Amanda Filipacchi - Vapor

That night the rat rained.

We spent the next two weeks enjoying our weight loss, playing with the freedom it gave us, injecting ourselves frequently and not spending much time at our regular weight. It was wonderful to hang on to birds. Or kites. Or one of those helium-filled party balloons, which would carry us up. When we’d let go of the string, we’d drift around or back down (depending on the breeze), like ordinary balloons. We rode on the backs of dogs and other small animals.

Walking on our hands was no problem anymore. Even walking on our fingers. We could run on the points of our toes, and jump that way, like ballerinas without needing toe shoes, and land that way. We could walk down the street on our bare points for hours if we wanted to and didn’t care what people thought.

We could do flips in the air, and if we fell on our faces, it didn’t hurt, and if we fell on our heads, we didn’t break our necks.

As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t possible for anyone to overestimate how much fun this was. If there was a heaven, weightlessness must be what it consisted of.

Due to our tremendously light weight, we were able to walk on water. And sit on it. We sat on rivers and took long walks on lakes and short walks on ponds and puddles.

We liked to sit on electric wires, like birds, and smooch. And then, when we got bored of sitting, we walked on those wires like circus performers, and when we lost our balance, we didn’t fall, but drifted to the side.

The one thing we couldn’t do was fly in rain. A few dozen raindrops weighed more than we did and made us sink to the ground, unless the breeze was strong enough to compensate.

The only really dangerous thing for us to do was to jump off the edge of a cliff or a roof or a tree while absentmindedly holding something in our hands, like a rock. Then, of course, we plummeted to the ground unless we had the presence of mind to let go of the rock before crashing.

But otherwise, walking off cliffs was fun. We called it “diving.” We’d stand on the edge, take off our shoes, and push off for the wind to carry us.

Gliding until our weight returned was exciting, but we invariably regretted it afterward, when we landed far from our shoes. Sometimes we’d land in very undesirable places.

Once, we landed in the middle of a forest. The ground was prickly, which, while we were still relatively light, was fine, but as our weight increased, our bare soles began to sting.

A note about our shoes: I preferred the loafer style, to the style with laces, like Damon’s. He liked to hang on to the laces with his toes while he bobbed in the breeze. I liked to be able to slip out of my shoes in a bookstore and float up to a high shelf. There was a big risk of getting caught, of course, which was why I always made sure to pretend I was climbing up the shelves, not floating up.

Damon and I also did some weightless socializing. For fun we went to cast parties, wrap parties, and every other sort of movie party. We wore normal clothes and our heavy shoes. I think people noticed that we moved strangely. We had to be careful not to leave our muscles relaxed, otherwise our arms would be floating at our sides, like in a bath. It required hard work and concentration to look heavy when we were light. Of course, since our hair was weightless too and floating around our heads as if we were under water, we had to do something about it. We wore wigs in the style of our own hair. Sometimes we wore hoods instead. At home, after the parties, I loved to stand in front of the mirror and whip off my wig or hood and see my hair drifting around.

It was so sensual to cavort around weightless that we often became extremely aroused. But it was hard to have sex while being light; a bit like being on Prozac, from what I’d heard. To replace gravity, we had to use sheer muscles — but a whole different set of muscles than those required for traditional, weighty sex. We had trouble making each other stay in place. We were like two big balloons, laughing with exasperation, laughing so hard we’d feel spent, as if we’d succeeded.

Eventually we figured out we had to be intertwined in order to have light sex; I had to wrap my legs around his like vines. And once we got the hang of it, the floor was what became annoying. Our smallest movement would make us bounce up in the air, for many long seconds, and then we’d land. It was distracting to have the floor bump into us repeatedly during sex. We’d land in unexpected ways, like on our sides, but only for a moment, because we’d pop up again at the next movement. Sometimes we would slowly drift back down head first. When this wasn’t the case, I’d kick the floor away impatiently with one foot, but when I did that too hard, we’d hit the ceiling, which could also be irritating. And, like a fly buzzing around us, the floor always came back, no matter how many times we’d shoo it away.

This was why we decided to have sex in the wind. We did it in the sky over the ocean at night. We hoped no one would see us. I wondered if we might get arrested for public lewdness. The wafting aspect would surely overshadow the erotic aspect. Nevertheless, we avoided the full moon, not wanting to be back-lit.

We were carried with an uneven rhythm. The wind twirled us, flipping us over and over in the sky, like a dead leaf.

Our lovemaking tended to be gentle without gravity. And sometimes that was frustrating, when our passion was too strong to tolerate gentleness. We craved weight, the weight of our bodies on top of each other. Weight was sexy, as it turned out.

We’d be drifting and hugging gently, being loving. Like a spider patiently waiting on its web for an insect to land, Damon was waiting for a handle to come along. When that object came, Damon would grab it and slam me against the wall, the railing, the ladder, the seesaw, the root, whatever, anything resembling a handle or narrow enough for him to hold on to behind my back. Then the lovemaking could be stronger, almost as if we had weight. He bore into me with all the strength in his arms, revealing the frustration he felt.

And sometimes it was me. When his back bumped against the trunk of a tree, I latched onto the branches on either side of him, and I pinned him there and savored him, wrapping my legs around him and the trunk. But then, unable to resist sinking my fingers into his hair, I let go of the branches. He pushed us away, and we went off, drifting again.

We were like insects making love anywhere.

After the first two weeks of being light almost all the time, we cut down to twice a week, because of my work. Sometimes we still got light every night. It was very addicting. Not literally, that is. There were no withdrawal symptoms when we did an experiment and stopped for a week.

I thought I had the solution for making my parents come ’round to liking Damon. After having heard them so often say things about Damon like, “He’s a loser, he’s pathetic, he’s mushy, he’s pretentious, he’s common, he’s evil or insane, in any case dangerous, he’ll make you unhappy,” I could prove to them that he was extraordinary by shooting up for them and showing them I could float.

Understandably, they were horrified at first when they saw me injecting something into my arm. They said Damon was influencing me to take drugs.

Then I started floating.

My father said, “That’s what drugs do. They give you the illusion of floating.”

“Is this an illusion?” I said.

“Probably.”

“Come on! Am I hallucinating that I’m floating?” I yelled at them from the ceiling.

“I don’t know if you are, but we are. The fact is, someone here is hallucinating; there is a hallucination going on.”

For Damon and me, it seemed things could not get better, that nothing could come between us. He continued to help me with my lines occasionally, when I asked him to. We lived in harmony. But then something did come between us.