Gravity, Restraint,
and the Reason Icarus Fell
by
Max E. Keele
*****
Published by Naraka Press
Gravity, Restraint, and the Reason Icarus Fell
© 2001 by Max E. Keele
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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously. Seriously. I made all of this up.
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"The law of gravity is a fine thing for holding people down," Harris said, "but it just don't apply to me." And the old man believed it, too. Believed with all the conviction of his soul, right up until his very last moment on Earth. I was there. He was staring right through me at the stars when he said that, and man, I almost wanted to see him fly away. But of course, I couldn't quite believe him, and by the time I finally understood, it was too late....
Now don't get me wrong; I'm really not that gullible. I'd been an attendant at the boobyhatch for five years, and from the first I was subjected to a wide variety of delusions. First guy I met there was convinced that the world had ended in 1962. He was arrested for looting a busy convenience store. After him, in no order: the rat man, the sex-alien from Pluto, the woman who had a family of elves living in her underwear, and the poor man who thought that the Cockroach Nation planned to rise against us. In fact, every lunatic I've ever met shared a common problem—solid faith in whatever their twisted minds happened to believe. It didn't take long for me to learn to smile nice and nod my head and make like whatever anybody said was gospel.
Naturally, I treated Harris that way. You know, standard procedure for delusions of all kinds.
It just happened that I was pulling graveyard the night they wheeled old Harris in. He was all wrapped up in a straitjacket and strapped tight to his wheelchair. He smiled loosely and the only part of his face that wasn't wrinkled was his chalky eyes. He seemed peaceful enough, but restraint calms a guy down after a while, and they probably had him doped, too. The cop that brought him in told us that they'd snagged him off the Wright building. He'd been squatting on a gargoyle, chanting and flapping his arms. Said he was hostile and tried to jump. The cop thought it was pretty funny. Cops are like that, generally. Well, anyway, I took hold of one of the old man's elbows and Doug, the fat redhead Okie, took the other. We slung him up onto the bed and peeled off the 'jacket. We tied him down tight, catheterized him, and decided to go for coffee. In all that, Harris had said one thing: "What's the matter, boys, 'fraid I'm gonna fly off?"
Doug and I smiled and nodded and said, "Sure, pops, that's right," and headed for coffee. We joked around and smoked a
couple of cigarettes, then went back to work. Doug had to mop the East Wing, I got to disinfect the showers. Slop a little chlorine; hose 'em down, nothing to it.
Graveyard's the quiet shift at the nut farm—all the wild things are doped into comas and the nurses usually lock themselves into the office and read romances. Aside from an occasional late delivery, there just isn't much to do. If I paced myself, I could make the side work last about two hours. That left me with four hours to burn, and two more for breaks. I spent twenty minutes on the showers, killed a few more with a smoke, then went looking for Doug to take another coffee break. He was barely half done, so I tried to think of something else to do. I wandered down to the front office, but the cop was still there, making time with the night nurse, Lucille. Not wanting to disturb Lucille's shot at heavy breathing, I shuffled off back to the ward. All was as well lit and silent as a morgue.
I was about to light up a smoke when I heard this weird sound: a kind of chanting, real soft, and then a sort of a thump. Here's something, I thought, hoping for diversion. The noises came from the room we'd just put old Harris into. I peeked around the door so as not to distract him. He was lying there, all taut and secure, still smiling. He mumbled some stuff that sounded like Latin. After a few minutes, he sighed and closed his eyes. For lack of anything better to do, I went in.
"Hey, pops," I said, "what's going on here? Why aren't we sleeping?"
He turned his head toward me and spat through his smile. "I'm busy, son. Go pester somebody else." His voice was light and airy.
"Busy, huh." I finally lit my smoke. I turned a chair backwards and straddled it. "This ain't busy-time, pops. This is sleepy-time. Whatever you got going can wait 'till morning, don't you think?"
"Maybe." He screwed up his face and looked me in the eye. "You keep a secret?"
"Sure," I said.
"When that idiot flatfoot grabbed me, I was just about ready." His tongue flicked out onto his lip, as if to taste the air for my reaction. "Just about ready to fly away."
"Okay." I smiled and nodded. "Like a bird, right?"
He laughed, but it sounded like a choking crow. "Yep, just like a bird. Might've been to the moon by now."
I suppressed a Bronx cheer. "And what were you using for feathers?"
He snorted through his nose. "Feathers! Who needs feathers? Did feathers help that Greek feller any? Huh? No, I got me something better." He winked. I nodded. "Got me the mystic secret of anti-gravity."
I blew a smoke ring, ground the smoke out against my heel. "Right, pops. The hell you say. Anti-gravity."
His eyes narrowed. "Yep, only word for it. Now I don't blame you for not believing right off, what with all the crazy folks around here, but look, you cut me loose, for just a minute, and I'll give you..." His eyes popped open wide. "...something to believe in."
I shifted my weight, a bit uneasy, and kicked out my legs. "Sorry, man. Can't do that. Rules." I decided that Doug was probably done with the mopping and that our coffee break was past due. I stood up.
"Oh, well," Harris said, "you'll have to untie me sooner or later. I'll be ready."
I beat it out of there, and found Doug sitting in the cafeteria with a hot cup, waiting for me. "Jesus," I said. "Been up talking to that old coot they just brought in. Crazy. Thinks he can fly."
"Probably can." Doug's pretty boring, but at least he was sane.
I bummed a smoke. "Says he's got anti-gravity. Offered to show it to me."
Doug laughed, one syllable. "And you declined?"
"Sure. Hell, I bet he just wanted to get free so he could strangle me." I grabbed my throat with both hands and stuck out
my tongue.
"You know," Doug said, "might be kind of funny." He slurped coffee.
I checked out the clock, an institutional wire-caged model that passed the time with an airplane buzz. It wasn't even four yet, but all my chores were done. "Doug, one of us has got to start bringing a bottle, or something. You got anything left to do?"
"Well..." Doug had this habit of stopping in the middle of a sentence to pink lint out of the pocket of his uniform. He rolled the lint into little balls, then laid the balls out in designs. He was making a ti
ny lint bird. "Thought I'd wander up to the roof and throw pigeon eggs at Lucille's window."
That sounded pretty good to me, so that's what we did. The roof was my favorite place. You couldn't get up there without a key, but I just happened to have one that someone else got blamed for losing. It was dark and quiet up there, except for the pigeons, the wind, and an occasional distant siren. We lobbed eggs for a while and then sat with our backs against cold stone and ivy for a smoke.
Doug sighed a cloud across his belly. "Hey, man," he said, "look at all them stars. And on every one of them there's a planet with a couple of guys sitting on a roof, bored out of their minds."
"Sure." I dipped an old cigarette butt in pigeon crap and started drawing a face on the tarpaper." "You don't believe in that E.T. garbage, do you?"
He looked a little offended. "Why not? It never hurt anybody to believe in things that don't matter. Ever heard of religion?"
I laughed. "Right. But what about people like that old Harris? He thinks he can fly. If he'd've jumped off the Wright building, he'd've come to some grief."
"And maybe he'd be in orbit around Mars by now. Who knows?"
Doug had studied philosophy at Oklahoma State. They taught him not to really believe in anything, except argument. I hear that he's a lot quieter these days, and a lot less cynical, too. But, man, he used to bug me.
"Like hell." I chewed at a hangnail. "He would