The Inner City (12 page)

Sam himself was probably the last one to realize it.

“Have you noticed anything about Sam lately?” Dolores asked Don. They had adjoining desks. Sam had just passed by.

Don shrugged and his glasses slipped down his nose. “Nothing, no. What do you mean?”

Dolores turned to Betty on her other side. The desks were arranged in rows. “Have you noticed?”

“Too busy,” Betty said. “I never notice walks anyway.”

“Still,” Dolores said dreamily, “still, there’s something . . .”

Sam had not yet noted the change in his walk. He did, however, feel a certain pleasant lightness.

He had gotten as far as the designers’ offices when a surprised voice said, “How did you do that?”

Sam had not done anything. He had merely stepped over a wadded piece of paper on the carpeted floor. “Do what?”

“You stepped over the paper, but you didn’t—well—
land
right away. Is it a trick?” the woman, whose name Sam did not know, looked at him with admiration.

“No trick at all,” Sam said, smiling with his broken tooth showing. He walked on, with that new, light tread Dolores had mentioned, thinking only that the woman was flirting. Sam, at the moment, felt above flirting. But the woman’s suggestion remained in the back of his mind.

For instance, it was only a day or so later that he reached for a particular book awkwardly placed a little too high on a shelf above his drafting table. He was surprised to find that he had left the ground. “Odd,” he remarked as he gently regained the floor. And then he laughed at himself. What a silly thought to have! He laughed again.

But Dolores, having happened to glance up from the row of desks where she worked across to the row of drafting tables where Sam worked, leaned over and nudged Don.

“I just saw him do it again.”

“I won’t believe it till I see it myself,” Don muttered in irritation. “You
say
you see it, but no one else does.”

“Well, then,
watch
,” she hissed back.

Don lifted his chin haughtily. “I’m busy. I’m working.”

“I do the same work you do, and get it done in the same amount of time, and yet I can still manage to keep in touch with the world around me.”

Don did not even condescend to sniff in response, but Betty, on Dolores’s other side, said, “You know, it’s funny, but I could almost swear . . .” She stopped uncertainly.

Sam sat thoughtfully in front of his draft board. He was no longer chuckling. That feeling of lightness he had—was it more than a feeling? He chewed thoughtfully on his moustache. Had he really learned a trick of some kind?

Once conscious of his new skill, Sam began to notice it more and more. He lived in a fourth-floor walk-up and it finally dawned on him, on the way home, how easy the stairs had become lately. In fact, once started, he drifted up effortlessly.

The next morning, coming downstairs began to be more of an effort. He had to grasp the handrail—gently, it’s true—to pull himself gradually down. Otherwise he moved very markedly forward, rather than down.

Sam began, tentatively, to test himself. Dolores was on the alert, and was able to nudge Don in time for him to see Sam as he took a gentle leap up to the top row of shelves and hovered there considering titles.

Don did not give in easily. “It’s a trick of some kind.”

“But what a trick!” Dolores breathed.

Sam exhaled and descended gently to the floor. Pencil in hand, he doodled rather than drafted at his board. If it was true, if it was really true . . . was it possible to put this to use somehow? His mind wandered.

Word spread along the rows of desks and drafting tables. Sam’s neighbours, hunched over their boards, had noticed nothing, but once alerted by Dolores, everyone kept an eye, or corner of an eye, watchfully on him.

Sam drifted by them, more obviously, day by day, floating.

There were various explanations.

“Maybe it’s glandular.”

Don was not to be appeased. “He’s just doing it to get attention.”

“Is he an air sign?”

“No, he’s a Pisces.”

“Well, fish float.”

Out of curiosity, people along the rows set traps for him. Suddenly there would be wastepaper baskets, cartons, or even chairs left temptingly in between the rows, directly in Sam’s path.

Sam was feeling lighter and lighter. He smiled as he stepped widely, gently, tenderly above cartons and chairs. The uninitiated would get a nod from those now familiar with Sam’s floating.

Everyone had some comment to make. Sam now spent little time on the ground.

“He’d make a great second-story man,” someone said speculatively.

But Sam had not figured out any use for floating, and it no longer mattered to him. He was happy to float. He began to do it in public—on street corners, in subways.

The urge would overcome him. He would smile, a small smile at first and then more expansive. He always had to step in order to rise; he couldn’t do it sitting down.

First the smile, then a lighthearted step and that wonderful lift into the air. He hung there—oh, what did the length of time matter, except that it increased subtly day by day?

People began to notice him on the street. If he jumped a curb, almost certainly someone would say, “Oh, look, that’s the same one we saw yesterday.” And maybe there would be the answer, “Oh, no, I think that one had a beard. Still, it might be the same.”

Sam’s smile, then, became almost beatific. Where he had loomed previously only a head above the crowd he now appeared head and shoulders.

The gradual settling down to Earth had a calming effect on him; it soothed him after the euphoria of his float.

Dolores once asked him—for she never questioned his ability, or thought it a trick—whether it was like certain dreams she’d had.

“It’s not at all like a flying dream,” he answered. “Unless you have flying dreams where you stand up? In that case it might be.” Sam had ceased to dream, anyway. He also couldn’t recall any of his old dreams. Apparently, he no longer needed them.

Sam’s reputation in the office was spreading. The rows where he worked were now very often cluttered with people who had no particular business being there, who “just stopped by” to say hello to an unnamed acquaintance.

This caused Don, who resented the attention paid to such an extraordinarily shallow form of amusement, a great deal of bitterness.

“He’s just doing it for effect,” he told Dolores and Betty more than once. “He thinks he’s special.”

“He is special,” Dolores repeated.

“Let’s just say ‘boo’ when he doesn’t expect it, and see what happens,” Betty whispered, raising her eyebrows.

“That’ll just encourage him,” Don sniffed. He shuffled the papers on his desk in disapproval.

Sam began to have difficulty getting back down to the ground. He was perplexed by this. When he took an elevator he continued to rise after the doors opened. People sometimes had to pull him down, like the pulling, they told him, of a large helium-filled balloon.

Although he could relax sitting down, he did not necessarily rest on the chair. He began to suspect that he was actually beginning to float in any position—but not at all times, perhaps only when his mind wandered and he thought about his mysterious gift.

He told Dolores he’d been to a fortune-teller. She had discussed only his present and past and vigorously shook her head when asked about his future.

Sam fingered his moustache sadly and settled only a few inches above the ground. “It’s the not having a future that seems surprising.”

“A man who can
fly
,” Dolores said. “How can there be a predictable future? Wind currents alone . . .”

Sam stopped her with a gesture. “It hasn’t gotten that bad yet.”

“Ah, but, as you said, she couldn’t see the future.”

Sam gradually settled a few inches higher. That very morning he had woken with his nose smack against the ceiling.

In fact, Sam was afraid he was losing all control over his gift. Crowds collected around him almost constantly now, since he rose so consistently and conspicuously at every opportunity. It was all right now, in the summer, to hover giddily in the air until it was time to come down to Earth—but in winter? In winter it could be unpleasant, at the rate he was going, to be stranded outside a third-story office window waiting for whatever it was that took him down again.

And it might not even wait till winter. At the rate he was going, by the time the leaves fell off the trees he would be evaporating into the stratosphere. How high, indeed, would he go? Was there a limit to his powers—or none at all?

His work was suffering, he had to admit. It was difficult enough trying to stay in some sort of relative proximity to his table, but his mind wandered so often (and as his mind wandered, so did his body) that he spent whole hours in idle trains of thought. The designs he handed in were incomplete, or they had certain erratic elements incorporated into them that caused consternation in the upper ranks.

The floor manager had spoken to him already a few times—at first tentatively, because he liked Sam. But he had been getting words, stronger and stronger, from those above. His heart thudded every time he saw Sam sitting in the air above his table, abstractedly staring into the distance. Sam was becoming a continuing disturbance, and disturbances did not help productivity.

The manager, Peter, overheard parts of the many conversations about Sam. He knew, for example, how irritated Don was with Sam’s unprofessional stance. And Don was the kind of person capable of making his complaints known straight up and down the hierarchy—even over Peter’s head. Peter also knew about the minor betting that was going on about the time and height of Sam’s best levitation each day—had even participated, much earlier on, with his own crumpled dollar.

But the encouragement—the egging on—that now continually interrupted the workday was beyond his tolerance and even beyond his specific orders.

Still, he could hear Don vexedly saying, “Oh, don’t ask him to do that, we’ll
never
hear the end of it,” and knew that his staff had come up with yet another test or trial for Sam to perform.

Dolores’s voice answered back, “Oh, but we have to see just what he can do. He doesn’t know it himself. In the interests of science!” She laughed gaily; she had begun to feel that Sam was her property, her discovery. Peter shuddered and turned away. Perhaps the situation could be covered by a memo. He rapidly composed it as he hurried down the corridor. “To all staff members: In the interests of professionalism, only those authorized to be in the Design Department will be admitted during their normal shifts. We would also like to point out that betting pools of any kind are strictly prohibited, and this prohibition will be enforced. In addition, business hours do not include the performance of any tricks or attention-gathering activities that distract from a working environment.” Yes, he thought, something along those lines would be appropriate.

Sam found that putting weights in his shoes did not work. He contrived to belt himself into the chair at work, but that began to drift with him as well. He requested metal bolts to keep his chair connected to the floor and Peter agreed to it. Sam rigged up all manner of devices to make it possible to stay strapped into his chair and still reach the materials he needed to work with.

But when he had to leave his chair the office effectively stopped working and a pleasant thrill of expectation spread down the rows. Sam now had gotten into the habit of holding onto the corners of desks and chairs as he walked down the aisle, as an astronaut might grope his way through space.

His smile had a worried edge to it. He became afraid of open spaces—areas without handles, or bars, or mailboxes to grab when the push upward became imperative.

His power, or gift, or trick, or curse, was escalating. He was almost never on the ground. And it had lost its interest for him; now that it was no longer a plaything, he was becoming more aware of the disadvantages. He regretted what he had said to Dolores (how recently was it?): “Sometimes I wonder how high I can go. I am the first.”

When he went for a drink of water and ended up standing above the water cooler, he was no longer curious about floating; it was no longer theoretical. He faced a practical problem. If he lost this job, he would have a particularly difficult time at job interviews. He twisted his mouth painfully at the thought.

But then there came a day when the straps of his chair no longer held him. They burst, not forcefully, but almost without comment, and Sam did not reach out quickly enough to hold himself down.

Unfortunately, it happened while a top executive was leading a tour through the building. They had been marching all morning up one aisle, one corridor after another, nodding and gravely paying attention to various aspects of dynamic management, theoretical projection and design. Sam, as a member of the Design Department, was on the last leg of the tour. The top executive was proud of this section—the rows of desks and draft boards were not the head or heart of the organization, but their sheer extent was impressive.

Unfortunately, Sam was by then firmly resting against the ceiling, and at least a dozen people who should have been at their desks were trying to get him down.

The tour stopped short at this crowd, and a horrible quiet descended along the rows. Everything stopped. All eyes and ears were turned in one direction.

“Peter,” the top executive said to the manager, “is there an explanation for this?”

Peter was in misery. After all, he
liked
Sam. But to be put in such a position!

“He floats,” was Peter’s strangled reply.

The executive regarded the situation with a cold, slow eye. He glanced from Sam on the ceiling, to the people stopped in their attempt to pull him down, to the unpleasantly meaningful quiet of the multitude of workers around them.

His slow survey seemed interminably long. Finally he said, “I’ll drag him down to Earth. He’s fired.”