The Man Who Walked on Air
A short story by Alain A. Misso

1. Jenny

Taut.. no, magnetic. Yes, magnetic and --sweet. Elusive, subtle. Haptic, I would like to say, but could one really put one's hands on it? It seemed to melt in mid-air. Ah, mid-air! That's funny! That's what it was, in the very middle of the air, in the paunchy hollow of the air, in the soft sweet hollow core of it!

Kristofori, Evergreen N0.52 Mar.'68

Augustus really did not know how to put it. He had been sitting on the floor when she called him, knees slightly bent and legs stretched out in front of him, leaning back supported on straight wrists, hands flat on the smooth wood. At the sweet bell-tone of her voice, he jerked his head and trunk forward and half-jumped upward and forward thrusting up from his wrists in an ambitious if ungainly effort to heave up off his rear with graceful soaring momentum, but that momentum not having quite sufficed to bring him over his center of gravity, especially since his legs were too far out in front of him, he was expecting to fall back with a thud on said posterior, but instead--it seemed, it was as if, almost-his hands no longer on the floor were planted in mid air, supported, that is, on nothing but a nothing that was somehow--solid! --for a moment, for a couple of moments, long enough to notice that something was amiss. Then he did thud back onto his posterior, straight-arming the floor with his right arm, painfully stubbing the heel of his right hand, and fell to the left crumpled on his left elbow.That was how she found him, as she paused shimmering in the doorway, short skirt swaying above bare knees, suddenly laughing, light as a breeze. Augustus, she said, what on earth!? Jenny! he exclaimed, ruefully rubbing his sore right arm, rueful that is regarding his manque athletic exploit, I'll be right there, but even as he spoke his thoughts were swirling in confusion and doubt, but also with a thrill of suspended disbelief. Jenny was looking at him oddly. Oh, oh, said Augustus, sorry, I'll be right there. No, no, she said, don't bother, I'm not leaving yet, and her lithe form drifted from the frame of the door jamb back into the other room with a tantalizing flip of the skirt. Jenny was his first, real, teenage romance, the knock-out at his prep school, lusted after by his inconsolate room-mate Don who had to make do with an ungainly "dog" from his home town. Right now though Augustus was concentrated on the already dissolving memory-sensation of that mid-air suspension. He gave a little shake of his head as if to dispel the clinging illusion, then lurched up again as he had the first time, and simply bounced back onto his rear with convincing gravity. He grunted a short self-deprecatory laugh, and then started to push himself up from the floor sensibly with both hands still behind him, lifting one hand up, then the other, without thinking, and raising his posterior: and now he realized his posterior was inches off the floor and his two hands were settled in mid-air, bearing down on a nothingness which did not give in the slightest. Indeed his entire body was in the air, he could see that his legs still stretching in front of him were not touching the floor except for the cuff of his pants and his heels, so that he found himself in a very odd, cantilevered posture, like one of those metallic minimal sculptures soldered at the base in an impossible anti-gravitational angle. He hardly dared to breathe, and called out, Jenny! but his voice barely rose above a whisper. He tried not to blink, not to turn a hair, in case some fragile balance might be upset. Augustus knew he was not dreaming, his breath, heavy and raw in his own ears and animating his whole frame, rendered his physical body and the surroundings with fresh immediacy. Without bending his head, he was able to steal a look out of the corners of his eyes and could distinctly make out his hands, which appeared to by distant in this immobility and focus, and it was clear that they were both at least four or five inches above the floor, furthermore he was aware of the absence of any surface friction or touch in his palms and fingers, in fact he could sense the coolness of a slight movement of air within his fingers. Drawing his will to a point, he called out again, Jenny! This time his voice rose to a normal speaking volume but sounded cracked and hoarse. He was desperate to have her witness and her confirmation. Jenny appeared again in the doorway, her features drawn into tight lines of anxiety, no doubt alarmed by his very peculiar tone. This time he did not notice her bare knees or the girlish flare of her breasts under the frock, just the way in which her face was screwed into a tighter contortion which seemed to him to express total disbelief coupled with the undeniable evidence. He had the witness he had wanted. Augustus, she finally cracked out, what, what. He was beginning to feel more comfortable now that he had her eye, and he whispered back, I don't know, I never ? he started to raise one foot, why, he did not know, and now was aware that his only point of contact with the floor was the heel of his left foot. This was a moment of most intense consciousness, he turned his head and stared at the incredulous Jenny with triumphant affirmation, and collapsed to the floor like a castle of cards, all the different parts of body seeming to rush back and floorwards in a reassertion of their physicality and weight, as if he had been several feet up in the void rather than a few inches, his entire body feeling as if it were crushed in its own regained gravity. He lay there stunned, his head aching, and Jennie was already kneeling by his side taking his face in her hands, talking to him incomprehensibly, until he could hear her voice saying, Augustus, Augustus! He raised himself up on his elbows, this time painfully bearing down on the knobby bone of his elbows on the floor, Jennie, did you see? Her eyes seemed clouded to Augustus, her normally smooth brow wrinkled with contradictions ? no, she said, I mean y-yes. Jenny, he said with suffocated excitement, do you realize that what you saw was impossible?! Y-yes, she said, as she touched his forehead, I mean no! No, it was just a moment, Augustus, you have the most amazing ability to balance yourself, you know that.. She spoke volubly, as if to cover up the traces of what she was saying. And she would not look him in the eyes. Augustus pulled himself together mentally and physically, getting up from the floor in disarray and especially disconcerted by what his girl-friend was saying to him. He did not try to talk to her any more at that moment, he was too busy organizing his own thoughts and conclusions, instead he gathered her to him, and felt her groin with his knee, and they began to grapple amorously as they were so used to doing, and the afternoon sank into another hot and moist embrace. But they spoke no more of the incident, she always skirted the subject, and little by little they drifted apart for many reasons it seemed, his going to college a few months later for example, but in reality they were divided by this unavowed common experience, as if it were a forbidden zone. Augustus himself, while deeply marked by amazement and delight at the anti-physicality of the event, gradually stopped thinking about it because of a lack of further confirmation, and being unable to repeat the experience, he even began to doubt that it had actually happened, although a slight thrill of intoxication still vibrated at the back of his head.