‘I’ll check it in a mirror later.’
The archangel volunteered a description anyway. He spoke with relish. ‘It looks like pimpled chicken skin,’ he said, ‘with big, bloody pores.’ Then, ‘You have no business caring for a human child,’ he said.
‘Who else…?’ Xas began, but Lucifer set a palm flat against his greasy skin, pressing so that the breath was forced out of his lungs.
‘Don’t answer,’ the archangel said. Then, ‘I should just carry you to Antarctica and throw you into that crater lake. Heaven is where you belong.’
Xas heaved in a breath and said, ‘You wouldn’t have bothered to spend the past several hours pulling feathers if you intended to repatriate me forcibly to Heaven.’ Then, ‘Have you got them all?’
‘I have.’ Lucifer raised his hand and Xas rolled off the silky ramp of wings. His back burned and smarted. He sat on his heels facing Lucifer.
The archangel folded his bloodied hands on his bloodstained bottom wings.
One candle went out, snuffed by the sand. But there was light in the sky now. The sun was just below the rim of the mountains.
Xas said, ‘I do know I shouldn’t be looking after a child. I know that I’m not a good parent. I’m vigilant, but I haven’t any instinct for it.’
And then Xas told his brother about the woman on Venice Beach.
He and Alison often went to the beach. One morning in July of that year, he said, they were there, on a weekday, with only the sparse weekday crowds. He’d taken Alison in to the low surf for a paddle, holding her hand. Then they went back up the beach and he read while she pottered about with her spade and bucket. He peeled a mandarin for her, tugged at the frill of her sun bonnet to get her attention, and fed her the fruit segment by segment, she smacking her lips to show him when she wanted more. She was distracted by a dog barking and chasing a stick, then sneezing as it breathed in seawater between barks. She kept twisting back to tap his arm and point to make him look too.
A woman came and stood over them. Xas recognised her. She was often at the beach, lived in an adjacent house. She was a hardy woman in late middle age, with short grey curls and an intelligent face. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘This will probably seem prying and impertinent but—you’re not deaf, are you? Either of you?’
‘No,’ Xas said.
‘I had thought you were. Or she was.’
‘Why?’
Alison got up and came to sit on his lap.
The woman didn’t answer his question, only went on, ‘Then I saw her turn around when that dog started barking.’
‘Yes?’ said Xas again.
Alison frowned and put her chubby toddler’s hand across his mouth. He removed the hand to ask, ‘Why would you think she was deaf?’
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. She may have been blushing beneath her deep mahogany tan.
‘I’m not offended. Only puzzled,’ Xas said. He moved his head to avoid his daughter’s sandy fingers.
The woman nodded at him. ‘See,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t like you talking. Do you live alone? Does she never hear you talking? Do you never talk to her?’
Xas was astonished. The woman was right. He had not been out of Alison’s presence—except when she was asleep—since Flora’s funeral. He was hardly ever more than an arm’s length from her. When he wanted her attention he’d touch her—and he’d always known what she wanted. When as a baby she’d cooed and gurgled and made word noises he had never hung over her mimicking the sounds she’d made. He’d never talked to her, narrating what he was doing, as he’d heard mothers do—as Flora had done when Alison was tiny, saying things like, ‘I’m just going to change this diaper,’ or, ‘In a minute, baby,’ or, ‘Yummy, mmmm,’ when spooning mashed banana into her little mouth. He’d done none of that. He’d been silent.
‘How old is she?’ the woman asked.
‘Two-and-a-half.’
‘Do you suppose she doesn’t have any thoughts to share with you? And have you none you’d like to share with her?’
‘None that are useful,’ Xas said. ‘I mean my thoughts, not hers.’
The woman looked impatient. ‘If you don’t talk to her she won’t learn to talk. Just imagine her first day at school—the poor girl standing like a ghost at the edge of the playground. Besides, I can’t see how you manage to anticipate what she wants.’
‘I’m with her all the time.’
‘But she’s not an animal, for heaven’s sake!’
‘I know. I’m just not cut out for this.’
‘Well, if you think it isn’t your place to tell her that that is a mandarin and this is a beach—’
‘Yes, but—’ he began, and Alison made a determined effort to pinch his lips closed.
‘See,’ said the woman. ‘Now she thinks you’re not quite yourself. Are you always silent? Are you always alone?’
Xas fished another mandarin out of the paper bag and began to peel it. He looked at his daughter and said, ‘Here, Alison, do you want some?’
She climbed off his lap and stood before him, mouth open.
‘That’s better,’ said the woman. ‘You keep that up.’
Xas said, ‘If we chance to be here again would you please come over and talk to us?’
‘If you like.’
Xas nodded.
The woman raised a warning finger.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’d like that.’
‘So,’ said Xas. ‘I’m not the best father. But I am her father.’ He didn’t want to say anything further. It should be obvious to his brother why he had to stay. He did add, ‘It no longer matters to me that God didn’t make the world—because He has the raising of it.’
‘I see,’ said Lucifer. He got up, and the last two guttering candles went out. He stood for a moment, utterly still, with his head bowed. Finally he said, ‘That woman—your friend Flora—gave you a clock to watch. The child is a clock. Angels are good at keeping vigils, so I guess you’ll watch that clock till it finally winds down.’
Xas caught the sound of a querulous calling in the house, the bang of the swing door to the kitchen, the slap of small feet on the linoleum, padded heels and toes, the childish bounty of fat not yet pressed away between her slight weight and the surface of the world. He quickly gathered up the main mass of feathers in the bloodied blanket. He grabbed his shirt and pulled it on. When he glanced behind him he saw that Lucifer had gone.
Alison stepped onto the back lawn. She pressed her toy bunny to her face. Bunny was a lop-eared velvet rabbit whose straw stuffing sprouted like hair under the arm Alison always hauled him around by.
Xas dropped into a crouch and stretched out his arms. Alison ran across the lawn—and Xas saw her bare foot fall right beside the day’s first browsing bee. There was danger everywhere, but she wasn’t aware of any. She ran into his arms, giggling, still hot from sleep. Xas straightened and raised his daughter up into the air, over his head. She shrieked with happiness. Xas spun, flying her about, holding her up between himself and Heaven.
Epilogue
Route 66, the Mojave desert
1975
Conrad Crow hated flashbacks. He preferred to get at a character’s back story this way: he’d introduce a guy into a group, some guy they’d all heard a story about, the kind of story that makes people look at a man with mistrust. We, the audience, watch the way the group treat the man. We hear them talking about what he’s supposed to have done. We observe what we think is his unrepentant defensiveness. And we have to work it out. We have to judge for ourselves. We’re not shown what happened in the past. We don’t get a flashback.
I haven’t offered any. I’ve told the story in its proper order, and, were I able to, I would even have told it without me in it.
I made a call to Xas’s message service asking him to phone me on a certain day at a certain time. I gave him a number.
At the appointed time—2.30 a.m.—I was waiting by a phone in the forecourt of an all-night gas station on Route 66
. The place was open, but the attendant was asleep, his head down on the counter by the cash register. I had instructed him to sleep.
While I waited, a car pulled into the forecourt. I wandered over, unhooked a nozzle from a pump, and offered to help. The driver declined my assistance and drove off, his car’s rear end fishtailing as he hit the road.
After that I decided it would be better to close the place down. I considered pulling the power lines from their ceramic insulators, but I wasn’t sure whether the phone needed power to work. I hadn’t used a phone before, and didn’t know much about them—to me they were just a noisy prop in movies, a plot device. I thought about the mobile Army switchboards in war movies, and how the operator would wind a handle to raise a charge. I reasoned that the phone must need power, and finally decided that the safest way of making the gas station look shut was to stuff myself through its doors and find the light switches.
It was a cold night and once the lights were off I could see that the moon had a halo. A big rig approached, and the shadow of the pumps and high awning swung away and back as it went by.
The phone rang.
I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear. There was nothing—well—there was his voice, familiar, saying an unfamiliar tentative hello. But apart from that there was nothing. God didn’t join me when Xas spoke.
I’ve lived a long time, and I’ve been unhappy, never in any simple way. Most of my feelings are mixed feelings, but at that moment I was happy. It was uncanny to be happy, it was strange and more painful than misery.
‘Is that you?’ Xas said.
And I said, ‘Hey. It’s a funny thing. It seems I’m alone with you.’ I pressed the phone to one ear, inserted a fingertip in the other, and closed my eyes. Another truck rolled by and when it had gone I was able to identify the tune playing in the background. Duke Ellington’s ‘Solitude’.
Xas said, ‘I’m picturing you crammed into a phone booth like a hatchling in an egg.’ Then, ‘You got this number from Cole, I guess.’
‘How long have you had a message service?’
‘Alison told me about them in 1959—so that we’d always be able to keep in touch, wherever I went. So—did Cole give you the number? I know he had it because he left a message several weeks before he died.’ Xas was silent for a bit, then said, ‘I’ve been avoiding the obituaries, and the clips on TV. I don’t want to contemplate all that black-and-white grandeur.’
Behind me, out in the desert, a coyote began to yip, an anxious calling. The mouthpiece of the gas station phone had a smell. It smelled of what it was, and of the more pungent things breathed into it—plastic and gingivitis.
‘Was he surprised?’ Xas asked.
‘To find himself in Hell? How surprised do you think he could be after a life of promiscuity and paying bribes and interfering with political processes.’
‘And murder.’
‘Yes—taking it on himself to seek someone else’s vengeance out of nothing more than boyish indignation.’ I listened to Xas’s silence then said, ‘He was surprised—as they all seem to be—that it was too late for him, and that his remorse was pointless, since it no longer served any civilising purpose.’
‘I forget,’ Xas said.
‘What do you forget?’
‘What Hell is like.’
‘Angels never forget anything, Xas, but there are always things we don’t know. Perhaps you would like to know what Cole said about you? I’d like to know what happened to you. What happened after I came back to your house in 1942 and found the windows were broken and boarded up.’
But Xas wouldn’t bargain. He wouldn’t ask for anything. Instead he told me what had happened when he last saw Cole.
In 1957 Xas sought out Cole who, rumour had it, was holed up in an old theatre, from which he’d had all the seats removed, except his own special chair. Cole was shut away in the dark watching movies.
Xas finagled and elbowed his way in to Cole through the dimwitted yes-men Cole had around him then. By the time he reached the door of the auditorium he had two men hanging off either arm, trying ineffectually to haul him away. Several others rushed ahead of him, to surround their boss, and perhaps carry him to safety. They pulled open the door and stumbled into darkness. A dank, combustible stink came out of the room and enveloped Xas and the men holding him. He heard the film, a good sound system, but cranked all the way up so that it took him a few seconds to recognise John Wayne as a booming sideshow god. After a moment the sound cut out, the speakers emitting a wounded popping and squawking. Then he heard a voice—rough, frightened and thready: ‘What is this? What’s the problem?’
He yelled, ‘Con!’
He heard murmurs, explanations, apologies. He heard, ‘Who is that?’
‘It’s Xas!’ he called. ‘I have to see you.’
More murmurs, measured, reasoning, then one of the men reappeared and said, ‘You can let him go,’ to those holding Xas. To Xas he said, ‘Mr Cole agrees to speak to you, but you have to stay there.’ He pointed at a spot only a pace on, in the doorway to the auditorium.
Xas stepped into the doorway. The men shuffled up behind him. They put their hands on him, and held him in place.
The room beyond the door was huge and dark, and filled with a thick sour smell. In the wedge of light Xas could see that there was another carpet of dust on the carpet, like the soft fur that forms on a rotting lemon.
As his eyes adjusted, he saw Cole, enthroned in a grubby lounger, bearded, and completely naked. Cole’s shins and forearms were bony; his knees had ripples of loose flesh above them, where his muscles had begun to waste from disuse. There was a drift of white around the chair—used Kleenex.
‘Con,’ Xas said, ‘I want to ask a favour.’
Cole made a wheezing noise. He was laughing. ‘I knew you would one day.’
‘Yes, you were right,’ Xas said.
‘I was right. It’s all commerce. Everything. Even for you.’
‘Yes,’ Xas said. Then, ‘Con.’ He said his former lover’s name with tenderness and ownership. His mouth began to water. He wasn’t disgusted. He wanted to walk into the dark room and lift Cole’s bony body out of that greasy chair and carry him away somewhere. He wanted to repair Cole.
‘Go on,’ Cole said. ‘Tell me what you want.’
‘You have this theatre. And I imagine you have copies of the films you and Crow made together—the films Flora edited. And all those early ones of yours she edited. I want Flora’s daughter to see them. I want Alison to see where she comes from and what’s possible for her.’
Cole was silent.
‘It wouldn’t take too long,’ Xas said. He peered into the foetid darkness.
Cole laughed some more. ‘You want to bring the girl here and show her what’s possible for her?’
‘Weren’t you ever curious about her?’
‘I was,’ said Cole. ‘And several years back I had a detective take some pictures. So I’ve seen her. A tall, skinny, flat-chested girl.’ Cole lifted his grey, ropy hand from the arm of the chair and waved Xas away. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t help you.’
One of Cole’s cronies immediately stepped between them and closed the door. Xas let the others conduct him out the nearest exit. He found himself on a fire escape. The sun was bright, glaring off the freshly painted wall behind him. He went slowly down the stairs and around the front of the cinema to his car. He got in behind the wheel and sat staring at the building, its clean white paint.
He had read about Cole’s seclusion. He’d heard talk of Cole’s ‘mania for privacy’. He had always supposed that Cole would call if he’d had any further use for him. He’d been busy himself. Their estrangement had been a rational one. It was just what happens to people.
‘To people,’ Xas thought, and closed his eyes. He remembered Cole standing by the trestle table in the hangar at Mines Field, saying, ‘I’m not people. Not folk.’ Youthful, brilliant, as proud as an emperor, a man whose keenest feelings were for him
self.
Cole had helped Xas discover that he couldn’t teach someone to love just by loving them. It was something he had needed to learn. It was a hard lesson, but Xas didn’t think that Cole was ever hard. To call him callous would be to claim that people made more impression on him than they had. He wasn’t callous, only remote, lost in his cloud of habits and hobbies, hobby horses and phobias, and a loneliness as ordinary to him as air.
Xas sat in his car outside the sealed cinema and thought that he had been right when he’d deduced, a long, long time ago, that souls in Hell were more like themselves than souls in Heaven. But now he understood that, although this was true, it didn’t matter, because the souls that came to Hell were already spoiled. Insufficient or, like Cole, having somehow never worked properly, as though there were people given to the world—and to those who had to love them—broken from the start.
And then Xas thought, ‘I did love him, after all.’ Sure, he’d made a mistake with Cole, and had given his heart where he stood to lose it. But that was good, it was right, it was what should happen, it was the way faith worked, it was the proper use of love.
When Xas had done talking, the record playing in the room behind him had long since come to an end and, in the ensuing silence, I heard church bells: old, deep, and mellow.
I said, ‘Cole filled himself with drugs, and surrounded himself with attendants who handled everything with rubber gloves but were properly reverent of his personal filth. He regarded “the herd” as deadly and diseased, so shut himself up, and lay in bed like an invalid, wearing nothing but his sour skin. And you say he was damned from the start because he was born broken.’
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