HE DESIRE to be “taken away from all this,” to be lifted up and out of the life one currently found oneself leading and transported to some other, a desire that was actually a set of more specific desires arising from the particular set of disappointments that fate had chosen from the myriad disappointments offered to the young, became a general yearning of Babbingtonians of my generation, a yearning encapsulated in one handy package in our desire to be blown up, as in, “Aw, man, I am so bored in this town.  Nothing ever happens here.  I just wish somebody would come along and blow me up, you know what I mean?”
    Yes.  I knew.  We all knew.  Implicit in that desire was the understanding that the life we were leading was not the life we would have chosen to lead, the belief that fate, the ill wind that had blown our parents to this dull burg, seeking shelter, perhaps, from a sudden storm, had moored us in this limp life, this empty bladder of a town.  It was a cri de coeur that we heard often, and I admit that my own heart cried it sometimes, begging fate to send me a wind from another direction, a plea familiar to every sailor.
    (I hear in this cry an anticipation of the use of blow for cocaine, the use of cocaine as a chemical means of transportation from somewhere boring to somewhere else, and I see that some of my little pals were already, in the realm of desire if not in actuality, on the road from inhaling to snorting.)
    We found Babbington boring.  I say “we,” I include myself in the group, because for a while I was in the group; I found Babbington boring, or claimed to find Babbington boring.  Looking back, I think that I never actually did find the town boring.  I was faking my boredom, showing that I could pronounce the shibboleths of my tribe, the disaffected youth of suburbia.  Albertine is fond of saying that people who are bored are boring, and I’m sure we were, I was, but it was the fashion to find Babbington boring; in fact, it was the fashion to find life itself—the local, quotidian life as lived by boys and girls in Babbington with little opportunity to go anywhere else—boring, and to want to be taken away from it.  We were living in a town that was in the process of losing its identity as a town and becoming just a patch of a pale, monochromatic wash on the map of the country’s socioeconomic bands: the suburbs.  We were teaching one another to believe that anywhere but here would be better, would have a more interesting culture, a more vital life for the soul (the yearning gas bag within us).  How lazy we were!  We didn’t want to leave this unsatisfactory place or to run away from it; we didn’t want to have to get ourselves up and go; we didn’t want “get up and go” to enter the picture at all.  We wanted to be taken away.  We wanted an agent who would not only pick the destination (that somewhere that was anywhere but here) but also arrange the journey and get the tickets, and then, with those welcome words, “let me take you away from all this,” stick a tube sharpened at one end into a certain part of us and blow into us something transporting.
    What great admiration and deep affection we felt for the people who could or might blow us up, the pumps, the gas tanks, the inflators, the dispensers of lifting gas.  The highest praise for such a one was to say, “Man, you are mad.”  By mad, a reference to the ultimate inflator, the Madman of Seville, we meant “having the capacity for doing such a surpassingly good job of inflation as to be capable even of inflating a dog, giving it a couple of pats and sending it on a dizzying flight to somewhere else.”
    And what deep affection and desire we felt for that transporting something that the pumps filled us with, whatever it might be, however it might be administered, anything that, beyond simply inflating us, gave us lift and buoyancy and allowed us to make the trip from here to somewhere else, anywhere, nowhere.  We sometimes called that magical stuff gas, which could be further specified as helium (an inert gas, suggesting a detachment in one’s elation, a noble aloofness in one’s elevation) or hydrogen (the heavy-lifting gas of dirigibles, capable of carrying one very far away, but dangerous, explosive), and sometimes hot air, a term that carried with it the most exalted compliment to the inflator, because hot air was just air, common and unremarkable, transformed by the arts of the inflator, someone who was hot, into a lifting agent, a means of transportation, like those sizzlin’ hot Montgolfier brothers, Joseph Michel  and Jacques Étienne, who in September of 1783, before the eyes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, lofted a duck, a rooster, and a sheep into the skies above Paris, suspended in a basket below a balloon full of nothing but hot air.
    There were already among us a few adepts who managed to achieve a kind of transcendental state of inflation.  Those who had the ability seemed to be able to get blown up by even the most mundane experience, to find the gas in the commonest things.  We called these lucky ones balloonists.   They did not blow themselves up in the calculating way that suckers or inflationalists did, but in an ingenuous way that we called just breathing.  There were few balloonists, but there were many aspirants to the balloonist state.  Balloonists had a certain way about them, a blissful knowingness that came from having said yes to everything, to life in general, even to boring Babbington; having found the hot air that was right in their own back yard, they had no need to travel.  I wanted to be a balloonist when I grew up, but also a cynic, if such a synthesis could be achieved.  

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Copyright © 2001 by Eric Kraft

Inflating a Dog is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. 

Picador USA will publish Inflating a Dog in the summer of 2002.

For information about publication rights outside the U. S. A., audio rights, serial rights, screen rights, and so on, e-mail Kraft’s indefatigable agent, Alec “Nick” Rafter.

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.