If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  He didn’t think, didn’t hesitate. He swung his rifle butt, maybe like someone he’d seen on TV, and caught the brother on the forehead. The kid staggered backwards. Blood trickled from his forehead. He turned and ran down the street howling.

  On the corner he passed Timmy’s mother, who hadn’t seen what happened. She was horrified, grabbed Timmy, and hustled him up to the apartment before some dreadful harm could happen to him. That night she told his father. “It was awful: a little boy with blood streaming down his face.”

  Never did it occur to her that her kid might have done it and he never told her. When they moved shortly afterwards to a leafy neighborhood where they had a back yard, Timothy saw that incident as a miracle staged just for him.

  Then the organ struck up “The Bridal March” from Lohengrin, and the Fool started up the aisle. He saw the feathers and halos on members of the congregation, on the bride, bridesmaids, and even the little flower girl. He knew Marie was searching his face for clues as to what would happen.

  In fact his instructions were confused. At the Gates of Heaven the Cherubim had told him to investigate thoroughly and to halt the ceremony if he felt it was blasphemous. But then Seraphim (who outranked them) took the Fool aside and told him to let the ceremony proceed if he was sure it wasn’t a trick.

  Both Cherubim and Seraphim said he was to remain until all was settled. He knew that if he allowed the marriage to come to pass he could be here for years waiting to see if this experiment worked. If he stopped the ceremony he’d have to stay and deal with the consequences.

  A long life was one of the perks (or one the curses) of his job. He could well be here until humankind disappeared. Or until it survived.

  The beings that had sent him on this mission stood so tall their faces were in the clouds. He wondered what secrets they had concealed; recalled rumors the Creator hadn’t been seen even by the highest circles of Heaven for eons. This could mean his mission originated with some cabal among the Heavenly Host.

  On the groom’s side could be seen a plentitude of horns and glowing red eyes. The Fiend sat with the Defiler on the center aisle. She avoided meeting his eyes, was obviously tense waiting for the possible life or death of this experiment. The Defiler’s dead eyes were on him, poised for battle. The Fool could handle whatever threats they posed.

  He could turn at that moment and take Marie against her will away from the altar and out of the church. He could level the building. Instead he kept walking.

  The bridal party approached the groom, his best man, a fellow Devil in morning clothes, and the sharp-eyed little ring bearer with a forked tail who waited at the foot of the altar. Officiating was a monsignor, a genial time-server with a rich parish who saw none of this and had no idea what was happening.

  Old St Peter’s in South Boston with its Lithuanian and its English masses was where The Fool first had a statue meet his stare and follow him with its eyes. It was there that he saw angels at the consecration and thought it meant he had a vocation to be a priest.

  A few years later, an angel visited him in his sleep and hinted he was meant for bigger things as an agent of heaven. In his teens he began discovering his powers. One day, all he knew about peoples’ souls was what the nuns had told him. The next morning, he could look right inside and see them.

  He had thought it was a miracle, a revelation. Now he saw it as something implanted, saw himself, the Fiend, Marie, Aiden, angels and door demons as subjects in an experiment.

  The Fool remembered the planet where he’d been groomed for his current position. On that world any trace of Satan had been eradicated. The people were pious, simple, and eventually bored.

  The Old Fool lived in a large stone house in the mountains. With a beard down to his knees and a taste for orchids, cigars, and chocolate, he was a source of insight once or twice a day and a font of confusion the rest of the time.

  He didn’t have as many bells and whistles installed in him as did his young pupil. But he once told the Fool, “The works of humankind may become as strong as God or Satan but perhaps not stronger than God and Satan.”

  Doubtless that world too had been an experiment, one that failed. Technology crept in. By the late 21st century it was a wasteland like a thousand other worlds where the Deity picked up his marbles and summoned the Apocalypse. On the far side of those dead planets was said to be the Singularity, devoid of humanity, God and Satan.

  This ceremony today was part of an experiment to see if the Old Fool was right.

  Nostalgia is a dangerous game for one like him. But the Fool wondered if versions of his family and himself—a kid in his teens- might be alive on this world and what the Fiend could tell him about them.

  It was within his power to bring all this to an end. Instead, the Great Fool moved forward to give the bride away. He recited the words, took Marie’s hand and Aiden’s in his.

  Then he stepped back, and as the ceremony proceeded, as the pair recited their vows, he decided to rain down flowers, fat cigars, and Hershey bars on the congregation as the Mendelssohn played. It would honor his old teacher and ease tensions.

  Later there would always be time for devastation and ruin if they turned out to be advisable. Or perhaps he would find a stone house in the mountains somewhere and ride this planet towards survival or destruction.

  Someone like me, who writes personal fiction, finds himself returning to the Boston neighborhoods of his childhood and adolescence, to the things he did, and jobs he held when he first lived in Manhattan.

  Part Three:

  HOME AGAIN

  My fiction is heavily informed by my life, and New York is where I’ve led most of that. This story was written for Ellen Datlow’s Blood and Other Cravings 2011 anthology. Themed anthologies these days are a lot more wide open than was the case some years back.

  Instead of one vampire story after another, this volume featured all manner of addictions and compulsion. But I went with blood suckers, mixed it with bits of contemporary Manhattan and memories of troubled times for a story of a very special cyclical fad.

  The Sixth Avenue Flea Market was a New York weekend institution from the early 1980s into the 21st century. I bought there and for a period of years, whatever the season, I sold there. Firefly flashlights, dealers who had seen EVERYTHING, club kids wandering into the market in the dawn: all of that is first hand.

  Ichordone, the methadone of vampires, is obviously an invention. But the mores and ways of addiction and recovery are not. In the end the writer uses every part of his or her life.

  As a side note, the world of same sex partners and their adopted children is part of gay life becoming everyday life. The twist I inserted into it says more about the needs of a storyteller in a themed anthology than it does about a process that has enabled me to meet some of the most wonderful small people I’ve ever encountered.

  BLOOD YESTERDAY, BLOOD TOMORROW

  1.

  Ai Ling, show Aunt Lilia and everyone else how you can play the Debussy ‘Claire de Lune,’” Larry said as his partner Boyd beamed at his side. Lilia Gaines was at the dinner party as a friend of one of the hosts, Larry Stepelli.

  She had, in fact, been his roommate in the bad old days. Twenty-five years before she and Larry had entered Ichordone therapy as a couple and left it separately and stayed that way.

  The exquisitely dressed Asian girl sat, tiny but fully at ease, at the piano. At one time Lilia had wondered if only well-to-do gay couples should be allowed to raise kids.

  Behind Ai Ling, the windows of the West Street duplex looked over the Hudson and the lights of New Jersey on a late June evening. And amazingly, almost like a beautifully rendered piece of automata, the child played the piece with scarcely a flaw.

  Amidst the applause of the dozen guests and her fathers, Ai Ling curtseyed and went off with her Nana. Lilia, not for the first time, considered Larry’s upward mobility. This dinner party was for some of Boyd’s clients, a few people whom Larry sought to impress and one or
two like her whom he liked to taunt with his success.

  A woman asked Boyd what preschool his daughter attended. One of his clients dropped the names of two Senators and the President in a single sentence.

  A young man who had been brought by an old and famous children’s book illustrator talked about the novel he was writing, “It’s YA and horror lite on what at the moment is a very timely theme,” he said.

  Larry smiled and said to Lilia, “I walked past Reliquary yesterday and you were closed.”

  “Major redecoration,” she replied. Their connection had once been so close that at times each could still read the other. So they both knew this wasn’t so.

  He tilted his handsome head with only a subtle touch of gray and raised his left eyebrow a fraction of an inch.

  Lilia knew he was going to ask her something about her shop and how long it could survive. She didn’t want to discuss the subject just then.

  Larry’s question went unasked. Right then the young author said, “It’s a theme which sometimes gets overworked but never gets stale. The book I’m doing right now is titled, Never Blood Today. You know, a variation on, ‘Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today’ from Alice in Wonderland. In fact the book is Alice with Vampires! Set in a well-to-do private high school!”

  The writer looked at Larry with fascination as he spoke. Boyd frowned. The illustrator who had a show up in Larry’s gallery rolled his eyes.

  Larry smiled again but just for a moment. For Lilia, the writer’s conversation was an unplanned bonus.

  A woman in an enviable apricot silk dress with just a hint of sheath about it changed the subject to a reliably safe one: how nicely real estate prices had bottomed out.

  Then Boyd suggested they all sit down to dinner. Boyd Lazlo was a corporate lawyer, solid, polite, nice looking, completely opaque. Lilia Gaines knew he didn’t much trust her.

  Lilia and Larry went back to the time when Warhol walked the earth, Manhattan was seamy and corroded, and an unending stream of young people came there to lose their identities and find newer, more exotic ones. Back then Boyd was still a college kid preparing to go to Yale Law.

  These many summers later, Manhattan was gripped by nostalgia for old sordid days, and Lilia had something to show Larry that would evoke them. But it was personal, private, and she hadn’t found a moment alone with him.

  At the end of the evening he stood at the door saying goodbye to the illustrator. The young writer looked wide-eyed at Larry and even at Lilia. The mystique of old evil: she understood it well.

  As Larry wished him farewell, Lilia caught the half wink her old companion gave the kid and was certain Larry was bored.

  She remembered him in the Ichordone group therapy standing in tears and swearing that when he walked out of there cured of his habit he would establish a stable relationship and raise children.

  Boyd was down the hall at the elevator kissing and shaking hands. Lilia and Larry were alone. Only then did he put his hands on her shoulders and say, “You have a secret; give it up.”

  “Something I just found,” she said, reached into her bag, and handed him a folded linen napkin. You’d have had to know him as well as she did to catch the eyes widening by a millimeter. Stitched into the cloth was what, when Lilia first saw it years before, had looked like a small gold crown, a coronet. Curving below the coronet in script were the words “Myrna’s Place.” The same words were above it upside down.

  Before anything more could be said, Boyd came back looking a bit concerned and as if he needed to speak to Larry alone. So Lilia thanked both of them for dinner and took her leave. She noticed that Larry had made the napkin disappear.

  Years ago when New York was the wilder, darker place, Larry and Lilia’s apartment was on a marginal street on the Lower East Side, and they pursued careers while watching for their chance. He acted in underground films with Madonna before the name meant anything and took photos; she sold dresses she’d designed to East Village Boutiques.

  Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe was the model for all the young couples like them: the poker faced serious girl with hair framing her face and the flashy bisexual guy. They were in the crowd at the Pyramid Club, Studio 54, and the Factory. Drugs and alcohol were their playthings. Love did enter into it, of course, and even sex when their stars crossed paths.

  Since they needed money, they also had an informal business selling antiques and weird collectibles at the flea market on Sixth Avenue in the Twenties.

  In those days that stretch of Manhattan was a place of rundown five story buildings and wide parking lots—fallow land waiting for a developer. On weekends, first one parking lot, then a second, then a third, then more blossomed with tables set up in the open air, tents pitched before dawn.

  It became a destination where New Yorkers spent their weekend afternoons sifting through the trash and the gems. Warhol, the pale prince, bought much of his fabled cookie jar collection there.

  During the week, Larry and Lilia haunted the auction rooms on Fourth Avenue and Broadway south of Union Square, swooped down on forlorn vases and candy dishes, old toys, unwanted lots of parasols and packets of photos of doughboys and chorus girls, turn of the century nude swimming scenes, elephants wearing bonnets and top hats.

  Since it kind of was their livelihood, they both tried to be reasonably straight and sober at the moment Sunday morning stopped being Saturday night. While it was still dark they’d go up to Sixth Avenue with their treasures in shopping carts, rent a few square feet of space and a couple of tables and set up their booth.

  In the predawn, out of town antique dealers, edgy interior decorators, compulsive collectors, all bearing flashlights, would circulate among the vans unloading furniture and the tables being carried to their places by the flea market porters.

  Beams of light would scan the dark and suddenly, four, five, a dozen of them would circle a booth where strange, interesting, perhaps even valuable stuff was being set up.

  Lilia and Larry wanted that attention. Then came the very drowsy weekday auction when they found a lot consisting of several cartons of distressed goods: everything from matchbooks and champagne flutes, to mirrors and table cloths all with the words “Myrna’s Place” in an oval and the gold design that looked like a small crown, a coronet.

  The name meant nothing to them. They guessed Myrna’s was some kind of uptown operation—a speakeasy, a bordello, a bohemian salon—they didn’t quite know.

  Old, hard-bitten market dealers called themselves “Fleas.”

  Larry said, “Fleas call the trash they sell Stuff.”

  “And this looks like Stuff,” Lilia replied.

  “And plenty of it,” they said at the same moment, which happened with them back then. They bid their last fifty dollars and got the lot.

  That Sunday morning they rented their usual space and a couple of tables. Other recent finds included a tackily furnished tin dollhouse, a set of blue and white china bowls, a few slightly decayed leather jackets, several antique corsets, a box of men’s assorted arm garters, and a golf bag and clubs bought at an apartment sale. They had dysfunctional old cameras and a cracked glass jar full of marbles. Prominently displayed was a selection of Myrna’s Place stuff.

  The couple in the booth across from theirs seemed to loot a different place each week. That Sunday it was an old hunting lodge. They had a moose head, skis, snow shoes and blunt, heavy ice skates, Adirondack chairs, and gun racks.

  Larry and Lilia set up in the pre-dawn dark as flashlights darted about the lot. Then one fell on them. A flat faced woman with rimless glasses and eyes that showed nothing turned her beam on the golf clubs.

  She shrugged when she saw them up close. But as she turned to walk away, her light caught a nicely draped tablecloth from Myrna’s Place. “Thirty dollars for the lot,” she said indicating all the Myrna items.

  Larry and Lilia hesitated. Thirty dollars would pay the day’s rent for the stall. Then another light found the table. A middle
aged man with the thin, drawn look of a veteran of many Manhattan scenes was examining Myrna’s wine glasses. “Five dollars each,” Lilia told him and he didn’t back off.

  To the woman who had offered thirty for the entire lot, Larry said, “Thirty for the tablecloth.”

  The woman ground them down to twenty. The thin, drawn man bought four wine glasses for fifteen dollars and continued examining the merchandise.

  Lilia and Larry’s booth attracted the pre-dawn flashlights. It was like being attacked by giant fireflies. Nobody was interested in anything else. It was all Myrna’s Place. Old Fleas paused and looked their way.

  As dawn began to slide in between the buildings, the thin, drawn man found a small ivory box.

  “Myrna Lavaliere, who and where are you now?” he asked, and opened the lid. It was full of business cards bearing the usual double Myrna’s Place and coronet logo. Below that was an address on the Upper East Side, a Butterfield 8 telephone number and the motto, “Halfway between Park Avenue and Heaven.”

  “More like far from Heaven and down the street from Hell,” the man said. “You kids have any idea what you have here?”

  Larry and Lilia shrugged. Other customers wanted their attention.

  “Wickedness always sells,” the man told them. “And after the war in the late 1940s, rumor had it this place was wicked. Myrna’s was a townhouse where you went in human and came out quite otherwise.”

  A tall woman with a black lace kerchief tied around her long neck and wearing sunglasses in the dawn light had stopped examining a pair of Myrna’s Place candlesticks and paused to listen.

  She gave a short, contemptuous laugh and said in an unplacable accent, “Oh please, spare these not-terribly-innocent children all the sour grape stories spread by all the ones who couldn’t get inside the front door of Myrna’s. What happened there happened before and will happen again. If you know anything about these phenomena at all you know that.”