This New and Poisonous Air by Adam McOmber Page A

dean’s torch-lit fall garden—two small men in tailored jackets—and when he introduced himself, I actually laughed.
    “What’s the joke?” he asked, sharply.
    “Your surname,” I responded, lips red with punch. “You’re Helmer Garrik’s son.”
    “That’s right.”
    “My father pitches the name around our house and shoots at it like a clay pigeon.”
    “I hate Herr Garrik, too,” Amon said, hands folded behind his back, a picture of fastidious organization. “He’s a fraud.”
    “You hate your own father?”
    “Of course I do,” he said. “Don’t you hate yours? I thought that was the modern condition.”
    I paused, unsure if Amon was making a joke. “He angers me,” I said. “But he is still my father.”
    “Does he ask you terrible questions?”
    “Terrible? ”
    The light from the nearest torch played across the damp flagstones between us, drawing us closer as if we were boats on a burning lake. “Embarrassing things,” Amon continued. “Sexual fantasies, odd dreams. Just yesterday Herr Garrik asked how I felt about horses. This came out of nowhere during breakfast. I said they were fine though I had no particular interest in them. Then he asked me to describe a horse! As if I couldn’t.”
    I search for some correlation from my own experience. “My father once asked me to describe a type of bird, I suppose. I can’t remember which. One from America.”
    Amon’s breath smelled of alcohol and cinnamon from his spiced drink. “We could be fast friends, Roddy,” he said. “I’m sure of it. We walk a common thread.”

    For the remainder of the hour, we discussed our fathers’ theories, Amon spitting on Herr Garrik’s more mystical leanings while I described my father’s biological and chemical approach until our mothers came to gather us into waiting cars, not daring to speak or even look at one another. And after that night, Amon and I began to seek each other out, sensing, like animals, if the other was near. Amon’s father attributed such ability to an awareness of the Earth’s magnetic fields which were said to cover and connect every surface. Some individuals were more attuned to the magnetic fields and could therefore make use of them, pluck them like harp strings.
    My father wrote specifically of Amon and me only once, making no reference to Amon’s rising. He knew nothing of it at the time. No one did. He wrote: Neither of the boys has developed symptoms per se, though neurotic illness often cannot be sharply differentiated from health, and the boys are both intelligent enough to fashion a cover. I’ve heard Helmer Garrik say in one of the follies he calls lectures that inversion has the dynamic characteristics of a dream. The behavior of the invert corresponds to unconscious memory and motivation in the same way that the dream relates to its latent content. A dream of a black dog represents the dreamer’s will to power, and the invert’s desire for another man represents his inability to process a buried trauma. Here again, I find myself in opposition to Helmer Garrik, but for once, I am also second-guessing my ideas, perhaps because Roderick is involved.
    Helmer Garrik’s analysis seems unnecessarily artful—as if he’s making an oil painting instead of practicing a science. Black dogs? What use do I have for such poetry? If my son is experiencing amorous desire for his friend, it must be because they share a common trait, chemical or otherwise—they are matched. I have seen the way they lock step and have
heard a nearly audible note in the air when they catch one another’s glance. It might even be argued that they form a kind of symmetry when placed side by side. If some yet undiscovered biology is at work, who am I to raise the poetry of dreams against it?
     
    I find it strange that Amon and I could have even appeared symmetrical to an astute outsider such as my father. If anything, we ruptured symmetry. After the night in the burning garden we became almost