by Joe Hill
Nick sat on the other side of her, sulking because he didn’t want to share her with me. Nick couldn’t talk about the book with us—he had never read it. Nick had always been in Advanced English courses, where the assigned reading was Milton and Chaucer. Whereas I was pulling Cs in Adventures in English!, a course for the world’s future janitors and air conditioner repairmen. We were the dumb kids, going nowhere, and for our stupidity, we were rewarded with all the really fun books.
Now and then Angie would stop and check out what was on TV and ask a provocative question: Do you guys think that girl is totally hot? Would it be embarrassing to be beaten by a female mud wrestler, or is that the whole point? It was never clear who she was talking to, and usually I answered first, just to fill the silences. Nick acted like his jaw was wired shut again, and smiled his angry pinched smile when my answers made her laugh. Once, when she was laughing especially hard, she put a hand on my arm. He sulked about that too.
ANGIE AND I were friends for two years, before the first time we kissed, in a closet, both of us drunk at a party, with others laughing and shouting our names through the door. We made love for the first time three months later, in my room, with the windows open and a cool breeze that smelled sweetly of pines blowing in on us. After that first time, she asked what I wanted to do with myself when I grew up. I said I wanted to learn how to hang-glide. I was eighteen, she was eighteen. This was an answer that satisfied us both.
Later, not long after she finished nursing school, and we settled into an apartment together downtown, she asked me again what I wanted to do. I had spent the summer working as a house painter, but that was over. I hadn’t found another job to replace it yet, and Angie said I ought to take the time to think about the long term.
She wanted me to get back into college. I told her I’d think about it, and while I was thinking, I missed the enrollment period for the next semester. She said why not learn to be an EMT, and spent several days collecting paperwork for me to fill out, so I could get in the program: applications, questionnaires, financial aid forms. The pile of them sat by the fridge, collecting coffee stains, until one of us threw them out. It wasn’t laziness that held me back. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. My brother was studying to be a doctor in Boston. He’d think I was, in some needy way, trying to be like him, an idea that gave me shivers of loathing.
Angie said there had to be something I wanted to do with myself. I told her I wanted to live in Barrow, Alaska, at the edge of the arctic circle, with her, and raise children, and malamutes, and have a garden in a greenhouse: tomatoes, string beans, a plot of mellow weed. We’d earn our living taking tourists dog sledding. We would shun the world of supermarkets, broadband Internet, and indoor plumbing. We would leave the TV behind. In the winter, the northern lights would paint the sky above us all day long. In the summers, our children would live half-wild, skiing unnamed backcountry hills, feeding playful seals by hand from the dock behind our house.
We had only just set out on the work of being adults, and were in the first stages of making a life with one another. In those days, when I talked about our children feeding seals, Angie would look at me in a way that made me feel both faintly weak and intensely hopeful…hopeful about myself and who I might turn out to be. Angie had the too-large eyes of a seal herself, brown, with a ring of brilliant gold around her pupil. She’d stare at me without blinking, listening to me tell it, lips parted, as attentive as a child hearing her favorite bedtime story.
But after my D.U.I., any mention of Alaska would cause her to make faces. Getting arrested cost me my job, too—no great loss, I admit, since I was temping as a pizza delivery man at the time—and Angie was desperate trying to keep up with the bills. She worried, and she did her worrying alone, avoiding me as much as possible, no easy task, considering we shared a three-room apartment.
I brought up Alaska now and then, anyway, trying to draw her back to me, but it only gave her a place to concentrate her anger. She said if I couldn’t keep the apartment clean, at home alone all day, what was our lodge going to be like? She saw our children playing amid piles of dogshit, the front porch caving in, rusting snowmobiles and deranged half-breed dogs scattered about the yard. She said hearing me talk about it made her want to scream, it was so pathetic, so disconnected from our lives. She said she was scared I had a problem, alcoholism maybe, or clinical depression. She wanted me to see someone, not that we had the money for that.
None of this explains why she walked out—fled without warning. It wasn’t the court case, or my drinking, or my lack of direction. The real reason we split was more terrible than that, so terrible we could never talk about it. If she had brought it up, I would’ve ridiculed her. And I couldn’t bring it up, because it was my policy to pretend it hadn’t happened.
I was cooking breakfast for supper one night, bacon and eggs, when Angie arrived home from work. I always liked to have supper ready for her when she got back, part of my plan to show her I was down but not out. I said something about how we were going to have our own pigs up in the Yukon, smoke our own bacon, kill a shoat for Christmas dinner. She said I wasn’t funny anymore. It was her tone more than what she said. I sang the song from Lord of the Flies—kill the pig, drain her blood—trying to squeeze a laugh out of what hadn’t been funny in the first place, and she said Stop it, very shrill, just stop it. At this particular moment I happened to have a knife in my hand, what I had used to cut open the pack of bacon, and she was leaning with her rump resting against the kitchen counter a few feet away. I had a sudden, vivid picture in my head, imagined turning and slashing the knife across her throat. In my mind I saw her hand fly to her neck, her baby seal eyes springing open in astonishment, saw blood the bright red of cranberry juice gushing down her V-neck sweater.
As this thought occurred to me, I happened to glance at her throat—then at her eyes. And she was staring back at me and she was afraid. She set her glass of orange juice down, very gently, in the sink, and said she wasn’t hungry and maybe she needed to lie down. Four days later I went around the corner for bread and milk and she was gone when I got back. She called from her parents to say we needed some time.
It was just a thought. Who doesn’t have a thought like that now and then?
WHEN I WAS two months behind on the rent and my landlord was saying he could get an order to have me thrown out, I moved home myself. My mother was remodeling and I said I wanted to help. I did want to help. I was desperate for something to do. I hadn’t worked in four months and had a court date in December.
My mother had knocked down the walls in my old bedroom, pulled out the windows. The holes in the wall were covered with plastic sheeting, and the floor was littered in chunks of plaster. I made a nest for myself in the basement, on a cot across from the washer and dryer. I put my TV on a milk crate at the foot of the bed. I couldn’t leave it behind in the apartment, needed it for company.
My mother was no company. The first day I was home, she only spoke to me to tell me I couldn’t use her car. If I wanted to get drunk and crash a set of wheels, I could buy my own. Most of her communication was nonverbal. She’d let me know it was time to wake up by stomping around over my head, feet booming through the basement ceiling. She told me I disgusted her by glaring at me over her crowbar, as she pulled boards out of my bedroom floor, yanking them up in a silent fury, as if she wanted to tear away all the evidence of my childhood in her home.
The cellar was unfinished, with a pitted cement floor and a maze of low pipes hanging from the ceiling. At least it had its own bathroom, an incongruously tidy room with a flower-pattern linoleum floor and a bowl of woodland-scented potpourri resting on the tank of the toilet. When I was in there taking a leak, I could shut my eyes and inhale that scent and imagine the wind stirring in the tops of the great pines of northern Alaska.
I woke one night, in my basement cell, to a bitter cold, my breath steaming silver and blue in the light from the TV, which I had left on. I had finished off a coup
le beers before bed and now I needed to urinate so badly it hurt.
Normally, I slept beneath a large quilt, hand-stitched by my grandmother, but I had spilled Chinese on it and tossed it in the wash, then never got around to drying it. To replace it, I had raided the linen closet, just before bed, gathering up a stack of old comforters from my childhood: a puffy blue bedspread decorated with characters from The Empire Strikes Back, a red blanket with fleets of Fokker triplanes soaring across it. None of them, singly, was large enough to cover me, but I had spread the different blankets over my body in overlapping patterns, one for my feet, another for my legs and crotch, a third for my chest.
They had kept me cozy enough to fall asleep, but now were in disarray, and I was huddled for warmth, my knees pulled almost to my chest, my arms wrapped around them, my bare feet sticking into the cold. I couldn’t feel my toes, as if they had already been amputated for frostbite.
My head was muddy. I was only half-awake. I needed to pee. I had to get warm. I rose and floated to the bathroom through the dark, the smallest blanket thrown over my shoulders to keep the cold off. I had the sleep-addled idea that I was still balled up to stay warm, with my knees close to my chest, although I was nevertheless moving forward. It was only when I was over the toilet, fumbling with the fly of my boxers, that I happened to look down and saw my knees were hitched up, and that my feet weren’t touching the floor. They dangled a full foot over the toilet seat.
The room swam around me and I felt momentarily light-headed, not with shock so much as a kind of dreaming wonder. Shock didn’t figure into it. I suppose some part of me had been waiting, all that time, to fly again, had almost been expecting it.
Not that what I was doing could really be described as flying. It was more like controlled floating. I was an egg again, tippy and awkward. My arms waved anxiously at my sides. The fingertips of one hand brushed the wall and steadied me a little.
I felt fabric shift across my shoulders and carefully dropped my gaze, as if even a sudden movement of the eyes could send me sprawling to the ground. At the edge of my vision I saw the blue sateen hem of a blanket, and part of a patch, red and yellow. Another wave of dizziness rolled over me and I wobbled in the air. The blanket slipped, just as it had done that day almost fourteen years before, and slid off my shoulders. I dropped in the same instant, clubbed a knee against the side of the toilet, shoved a hand into the bowl, plunging it deep into freezing water.
I SAT WITH the cape spread across my knees, studying it as the first silvery flush of dawn lit the windows high along the basement walls.
The cape was even smaller than I remembered, about the length of a large pillowcase. The red felt lightning bolt was still sewn to the back, although a couple of stitches had popped free, and one corner of the bolt was sticking up. My father’s Marine patch was still sewn on as well, was what I had seen from the corner of my eye: a slash of lightning across a background like fire.
Of course my mother hadn’t sent it to the dump to be incinerated. She never got rid of anything, on the theory she might find a use for it later. Hoarding what she had was a mania, not spending money an obsession. She didn’t know anything about home renovation, but it never would’ve crossed her mind to pay anyone to do the work for her. My bedroom would be torn open to the elements and I would be sleeping in the basement until she was in diapers and I was in charge of changing them. What she thought of as self-reliance was really a kind of white-trash mulishness, and I had not been home long before it got under my skin and I had quit helping her out.
The sateen edge of the cape was just long enough for me to tie it around my neck.
I sat on the edge of my cot for a long time, perched with my feet up, like a pigeon on a ledge, and the blanket trailing to the small of my back. The floor was half a foot below, but I stared over the side as if looking at a forty-foot drop. At last, I pushed off.
And hung. Bobbled unsteadily, frontward and backways, but did not fall. My breath got caught behind my diaphragm and it was several moments before I could force myself to exhale, in a great equine snort.
I ignored my mother’s wooden-heeled shoes banging overhead at nine in the morning. She tried again at ten, this time opening the door to shout down, Are you ever getting up? I yelled back that I was up. It was true: I was two feet off the ground.
By then I had been flying for hours…but again, describing it as flight probably brings to mind the wrong sort of image. You see Superman. Imagine, instead, a man sitting on a magic carpet, with his knees pulled to his chest. Now take away the magic carpet and you’ll be close.
I had one speed, which I would call stately. I moved like a float in a parade. All I had to do to glide forward was look forward, and I was going, as if driven by a stream of powerful but invisible gas, the flatulence of the Gods.
For a while, I had trouble turning, but eventually, I learned to change direction in the same way one steers a canoe. As I moved across the room, I’d throw an arm in the air and pull the other in. And effortlessly, I’d veer to the right or left, depending on which metaphorical oar I stuck in the water. Once I got the hang of it, the act of turning became exhilarating, the way I seemed to accelerate into the curves, in a sudden rush that produced a ticklish feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I could rise by leaning back, as if into a recliner. The first time I tried it, I swooped upward so quickly, I bashed a head against a brass pipe, hard enough to make constellations of black dots wheel in front of my eyes. But I only laughed and rubbed at the stinging lump in the center of my forehead.
When I finally quit, at almost noon, I was exhausted, and I lay in bed, my stomach muscles twitching helplessly from the effort it had required to keep my knees hitched up all that time. I had forgotten to eat, and I felt light-headed from low blood sugar. And still, even lying down, under my sheets, in the slowly warming basement, I felt as if I were soaring. I shut my eyes and sailed away into the limitless reaches of sleep.
IN THE LATE afternoon, I took the cape off and went upstairs to make bacon sandwiches. The phone rang and I answered automatically. It was my brother.
“Mom tells me you aren’t helping upstairs,” he said.
“Hi. I’m good. How are you?”
“She also said you sit in the basement all day watching TV.”
“That’s not all I do,” I said. I sounded more defensive than I liked. “If you’re so worried about her, why don’t you come home and play handyman one of these weekends?”
“When you’re third-year premed, you can’t just take off whenever you feel like it. I have to schedule my BMs in advance. One day last week I was in the ER for ten hours. I should’ve left, but this old woman came in with heavy vaginal bleeding—” At this, I giggled, a reaction that was met with a long moment of disapproving silence. Then Nick went on, “I stayed at work another hour to make sure she was okay. That’s what I want for you. Get you doing something that will lift you up above your own little world.”
“I’ve got things I’m doing.”
“What things? For example, what have you done with yourself today?”
“Today—today isn’t a normal day. I didn’t sleep all night. I’ve just been—sort of—floating from here to there.” I couldn’t help it; I giggled again.
He was silent for a while. Then he said, “If you were in total freefall, Eric, do you think you’d even know it?”
I SLIPPED OFF the edge of the roof like a swimmer sliding from the edge of the pool into the water. My insides churned and my scalp prickled, icy-hot, my whole body clenching up, waiting for freefall. This is how it ends, I thought, and it crossed my mind that the entire morning, all that flying around the basement, had been a delusion, a schizophrenic fantasy, and now I would drop and shatter, gravity asserting its reality. Instead I dipped, then rose. My child’s cape fluttered at my shoulders.
While waiting for my mother to go to bed, I had painted my face. I had retreated into the basement bathroom, and used one of her lipsticks to dr
aw an oily red mask, a pair of linked loops, around my eyes. I did not want to be spotted while I was out flying, and if I was, I thought the red circles would distract any potential witnesses from my other features. Besides, it felt good to paint my face, was oddly arousing, the sensation of the lipstick rolling hard and smooth across my skin. When I was done, I stood admiring myself in front of the bathroom mirror for a while. I liked my red mask. It was a simple thing, but made my features strange and unfamiliar. I was curious about this new person staring back at me out of the mirror glass. About what he wanted. About what he could do.
After my mother closed herself in her bedroom for the night, I had crept upstairs, out the hole in my bedroom wall where the dormer window had been, and onto the roof. A few of the black tar shingles were missing, and others were loose, hanging askew. Something else my mother could try and fix herself in the interest of saving a few nickels. She would be lucky not to slide off the roof and snap her neck. Anything could happen out there where the world touches the sky. No one knew that better than me.
The cold stung my face, numbed my hands. I had sat flexing my fingers for a long time, building up the nerve to overcome a hundred thousand years of evolution, screaming at me that I would die if I went over the edge. Then I was over the edge, and suspended in the clear, frozen air, thirty feet above the lawn.
You want to hear now that I felt a rush of excitement, whooped at the thrill of flight. I didn’t. What I felt was something much more subtle. My pulse quickened. I caught my breath for a moment. Then I felt a stillness settling into me, like the stillness of the air. I was drawn completely into myself, concentrating on staying balanced atop the invisible bubble beneath me (which perhaps gives the impression that I could feel something beneath me, some unseen cushion of support; I could not, which was why I was constantly squirming around for balance). Out of instinct, as much as habit, I held my knees up to my chest, and kept my arms out to the side.
