In the Air

"Recently, the Met had to stop a performance of Wagner's comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Someone in the audience laughed."

I spoke these words at a select meeting of the Humanist Club, and I expected a reaction. Perhaps there would be a belly-laugh somewhere amongst us, or maybe a few would close their eyes in silent mirth, or some fellow would mutter: "Hah! Very good, very good." Rather, it was as if I had not spoken at all. It was as if my presence had been nullified, or my voice muted, or their ears deafened. In case I was looking the fool, I considered repeating myself, more loudly this time, to confirm the suspicion, for truly there was something foolish about the entire set piece; I had told a terrific joke, entirely of my own concoction, and yet it had fallen flatter than flat. Not even politesse occurred. I remained silent, as all the other members remained silent. Had I made the joke too obscure? Should I have used the English translation of the title? I had opted to use enough clues to the non-Wagnerite, hadn't I? I'd included the composer's name, and also helpfully the work's genre. I looked from humanist to humanist. Were these fellows not my friends after all? Surely one of them should have recognized me, encouraged me. After all, even if the joke was uninspired, isn't attempting a joke some fraction of a measure of successfully accomplishing one? After all, someone could have suggested refining my joke by making it more, or less, specific. The silence hung in the air like a noisome mist. Hours seemed to pass as I awaited some recognition, but nothing forthcame. There was absolutely nothing I could do, and the mystery remained unsolved. Something had gone profoundly wrong, but I knew not where to start in my investigation. "Did anyone hear me?" seemed to be not the thing to say.

I don't like using rhetoric, and I especially dislike using rhetorical questions, so I will try to avoid using them. The conversation at the Humanist Club continued as if I hadn't spoken a word. The next time I spoke, which was some time later, was to agree with something Jones had said about modern restaurants. I said: "There are nice places down in Virginia," and Jones looked to me and nodded and said: "Virginia, yes, one can get a hearty meal there," and one or two other humanists nodded in agreement; thusly I discovered I was not in any way invisible, even though my joke had fallen flat; but perhaps it had fallen flatter than flat because the bon mot was not humorous after all, or perhaps by some miracle the joke had already been made. As My Sweet Lord was ruled to have been unconsciously cribbed by George Harrison from He's So Fine, so may my joke have been cribbed from some ages-old source: perhaps from something Shaw said? I decided I would have to use an Internet search to determine if the joke--about Wagner's comedy not being funny--was original or not, for there's nothing new under the sun, as they say, and perhaps the joke had been used the previous evening on some television show; but that made no sense since television is so extraordinarily stupid that no-one on television could possibly make an ever-so-slightly erudite joke about Richard Wagner. My humanist friends and I continued like Masons our consideration of the world, and though my unease never quite left me I was able to contribute to our discussions of architecture and the proper place of technology--tamed by ethics--in the society of today and tomorrow. By the time midnight rolled around I was convinced I had recovered; but from what, exactly? I thought of going to a dive bar to discuss the problem with a drunkard, but decided otherwise.

Since H Street is but a stone's throw to M Street, I walked. Late-night cars passed on the avenue, but I paid them no mind. I can't say I was entirely at ease, for I was not. Absentmindedly I watched my shadows as cast negatively by the tungsten streetlamps upon the pavement ahead of me, watching them move relatively backwards to my real self with the steadiness of Edison's world. I may have been humming something. It may have been a Strauss waltz. I cast other shadows to my right (for I was walking up the right side of the avenue) as etched by autos. It was as I passed an ash tree that it happened. It is hard to describe. I don't believe a surrealist could make it credible. Perhaps David Lynch in some short or other could have presented it; I haven't seen all his films. In any case, my shadow briefly vanished. For a fraction of a second, the space where my shadow was became a space without a shadow. My shadow--my negative space--disappeared for a moment, and then re-appeared. I stopped. Like a cluck I stood there, watching my shadow for something on the order of a minute. I doubted myself. Had I blinked in some unusual way? Had there been a flash of light from my left or right that erased temporarily my personal shadow? (I apologize for the rhetorical questions, but I feel that in this situation they are warranted.) I watched and waited to see if there would be a re-occurrence. There's a poem by Eugenio Montale about a man who turns around to look back at the path he has taken, and sees absolutely nothing there. I felt somewhat like that very path-walker.

I concentrated on listening to my surroundings. I heard some distant sirens from the Georgetown direction, the hissing of distant traffic, a car horn from behind me, and nothing else, while I continued to gaze upon my shadow, expecting to see a repeat performance of the illusion. I don't know how long I waited, but there was no repetition. It had been a one-off event, nothing more, and I had no explanation, so I continued on my way. I was thinking about going to work in the morning, and about the non-reception of my gag, and about my shadow disappearing, as I walked. Foremost in my mind was work tomorrow, and about how I would waste time shuffling papers from one box to another. I thought perhaps I could try my joke with my pal Phil in the morning, but I didn't know him well enough to trust he knew enough about Wagner to be receptive. I would try anyway. Yes, that's what I decided. Also I thought I could try the joke out on Mary. Mary knew some Wagner--we'd seen Das Rheingold together--and even if I had to explain it to her I believed she would be polite enough to pretend to see the humour of it. The fact of my shadow disappearing unsettled me somewhat, and though it wasn't something I was trying to avoid thinking about I could not help but feel unnerved whenever I re-pictured the vanishing. When it crossed my mind I could feel the miniscule hairs on the back of my neck rising, and I was not a little nauseated by the experience of memory.

I unlocked the locks to my house and went inside. The hall light had been turned by my wife Mary helpfully on, so I had no difficulties in taking off my jacket and shoes. I considered stopping into the kitchen for a little something but decided not to. Rather, I ascended the stairs (after turning off the hall light) and proceeded into our bedroom. Mary was in bed, sleeping or appearing to be asleep. I chose not to discommode her in any way, nor would I ask about the kids, nor would I ask about her day. Instead I silently disrobed, pulled back the sheet and blanket on my side, and slipped in supinely.

Immediately I noticed that the bed was far harder than it had been the previous evening. I pushed on it with my hands and it did not want to give way in its usual comforting way. "Is this a new mattress?" I inconsiderately muttered, thereby either awakening Mary or merely alerting her attention. She rolled over and said: "What?" "This bed--it's different--did you have the mattress replaced today?" She stared at me readingly. She said: "Nooooo?" "It feels very different, like it felt years ago when we first bought it." She rolled over, away from me, and muttered: "Maybe you've gone Rip Van Wrinkly." I didn't know quite how to respond, and jettisoned my scheme of turning my Wagnerian joke into something approaching pillow talk, and as for mentioning the illusion of my disappearing shadow, forget it! I knew her well enough to know which topics were valid and which were not, and little peccadilloes were not in the 'valid' category. There were vastly more important things to be concerned about. And yet: the bed continued to be unreasonably stiff.

I continued pressing down on it with my palms, for I could not understand anything. Mary couldn't have been lying to me; how would someone go about lying about buying a mattress, and for what purpose? How could one sneak a mattress into a typical house? It can't be done, and thus it was not done. Besides, Mary had reacted to my questions in her typically sarcastic way, showing no signs of upset. I wondered if I had somehow forgotten, having been through two odd and unexplained experiences that evening, what the mattress felt like? I turned my head to give my pillow a good sniff only to discover that yes it was in fact my pillow. So far so good. Maybe my sense of touch had changed, or perhaps I had become stricken with a paralytic weakness that did not allow me to press down with yesterday's strength. There exists a barrier between one's body and all that that body touches; there's the membrane of skin, then the miniscule pockets of air, and finally the object; and I could not decide whether the fault lay on my side or the other side of the air pockets. I thought about this, and I have to say I concluded I could not know, when considering the other two disturbances, if the fault lay within me, or without me. No matter how I tried to solve these problems, I always got stuck at the air that always divided my experience from the outside world. Perhaps the air itself was conspiring against me, or against the outside world. I nearly drifted to sleep with this idea, but awoke suddenly when I again noticed the hardness of the mattress. I had to sleep, come what may, so I pretended to myself that it was in fact a new mattress--we had purchased a new mattress--and thus everything was right with the world, and I finally fell into an imperfect slumber.

I awoke next morning, still on my rock-hard bed, to the smell of steak and coconut coming from the kitchen downstairs. I figured I was confusing some smells for others, for though Mary was notorious for cooking odd matter at odd times, steak and coconut (I believed) would be too outré even for such a soul as hers. I rose and dressed and went downstairs and I saw Mary dishing out bacon and eggs to our daughters Dolly and Sally. The girls greeted me, and I looked in vain for the steak (attractive) and the coconut (repulsive) but nothing met my eye; rather I saw merely the usual conglomeration of toast and jam, bacon and eggs, coffee and juice. Then I spoke: "Why does it smell like steak and coconut in here?" The girls laughed at me. This provided not a clue, for they have made a habit of laughing at me, minute in, minute out. (Such is life for a Washington father in the state department.) I went over to the frying pan and inhaled a good inhale. "What's up with these eggs? Do they taste funny?" "They're good, daddy," said Sally. "Good as ever," said Dolly. I got out my plate and slid two of the rubbery units onto it and sat down at the table. I pulled two slices of bacon onto the plate, then I leaned over classlessly to inhale. Yes, steak and coconut still. I took my fork and plunged into an egg. Yolk broke and ran. I forked up a white-and-yellow miasm and trust the fork into my mouth. There it was, for all my taste-buds to witness: steak, medium rare, garnished with stale coconut flakes from a jar courtesy McCormick's (or some such brand).

I swallowed the steak and coconut mixture that had the consistency of fried eggs. I glanced at my daughters to see if it was a trick but if it was a trick they were smarter than they had been the morning before when they were convinced the moon was closer than New Jersey. That was when it hit me that it is well-known that the sense of scent could overpower any food's taste; that though there was precious little air in my mouth (although there was undoubtedly some air in there as I chewed), smell is entirely something made of air. Again there was the problem. Was the disturbance of my senses within or without or was it rather something in the airy space between? I asked: "Does anyone smell steak?" The girls looked at each other, then at me, and shook their heads in accord. I looked at Mary. Naturally she was ignoring me. I said: "You know, in New York City at the Met last night they had to halt a performance of Wagner's comedy The Mastersingers of Nuremburg. Apparently, someone in the audience laughed." The girls stared blankly, and Mary evenly said: "Ha ha ha," without looking up. I continued eating my steaky and coconutty bacon and eggs. Strangely enough, the coffee and juice tasted like coffee and juice. After finishing up I put my plate in the sink and went back upstairs, ignored by all. In the bedroom I touched the bed. It was soft and broken-in again. So whatever it was that was in the air couldn't affect things for very long. Sooner or later, whatever it was that was in the air lost its power only to manifest itself somewhere else. Curious.

Regardless of whatever curiosity there was to feel in the phenomena of being bodily assaulted by aerie daemons, I had to go to work. My wife and daughters continued to mock me naturally as I put on my shoes and proceeded out the door. I shouted: "Farewell, my wenches," and my wife responded: "Farewell, one who knows not how to talk like a normal person." Thus I knew that everything was all right on the home front. Across to 19th St NW I proceeded, then southwards I journeyed, crossing L and I, and while I was waiting for the light at Penn Ave it happened. I thought I had been suddenly deafened, for I suddenly heard absolutely nothing. The noisy street was entirely silenced. Cars passed me like road-clouds. Jackhammers were felt but not heard. Then the noise started again like thunder, but only for a fragment of a second; sounds came to me like the dusty plug of a headphone loudspeaker, all glitch, as if I had been suddenly plunged mid-track into a mid-tempo bonus song by Autechre. I watched an Audi as its lousy engine sputtered in and out of audibility pass me by, sensing my feet on the ground and the pressing air surrounding me. Sounds we 'on' and 'off' in what seemed to be a chaotic pattern, with strange silence battling the lurid cacophony in which we find ourselves at all times otherwise. In my utter confusion I dared not cross the street for I could not use binaural signals to put one foot in front of the other; verily, I felt that if I had tried to cross the road I would have been bloodily smooshed by a two-toned delivery van. I spent two or three minutes in this state; finally, ordinary and normal hearing came back to me.

I wondered as I continued my way to work; I wondered if there had not been an earlier event or earlier events in which these gremlins had assaulted me likewise. Could it not be the case that from the day of my birth they had looked into and effectuated some corruption of my sensorium on if not a daily then perhaps a weekly basis? I had faint recollections of mystery. I have seen things that proved to be illusory. I have heard knocks in the night from my child-bed, voices where no-one was, auditory illusions involving Malcolm McLaren etc. These assaults are, I suppose, the common truck of humanity. I could be wrong there, but it logically follows that, since I am not special in the least, the daemons pervasive, ancient as they are, have been hithering and thithering through the world from day one. At least, that how it all seemed to me at the time. I showed my badge, passed through the metal detector. Everything was normal, and dull. Where would I find information concerning what was happening to me? The sound had been lost when I stood at that corner; where had it gone to? It could not have not existed; a basic fact of everything is that waves and vibrations have to occur, and thus that the sounds--radiations--had to have gone somewhere. Which leads one to believe that these air-critters have the ability to swallow energy. Since that had to be the case, where did they store it or what did they do with it? I suppose it could have been turned to matter. But where that matter resided, well, that was another problem. Maybe all matter comes from them. I couldn't figure it out.

In my office I absentminded shuffled around some papers concerning Algeria and Martinique. After an hour, during which the gremlins did not attack me in any way, I called up my buddy Phil to see if he had time to discuss a personal matter with me. He jumped at the chance to avoid his numbing work, and we met in the cafeteria, bought coffee, and sat down at an old orange table and chairs, all securely bolted to the floor. I told him, "I'm under attack. No, no, it could be banal, maybe a matter of coincidence, but nevertheless it's happening to me. Last night, at my Humanist Club, I told a joke, a very funny one, and no-one acknowledged it. Next, my shadow disappeared on the way home. In bed, the bed was too hard. That made no sense. In the morning, everything tasted like steak and coconut. Then, coming here to work, my hearing went funny, blanking out in a weird way. So all this stuff is happening, all more or less within an Aristotelian unity, and the only explanation I have is that air-devils are interfering with my channels of sensory perception. Are you following me? I think I'm not alone in this. See, there's the source, the channel, and the receiver. The fault has to lie in the channel. I don't think there's anything wrong with me, and I don't think there's anything wrong with the world. So it must be the air, which I believe is filled with invisible gremlins who might be doing it for fun or for some other purpose. I'm not sure. All I know is that they're after me and making my life weird. What do you think?"

Phil shuffled his full coffee cup from hand to hand, and nothing spilled out of it. He said: "Disturbances of this sort are.... The word you're looking for? You said gremlins? Gremlins? They must be pretty small, are they pretty too?" He smiled broadly in a backwards way. "Did you see what it said about me? Should be fired, and I quote." He quietly said: "I hope I'm not disturbing you too much." My coffee tasted like limburger. He continued in sign language, mouthing the words: "You know whose fault this is? Who's set these things loose in the world? I was in Jackson, Mississippi last night; a guy on a truck was talking about the new goods in his store and everyone was loudly cheering him on. Mob rule." My cup had turned to the coldness of steel. There was an eclipse. "Isn't this what you wanted?" asked Phil. "Where was I? Oh yes. They must be acting up." He laughed. "I don't think you should worry about it. These things happen. It's just that they've bunched up on you. Statistics says it has to happen." My cup was foam again and the sun came out. "You could go back to your therapist. He'd be interested in hearing about it all. In the end, don't worry about it. It may have passed already." I said: "You were all weird there. What about Mississippi?" "What about Mississippi?" "Didn't you mention Mississippi?" "No. I did not mention Mississippi." "So you were all weird there." "Am I normal now?" "Seems so." "Then your problem is over and done with." "For the moment. It could come back at any time." "Let me know if it does." He smiled. "I have a meeting to go to." "And I have papers to shuffle."

Back in my office, I took a couple of minutes to examine myself, and my surroundings, and the creatures between. However, nothing happened. I did some running on the spot to see if that changed anything, but it didn't. If they ignore me when I come to them, I guess I'll have to wait for them to come to me, or so I figured. Why would they stop their assaults now? I turned my mind to other matters and vigorously shuffled more papers around. A !bing! alerted me to a new email message and wouldn't you know it, it was from you, my brother. You had sent it fifty months before, and you said that everything was fine on Proxima. Your wife was fine, your kids were fine. You'd all been involved in setting up some schools and activities, all under their solar-wind-resistant domes. Colonists were arriving fresh every day, so there were a lot of get-togethers and a lot of bad behaviour going on, in which you avidly participated, since there wasn't that much to do on the only habitable exoplanet to be settled so far. You all were going to have your local elections in three weeks and, wouldn't you know it, the politics there was just like the politics here. Your letter went on and on; you'd spent weeks putting it together; you were on the engineering team working on the transmission of photographs, moving images, and music between Earth and Proxima but the problem was generating enough energy for it. You said you might be able to send a photo in two years or thereabouts. I only read two pages of your letter before putting it aside to perhaps read out loud to my wife and kids that night. Then I continued shuffling papers, and the gremlins left me alone for the rest of the day.

I walked home without any disturbance to speak of, though I did stop for too long at a red light that had turned green, which made one rascal behind me shout: "Get a move on, buddy."

Everything was normal when I got home. Everything was in its proper place, and the four of us had dinner, and I told them about your letter. I asked if they wanted to hear it, but they asked me to postpone my oration to a later time. I meekly agreed to their demand.

So now it's late at night. Past midnight! I have to work in the morning, as you can guess. More of the paper-shuffling, while you out there so far away continue your important work. The air-demons appear to have left me alone. I suppose you must have such critters as these out there too. I suppose they must have some mass, but they could be made of anti-matter for all I know. Perhaps the same ones that attacked me in the last twenty-four hours are with you right now, making you see and hear things that simply aren't there. I certainly hope not! for it is terribly disconcerting. But if you find them there, don't worry, because they go away after a while, or so I believe. You must be experiencing your own oddities way out there. Perhaps you have developed by this time a different set of senses, perhaps one that is made of gravitatium or whatever you scientists and engineers are calling it. The universe is a very big place, and it contains, oh, a hundred thousand times more than we believe it contains.

It is very late to finish a letter, so perhaps I will write another tomorrow evening. Now I must press send.