Howard Smith—his friends call him Howie—can’t go up nor down without help. It is
peculiar, really, but he makes it work.
At the time of his birth, he weighed nothing. The midwife pulled him out, and he just
hung in the air. She called in other doctors on the hospital floor, and they stood there,
experimenting with minutes-old Howie while his mother sat with her legs open from giving
birth. They pushed him to the ceiling, and he just hung there. They pushed him down to half an
inch from the floor, and he just hung there. He squirmed and cried, but he just stayed wherever
they put him. Of course, this meant he couldn’t be put on a scale, so they estimated eight pounds
on his birth certificate.
His mother, laying there open and slack-jawed, was shocked, but got over it quickly when
she realized there was nothing really wrong with her baby. Howard had a normal childhood: his
mother loved him, he cried a healthy amount, and he became conscious of his own existence and
the existence of others at roughly the appropriate age. Scientists in his hometown did
experiments on him occasionally, and they came to the conclusion that to “influence the vertical
(z) position of the child” there had to be a “human and intentional element acting upon him.”
Those were the scientists’ words. But really, aside from the stuck-on-the-vertical-axis thing, he
was an unremarkable child.
And so Howard continued, unremarkable into adulthood. At the age of twenty-four, he
left his mother’s house in Springfield and found gainful employment in the construction industry.
See, they loved him because he couldn’t fall or slip. They sent him high into the sky, building
skyscrapers and pylons. He was good at it, too. He could string the wires and drive in the nails
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and cut the boards, no safety harness required. Everyone (except him) was quietly concerned that
he would fall, but he was useful, so they never brought that up.
And now, here he was at a nice round thirty years old, working on a skyscraper. At the
start of a job, they would have someone carry him up—remember that “necessary human
element?”—and he would spend nights sleeping on the scaffolding.
He tightened the last bolt on a beam and stretched. It was almost noon.
He walked over empty air to his base camp. It wasn’t much: a hammock, a metal ice chest
with food, a lamp, and a stack of magazines. The companies he worked for always insisted on
sending beds or hammocks, though he just slept suspended in the air. Maybe they were trying to
feel like they weren’t taking advantage of him.
And were they, really? Howard got good pay, and he was treated pretty well, and he got
benefits. Still, the unions wouldn’t touch him, and some of his bosses seemed to think he was a
charity case. The guys who had to haul him up or drag him down the buildings weren’t friendly
either.
Howard didn’t have any friends. Nobody to drink with, nobody to say hello to when he
woke up, nobody to send a postcard to when he was repairing Notre Dame. He would have sent
the postcard to his mother, but she had died when he was twenty-four. It hadn’t affected him
much. Nobody called him Howie, but he wished they would.
And so when today he found another man sitting on his ice chest, he was surprised and
somewhat excited.
“Hello!” Howard wanted to open neutrally.
“Are you Howard Smith?” asked the man.
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“Yes.” Howard didn’t talk to many people, and so didn’t remember that he was supposed
to ask a question after answering someone’s.
They were in silence for a bit. Howard stood on air and looked at the man, who looked at
his shoes.
Howard remembered why he was there: “You’re sitting on my icebox, and so stopping me
from eating lunch. Today I’m going to eat a ham sandwich and pickles.”
The man looked at him. Howard looked at the man. They did a lot of looking, and quite a
bit of thinking. Not the productive kind, but the metacognition/anxiety kind. Howard was
nervous enough for the both of them, made worse by the other man’s face being impenetrable.
Howard felt big, like he was taking up too much space. He forced his shoulders together and
pushed his head down into his collar. The man did not seem to notice.
They continue looking at each other, each unwilling to break the silence. Howard was
afraid he’d say something wrong, and so paralyzed by anxiety, made possibly the worst choice: to
stare wordlessly.
The strange man was the first to break the silence, “Why do you float like that?”
“I, uh, don’t know. Been doing it my whole life. Never once fell, never once successfully
jumped. I don’t know how it happens, really. The scientists back home were amused, of course.
They ran this one experiment, it involved a level like this one”—he holds up a bubble
level—”and a few dogs. I did feel bad for the—”
“Can I learn to do it, too?” The man leaned forward with expectation.
Howard blinked very slowly at him, “Probably not.”
“But you can do it! How? How is it you fly? How is it you walk in the earth? How is it
that you are the way that you are?”
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“I am the way that I am because I was given this lot. You can try to change how you
move, but I can’t help you with that. Maybe it’s a journey of self-discovery. Maybe you need to
talk to some scientists. Maybe a therapist. Maybe you need to be born from my mother. I have no
siblings, you know.”
“So the secret is to be joyful? Your great secret is to be happy?” The man ignored
Howard’s later statements.
“No. I am not happy. I have no friends. You are the first person to intentionally visit me. I
am like this and I have no will to change it. Is that contentment?”
“It sure as hell isn’t whatever I’m experiencing. I want to be you. I want what you have. I
want to be untouched by the winds and gravity. I want to walk under hills and over valleys. I
want to fall asleep on a cloud. I want my face in physics textbooks and gossip magazines. I want
your stature, I want to stand how you stand. I want the shape of your ears, I want my earlobe to
be detached. I want your ears. I want to be you.”
Howard didn’t know what to say to this. He’d never felt desired, coveted. Sure, people
hired him for jobs, but they wanted one small part of him. This man wanted all of him, wanted to
consume him like a boa constrictor and assume his shape. It felt nice to be wanted.
And Howard knew what he was getting into when he lied and said this:
“I can fly because I fell to the ground as a child. I fell so hard that I broke through the
Earth, came out the other side and floated there, stopped by gravity fighting itself and getting
confused.”
“You fly because you fell!” The man seemed both heartbroken and elated; he had the
answer he was searching for, but wasn’t the mystery of it much nicer? Wasn’t it nicer to search
for a thing you could never find?
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“I’m sure you can do it as an adult, too. Actually, I’m sure of nothing, but who is?”
“That’s right!” said the man absentmindedly, who was now sitting on a beam and looking
at the ground below him. Between him and the city was space—so much space that he could not
comprehend it. He just interpreted it as “unknown but dangerous quantity of space;” the mind is
good at simplifying terrible concepts.
Howard looked at the man and sat down next to him, best he could. He hung about two
feet above the other man.
“When did you first go looking for me?”
“I first saw your face in a local newspaper. I’m from Springfield too, you know. I wanted
to be you when I first saw you. Your arms, can I touch them?”—the man didn’t wait for an
answer, and squeezed Howard’s bicep—”struck me as something I would never have. Your
roughness, the kind they display in carefully prepped suit or deodorant advertisements, but more
real somehow. I started looking for more articles featuring you, featuring pictures of you. I have
so many newspaper cut-outs of you. Many of you in overalls. And you’re not hard to find, you’re
the guy who can float—who has no choice but to float. Above it all, below it all, doesn’t matter.
You can avoid it. And I guess that also drew me to you.”
“Why,” Howard made deliberate eye contact with the man, “Do you not idolize
yourself?”
“What is there to idolize? Women don’t want me, men don’t drink with me, I work as a
cashier, I look small and weak. The people who talk to me want something from me, and it’s
usually something I can’t give. I’m not even a manager, I get paid minimum wage and work with
teenagers. I tried to work in construction for a bit, like you, but I couldn’t lift anything and the
summer heat overwhelmed me. I tried to shoot guns, but the noise was too much for me, even
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with headphones. I tried so many manly hobbies: knives, carpentry, bourbon-tasting. I was bad at
all of it.”
“And so you come to me, but why?
“I’m out of ideas. I’ve tried to be like you. I’ve done so many things. I’ve tried. I’ve tried
so hard. But I can’t fly. I want to be above everything, separate from humanity. I want there to be
a space between me and the girls who laugh when I drop my lunch. I want to hang in the air,
spend a month or so enjoying the world from a new perspective, and then I want to go so high up
that nobody can find me. That is when I will be free.”
“You know, I lied to you earlier,” said Howard, “I didn’t fall through the Earth. I was just
born, stuck on a radius sprouting from the center of the Earth. I’m stuck here, stuck to this plane.”
“I know. But I want to fall. You made up that story, you lied to me, but I think it’s true. I
have no proof. But I will slide off this beam soon enough.”
“Please don’t,” says Howard. But the strange man is already falling.