by Alan Deniro
At any rate, after her revelation, I saw her point rather clearly, and I asked what I could do to help. Anything to help. I was desperate
to, and there wasn’t really any question about any previous, skeptical thought processes that I might have had regarding her and her needs.
She hid her true face again—one glance was enough for me to become her sycophant, no need to overdo it—and then explained the rest of her plan, which I considered extremely cunning.
My brother is the safecracker, she said, in her honeyed voice. He can turn off the waterfall, at least for a few instants. Your purpose—and it is a very noble purpose—is to collide into the waterfall and kill yourself. There’s a good chance there’ll be a spectacular explosion, which would be a nice touch. This will distract the angels just long enough for my brother and I to pass through.
Got it, I said. And so you’ll be in the mist near the car, waiting for your brother to open up the waterfall.
Exactly! I knew you’d understand.
I was pleased by her words. I wanted to befriend her, now even more so, and this seemed to be the only way. I wished, naturally, that I wouldn’t have to die to curry her favor. Barring mental disorder, or some kind of severe, unbearable depression, who wouldn’t? But I searched the catacombs of my brain over and over, and came across only dead ends where any objections should have been. So that decided things.
Okay, I said, I’m ready! Let’s do this.
She threw me the keys. The wind blew her wooly shirt up a little. I could see for a second some kind of armor above her knees. At this point my desire for her wasn’t sexual at all. It was pure and altruistic. This point should be clear.
Okay, she said. Why don’t you drive a little closer. Into the mist. I’ll walk alongside the car, so drive slowly.
Great! I said. I’d never been happier. I opened the car door, stepped inside, and started the Hummer up. I began to buckle my seat belt, but that seemed absurd, considering that the point was to kill myself. Safety wasn’t coming first. Her brother—although I wasn’t sure whether it was her brother at all—was still laying behind me, totally still. He didn’t say anything, but then I saw he had an orange handkerchief covering his mouth. It was almost like the handkerchief was gagging him.
Hey, I said behind me, taking the Hummer out of park and letting it crawl forward, on Lydia’s signal. I knew her name was Lydia all of the sudden. I didn’t know the water-guy’s name; otherwise I would have used it.
He still didn’t say anything. I wondered briefly if the handkerchief in his mouth was impeding his speech. But I was preoccupied with the driving, really.
You’ll be able to do your thing soon enough, I told him. And then you’ll be home free. Scotch free.
The man tried to say something, but it was muffled.
Did you say anything? Lydia asked me.
The man’s eyes widened and he shook his head. I didn’t know why it was important to him, but I called out to her: No, you must be hearing things.
I loved her! But the guy relaxed. He must have loved her, too, and wanted to please her; otherwise, he wouldn’t be in this position.
I want to say, at this point, that in no way did I believe I was a sycophant. I was merely doing what I thought was in my best interest, which happened to be in her best interest. Others might consider alignment of desire some kind of flattery. But it’s not the same. Even now, I’m not sure what to think about that time in the desert with Lydia and her brother. I had a customer come in about a week ago who was an angel. I didn’t think this was at all strange. Why was that? He wanted chaw and ethanol for his truck, but he didn’t seem to have a truck. He did, however, have a sword strapped to his belt. He wasn’t wearing his poncho and seemed even taller up close. And there was no winged gun in sight. The sign on my door said BANS GUNNED ON PREMISES, but the sign didn’t say anything about edged weapons. And what was a PREMISES, anyway? A group of more than one premise? Every word, in the presence of the angel, seemed to be utterly beautiful and yet completely falter as a means to communicate. He blinked at me, and he paid for the chaw, and I told him that we didn’t have any ethanol-substitute fuel, we weren’t really positioned in a progressive part of the country. He appeared mildly upset. It’s for my truck, it’s broken down just outside of town, he said. I pretended he wasn’t there. Finally, he gave up on me. Have a good day! I called out to him as he left. Then I noticed that there was moss in the ice cream sandwiches case, and that I should probably clean it out after I closed.
To call the moment dreamlike would have been inaccurate. My life was normal and real—and yet I did things for reasons I didn’t understand, all the time. Especially when I was younger.
None of this was on my mind in the desert with Lydia, though.
After a minute she tapped my window and I stopped. The mist from the waterfall was really bad for driving, or good for hiding, depending on how you looked at it. I turned on the windshield wipers, because I wanted to see as clearly as possible when I slammed into the waterfall and killed myself.
Look there, she said, pointing to the eastern edge of the border, in the direction of the checkpoint.
I don’t see anything, I said. I wished I had had my binoculars—for no other reason than to give them to Lydia.
An angel is walking toward us, she said. Giving us a once-over. This is perfect. When you drive, maybe it’s better if you aim for the angel.
It certainly seemed perfect, at that moment, and I didn’t want to delve too deeply into the workings of her well-reasoned plan, so I nodded.
She opened the back door. Get out, she said to her brother. I went back and forth in my mind on whether the two of them had blood relations. He held up his bound wrists, which I hadn’t seen before.
Well, untie him, she told me. And remove the gag.
I got out of the car and went over to untie him, as I was instructed. The water man looked at me through his glasses, and I could tell he was trying to make a decision, size me up. I tried to be as inscrutable as possible, for Lydia’s sake, as I loosened the handkerchief gagging him, and then the bands around his wrist. My hands sank into his wrists by just a little bit. I recoiled. The man stood up, sliding out of the car. I stepped back. Lydia’s brother seemed almost to blend into the mist around us, so that he had a kind of halo. I noticed the angel then, and I relished the thought of driving into him, even though he had noticed our little congress.
Ready? she asked.
Am I? I said. That was a joke, I wanted to add. She was silent, waiting for me to begin. I wanted, I guess, a little more gratitude from her, some recognition of my sacrifice. But then I figured I was just being selfish. I was about to step back into the Hummer when I saw Lydia and the water man turn away and start walking toward the wall. And then the water man jumped on Lydia’s back. It was stupid, I realized, to let his arms free. I should have known better, and felt horribly guilty. Even though Lydia gave the orders, I was to blame. I’m sure she felt utterly confident about her strength and his compliance.
But as he was trying to strangle her, I sat there beside the car in deep thought—just what was it about her that made me so attendant to her every whim? I thought about helping her right away, I really did. She was, however, handling him rather easily. She was, after all, Lydia.
When I was small and inchoate, a mere child, I wandered the annexed, grim factories of my youth, looking for work. I always kept my head down and sought out gross, thoughtless errands. Kind of like cleaning the grease trap. I worked in quite a few automobile factories, actually—delivering sandwiches and juices on catwalks twenty stories above the assembly lines for the snipers. Those grimy mercenaries joked about pushing me off—my bones being smelted into the workings of an Impala chassis—but I took their coins and continued on my way. In spite of the ruthless teasing, I didn’t feel powerless.
; Maybe I should have.
Then I snapped out of my state—Lydia was in trouble! Forget my lousy childhood! I stepped out of the car and pulled out my gun. Neither of them knew I had it. I’d forgotten that I had it, that I’d slipped it into my pocket as we were leaving my car. I really had forgotten. It was from my back seat, a snub-nosed pistol, but it could still kill. I didn’t even give a warning. I aimed at the water man’s head and fired.
The bullet passed through him and into Lydia’s head.
After she slumped to the ground, I realized that my life was a rabbit hole looking for a rabbit. The man made out of water looked at Lydia’s body, looked at me, and then started walking.
Hey! I called out behind him, thinking there’d be some kind of camaraderie or bonding moment between us. I had, after all, freed him, albeit at her orders. But he kept walking.
I looked at Lydia’s body, then the Hummer, then the man who I swore was sweating away and diminishing in the hot twilight. I didn’t want to stare at Lydia too much, just in case I accidentally uncovered her true face again. But I did see, through her soaked shirt, that her armor was mangled and shrunken. She must not have anticipated its failure. Was it the heat? Or the water? Her brother might have concocted a scheme to free himself during their entire journey. Or, who knew, maybe it was a desperate, blind chance that he took—to prove, once and for all, that he wasn’t her sycophant, as I was.
He started sprinting toward the border. The angel moving toward us had drawn his gun, and the gun’s wings unfurled.
I kept following the water man. Soon the mist completely enveloped us. I lost his trail, but I assumed the angel and gun following us had as well. Unable to see far, I stumbled around for quite a while, devoid of direction. I thought about Lydia’s face—both of her faces actually—and wondered what I’d seen in them, what I’d hoped to accomplish by helping her out of a jam. I heard hissing gunshots here and there and I was afraid. The roar of the waterfall was deafening. I was afraid of getting caught in the waterfall, getting sucked down into whatever wet hell was below the earth’s barren surface.
At some point when it was starting to get dark in earnest, I must have reached the border itself. Close enough to touch. I actually bumped into it, and quickly stepped back. I didn’t die! The waterfall was cold and squishy and felt, I don’t know, like I was touching an idea. I was pretty sure I was going to die there, that there was zero chance of home, or even my stupid pawn shop job.
Then I felt someone stroking my hair. No one was behind me who I could see. Then it stopped. For a second—a second—the waters parted in a sliver of a crevice. There was a humming sound. On the other side, I could see strange beings, with imprecise, blurry features, sitting on a hill, intently listening to music I could not hear on account of the humming, coming from instruments I couldn’t see. The hills were shot with green so bright that my eyes were slain. But I couldn’t stop looking. It was like looking into Lydia’s actual face again, except it didn’t bother me at all. There were tall grasses and thickets, and paradise’s blackbirds soaring above them, between silver clouds—
Then the crevice closed. It was stupid not to jump through.
But, you know, I’m not sure that I didn’t. I mean, I walked back to my Civic. I did. The Civic was there. The angel and gun were poring over the Hummer, but paid me no mind. I was miniscule compared to the other entities at work. The watery man was nowhere to be found. I was soaked and also scared. I drove back to my trailer and drank for a few days, thinking that would fix things.
And then, I went back to work. Although things were different. And still are different. Mostly little things. Mops don’t work particularly well inside the store; they’re always soaked. Mist comes into the shop at odd times, making the guns unusable. We’ve stopped selling them. My boss doesn’t mind since business is better than ever. Tons of cars. A lot of people on horseback have shown up recently, so we have opened a livery next to the gas pumps. My boss gave me a raise, on account of my “valuable, noble service.” I moved out of the trailer on the edge of town and into an apartment complex.
I’m looking for a confidant, someone to follow, but no one has shown up at the store like that.
The angels and their guns are no longer fearsome to me. Several angels live in my apartment complex. They smoke a lot.
I often wonder about this—their dwelling amongst mere mortals—and I think I’ve finally figured it out. The angels are mere weapons—the sycophants, if you will—and the winged guns call the shots. The winged guns reproduce, follow or break customs of society, fall in love. They don’t live in apartment complexes like the angels, but rather in burrows deep underneath the earth. The guns travel great distances through underground, pneumatic tubes. I had always thought these were gopher holes in the desert, but obviously I was wrong.
And so, everything that happened with Lydia makes perfect sense to me now. If you’re not a gun, then you’re an angel. This includes me. Lydia was probably a gun. It doesn’t matter if you’re made of water or not, or flesh and blood, or . . . well, whatever angels are made of. Angels are meant to do things—guard borders, build cars, safecrack waterfalls, operate cash registers. The guns, on the other hand, do what they love. They love the waterfall, and love to control it, to control who comes through.
Even now I’m not sure whose side I’m on. I only want to do the right thing, to live with what the world will give me. The question is, which world? Did I cross? That green hillside of music that I saw for just a few seconds—is it impossibly close or impossibly far away?
I want to know.
Dancing in a House
We want to go dancing, so we approach a nice Cape Cod. The house has indigo aluminum siding and an imitation oak door with a gargoyle knocker. The gargoyle is sticking out its tongue. It’s nice. Once we’re inside we see that the living room has plenty of floor space for what we are going to do. The floors are hardwood, a rich dark cherry, and the rugs are only throws, so it doesn’t take any time at all to move them out of the way.
The beauty is, none of us have to ever bring our own stereo. It’s a perk that comes with most houses: the voice of a house. We do however bring our own knapsack of CDs, because you can never trust peoples’ tastes. The stereo is one of those upper middle class jobs—large but not ostentatious. There are a few boring family pictures on the wall, cluttering the future path of the sound, as well as a magazine rack, a coffee table—easily disposed of. After that happens, * goes to the kitchen to make sandwiches and ** warms up the stereo. I root through the backpack to begin things.
Enjoyment of music depends a lot—maybe entirely—on environmental conditions. Because this is a clean house, and because twilight creeps through the bay windows like ivy, I decide we should dance to Steely Dan. We all have our own tastes, and that’s fine, but we all really like Steely Dan. The thing we like about Dan most is how the Eagles sing about him in ______. It’s during the part when the Eagles are talking about steely knives being unable to kill animals. A heartbreaking moment in code, especially if you’ve danced to Steely Dan lots of times in houses, listening to dogs barking in the basement.
Everything is running smoothly, when just as * comes back from the kitchen with a plate full of peanut butter sandwiches, and ** has cued up ______, someone comes down the stairs. It’s a girl, still pretty young. She must have been sleeping because she’s rubbing her eyes. Her red hair is in a scrunchie, and she’s wearing the sweatshirt of this band I’d never heard of. I reason that maybe she’s woken from a nightmare, so seeing us in her house’s living room might not be all that bad. Who knows, maybe it’s an improvement.
The thing is, she looks exactly like my mother did at that age.
I’m about to say something to her when ***, who’s been really quiet until now, just kind of skulking by the door, starts screaming at her that she’s ruining everything, and why doesn
’t she just die. *** has always been a little bit unhinged, but I have to admit that at that moment I couldn’t have agreed with him more, except maybe the dying part. I don’t want anyone to die, especially when there’s dancing about to start. But it’s hard to tell that to *** when he gets going. It’s hard to stop. Everything else more or less freezes. We’re not used to interruptions once we’re in a house. **’s hand hovers over the play button, and * is looking for a place to set down the sandwiches, as if the plate is hot.
The girl takes one good look at us and runs back up the stairs. I grab a sandwich and stand at the foot of those stairs, telling *** as he’s running up to be cautious, that he shouldn’t do anything he’d regret later. *** does a good job of ignoring me. Doors slam above us on the second floor. They open, they shut. I don’t even hear ***’s heavy breathing anymore.
** starts the Steely Dan anyway, but it’s not right. The power chords of _____ jangle instead of soothe, and there’s no way for the music to enter me. It’s never been less right, and I clench my head in my hands and shout to ** to turn the music off, that the moment’s over, and if we’re not lucky and careful we might never dance again.
I take the Polaroid of my mother out of my back pocket. I don’t know who took it; I just kind of found it at the foot of my bed one day. The picture depicts my mother at a Laker Girl tryout, dancing in the empty Forum, eyes wide, doused in sweat and glitter, in yellow and purple stretch pants. It’s the only picture I have of her where she’s smiling. She didn’t make the final cut.
* throws the platter of sandwiches to the hardwood. I put the picture away. Peanut butter splotches the floor, ruining it. I don’t blame him. * couldn’t have done anything else, and there isn’t going to be any dancing anyway. I put my hand on his shoulder and head up the stairs. ** starts crying below me, but then his voice is very small as I notice other voices above me. Plush blue carpeting at the top of the stairs. I take off my shoes. I hear them in the bathroom, talking. But ***’s voice is much louder than hers. I want more than anything for the girl to be dancing with us, though I should have tried to ensure that when I had the chance to do something about it. Instead, I went along thinking that my silence was a lot more important than her well-being. Pain is not a form of dancing, though many confuse the two, no matter what type of thrashing occurs.