by Skyler White
“I can’t really explain that.”
“Are you who brought me here?”
“No.”
“But you know who did.” Dominic studied the man’s serene face.
“It doesn’t matter. She’s gone.”
“There’s an awful lot you’re not saying.”
The old man smiled. “And an awful lot I could. But here’s a simple and conventional bit of wisdom for you. You’ve kept a journal as long as I’ve known you, and that’s a long time. I’ve brought it from your room. Read through it. Once you’re done, if you have questions, I’ll be willing to say more. But let’s get you back to your bed. You look about to slide out of that chair.”
Too weak to nod more than once, Dominic allowed himself to be steered back to bed by the old man’s deceptively powerful hands, and was asleep before he had been fully lifted in.
———
Dominic closed the red leather diary and put it back into the bag that Dysart had bought to replace his bloodstained one. His laptop, likewise soaked, was with Trinity’s computer experts for data recovery. Dominic stayed standing, enjoying the increasing strength of his back and legs. He braced a hand on either side of the window and flexed his arms and chest.
“The doctors say you’re much improved,” commented Dysart from the doorway.
Dominic pulled his laptop bag off the chair and gestured to the professor, who took the proffered seat.
Dominic paced. “I feel great, but I can’t convince them to let me out for a jog.”
Dysart chuckled. “It’s still too soon. But you’re sounding like yourself again, D—impatient as ever.”
“Well, you would know that better than I. It’s weird. You have memories of me and I have—not only none of you—but not even any of me. You have more of me than I do.”
“Your memory may still come back, D. We haven’t crossed the seventy-two-hour threshold yet.”
“But we’re getting pretty damn close, aren’t we?” Dominic prowled the space between the bed and chairs. “When I was first waking up, you said you thought I might have been trying to forget something.”
“I don’t think your amnesia is psychosomatic, D.”
“I know, but I think you might have been right. My landlord brought me a diary he found in my room. It’s clear I kept most of my notes on my laptop, but there are hints. I talk about an experiment I want to conduct. What if I can’t remember anything now because what I tried worked? I think the man I was wouldn’t want his memory back. I think he—I mean I—would have chosen amnesia over memory.”
“I don’t know, D. I suppose it’s possible. But we haven’t exhausted your medical options. I’d still like to see what some high-dose intravenous thiamine might do. Would you take my recommendation, even over your doctor’s? He disagrees.”
“I trust you, but you’re not the only person from before my accident to tell me I wouldn’t want to get well.”
“Who else has been visiting you?” Dysart’s rheumy eyes narrowed.
“Nobody I know.”
The doctor flashed brown teeth at Dominic. “But of course, you don’t know me either, do you?”
“No. So, it’s hard to know who to trust.”
“Trust yourself.”
“My present self or my prior self? Hell, can a man even have a self without a memory? I want my memories back to feel whole again, but everything I know about my whole self says I wanted to be rid of my memories. I don’t know what to do, and time is running out.” Dominic dropped wearily into the chair across from Dysart.
“You may not remember yourself, but I know you well enough to know that nothing I—or anyone else—can say will sway you. You’ve always been one to make up your own mind.” The old man heaved himself to standing and patted Dominic’s shoulder.
“You don’t have to go,” Dominic said.
“I also know you well enough to know when you’re done talking. You’ll think it through and make your decision. Get some sleep, son. I’ll be back in the morning. Visiting hours are about over anyway. I’ll go before they throw me out again.”
Dominic nodded, looking out the hospital window at the river. By this time tomorrow, if he didn’t do anything, his memory would be gone. Perhaps he should just let it go.
———
Alyx is right. Getting what you want is not the death of desire any more than not getting it is. I beat my practiced wings hard through the hotel lobby’s vast spiraling space, up through the glass dome I broke four days ago taking Dominic to Dublin.
Alyx didn’t want to die. He just couldn’t figure out how to live. All his talent went into his voice. He had none left for living, or for happiness. I wish I could have helped him, but what can the Undead offer the living? I have no talent for happiness myself. Alyx, at least, had his suffering to call his own. Everything I have, I’ve stolen.
I’m halfway to Dublin before I know where I’m going. I will track down Gaehod tomorrow, but I want to see Dominic again now. Even his inert body would be better than this. I fly across the black country, over the cars and homes bleeding their light into a hungry dark that swallows even the brightest beams in time.
I find him standing in a new hospital room five floors above the ICU where I last saw him. He looks wonderful. Healthy and powerful again, in pajamas someone else has bought for him. He looks out the safety glass into the night. He cannot see me in it.
I wait until he sleeps. Then I climb into the metal-railed bed to rest my timeless body against his. He is warm and human under their white blankets, and he smells of mouthwash and dry ovens. I gaze into the thin, folded flesh of his flickering eyelids and kiss his slack mouth. He makes a low groan and turns his copper head away from me. I lift a sleep-heavy arm with its fine spray of freckles and tuck my invisible body against him. It is easier to feel him in imagination than to touch his senseless body beside me. I close my eyes and conjure him standing in the brilliant, gas- lit, mirrored ballroom. His lips are parted in my memory, as they are now, but I see them as they were then, open against a hunger he wars with himself to satisfy. I could stay like this forever, immortal and invisible, making love to him in vision, but he’s a restless sleeper.
“He moves like that, in his sleep, because it hurts him.”
It is Gaehod’s voice.
“You can see it on the monitors—the spike in heart rate, elevated body temp. And yet he fights to stay asleep.”
My winged back is to the door. I whisper his name, but Gaehod doesn’t reply. Can he hear me? Or see me? Is he right about Dominic? I touch his unshaven cheek with my invisible fingertips. He moans.
“You’re hurting him, Olivia.”
I leap to face him, full of rage. Standing before him, slight man that he is, my wings outspread, I am taller, stronger, invisible, immortal, and divine. But he can’t see me, and even if he could, I wouldn’t frighten him into telling me otherwise.
“You carried him here, didn’t you?”
Yes.
“I wonder if it occurred to you when you did, or when you came back tonight, that it would cost us the hotel?”
What? I’m psycasting to him, but I don’t know if he can hear me. He pauses between sentences, but he may be just thinking of what to say next and not listening to me at all.
“That was the flip side of the wager, my beautiful daughter. Dominic would kiss you in the garden, or you would come here with him. Myth lost, my child. I’m closing down the old home.”
“No! You can’t do that,” I shout, forgetting he can’t hear me. “How will he find me the next time? Where will I go to wait?” The slow, steady bleeps of Dominic’s monitors are the only thing in the air between us. Sleeping easily now, without me, his strong chest moves in rhythm with life. I fold my wings around my still naked body and push a piece of hair back from his handsome face. It leaves an angry red wheal where my finger brushed the skin of his brow, but he does not wince.
“You saved his life, bringing him here, Olivia. Just as h
e saved yours. Only a symbolic gesture could redeem an angel. Only modern medicine can save a doctor. What we believe in heals us.”
But what good is my redemption to me if I can no longer touch him?
“Once, you sought a loophole. You believed that if a mortal could both see and love you, it would allow you to return home, escape the world of the living. Now, full angel again, you want to remain material. You’re the reason he came back, I think, although I’m sure the doctors would disagree. They feel quite heroic, having saved him.”
What do you mean?
“Dominic embraced the empty space, my dear. He put his arms around the hole. In loving something he could not have, he met the pain that let him know he was alive. It was that pain that woke him.”
Did he ask for me?
“He woke up here. And you, my precious child, are going to have to come down and live in the real world now, if you want to be with him.”
That’s impossible. I wouldn’t even know how. And where? There’s no hotel left. No place for me.
“Dominic’s memories are gone.”
He doesn’t remember me!
“He’s found, at least, a way out of the suffering his curse has caused him, lifetime after lifetime. You should be happy for him.”
How can I be happy?
“You should be happy for yourself as well. You both attained what you came home to find. Dominic, his past forgotten, dwells in a new world that is completely explicable. Any abnormalities in memory he may experience going forward are attributable to a previous severe head trauma. Everything he has experienced since waking makes sense. And you, no longer shaped by the desire of others, live in an abstract realm where your every desire is gratified.”
I was happier with the wanting than the having.
“You always held yourself aloof from life anyway, my darling…”
It never seemed real to me! I could not feel. It was a temporary place of punishment.
“And now you are beyond it.”
I want to come back.
Gaehod walks past me to Dominic’s bed and stands over him, gazing tenderly down at the sleeping man. I think everyone must have been in love with Dominic—Alyx, Gaehod, me. Are they as oblivious to my love for him as I have been to theirs?
Look up if you can hear me, I psycast to him, but Gaehod doesn’t glance away from Dominic’s still face. I shout his name, but I know he cannot hear me.
I have longed for this—total freedom from the needs of others, and the constant gnawing of their eyes, but now, without them, I feel like the separated pieces of me are coming apart. I squeeze my eyes closed against the tears.
———
Gaehod’s study is dark and still, lifeless as my crypt. The constant fire he keeps on the low grate has burned out. Even the flames of Hell will die when we don’t feed them. I look around the desolate room. Without Gaehod’s pottering presence to tend them, the stacks of papers and books just look untidy. The room is haunted by him, his touch, his ordering on everything that, without him, dissolves into meaninglessness and chaos.
———
Sylvia stands over Ophelia in the Quarry lounge. Ophelia’s hands are bound. She is howling, and her flailing whips the ropes loose to fly around her like fantastic garlands, which Vivian silently captures and reties. Ophelia’s struggles rock the antique armchair to which they’ve lashed her delicate frame, and the clatter and roll of ball bearings and cogs make a mechanical hailstorm beneath her shriek. Alyx’s only slightly larger body, gaunt and ungainly in its brokenness, lies on one of the modular, backless sofas, empty and meaningless as Gaehod’s office.
“You had no right to take his life,” Vivian accuses our baby sister.
“That right is not yours to bestow and take away,” Ophelia snarls back.
“Enough!” Sylvia cries. “Carry her to her tomb and be done with it!”
“You have not that right either!” Ophelia chokes on rage and hysteria, hurling her bound body violently between the ornate arms of the carved chair. I am standing behind her, and although all my raging sisters turn their eyes in my direction, they cannot see me.
“We have the right to decide who is too broken to dwell among us.” Vivian’s voice is bright ice. “And you cannot fight us and win. So you must submit to judgment.”
Even for angels, it devolves to brute force.
“We find you guilty of murder—”
“Hypocrites!” Ophelia shouts. “We are all vampires!”
“—murder most foul.”
“You know what we are, but not what we may be. Odin and Jesus on trees! See how the branches are breaking…” Ophelia’s voice trails into a gurgling wail.
“She’s insane!” Sylvia barks. “We can’t try her like this.”
“Bullshit.” Vivian grips our keening sister by the jaw and sniffs her lips. “She’s stoned on Alyx. I used to hit that fucker when I wanted a buzz. It wouldn’t take much. And she was weak to begin with. And drained him. Put Ophelia in her crypt. Let her fade away. She’ll never be any saner.”
My sisters nod. “Sugar, sugar, sugar don’t you laugh. Driving is flying and the highway’s my whore.” Ophelia launches into song, writhing against the ropes that hold her. “Sugar, sugar, sugar take my breath. Your kisses are poison and I want to drink more.”
I will be a ministering angel, while she lies howling. I close my eyes to bless her.
———
The moist night air at the empty abbey insinuates its chill through my self-less self in a way even the cold of the grave could not. The spectral cows don’t see me, but unnerve me more than Gaehod’s empty office or Alyx’s corpse. My avenging sisters are carrying Ophelia to her grappling grave.
Above me, the Irish night seems endlessly heavier than it did when I walked with Dominic here. I circle the ruined building, trying to locate the glassless window he looked through to see a star as home, but the stones blend with the grass, and the walls with the night, and I’m afraid to walk along the boundary fence because of the cows. I must inhabit all this, partake of this, if I hope to love him.
It could destroy me.
I climb the bell tower’s spiraling stairs to stand at the peak of the roofless church. It cannot hold me. How can anything?
I flex my wings. They stretch like a fighter’s arms from the taut center of my back. Spread, they are so formed for flight that the light breeze tugs me into it. I lean my naked breasts into the air and raise my chin, my hollow throat stretched against the emptiness. My fingertips curl around the soft flesh of wing ridges, the muscles of my arm wrapping upward to lend the strength of bicep and belly, forearm and chest to the span of my extending wings.
I let slip. They beat. I am flying.
Flight is not a glide, but the muscular swim of a fluid body through living air. My every sinew and thought is lost to the tides of space riding me up and down, driving ascent and gravity, pulling and pushing me and the void I fly across. I leave Earth behind me. I am mastery, pure and potent. I am desire and denial. I am inner contradiction. I own my entire soul.
The Atlantic is cold and distant, swollen like a headache, folding wave on icy wave under me. I flew here once before, cocooned in metal, beside a prattling Persephone, winging our way home to Hell. Now I will make the unfathomable my own, and be forever both buoyed and anchored by its breaking within me.
I pike my body, pull tight my wings around me, and make a comet of my cloud-light flight.
I plummet.
My body rattles madly. I cannot hold my wings. I am knocked backwards, see the moon-drenched sky receding, then thrown over again, wings torn back, torn apart, ripped from me. Blood flies into the space behind. Air drives into my lungs so fast it drowns me. Falling out of control, out of grace—I am free. Falling.
12
VERTIGO
Dominic threw the thin hospital blankets from his restless body in disgust, and jumped out of bed. He shook himself, touched a sore place on his forehead, and bounced on the
balls of his feet. If his memory didn’t start coming back today, it was likely to stay gone.
He was sick of pajamas. He was tired of sleep, of doctors, of the machinery of medicine. He plucked the irritating pulse oximeter from his hand and unpeeled the sticky electrode tabs from his chest with fingers that seemed to retain more memory than his mind. He spread his hands and looked at them. They were strong, but not callused, skilled. He had been a doctor. Dysart had told him so. And an athlete. He didn’t need any confirmation of that beyond his body’s indignation at his current lack of activity. He wanted to run.
“Dr. O’Shaughnessy?” His pretty, black-haired nurse poked her sharp face into the room.
“Good morning, Clare. How does a man get a pair of running shoes in this place?”
“Did you disable your pulse ox, Dr. O’Shaughnessy?” It was remarkable to Dominic how stern the Irish young could be. He grinned at the beaky girl and sat down on the edge of his knotted bed.
“Yes. Sorry, Clare.”
“Were you having the bad dreams again?” Her brow constricted in concern.
Dominic nodded. The past two days had been a restless parade of visits and visitors. Specialists, nurses, scans, tests, and their incomprehensible results were interrupted only by the necessity of rehashing it all with Dysart during visiting hours. When he slept, his mind tangled without context to make sense of it all.
“Your mum phoned from the airport. She’s on the ground in Dublin and should be here in another hour.”
“Could I please get some clothes before then?”
“She’s your mother.”
“Please?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you.”
Clare’s slender, tapered fingers re-clipped the monitor and pushed Dominic back toward the stack of pillows on his bed.
“Maybe your landlord can help. He’s so lovely. Came by t’other day. Maybe he could bring you some of your things.” She regarded the discarded EEG pads and shrugged.