The Weight of Air

by David Poses

  In the middle of the night, I panic. What if Jane inspects the condom?

  I get up, take it out of the trash, and put it in my jeans pocket. In the morning, I drop it in a garbage can in the dining hall. Then I worry Jane will look in her trash and notice the condom is gone. That’s worse, right?

  I stop initiating sex. Jane initiates less, presumably for related reasons. I wouldn’t know—neither of us initiate a conversation about it.

  By March, the entire school seems to know about my correspondence with Woody Allen. He FedExes his copy of the Deconstructing Harry script to me—his handwritten notes are scribbled in the margins.

  A rumor begins to circulate: Woody Allen is going to produce Hypothermia, the original, feature-length screenplay I claim to be writing, which I haven’t actually begun. I don’t even have an idea for the story.

  For the first time in more than a year, I write to Chessa. “Sorry for being out of touch for so long. It hurts too much when we’re in regular contact.” She replies quickly, saying she hasn’t stopped thinking about me and still has a picture of me next to her bed—I’m wearing a brown leisure suit, and my hair is purple.

  As letters go back and forth, I can’t decide if I’m betraying Jane or engaging in mental masturbation. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to tell her. At the end of April, Chessa mentions an abortion and a fiancé. I don’t reply.

  Jane makes appointments to see summer apartment options in Northampton. On the ride down, I rehearse breakup speeches in my mind. On the ride back, I seethe about the lease we just signed to sublet a bedroom in a small, dumpy apartment half a mile from downtown. Our roommate, Sol, is a transsexual man and UMASS Amherst student.

  On the last night of the semester, I leave the editing room at four in the morning. Nora, a sophomore, is sitting on a rock wall by the entrance. Wearing a bulky sweatshirt and sweatpants, her bob hairdo seemingly slept on funny for a week, she’s wearing the kind of glasses my sixth-grade science teacher wore—big, gray, ninety-degree uppercase D-shaped frames.

  Next thing I know, Nora is on her knees in the editing room, talking about unzipping my fly with her teeth. My hand brushes against her cheek as I pull her hair back. Standing there, my jeans around my ankles, I feel guilty for not feeling guilty.

  After, Nora swears not to tell anyone. “Trust me,” she says, wiping her face on her sleeve. “You think I want to be the whore who made David and Jane break up?”

  Dew sticks to my low-top Chuck Taylors as I walk through a field to my car. Driving home, I look at every tree and telephone pole on the side of the road. “Exit Music (for a Film)” comes on, the fourth track on OK Computer. Four and a half minutes of fragile vocals and delicate acoustic guitar before the electric melts in—high-gain, oversaturated velcro fuzz tearing at menacing lyrics.

  twenty

  Sol stands at the faucet at an angle that’s clearly intentional—he wants us to see the scars on his chest, upturned half moons where his breasts used to be. He asks salaciously, “Who wants to see how I make a cock?”

  Jane abandons a box of books at the top of the stairs and watches Sol fill a condom. He says something about ideal “dick water temperature,” his stubby fingers struggling to tie a knot. He hands the squishy, slippery makeshift surrogate member to Jane, who squeezes it and jokes about the small size. Sol snatches it back and drops it down the front of his sweatpants.

  “For your information,” he sneers jokingly, “this is an ‘around town’ dick. If I’m going out to a bar or whatever, I have a box of Magnums.”

  Four hours later, the car is still filled with crap because Jane and I can’t schlep boxes up three steep, narrow flights of stairs without Sol stopping us for another round of show and tell. Once our belongings are finally in the apartment, I want to rest, but Jane wants to look for jobs.

  A steady drizzle pelts us all afternoon. In three hours, I don’t apply for any jobs. Jane fills out one application—at Bruegger’s Bagels, a crappy chain on the main drag.

  “Let’s call it quits,” I say.

  “If I don’t make a certain amount of money this summer, I’ll starve in the fall.”

  At dusk, Jane finally agrees to go home. We stop at the natural food store. She moves swiftly through the aisles, grabbing eggplant and veggie burgers and tofu while a cleaning crew preps a machine to wax the floors. When we go to pay, she asks the hippie girl at the register if the store is hiring.

  “Totally. Do you both want applications?”

  I shake my head.

  Jane elbows me and whispers, “If we both apply, our chances double.”

  Twenty-four hours later, while she sprinkles shredded cheese onto layers of breaded eggplant, Sol tells me how lucky I am to be with a woman who knows how to cook such delicious food.

  “David loves when I make this,” Jane says.

  The phone rings. Sol answers and turns to Jane. “It’s Joe,” he sings. “From Northampton Natural.”

  She takes the phone and puts it to her ear, her slight, victorious smile quickly morphing to disappointment. She hands me the phone, mouths You got the job, and slips into the bathroom.

  Joe says, “I hope this doesn’t cause problems between you and Jane.” We sort out the details of my starting date and pay. When I hang up, Sol glares at me.

  I wish I could be as excited about anything as Joe is about a shelf of uniformly facing labels on organic pickled beet jars. He leads me up and down the aisles with his hands clasped behind his back, comparing Northampton Natural to a Broadway show.

  “You’re always on. Everything has to be perfect. See how everything’s lined up on the shelves?”

  In his small office at the back of the store, Joe contorts his body into a backless chair and goes over employee benefits.

  “Medical, dental, vision, supplemental life insurance. In a year, we’ll have a 401(k). And we have this philanthropic program—you can donate some percentage of your paycheck. Totally voluntary, but just so you know, we all participate.”

  This month’s cause is Gang Up For Good, a nonprofit that gives at-risk youth a shot at having a better life.

  Joe points to a picture of birdhouses on a patio. “One of the head honchos at this regional birdhouse manufacturer donated second-quality birdhouses worth a total of five grand to GUFG. All week, the at-risk youth, God love ’em, they’ve been all over selling birdhouses. If you buy one, take a snapshot and bring it in.”

  A tall woman with heavy canvas bags dangling from each elbow appears: Matilda, the assistant manager. She drops her bags and asks Joe if there’ve been any new developments on the letter. He explains to me that an anonymous tenant at his condo compound filed a complaint about an uptick in bird excrement on the premises.

  “Five bucks says it’s that woman who lives next door to you,” Matilda says.

  “Mary?” Joe scratches his head. “Really?”

  “Totally. She blamed you when a bird went to the bathroom on her last week.”

  Joe shrugs. I suggest he tell Mary to exact revenge by going to the bathroom on a bird. He doesn’t laugh, nor does Matilda.

  When Neil arrives in Birkenstocks at ten o’clock, Matilda chides him for wearing open-toed shoes. She asks him to school me on trimming a head of lettuce and reorienting it in the veggie case for maximum appeal. Walking away, she sneezes a few times. Everyone in the store, customers included, says bless you after each sneeze.

  I go outside and smoke. When I return, Neil asks, “Did you get permission to take a fifteen?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “You can’t just come and go as you please.” He sniffs the air vigorously and holds his nose. “You have to wash your hands. Nobody wants food that reeks of smoke.”

  Northampton Natural is on the ground level of a three-story mini-mall-ish structure. After an exhaustive search for the bathroom on the second floor, I go down to the dank, windowless basement and find it in the back corner.

  The floor is sticky and covered in dust. Fou
r urinals, without dividers to prevent other guys from seeing you pee. Three toilet stalls. I notice feet on the floor. Birkenstocks. Neil. I wash my hands and turn off the light on my way out.

  “Hey, not cool, whoever turned out the lights. Karma’s a bitch.”

  Matilda tells me, “Associates eat meals together as one big, happy family, except we do it in two shifts because if we all ate at the same time, who’d be on the sales floor?” She gives me a choice between first or second lunch shifts.

  “I was going to leave. I have a ton of errands.”

  With a frown, Matilda says to clock out anytime for my lunch break.

  A drum circle of stoned hippies pound out a rhythmic noise on the village green. In front of the bike store, a Goth girl leans against a parking meter. She’s dressed entirely in black, her black nail polish severely chipped. On the sidewalk next to her, a few dollar bills poke out of a coffee cup. I give her five dollars.

  “Pssst,” she says, “do you want to smoke a joint?”

  I decline with a wave. Before turning away, I say, “If you had some heroin . . .”

  Goth girl jumps and looks me over—white polo shirt, khaki cargo shorts, low-top Chucks with a hand-drawn anarchy symbol on the toe.

  “I can get dope,” she says. “But you have to buy me a bag.”

  The dealer lives in Holyoke, twenty miles south. On I-91, wind whipping through the car, I’m profoundly aware of the choice I’m making. This isn’t a relapse. It’s a reset.

  OK Computer is in the tape deck. “Airbag.” My new friend, Arianne, arches her back and dangles her feet out the window, her short shorts riding so high that I can see her stubbly thighs and black panties in the mirror. I think maybe she’s flirting. I don’t care.

  “I don’t do dope more than two days in a row,” Arianne says. “Today was s’posed to be an off day, but I woke up thinking about it, and that’s the thing about dope. It knows when you need it. It finds you.”

  “I thought about it when I woke up today too. And yesterday and the day before and every day for a thousand days before that.”

  “Yeah, you know what I mean.”

  “I thought about it. I haven’t gotten high in more than three years.”

  Arianne pulls her feet in and sits straight. “Fuck, dude. I never would’ve done this if I knew.”

  I stop myself from asking, jokingly, if she wants to turn back.

  We pull into a gas station at the bottom of the exit ramp in Holyoke.

  Arianne calls the dealer from a pay phone. She says he’s home, but we have to wait twenty minutes.

  Time hangs in the humid air as we smoke on a patch of grass by the coin-operated car vacuums. I stomp out a cigarette and light another to give myself something to do, half listening to Arianne mutter about living with her boyfriend in a tent in the woods by Northampton’s municipal fields.

  Across the street, a backhoe digs up an empty lot. The repetitive motion reminds me of The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus—another book I own but haven’t read. I ask Arianne if she’s read it.

  “Um, I dropped outta high school.”

  “The gods wanted to condemn Sisyphus to an eternity without meaning, so they made him roll a boulder up a hill all day every day. When he got to the top, the boulder would roll back down, and he’d start over.”

  In the car, Arianne calls out directions. We make a few turns and pass a playground. A few turns later, we pass the playground again.

  “What if the dealer isn’t home anymore?”

  “Chill. He’s home.”

  We backtrack to the gas station and start over. “Like the guy with the rock,” Arianne says. “Wait. If all he did was roll some stupid rock up a hill, wasn’t that the meaning of his life?”

  Did she pick up on something nobody else has? We turn left instead of right this time and end up in a more promising-looking neighborhood.

  Big, formerly single-family homes, each with eight or ten utility meters on the side and as many satellite dishes on the roof. Peeling vinyl siding. Rotted wooden columns. Webs of duct tape on broken windows with missing screens. Front yards of dirt and crispy brown grass. Empty beer and soda bottles and cans. Clothes. A giant empty cable spool. Sneakers hanging from electrical wires.

  Arianne points to a space between a blue Accord and a minivan with a “Bob Dole for President” bumper sticker. “Here,” she says. I coast into the spot and tell her I’ll wait in the car. She asks if I’m a cop. I laugh.

  “If you’re a cop, it’s illegal to say you’re not, so say it.”

  “I’m not a cop. This is a one-time thing. I don’t want to have access in case I get tempted later.”

  She studies my face. “Fine. One bag for you, one for me. Twenty bucks.”

  I thumb through the bills in my wallet and hand them over: a hundred dollars in twenties. Arianne gives me a long, disapproving look and takes the money. I watch her cross the street and disappear between two houses.

  I turn up the stereo. Ten minutes pass and no sign of her. “Let Down” ends, and “Karma Police” begins.

  My stomach clenches. Something bad is happening. Arianne is getting robbed. Arrested. Or something worse? She copped and slipped away.

  There she is. Finally. She looks left and right five times before running across, her arms at her side. She slides into the passenger seat and opens her hand. My mouth waters at the sight in her sweaty palm: pale blue glassine envelopes wrapped in a rubber band. Ten bags. A bundle of dope.

  The sun’s warmth radiates through the windshield as I pull away from the curb. Arianne rolls up a dollar bill and pokes it into the corner of a bag and then bows her head and snorts.

  “Damn, dude,” she says, passing the bag and the dollar to me, her pupils shrinking from the dope. “Careful. Shit’s crazy strong and you have no tolerance.”

  I wipe the dollar on my shirt and take a quick rip, steering with my knees. A bitter mix of snot and dope runs down the back of my throat, along with three years of sobriety.

  Good riddance.

  twenty-one

  An oscillating floor fan blows hot air at Sol lying shirtless on the couch. “Honestly,” he says, “I don’t know how Jane puts up with you. Poor thing’s up at four in the morning, making minimum wage at Bruegger’s because you took the job she wanted, and then you quit?”

  I go into the bedroom, close the door, and turn on the stereo. John Frusciante. Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt. Four simultaneous guitars. Electric, acoustic, forward, backward. I keep a bag in my pocket and stash the rest in a sunglass case, which I slide into a sock, wrap in a shirt, and bury in my backpack.

  I push the thin gauzy white curtain aside and stick my head out the window. Clusters of daffodils light up the small plot of land behind the house, separated from the neighbors by a tall white fence. The trees are starting to bloom. In the distance, past the old cemetery, cars chug up and down Route 5. Not long ago, dirty black snowbanks lined the road. In the crystalline eternity of this moment, winter never happened. Winter doesn’t exist. This is all I know.

  Wires run from the stereo on the dresser to speakers on either side of a queen-sized mattress. I lay on the bed and stare at the round, milky glass light fixture on the ceiling. A metal pull chain with fourteen beads hangs from the bottom. I lose myself in the music for half an hour—until the door to the apartment opens and Sol receives Jane.

  “You’re dripping with sweat. Why didn’t your boyfriend pick you up, now that he’s not working anymore?”

  I go out to the living room, and Jane greets me with a quizzical look. I tell her I quit my job so I’d have more time to work on Hypothermia.

  “Awesome,” she says, tugging at her collar, a polyester maroon polo with the Bruegger’s Bagels logo on the left breast. With the matching pants, she could be a giant blood clot for Halloween. She says something about rinsing off the bagel smell and slinks into the bathroom.

  Jane makes her famous tofu stir-fry for dinner. I nurse a can of Coke while she
shares a bottle of red wine with Sol. The little appetite I have disappears altogether when he says he’s a lot less self-conscious about his broccoli farts now that he is officially a dude.

  When Jane starts gathering the plates and silverware, I refill her glass and tell her to relax. I’ll do the dishes. She continues to clear the table until Sol yanks the plates from her and drops them in the sink. “If Prince Valiant wants to clean up, let him.” He dives into the futon and turns on the TV. Jane sits on the floor, and they start watching a John Hughes movie—Sixteen Candles or Pretty in Pink.

  After I finish cleaning, I sit next to Jane and wrap my arm around her. “Psst. Are you sure you’re not upset that I quit my job?”

  “Not at all,” Jane says. “You totally should if you can afford it, and honestly, in the past few hours, you’ve been so much more chill than you were all semester.”

  Hazelden had everything backward. Pain doesn’t end when you stop taking painkillers. It gets worse. Sobriety had the healing power of a Band-Aid on a bullet wound—because life is the disease. I’m powerless without heroin.

  I hold a bag up to the window and flick it with my finger. Tiny cakes of powder break apart and dance in the sunlight. I spill some on the back of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, roll up a dollar, and snort my first hit of the day. The effect is gradual—a ramp into your bloodstream—compared to the concentrated immediacy of a shot.

  Supposedly, citric acid increases the effect of opioids. I pour a tall glass of orange juice and down it in the kitchen, staring at shadows of leaves swaying on the wall. The smell of jasmine explodes through the open window. My body warms and tingles, and that cheesy ’70s song by Seals and Crofts pops into my head. “Summer Breeze.”

  On the sun porch, I prop my feet on the desk and brainstorm ideas for Hypothermia. Everything revolves around the end of the world. What’ll be the last flight out of any given airport? Who’ll be left behind? Will they break into the nearest Lamborghini dealership and take a Diablo for a test drive, or stay put and cower in fear, washing down single-serve bags of peanuts with small plastic bottles of Jack Daniel’s?