“Where was that?”
“About two inches above the tip of my nose. It felt peculiar.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Then I began flying from one part of the basement to the other.”
“You had wings? I mean, real wings?”
“I couldn’t see myself, but it felt like real wings. It felt like a great charge of power in the middle of my spine. Will power, in the most literal sense. I had this sense of being totally focused on what I was doing, and where I was going — and that’s what the flying was. It was as though you could drive a car by just looking at the road ahead of you.”
Daniel closed his eyes to savor the idea of a freedom so perfect and entire.
“I flew around the basement for what seemed like hours. I’d closed the basement door behind me, like a dummy, and the windows were all sealed tight, so there was no way to get out of the basement. People don’t consider making fairy-holes until they’ve actually got off the ground. It didn’t matter though. I was so small that the basement seemed as big as a cathedral. And almost that beautiful. More than almost — it was incredible.”
“Just flying around?”
“And being aware. There was a shelf of canned goods. I can still remember the light that came out of the jars of jam and tomatoes. Not really a light though. It was more as though you could see the life still left in them, the energy they’d stored up while they were growing.”
“You must have been hungry.”
She laughed. “Probably.”
“What else?” he insisted. It was Daniel who was hungry, who was insatiable.
“At a certain point I got afraid. My body — my physical body that was lying there in the hook-up — didn’t seem real to me. No, I suppose it seemed real enough, maybe even too much so. But it didn’t seem mine. Have you ever been to a zoo?”
Daniel shook his head.
“Well then I can’t explain.”
Barbara was quiet for a while. Daniel looked at her body, swollen with pregnancy, and tried to imagine the feeling she couldn’t explain. Except in gym class he didn’t pay much attention to his own body. Or to other people’s, for that matter.
“There was a freezer in the basement. I hadn’t noticed it till at one point the motor started up. You know how there’s a shudder first, and then a steady hum. Well, for me, then, it was like a symphony orchestra starting up. I was aware, without seeing it, of the part of the engine that was spinning around. I didn’t go near it, of course. I knew that any kind of rotary motor is supposed to be dangerous, like quicksand, but it was so… intoxicating. Like dance music that you can’t possibly resist. I began spinning around where I was, very slowly at first, but there was nothing to keep me from going faster. It was still pure will power. The faster I let myself spin the more exciting, and inviting, the motor seemed. Without realizing it, I’d drifted over to the freezer and I was spinning along the same axis as the motor. I lost all sense of everything but that single motion. I felt like… a planet! It could have gone on forever and I wouldn’t have cared. But it stopped. The freezer shut itself off, and as the motor slowed down, so did I. Even that part was wonderful. But when it had stopped completely, I was scared shitless. I realized what had happened, and I’d heard that that was how a lot of people had just disappeared. I would have. Gladly. I would to this day. When I remember.”
“What did you do then?”
“I went back to the hook-up. Back to my body. There’s a kind of crystal you touch, and the moment you touch it, zip, you’re back inside yourself.”
“And the whole thing was real? You didn’t just imagine it?”
“As real as the two of us talking. As real as the snow on the ground.”
“And you never flew again after that?”
“It wasn’t for want of trying, believe me. I’ve spent a small fortune on voice lessons, on drugs, on every kind of therapy there is. But I could never reach escape velocity no matter how I tried. A part of my mind wouldn’t join in, wouldn’t let go. Maybe it was fear of getting trapped inside some dumb engine. Maybe, like I said before, I just don’t have a gift for singing. Anyhow, nothing helped. Finally I stopped trying. And that’s the story of my life. And all I can say is, piss on it.”
Daniel had the good sense not to try and argue against her bitterness. There even seemed something noble and elevated about it. Compared to Barbara Steiner’s, his own little miseries seemed pretty insignificant.
There was still a chance, after all, that he could fly.
And he would! Oh, he would! He knew that now. It was the purpose of his life. He’d found it at last! He would fly! He would learn how to fly!
Daniel didn’t know how long they’d been standing there in the snow. Gradually, as his euphoria sailed away, he realized that he was cold, that he was aching with the cold, and that they’d better head back to the dorm.
“Hey, Barbara,” he said, catching the sleeve of her coat in his numb fingers and giving it a reminding yank. “Hey.”
“Right,” she agreed sadly, but without stirring.
“We’d better head back to the dorm.”
“Right.”
“It’s cold.”
“Very. Yes.” She still stood there. “Would you do me a favor first?”
“What?”
“Kiss me.”
Usually he would have been flustered by such a suggestion, but there was something in the tone of her voice that reassured him. He said, “Okay.”
With her eyes looking straight into his, she slid her fingers under the collar of his jacket and then back around his neck. She pulled him close until their faces touched. Hers was as cold as his, and probably as numb. Her mouth opened and she pressed her tongue against his lips, gently urging them apart.
He closed his eyes and tried to let the kiss be real. He’d kissed a girl once before, at a party, and thought the whole process a bit unnatural, if also, at last, rather nice. But he couldn’t stop thinking of Barbara’s bad teeth, and by the time he’d braced himself to the idea of pushing his tongue around inside her mouth, she’d had enough.
He felt guilty for not having done more, but she seemed not to care. At least Daniel supposed that her faraway look meant she’d got what she wanted, though he didn’t really know what that might have been. Even so, he felt guilty. Or at the very least confused.
“Thank you,” she said. “That was sweet.”
With automatic politeness Daniel answered, “You’re welcome.” Oddly that was not the wrong thing to say.
Of the man whose song had so wrought upon him, Daniel knew little, not even his real name. In the camp he was known as Gus, having inherited a work shirt across the back of which a former prisoner had stenciled that name. He was a tall, lean, red-faced, ravaged-looking man, somewhere in his forties, who had arrived two weeks ago with a nasty cut over his left eye that was now a puckered scarlet scar. People speculated that he’d been sent up for the fight that had got him the scar, which would have been congruent with his sentence, a bare ninety days. Likely, he’d started the fight on purpose to get that sentence, since a winter at Spirit Lake was more survivable than a jobless and houseless winter in Des Moines, where he came from, and where vagrants, which is what he seemed to be, often died en masse during the worst cold spells.
An ugly customer, without a doubt, but that did not prevent Daniel, as he lay awake that night, from rehearsing, in rather abundant detail, their future relationship, beginning at the moment, tomorrow, that Daniel, would approach him as supplicant and maybe, ultimately, even as friend, though the latter possibility was harder to envision in concrete terms, since, aside from his being such a sensational singer, Daniel couldn’t see, as yet, what there was to like in Gus, or whoever he was, though it had to be there — his song was the proof. With this faith then in Gus’s essential goodness, despite appearances, Daniel (in his daydream) approached the older man (who was, at first, not friendly at all and used some extremely abusive language) and put this simple proposition to him — that Gus should teach Daniel to sing. In payment for his lessons Daniel agreed, after much haggling and more abuse, to give over to Gus each day his supplementary dinner from McDonald’s. Gus was skeptical at first, then delighted at such generous and self-sacrificing terms. The lessons began (this part was rather sketchy, since Daniel had no very clear notion of what, besides scales, voice lessons might entail) and came to an end with a kind of graduation ceremony that took place on the evening before Daniel’s release. Daniel, gaunt from his long fast, his eyes aglow with inspiration, took leave of his fellow prisoners with a song as piercing and authentic as the song Gus had sung tonight. Perhaps (being realistic) this was asking too much. Perhaps that level of mastery would take longer. But the essential part of the daydream seemed feasible, and in the morning, or at the latest after work, Daniel meant to set his plan in motion.