Sam, the Small Breeze

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red;
Pestilence-stricken multitudes...

Ode to the West Wind, Percy Byhsse Shelly

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            Sam, the Small Breeze

            Just because in one place the day is windless does not mean that it is not windy somewhere else. In fact, Sam the Small Breeze is eternal, he has never disappeared. You may have felt him on your cheek. The curtains softly bestirred by him might have been yours, you might have been the one that left open the window through which, at night, he came and he went. Sam the Small Breeze is a major contributor to the swaying of flowers, the rattle of bushes, the rustle of leaves, the billowing of shirts, a scarf’s red leap, the danced levitations of a plastic bag, the indescribable sweeps across rape fields, across bodies of water, across grasses, those dark movements. He has even been the white in the sea: foam, a crest, a white horse. He never dies, he just goes away for a while, and then comes back. He is a musician, he is always on the road, always moving, always travelling. He is an itinerant maker of music, a vocalist, all breath. He is an itinerant breath. You will have heard him. If you have seen the sea, then so has Sam: you have heard him in your ears, you have felt his music in your skin. His caresses caused your hairs to stand on end, piloerection it has been called. You have heard him in the woods. You looked above your head and nothing was there: but you knew you heard his voice, and you knew that you had felt his tickling chill, and you saw branches move, saw foliage flutter, the world makes visible his invisible being. Had he touched no-one, touched nothing, his wake would have remained witnessed.

            It’s a lonely life, though Sam is unable to recognise and be affected by the gnaw of loneliness in himself. Habit of memory is ever leading Sam the Small Breeze back to the sky, where he was born. He never sleeps: he doesn’t need to. He feels neither loneliness nor weariness. He feels nothing but an attitude, a pure impulse of movement, an unkillable, unstillable inclination towards flight. He has an ego, he requires affirmation. The sky is large, its hugeness houses many winds, and all of them, however scary or significant, have only the clouds to play with, cumuli to mould, break bits off of, push in any direction they choose. But the variety, the textures and the many voices of the earth exert a particular pull. Sam the Small Breeze has little influence, there is not much he can move, upset, dislodge. He can hardly keep a kite aloft, he can just about keep it afloat on a current of him, if he uses all the power in his back. But he hardly arouses comment of even the most passing and casual kind, he certainly cannot provoke a weather report on the news. He can cool a forehead wet with perspiration, and he can make ripples in the water, and he can shake a rose, make a book a little difficult to read- mischievously turn a page or two, he can lift a feather from the ground a few yards, even help a kestrel in flight for while- (the clever wings do most of the work, buoying the bird’s flat display at a surveying altitude over the earth).

            Once upon a time, Sam the Small Breeze felt adventurous. He felt a certain desire, a niggling wish, to venture a little way beyond his remit, experience a change of province. He knew the outdoors too well. Of the indoors, of houses, establishments, public buildings, he knew almost nothing. He had capered about the layout of the odd bedroom, or sometimes the odd kitchen, softly disturbed a sleeper’s hair, touched a plate of food with his coolness, stirred a sheet of paper. What Sam the Small Breeze really craved was enclosure, the sort of enclosure that human beings know, with all their walls, and fences, and street-blocks, and gates, and doors, and corridors. All week, he watched a particular street, sang, whistled, whooshed, windily went up and down its length of terraced houses. A wind can never be still, but if he verticalizes his motion, he can more or less stay on the same spot without going anywhere else. Up and around and down and up again Sam shimmied, rolled, tumbled, the birch in which he made his disturbances, incessantly hissing as forcefully as rain or a rasher of bacon. Sam’s freedom seemed to him pointless and banal, how gladly he would relinquish it. Sam acutely felt the need of a place to be, a containing vessel within which his ventilation would matter. A door opened, a green door, and a woman emerged. She was large, young, spectacled, and ginger-haired. With great intensity, Sam dived towards her, dived as he was so used to doing, every day, with eagerness, from the celestial to the mortal world. This time the distance was small, but, for his purposes, he had for only as long as that green front door was open. He rushed at the open door, sidled cooly through the woman’s legs (not lifting her skirt as some dirtier jets have been known to do), and found himself quite a way beyond the threshold of the house, among hanging coats, which swung. The woman noticed the brief breeze but thought nothing of it, and closed the door of her house, locking it from the outside, locking Sam within. Sam was inside. He blew, inside. No-one was home, none of the lights were on, and the sources of natural light were few and far between. The darkness of the interior was unexpectedly intense, Sam couldn’t deny. Sam had lived so constantly in the full flash of the sun that its deprivation was initially a handicap. Sam explored the house, ricochetting painlessly off jagged edges, from mantle-piece to the edge of a coffee table, up and down corridors, and he rode the stair-banisters in whatever direction he pleased.

            But Sam the Small Breeze did not appear as he used to appear, now that he was an indoor wind. He was not one of those quick, meaningless winter winds that get in under the doors of houses, particularly poverty-stricken ones, or intrude through cracks in the wall-panelling in unpleasant, needling jets. Sam danced in the woman’s house, in her respectable house. Before, he had been a formless, amorphous, meaningless flash of breath and sibilant music…almost synaptic, like a shot of sensation up a nerve.

When the woman returned she found a chilly imposter in her house, and she was able to identify Sam as such. He wasn’t merely a change in temperature, or a sound on the rooftops: he was an airy, swirling being. The woman looked on Sam the Small Breeze with love, with unbearable love, and invited him into her bed, not caring about the little mess he made, the things he left dislodged and upset in his wake. Sam crossed her supine body, was delighted when her hair rose and wavered not by accident, but because she desired closeness to him. With an upturned palm, she entered his blowy precincts and felt swirls of him bathe her hand. But he could do little more than make manual contact. He sat there in one place on her bed, revolving, blowing, tumbling like a convection current in air, rather than liquid. But he was heated from beneath, heated coldly from a source beneath. That he knew.

            The woman’s only child, a small, fat boy with an avid, red face, returned from school in the afternoon. He complained of a chill in the house, and some disarray: Sam the Small Breeze had dislodged one or two picture frames from the stair wall, scattered some letters, scattered also a bit of potpourri onto the floor. Sam attempted to play with the hair of the little fat son, as he had his mother’s, but the little boy screwed up his face and tears began to precipitate from his eyes like tiny rain. The woman’s husband eventually returned. He entered wearily, almost facelessly, stumbling as he closed the door behind him, hanging up his coat and not bothering to pair his shoes neatly with all the other shoes in the hallway. Sam went right up to the man and attempted to tickle him. He tried to amuse him by creeping up his trouserlegs and shirtsleeves. But the man was not amused.                                

            In their house, for years and years, Sam the Small Breeze has swirled and sagged and huffed and puffed and wilted and risen and whooshed and hovered and rushed and shushed and tickled and died- (or seemed to die). He is the air they breathe. He is the breath that breathes. He breathes the air they breathe. He stands in corners, or shimmers, elevated, over the dinner table. The human family with whom he shares a space meant for humans, not small breezes, is so used to his invasion that they hardly notice the chill he strikes into them should their paths cross. An electrician entering the house on a baking summer day is greeted all about his bare arms by Sam, by his breezy amorousness, his chilly advances: the electrician finds himself wishing he had a pullover, though the heat without is sweltering.

Because they do not well understand the composition of the winds, the spirits that glide there and are never really gone, some friends and acquaintances take Sam the Small Breeze to be something more sinister than what he is. Sam strikes fear into some people. He looks like a ray, a wavering, glimmering ray, a forcefield, a sonic boom’s airy saucer captured, stopped in time. Frankly, he looks like a ghost.

            He is distracting to the divorce lawyer, as the man and the women, whose names Sam has yet to learn, sign away their bond under the divorce lawyer’s supervision. Only the woman has a lawyer, on this occasion. The distribution of assets are agreed, child access is negotiated.

            “You know there is a small breeze standing in the corner of the room?” the lawyer says.

            The man and the woman don’t say anything.

            “Gives me chills,” the lawyer says. “You should be careful what you let in. Ventilation is one thing but…”

            Sam has an inkling that they are talking about him. He tries to ask them Hey, are you talking about me? and tries additionally to volunteer his name: My name is Sam. I am a small breeze. But it just comes out like radio interference, futile and unworded blowing.

            It’s a lonely life, being a small breeze. Such perpetual existence, made for eternality, never allowed to expire. Able to go anywhere, but hardly able to make a mark, or be noticed more than fleetingly. Those who felt on their cheek, or in their clothes, such a thing as Sam the Small Breeze, think him to be dead when they can’t feel him anymore, when the impression of coolness he left ceases to linger. But all he has done is gone back to the skies. Peripheral and unemphasised, having tried to matter, Sam the Small Breeze walks out the door into the sun. He kicks a leaf along the ground a few paces, lifts it into the air and bears it for a few yards, before dropping it back down. He carries cigarette smoke away from a smoker. He could stir the trouserleg of a hanging suicide. He could scatter the feathers of a dead pigeon in the road, begin parting the soft components of a crushed thing. He could ruffle the hair of a dead junkie in the woods. Carry the smell of the corpse, help somebody notice. Somebody must notice.