The sensation, when he allowed himself to be aware of it, was so quietly ecstatic that he could not bear the thought of losing it, perhaps for ever. With this worry in mind he bobbed upwards a little again, just to try the feel of it, the surprising and effortless movement of it. He bobbed, he floated. He tried a little swoop.
The swoop was terrific. With his arms spread out in front of him, his hair and dressing gown streaming out behind him, he dived down out of the sky, bellied along a body of air about two feet from the ground and swung back up again, catching himself at the top of the swing and holding. Just holding. He stayed there.
It was wonderful. And that, he realized, was the way of picking up the bag. He would swoop down and catch hold of it just at the point of the upswing. He would carry it on up with him. He might wobble a bit, but he was certain that he could hold it.
He tried one or two more practice swoops, and they got better and better. The air on his face, the bounce and woof of his body, all combined to make him feel an intoxication of the spirit that he hadn’t felt since, since well as far as he could work out, since he was born. He drifted away on the breeze and surveyed the countryside, which was, he discovered, pretty nasty. It had a wasted ravaged look. He decided not to look at it any more. He would just pick up the bag and then… he didn’t know what he was going to do after he had picked up the bag. He decided he would just pick up the bag and see where things went from there.
He judged himself against the wind, pushed up against it and turned around. He floated on its body. He didn’t realize, but his body was willoming at this point. He ducked down under the airstream, dipped and dived. The air threw itself past him, he thrilled through it. The ground wobbled uncertainly, straightened its ideas out and rose smoothly up to meet him, offering the bag, its cracked plastic handles up towards him.
Halfway down there was a sudden dangerous moment when he could no longer believe he was doing this, and therefore he very nearly wasn’t, but he recovered himself in time, skimmed over the ground, slipped an arm smoothly through the handles of the bag, and began to climb back up, couldn’t make it and all of a sudden collapsed, bruised, scratched and shaking in the stony ground. He staggered instantly to his feet and swayed hopelessly around, swinging the bag round him in agony of grief and disappointment.
Ten minutes later, drifting idly through a cloud, he got a large and extremely disreputable cocktail party in the small of the back.