Hover

The Hover Stories

by Paul Mitchum

One

He's 7 or 8, that kid. He has a game he likes to play, called hovering. It's a game you can almost play alone.

What you do is- you go somewhere where you're alone, but you can watch people. Then you sit and be baffled by your situation, and how you won't ever fit in. You hover there. He's still too young to understand it, so he hovers.

He's hovering. He skipped school, but instead of doing what other kids would do if they skipped school, he hovers on the banks of the creek that runs behind the school's property line. He's peeking in the windows of his class. He's trying not to be seen, not because he's scared of the consequences, but because it's a fun game. It makes him feel like a hero in a spy movie.

Why would he skip school only to watch school happen from the outside?

It's raining. He's wearing his yellow rain slicker, and he's got a red backpack that has all his homework, the homework he'd be turning in right now if he were in class, a few books, a packed lunch which was eaten shortly after the decision was made to skip. Why is a kid, skipping school, hunkering behind a grassy knoll trying not to be seen, peering in at his classmates, in the rain?

He's hovering. He knows he can become invisible; it's happened before. No one can see him, such is his loneliness. He doesn't want to be seen, either, because that would ruin the fun.

His mom thinks he's relatively happy. She says he's having some rough times, what with the two hospitalizations this year and the sexual predator in that very same school playground where he now lurks, trying to remain unseen. But she wants him to be happy, because if he weren't, she'd be a bad mom.

Across the creek, there's a shopping center. As they say, a 'strip mall.' He likes to go there. He can go into the drug store and be fascinated by all the products, the array of products, the maze of displayed products. He has a disorder that makes it so he can't learn how to 'do' culture, so he latches on to the easily-digestible culture of advertising and merchandise. Status objects are easier markers than real social navigation. The people on packages always look so content and happy, having purchased their way through the social hierarchy.

He doesn't understand any of that. He just likes to see the products in their packaging. That's how he sees it. He's 7 or 8; he doesn't understand the irony of it. Yet.

He's gone from the schoolyard to the drugstore. He likes the orderedness of the store layout. Even rows, recessed fluorescent lighting, magazines always in one place, toys always in another. Candy bars. Weird hygiene products. 'As Seen On TV.'

He's caught. A clerk at the drugstore was bright enough to realize that a 7 or 8 year old kid shouldn't be there alone. The school is alerted. The boy is carted off to school where he spends fifteen minutes in class before the school day is over.

Two

He's 11 or 12, that kid. He has perfected the art of hovering. He's in junior high school, and hates it, predictably.

When he dreams, he dreams that he can levitate. Most people he talks to about it say, "Yeah, I have flying dreams, too," which underscores his alienation. He's not flying in these dreams, he's levitating. He never has flying dreams. He has to concentrate in his dreams, in order to sort of bounce, like he was walking on the moon. Even in bouncing, there are obstacles; power lines, tree branches, low-flying airplanes, birds.

In these dreams, his neighborhood is sometimes a post-apocalyptic ruin. Like Ronald Reagan finally pressed the button, and he's the only one left. He desperately bounces around, trying to get a new perspective, brought back to the ground through the gravity of his own inability to fly.

At this point in his life, he has two modes of existence: Pleasing others at his own expense, and getting picked on and beaten up by schoolmates. So while he's perfected the art of hovering, it's not terribly effective.

He doesn't attend the school where he skipped class a few years back, since he graduated up to junior high. But he revisits that school, because it's near where he lives. His new perfected form of hovering is to climb on the roof of the building after hours and pretend to be Spiderman. He knows he can't swing by a web or jump off and land safely, but the physics of the situation have never interrupted his fantasies before, so they don't do so now.

He's on the roof of the school. There's an easy way to get up there that involves a little upper body strength; it's relatively safe, too. The way down is safer, it's just not as easy a way up. He's in no real danger, but he knows that no one else would ever, ever see it that way.

He's looking out across the neighborhood, an upper-middle-class neighborhood devoid of any external life. To look at it, it might as well be empty of people. They're all indoors, watching TV or something. Or they're in cars, driving on the arterial that runs by the school. He could be on the roof of the school doing a jig and no one would notice, since he's not a traffic hazard.

Being up there teaches him that lesson. Being strange has its advantages, and the apathy of others is one of them. If you just put a tiny bit of effort into not being overtly offensive, you'll have no problem. Just don't stand in the street when you're being a freak.

Once, he climbed down the front of the building, using the letters on the wall that spell out the name of the school as hand-holds. He expected a crowd of people and a SWAT team to surround him when he got to the bottom; Spiderman UNMASKED! But no one noticed. His parents never found out. They never found out about any of it.

Later, though, he would learn how to stand in the street and be a freak.

Three

He's 15 or 16 that kid. No one knows what to do with him, least of all himself.

He left high school because the pressure was too great. He hates his parents because they represent his lack of independence. He's too ashamed of himself to have close friends.

At night, he goes for long walks alone through the same suburbia he saw from the roof of the elementary school so long ago. He wanders anonymous through the schoolyards, down the well-lit quiet streets, across the highway, through the tiny patch of forest that hasn't been developed yet.

There's a park he likes to go to. It's not much besides a big rectangular pseudo-meadow, its precise geometry determined by how many homes weren't developed on the land. It's ringed by the homes lucky enough to have been built. There's a pair of soccer fields, a nonsensically winding paved footpath (the sort of design that looks good on an architect's blueprint but has no place in reality), a playground area, nonsensically planted trees (to go along with the footpath), a tennis/basketball court. Every aspect of this park is designed with a purpose in mind; there is no wilderness here.

In the northwest corner of this park, there's a break in a chain-link fence which allows a pedestrian access to the satellite parking lot behind a shopping mall. And his favorite thing to do when he goes out in the night for a walk is to wander around the empty parking garages of the mall.

The mall is the most unsuccessful mall in the history of the city in which he lives. No one goes there to shop, even at Christmas time. It's inconvenient, impersonal, ugly. He thinks of this mall as his own. He watched it being built on the very ground of another mall he would explore in this very same way when he was younger. One must doubt the wisdom of whoever built the least-successful mall ever on the very ground where another unsuccessful mall once stood.

But he loves parking garages that are empty. They're husks; places designed to store the shells of hermit crabs when they do their shopping. Purely utilitarian. There is no beauty in a parking garage. There's cold cement, a coat of paint made to last, an arbitrary numbering system for lost patrons. Glaring lights, empty stairwells.

In later years, he will come to appreciate the poetry of the shopping mall and the parking garage, but for now, in their empty state they remind him of post-apocalyptic movies he's seen. He imagines himself leading his people to the best parking garage after the bombs drop, where they can defend themselves against mutants and power-crazy militants. A strange violent conflict in a strangely silent world.

He never acts out any of these fantasies; they all happen in his head. He's just walking quietly through a parking garage for no apparent reason. The security guards don't care about him. He thinks that maybe they recognize him and give him room, but they probably aren't even aware of his presence. He's learned how to hover, how to avoid detection by standing more still than people typically do. He's transparent by simply being nondescript. He's a ninja of the obvious.

He climbs the empty stairwell. Steps echo. The tallest of the two garages is four stories. At the top, the metal door creaks, a satisfactory echo down the stairs. He's careful to make sure the door doesn't close all the way, or else he'll have to walk down the ramps.

He's on the roof of the garage. The mall to one side, the windy rumble sound of the freeway to the other. The trees are tiny, the houses, the streetlamps, the security guard's car, the movie theater nearby, the highway. Small and manageable. He stays there for an hour, just looking.

He's alone, because it's better that way.

Four

He's 31 or 32 that kid.

He lives next to a big city park on top of a hill. He goes there with his friends in the middle of the night. It's a really large park with a cliff that falls down into a huge salt-water inlet. From on that cliff, you can see the mountains to the west, and at night, the halo of light over the town on the other side of the inlet. The top of the cliff is sandy; it's like a dune. In fact, it's quickly eroding into the water below, as erosion rates go.

He and his friends are in between wakefulness and sleep. They're stoned, of course, and they're looking at the stars. Tonight is meteor night. On their blankets in the sand. In the stars and drifting in and out of consciousness.

He thinks, "This is a dream."

Sitting up to look at the city halo across the water. Standing to remember that he has legs and mobility. This is the first time the world has been one of his friends, supporting him as it does.

Moving away from his comatose companions towards the edge of the cliff. Sitting on a log. The log is meant to keep people from causing more erosion at the edge of the cliff. Sitting.

And feeling it all going through him. It moves from the stars to the ground through him, and then back up and out again. It's a constant motion. This place, he thinks, this place and those people, and this moment. Feet feel indistinct from the soil they touch. Mind indistinct from stars and water and mountains dimly visible far off. It must be a dream. Motion that ends with an owl sitting in a tree, just inside the boundary of his wakeful mind. Meteors thoughts falling beauty tree owl.

Remembering: One time, a friend told him about taking peyote and seeing the life force in his urine as he peed onto the ground. He said his urine looked like that glowing green liquid they use in movies to signify toxic waste. He laughed about it. Was it something always there that the peyote let him see, or was the peyote causing him to see something nonexistent?

Now: The universe was finally his friend, and might continue to be, even the next day. And he might even see it.