Xas said, ‘I’m not on your side, Lucifer. I’m not going to say, “What kind of God does that?” like people do. There’s another way of thinking about all this, only I haven’t found it yet.’
‘You’re not going to find it on earth, Xas.’
‘Don’t start that again—offering to restore me to Heaven.’
‘All right.’ I took a deep breath. The frame of the phone box creaked in complaint. I made my voice casual. ‘What are you calling yourself these days?’
‘I’m not going to tell you. I haven’t forgotten that Hell has phonebooks. And soon the number you called won’t be any good. My message centre is winding up its business, because everyone is buying answering machines.’
The desert was a dusky Martian-red already. There was a bullet-battered Joshua tree near the highway, and others further out, appearing against the red light as feathered blots of spilled ink.
The gas station attendant came out and leaned in the gilded aluminum frame of the door. He rubbed his groggy face. His cheek showed the clear print of the coins he’d been counting when I told him to sleep. The windows of the gas station threw back the soft fire of the first sliver of sunlight. The attendant blinked, dazzled, and put up his hands as if he was trying to part a curtain between him and what he could see. Then he saw me and staggered back.
I shook my head at him. I pointed at the door.
He ran back inside.
A car went by, slowed, wobbled, accelerated again. It drove on for a short distance then pulled over and braked hard. Its driver wound his window down and craned his head out.
‘I’m getting looks,’ I said.
Xas said, ‘In a few days I’ll be able to go to the newspaper reading room at my library, and look for news of you.’
‘The foreign newspapers,’ I guessed.
Xas said smoothly, ‘The LA newspapers. Your area code is a giveaway. I think you’re in the Mojave. There’ll be something in the LA Times. In their whacko spot. They won’t report an angel though. No one ever sees angels now. Now it’s all aliens.’
A couple more cars had stopped by the first. I tried to ignore the excited consultation between the people there. I listened hard to the room at the far end of all the lines and the undersea cable. ‘Xas?’ I said. ‘Where are you?’
He was quiet. Then, ‘No.’
‘There’s a gathering of people here now,’ I said. ‘The attendant is on the phone inside, no doubt summoning the police. The sun is up.’
‘How problematic for you.’
‘Yes. I’m visible,’ I said. ‘And the cities are huge now, Xas. The skies are always light, and full of planes. There’s radar. I can’t go freely. I can’t pass, I can’t walk around and take my time till I find you.’
Xas made a small noise, possibly of amusement. ‘Perhaps you’d like me to cut your wings off?’
I didn’t answer, and after a short silence, he hung up on me.
I didn’t fly away from the gas station, but walked through the little crowd of vehicles, pausing a moment to formulate a sentence in my native tongue, one that would make the film in the camera I could see spoil, but would leave the people and machinery unscathed. I worked out the command, uttered it, and the woman holding the camera dropped it and doubled over, while everyone else clapped their hands over their ears.
I kept on walking. A snake fled ahead of me, making a cross-stitch pattern in the sand.
When Xas’s first friend the beekeeping monk died, he came to believe that God didn’t after all save everything. That Heaven didn’t want circus acts with circus performers. I offered to return him to Heaven, but he, Godlike, wanted more. He wanted back the people he loved. He wanted to call, and have them answer. He wanted them to be themselves forever. Godlike, he wanted that.
When I spoke to him in 1938, he talked about souls, and what God does with them. He came up with an abortive parable. He wasn’t sure enough of what he thought, and his parable turned into a question. What he said was this: ‘Let us say that human bodies are planes. The purpose of a plane is flight. A soul is a flight; it is the purpose of a body. But what is it that flies? I don’t think you can separate a thing and its purpose. But that’s what God does, He winnows things from purposes and keeps only purposes. Which makes me wonder—what was it God lacked that He called for light? What kind of lack couldn’t be satisfied by all this?’ And he had gestured around him at the moonlit flowers of Flora McLeod’s paper road.
When I was far enough from the highway to judge that I couldn’t be seen, I pushed off from the ground. My wings laboured till they caught the weak upward tendency of the new day’s first thermals.
I would go back to Hell, and our cinema. I’d move its main projector, the DP70 Todd-AO I stole from the Newsreel Theatre in Los Angeles by carrying it off through a skylight one night in 1957. I’d wheel out the older projector and put on a silent movie—Dance Hall Daisy. I’d watch the young Flora McLeod checking her hair and waving hello.
There was a highway now on Flora’s paper road, and an industrial park spreading on the airfield she’d crossed shortly before dawn one morning in June, 1929, whistling, and listening for her whistle to echo as if the twilight was a soundstage. Flora the film editor, who understood transitions, and understood time, and who once said to Xas that, when she was alone, she would sometimes sense an alteration, something like the soft click of a splice passing through the gate of her editing machine.
I put this story together from the testimony of the damned, and I used my imagination. I will continue to run it, listening for clicks. Angels never forget anything. There is no unwanted footage.
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600 Wellington
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vup
Copyright © Elizabeth Knox 2009
First published 2009
Reprinted 2009
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Knox, Elizabeth.
The angel’s cut / Elizabeth Knox.
ISBN 978-0-86473-665-9
I. Title.
NZ823.2—dc 22
The Angel's Cut Page 34