by Chloe Garner
Samantha spent the ten-minute drive back to the rental watching the back of Sam’s head. She wished she knew what he was thinking. They hadn’t spoken directly to each other about anything of consequence in several days. Just in the last day, he had taken to leaving the room when she entered. Worse, she had been doing the same thing. The odor he carried had changed from wet rot to bad meat, and the toxicity of it made her head swim. She was dying to open a window, but she knew he would know that he was the reason she had done it. He was showing symptoms of end-game soulburn, and she knew that she was, as well. They were all three of them just one significant mistake away from a cage match brawl.
“I’m going to e-mail Simon and see what he can find out about our friend Larry. You two play nice,” Jason said, getting out of the car.
“How do you feel?” she asked after a moment. He turned slowly and looked back at her, blinking as he considered.
“It’s almost over,” he said. “I’m ready for it to be over.”
“I need you to fight for it,” Samantha said softly, gagging to be out of the car and away. “You have to fight for your life.”
“Are you?” he asked blandly.
“Yes. You, too? Seriously? I’m doing everything I can think of to save you. Everything.” She kicked his seat hard. “You can’t give up on me.”
“What difference does it make if I fight or not? You’ve made it clear that you’re the only one who can save my life. I can’t do anything.”
“That’s the soulburn. Hopelessness then paranoia. You have to fight it. It could buy you a day.”
“Oh, good, a whole ‘nother day of this,” he said, swinging his head to look at her like a broken beast of burden. “Maybe it’s time to just call it what it is.”
“I’m not giving up yet.” She kicked his seat again, anger flaring. “I won’t stand for you giving up, either.”
He opened his car door.
“Stop me.”
<><><>
Jason sat in his room waiting for Simon to e-mail back. Samantha had made dinner, the same as she had every night that they’d been staying at the rental - always excellent, though that was getting to be less fun as time went on - and then he had gone to hide in his room, same as every night, while she tried that night’s attempt to fix Sam. At first, he had sat on the edge of his bed, waiting for them to come tell him that it had worked, but now he just stared dully at the computer. Tonight would be the same as last night and the night before that. Someone knocked on his door and he went to open it, finding Samantha. She shook her head.
“Can I come in?”
He stepped aside.
“I’m sorry I barked at you today,” he said. “I know you’re doing your best.”
“We all have short fuses right now,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about some other stuff you said. Do you trust me?”
“You ask that more than anyone else I’ve ever known.”
“Do you?”
He paused, deciding it merited real consideration.
“Yes. I trust you.”
“There’s something I want to show you. I have no idea if this is going to work or not so… don’t make fun of me.”
“You know I can’t promise that.”
She looked at him with nervous eyes, then walked over to him and wrapped her arms around his chest.
That wasn’t what he had been expecting, but he held her anyway. Hard to argue with that. She was warm.
“Hold me like I’m the only one you’ve ever wanted to hold, and you never want to let go,” she said, looking up at him. “Can you imagine that?”
She shifted first one arm and then the other around his neck and he closed his eyes, first awkwardly, then more comfortably settling against her. He felt a little exposed, but his curiosity was stronger than the instinct to get distance. He settled his chin down against her shoulder and felt her sigh. She turned her head to find his mouth and kissed him, gently. The goodnight-no-you’re-not-coming-into-my-apartment kiss. He pulled his head away from her and raised an eyebrow.
“Trust,” she said. “I do have a point, here.”
Ignoring the lob, he let her kiss him again. He tightened his arms around her, the quiet intimacy of the moment foreign, but not as unpleasant as he would have believed, when she pulled away. He opened his eyes and looked at her cross-eyed, and realized she hadn’t moved. Weird. She kissed him again, and he felt her pull away again, but paid better attention to realize that she hadn’t physically moved at all. He settled her deeper against his chest, kissing her harder. He hadn’t kissed a woman since before she had come back. She pulled her head away and he muttered an apology and opened his eyes to find her mouth again. Then frowned. She pushed him away with the palms of her hands and stepped away from him, grinning up at the sky.
“I can’t believe that worked,” she said, then looked at him. “You have a lot of baggage.”
He looked around.
“Where are we?”
“Paradise,” she said, turning and walking away. “At least, my corner of it.”
He scratched his scalp. He was standing on a stretching, grassy hillside overlooking an ancient tree, at whose foot lay a single, massive, round granite stone buried in the turf and a deep blue pond. To his right, following a small stream back to the waterfall that fed it, were high, red limestone cliffs, and to his left, where the stream left the pond and meandered down through increasingly tall, green grass, there was an orchard of thick, tended trees that cast shadows to near, but not complete darkness. She was watching him.
“What are you wearing?” he asked. She spread her arms and looked down at the dress. White, flowing linen, simply cut.
“It’s how I’m happy,” she said, then jerked her head at him. He looked down at his own clothes, cut from the same fabric. Loose, comfortable pants and a shirt slit to mid-chest with linen strips for laces.
“You pick this?” he asked. She grinned.
“No. You did.”
“Never in a million years,” he said, looking down again. Flared sleeves. He was wearing flared sleeves. She laughed. He looked at her again.
“You’re different,” he said. She tossed her hair. Yup, that was it. It was thick, and brown again, and hung in waves down to the middle of her back.
“It’s my indulgence,” she said. “This is how I think my hair looks, when I’m not looking at it.”
“Your eyes,” he said, walking closer to look at them. He didn’t see them in natural light much - ever - but he was pretty sure that they were a brighter blue now than he had ever seen them before. He looked around again. Everything was the wrong colors. The grass was unbelievably green, the trees had thick, dark green foliage, the red limestone was strikingly red against a perfect, cloudless blue sky, which reflected off of the pool in equally perfect blue. He shook his head.
“This isn’t real.”
“Depends on how you mean real,” she said. “Strictly speaking, we’re in my head. But it exists, all the same. We changed planes.”
He looked up.
“The sky is too perfect,” he said. She frowned up, following his gaze.
“Would you prefer clouds?”
White, happy clouds rolled in fast-forward across the sky, settling into a pace of drifty cotton blown by a breeze.
“Is this an acid trip? Am I high?”
“No,” she said, taking his hand. “Walk with me.”
“Tell me one more time what this place is,” he said. She led him to a small peak in the ground and turned to look down over the valley.
“This is my refuge. I’ve had it in my head since I was a child. Back then, it looked like this.” The scenery changed, the colors turning crayon-esque and the details vanishing. Instead of a hillside that rolled into blue nothing in the distance, it was simply the top of a hill with white behind it.” The large tree had a round gray stone under it, and the water had swirl patterns to make sure that it was clearly water. “Around high school, it had matured to this,�
�� she said, and some of the air picked up again. The setting looked more like a post card - staged, but real enough. The orchard was black with shadow. “Then, when I died, it turned into a real place. I spent a lot of time here.” It sprung back into surreal life, air blowing through now-individual grass blades, and the pool of water shimmering and rippling as a fish broke the surface after a fly. He realized that she was still holding his hand, but when he looked down at her, the bliss in her expression told him that, whether she remembered or not, she didn’t mind. She looked at him with those unreal blue eyes and smiled.
“What do you think?”
“Sam would like it here.”
She nodded.
“They’ve promised that I’ll get some time with him here, after he dies,” she said.
“They?” Jason asked. She nodded her head up the hillside behind them, and he turned, nearly falling in shock to find a short, round little man standing at the highest crest of the hill, sunning himself.
“Him and O’na Anu’dd,” she said.
“Who is that?” he asked.
“God,” she said simply. “It used to be a character in a story, but when I died, God took the form and breathed life into this place. You can talk to him, if you want.”
“Creepy,” Jason said.
“It’s just a form of prayer,” she told him. “He exists, he knows you, he cares, and he listens. Sometimes, he talks. More, if you stop to listen. Like a normal conversation.”
“So, you know that Sam is going to die,” he said, looking around the place with new eyes. Sam would be happy here, and he wouldn’t be alone. It wasn’t terrible, as happy endings went.
“Someday,” she said. “And I’ll die someday. There is no promise of when, or what order. Nor that either of us get to stay.” She looked up at him again. “This is where I came to say goodbye to Arthur.” She jerked her head toward the far hillside. “Over there. On the far side of that hillside is the rest of Paradise, but I’m not allowed to go yet. You can walk as far as you want, it always feels like you’re headed toward the top of the hill. You can get just out of sight of the valley and no further. That’s where O’na Anu’dd comes from.” She grinned. “You should at least meet him, while you’re here. So that you can remember what he looks like, this time.”
She pulled him down the hillside and hopped from rock to rock in the stream to cross, her bare feet slapping on the wet stones, then up the far hill.
“Anu’dd,” she called. “O’na Anu’dd.”
A blond head appeared over the crest of the hill and she laughed, running to greet him without Jason. Their hug was so long and so close that Jason felt like he should have looked away. She turned and led the tall, fit man across the grass to greet Jason. The wings that had folded almost completely around Samantha when they had embraced now stretched out as far as they could go, sunshine lighting the white feathers to radiance.
“He should not be here,” the angel said. “He should not know.”
“I asked permission,” Samantha said. “He said that it was my decision.” She looked at Jason and nodded. “That means it isn’t wrong. It could be a mistake, but it isn’t wrong.” As if that explained something important. She turned back to the angel, stepping away from him to split the distance between the golden-haired man and Jason. “You dishonor my friend. O’na Anu’dd, this is Jason. Twin brother of my bonded one, and frequent pillar of strength. Jason, this is O’na Anu’dd, my friend. He and I spent many years together, and I know his heart. No sentience in existence, save God himself, loves life more.”
The angel’s wings retracted behind his back and he bowed.
“Greetings to the friend of my greatest friend,” he said. Jason glanced at Samantha, then offered his hand to the angel. The man shook it warmly, then turned to Samantha and bowed.
“Forgive my brevity, but I have an appointment.”
She nodded.
“Of course.”
She flung herself into his arms and laughed.
“It was so good to see you,” she said as the angel hugged her again, then he spread his wings and flapped them once, pushing his feet only just clear of the grass and gliding up and over the hillside, quickly vanishing over the far side. Jason turned and looked over the valley again.
“I thought you didn’t like light,” he said, touching his temple. “No sunglasses.”
She laughed and threw her head back at the sky.
“Look up, Jason. There’s no sun. I spent eighty-five years in perfect light. The sun is gaudy and awful, by comparison. It hurts my eyes.”
He looked down and realized that he cast no shadow.
“Even indoors, it’s lit like this. I like the shade of the grove, so I keep it, but it doesn’t have to be there.”
The shade in the orchard lifted so that the grass, where it was visible through the trees, was just as green as that on the hillside.
“You control this place?”
“It’s in my head.”
“There’s an angel and God in your head.”
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m in your head?” he asked. She laughed again.
“I said it’s complicated.”
She took his hand and they headed back down the hillside.
“Why did he say I shouldn’t know?” Jason asked. She pressed her lips together, eyes still reveling in the view.
“Faith is belief without proof, so it has two enemies: doubt, and direct knowledge.” She paused and slipped her hand out of his, taking a step back.
“Sam, when he’s being Sam, has faith. It’s not for me to tell him what to have faith in - if I told him, it wouldn’t be faith anymore. I hope, at the end of days, he is right, but he has faith. I have knowledge. Direct, experiential knowledge. I don’t know what to have faith in, because I know.” She sighed and looked at the squat little man standing across the valley from them. “And I worry.” Her eyes came back to Jason and she squinted. “You, on the other hand, feel like you are slipping off to the point that doubt is your faith. That’s why I brought you. God is. Good is. This place… It’s peaceful. It’s happy. It’s real. I could spend the rest of eternity here, just let my body on the earth plane starve and die, but there are things going on there that matter. I need to go be there, because I can make decisions that make differences. You and I, we save people’s lives. That’s important. And I want to be happy. It isn’t some masochistic thing that I’m just going to go suffer through. But it isn’t all there is.” She spread her arms and twirled on her toes in the grass, her dress floating and twirling around her calves. “Don’t give up. There’s more going on than you know about, and I believe that you’re a part of it.”
Jason looked around them again and she reclaimed his hand, beginning the walk back down to the stream.
“This is nice and all, but… I think I’d rather have the seventy-two virgins.”
She elbowed him in the side. Jason looked up at the little figure on the hillside and pulled his lips to one side.
“Is he going to be mad?” he asked.
“Same here as anywhere else,” Samantha said. “Do you want to stay, or should I cross you back?”
“You come here a lot?” he asked. She nodded.
“All the time. I have a hard time crossing in the middle of a fight, and that would be dumb, anyway, but I can come any other time I want to. I come here to think.”
They approached the stream again, and he turned to walk down it, his feet in the cool water. She followed, then climbed up the bank to go sit on the granite stone under the tree.
“I think this place would drive me crazy,” he said. She shrugged, tossing her hair back and looking up at the branches of the tree.
“It’s not for you,” she said.
“It is nice, though.” He looked over his shoulder. “You said I could talk to him?”
“As long as you want. And you don’t have to tell me anything about it, if you do. What you say is between the two of you.”
Jason turned and looked up the hillside. The man looked down at him and smiled, the weather-tanned skin of his face bunching up into a pile of wrinkles.
“Maybe another time,” he said. She nodded.
“Stay or go?” she asked. He looked around one last time.
“Go.” He wanted to be someplace where he knew where he was, and he knew what was going on. Easy as it felt to be here, he didn’t feel like he belonged. She nodded and stood, hopping off of the rock and walking over to him.
“So, on the other side, we’ll have been gone a tiny fraction of a second, same as when you crossed to Hell. And you’re kissing me. I can cross you from here, just like this, but the transition is going to be really weird.”
“Are you asking me to kiss you?” Jason asked. She tipped her head, smiling.
“Offering,” she said. He stepped forward and put his hand behind her head, then frowned.
“I feel weird with him watching,” he said. She looked at him with playful innocence.
“You’re fooling yourself, if you think he isn’t watching, the rest of the time.”
She stepped forward and kissed him, and as he closed his eyes, there was a tug, then his arms were in different spots, and her head was different, and he nearly lost his balance. She held him up for a half second as he figured out where his feet had gotten to, then let him go. They watched each other, waiting for the other to say something, then the door to the room flew open.
“You took him,” Sam accused. Samantha whirled to face him, putting her hands up and backing away. “I felt you glitch. You took him, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know you could still tell…” Samantha started.
“You said you couldn’t take me. That knowledge and faith and whatever. You lied to me.”
Jason turned to the side and frowned as Samantha slowly cowered to the floor.
“You told me you couldn’t do it, for my own good, then you take him, like it’s no big deal. How dare you?”
“Sam,” she whispered at the floor.
“Sam, get out,” Jason said, pushing Sam back from her.
“How dare you?” Sam yelled, then Jason shoved him out the door and slammed it. Samantha didn’t stand up.