The Angel's Cut

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘You’re not making the best of yourself.’ Cole said.

  But Xas had stopped listening, for, in that moment, he’d remembered that, though he was a nobody, he did have means. He had the means to help Millie. He had money of a sort. All he had to do was to find a valley near a lake in the Californian Sierras, and the split apple rock into which he had dropped his only real earthly possession—a rope of perfectly matched black pearls.

  Fifty years before he had been caught in a forest fire. The blaze had jumped from one ridge to another, torn sails of flame separating from the wave of fire cresting hundreds of feet high. The flames were behind him, then before him—emptying the valley of air. His mule dropped to its knees and rolled onto its side, kicking. The fire was cacophonous, but still Xas could hear the rasping hitch the animal made as it tried to suck breath in a vacuum. And he heard a bright smash from the saddlebags, where he kept the photographs he’d taken on his trip across the Rockies. His mule was finished. His camera and the fifty glass plate photographs were too bulky to save. But he remembered his pearls, took them off, wrapped them in his shirt, and dropped the bundle into a deep crack in a boulder split like an apple. After that he walked on through the flame’s agonising but ineffectual heat, held upright in blinding, billowing transparency, almost afloat on the fire’s twisting updrafts. He emerged on a smoking hillside, naked but for his charred leather belt, and smeared with ash. He didn’t go back when the valley cooled. He didn’t try to retrieve his pearls, because he wasn’t ready to discover he’d lost them.

  The pearls had once belonged to Lucifer, who had worn them to demonstrate—in a way that his indestructible body could not—that he was above discomfort, above the fire, living in the shade and insulation of his book-filled fortress. All angels are indestructible, and if they are also proud they must keep something perishable close to them and declare: ‘I mean to keep this.’

  With this recollection came a feeling of ash coating his skin. Xas remembered, and felt his empty, superficial self drifting up like feathers of ash on a forest fire’s thermals.

  ‘You’re smiling again,’ Cole said, bemused. Then, ‘Can you do something for me?’ Xas heard the springs in the sofa creak as Cole moved. ‘Come here now,’ Cole said.

  Again Xas was taken in by everything: Cole’s thick oiled hair, the strength of his hands, and the flushed, furred lobe of his good ear.

  They were kissing, but something was wrong.

  ‘I don’t do this with people like you,’ Cole whispered. ‘So you have to do what I want.’

  Xas found himself in a horror of puzzlement. Somehow Cole didn’t smell or taste right. He had a smell like dry mouse droppings at the back of a cupboard.

  ‘Take your shirt off,’ Cole whispered. ‘Turn over,’ he said. ‘You can’t always keep your back against the bed.’

  Xas made a soft noise, somewhere between laughter and distress. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But I have lines I draw, just like you.’

  Cole paused. He asked, ‘Is there something you’re hiding? Something wrong with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Something freakish? Or something like Flora?’

  Xas saw an opportunity to distract the man. He said, ‘What exactly happened to Flora?’

  ‘She can tell you, if she wants. What happened to you?’

  Xas was silent.

  ‘Is it ugly?’

  Xas stirred and murmured, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t want to press you,’ Cole said. ‘And I don’t want to see. I don’t like ugly things. But you would tell me if it was something contagious?’ Cole must have had some fear pushing him to go on, for he added, confidingly, ‘I’ve been feeling off-colour lately.’

  Without thinking, Xas said, ‘I think you are sick.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘You smell different.’

  Xas had hoped to distract Cole, but was a little alarmed at how successful he was. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Cole said. ‘You didn’t tell me whether or not it was contagious.’

  Xas put his mouth against Cole’s good ear. ‘No,’ he said, then touched the lobe with his tongue. ‘It’s an injury, not a disease.’

  ‘Good,’ Cole said. His voice was tight. Then, ‘I’m not sick,’ he added.

  In the early hours of the morning, Cole was restless, and exhausted, and talkative still. He wanted to try out more ideas. But everything he said let Xas know that Cole thought he was angling for something—permanent employment, a salary. Xas listened, and ran his hands through the man’s thick, slick hair, while Cole kept trying to interview him.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Cole said. ‘Why don’t you try to impress me—without unbuttoning your shirt.’ He peered at Xas, his head reared back on the pillow. ‘Hasn’t that been your aim all along—to impress me?’

  When Xas didn’t respond Cole went on. ‘I think you are one of those people who can only answer questions, like the clever boys at my prep school. You can’t think what to say, given a broad charter.’ He stroked Xas’s face. ‘But you’re better than that, too, aren’t you? You have your beauty, and your facility—your way of turning out to be good at things.’

  ‘Con,’ Xas said, ‘what do you imagine I want? Do you think I do this,’ he kissed Cole, ‘in hopes of a position, or income?’ He stroked the man’s chest; felt both Cole’s heart and his own beating in the tips of his fingers. ‘I’m interested in your life, and what you’ll do with it.’

  Cole sat up abruptly, and curled his arms around his crooked knees. He said, ‘For now why don’t you go get us some more ice. I’m going to take another shower.’

  And Xas thought: ‘I’ve said what he wanted me to say.’

  Cole opened the door of the room for Xas as someone opens the door for a bee that has wandered indoors in the hope that it will find its way out again. And then, once Xas had put on his boots and laced them up, Cole had another idea. He decided to make an offer. Of money. ‘Before I wire my list of expenses to my business manager I’m of a mind to add a few thousand “miscellaneous”.’ He winked.

  Xas came and leaned in the doorframe opposite the man. It was January, crisp in the mornings, but only cold when it rained, which it did with modest infrequency. The sun was out. The bougainvillea had opened, and its colour warmed the air.

  Cole said, ‘If you had ten thousand dollars to invest, now, when businesses are closing down all over and almost everyone has retrenched their spending, where would you put it? That’s my question for you. And don’t tell me you’d give it to that Coloured girl.’

  ‘You want to see if I have vision, don’t you?’ Xas said. ‘Because that’s what you’re proud of in yourself.’

  ‘With just ten thousand you’d have to have a lot of vision. With most of the exciting industries it’s better to have real money and to spread the investment.’

  ‘Sound recording. Aviation. Movies,’ Xas said. ‘I know. I have your list even if I don’t have your vision—or any real money. But I can think of one safe business, somewhere I could put the whole ten thousand.’

  ‘Safe? Even now?’

  ‘In a growing city.’

  ‘Construction,’ Cole said, and shrugged. ‘But growth will slow for quite some time. And there’s oil exploration— overall a great business, but chancy.’

  ‘You can test me if you want to, Cole, but you’ll have to trust me, and be patient about the results.’

  ‘I’ll think about it. I’d better not make the ten thousand a whole sum or my manager will say, “This doesn’t look like a total of several miscellaneous items.” So we’ll say nine thousand and change.’ He inclined toward Xas and rubbed his hands together. He took a careful look out into the garden to check that no one could see, then kissed Xas again—beginning the kiss proprietary but finishing with the pressure of true possession. He broke off and breathed at Xas, ‘You’re my miscellaneous.’

  Flora’s paper road

  January, 1930

  On a dank, lat
e January evening, Xas was on his way back to Flora’s. It was after dark, and foggy when he got off the trolley at the stop along the Venice shore. He left the beach by an alley between a pool hall and a chop suey house, then passed the little lean-to where a man worked mending sewing machines, and another shack that had a butter churn standing by its door—no one ever seemed to be home there. He reached the start of the sandhills.

  The track from the shore to Flora’s back gate was fringed by orange poppies, their bells pinched closed in the damp air. In the dips by the path the tangles of bushes were reefs where fog clung like seaweed. When Xas passed a flat stretch of rushes and wet sod, he could hear a soft quacking conversation, but couldn’t see the ducks. He found the stile that took him over a fence, where the track went along for a while beside a brackish waterway. Xas crossed the water balancing on a sewer pipe. The pipe’s rusting iron was wrapped in tarred cloth, and sticky beneath his boot soles.

  On the other side the track continued along by a stand of low, matted live oak. When the trees came to an end, Xas was out in the open, surrounded by blind white mist, with no landmarks in view, only the track leading him on. Up and down it went, a course of cold sand. The fog had set its surface, but the sand was dry underneath and Xas’s footprints showed behind him as white splashes on the dark grey path.

  Xas didn’t hear the archangel coming, for his wings were silent, mist lubricating each feather. The archangel dropped down out of the air as stealthy as an owl. He knocked Xas over and pinned him on the ground.

  ‘Ha!’ he breathed, a satisfied predatory noise, then added, offhand, ‘I wasn’t actually looking for you.’

  ‘Then perhaps you don’t need to sit on me,’ Xas said.

  Lucifer extended one thin finger of a wing hand and scratched Xas’s neck. Xas felt the archangel’s nail tear his skin. He felt the bright, frightening pain of damage—something he’d not experienced for a very long time—not since he’d woken up in the Soldiers’ Gallery of Château Vully to find his wings had been cut off.

  Lucifer put his mouth by Xas’s ear and said, ‘He feels that,’ as solemnly, savagely happy as a tiger delaying his kill by making sport of his prey.

  Xas wasn’t sure whether Lucifer was talking to God about him, or to him about God.

  When—some twenty-five hundred years before—God and Lucifer had signed him, and made their treaty, they had agreed to split both the price and benefits of his freedom, which is to say that Lucifer got the benefits and God the price. ‘Xas can go freely,’ the treaty said. ‘Lucifer shall have his pleasures and God his pains.’ Xas had very little idea why they chose to tie themselves to him in that way, though perhaps it was to keep each other honest, for, if Lucifer had the pleasures of his freedom then Lucifer wouldn’t interfere with him, and if God shared his pains, then God would protect him. Xas had believed that was the idea—until the day he lost his wings. (The treaty had a third clause: Only when Xas is with Lucifer will Lucifer be with God. But Xas didn’t like to think about that.)

  The archangel abruptly rolled over onto his back and lifted Xas above him, holding the angel by throat, wrists and ankles. As Lucifer went over, Xas heard his wings hiss and clatter, his plaits and pearls sliding from his neck and shoulders. He looked down at the terrible scars on Lucifer’s chest, partly hidden by the gleaming ropes of his jewels and hair. Xas noticed that the archangel had a residue of salt in his ears, and salt on his bare arms. Xas knew, of course, that Lucifer had come from Hell to earth through the salt dome in Turkey, Hell’s only gate. Then Xas was immersed in the cloud of the archangel’s bodily perfume—a resinous scent of apple, ozone, and lightning—and he lost all the strength in his muscles. He found that he couldn’t take his eyes off the glassy points of the archangel’s canine teeth, just visible between his relaxed lips.

  There is nothing more appalling and paralysing in nature than an archangel. Archangels have no natural enemies. Xas knew that this archangel wasn’t the most dangerous, wasn’t the great champion of Heaven—but he was brilliant, and princely, and playful, and full of the malice of misery.

  Lucifer looked at Xas with distaste. He said, ‘What are you wearing?’ Then, ‘You smell,’ then, ‘What do you smell of?’ Thoughtful.

  ‘Cologne,’ Xas said. He’d been with Cole, and hadn’t washed. He smelled of Cole, of sweat, cologne, and the mousy smell of Cole’s infection.

  Lucifer said, ‘Listen,’ then was quiet as though they were both supposed to be listening to God.

  ‘No,’ Xas said, refusing again.

  ‘No,’ Lucifer mimicked, and moved the angel back and forth above him as fathers fly their babies. Xas had always liked the look of that. He knew that parents only did it to make their babies laugh and—instinctively—to rock their infants’ senses of space, motion and position into health and capability. But to him it had always looked as if those parents were saying to Heaven: ‘I hold this happiness between me and You,’ and, if they were, then that was instinct too, the instinct humans must have, despite all their ideas about a just and loving God, to preserve themselves from that God’s unloving love of perfection, His exacting beneficence.

  ‘Why would I be looking for you,’ Lucifer said, ‘when I have nothing to say to God?’ He repeated, in exactly the same tone, ‘I have nothing to say to You,’ this time addressing God. He pushed himself up off the ground using one set of wings. The sand billowed up around them. He landed on his feet and let go his multiple grip, keeping hold of Xas with only the hand on one top wing. He stretched his wing high over his head so that Xas dangled by one ankle.

  Xas’s jacket flopped over his head, and Lucifer shook him till coins dropped out of his pockets.

  Xas had had enough. He contracted his stomach muscles, bent his spine, whipped up and grabbed the hand clamped to his ankle. He closed his teeth on it. He bit down till he broke the downy skin, and the sinew in the archangel’s hand creaked, and the archangel’s blood spilled into his mouth. Xas sank his teeth into Lucifer—and learned something new.

  Archangels may have no natural enemies but, it turned out, Lucifer had a remarkable array of defences. There was no reason—no divine design evident in the fact that Xas’s spit on the permeable surfaces of human mucosa—men’s mouths, women’s mouths and vulvas—could make men stiff and responsive, and women wet and responsive. Why would God have made an angel like that? And why would God have made the blood of an archangel, who had no natural enemies, so toxic?

  Xas’s mouth began to burn, then his vision blurred and he became breathless. He opened his teeth and let go. The muscles of his jaw and neck stiffened, then locked in a spasm. Foam filled his mouth and nose and burst from them.

  Lucifer dropped him.

  Xas thrashed about on the ground. The half moons of his own eye sockets eclipsed his vision, then he saw red, and a roaring filled his head.

  *

  It was Millie who found him. She was coming home from the Villa Venice, making her way in the pre-dawn dark. She’d nearly reached Flora’s back gate when a noise made her stop. She couldn’t make any sense of the soft scuffles and thumps or the sound of breath bubbling through froth. Whatever it was that was making the strange noises lay in a hollow before the last rise in the track that branched off the main way and terminated at Flora’s gate. The hollow was shadowy and, Millie later said, all she could make out was motion, a frenzied thrashing that seemed to form a knot of clearer air in the mist there. Whatever it was, Millie knew she’d have to go past it in order to get to the house.

  She edged down the hill, shading her eyes from the streaks of light shining through the gaps between the plank palings of the fence. (Flora, knowing that both Millie and Xas came the back way, had left the light on in the kitchen.) A clot of kicked-up sand hit her leg and she broke into a run, jumped over the place and scrambled up the slope. At the fence she stopped and looked back. In the lines of light shining between the palings she saw that was it Xas. It was at that moment Millie heard the sound of one of her own
records, Duke Ellington’s ‘Black Beauty’. Flora was at home. Millie hauled open the gate and ran to the house.

  Flora brought a blanket and they threw it over Xas and pinned his flailing limbs by lying on him. ‘No, let me do it,’ said Millie, who was worried about Flora’s scars.

  ‘I’m down here now. Did you know he had fits, Millie?’

  Millie shook her head.

  Flora, who was close to Xas’s face, saw that the foam streaming from his nose and mouth was tinged pink—but a little less so than the smears on his hair or the puddle of foam around his head. She hoped that the blood was only from a bitten tongue, and that the bleeding was easing. The foam gave off a fiery resinous perfume. ‘Has he poisoned himself?’ Flora said.

  Millie looked about for a bottle or a pill box. ‘Maybe he’s snake-bit,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t help you carry him,’ said Flora. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Once he’s quieter we can roll him onto the blanket and drag him in,’ said Millie.

  ‘Jesus—what is that?’ said Flora. The resinous smell alone made her heart pound and her mouth fill with metallic saliva. It wasn’t unpleasant, but somehow terribly alarming.

  There were pauses now between Xas’s spasms. Millie let go one of his hands to retrieve a dollar note that was sticking out from a flattened spray of lupin. ‘There’s money all over the place,’ she said.

  Flora touched Xas’s face, felt the wet foam, then snatched back her hand and wiped it on her shirt. Her fingers throbbed as though she had brushed against the ruffled stingers trailing below the sail of a Portuguese Man-of-War. She told herself that the sensation must be imaginary, but her fingers continued to smart.

  Millie got off Xas and helped Flora up. ‘He’s still breathing,’ she said, and Flora supposed that her friend had been thinking the same thing she had, that Xas might succumb completely to whatever this was. Millie continued, ‘My cousin was bitten by a rattler. But it wasn’t like this.’ She caught up the blanket and spread it beside Xas’s trembling form. ‘Though I suppose this might be the beginning of the paralysis,’ she said, uncertain.