Christopher A. Lane

FLOATING

by

Christopher Lane

He was floating. Grinning at the way the world – the sweaty streets, the crooked, swaying buildings, the hungry, insatiable sky – curved around him, enfolding him, flowing past him without speech or even sound. It was blurry and disorienting and wonderful.

He pushed his cart up the hill, thinking that instead of walking, he could just be flying. And then thinking, wondering, if perhaps he was flying and didn’t realize it. He looked down and watched his feet, shabby Nikes impacting the sidewalk with a sickening rhythm. But he felt nothing. Not the dead insoles or the filthy, rock-hard concrete or the angle of the slope or the weight of his basket.

Flying.

No. More like floating. Flight implied speed. Flying meant soaring. Zooming. The universe was racing past like a mighty river. But he was progressing in slow motion, numb, unfeeling, unconcerned. Happy.

Floating.

He hadn’t been this happy since… He couldn’t remember ever being happy. Maybe as a child, though, at this moment, he recalled no childhood. Maybe as a teen. Except he was still a teen. Or… No. He glanced over and caught his reflection in the wide, empty glass of a vacant storefront: a ghost. Floating. A gray ghost with a beard like ZZ Top and clothes like an industrial afghan.

He wasn’t sure what an industrial afghan was – if there even was such a thing – but it seemed accurate. His skin was splotched with dirt. Or maybe soot. Maybe he was a chimney sweep.

He suddenly heard “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” echoing from the alleyway and, though he tried to resist the urge, he turned to look, hoping he might see Dick Van Dyke in his funny little chimney sweep outfit and that long broom thing that he used to stick in chimneys to clean out the ashes or whatever it was that sought refuge in chimneys and clogged them the hell up.

Chim-chim-cheree!

He wondered if by laughing, he would rise into the sky, like in that movie. Looking up, he saw thin clouds that seemed quite friendly and welcoming, as though they were awaiting his arrival. He decided that as soon as he attended to this chore, he would oblige them, releasing his grip on the cart and doing his best impersonation of a helium balloon.

Did ducks choke on people or just real, actual, rubber balloons? Did they really choke on balloons or was that total bullshit that someone’s mom made up to keep kids from letting go of the string?

He pushed. He floated. He grinned. He trudged in greasy black trousers that, he decided, nodding to himself, really did resemble an industrial afghan. He closed his eyes for a second and saw one: brownish and blackish with a plaid pattern and huge oil stains and coming apart at the edges.

Yes.

He suddenly felt the wind and wondered why, after floating so numbly, it had chosen to reach a finger out of the huge blue expanse and tap him on the shoulder. It was probably God talking, trying to get his attention again. He was usually woefully distracted and seldom noticed God or gave him the fricking time of day.

That God… what a joker!

He was about to start thinking about God and what a joker he was and how he hated God’s freaking guts for using him as an experiment and for playing tricks on him and for snatching things away from him like they were playing a freaking game of jacks or marbles or something. He was about to tell God where to go and that he was a bully and that he did not appreciate being tapped or spoken to softly or reminded of things that should have never happened. He was about to do this with his special outside-talking-to-God voice, a voice loud enough to be heard for blocks and shrill enough to make old ladies stop short and so filled with rage and cursing and manic ranting that it had often worked like an incantation, magically making the police appear.

But before he could do this, even as the bile in his throat prepared itself to spew forth and his heart readied itself to call down curses on the Almighty and all of his creation, a bird landed on a small, pathetic, undernourished bush just a few feet from his cart. It was a fat robin, so fat that it caused the branch on the crappy little bush to bend and slowly sink to the ground like an elevator. Like a carnival Ferris wheel. Like the chair beneath Johnny Depp when he was wearing a hat and doing a dance kind of thing in a movie that was titled with two names that, at this very moment, he could not come up with: Ally and Jane, Ben and Jerry, Bugs and Bunny, Fanny and Mack…. Shit!

He watched as the robin stepped from the private branch elevator and, like Johnny, performed a jerky soft shoe. It was a very talented robin and, while desperately overweight, was quite agile. It moved smoothly and effortlessly and gracefully. It was actually better than Johnny Depp!

He swore at it – a kindly, complementary curse that communicated his amazement and appreciation – and realized that he had somehow floated up the hill and was standing on Tejon street. This was a main thoroughfare in this particular town that people often referred to as “Tay-hone.” He had long considered this to be a mistake and when he heard it being made, he usually went to great efforts to remedy the situation, demonstrating that it was pronounced: “Tee-john.”

He was nice enough about this, seldom calling the “Tay-hone”ers imbeciles or morons or Californians or assholes. He just smiled, corrected them, and hoped they didn’t make the same mistake again, requiring him to maim or murder them.

Mispronunciation was a crime. A true crime and a very serious one. It was disrespectful and meant that the speaker didn’t give a shit about American English. It meant they were either a communist, a bigamist, or a plagiarist. Or maybe a phlebotomist.

This reminded him of a woman he had met at the plasma center who was convinced that he was a homeless individual merely because of his ZZ Top beard, Dick Van Dyke skin, and industrial afghan clothing. She had expressed concern that he might need assistance and directed him to a nearby shelter. He had nodded his thanks and knocked one of her front teeth out with his fist. The blow hurt – actually creating a cut on his knuckle – but teaching and mentoring in this way, helping people learn essential life-lessons, was his calling and he was willing to endure the sacrifices it involved.

“I am a life coach!” He said this out loud, in something of a shriek, directly into the face of a man who was wearing a suit, sipping from a Starbucks cup, seated on a bench in front of the tall, glassy building that served as the headquarters of the local newspaper. Taking all of this in at once, he followed up his statement with: “I don’t think they’ll survive.” He considered this bit of wisdom and found it remarkably profound. He wasn’t certain if he was referring to men in suits, Starbucks, benches, buildings, or newspapers. But it applied equally to all of them: they were on the way out. Extinct. Dinosauric. Bound for irrelevance. Something relegated to the history books.

The man blinked up at him, clearly confused and also obviously a little concerned. His eyes danced with anxiety and even glints of fear.

Pointing a long bony finger at the man, he cleared his throat and added, “Dare to change.”

The man’s face was suddenly stricken. He had the look of someone who dreaded change and would avoid it at all costs. In fact, he was avoiding it now by rising and starting up the sidewalk at a frightening pace, fleeing even the mention of change.

“You can’t run from it, bitch!” he called after him, helpfully. As the man disappeared around the corner, it occurred to him that the man might have misunderstood. What if the man thought he said, “Spare some change” instead of “Dare to change”?

It was all in the pronunciation and in the delicate practice of listening. You had to have a listening ear. A discerning and careful ear. Jesus said something about ears.

Ears!

Pushing his cart, he tried out both phrases, interchanging words: “Dare to change… Spare some change… Dare to spare… Spare to dare… Change to spare…”

It was dizzying how many combinations of words there were in the world. The number of possible conglomerations must be infinite.

This made him giggle.

Then he turned his attention to “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Pronunciation here was key, as well. Spelling was semi-important. But pronunciation was irreplaceable. It was essential. It was paramount. It was penultimate. It was so many freaking things.

He giggled again, then yelled, loud enough for the waiting clouds and the God hiding up there behind them to hear: “Pronunciation!”

It sounded like something a king would proclaim. It really did. He said it again, even louder, feeling quite kingly. He said it again and again and again and again and…

A horn shattered his euphoria. A screeching sound intruded upon his mystical moment of royal serenity. The sky and clouds and chimney sweeps and Tay-hone-ites parted like a furious storm of stars – the kind that like to show up when you’re about to faint. They parted and zinged off like fireworks, hissing and sputtering, and he found himself suspended between heaven and earth.

Floating.

He saw the car – a brand new, candy-apple red BMW that didn’t even have freaking license plates yet – with a hood that gleamed like a baby’s bottom. Actually, not a baby’s bottom, he decided. Those didn’t gleam. They were soft and pliable. This was hard and definitely not pliable.

He watched the smooth, gleaming hood float forward and he, floating in space directly in front of the brand new, bitchingly expensive (those things cost as much as a freaking house!) BMW, and could see a woman hunched on the other side of the windshield. She appeared to be terrified. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps she didn’t have the money to pay for this freaking car or maybe she was on her way to buy a new pair of shoes and didn’t know whether to choose Louis Vuittons or Jimmy Choos or maybe she had seen an asteroid in the sky, about to completely obliterate planet Earth. He felt certain one of those reasons accounted for her horrified expression. He wanted to ask which one it was, and also verify if Louis Vuitton made shoes. It was entirely possible that they only made crazy-ass handbags.  

He was floating when the BMW passed through him. Just like the sky and the buildings and streets and the bird and all that shit – it flowed around him. He was numb and felt nothing. But then, just like the wind, it tapped him on the shoulder.

He felt the tap and he knew it was God again. But he wasn’t in the mood for divine shenanigans.

Shaking his head, he huffed, “Not now!” and he floated away.