The Crossing Point

by August Arrea

  “Your grandmother has a unique and strident way of harnessing one’s guilt. It was she who, shall we say, stressed somewhat vigorously that I make myself formally known to you,” said the man.

  “You know my grandmother?” asked Jacob somewhat disbelievingly, as the man looked nothing like the sort of person his grandmother would be acquainted with, except perhaps in passing, like a cashier at the local grocery store.

  “For some time now,” said the man when he reached the last wooden plank at the foot of the bleachers. “My name is Gotham.”

  “Gotham. As in Gotham City from Batman?” questioned Jacob, his slight grin revealing his bemusement at the name. And yet Jacob found the name oddly fitting for this inscrutable figure who, in just a short reveal under the lights, had an intense aura of mystery surrounding him beyond any fictional character found in some silly comic book.

  “It’s short for Gothamel,” said the man who, from the serious look on his face, found nothing amusing about his name. “As for the rest of the formalities, I’m afraid it won’t be quite as simple. I’ve found over time there is never an easy way to do this except to just come right out and say it so that we may get on with the business at hand.”

  “Say what exactly?” inquired Jacob, who once again found himself struggling to follow what the man was saying.

  “I’m an angel,” answered Gotham as simply as if revealing the zodiac sign under which he was born.

  ~~~

  Naturally, the man could have stripped off his long wool overcoat and revealed himself to be wearing a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform underneath and Jacob wouldn’t have been caught any more off guard.

  “Angel, you say. Is that a fact?” he said.

  Only this time he couldn’t keep his growing grin from surfacing. “That’s right,” said Gotham.

  “As in with wings?”

  “You might say they’ve been clipped some, but I still manage to sail the skies. I am what mankind has so often depicted in its literature and art as an angel of the fallen variety.”

  “Uh-huh…of course...a fallen angel,” said Jacob who was now snickering openly even as Gotham fixed a firm gaze on him from the other side of the gymnasium. “Look, I’ve really gotta go, but the next time you do a fly-by of heaven, be sure to give a shout out from me.”

  Gotham bowed his head and patiently endured the lingering chortle while clenching his jaw. It was, after all, par for the course. Then as Jacob turned on his heel to head to the locker room he was stopped dead in his tracks by the sight of the man now suddenly standing in his path. Nearly leaping out of his own skin, Jacob whipped his head around to look back toward the bleachers to the spot where the man had been standing just seconds earlier only to find it vacant and then back to the sight of the figure standing before him, and the color instantly drained from his face.

  “Wh–what the—? How did you do that?” There was a noticeable tremble in his voice, though not necessarily caused by fear.

  “The same as anyone with two working legs—by simply putting one foot in front of the other to get from one point to another, only in a manner far quicker than the human eye is able to observe,” explained the stranger in an off-handed manner.

  Even as he felt his own body urging him to retreat, Jacob remained fast where he stood as the towering figure of a man slowly stepped his way closer toward him like the dark shadow of a great mountain stretching itself across the landscape as the sun sinks into the horizon. Despite the bulky dark overcoat draped over the stranger’s body, Jacob could see the man possessed a powerful build underneath, the weight of which could be heard in the heavy footsteps of the loosely laced boots that carried the beat-up, scuffed scarring of never being retired to the back of a closet treading their way across the slick, polished wood of the gymnasium floor. When the man stopped in front of him, Jacob could only tilt back his head to better examine the face staring down at him. The man was quite tall—much taller than he appeared from across the gymnasium—but the imposing height was momentarily forgotten when Jacob looked into what seemed like two vats of swirling molten gold that formed two piercing and penetrating eyes bringing life to a stone, expressionless face which cracked momentarily with a slight smile while staring down into the perplexed look fixed in the boy’s own eyes.

  “Who am I, you’re asking yourself. And so I shall tell you again, as I did a few moments ago to your scoff, that indeed I am an angel, though you still will not believe me. That, as they say, will come in time,” Gotham began. “It’s what I’ve been tasked to tell you about your own self that you will have difficulty in accepting far more than the idea of an angel standing before you at this moment. Yet that, too, will come in time.”

  “Wh–what about me?” asked Jacob with noted trepidation.

  “That you are a Nephilim,” answered Gotham.

  The declaration made Jacob tilt his head slightly in confusion like that of dog trying to decipher words coming from human lips.

  “What the blazes is a Neph…Nephol—”

  At first Jacob wasn’t sure whether or not he’d just been insulted by some foreign word he found himself tripping over his tongue trying to pronounce.

  “Nephilim,” repeated Gotham. “A Nephilim is a halfling of sorts—in this case, someone who is born to a mortal woman, but fathered by an angel.”

  An intensely troubled look slowly darkened its way across Jacob’s face. Not that he believed any of the nonsense the man was concocting, but the elaborateness of crazy the man was conjuring had suddenly taken an unfunny turn. It was one thing for someone to proclaim themselves to be an angel. Mrs. Cossmeyer, the local eccentric who spent her days in the downtown park surrounded by a flock of loyal pigeons, believed herself to be Mother Nature. It was a harmless, not to mention amusingly entertaining detachment from reality. But this—this had a completely different feel to it. There was nothing amusing about being painted inside another person’s delusions. It made Jacob recall a spat of tragic, unfortunate stories that had made their way across the news in recent years about instances of normal-looking yet deranged persons opening fire on unsuspecting innocents at numerous school campuses, malls and movie theaters, and suddenly he found himself eyeing the man’s overcoat a little more suspiciously.

  “Look, uh, it was great meeting you and all, uh—” Jacob began awkwardly.

  “Gotham,” the man helped out quietly noting the boy’s nervousness.

  “Right…Gotham,” said Jacob. “But, uh, Mr. O’Brien’s going to be showing up any moment now to lock up so—”

  “Not for another few minutes,” said Gotham. “We’ve still got a little time left.”

  Another shiver made its way up the middle of Jacob’s back.

  “You’re not afraid of me, are you, Jacob?” asked Gotham.

  “Why should I be afraid of you? I mean…you’re an angel, right?” answered Jacob not too convincingly. “But like I told you earlier, I really have to get going.”

  He spun himself on the ball of his foot before even finishing the sentence, wanting nothing more at that moment than to slink out of the gymnasium as quickly as possible and let Mr. O’Brien, the school security guard, know about the looney tunes inside.

  “Your mother warned me you’d be a difficult one to convince regarding this revelation,” Gotham called after Jacob. “I see now she was quite right.”

  It was the only thing at the moment that would have been able to bring Jacob’s feet to a standstill.

  “My mother’s dead,” replied Jacob, glancing back at Gotham with an angry glare.

  “Yes, I know. I visited her the night she passed,” said Gotham. “She told me she had tried to explain to you that night when you went to sit with her in her room what I have now revealed to you, only she was far too weak and overcome by her illness to continue before you ushered her to the confines of her bed. Not that it would have mattered much had she found the strength, as you most likely would have brushed off what she had to say as the delusional raving
s of a severely sick woman.”

  Jacob struggled to choke down the emotion rising up inside himself as he listened to the man eerily describe the last moments he remembered spending with his mother that remained etched in his memory. Yet the tears brewing in his eyes were quickly vaporized by the heat of anger he felt surge through him.

  “Who the hell are you?” Jacob hissed at the man.

  “I’ve already told you twice. I doubt the third time will prove to be the charm,” answered Gotham.

  “Alright, fine, have it your way, Gotham the angel. Just...what do you want with me?” Jacob implored with a frustrated sigh.

  “It’s not my wants at play here, but your mother’s—and, to a larger extent, your grandmother’s. See me, if you will, only as a reluctant messenger sent to shed light on the truth they struggled to bring out of the shadows and reveal to you who and what you truly are,” said Gotham. “And yet I suspect what I’ve told you, incomprehensible as you may at this very moment find it to be, isn’t as surprising or shocking as you might lead one to believe.”

  Jacob wanted nothing more in the world for this man and this conversation to no longer exist, and still he couldn’t help but ask, albeit warily, “What do you mean?”

  “Discovering one is different—in your case, markedly—than other boys can be off-putting, to say the least,” said Gotham. “Subtle as they may have been at first, those differences—whether it was the speed with which you could run, or distance your legs could carry you in a single leap—were likely happily embraced in the beginning, in the same way a young athlete recognizes a shining ability that will one day carry him to Olympic greatness. But it wasn’t long before you began to take notice of other unnatural abilities beginning to blossom within yourself. Like suddenly being surrounded by the sounds of nature, and instead of the overlapping drone of birds and dogs and cats and other creatures that fills the ears of others, you hear individual voices speaking words you can decipher and understand as if spoken by any other person. Or the day in Mrs. Lopez’s Spanish class when your tongue got away from you and, to your surprise, began speaking the language you had been struggling to comprehend. Understandably, you found it easiest to explain away the unexplainable by convincing yourself it was all some kind of ruse: that the voices of animals you now made sense of like some modern-day Dr. Doolittle was concocted by an imagination having a bit of fun with you, and the overnight fluency of a foreign language nothing more than the fruits of labor that come from focusing harder on your studies finally kicking in. Yet all the while a crawling realization begins to congregate in the back of your mind that there is something innately different about you, something you can’t quite pin-point, and a slow-brewing fear sets in. It undoubtedly leads you to do your best to turn a blind eye to your abilities. For what young boy wants to reveal himself as anything more or less than what has been sketched out by others as normal and risk the loneliness of being branded an outcast?”

  Jacob stood listening without uttering one syllable of a rebuttal because, for the first time since he rose up out of the bleachers, the man was speaking sense Jacob not only understood, but couldn’t deny. And in a brief moment that rarely visited itself upon him, Jacob no longer felt unseen while mirrored in the golden gleam of Gotham’s gaze—he no longer felt like a Ghost. If anything, he was suddenly overcome by an uncomfortably vulnerable feeling; the same kind of feeling one gets when caught in the realm of a dream where the dreamer finds himself naked in a grocery store or standing before an auditorium filled with people with all eyes fixed on him.

  “But now other things have surfaced you can’t ignore, or bury, haven’t they?” continued Gotham. “Now your physical body is revealing your truth, and no matter how hard you might try you cannot turn a blind eye to it.”

  Jacob knew immediately to what Gotham was referring.

  “The doctor said it was a condition called winging scapula,” said Jacob, instinctively bringing his hand to nervously rub the space between his neck and shoulder.

  “The good doctor is only half correct,” said Gotham.

  He took a step toward the boy, and as he did Jacob automatically took an equal one back to ensure the distance between them.

  “Are you that close-minded as to readily accept the conclusion you are suffering a cruel betrayal by your body rather than consider, if be for a moment, the possibility you’ve been given a divine gift?” asked Gotham.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” answered Jacob. “You’re asking me to believe I’m half human and half angel.”

  He almost couldn’t get the words to flow from his lips.

  “The sooner you do, the easier it will be for you to embrace the next stage of your...awakening,” said Gotham.

  Next stage? What did he mean by that? Jacob wondered. Before he could ask, the sound of the door to the gym opening broke through the silence with a loud drawn-out squeal. Jacob turned to see Mr. O’Brien, a short, pear-shaped man squeezed into a gray security guard’s uniform, making his rounds at just about the time Gotham said he would.

  “You ready to call it a day, Jacob? I’m about to lock everything up,” the security guard announced.

  “Yeah...no problem. We were just getting ready to leave,” said Jacob, bringing a curious look to the security guard’s face.

  “We?” asked Mr. O’Brien, casting a puzzled glance to the four corners of the gym.

  Jacob turned to look where Gotham had stood just moments before and saw he was nowhere to be found, and strangely he found his sudden disappearance oddly fitting.

  “When you’re ready to speak again,” the mysterious man’s voice suddenly made itself heard inside Jacob’s head, “I’ll come to you.”

  Jacob’s eyes darted from one side of the gym to the other and all points in between and the noticeable emptiness sent a strange tremble through him.

  “Me,” he mumbled to himself under his breath as if to soothe the sudden fear that he might be losing a good portion of his functioning mind. “It’s just me.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Buried Secret

  “I

  ’m home!” Jacob’s announcement echoed through the house when he walked in through the front door. “Hello?”

  Silence.

  He headed upstairs. His long-limbed legs effortlessly took the stairs two at a time as he bounded his way toward his room. When he reached the top, he called out for his grandmother. There was no answer. The house was empty. Even markedly so. Then again, these days the house seemed to have acquired a permanent hollow, vacant feel to it. It was a bothersome, shiftless feeling Jacob did his best to try and ignore. This time he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—and he found himself allowing his gaze to drift toward the one area of the house he consciously forced himself to avert his eyes whenever he went upstairs where the emptiness seemed to emanate with the greatest strength: the door leading to his mother’s bedroom at the end of the darkened hallway straight ahead of him.

  Now, strangely, after kicking off his sneakers at the doorway of his own bedroom, his feet walked him to the end of that hallway he had consciously ignored. How long he stood staring at the closed door while struggling with the decision of whether to go inside or not he did not know. It had remained closed tight ever since the day his mother...you know. It had been almost as if a wall had been erected to end that part of the house from existing. It was an eerie feeling, one which nudged Jacob’s feet to turn direction and walk themselves back down the hall. Instead, he slowly took hold of the doorknob, turned it and the door swung open with a yawning squeal of his hinges.

  Jacob took a tentative step inside the room and immediately the familiar scent of his mother swirled about him to greet him. Lilacs and jasmine with a hint of gardenia. It was strong enough that if he closed his eyes he could almost imagine her still in the room, before the added stench of sickness took up residence with its unwelcome presence. For a minute or two, Jacob stood in the middle of the room and just breathed in the remnants of his mother an
d for the first few inhales it proved to be comforting, but only the first few. Then suddenly it wasn’t comforting any longer, and an overwhelming sense of missing her made him rush to the window which he hurriedly flung open. The breeze from outside came to his aide and helped to steady him as he breathed deeply the tangy wood fragrance coming off the nearby eucalyptus trees.

  His grandmother had left her mark on the room. Jacob could see it in every corner. It was spotless. Everything was in its place. Even the bed where his mother had been shackled like some prisoner was meticulously made with the pillows arranged just so. No one would ever guess death had paid a visit and made itself a guest there only a short time ago, and that, strangely enough, was an unsettling thing to Jacob. Moments before he had been gripped with an uncomfortable fear of confronting the ghosts which lurked behind the closed bedroom door only to discover an impeccable cleanliness had managed to give the appearance the room had never before been occupied. Except for the familiar strand of rosary beads resting atop a small Bible on the night table next to the bed and the few personal items carefully arranged on a nearby dresser, all signs that his mother had lived there had been scrubbed away. In many ways, it was as if she had never been there. For Jacob, that proved far more unsettling than any memory of her long-lived suffering.

  As he looked about, Jacob suddenly found himself thinking about the strange man with shimmering gold eyes who had approached him at school. He went to his mother’s dresser and with some hesitation began nosing through the drawers, careful not to mess up the neatly folded blouses inside. What he was looking for he didn’t know, yet he moved at a faster more determined pace with each drawer he searched. Drawer after drawer, however, failed to offer up whatever it was for which he was searching. When he had finished, he was quick to leave and closed the door behind returning the bedroom to the sealed tomb it had become without a body resting inside.