Audio: Joseph O’Neill reads.
The whole business led my wife to suggest a conference with our dear friends Pam and Becky, who were discreet and worldly and kind. She wrote them:
I prepared the meal—cucumber soup, grilled chicken breast, and a lentil-and-scallion salad. Cooking had been Viki’s thing, not mine, but I’d been stuck at home for months and the kitchen had become a place of recreation. Also, my relationship with my body had changed.
Pam and Becky arrived on the dot, at seven. My illness had made me very small and very light, and they embraced me gently. “He looks so young,” Becky said to Viki. “Where’s Molly?”
Our daughter, Molly, aged five, was spending the evening with Viki’s sister, Maya. Maya and Molly didn’t know what was going on. Nobody knew, not even my physician.
I poured everyone a drink—purified water, in my case—and without further ado Viki announced, “Something strange has happened.” This was planned. Viki is an inarguably sane and well-balanced person with no history of hoaxing or chain-yanking. She is the perfect person to break unfathomable news. It’s not that I’ve ever been the class clown, but my physical weakness had for some reason lessened my authority. “This is all supersensitive and confidential,” Viki said.
“Uh-oh,” Becky said.
“If we’re going to have a top-secret discussion, I’m going to sit down,” Pam said.
We joined her at the table. My wife said, “I don’t know how else to put this.” She moved her hand in my direction. “He’s developed the ability to fly.”
Our friends fell into a silence of incomprehension and alarm—as if we’d announced a religious conversion. Then Pam did a short laugh and said, “Fly how?”
“As in fly like a bird,” Viki said. “Fly.”
“ ‘Bird,’ ” I said, “is maybe taking it too far.”
“I don’t get it,” Becky said.
At Viki’s signal, I fetched my laptop. Everyone turned toward the screen. I played the nine-second clip that Viki had filmed with her phone.
“Let’s see that again,” Pam said.
We all watched it twice more. Both times it showed the same thing: me levitating in that very room and then sort of scooting from the kitchen to the windows of our eleventh-floor apartment with my arms defensively stretched out ahead of me. I reach up with one hand and touch the ceiling. The clip ends.
Pam said, “It’s so, it’s so—lifelike.”
Becky said, “You know what it reminds me of? Mary Poppins.”
They didn’t believe, or understand, their eyes. Again, we had anticipated this. Viki gave me a little kiss of encouragement, because she knew that I was about to do something I found loathsome and embarrassing.
I pushed off with my toes and floated over to the aforementioned windows. It was a clear February night. Through the panes you saw the purposeless, dominating brilliance of the skyscrapers of New York.
When I came down, our guests were looking at each other with horror. Becky’s hands covered her mouth.
Viki said, “We can’t explain it, either. We can only think that it’s connected to his illness.” She said, “Are we ready for some soup?”
The soup went down well. We learned about Becky and Pam’s trip to Maine, and Viki reciprocated with an update about Molly and her adventures in kindergarten. There had been issues with a boy named Andy, but Andy was now socializing more successfully.
This exchange did not involve me speaking or being spoken to. When I say that Pam and Becky were our dear friends, I really mean that they were Viki’s dear friends. They were attached to me because I was attached to Viki.
I brought out the lentil salad. Becky picked up her fork, then abruptly stood up. “This is too much for me right now,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
As our guests made their way out, Pam took Viki to one side and said, “He’s going to need insurance. I’ll e-mail you.”
My volatility had become apparent three weeks earlier. On an errand to buy hydrogen peroxide to clean the bathroom grout, I sprang over a pool of melted snow—and rocketed to the far sidewalk, passing in front of a car that was making a turn from York Avenue. I nearly got somebody killed. I immediately returned home, treading very slowly and very softly. After I’d sat down for a while, trying to calm myself, I decided to take an experimental little leap. I hit the ceiling.
The next two days I spent mostly in bed, too consternated to move. Luckily my presence was nowhere expected. Eventually I convinced myself that I’d experienced a powerful hallucination—a side effect of the medication I was taking, no doubt—and I decided to step out and complete my mission of buying grout cleaner. To be on the safe side, I first hopped on one foot. I took off.
There was no way around it: I’d undergone a transition, or translation. I wasn’t dreaming—although it so happened that in my dreams I never flew. I didn’t say anything to Viki right away. The relevant confession took place only the following week, after I’d spent some time familiarizing myself with certain parameters of my new state (getting airborne; hovering; landing). My kind of aerial motion felt like sideways falling: it was scary, slightly nauseating, and unpleasant, even after I’d worked out that, by a simple but mysterious exercise of volition, I could adjust my speed and elevation. It always felt unnatural and lonely to be up in the air.
One evening, when Molly was asleep, I overcame my dread and my shame, and I sat Viki down and tried to relate what had happened to me. Of course, it took a physical demonstration to bring the facts home to her. Language alone could not effectively represent a state of affairs contradicted by physics, biology, and the history of reality. Neither of us knew what to do about it, in the sense of how to cure me. There was no discussion of what use, if any, to make of my new potentiality. “I think we should talk it over with someone,” Viki said. “Maybe Pam and Becky.” All in all, it was extraordinary how quickly my wife adapted. I’d say that within ten minutes of hearing, or seeing, my epochal news she was asking me what else had happened that day.
“I’m finally done,” I told her, referring to a project that had been plaguing me. I produced communications materials for a financial group. I’d foolishly got involved in drafting the annual report, which wasn’t something you could just wing, given the legal framework. Being away from the office, on account of my undiagnosable ailment, hadn’t made it any easier. The substance of the job was handling various stupidities, my own included.
I was at that time a stupidist, and probably still am. Stupidism is the theory that people are stupid in the measure of their most powerful agency. They’re stupid precisely when we need them not to be stupid. Much as I didn’t want to be a stupidist—it’s dispiriting, for starters—I recognized that it improved my grasp on things. Whereas I used to listen with great respect to what the Treasury Secretary or the C.E.O. of a booming conglomerate or even your regular talking head had to say, now I presumed that they were full of it. It was revelatory. The world makes a lot more sense when you accept that it’s run by dingbats. And once you’ve recognized the nature of stupidity—that it expresses a relation between a person and that person’s situation; that it describes the gap between what ought to be understood and done and what is, in fact, understood and done—you begin to recognize the magnitude of the problem. Stupidity isn’t inevitable or constant, of course, but in the long run it almost always prevails. Alan Greenspan? Stupid, ultimately. Barack Obama? Not as smart as he needed to be, at the end of the day. Joe Schmo? Amazingly stupid.
The subject had a very personal relevance. There was something downright stupid about a flying human being. I felt, above all, stupid.
With this organizing principle in my mind—not to be stupid—I followed up on Pam’s suggestion about insurance. She put me on to a friend of hers, Naomi Patel, who had one of those cute little offices in the Empire State Building. Naomi, according to Pam, specialized in boutique perils. I made an appointment. Viki said doubtfully, “I guess that makes sense.”
It was my first excursion since that fateful near-miss on York Avenue. Viki, who had left work early, held my hand as we walked to and from the taxi. She did this in order to keep me anchored to the ground as well as to convey love.
Naomi Patel was our age—late-ish thirties—and had a very reassuring and competent manner. Her office was on the seventy-sixth floor and offered a view of a silvery and gleaming Hudson River and a silvery and gleaming New York Harbor. I cleaned my glasses to get a better look, because it was that order of spectacle—the order that reminds you of words like “argentine” and “numinous.”
She listened conscientiously, making notes on a yellow pad. When I’d finished, she put down her pen and removed her glasses and said, to Viki, “Have I understood this correctly? Your husband”—a little ironically, it seemed to me, she checked her notes—“has the power of flight?”
“Um, yes,” Viki said. She was making the face that we’d agreed she would make, namely, a face signalling to the insurance broker that she should humor the eccentric husband. We didn’t want the broker to believe that I was truly an aeronaut.
Naomi Patel said, “That is unusual.” She continued, “I’ve handled a lot of dangerous activities—skydiving, wingsuit flying, really far-out stuff—but never this. Huh.”
She reflected for a moment, calculating whether my case would produce a commission and how much work it would involve. You could practically see her brow and mouth creasing into plus and minus and equals signs. Or she was thinking how best to get me out of her office. She said decisively, “You need to think of yourself as a car, or a helicopter. You’re going to need protection against accidental damage to yourself—it’s called A. D. & D., and covers death or dismemberment—and you need liability insurance, in case you cause loss to others. The tricky piece is assessing the risk. We’re going to have to give the underwriters some guidance.” She swivelled to her keyboard. “I’m sending you the application form.”
It seems that nothing can proceed, at a certain point in life, without filling out a form—without boring a new hole in one’s small bowl of time.
That’s O.K. The older I get, the greater grows my respect for the underground deeds that make our lives persistently functional. Nobody told me, growing up, that in addition to a regular career one must embrace a secret administrative vocation. I can hardly believe that for years I lived in a fantastical world in which I gave no thought to ventilation solutions, health-provision networks, wood conditioner, bylaws, credit scores, automatic-payment dates, storage space, and propane.
When we got home, I ate some chocolate-peanut-butter ice cream, for the calories, then made use of the bathroom, then retreated to bed in order to fill out the insurance questionnaire. Viki and Molly were in the living room, cutting paper with tiny yellow scissors.
The assumption, here, was that I would zip around of my own free will. But why on earth would I do that? Who knew how long I could stay aloft? What about the wind, rain, lightning, radiation, and cold? What would I wear? What about my glasses? What about drones and aircraft and wind turbines and electrical wires and chimneys and miscellaneous poles? Any sizable city would be a death trap, basically. As for the countryside, everyone out there was locked and loaded. Anything that moved in the sky they shot. They gunned down ducks and turkeys by the million. I’d have to fly at night, like an owl. No: I needed insurance only for involuntary or emergency flights. Who knew what lay ahead? I might fall out of an airplane. I might find myself caught in a fire or fleeing rising waters. Even then, even in extremis, I would fly only as a last resort. There were systems in place. The parachute had been invented. We had fire exits and flood alerts and evacuation plans. We had disaster preparedness. The great fray, in the real world, wasn’t good versus evil. It was perils versus protocols.
From the bedroom doorway I said, “Hey, Molly. What would you do if you could fly?”
Molly stayed focussed on her work. Even a five-year-old could see that the question was absurd. She said, “I would fly to pasta.”
I said, “What else?” I was convinced that she knew something that I could not know.
“I would fly to you,” Molly said, to her mother.
Aday or two later, there was a meeting at the office. The purpose of the meeting was to review the draft annual report. My bodily presence was required, and the C.C.O. himself was also going to be there. I was excited. It had been a long time since I’d gone in. I got dressed up. My one belt, I discovered, was now too long for me, and like a teen-ager I had to punch an extra hole in the strap to accommodate the prong. Viki said, “Why don’t you put on your blue sweater? It makes you look taller. I can’t explain it, it makes you taller.”
The meeting went well. “I have no idea what ‘agile feedback loops’ means,” the C.C.O. said. “I like it.” Everyone laughed. I waited for somebody to credit me with the phrase, but no one did. In fact, and I guess to my relief, I wasn’t mentioned or called on at all.
Afterward I accompanied Valerie Acevedo and Alexis Chen, who were workplace buddies and funny, to the smoking balcony. I didn’t smoke, but to hightail it home right after the meeting would risk giving the wrong impression. This balcony was on the thirty-second floor and had snow on it. The daylight was fading. Across the street, a lustrous tower was filled with white-shirted workers.
“What this place needs,” Alexis said, vaping, “is Acapulco chairs.”
“Which ones are they?” Valerie said.
“You know—with the bouncy vinyl cords. They’re made for the outdoors. Hence ‘Acapulco.’ ”
I started laughing. “Wait—‘Hence Acapulco’?”
Alexis continued, “Well, how did last night go?”
“Fun. Good,” Valerie said evenly.
Alexis made a listening noise.
Valerie, suddenly inspired, said, “It’s like I’m like a restaurant. Like he liked me like he’d like a restaurant. Like, ‘That was cool. I should come here again.’ ”
Alexis said quickly, “ ‘The osso buco was excellent.’ ”
They both laughed and drew on their e-cigarettes. I made a proximate sound, but quietly. I didn’t feel like a party to the conversation; I felt merely privy to it. It surprised me that they were talking about this stuff, because I thought a masculine presence would be inhibitive. Maybe corporate-banter norms had changed in my absence.
Alexis said, “And?”
Valerie said, “Yeah, it was sweet. He was kind of . . . focussed on the details. On trend. What’s that word? Artisanal.”
Alexis said, “Yeah, the craft-brewer thing. Expert but traditional. I’m on the fence.”
Valerie waited a beat, like an actual comedian, then said, very dryly, “Still, it’s been a while since I saw penis.” The two women laughed explosively.
It was at this moment that I did something stupid. I put my weight on my heels and, from my position next to them, rose about three feet off the floor and floated backward into the building. I watched them for a moment. They were talking and vaping as before. They had failed to notice—I say this in all objectivity—one of the most wondrous occurrences in the history of humankind.
When I got home, Pam was sitting at the table. She had not removed her coat. Viki was on the sofa with Molly, fixing her up with headphones and an iPad. That wasn’t normally permitted on weekdays. Something was up.
I decided to make green tea.
I overheard Pam telling Viki that Becky had physically attacked her; that it wasn’t the first time this had happened; that on this occasion Pam had felt in mortal danger. “I’m scared she’s going to come by here,” she said.
“This is terrible,” Viki said. She was wringing her hands, which wasn’t like her. But the situation was unusually vexing. Her primary allegiance was to Becky, not to Pam. Viki had known Pam only since the moment, about five years before, when she had surfaced as Becky’s first girlfriend. Viki’s friendship with Becky went back to their undergrad days at Boston College, where they belonged to a Thomas Aquinas study group whose members had stayed in touch, more or less, ever since—“the old theology gang,” Viki called them.
The first time I met Viki, I asked her what theology was, exactly. She answered that it was the study of the nature of the divine. She must have known that this was a very, very hot thing to say, particularly to someone like me, an atheist and a desperado. When I asked if she believed in God, she murmured, also hotly, “Would that I did.” For years the subject didn’t come up again. Then, one night, when I was beset by anguish at my deformation, I confided to Viki in the darkness of our bedroom that I felt overwhelmingly confused. “I just don’t understand it,” I said.
There was a pause. From out of the dark her voice said, “The ultimate end of man is to understand God, in some fashion.”
“I’m sorry?”
The Viki voice whispered, “All things exist in order to attain the divine likeness.”
A third voice sounded: Molly had woken up with a shout of fear. We heard the rapidly thumping approach of a panicked little sprinter. The door crashed open, and then she was in bed with us, and then she was asleep in the space between her mother and father.
Pam wasn’t part of the old theology gang. Pam was out of Peru, New York. When Becky had begun furtively dating her, she had referred to her as the Peruvian. Becky had always been straight, and Viki and I thought the Peruvian was a dude from the Andes. It was quite the thunderbolt when we were introduced to a woman, somewhat older and beefier than any of us, who worked as a purchasing manager in Long Island City. We liked Pam right away. She was warm and lively and had all these stories about hunting ghosts on Valcour Island and making out with Vermont girls on the banks of the Ausable River. In all honesty, we soon preferred her company to Becky’s, not that anyone was making comparisons.
And yet, even if Pam was more fun, she was more detachable. It would have been easier for Viki if it had been Pam, not Becky, who was the one doing the beating up.
I served Viki and Pam the green tea. I don’t know why, but it bothered me that Pam hadn’t removed her coat. It added to the disturbance.
Pam related that she’d started a breakup discussion—not for the first time—and Becky had flown into a rage. She started throwing things, including a glass paperweight that if it had hit Pam on the head would have brained her.
I had been in Pam and Becky’s apartment many times. It was full of tchotchkes. If you wanted to throw things, there was no shortage of ammunition.
“Oh, my God,” Viki said.
“She went to look for my gun,” Pam said. “She knows I keep it in one of the shoeboxes. She had this look on her face. She wanted to stop me from leaving. I ran out before she could get me.”
“Oh, my God,” Viki said.
Pam showed us her phone. There were twenty-seven missed calls from Becky.
I was in the kitchen, throwing together some dinner. “You can get a restraining order,” I said. “There are things that can be done.”
Pam seemed not to hear. Viki was looking at Molly. Molly, still wearing headphones, was grinning and squirming as she interacted with her iPad.
The buzzer sounded.
Viki said, “Are we expecting a delivery?”
That was my province—online grocery shopping. “No,” I said.
Nobody moved. We listened.
The buzzer sounded again.
“It’s her,” Pam said. “I’m telling you, it’s her.”
Iturned off the gas flame and put a lid on the saucepan. I wiped my hands with a dishcloth. Dinner was pretty much ready. The kale had been steamed and the chickpeas and onions had been sautéed.
“That’s strange,” Viki said, peering at the intercom video. “I don’t see anyone.”
I went over to see for myself. Nobody was visible at the entrance.
Viki said, “She might be inside already. Someone might have let her in.”
Our building had no doorman. In order to enter, a visitor had to be buzzed through two doors. However, if the visit coincided with a person exiting the building, often the doors would be held open as a courtesy. This didn’t mean that the visitor could go right up, however, because the elevator was controlled by the host.
The intercom screen went dark, which was to be expected.
I said, “Look, it might not be her.” It happened sometimes—an impatient food-delivery guy buzzing multiple apartments.
Viki said, “She just texted me.”
Our front door has two locks. I turned them both.
Viki said, “Let me talk to her.”
I got out three plates and served the food.
Viki made the call from the bedroom. We didn’t speak, Pam and I. I thought about putting an arm around her, but was deterred by the bulk of her coat. She didn’t touch her food.
Viki came out of the bedroom. She sat down at the table. Her face was exhausted or something. She said slowly, “She won’t leave. ‘I want to talk to her,’ she keeps saying, in this weird calm voice. ‘I have a right to talk to her.’ She sounds off. She sounds really off.”
“Maybe we’re jumping to conclusions here,” I said.
“That stupid gun,” Pam said. “I’m scared, Vik.”
Viki said to nobody in particular, “She wanted to be a missionary. In college. You know—go to Africa. Convert everyone.”
Pam started crying. She displayed her phone: the calls were still coming.
I didn’t know if Pam’s assessment of the threat was reliable or not, but I did know that very specific situations are associated with murder and mayhem, and that a breakup is one such situation. I said, “There’s no way out of the building except through the lobby. We’re going to have to call the cops.”
“No,” Pam said, her face in her hands. “They’ll shoot her. No.”
I was filling my mouth with kale when I noticed that Pam was pointing a finger at me. “You,” she said. “You could do something. You know what I’m talking about.”
Viki was contemplating me with a strange expression. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. I forgot all about that. My God, yes.”
I took a sip of green tea. The important thing was not to do anything dumb.
As I was deliberating, as I was trying to determine exactly how an uninsured aerial intervention would help matters, I was blindsided by a feeling that I can describe only as a powerful sense of arrival—as if all my life I had been trekking, in a series of unconscious gradations and unconscious turns, on an imperceptible road that finally, at this exact moment, had delivered me to a new place and a new dimension of action.
Slowly, I stood up. I went to a window and opened it. Bright, enigmatic apartments were everywhere. As the cold entered the room, I turned toward the two women so that they could behold my face. I spread my arms as if they were wings. I rose into the air. “Tell me what I should do,” I said, and their visages filled with awe and dread.
Viki’s sister, Maya, is in the habit of dropping by without warning. In mitigation, she has a recognizable, superfluously insistent way of buzzing that functions as a heads-up. I was still aloft by the window, my back to the flaming skyscrapers, when her specific buzz sounded. Viki immediately said, “Maya?”
I glided to the intercom. There she was, humorously blowing a cloud of breath and cigarette smoke into the door camera. Before I could react, she was looking through the glass front doors and waving at someone inside. That person had to be Becky, whom Maya had known for years. Maya was let into the building.
Viki said with sudden conviction, “Maya will handle her.”
I knew Maya to be a good-hearted if somewhat erratic person. She had a history of eccentric and disastrous sales ventures that she ran out of her basement apartment in the East Village. She owned a harp that she couldn’t play. She had opinions about yogurts and blue algae and the energies of rooms. It was all a bit silly, to my mind, but it was Maya who had astonishingly observed to Viki, “There’s something different about him. I don’t know what it is. But his energy has definitely changed.”
Who am I to scoff at extrasensory perception? Who am I to rule out the idea of a supernature? It was precisely Maya’s heightened atmospheric instincts that led her to detect (she later reported) a “funky aura” about Becky that night. Maya stated that she’d long had this funny feeling about Becky, who was “always sort of shrinking herself for no reason” and for this reason had to be “bottling up a lot of negativity and anger.” When she saw Becky loitering in the lobby, she knew straightaway that something was very wrong. “It was her ponytail,” Maya said. “It was so neat and vicious. She’s, like, ‘What a coincidence, I just got here,’ and in my head I’m, like, Learn how to lie, lady.”
Maya and Becky entered the elevator. They stood inside the brushed-steel box for a minute or two. “I guess they’re not in,” Maya suggested.
“Oh, they’re in,” Becky said. “Pam told me to come. They’re just not letting us up for some reason. I’m worried. I think there might be an emergency. I called them earlier, but got no response. We have to find a way up there.”
Maya said, “I’m going to text them. If we don’t hear back quickly, I’ll start to worry.” They left the elevator and sat down on the lobby bench.
Maya’s text to Viki read:
How did Maya understand the situation so swiftly and so correctly, without any of the facts? How did she see through Becky and her plausible story? How could she have been so smart?
Viki always does as her big sister says. She called 911.
About six minutes later, the red and white lights of squad cars were flashing in the street. Maya opened the door to twelve cops from the Nineteenth Precinct. They identified Becky and arrested her on the spot, evidently a compulsory procedure in domestic-violence cases. Becky went very quietly, like a little lamb, Maya said, just as Maya had figured she would.
Two of the cops, a woman and a man, came up with Maya. We all sat down. Maya said, “You found a weapon on her, right? I sensed a weapon.”
“I’ll come to that,” the woman police officer said.
Later it became known that Maya was right. Becky had been carrying Pam’s gun.
The woman police officer separately interviewed Viki and Pam and Maya. There was a lot of paperwork; everything was methodically written down. I wasn’t asked to make a statement. I hung out with Molly, who was interested in what was going on and kept trying to remove her headphones. The woman police officer explained to Pam what her options were, and recommended a “safety plan.” Pam said, “She’s dangerous. I want to emphasize that she’s dangerous. I don’t want to see her again.” The woman police officer repeated to Pam what remedies were available to her and what systems were in place to protect her. She gave Pam three brochures, which Viki and I leafed through, because our friend was in no state to retain information. The N.Y.P.D., I read, annually processes more than two hundred thousand domestic-violence calls. Pam, coat and all, went to hug the woman police officer. The officer accepted this with professionalism. She had been trained to handle hugs, too.
The thing that struck me was how orderly these cops were. It made me feel hopeful.
It was agreed that Pam would spend the night in a hotel a couple of blocks away and that Viki would walk her there. Maya went home.
Amazingly, Molly was still awake. She sat on the living-room floor surrounded by animal figurines and other objects. The big cats, her favorites, were arranged in a long line. There was a group of unicorns. There were green soldiers and there were glass beads and there were bears and there was at least one crocodile. A dinosaur, massively bigger than the other toys, lay on its side. Molly has very white skin and dark-brown hair. She was murmuring as she manipulated the creatures, and I tried in vain, from my chair, to make out what the creatures were saying to one another. Some kind of drama of coöperation seemed to be taking place. There was an imaginary obstacle, a crevasse or a river, and the animals were helping one another across. Then a battle started. A soldier battled a shark, who battled a unicorn, who defeated the shark, who reattacked. When the white tiger was imperilled by the lynx, some turtles and sheep flew to the tiger’s aid. One by one the combatants were downed, then picked up and revived by a girl’s giant hand. Would that, Molly seemed to be repeating. Would that.
She yawned.
“Let’s go to bed,” I said. I took her hand. “It’ll all be here in the morning.”
This was nearly two thousand mornings ago. Within weeks, I lost the power to fly, if that’s what the power was. My theory is that I regained weight and became too heavy, but who knows. I never again discussed this strange chapter with anyone, not even with Viki, and increasingly I find myself unsure that it happened. The video clip of my airborne self has been lost. But I have my confirmation. Molly’s toys are stored in a box under her bed, where they can easily be found. Once or twice a year she’ll wistfully resurrect them, the white tiger and his gang, and I see with my own eyes that there was once a flier. ♦
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