This New & Poisonous Air

DAVID MILLER AND HIS SISTER, Kitty, almost didn’t go to the theater on the night she disappeared. After getting into a fight with a boy at school, Kitty lay on the leather sofa at the Miller house, staring at the shadows of moths caught in the beveled globe of the ceiling fan, whispering oaths about how she’d never again make another mistake with her heart. David sat rocking in the corner chair, still dressed in his grassy baseball jersey and wearing cleats in the house despite his mother’s wishes. He felt restless from an evening of pitching drills and tried reasoning with his sister, saying the movie wasn’t a love story—it was about men looking for a diamond in the jungles of Peru. Cheeks flushed and a pillow clutched to her chest, Kitty said that looking for diamonds in the jungle was just like looking for love, and if the stupid king of baseball was too dense to understand metaphor, she didn’t want to go anywhere with him anyway. He grabbed her legs and pulled her roughly off the sofa, wrestling her to the floor. This was enough to finally rouse her, and as she adjusted her tank top, she said, “All right, David. Let’s go see if they find that stupid rock.”

He was relieved, though he’d never show Kitty how much. He knew he was, in fact, the stupid king of baseball and saw the world as a series of outlines. Kitty knew how to fill in the blanks. To him, she was like one of the statues at St. John’s, long-limbed and tormented—a series of miraculous meditations.

We understood David’s love. On Tuesday nights at women’s basketball games, we rooted for Kitty Miller, admiring the sharp curve of her ponytail and the way her eyes caught light from the blond gymnasium floor. At seventeen, she was still an arrow of time, pointing us toward our own graceful moments of youth. She took care of our children, served plates of egg casserole at church brunches, and helped the Founder’s Daughters fold paper flowers to decorate empty shop windows. Despite all of this, we knew she was biding her time. Girls like Kitty weren’t meant to grow old among our factory corridors and sawdust diners. Eventually, when she found a way, she’d leave. We’d seen it happen to other promising sons and daughters, though we thought, like them, she’d end up in some city, calling home twice a month to assure her mother and her brother that she was fine.

What we never imagined was that Kitty would be taken. How could such a thing happen to our girl? But Kitty rose halfway through the movie when the adventurers had assembled the collected pieces of a parchment map and found the entrance to the cave where the diamond was hidden. Wind blew across the cave mouth, and one of the adventurers, gaunt with exhaustion, said the noise sounded very much like regret. We wanted to stop Kitty, to pull her back. If nothing else, we wanted to save her for David’s sake. But farmers and factory workers, teachers and clerks, we were each trapped in our roles.

The Orpheum Theater was our landmark after all, a sweet flycatcher in an otherwise unlovely town. How did the building become more than mere mortar and brick? If we had to guess, we’d say its transcendence was a product of our desiring. Everything that is desired is, in a sense, made flesh. We snuck off for afternoon matinees when we should have been building toolboxes at the plant and stayed late for midnight shows rather than making conversation under the dinner-plate moon at the reservoir. Our mothers hadn’t been able to warn us about work not doing itself because they too had spent their time in the Orpheum’s thrall, sometimes barely remembering to feed us. When visitors came, they were drawn to our theater, if not to sit for a movie, then just to marvel at the abundance of its Oriental bric-a-brac: silk-tasseled mirrors, brass elephant heads, brèche violette pillars, and foreign deities that peered from every corner of the stonework. The auditorium was a walled courtyard, complete with an accurately constellated sky and a procession of clouds projected on the black ceiling by a magic lantern machine, and the pale glow that fell on us night after night was like a hunter’s jack-light, pulling animals helplessly from the brush.

David thought his sister needed to use the theater’s restroom, but when she simply remained standing at her seat, blocking the view of those behind her, he touched her hand and whispered, “Kit, you feeling okay? ” Her gaze drifted from the tense scene at the jungle cave to the black door beneath the movie screen, the one we told ourselves was the entrance to a storage room or simply an unmarked exit. We said these things to avoid saying the door was a way of climbing inside the Orpheum’s skin. “We can leave if you want,” David said. “Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea.” Without responding, Kitty began to walk down the center aisle, a bride in khaki shorts and a tank top that revealed arms and legs as smooth as stone. Of course, David stood to follow her, and we don’t know which of us dropped the white candy at his feet. All those brittle pieces, like so many broken teeth. It was awful to watch such a sure young sportsman fall. By the time David had righted himself, his sister had already opened the black door beneath the screen and stepped inside, closing it softly behind. David tried the knob. “Kitty,” he whispered, “Come on, Kit. This isn’t funny.” When she didn’t respond, he turned to look at us, searching our faces for the possibility of help. On the screen, a man with a sweat-beaded brow held the diamond as big as his fist, unaware that he was about to be struck by a poison dart.

In the weeks before her disappearance, the Orpheum had started to become for Kitty what it was for all of us—a kind of gentle mystery, easing us along, never providing enough clues to disturb us from our sleep. She was seventeen after all, old enough to begin her awakening, and David was a sturdy vessel for her confidences. “The air inside that place goes all the way through me, but it doesn’t feel cold,” she told him, as they sat on the bench at Ray’s Creamery, both eating piles of vanilla ice cream with plastic spoons. The Orpheum loomed across the street, an arabesque palace, the evening sun turning its gold leaf a livid shade of red.

He squinted at a particularly malicious-looking stone monkey that peered from one corner of the Orpheum’s jade roof. “The nut that sells the tickets—old white braids—would beat you to it,” he said. “She’d shoot Mike and Ike’s out of every hole in her body to fend off the bulldozers.”

Poor Kitty went to the bathroom to wash, and we kept our distance from the scene. If David Miller was right about anything, it was that the ticket seller, May Avalon, would chain herself to the theater to save it. In a sense, she already had, manning her glass booth for nearly sixty years, a wooden woman on the prow of a sunken ship, submerged but unable to drown. With her white hair still in girlish braids, she pushed the button to dispense pink tickets without giving our faces so much as a single glance. Old songs drifted from her antique record player, music from the vaudeville age that conjured images of singing puppets, garish blackface and fluttering Chinese silk. We knew her history well enough—had heard it repeated by our parents and grandparents. If the theater was a body, May Avalon was not its heart but its liver, performing a hundred mysterious functions, and her despair was nearly as much a landmark as the Orpheum itself.

May had lost her only love to the theater years ago—a towheaded buck dancer named Common Woolbrink who traveled the vaudeville circuit, performing on the flamelit stages of small towns across the Midwest. Unlike his shabby costume, Woolbrink’s dancing was said to be a modern marvel. His colorless eyes recognized the world anew every time he looked out over an audience, and he danced with such vigor that he required an oak platform on which to perform for fear that he might break through the pinewood stage. If women watched him too long, they fainted. Men were driven to riot.

What burned him into our town’s collective memory was not his dancing but his death—stabbed eleven times with a hunting knife on the steps of the Orpheum by a man named Roy Elkhart who said Woolbrink had lied at a game of cards. May Avalon, then just a girl, held the boy’s head in her lap and ran her fingers through his hair like she was his mother, watching blood pool on the concrete. She undid the clasps of his red dancing shoes, and after they took his body away, sat holding them to her chest, not five feet from where she’d spend the rest of her life selling tickets. The Orpheum transitioned from vaudeville house to movie palace, and May remained. “Picture shows are safer than live acts,” one man was quoted as saying in The Monitor. “They can’t be pig-stuck—no matter how much we hate the act.”

If Common Woolbrink’s death was the Orpheum’s first real tragedy, then Kitty Miller’s disappearance was to be its last. One week after she and her brother sat eating ice cream at Ray’s, she was gone, and David Miller, T-shirt torn and blood on his cheek, pulled the first piece of concrete from the crumbling steps, aiming it at the Orpheum. He threw his stone, not at the glass ticket booth, nor at the grand marquee that sprouted birds’ nests like untrimmed hair. Instead, he aimed at one of the Egyptian crocodile gods that flanked the theater’s entrance, using the smooth motion he’d learned from a summer of practices, believing that at least those toothy, moon-eyed gods provided a face for the Orpheum’s mysteries. But we knew the sculptures were little more than monster masks, products of the 1923 renovation. If anyone was to blame for Kitty’s disappearance, it was not the gods but us—we who’d been losing control of our house of dreams for years.

David was too young to know about the others, but what happened to Kitty had happened before. There’d been the black girl who’d come on the bus, no more than thirteen, carrying a backpack full of clothes with a doll tied to it. She looked like the kind of child who’d been hollowed out by life. When she went to the Orpheum, we assumed she intended to wash herself in its bathroom sink and then lose her worries in a movie for a while. May Avalon even gave her a free pass, something the old crone was loath to do for any of us. The girl left her backpack in a pool of soda, and we put the dirty thing in the garbage when the lights came on.

There’d also been the young man who slicked his hair and tucked his shirts and affected melancholy even when working at the toolbox factory. We knew his sort. When he talked about the movies, he said he still dreamed of being part of them, an idea that was tedious, and when he disappeared behind the black door, we told ourselves he’d run away to live some other life. Having a family and watching movies weren’t good enough for him.

And finally, there’d been Lon Stellmacher, the Stellmachers’ retarded son who was such a burden to his parents, he made Beth look old before her time and forced Carl to put away all his hearty ambitions. Poor Lon almost didn’t make it down the aisle because he had trouble seeing in the dark. When he stumbled against a row of seats, a few of us reached out and put him back on his way. Beth and Carl blamed themselves for letting him go to the Orpheum alone, but we didn’t place such blame. Even watchfulness and care have their limits.

David Miller didn’t know that we’d been observing disappearances for years, never quite thinking of them as sacrifices. We knew only that our parents had done the same as us, and their parents before that. Any one of our grandparents could have stopped Roy Elkhart before he stabbed Common Woolbrink eleven times, but instead they stood by and marveled at the way his wounds opened like mouths in his red coat.

David didn’t call for our help on the night Kitty slipped behind the black door. Instead, he merely stared at us there in our threadbare seats, still dressed in our work clothes, the expression on his face becoming a kind of mirror. On the day-bright streets, he knew most of us by name, but in the Orpheum, we were different, a single organism, immense yet paralyzed, and our beautiful theater, with all its rich trappings and pictures of youth, was nothing more than a funeral hall, holding services, night after night, for the same powdered corpse. Perhaps what frightened David the most was not our empty faces but the fact that so many seats in the Orpheum remained empty too, like invitations to sit for a show.

He took a deep breath. “Look, May, my sister is locked behind the door under the screen. She is a . . . darling, I guess. But she’s sad tonight because of a stupid thing that happened with some guy. Something that shouldn’t bother her because so many people at school are just in love with her. I just need you to unlock the door so I can get her out and take her home. Please. May.”

David didn’t bother to ask what she meant and instead simply followed her into the cold auditorium, down the darkened aisle to the door. She put a key from the ring around her wrist into the lock and whispered, “The manager doesn’t like anyone going up here. We’ve had some problems.” The smell that wafted from the space beyond was intensely sweet, unlike anything David had ever experienced—perfume from another place. And as they ascended the wooden staircase behind the door, he whispered, “Is this where you keep all the movie candy or something?”

They arrived at a long empty room made of pinewood planks, and it took David a moment to realize that he was looking at a portion of the old vaudeville stage that his grandfather had told him about, complete with rusted footlights and a hinged trapdoor. Abandoned flats leaned against one wall—trees cut from plywood, the circle of a lover’s moon hung from a wire, and finally there was a wooden city, hastily painted yet still evocative—perhaps all part of some long-forgotten act. The city drew David’s attention. Walled and turreted like a medieval fortress, its streets and bridges made little sense, wandering until they eventually disappeared. People could get lost on streets like those, especially if they didn’t know their way. The city was empty—no painted version of Kitty there. He pulled his attention away from it and pointed at the trapdoor that was wide enough to raise a small piano. “Could she have fallen down there? ” he asked.

“Was your sister the clumsy sort?” May asked, as she unwound a tattered rope from a hook and allowed the trapdoor to drop, revealing a dark pit, from which rose another potent blast of candied air. David knelt beside the hole and called his sister’s name, and when no one answered, he said, “We have to get some light. Maybe she can’t talk because she’s hurt.”

Our town doctor had once requested that Common Woolbrink sit for an examination so that he might learn the secrets of the boy’s agility. It was at this examination that May Avalon met the handsome young buck dancer, as she was acting as an assistant to the nurse, her braids then as dark as her eyes, and the red stripes of her uniform so bright they could have been woven from flame. She was an intelligent girl and knew when to smile. May and Common chatted while he sat on the doctor’s table, and afterward he invited her to the drugstore for a soda. At the chrome counter of the soda fountain, he told her the real secret to moving so fast—the one he’d never tell any doctor—he drank a daily dose of vegetable juice infused with a cutting from a mysterious and nameless root, provided to him by a Chinaman in St. Louis. When May pressed him to show her the root, he finally relented, producing a piece of it, which he kept in his pocket as a kind of talisman. The sight of Common Woolbrink holding the shriveled, rust-colored knob with so much reverence was enough to make May choke on her soda. She put the glass carefully on the counter, folded her hands and said that his magic root was nothing but a regular piece of ginger, and she could make him a cake of it for Christmas if he liked and then he could dance even faster.

We don’t know the boy’s response because the soda jerk who’d recorded the conversation until that point moved away so as not to appear to be spying, but if Woolbrink acted in character, he probably made up a lie to cover his embarrassment. Roy Elkhart knew Common was a liar, just as our grandparents did. A boy so bombastic couldn’t always tell the truth. It soon became clear that May liked to hear Common’s lies almost as much as he liked to tell them. According to him, he’d traveled halfway around the world, performing in English taverns, German cabarets, and even the floating show houses of Venice. May knew that a boy too poor to buy a suit that fit hadn’t really traveled the world, but she stopped calling Common’s bluffs and simply learned to revel in the details of his imagination. We know little of their relationship’s progression, only that they were seen together when Common was in town and that May eventually wore his ring, a boyish bit of junk shop glamour in the form of an oversized diamond made of sugar that glittered madly in the sun.

In matters of love, the element least understood by outsiders often provides the glue, and there was, in fact, a final mystery to their story, a detail we could only see dimly. Common Woolbrink once whispered a secret so awful in May’s ear that she didn’t speak to him for nearly three weeks, only returning after a succession of bouquets and promises that he would never tell such a lie again. Apparently he’d gone too far with one of his confabulations, confessing to have traveled beyond the fair stages of Europe. Dancing, he said, was good for more than mere entertainment, and if the right dancer moved backward in a certain way, he could open doors to another place where everything was backward. Smoke was sucked into chimneys. Men returned home before leaving for work. And food was spat onto plates. Everyone there got younger instead of older. When May herself talked to him there, for she existed in that world just as everyone had a double, her teeth were actually on the outside of her mouth. Kissing her, he said, was like kissing a bed of stones.

May began to watch Common for any sign that his habitual lying was an expression of some mental infirmity, but he never spoke of the backward place or anything like it again. He was courteous and jovial. The lies he told were sweet, not frightening, and when he kissed her, he acted as though he had no memory of their stony kisses in that other world. It was only as he lay on the steps of the Orpheum, red coat darkened with redder blood, that he spoke of it again. Our grandparents crowded around the pair, and the sky must have looked to Common like a dome supported by their curious faces, with May’s own hung closest, a beautiful child in mourning. At a safe distance, some of the stronger men held Roy Elkhart on the ground, and he howled for his hunting knife to be returned. People had to lean in close to hear Common say, “I left them open, May. Every single door is standing wide in there.”

May forced herself not to scream. This wasn’t the ending she’d pictured. This wasn’t the way to end. When she looked at blond David Miller on that dimly lit stage, some sixty years after Common was buried, she couldn’t muster such control. She understood the clock-springs of love were more fragile than a young girl could have ever known. “You’re younger by a few years,” she whispered to David Miller, “but that’s what happens there isn’t it? You told me so. People age backward. I didn’t believe you. I thought you were lying. But you’re him.”

David started to say he didn’t know what she was talking about, but it was already too late. May was pulling him close. “We’ll go through the door ourselves,” she said. “I can be young again too, away from this place. I won’t mind about your teeth. I promise I won’t.” And then she drew close to him, searching for some reassurance that he was who she wanted him to be—her beautiful liar without his red suit.

David Miller ran down the wooden staircase and burst through the black door. He would call his parents, and they would call the police, and all of them would call for Kitty until they’d lost their breath. They would question May, trying to understand the things she’d said that night, but the old woman would give them no straight answers, feigning confusion and turning up the volume on her record player. And as the days went by without any sign of Kitty, David Miller would come to believe that if he wanted his sister back, he’d have to take matters in hand.

When he finally pulled a piece of loose concrete from the steps outside the Orpheum and threw it at one of the upright crocodiles that flanked the entrance, only a few of us were there to see. He threw a second stone that shattered the glass poster case, and more of us came spilling from stores and houses to watch the boy. A few of us tried to stop him at first but only halfheartedly, knowing what had to be done. We no longer wanted to be the sort of thing that could not act. The kind of body that deserves a funeral every night.

It took our strongest backs to do the initial work, breaking down the Orpheum’s glass doors, ripping the ornaments from the marquee, but by the end, even the weakest among us were able to get some of the work done, smashing the windows of the ticket booth and causing pink tickets to spiral onto the ground, destroying the concession stand, scattering popcorn and bright candy. We broke the decorative mirrors, pulled down the plastic vines, and threw May Avalon’s record player against the pipe organ. But it was David Miller, T-shirt streaked and chest heaving, who actually found the old ticket seller, cowering on her knees in a row of empty seats. He pulled May to her feet and looked into her frightened face, covered with the same gray dust that churned in the air. “Now you tell me,” he said, voice breaking. “You tell me, you old witch, without any of your crazy talk, where my sister is. You know, don’t you? You’ve known all along.”

Before she could answer, one of us struck her in the shoulder with a metal pipe, and as she was falling, another drove a piece of molding against her temple. If we were giving a confession, perhaps we would say we did this to test the flesh of the Orpheum against the flesh of the woman. Or maybe we would tell the truth, that we’d always hated May Avalon for knowing things we didn’t. David watched her fall, then stood over her sprawled and unmoving body. He seemed to hesitate as she groped feebly with one hand to touch his shoe, not a dancing shoe at all, and finally with all his strength, David Miller kicked the old woman in the stomach. She didn’t make a sound, and we had to look away from the terrible expression on her face.

Our razing of the Orpheum made the news as far away as Chicago, and when they saw pictures of what we’d done, they thought the whole town had lost its mind. Mob rule, they called it. Psychologists were interviewed and said our actions could very well be the product of the modern nihilism fed by the movies themselves. No outsider could understand our motivations though, nor could they know that after we’d finished our job, when many of us had been hauled off to bleach-smelling cots in the nearby jail, we shared a dream.

In the dream, we saw Kitty Miller injured and dragging her body, hand over fist, down a country road outside of town. A flat moon hung in the sky, nothing but a stage prop, and the trees at the sides of the road were the sketches of an untrained artist. Kitty was no longer just a girl. Her pretty cheeks were made of brick and mortar, her eyes as white as screens. Even her once lush hair looked more like the old birds’ nests that sprouted from beneath the Orpheum’s marquee.

In the distance stood a walled city, hastily painted, and on the shining streets of that city were the missing—Lon Stellmacher and the girl who came on the bus and the young man who wanted to be in the movies. There were so many more whom we didn’t know, those who’d come before our time. And at the very head of the crowd was a blond boy dressed in a top hat and red tuxedo jacket, too tight around the shoulders. His face was a lamp, his eyebrows arched and white. He watched our girl approach and seemed to appraise us. We, who could no longer dress ourselves in the chilly air of our Orpheum, who could only watch as he gathered Kitty Miller in his arms. Common Woolbrink gave us a final warning glance before turning on his heel and pulling shut the tall wooden gate of the city, leaving us to darkness. Knowing that this, after all, was what we’d wanted.