If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  “An impromptu,” Christopher said when it was his turn on the small, four-by-four stage shoved against the wall opposite the bar. Paper posters for literary events and art openings covered the wall in hap-hazard patches, the corner of an old Moxie sign appearing in one spot.

  Christopher closed his eyes, then opened them again. He saw words as geese curving through the sky before circling down to the river below. They came down. Christopher opened his mouth. He spoke with each syllable falling from his lips with even weight. Even the stops for breath or phrasing fell into a shuffling time that made cool drinks warm in their glasses.

  He said,

  “A Poem for Somewhere”

  “And the crow falls from the sky saying the city’s name

  At the base of the towers of the Congress of Sighs.

  The uncounted, unspoken wishes for order at all times

  Meet in a rushing of insect-wings, and in the blind eyes

  on the helmet of Flux the Deceiver. They fall into

  slumber as my words make spires of encircled silver strands.”

  When he was done, finger-snapping and a smattering of applause stirred the smoky air like the wings of bats.

  “Whiskey on the counter calls,” whispered the jacket to him. “It is a melodious song.” It took him to the far end of the bar. The kid carried an I.D. for Christopher J. Deware. His fake draft card made him twenty-one.

  “There is no Congress of Sighs,” said the jacket.

  “There is now,” said Christopher.

  “How do you know of the Flux-Agent?”

  “Beats me. I also know he was called by another name.”

  “Tomkin of The Tomkins,” said the jacket, “Friend of the great Seth Jackson. Or former friend. Betrayed my creator. How did you know?”

  Christopher shrugged.

  “Let it pass,” said the jacket.

  It whistled. The boy’s hand raised the empty glass toward the bartender.

  When he drained it, the jacket whispered. “Time we found the road. And that you met the lovely one named Blue Maria.”

  Christopher nodded.

  8.

  “I don’t think I will even respond to Red Pauline’s provocation,” said the Clockmaster. “Her punishment is to long in vain for her precious jacket. She sits in the yearning fires of her own desolate hell.”

  “We know how she clings to the memory of Jackson,” said the Flux-Agent. “But she could be swayed. She might be induced to become devoted instead to you.”

  “She’s gone too far from the girl I knew.” The Clockmaster regarded the turning spokes of light panning across Maxee, the City of the Time Helix, and sipped his water. “Another immortal entity might give way to feelings for a childhood sweetheart who has chosen to make herself a machine. But I am devoted to trying to make Time work in an orderly manner. There it is. I am an old-fashioned entity, dedicated to old things and old ways.”

  “And to stopping the jacket and the ones with whom it returns.”

  “They are opposed to old things and old ways,” said the Clockmaster. “Especially my old ways.”

  At that moment, a blue Dodge Royale with its top down came barreling over the Lake of Tears by way of the Bridge of Scant Regard. The green lenses of the Frog Observatory reflected the light of two rising suns.

  The eyes of Clockmaster and Flux-Agent met, as the thought struck them both at once that nothing like the Frog Observatory had ever before stood in that place.

  Before they could react, the car vanished.

  Their gazes shifted to an eighty-story Art Deco folly, topped with anchorages for spaceships. The light of various suns glowed pink on the silver spires and minarets of the new and eternal Congress of Sighs. Sun-tinted doves settled across the wide expanse of scale-like tiles.

  A voice arose, somewhere, in a sigh that was not theirs.

  9.

  In the kitchen, Alice stirred the pot of beef stew heating on the range.

  “You had him out late last night,” she said. “Got to keep up his strength.”

  The jacket hung on the back of a chair.

  “Yes,” it said. “But that strength of his must be exercised.”

  Sounds of a shower running, of water splashing and a voice complaining, almost crying, came from the bathroom.

  “It hurts, Bill.”

  “Sure, it hurts.”

  “We saw Maxee. The City Of Diamond Knives. Oh, man. My mouth hurts.”

  “Don’t talk, then.”

  “It’s wonderful,” Alice said, “being a part of this. Saving Maxee, the City Of Unraveled Time. And in the end we can visit and see its wonders. Really, I can’t wait.”

  “Of course,” the jacket murmured to her, while thinking such a visit akin to flying pigs and sulfur tasting of honey: possible, but purposeless.

  The splashing ceased. Bill’s voice came again, gently coaxing.

  “It’s crazy,” said Alice. She looked away and smiled. “He’s all gooey about the kid. And, you know, he’s the one who didn’t want to have children.”

  “Sentimentality,” said the jacket, tightly.

  Bill Deware led a towel-wrapped Christopher into the kitchen. The kid moaned as the jacket was placed over his shoulders. His lips were stained blue. Bill helped him into his seat.

  “I need him to drive again tonight,” said the jacket.

  Christopher’s hand holding the fork shivered. Bill took it. He guided the fork to the bowl, speared a gravy-soaked carrot, and brought it up.

  Christopher averted his face. “It hurts.” His voice was faint and hoarse. “That Blue Maria burned my mouth. Please. Let me sleep.”

  The jacket rose, with the kid inside it, and walked him down the hall. Christopher fell face-down on the bed.

  “Sir,” said Bill respectfully, looking in from the hallway. “That stuff he’s taking. Makes him sick. Could he ease up?”

  “Blue Maria was given to us by the great Seth Jackson to ease our path back to Maxee. He created it before he created me. Long before he made and populated these Outer Possibilities. Long before the Bridges of Glass.”

  “It’s hard on him.”

  “I believe Christopher is the chosen instrument.”

  Bill nodded, and rubbed his forehead. “Right,” he said, quietly. “It’s our fight. To save Maxee.” The jacket had said these words many times.

  “He’s a strong kid.”

  “He’s a strong kid,” repeated Bill.

  “Maybe too strong,” the jacket said. “Driving back here we missed a tree by inches, before I finally got the boy’s foot down on the brakes. He fought me. He could have been killed.”

  “What would we do then?” Bill asked.

  “Find someone more willing,” Alice said, from behind Bill.

  The jacket said nothing, floating at the edge of Christopher’s dulled mind, probing. This boy had found turns on the Time Lanes the jacket had never seen before. Yet it could dig through these mental layers and find only the tangled thoughts of youth, speared through with strangely vivid poetry.

  Christopher, asleep, his sweating forehead pressed to the pillow, dreamed of playing with brick-shaped blocks. He placed brick atop tiny brick. Then he stepped back, to see what he had built. Structures ornate and aimless rose from the floor, in an untidy mess of a miniature city.

  In his hand he found a small metal figure. A man with a clock for a hat. Very carefully, he bent down and placed it atop a pedestal at the center of his miniature city.

  Now the walls of the room went away. He stood on the grassy hill, in a park. Great feathered trees swaying beneath floating globes of light caught his eye. When he looked back at what he had built, it had changed. The buildings grew toward the sky. The man on the pedestal loomed, an enormous giant. The clock on his hat shone. Crowds of tiny figures walked on his shoulders.

  The giant waved his arms, and what seemed like white, glistening bullets flew through the air and bit into the grass, churning up clots of turf and cutting Ch
ristopher in two.

  He woke up face-down on a drenched pillow.

  “Come on, kid, up and at it,” said the jacket, tugging at Christopher’s limp form.

  “My head’s still crapped out from yesterday,” Christopher said. He shut his eyes, asleep again.

  The hill and the lights and the city and the metal man were gone. All was dark in this place now except for the shining in Christopher’s own hands.

  The swirling stuff of stars coalesced in his palms. This he mashed together with his palms, then with his fingers, until it became firm. He pressed it into the shape of a glowing block. He put down the block, only to find the space between his hands aglow again.

  The pile of blocks grew through the long ages of night.

  At some point, when the bridge was nearly built, he realized his mouth no longer hurt.

  10.

  The lights dimmed. The helix spun more swiftly. “The jacket has a way with the time streams,” said the Clockmaster. “They keep opening onto Maxee, when it’s riding them.”

  He stared at the images appearing on the back of his Flux-Agent’s hand. The ’54 Dodge, with its rag top down, sat parked beside a road. Chris took a drag from a small bottle, stuck a blue pill in his mouth, and pulled his leather jacket tightly around him.

  “It’s that boy and that wonderful car,” said Tomkin of the Tomkins, looking at the image. “Couldn’t they find themselves in some dark corner of the Possibilities?”

  “The time is not right,” said the Clockmaster. “No time is ever right.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Beautiful, in its way, that pink hairbrush on the grass by the road,” said the Clockmaster, pointing. “Meaningless details are the stuff of Time.”

  “But you cannot tend to them all.”

  “I cannot attend to any of them. I maintain the illusion that I tend to a few, for the sake of appearances. The Helix turns, and I dream that I tug and shape it here and there. I shine lights where necessary. And that, really, is all. I am like someone who nudges gently at the reigning stasis.”

  “O, Demiurge.”

  “Sweet of you to call me that, but not true.”

  Tomkin of the Tomkins then sang an old, old song, making the Clockmaster frown, then smile, his eyes looking far into the distance.

  11.

  Once and sometime, the jacket raised armies of wanderers who bore it aloft as their standard, and flashed fangs of steel at the slave beings pushing the Great Wheel, turning Maxee on its endless rotations and grinding Time and its victims to ashes of forgetfulness.

  Once and sometime again, it rode the back of a champion with flaming hands, who leaped from a bridge of glass to dig burning fingertips into the Obelisk of Oblivion at the heart of Maxee, City of Gestalt and Zeitgeist, City of the Lost, City of Loneliness, City of Forever and Never, City With No End.

  Those assaults came to nothing. A flash, a slap, a puff of wind, and the jacket found itself in some 1949, in some weary Massachusetts warehouse with distraught pigeons fluttering between rafters, with the steed it rode toward victory now become more or less a pumpkin, and with the armed hordes it raised out of deep, dusty regions of the past reduced now to a scattering of mice and rats.

  Never had the jacket entered Maxee, City of Infinite Chance, as it did with Christopher Deware at the wheel of the blue Dodge. Never before had it seen the bright red Cyrillic lettering on the dome of the Helium Exchange. Never before had it seen the Ballroom Of The Reluctant Elephants rise from the dry bed of the Lake of Desuetude.

  Yet on the edge of triumph it felt stabs of intense longing for those lone, lost crusades.

  Now the city shimmered in the presence of the one who had reimagined it. The liquid in the capsule burned Christopher’s smiling mouth. Where Christopher turned his gaze, glowing esplanades rippled along the river banks.

  A figure rose above the buildings. On the front of the Clockmaster’s slouch hat appeared the face of Big Ben. Out of his ears and along his shoulders moved the same mechanical procession of princes, priests, and populace that emerges twice a day from the great, high clock of the Cathedral of Ghent. Seconds sprayed from the Clockmaster’s long right arm. Hours pumped from the short left one.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” the jacket said sharply. “It’s an illusion. He’s not as big as a whale. Nor as tall as many castles.”

  The Clockmaster raised both hands. Seconds and minutes rattled off the hood of the car. Hours and days smashed the trunk. The blue Dodge hung a sharp right and passed through the Arctic Portals that sprang into being to greet its rusting grille. The shrapnel of hours and the scattered buckshot of seconds embedded themselves in the diamond surface of ice, where they would become the Memorials to Time Once Frozen, in Maxee, City of Stillness, when it was no longer still and dead.

  The Clockmaster seen in the rearview mirror, reminded Chris of an amusement park ride.

  The Dodge thundered down a winding marble slope. On a terrace just over the edge of the ramp, Christopher saw a flash of red hair. The jacket quivered on his back. A name appeared in Christopher’s mind as he felt the heat the passion course quickly through him: Red Pauline.

  A figure in an amber robe and feathered helmet appeared beside her.

  He raised his Flux staff and called out. He wished to talk.

  “I’m glad someone the hell wants to talk,” said Christopher, hitting the brakes.

  Then he yelled. The jacket forced his hands off the steering wheel. The Dodge left the marble road and spun in the air. Maxee spiraled.

  Christopher yelled again and bit viciously on what remained of the Blue Maria, trying to get his hands back on the wheel.

  Then it was night. Headlights blazed and horns blared. Under a quarter moon, the Dodge touched down on asphalt, drove diagonally across a highway and jumped an embankment as Chris and the jacket struggled for control.

  12.

  Iron doors clanged in the distance. A static-filled radio echoed down a hall.

  Christopher rolled his head back. His eyes opened a slit to a smear of fluorescent lights.

  “Watch him.” Hands held him up, went through his pockets. “Kleenex. Stick of gum. Sixty-five, no, sixty-seven cents. Keys for the Dodge. House keys. Wallet. Two dollars. State College I.D. for Christopher J. Deware. Driver’s license for same. Birthdates June 3, 1945. Draft card, 2S, says he’s exactly two years older. Wrist watch looks like it got smashed just now. High school ring.”

  “Christopher Deware? Chris? CHRISTOPHER! You hear me?”

  “Look at his eyes. Nobody home in there. He spends the night.” Hands unbuckled his belt, whipped it through the loops and off him. “One brown leather belt. Hold your pants up, stupid bastard. Shoes off. Pair of black loafers.”

  “Hold him. Going to fall.”

  “Lock him down.”

  Christopher found himself moving barefoot. His head lolled. Through silted eyes, he saw a metal door open. Someone whistled and said, “Ohhh, my,” when they saw him.

  “Lou, this one’s too fucked up to take care of himself. Mr. and Mrs. Deware won’t like finding out their baby choked to death on his own vomit while getting gang raped.”

  “Cuff him outside the cage, then. Get that jacket off him.”

  “Fancy leather. Never felt anything like it. Like butter.”

  Christopher felt it slipping away. His eyes opened all the way. He twisted. “Down boy.” Slammed against the bars. The pain was like an echo. He fell. The jacket came off. The light went out of his eyes. His tongue lolled out of mouth. Blue liquid dribbled on his chin. “What’s that stuff?”

  Chris saw the jacket fall, end over end, past steel walkways, past halls of glass and stone, blown like a leaf out of Maxee, the Spiral City.

  Beyond the jacket, he saw the one who had thrown the jacket free. The figure bent over the Bridge of Unspoken Remorse. Chris knew the figure’s name. Seth Jackson.

  Then he saw the Clockmaster rise behind the creator of the jacket.

  An
d everyone, the bailiffs, the prisoners, paused and listened to the sound of bells that tinkled like ice in a thousand big, big, highball glasses.

  13.

  Bright metal fish gathered in the air, their shadows blocking the light from the double suns high in the noonday sky.

  In that twilight, a red-haired figure stood on a walkway overlooking the Charm Chasm. She stared down at the spinning turbines that powered Maxee, the Artificial City, and at the long lines of husklike dead souls, who provided the fuel to power the turbines.

  Chimes tinkled. A glass swan floated up. Its side opened, to release Tomkin of the Tomkins.

  “You have heard,” he said.

  “About the Clockmaster,” said Red Pauline. “Rooted to the spot where that young man last saw him.”

  Her voice had a rare warmth.

  “And all is changed. On my way here, I was stopped by a crowd—what they call a family. Of people! They asked me where all the tourists were. I told them there were none. None at all. Never can be. Maxee grows out of the stillness of all Time.”

  He paused. A tinkling filled the air.

  “At least that was my understanding,” he said.

  “He will return, you know,” said Red Pauline.

  “We must be ready, then.”

  “I already am.” Her distant smile was like the faint swell of a wave.

  14.

  Chris awoke to the smell of ammonia and a bailiff poking his shoulder.

  “Rise and shine, son. Parents here.”

  A radio blared early morning news. “Campaigning in Wichita yesterday, President Johnson promised a new small farmer initiative. His opponent, Senator Goldwater, decried what he described as Big Government. In local news, several people reported a bright object the size of a car in the sky last night. The Air Force National Guard reports no unusual incidents.”