talked until it was all blubber and strangled, helpless sobs, and he reached his crinkly plastic arms around me and held me while I hid my face in his chest.
He took the balloons from me, got them looped around one wrist. I held his other hand and we walked to the edge of the water. The surf splashed in and filled my sneakers. The sea was so cold it made the bones in my feet throb. I lifted him and held him in both arms, and squeezed until he made a mournful squeak. We hugged for a long time. Then I opened my arms. I let him go. I hope if there is another world, we will not be judged too harshly for the things we did wrong here—that we will at least be forgiven for the mistakes we made out of love. I have no doubt it was a sin of some kind, to let such a one go.
He rose away and the airstream turned him around so he was looking back at me as he bobbed out over the water, his left arm pulled high over his head, the balloons attached to his wrist. His head was tipped at a thoughtful angle, so he seemed to be studying me.
I sat on the beach and watched him go. I watched until I could no longer distinguish him from the gulls that were wheeling and diving over the water, a few miles away. He was just one more dirty speck wandering the sky. I didn’t move. I wasn’t sure I could get up. In time, the horizon turned a dusky rose and the blue sky above deepened to black. I stretched out on the beach, and watched the stars spill through the darkness overhead. I watched until a dizziness overcame me, and I could imagine spilling off the ground, and falling up into the night.
* * *
—
I developed emotional problems. When school started again, I would cry at the sight of an empty desk. I couldn’t answer questions or do homework. I flunked out and had to go through seventh grade again.
Worse, no one believed I was dangerous anymore. It was impossible to be scared of me after you had seen me sobbing my guts out a few times. I didn’t have the switchblade anymore; my father had confiscated it.
Billy Spears beat me up one day, after school—mashed my lips, loosened a tooth. John Erikson held me down, wrote COLLISTAMY BAG on my forehead in Magic Marker. Still trying to get it right. Cassius Delamitri ambushed me, shoved me down and jumped on top of me, crushing me under his weight, driving all the air out of my lungs. A defeat by way of deflation; Art would have understood perfectly.
I avoided the Roths’. I wanted more than anything to see Art’s mother, but stayed away. I was afraid if I talked to her, it would come pouring out of me, that I had been there at the end, that I stood in the surf and let Art go. I was afraid of what I might see in her eyes; of her hurt and anger.
Less than six months after Art’s deflated body was found slopping in the surf along North Scarswell beach, there was a FOR SALE sign out in front of the Roths’ ranch. I never saw either of his parents again. Mrs. Roth sometimes wrote me letters, asking how I was and what I was doing, but I never replied. She signed her letters love.
I went out for track in high school, and did well at pole vault. My track coach said the law of gravity didn’t apply to me. My track coach didn’t know fuck all about gravity. No matter how high I went for a moment, I always came down in the end, same as anyone else.
Pole vault got me a state college scholarship. I kept to myself. No one at college knew me, and I was at last able to rebuild my long-lost image as a sociopath. I didn’t go to parties. I didn’t date. I didn’t want to get to know anybody.
I was crossing the campus one morning, and I saw coming toward me a young girl, with black hair so dark it had the cold blue sheen of rich oil. She wore a bulky sweater and a librarian’s ankle-length skirt; a very asexual outfit, but all the same you could see she had a stunning figure, slim hips, high ripe breasts. Her eyes were of startling blue glass, her skin as white as Art’s. It was the first time I had seen an inflatable person since Art drifted away on his balloons. A kid walking behind me wolf-whistled at her. I stepped aside, and when he went past, I tripped him up and watched his books fly everywhere.
“Are you some kind of psycho?” he screeched.
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”
Her name was Ruth Goldman. She had a round rubber patch on the heel of one foot where she had stepped on a shard of broken glass as a little girl, and a larger square patch o
n her left shoulder where a sharp branch had poked her once on a windy day. Home schooling and obsessively protective parents had saved her from further damage. We were both English majors. Her favorite writer was Kafka—because he understood the absurd. My favorite writer was Malamud—because he understood loneliness.
We married the same year I graduated. Although I remain doubtful about the life eternal, I converted without any prodding from her, gave in at last to a longing to have some talk of the spirit in my life. Can you really call it a conversion? In truth, I had no beliefs to convert from. Whatever the case, ours was a Jewish wedding, glass under white cloth, crunched beneath the boot heel.
One afternoon I told her about Art.
That’s so sad. I’m so sorry.
She wrote to me in wax pencil. She put her hand over mine.
What happened? Did he run out of air?
“Ran out of sky,” I said.
Stepan Chapman (1951–2014) was an American writer whose novel The Troika (1997) won the Philip K. Dick Award. This was the first time this award went to an independent press. His first story appeared in Analog in 1969, and he became a frequent contributor to Damon Knight’s renowned Orbit series of anthologies in the 1970s (under the name Steven Chapman), where his surreal visions were right at home alongside the work of such writers as R. A. Lafferty. His subsequent work often appeared in literary journals, but by the mid-1990s, he found small-press SF and horror publishers sometimes welcoming his writing. His stories were collected in Danger Music (1997) and Dossier (2001). In addition to his writing, he was also an accomplished actor and puppeteer. Along with his wife, Kia, he often worked in the school system doing elaborate puppet shows for the students. What a treat for them! “State Secrets of Aphasias” originally appeared in the anthology Leviathan 3 (2002).
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 131
