While Damon was away, my friend Jeremy asked me to baby-sit his cat, Minou, for a while. I missed Damon and welcomed the company, even though I was busily working on a film almost every day.
Three weeks after Damon left me and the city, he finished his invention. He still wouldn’t tell me what it was, but said he’d be back in a week and would show it to me then, after doing some more tests on it. He added that he couldn’t wait to see me.
To my surprise, when Damon came back, he was wearing his old transparent clothes. But now he was also wearing huge, clunky metal shoes. I was very happy to see him and hugged him as soon as he walked in the door — or rather, as soon as he wobbled in (due to his weighty shoes). He kissed me and held me tightly. In my arms he felt unsteady, as if tipsy or tired. He sat down in a chair and was smiling expectantly, perhaps waiting for me to say something.
“How’ve you been?” I asked.
“Very well,” he said, nodding and still grinning.
“Have you had trouble wearing opaque clothing?”
“No trouble at all. I’m dressed like this today out of necessity. But don’t ask me about it right now.”
“Did you bring your invention?” I looked at his big shoes.
“Yes.”
He got up and walked to the middle of the room. He unlaced his shoes. So I was right: the invention involved his shoes.
He slipped one of his feet out of one shoe, and then slowly, delicately, slipped the other foot out of the other shoe.
“Do you remember how badly I wanted to make clouds solid?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, I failed. So then I thought: if you can’t solidify them, join them.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He gently hopped once. But the word hop is not accurate because it implies coming back down right away, which he did not do, at least not very quickly and not before having practically reached the ceiling. I understood then what he meant when he said he had joined them.
I felt weak.
Still, the explanation for what I was seeing had to be less far-fetched than that Damon had become a cloud. “Have you become bionic?” I asked.
“No. Just light.”
And he hopped again, and started leaping around the room, like a gazelle, practically hitting the ceiling each time, and doing it in slight slow-motion at that. His white flimsy clothes were fluttering and his blond hair was flowing. He looked like a privileged person.
After a while he stopped and stood in front of me. He took my hand.
“Raise me,” he said.
He was indeed very light. He couldn’t have weighed more than two or three pounds. I continued raising him until he was above my head. I slowly waved him over me.
Once down, he said he wanted to go to the car to get his accessories. He put his shoes back on and went clunking out. I went with him.
He took some bags out of his car, and we went back upstairs.
He opened his carrying case and out drifted a live rat. It floated in the air around us, trying to run away, but going nowhere, really. Minou, the cat I was baby-sitting, was transfixed. I had never seen a more miserable rat or a more excited cat.
“I had to experiment on rats before experimenting on myself,” explained Damon. “I’m sorry about it. I’m not in favor of testing on animals, but I didn’t know what else to do in this case.”
He then pulled out of his shoulder bag some hypodermic needles and a tourniquet.
“Bring out the scales!” he exclaimed.
“What scales?”
“I know you have scales.”
“I just have one.”
“No kitchen scale?”
I brought out my human scale and my kitchen scale.
He got undressed and stepped on the human scale. He weighed two pounds. He wrapped the tourniquet around his arm and injected himself with a clear solution. We watched the scale, and within a few seconds he lost one pound.
“I want you to bring me closer,” he said, stepping off the scale.
“To what?” I said.
“Zero.”
“Why?”
“Cause then I can do even more fun things.”
“Like what?”
“Like swim in air or be blown by your breath and stuff like that. The lower the weight, the more fun it gets. But don’t let it reach zero or I’ll die.”
“Do you mean you’ll die, as in: you’ll be upset, or you’ll die literally?”
“I mean the latter, and therefore the former as well. If I become completely weightless, I’ll be more cloud than human, and there’s no turning back. I won’t regain my weight, I’ll just eventually rain. Not right away. It takes a few days or weeks. But once you rain, you lose your life. You become a puddle.”
He placed one needle and the tourniquet on my kitchen scale, which he then set to zero.
He stepped onto the kitchen scale himself, trying to find his balance.
“Watch the scale and tell me what you see,” he said.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I said.
“Yes.”
“What if my scale is inaccurate and you’ve reached zero and it says you haven’t?”
“Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.”
He was about to inject himself, when I shouted, “Wait! Are you sure you got all the air bubbles out?”
“The liquid is weightless. You can’t get the air bubbles out.”
“But if you inject yourself with air, it can be fatal.”
“I am air, or rather, cloud. It doesn’t matter.”
He injected part of the solution into his arm, and waited.
After a few seconds the scale steadied at eight ounces.
He injected himself again, and his weight went down to four ounces. He continued giving himself tiny doses of the solution, bringing himself closer and closer to zero.
“How close do you want to get?” I asked.
“Quarter of an ounce.”
“That’s crazy. My scale’s not that good. You can’t trust it at that level.”
“I’ve done it before on my own kitchen scale, which is no better than yours.”
“I don’t believe you. How could you tell how close you were getting if you had no one to tell you?”
“I used mirrors.”
He kept injecting himself with small doses until I lied to him and told him he had reached a quarter of an ounce, when he actually weighed half an ounce.
“Are you sure you’re not fibbing?” he said. “I think you’re fibbing, but let’s try it anyway.”
He stepped off the scale. “Oh yes, I feel heavy.”
Naked, he jumped in the air, reached the ceiling, and slowly drifted back down like a balloon. Before he landed, he started kicking his legs vigorously and doing the breast stroke with his arms, as if trying to swim in air. And then he landed.
“An-na. You fibbed. I’m not supposed to land when I do this.”
He went back on the scale and said, “I’m sure I weigh at least three-quarters of an ounce, which means I will inject myself with enough serum to eliminate half an ounce.”
“If you do that you’ll be dead. You weighed half an ounce, okay?”
“Okay. Don’t lie to me anymore, or it can be dangerous. Be very truthful, very accurate.”
He injected himself and we waited a few seconds. I then told him he had reached his ideal weight.
“Good. Now I’m as heavy as a Bic pen.”
He stepped off the scale, jumped toward the ceiling, and did the breast stroke and kicked his legs. He succeeded in not landing. He slowly, very slowly, advanced in air.
After a minute, he stopped and landed. He was panting from the exertion.
“You know, I’ll have to get a more sensitive scale so I can get closer to zero, because a quarter ounce still requires too much effort to stay up in the air for long. I bet that if I could get down to one-twentieth of an ounce, I could stay up in the air with as little effort as staying afloat in water.”