We then played around. He asked me to blow on him, and I did: I blew him upward, I blew him away. I fanned him away. I opened the window slightly to create a draft. I tapped him like a balloon. He swam after the rat.
We even tried to have sex. When he was on top, he weighed nothing, which was pleasant on the one hand, but impractical on the other. The way we finally managed to do it was with me on top, pinning him down so he wouldn’t float away.
Then came the serious question, as we laid side by side, the weight of my arm holding him down.
“Do you want me to try it too?” I asked.
“That’s not up to me. It’s entirely up to you if you want to try becoming light. I’m not going to pressure you or even encourage you. I’m pretty sure it’s safe, health-wise, even in the long run, but I can’t be absolutely certain.”
For a moment I had a horrible vision of ourselves, a few months down the line, vomiting and shriveling up, due to having been injected with this potion.
“Is it fun? Becoming light?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s like being an astronaut. But God forbid, if you reach zero by accident, you’ll be like that rat, doomed to rain and die any day. I’ve already had three rats rain on me. It’s something to think about.”
“You won’t let me reach zero, right?”
“No. I would rather rain a thousand times than let you drizzle once.”
“Okay, I’ll do it.”
Damon made me light. He gave me a tiny dose at first, to see if I tolerated it, and if I wanted to go further. With that first injection, he made me lose ten pounds in about fifteen seconds. I giggled nervously. I felt giddy and, of course, light. It felt good.
As I soon found out, being twenty pounds lighter felt even better. But no matter how good that felt, it was nothing compared to getting down to a quarter of an ounce. I had to perform the injections on myself, after a certain point, because any touch from Damon would have altered my weight on the scale.
Being light, very light, was not much like anything I had ever experienced. It reminded me vaguely of the liberating feeling one gets when someone offers to carry one’s bag.
We bounced in slow motion around the apartment, danced and swam in the air.
Then we walked down the street with our heavy shoes (he gave me a pair of shoes like his) and took Damon’s car out to the country, to a deserted road, and while one of us drove, the other was pulled through the air by a thread attached with Scotch tape to the roof of the car. When we had exhausted the fun in that, we left the car and climbed trees using only the tips of our fingers and the lightest pressure. We sat on branches no thicker than chopsticks. We swung off leaves.
When the weight came back, it came back slowly, which meant we started landing just a little quicker than usual when we jumped off the top of trees. We drove back to the city and injected ourselves again and waited till night so we’d be less visible when we drifted outside. We went to deserted streets and made sure no one was around, and then climbed up the walls of buildings. We lowered ourselves down to the East River. We held on to threads that we tied to the railing, so as not to be blown away. It was a very warm night.
The next day Damon bought a scale that allowed us to get down to one-tenth of an ounce: the weight of a jumbo-sized paper clip. And later that day we weighed in at one-twentieth of an ounce. We had so much fun at that weight. We didn’t need to be any lighter.
That night the rat rained.
We spent the next two weeks enjoying our weight loss, playing with the freedom it gave us, injecting ourselves frequently and not spending much time at our regular weight. It was wonderful to hang on to birds. Or kites. Or one of those helium-filled party balloons, which would carry us up. When we’d let go of the string, we’d drift around or back down (depending on the breeze), like ordinary balloons. We rode on the backs of dogs and other small animals.
Walking on our hands was no problem anymore. Even walking on our fingers. We could run on the points of our toes, and jump that way, like ballerinas without needing toe shoes, and land that way. We could walk down the street on our bare points for hours if we wanted to and didn’t care what people thought.
We could do flips in the air, and if we fell on our faces, it didn’t hurt, and if we fell on our heads, we didn’t break our necks.
As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t possible for anyone to overestimate how much fun this was. If there was a heaven, weightlessness must be what it consisted of.
Due to our tremendously light weight, we were able to walk on water. And sit on it. We sat on rivers and took long walks on lakes and short walks on ponds and puddles.
We liked to sit on electric wires, like birds, and smooch. And then, when we got bored of sitting, we walked on those wires like circus performers, and when we lost our balance, we didn’t fall, but drifted to the side.
The one thing we couldn’t do was fly in rain. A few dozen raindrops weighed more than we did and made us sink to the ground, unless the breeze was strong enough to compensate.
The only really dangerous thing for us to do was to jump off the edge of a cliff or a roof or a tree while absentmindedly holding something in our hands, like a rock. Then, of course, we plummeted to the ground unless we had the presence of mind to let go of the rock before crashing.
But otherwise, walking off cliffs was fun. We called it “diving.” We’d stand on the edge, take off our shoes, and push off for the wind to carry us.
Gliding until our weight returned was exciting, but we invariably regretted it afterward, when we landed far from our shoes. Sometimes we’d land in very undesirable places.
Once, we landed in the middle of a forest. The ground was prickly, which, while we were still relatively light, was fine, but as our weight increased, our bare soles began to sting.
A note about our shoes: I preferred the loafer style, to the style with laces, like Damon’s. He liked to hang on to the laces with his toes while he bobbed in the breeze. I liked to be able to slip out of my shoes in a bookstore and float up to a high shelf. There was a big risk of getting caught, of course, which was why I always made sure to pretend I was climbing up the shelves, not floating up.
Damon and I also did some weightless socializing. For fun we went to cast parties, wrap parties, and every other sort of movie party. We wore normal clothes and our heavy shoes. I think people noticed that we moved strangely. We had to be careful not to leave our muscles relaxed, otherwise our arms would be floating at our sides, like in a bath. It required hard work and concentration to look heavy when we were light. Of course, since our hair was weightless too and floating around our heads as if we were under water, we had to do something about it. We wore wigs in the style of our own hair. Sometimes we wore hoods instead. At home, after the parties, I loved to stand in front of the mirror and whip off my wig or hood and see my hair drifting around.
It was so sensual to cavort around weightless that we often became extremely aroused. But it was hard to have sex while being light; a bit like being on Prozac, from what I’d heard. To replace gravity, we had to use sheer muscles — but a whole different set of muscles than those required for traditional, weighty sex. We had trouble making each other stay in place. We were like two big balloons, laughing with exasperation, laughing so hard we’d feel spent, as if we’d succeeded.
Eventually we figured out we had to be intertwined in order to have light sex; I had to wrap my legs around his like vines. And once we got the hang of it, the floor was what became annoying. Our smallest movement would make us bounce up in the air, for many long seconds, and then we’d land. It was distracting to have the floor bump into us repeatedly during sex. We’d land in unexpected ways, like on our sides, but only for a moment, because we’d pop up again at the next movement. Sometimes we would slowly drift back down head first. When this wasn’t the case, I’d kick the floor away impatiently with one foot, but when I did that too hard, we’d hit the ceiling, which could also be irritating. And, like a fly buzzing around us, the floor always came back, no matter how many times we’d shoo it away.