Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

She couldn’t help looking, while the tube warmed up, at the pattern of fine black hair on his chest. The transformer rumbled, the tube hissed, one end of the tube glowed purplish yellow, and the air began to smell like rain. When the tube was ready, she arranged Leo in front of the film holder.

“Hold your breath,” she said, just as Irene had once said to her. She slipped in the film and counted.

The tube was alive, he thought. A breathing thing — that was ozone he smelled — glowing and probing inside him, the rays streaming from the target and out the side of the tube, passing through him to trace his rounded image on the film.

Irene was still absent, but Eudora had developed plenty of films with her watching silently, doing no more than nodding her approval. What harm, then, in developing the image alone? In the darkroom, among the comforting eggy stink of the chemicals, she splashed through the familiar steps and was rewarded by ribs, vertebrae, collarbones. Leo’s heart, his diaphragm. She was trembling, she noticed. He was standing very close to her, looking over her shoulder, and she could feel the warmth of his body on her back. On the negative she saw the clouds of his lungs, dotted with the scars of healed cavities and a few more dubious spots.

“I shouldn’t try to read this,” she said. “Irene will have to make you a better one when you’re due for another consultation with Dr. Petrie.”

“How could she do any better?” Leo said, his chin near her ear. “The detail — that’s marvelous.”

“I had a feeling that tube would work well with you.” Her cheeks were hot and she moved away. “Let’s go see if Irene’s back.”

Still the space outside the darkroom was empty except for them; still it smelled as if lightning had passed through. The machine, cold now, was only a heap of metal and wood, but Eudora’s face was pink and haloed by her electrified golden hair. An idea had developed in Leo’s mind as he watched the image of his chest appear, and now he blurted it out.

“Would you — we have a movie night coming up in a couple of weeks, would you join us for that? Would you go with me, I mean, that evening?”

She looked as if he’d slapped her. “You, and — me?”

“Yes,” he replied, catching himself before he reached for her hand. “I’ve been wanting to ask you. I thought you knew.”

She stood, staring at the film, for what seemed to him like a long time. “I didn’t,” she said. “Not at all.” More silence, more staring at the film they’d developed together. “I lied to you earlier, about Naomi,” she said. “About what she was doing in your room.”

She hadn’t led Naomi in there because Naomi felt faint, she confessed; Naomi had entered the room by herself, hoping to see him, or to learn something more about him. Before Eudora completed her awkward story, Leo realized he knew what she meant and he stiffened with embarrassment.

“She’s so drawn to you,” Eudora concluded. “She doesn’t seem able to tell you herself and I wouldn’t have told you except…”

“Except what?” Had Naomi, he suddenly wondered, written the anonymous note he’d found inside his Kill-Gloom Gazette ?

“Except it’s Naomi you should be taking to the pictures. Obviously.”

“But it’s not Naomi I’m interested in. I have no interest in her. None.”

Then it was his turn to look at the film on the light box. He waited, listening to the air moving raggedly in and out of his lungs — why was he so conscious of his breathing? — until he could add, “It’s you I want to see.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“It’s just the movies. You might come see them on your own, I know you like them.”

“Naomi’s my friend,” she said.

He caught himself digging the thumbnail of one hand into the palm of the other. “It’s not Naomi,” he said again. “It’s not ever going to be Naomi.”

She ran her finger half an inch above the surface of the film, pausing at two different spots before moving on. “All right,” she said — a moment which, later, she’d pause over again and again. “I’ll meet you there. But just to see the pictures.”

ON THE NIGHT after Eudora X-rayed his chest, Leo slipped stealthily past the nurses’ station and then down through the kitchen and out the back door, just as Ephraim had done on the night he left us. Once he was beyond the buildings, the grounds, so vast and dark, absorbed him instantly. Down the slope he moved, over the lawns and through the meadow toward the woods, passing a fox trotting up the hill. The sky was clear, the stars were blazing, a moist breeze drifted from the disk of ice still floating in the center of the pond. As he walked down into hollows and then back up, the air felt cool then warm then almost cold against his cheeks and he smelled rotted leaves, wet dirt, sap moving beneath bark, witch hazel, thawing carcasses. The moon, which was nearly full, lit the trees around him.

At dusk he’d heard a chorus of tree frogs, but now the peeping had stopped and whatever had made the slow, clacking sound — a duck, Arkady had said irritably, although Abe claimed that it too was a kind of frog — was also sleeping. A few bats swooped over his head; moths surged around him; a dead duck lay in a puddle. In the moonlight his feet glimmered oddly through the ground fog. The dirty patches of snow, he found, were easier to walk on than the mud.

At the sugar refinery in Williamsburg he’d felt ancient; the other workers had been eighteen or nineteen or even younger, boys in their early teens skittering through the machines. Up here, where most of us were around his age but where we lived at a middle-aged pace, wrapped in our blankets, endlessly resting, he’d felt younger in some ways, older in others. Now, in the cool piney breeze, he felt how young he really was. Twenty-seven! He might still do almost anything, might even without Miles’s help find work related to the chemistry he’d once studied. He might find a good job, start a family. When he’d leaned over Eudora’s shoulder and seen her holding his ribs in her hand, something had reacted inside him. There were different kinds of chemical reactions, his teacher in Odessa had once explained. Decomposition, displacement, exchange, rearrangement, union…

From a tree an owl called; was he in love? Was that the name for this sense that, like the trees, the cattails, the frogs peeping, the geese arrowing overhead, he was springing back to life? Or maybe he was simply in hope, which might be the same thing. Something had been growing in him all winter, just now poking a green tip through the surface; a sense that almost anything might after all be possible. He felt — this astonished him— grateful. Not since he was a boy had he had time to think and study and look at the world and himself; and although throughout his stay up here he’d been sick, sometimes terribly so, and had feared for his body, at the same time these past months had been astonishing. Food, shelter, books, the forest, our Wednesday gatherings. The world, unclouded. Eudora. He drew another deep breath and made a modest plan, one step at a time. Study, tell Irene he was ready to work. Work, and then meet Eudora at the movies. There, perhaps…

BEFORE THE NEXT movie night, though, we had two more Wednesday sessions scheduled, which we were particularly excited about because Irene had finally agreed to take her turn. The rest of us had been flattered that she continued to come to our sessions; she was older than most, better educated than anyone except for Dr. Petrie, and she knew so much about so many things that we couldn’t predict what she’d discuss. Poland, Ian hypothesized before that last Wednesday of April. Madame Curie, Kathleen said; we knew she worshipped the Polish scientist. Eudora, wedged between Naomi and a mute and clumsy Leo — he’d hardly been able to speak to her since their session in the darkroom, and he still hadn’t asked her advice about his own proposed talk — wondered out loud if Irene might describe some of her first experiments with X-rays. Dr. Petrie worried that she’d mention their work correlating her films with the autopsy reports. But instead she announced something we hadn’t even known she was interested in: the work of a German physicist named Albert Einstein.