2. Liana

In his last year at college it happened again. Augustus had floated through his last two years at Harvard hardly noticing the courses or their contents, hardly distinguishing one professor from the next, only the idlest glance for an occasional female student but never any serious interest outside of books, until he met Liana on a holiday jaunt to the Cape. Liana was simply the most splendiferous feline predator Augustus had ever seen, the bored wife of a wealthy architect who sent his unmanageable and explosive wife to their holiday house on the Island while he pursued his own business interest in the City. Her face (her breasts, her milky thighs as the cliche goes, but they were truly of a creamy touch and delicate white that could best be characterized as milky, her slender Max Ernst viola-shaped back-side!) swam into his mind's eye with an obsessiveness which he knew he would never be able to eradicate however complicated his life's itinerary might be. She captured his youth with an impetuousness he was impotent to resist but not impotent to fulfill, and their repeated couplings and vibratory celestial harmonies would leave him humming like a string instrument for days afterwards. At such times he was, he thought, ecstatically knowledgeable, because he discovered the bliss at the root of the fleshly stock of his body: sex and spirit not irremediably split, but identified and mutually transparent. Be that as it may, they enjoyed each other's company intensely outside of the fleshly transports as well, and would careen about the Island country roads at life-in-their-hands speeds, she in her paint-daubed toreador pants and he in his shoe-lace-loose sneakers, and he would talk endlessly about Kafka and Proust and Lorca while she listened with rapturous unhearing, and she would show him her incomprehensible but immediately, mystically accessible abstract paintings and initiate him into their mysteries, and within minutes they would fall again onto the nearest sofa or bed and suckle and interpenetrate and cling to each other for this passing, tremulous, ephemeral forever, with a passion which while no doubt not divine, surely was smiled upon by God with paternal indulgence. It was after one of these sensual tumults, while Liana was in the bathroom involved in some watery repairs with the mysterious bidet, that his second "experience" occurred. Somewhat tipsy from love and excessive sex, he had gotten up from the much-rumpled bed and padded barefoot and bare-ass to the kitchen where he collected an American student's all-restoring tall glass of cold milk, and plumped down at the kitchen table with it ? only realizing as his head started to drop below table level in a rush that he had misjudged the position of the chair in his inebriated well-being, missing it, and he jabbed back with his hands to cushion the collapse and instead ? found himself solidly supported mid-air. That is, more accurately, he ob-served his own body abruptly immobilized as if tilted back in an inclined chair, only the feet on the floor, knees back, trunk leaning way back beyond any center of gravity, and hands dropped down for the express purpose described moments ago, but without in any way having fulfilled that purpose, since his hands, wide open, encountered nothing but the thin air, which however was providing a supple, malleable support. Of course he immediately remembered, with perfect vividness, that first occasion of air-support, only now he did not even feel that he was being somehow sustained by his hands on an invisible substance of nothingness, but that his entire body, aside from his feet which rested their toes still on the kitchen floor, was buoyant as if in some dense (but textureless, undefinable at point of contact) medium. In this grotesque posture he re-mained very quietly, hardly breathing in order not to disturb the as-yet incomprehensible spell, order, metaphysics, biophysics ? the words came at him in a disorganized flurry ? and eyeing the table at an unusual angle, since his eyes were even with the level of the top of the table which he had been on the verge of disappearing below before he was stopped. Familiar objects appeared to loom up from that angle, the glass of milk which had come to rest on the table top as he had dropped below, rising like a white tower, a salt shaker like an orthodox church dome. He thought carefully about his pre-dicament, and again his first thought was to call Liana for corroboration. He was im-mensely excited to have found again this position as if time itself had been bent back on itself, in fact the thrill was so deep that he had the curious thought that he could easily give up sex just to enjoy this exquisite state, and he prayed briefly to God knows what God of Miracles to let him keep it, and then suddenly resolved, called out in as firm a voice as he could manage, which nonetheless trembled with excitement, Liana! Can you please bring your camera here! This was a stroke of genius which came to him as he opened his mouth, and he waited now breathless, or actually breathing in a long shallow breath as he had been taught to do for his taoist exercises ? and her bell-voice answered (at certain annunciatory moments all the women he loved appeared to have a chime-tone), what do you want it for, Augustus, in a wily knowing tone as if she guessed only too accurately what he wanted it for, and she appeared in the doorway in her (his) favourite black panties, her breasts, sweet, heavy, not large, slightly swaying, pink perfect nipples still erect, dangling the camera by its strap. Her teasing smile froze in startled panic as she peered at him, he was on the side of the table facing the door, the first mental pulsation suggesting "accident" at his bizarre angled suspension, the second suggesting disbelief and attempted refocussing. This time Augustus felt so secure in his overlall support that he raised one foot off the floor, now visibly bearing on the surface of the earth by the single point of the toes of his left foot. Liana, he said in a hushed, strained voice, take a picture. Liana looked at him dumbly, seeming not to understand. He very cautiously drew his left foot up off the floor: now he rested entirely in the air, solidly cushioned. Now, Liana, take a picture now! His tone was peremptory, even a little hard, as he tried to penetrate her mental self-protective shield, and the inhabitual hardness of tone obviously jolted her from the dreamlike state she appered to have fallen into, and she immediately aimed the camera and clicked. Augustus, she finally whispered, they were both speaking in very low tones as if they were fearful of upsetting a delicate and incomprehensible arrangement or of causing a "tilt" in the present as yet unclear balance of things?Augustus, what are you doing, how ? she came closer but not very close.. He watched her carefully, keeping eye-contact, and now raised his left foot off the floor slowly but securely. Now that he was entirely "air-born(e)" (the play of words was his in that moment, he felt he was coming into something unprecedented in his life), he realized that his first impression of two years ago had been mistaken or perhaps overly metaphorical: there was no sense of solid or substantial support underneath him at all, not even of the subtlest feather-touch. No, he was sensationally quite conscious of fresh air enveloping his limbs, swaddling them even, since a slight swell or body of air had eddied through the open door with Liana. She had now gotten down on her hands and knees next to him, her breasts swinging unprotected by the usual protective hand in her astonishment, peering at him and underneath him with such puzzlement that he burst into a stifled laugh. No, Liana, no tricks, I am ? levitating, I guess, he said after a moment's hesitation. I'm sitting on just air. She stretched out a hand and pressed lightly but insistently on his bare chest, perhaps expecting him to give, or even just to fall backward. Instead, tiring of the reclining position, Augustus straightened and got up without giving it a thought, and took two steps into the air. And stopped. He could not conceive of what he was doing. What might seem to be quite imaginable was not in reality because while clearly perceiving that there was no solid underfoot, indeed sensing the air practically hiss under his feet as he moved, nonetheless he could not conceive how he could be "mounting" the air so to speak with nothing to step on! He was now standing about two feet above the floor, looking down at the upturned, incredulous face of Liana. His groin was level with her face, and his cock sprang erect in front of her lips. Like a sleepwalker except for the still astonished expression, she brushed a silky brown lock way from her eyes and took his member into her mouth and sucked on it vigorously until he came in milky splashes, and as he came, his member still in her hand, he felt as if he had lost his balance, slipped on a banana peel, and dropped suddenly in a void and landed with a crash of his joints on the floor. He never forgot the look of sheer astonishment in her eyes and the wetness about her half open lips. She wiped them distractedly with the back of her hand and turned away as if not aware of what had just transpired, in fact it was as if the sexual act had taken place in a sort of parenthesis in real consciousness or as if her consciousness had simply refused to note the act of "levitation". He pulled himself no longer feeling anti-gravitational but heavier than normal as if all his bones were pressing down onto the floor. Nothing was broken in spite of the violence of the fall although his lower spine was achiing, and he followed her quickly into the kitchen, his member flapping wetly, to where she was sitting in her panties, still bare-breasted, at the kitchen table gazing at the camera in a daze. He unravelled the strap gently from her wrist, brushed her lips with his gingerly, and said, Liana, it's true, it did happen, I can't explain it but I've been aware of it since I was a boy. No, Augustus, she murmured finally, it didn't, it couldn't, and she shook her head vigorously. Well, he said, looking her in the eyes, trying the fix the floating gaze of her beautiful blue eyes, waving the camera, once we've developed this you'll see. She gazed at him blankly and he found her so irresistibly appealing in that raw state in the antiseptic kitchen that his member rose of its own accord, but she laughed in that unselfconscious way women have with their overwhelming superiority regarding these physical realities and gesturing banishment, got up with one hand in front of her undulating breasts and left. Augustus fondly watched the wiggle of her rear in the slight panties, and reluctantly went back to recover his clothes. The next days were more a breathless expectation punctuated by various domestic distractions as he waited for his film to be developed by the local drugstore. When he went to pick up the film, for one panic-stricken moment he could not find the receipt, but he got it and feverishly examined the photos: one boring photograph after another of their house, the garden, the cat, the dog, but no levitation! He stopped in his tracks in the middle of the sidewalk and studied the negatives with great apprehension. Yes, there was a negative which appeared to show him leaning backward. He hurried back to the drugstore with furious but relieved indignation, why! he practically collared the pudgy-mouse faced photo-manager, why wasn't this photo developed!! The manager looked past him with the faintest smile and said as if speaking to the customers behind him, store policy requires us not to develop any pornographic material. The blood drained out of Augustus' face, what! there's nothing porno ? and the manager witheringly interrupted him and put a finger on the negative, and what is that? It seems to be your penis. Augustus turned scarlet with the sense and shame that half a dozen persons were standing right behind him, and he heard titters and a snort, what! he said, there's no ? and he looked more closely at the figure in the negative to where the accusing finger ? and indeed he discerned a small vertical bar standing up at the crotch: it was his erect penis! But I didn't have ? he began to protest but realizing the ridiculous and untenable position he held he quickly beat a retreat. As soon as he got home he hurried to the kitchen where he found Liana preparing something or other, and he asked her, Liana did I have an erection the other evening when I called for you to come? Her skyblue eyes did not blink and she said nothing as if it not to dignify his statement, and when he pressed her she professed not to know what he was talking about. In fact she appeared to have entirely forgotten about the whole incident. Augustus gave up the idea of using the photograph in order to "prove" anything, because this untoward manifestation ob-viously distracted from the real interest of the photo. The affair with Liana dragged through the summer but the zing had gone out of it obviously, it was as if some mutual suspicion had arisen between them. He never broached the subject again.