Emperor of the Air by Ethan Canin Page A

I know I could be mistaken. I come home early that night, before dusk, and when darkness falls I move a chair by the window downstairs. I draw apart the outer curtain and raise the shade. Francine brings me a pot of tea. She turns out the light and pauses next to me, and as she does, her hand on the chair’s backbrace, I am so struck by the proximity of elements—of the night, of the teapot’s heat, of the sounds of water outside—that I consider speaking. I want to ask her what has become of us, what has made our breathed air so sorry now, and loveless. But the timing is wrong and in a moment she turns and climbs the stairs. I look out into the night. Later, I hear the closet shut, then our bed creak.
    There is nothing to see outside, nothing to hear. This I know. I let hours pass. Behind the window I imagine fish moving down to greet me: broomtail grouper, surfperch, sturgeon with their prehistoric rows of scutes. It is almost possible to see them. The night is full of shapes and bits of light. In it the moon rises, losing the colors of the horizon, so that by early morning it is high and pale. Frost has made a ring around it.
    A ringed moon above, and I am thinking back on things. What have I regretted in my life? Plenty of things, mistakes enough to fill the car showroom, then a good deal of the back lot. I’ve been a man of gains and losses. What gains? My marriage, certainly, though it has been no knee-buckling windfall but more like a split decision in the end, a stock risen a few points since bought. I’ve certainly enjoyed certain things about the world, too. These are things gone over and over again by the writers and probably enjoyed by everybody who ever lived. Most of them involve air. Early morning air, air after a rainstorm, air through a car window. Sometimes I think the cerebrum is wasted and all we really need is the lower brain, which I’ve been told is what makes the lungs breathe and the heart beat and what lets us smell pleasant things. What about the poetry? That’s another split decision, maybe going the other way if I really made a tally. It’s made me melancholy in old age, sad when if I’d stuck with motor homes and the national league standings I don’t think I would have been rooting around in regret and doubt at this point. Nothing wrong with sadness, but this is not the real thing—not the death of a child but the feelings of a college student reading
Don Quixote
on a warm afternoon before going out to the lake.
    Now, with Francine upstairs, I wait for a night prowler. He will not appear. This I know, but the window glass is ill-blown and makes moving shadows anyway, shapes that change in the wind’s rattle. I look out and despite myself am afraid.
    Before me, the night unrolls. Now the tree leaves turn yellow in moonshine. By two or three, Francine sleeps, but I get up anyway and change into my coat and hat. The books weigh against my chest. I don gloves, scarf, galoshes. Then I climb the stairs and go into our bedroom, where she is sleeping. On the far side of the bed I see her white hair and beneath the blankets the uneven heave of her chest. I watch the bedcovers rise. She is probably dreaming at this moment. Though we have shared this bed for most of a lifetime I cannot guess what her dreams are about. I step next to her and touch the sheets where they lie across her neck.
    “Wake up,” I whisper. I touch her cheek, and her eyes open. I know this though I cannot really see them, just the darkness of their sockets.
    “Is he there?”
    “No.”
    “Then what’s the matter?”
    “Nothing’s the matter,” I say. “But I’d like to go for a walk.”
    “You’ve been outside,” she says. “You saw him, didn’t you?”
    “I’ve been at the window.”
    “Did you see him?”
    “No. There’s no one there.”
    “Then why do you want to walk?” In a moment she is sitting aside the bed, her feet in slippers. “We don’t ever walk,” she says.
    I am warm in all my