Adam Johnson - Emporium

“We’re going on a smoke run,” Marty says, stripping his flight suit clean off, right in the chamber.

“Sure,” she says. “Whatever.”

Jimbo comes up to me. “Right back,” he says and tries to do the complicated shake with me, leaving my hands fumbling to keep up. Jimbo punches the air and tokes an imaginary joint before the two of them cruise, half-naked, out the padded door.

Tasha slides her fingers from my neck to my helmet, which she pats. “Your pulse is strong, rising some, but fine.”

“That scar — really, I was a kid. I fell on a rake.”

Tasha sits next to me, throwing a leg across the padding. “Mine was heart massage. You know what that is?”

“That must have been some crash.”

“I used to be a cheerleader. Can you believe that? What was I cheering for? I don’t even see the point now.”

“’Cause you saw the other side?”

“The other side of what?”

“Jimbo says, you know, you saw the light.”

“‘The light?’ What an asshole.”

We hear Jimbo and Marty bang a locker closed in preflight, and Tasha and I stare at each other. In our minds, we are both mentally following the dopey boys through the corridor, down the stairs until they pass a painting of Tasha that will wink them through a self-locking door, and we almost hold our breath listening for the sound of the exit’s electric deadbolt.

“You wanna see the light? I’ll show you light,” she says.

Using a time delay, Tasha programs the motor for topspeed, 240 miles per hour, to get us off the ground together. On the wire mat, she lies face down, arms and legs out, and tells me to lay on top of her, so that we are stacked and spread-eagled, both with a view down into the DC-3. I immediately begin to swell in my dragsuit, and I know she can feel me harden. The pneumatic starter motor whines into life, and as the radial cylinders choke and sputter before firing up with authority, the lights turn out, leaving us in absolute blackness, something she must have programmed, too. With the sudden dark, Tasha says yes, and, given the earplugs and air pressure, it is more a vibration through our ribs than a sound.

There is no noise or light as the propellers clap up to a fast throttle. The ground simply falls away, and we rise, riding a column of air like a life raft on roiling, black breakers. Tasha does the balancing with her arms and I just hold on, wrapping around her, letting my fingers interlock her ribs, run the raised line of her breastplate scar. Mostly, I just hold on, but as my eyes start to adjust, I begin to see a faint light. From the dark engine below comes a coppery fire, the green-black glow of its hot cowls, and into this I look for a first glimpse of the future. In air hot and black as jet, this minor light speaks loud to me, winks at me as I feel Tasha reach back through the dark to unsnap the crotch flaps in our suits. She yells something I cannot hear.

I enter her without ceremony, and we screw spread-eagled, through wind-whipped nylon, the rattle making Tasha’s flesh feel hard and fibrous inside, like the slick white, gumlike meat of coconut. In the wind tunnel below, the motor’s buttery fire is the only light we have to guide us, and we fall endlessly toward it, like the path-dangling shimmer of a tree viper’s heat pits, the golden Isis beetle burrowing beneath the Valley of Kings. I am a cliff diver, held midleap. I am between engine and ice, green felt and craps, hovering between the untrue city and the coming flash. Close by is my father, night falling, high on endorphins, somewhere after the bullet but before the hyenas, the constellations overhead forming themselves not into giant bears or crabs, but silver Jeeps, celestial banana clips, a great gavel. Of the hard, wheeling lights above, my father’s eyes make out Ladder, Lariat, Fleece, and Sickle. From the stars of Serpens, Scorpio, Leo Major, and Lupus, he sees the Burning Chariot, the Lesser Wing, the False Book.

Tasha has her feet looped around my ankles, and she’s elbowing me in the ribs, to fuck harder, I figure, so I jostle my hips as I am supposed to, yet I feel nothing. Losing my senses, I drift closer to my essential state: coupled and bound with someone I cannot see, hear, or feel. It is in this state — floating, hungry, tethered — that I have a moment of clarity, a vision: I see a resort permanently frozen in glass, like a “Wish you were here” diorama in a snow globe, with plastic figurines of those who people my life, while around them whips a constant category-three storm. If there is a heaven or hell for Tammy, it is the same place — this hot tub she reclines in, with enough chlorine to burn her hair blond again, while above tumbles a sky of yellow masks, complimentary Tanquereys, and wheeling black boxes. On a white towel, my mother sleeps under this sun, margarita gone warm. Of Ted, there is only the red tip of his snorkel as he examines bright fish trapped in clear blue plastic. And driving blind through a storm of seismic charges, MP badges, and Togo masks is my father, one hand on the wheel, the other holding binoculars focused so that everything near him is overblown and blurry, so that all beyond is bathed in tempting, miraculous light.

The storm around me, however, begins to subside, and our column of air becomes unsteady as the engine tires down. While I’m still inside Tasha, we slowly settle on the wire mat, lightly bouncing from its spring as we begin to gain weight. I don’t know if I came in her or not. I thought there’d be that white flash, the divine light, so to speak, but I may have missed it.

Finished, we strip out of our sweaty suits, and, naked, skin red-streaked, we lie facedown together on the mesh, letting our forearms dangle through the squares of wire. We let it go quiet, and above the smoldering engine, the aluminum sounds of our breathing echo from its turbines, mingling together, so that it whispers back.

Tasha shifts so her breasts swing through, and above the pale ticking blue of hot manifolds, we both let our bladders go, our ears following the urine as it dribbles to crackle and hiss in the blades below. The glowing steam that lifts, a fog of pissy vinegar, drowsily mumbles to us with our own breath, and it is the first true ghost I have seen, though there will be others.

“There it is,” she says. “There’s your light.”

This is the point of the story where I’m supposed to tell you how everything works out and then hit you with the big picture. I’ll give it a shot.

It turns out that, after three operations, Marty’s father loses half the foot to infection and later he sways when he stands. Jimbo shakes his head as he tells me this on the last night I see him, when I go to his house to watch Speedweek ’s coverage of LeMans. Speedweek puts me in a bad mood because there are too many commercials. There are no breaks or second halves in the real world. You can’t call time-out at two hundred miles an hour. Around lap four hundred, Jimbo returns from the kitchen shirtless, holding two Millers. Smiling, he asks me if I’d like a beer with head.

The Runnin’ Rebels go on to win the conference title.

Mythology isn’t for me. Right before I fail, though, as an aside, the teacher says something I remember. Of course there are no gods, really, he tells us, which surprises me, because I’d gotten used to the idea. But it makes sense. I know there’s no great hand that shuttles jets safely down or suggests to scavengers that they find other meals.

Ted says he hears from somebody who hears from somebody that my dad is caught bartering military radios for low-grade emeralds in Tanganyika and is deported by the British. They say he makes it out of Africa A-okay, but the more I get used to Ted, the less I trust him. Back when we first meet, when I am nobody in his eyes, the truths come hard and fast. Now I see Ted often, and he no longer says things like Tough break and Face it. Assuming he’s ever even met my father, which is still in question, Ted’s little stories suggest a bigger truth: he’s begun to care enough to lie.