Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (14 page)

The Koreans at the corner store were professionally cordial, though lately, as a younger generation took over from its parents, he was sometimes received with blank stares that revealed the ignorance of youth, instead of the faint smiles and small acknowledging nods with which the bespectacled elders had greeted a longtime customer. The many medical institutions along First Avenue had infected the neighborhood with a plague of doctors but he was contemptuous of the medical profession. He no longer went to see his own doctor and the admonitory texts from that gentleman’s assistant,
We need to see you at least once a year if you want to continue the relationship with Dr.——,
had stopped coming. What use did he have for doctors? Could a pill cure his condition? No, it could not. American medical care invariably failed those who needed it most. He wanted nothing to do with it. Your health was what you had until the day you didn’t have it and after that day you were screwed and it was better not to let doctors screw you before that day came.

On the rare occasions that his phone rang, it was invariably a gardening matter, and the longer his condition continued, the harder it was for him to work. He had handed off his clientele to other gardeners and was living now off his savings. There was the nest egg he had accumulated over the years, which was not insubstantial, on account of his thrifty lifestyle and the proceeds from the sale of the marital home, but, on the other hand, nobody ever went into the gardening business to accumulate a fortune. There was Ella’s inheritance too, which she had described as “next to nothing,” but that was because she had grown up rich. It was in fact quite a tidy sum and had passed to him after her death and he had never touched it. So he had time, but a moment would inevitably come, if things remained as they were, when the money would be gone and he would be at fortune’s mercy—Fortune, that merciless hag. So yes, he worried about money, but, again, he was happy he was not inflicting those worries on anyone else.

It was no longer possible to conceal what was happening from his neighbors, from people on the sidewalk, or in the stores he had to enter from time to time to buy provisions, though he had his hoarded supplies of soups and cereals, and he raided that larder to minimize his excursions. When he needed to restock he shopped online, often ordered for delivery when he was hungry, and went out less and less, except, occasionally, under cover of darkness. In spite of all his precautions, however, his condition was known to the neighborhood. He was lucky to live amongst people with a low boredom threshold, famous for their jaundiced, seen-it-all uninterest in their fellow citizens’ eccentricities. Hearing of his levitation, the neighborhood was largely unimpressed, assuming, with minimal discussion, that it must be some kind of trick. The fact that he continued to perform the same trick day after day made him tiresome, a stilt walker who never got off his stilts, an exhibitionist whose “wow” factor had long since evaporated. Or, if he was in some way damaged, if something had gone wrong, it was probably his fault. Probably he had been meddling in stuff that was best not meddled with. Or, the world was sick of him and was kicking him out. Whatever. The bottom line was, his shtick had gotten old, like him.

So for a time he was ignored, which made things a little easier, because he had no desire to explain himself to strangers. He stayed home and made calculations. Three and a half inches in one year meant that in three years’ time, if he was still alive, he would still be less than a foot off the ground. At that rate, he comforted himself, he should be able to work out survival techniques that would give him a livable life—not a conventional or easy existence, but one that should be workable. There were practical problems to be solved, however, some of them very awkward. Taking a bath was out of the question. Fortunately there was a shower cubicle in the bathroom. Performing his natural functions was trickier. When he tried to sit down on the toilet his behind obstinately hovered above the seat, maintaining exactly the same distance from it as his feet insisted on keeping from the ground. The higher he got, the harder it would be to shit. This needed to be considered.

Travel was already a problem, and would become a much bigger one. He had already ruled out air travel. He might strike a TSA officer as constituting some sort of threat. Only aircraft were permitted to take off at airports. A passenger trying to do so without boarding a plane could very easily be seen as acting improperly and needing to be restrained. Other forms of public transportation were also problematic. In the subway his levitation might be mistaken for an illegal effort to vault the turnstiles. Nor could he drive safely anymore. The accident had made that clear. That left walking, but even nocturnal walking was too visible and vulnerable, no matter how indifferent people acted. Perhaps it would be best to stay put in his apartment. An enforced retirement until the condition eased and he could go back to what remained of everyday life. But that was difficult to contemplate. After all, he was a man accustomed to life in the outdoors, doing hard physical work for many hours a day, in sunshine and in rain, in heat and cold, adding his own small sense of beauty to the natural beauty of the earth. If he could not work, he would still have to exercise. To walk. Yes. To walk at night.

Mr. Geronimo lived on the lowest two floors of The Bagdad, a narrow apartment building on a narrow block which might have been the least fashionable block in that least fashionable of neighborhoods, his narrow living room at the level of the narrow street and his narrow bedroom in the narrow basement below. During the great storm The Bagdad had been inside the evacuation zone but the floodwaters had not quite reached his basement. It had been a narrow escape; the adjacent streets, broader, opening their arms to the elements, had been battered. Perhaps there was a lesson to be learned, Mr. Geronimo thought. Perhaps narrowness survived attacks better than breadth. But that was an unattractive lesson and he didn’t want to learn it. Capaciousness, inclusiveness, everything-at-once-ness, breadth, width, depth,
bigness:
these were the values to which a tall, long-striding, broad-shouldered man like himself should cleave. And if the world wanted to preserve the narrow and to destroy the expansive, favoring the pinched mouth over wide fleshy lips, the emaciated body over the ample frame, the tight over the loose, the whine over the roar, he would prefer to go down with that big ship.

His own narrow home might have withstood the storm, but it had not protected him. For unknown reasons the storm had affected him uniquely—if indeed the storm was responsible—separating him to his growing alarm from the home soil of his species. It was hard not to ask
why me,
but he had begun to grasp the difficult truth that a thing could have a cause but that was not the same as having a purpose. Even if you could work out how a certain thing had come about—even if you answered the
how
question—you would be no closer to solving the
why.
Anomalies of nature, like diseases, did not respond to inquiries about their motivation. Still, he thought, the
how
bothered him. He tried to present a brave face to the mirror—he had to stoop uncomfortably, now, to see himself while he shaved—but the fear mounted daily.

The apartment in The Bagdad was a kind of absence, not only narrow but minimally furnished. He had always been a man of few needs and after his wife’s death he needed nothing except what he could not have: her presence in his life. He had discarded possessions, shedding burdens, keeping nothing but what was essential, lightening his load. It did not occur to him that this process of divesting himself of the physical aspects of his past, of letting go, might be related to his condition. Now, as he rose, he began to clutch at scraps of memory, as though their cumulative weight might bring him back down to earth. He remembered himself and Ella with microwaved popcorn in a bowl and a blanket across their laps, watching a movie on TV, an epic in which a Chinese boy-king was raised in the Forbidden City in Beijing believing himself to be God but, after many changes, ended up as a gardener working in the very palace in which he had formerly been a deity. The god/gardener said he was happy with his new life, which may have been true. Maybe, thought Mr. Geronimo, it’s the other way around with me. Maybe I am slowly ascending towards the divine. Or maybe this city, and all cities, will soon be forbidden to me.

When he was a child he often had a flying dream. In the dream he was lying in his own bed in his own bedroom and was able to rise lightly up towards the ceiling, his bedsheet dropping from him as he rose. Then in his pajamas he floated about, carefully avoiding the slowly rotating blades of the ceiling fan. He could even turn the room upside down and sit on the ceiling giggling at the furniture down there on the inverted floor and wondering why it didn’t fall down, that is to say up, towards the ceiling, which was now the floor. As long as he stayed in his room the flying was effortless. But his room had long high windows which stayed open at night to let in the breeze and if he was foolish enough to fly out through them he found that his house was on top of a hill (it wasn’t, in his waking hours) and that he immediately began to lose height—slowly, not frighteningly, but inexorably—and he knew that if he didn’t fly back inside the moment would come when his bedroom would be lost to him and he’d descend slowly to the bottom of the hill, where there were what his mother called “strangers and dangers.” He always managed to make it back through the bedroom windows but sometimes it was a close-run thing. This memory too he turned upside down. Maybe now groundedness depended on him staying in his room, while every foray into the outdoors led to his becoming more detached.

He turned on the television. The magic baby was on the news. He noticed that the magic baby and he both had the same ears. And both of them now lived in the universe of magic, having become detached from the old, familiar, grounded continuum. He took comfort from the magic baby. Its existence meant that he was not alone in departing from what he was beginning to understand was no longer the norm.

The car accident hadn’t been his fault, but driving was awkward and uncomfortable now and his reflexes were not what they should be. He was lucky to have escaped without serious injury. After the accident the other driver, a playboy type called Giacomo Donizetti, had regained consciousness in a kind of delirium and had shouted at him like a man possessed, “What are you doing up there? You think you’re better than the rest of us? Is that why you hold yourself apart? The earth isn’t good enough for you, you have to be higher than everyone else? What are you, some kind of fucking
radical
? Look what you did to my beautiful car with your pathetic truck. I hate people like you. Fucking
elitist.
” After delivering these words Signor Donizetti passed out again and the paramedics arrived and took care of him.

Shock made people behave strangely, Mr. Geronimo knew, but he was beginning to be aware of a certain budding hostility in the eyes of at least some people who observed his condition. Perhaps he was more alarming at night. Perhaps he should just bite the bullet and walk around in the daylight hours. But then the objections to his condition would multiply. Yes, the familiar indifference of the citizenry had protected him thus far, but it might not guard him against the accusation of a bizarre type of snobbery, and the further he rose, the greater the antagonism might be. This idea, that he was setting himself apart, that his levitation was a judgment on the earthbound, that in his extraordinary state he was looking down on ordinary people, was beginning to be visible in the eyes of strangers, or he was beginning to think he saw it there. Why do you imagine I consider my condition an improvement? he wanted to cry out. Why, when it has ruined my life and I fear it may bring about my early death?

He longed for a way “down.” Could any branch of science help him? If not quantum theory, maybe something else? He had read about “gravity boots” that allowed their wearers to hang down from the ceiling. Could they be adjusted to allow their wearers to cling to the floor? Could anything be done, or was he beyond the reach of medicine and science? Had real life simply become irrelevant? Had he been captured by the surreal, and would he soon be devoured by it? Was there any way of thinking about his plight that made any ordinary kind of sense? And was he in fact infectious or contagious or capable in some other way of transmitting his condition to others?

How long did he have?

Levitation was not an entirely unknown phenomenon. Small living creatures, frogs for example, had been levitated in laboratory conditions by electromagnets that used superconductors and produced something he did not understand, the diamagnetic repulsion of body water. Human beings were mostly made up of water, so might this be a clue to what was happening to him? But in that case where were the giant electromagnets, the huge superconductors that were creating the effect? Had the earth itself become a gigantic electromagnet/superconductor? And if so why was he the only living creature to be affected? Or was he for some biochemical or supernatural reason preternaturally sensitive to the changes in the planet—in which case, would everyone else soon be in the same boat as he was? Was he the guinea pig for what would eventually be the earth’s rejection of the entire human race?

Look, here on his computer screen was something else he didn’t understand. The levitation of ultrasmall objects had been achieved by manipulating the Casimir Force. As he struggled to explore the subatomic world of this force, he understood that at the deeper levels of the essence of matter the English language disintegrated under the immense pressure of the foundational forces of the universe and was replaced by the language of creation itself,
isospin doublet, Noether’s theorem, rotation transformation, up and down quarks, Pauli exclusion principle, topological winding number density, De Rham cohomology, hedgehog space, disjoint union, spectral asymmetry, Cheshire Cat principle,
all of which was beyond his comprehension. Maybe Lewis Carroll who created the Cheshire Cat knew that its principle was somewhere near the roots of matter. Maybe something Casimirish was at work in his personal circumstances, and then again maybe not. If he saw himself in the eye of the cosmos then he might well be an ultrasmall object upon whom such a Force could work.