Icarus

by Hugo Carnavale

"Hi. I'm Icarus. I'm falling." He said this to me, his voice high and half breathless, in the way young people do when they are trying to overcome their nervousness about meeting someone new.

One arm was extended straight out in front of him, his hand presented for shaking. The other was held stiffly at his side. White feathers snapped up past him, spinning their orbits around him and up, a curtain of moving feathers through which I saw his sad, hopeful face. I remember those eyes filled with the purity that children have before they learn of teasing and insults, and bullies and enemies. There was some fear, some sad fear, but it was a fear of nothing in particular; of only doing something new. Wax swept up his skin like upside down tears.

Down.

He was gone. Gone bellow me, leaving a helix of feathers whirling a pillar towards the sea and ground.

I saw him again later.

It was at a house party at college. People milled around in their groups of friends, drinking and laughing because that's we did in those days. I was with some friends. Like everyone else we didn't mingle outside the people we knew and we drank "Hi, I'm Icarus. I'm falling."

He said this out of nowhere. He came out of nowhere. His hand was held out in a manner clearly displaying that he didn't care whether any of us took it or not. To enunciate this apathy he downed his beer; he didn't stop drinking, not even for social graces. That must have been his idea of displaying cool. I didn't take his hand because I didn't feel like encouraging this silly boy.

His skin was tanned. It was stretched across his lean muscles so we could see his strength bunch and stretch beneath his bronze. Wet feathers were stuck in his hair and on his limbs and torso. Dried wax dripped across that tight brown skin, defying gravity. It looked like it could either have been melted there from the sun or from some overexuberant lover.

I was interested in him. Because I remembered the child. I saw it somewhere in him. I saw its vague shape wrestling inside the ocean it had been confined to. My friends teased me for taking such an interest in a well muscled, half naked, winged boy at a party but I let them think what they wanted.

We did date for a while. But it was all the same as that introduction at the party. He put on his pretensions and his acts. I never got closer to him. He just rolled his eyes and downed his beer.

I saw him again during the war. He was an officer leaning over a table pointing at a map. I stood, behind him under the tent pitched in a crater, and waited. I listened to his strong, confident, powerful voice say, "We need the names," he nodded to his Lieutenant as he straightened and began to turn to me. "And dates, hi, I'm Icarus. I'm falling." His hand was already held out to me before he finished speaking. I could see in the way he held his arm that there was no meaning to this gesture for him. It was something someone did during introductions. It was part of a script to a play which he knew he was in. His voice had been breathless, but confidently breathless; just like a worker who puts down his hammer to speak.

He wore a smart officer's uniform and his hair was neatly cut. The only skin I could see was on his face and hands. It was weathered and I saw the tightness of where the sun had burnt deep. There were patches of skin unburnt, left healthy, where the wax had once been. The splotch and drip shapes of soft, light skin, surrounded by redness.

I shook his hand. As I did, I looked for the little boy I once met. All I saw was his skeleton, buried within the flesh of this man.

(inspired while listening to Regina Spektor's song Lacrimosa)