This was why we decided to have sex in the wind. We did it in the sky over the ocean at night. We hoped no one would see us. I wondered if we might get arrested for public lewdness. The wafting aspect would surely overshadow the erotic aspect. Nevertheless, we avoided the full moon, not wanting to be back-lit.
We were carried with an uneven rhythm. The wind twirled us, flipping us over and over in the sky, like a dead leaf.
Our lovemaking tended to be gentle without gravity. And sometimes that was frustrating, when our passion was too strong to tolerate gentleness. We craved weight, the weight of our bodies on top of each other. Weight was sexy, as it turned out.
We’d be drifting and hugging gently, being loving. Like a spider patiently waiting on its web for an insect to land, Damon was waiting for a handle to come along. When that object came, Damon would grab it and slam me against the wall, the railing, the ladder, the seesaw, the root, whatever, anything resembling a handle or narrow enough for him to hold on to behind my back. Then the lovemaking could be stronger, almost as if we had weight. He bore into me with all the strength in his arms, revealing the frustration he felt.
And sometimes it was me. When his back bumped against the trunk of a tree, I latched onto the branches on either side of him, and I pinned him there and savored him, wrapping my legs around him and the trunk. But then, unable to resist sinking my fingers into his hair, I let go of the branches. He pushed us away, and we went off, drifting again.
We were like insects making love anywhere.
After the first two weeks of being light almost all the time, we cut down to twice a week, because of my work. Sometimes we still got light every night. It was very addicting. Not literally, that is. There were no withdrawal symptoms when we did an experiment and stopped for a week.
I thought I had the solution for making my parents come ’round to liking Damon. After having heard them so often say things about Damon like, “He’s a loser, he’s pathetic, he’s mushy, he’s pretentious, he’s common, he’s evil or insane, in any case dangerous, he’ll make you unhappy,” I could prove to them that he was extraordinary by shooting up for them and showing them I could float.
Understandably, they were horrified at first when they saw me injecting something into my arm. They said Damon was influencing me to take drugs.
Then I started floating.
My father said, “That’s what drugs do. They give you the illusion of floating.”
“Is this an illusion?” I said.
“Probably.”
“Come on! Am I hallucinating that I’m floating?” I yelled at them from the ceiling.
“I don’t know if you are, but we are. The fact is, someone here is hallucinating; there is a hallucination going on.”
For Damon and me, it seemed things could not get better, that nothing could come between us. He continued to help me with my lines occasionally, when I asked him to. We lived in harmony. But then something did come between us.
It started when we sank into a routine. Flying was no longer new, and Damon became gloomy. He mentioned to me that he was having sick thoughts. When I asked him what they were, he just shook his head and said he couldn’t tell me. I wondered if they had to do with a desire to be unfaithful. I asked him and he said no. Then I asked if they had to do with a desire to kidnap me again. He said no.
I mentioned to Nathaniel that Damon was having bad thoughts. He wanted to know what they were and urged me to find out.
But I had already tried and failed. And anyway, something else began happening, something that sort of overshadowed the issue. Damon started trying to kill me.
At first I wasn’t sure if it was just my imagination.
He backed his car toward me, and if I hadn’t jumped out of the way, it would have hit me. Once, when I weighed my full weight, he almost pushed me off my balcony, supposedly by accident, and another time it was supposedly playfully.
He “jokingly” put a pillow on my face for a long time, until I was practically suffocating. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t fought him off as hard as I did. And when it wasn’t a pillow on my face it was his hands around my neck. And he’d press. Nothing came of it, but it wasn’t pleasant. And he looked very tempted to press harder and longer, unless that was my imagination too.
And I noticed he felt drawn to my sword. One night I woke up and he was standing over me with the sword raised, as if about to stab me, and I wasn’t sure if I had caught him just in time, or if he had been standing that way for a while, not really intending to do anything. I’d see him in the kitchen sometimes, holding the big kitchen knife and staring at me in a dreamy way.
Granted, these attempts seemed ambivalent, but they preoccupied me. I felt depressed. I didn’t want to bring up the topic with him, because I didn’t want to acknowledge yet that there was a problem in our relationship.
I racked my brains as to what could be his reason for wanting to kill me; what could be his logic. Finally, it dawned on me what his sick thoughts were: he was afraid our relationship might be losing its initial excitement. To rectify this problem and to put spice back into the relationship, he tried to scare me by pushing me toward oncoming subways, for example. I was relieved that that’s all it was.
I mentioned to Nathaniel that Damon was trying to kill me.
“What do you mean he’s trying to kill you?” he said, very upset. “Doesn’t he tell you he loves you?”
“Yes, all the time.”
“Well then it’s ridiculous what you’re telling me. You’re paranoid or something.”
I told him the many instances of Damon’s murder attempts, and then I told him my theory about Damon’s need for spice.
“I don’t think he’s trying to kill you. I think he’s just goofing off, being playful. And I don’t think he’s doing it in a calculated way to add spice.”
A few days after this conversation, Damon said to me, “There is an issue we haven’t addressed.”
“What is it?”
“The fact that I try to kill you from time to time.”
“So you do try to?”
He nodded. “I’m afraid so. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I can’t hide from the truth any longer.”
“Well, I’m sad to hear it. I was hoping it was my imagination.”
“What do you think we should do about it?”
“Are you asking whether we should break up?”
“I don’t think I could live without you.”
“You may have to if you kill me.”
“I know. That’s why I’m tempted. The misery would be so acute.”
“Maybe I could try to make you miserable in other ways. I could take on lovers. I could be mean to you. No, I probably couldn’t. I love you too much. Can’t you just use your willpower to control yourself?”
“I do. I try to resist the temptation to kill you, and I have, till now, succeeded, but it’s a war within me. When the pain is so bad my logic is forced to accommodate it, the logic gets twisted into unnatural shapes.”
I told him not to worry, that we’d work through his urges to kill me.
Deep down I believed he wouldn’t actually go through with it, that he just needed to regularly scare himself about it.
Damon began to get notes on his windshield wiper that said things like, “Prepare yourself,” and “Not much longer now.” At first he wondered if I had put them there. Then we both wondered if my parents had. When I questioned them, they denied it. Soon the notes said “Brace yourself,” and “Better late than never.”