Call It in the Air (Paperback)

Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavlic’s Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song.

Pavlic’s collection traces the life and death of his elder sister, Kate: a brilliant, talented, tormented woman who lived on her own terms to the very end. Kate’s shadow hovers like a penumbra over these pages that unfold a kaleidoscope of her world. A small-town apartment full of “paintings & burritos & pyramid-shaped empty bottles of Patron & an ad hoc anthology of vibrators.” A banged-up Jeep, loose syringes underfoot, rattles under Colorado skies. Near an ICU bed, Pavlic agonizes over the most difficult questions, while doctors “swish off to the tune of their thin-soled leather loafers.” And a diary, left behind, brims with revelations of vulnerability nearly as great as Pavlic’s own.

But Call It in the Air records more than a relationship between brother and sister, more than a moment of personal loss. “I sit while eleven bodies of mine fall all over the countless mysteries of who you are,” he writes, while “Somewhere along the way, heat blasting past us & out the open jeep, the mountain sky turned to black steel & swung open its empty mouth.” In moments like these, Pavlic recognizes something of his big sister everywhere.

Rived by loss and ravaged by grief, Call It in the Air mingles the voices of brother and sister, one falling and one forgiven, to offer an intimate elegy that meditates on love itself.  

Ca. 1972. The night’s a blue spruce in my room   Dawn in my bed comes on green & silver in my mouth   You come in various ways   You come in the middle of a dream to tell me about girls who eat their brothers   You tell me you have a friend no one knows about   She’s white as chalk   Veins slide across her bones like a tongue moves in moonlight   You tell me to picture it   Thin blue worms under my skin   She lives at the Ledge in the woods & helps women run away from the state prison

Ca. 1972. A summer night feels like it feels when I wake to the golden ends of your hair along the slope of my spine. A summer night feels like it buried my breath hot into the cool pillow. Your breath on the back of my arm. A summer night feels like it feels to the first hands in the room on my walking stick’s worth of a nude undercovers body. You sing  There’s no time to hold a spark. You say   Hurry up dreary deary you have to learn where to touch yourself before you blink & disappear in the dark

Salida, CO. The roof of your jeep must be up on the mountainside near the tree line in Tim’s garage. We’re not going back for it. The night before we go to the Angel, we drive up to Leadville and back looking for orange and blue thread you need for something you have to do immediately. A custom-made margarita in a stainless coffee mug in your hand: “I told him it needed more Grand Marnier.” I drove. Somewhere along the way, heat blasting past us & out the open jeep, the mountain sky turned to black steel & swung open its empty mouth. The line of your face pushed against the tongue of the night. The air tastes blue & plays our heads like cold flame. The dark line of your face pushes into bright black steel. A shut-eyed face hidden by a night wing. A serrated song with a split tongue of onyx feathers.

Ca. 1975. When you were fourteen I was eight. Somehow Mom and Dad learned where you were living. I remember hearing it: “Steamboat Springs, Colorado?! Get a map.” They called the police. They wanted you home. The police pin-pointed you. They picked you up and put you in jail. Dad came from a job somewhere, and you cursed him thru clenched teeth on the flight home. I remember, terrified of you, hiding upstairs while you hissed at our house as if it were prison. “You called the fucking cops on me?”

Rain in reverse. I remember one sentence from your return to us. Did I say I was stuck-to-the-wall terrified of you? You whispered low thru a smile like a straight razor on a strop, over and over at dinner: “You can’t keep me here if I want to leave.” I remember feeling like you’d etched the sentence in the air with fingernails full of flesh carved out of your arms. You were right. You were gone in a week. A month? All I remember is that one sentence of your hissing & evil teenage flesh hanging there before my eyes, the only living thing in the terrified room. The sound of flesh that’s declared itself uncaged. I can taste that sentence whenever I want. It’s under my tongue. It tastes like sweat off clean brass. Like adrenaline.