This New and Poisonous Air by Adam McOmber Read Free Book Online Page B

fist, down a country road outside of town. A flat moon hung in the sky, nothing but a stage prop, and the trees at the sides of the road were the sketches of an untrained artist. Kitty was no longer just a girl. Her pretty cheeks were made of brick and mortar, her eyes as white as screens. Even her once lush hair looked more like the old birds’ nests that sprouted from beneath the Orpheum’s marquee.
    In the distance stood a walled city, hastily painted, and on the shining streets of that city were the missing—Lon Stellmacher and the girl who came on the bus and the young man who wanted to be in the movies. There were so many more whom we didn’t know, those who’d come before our time. And at the very head of the crowd was a blond boy dressed in a top hat and red tuxedo jacket, too tight around the shoulders. His face was a lamp, his eyebrows arched and white. He watched our girl approach and seemed to appraise us. We, who could no longer dress ourselves in the chilly air of our Orpheum, who could only watch as he gathered Kitty Miller in his arms. Common
Woolbrink gave us a final warning glance before turning on his heel and pulling shut the tall wooden gate of the city, leaving us to darkness. Knowing that this, after all, was what we’d wanted.

A Memory of His Rising

December 17, 19—
    YOUNG MEN MOST COMMONLY REPORT dreams of flight— this passage taken from my father’s professional journal. A recent patient was subject to such realistic floating that, upon waking, he leapt from his bed and repeatedly attempted to rise, nearly going as far as jumping from the second-floor landing before he was finally restrained by his mother. Reveries of this kind are not, as some would have it, connected to the sexual nature of flying. Though the dream does appear to imitate the excitability and anxiety found in the adolescent male, it would be wrong to imagine some bit of poetry here, or worse yet, a symbol. I assert that general biology is the culprit. The quickening of the young male’s physiology creates a variety of tremors and flexations in sleep which in turn signal the body that it is in motion—a simple constriction of the bowel can therefore cause a poor boy to take wing.

    My father’s journal lies open on the desk beside my own, and there are moments when I take comfort in copying his words, going as far as imitating the low crawl of his script. His thoughts about flying remind me that I am no longer a young man. Instead of rising in dreams, I fall—calamitous head-over-foot plummeting through a hundred ornamented living rooms, nighttime cafés and sweat rich mattresses. I fall through the branches of apple trees. Plunge through oceans, duck ponds, my mother’s bath water. I have fallen through glass and fire. Fallen with bombs on spired cities. Fallen away from Amon Garrik a hundred times over again.
    It’s true that I can no longer recall the expression on the face of my boyhood friend the first time he left the ground. I remember well enough the scene—a sunlit morning. Amon and I were lying in the low hills above my father’s stone house, the university a dark island in the distance. Yellow tulips nodded against the verdigris of the hill, and flat-bottomed clouds trundled like hay carts overhead. Bread was baking in the house ovens, and its yeasty scent perfumed the air, mingling with the bright smell of the flowers. Amon was red-cheeked because he’d been in some argument with his father, Helmer Garrik, my own father’s rival at the university. Amon thought the whole endeavor of analysis absurd, especially his father’s brand—a mythic exploration of man and symbol. “As if the self is a fixed and organized museum,” Amon ranted, tearing the head off a tulip and tossing it down the hill. “I can assure you, Roddy, there are no marble hallways in my skull for old men to walk down. No busts of labeled complexes either. Nothing’s as pattered as that.”
    I clasped my fingers behind my head,