“Los Diablos,” she muttered hoarsely, staring at him. She crossed herself and hurried outside.
Carter wasn’t sure exactly where he was going when he got back into his car, but he started driving anyway. Ten years since Addie died, eight since his wife divorced him. A little longer than that looking for Casa de los Angelos, house of the angels.
All because of something one of the nurses had said at the last hospital. An older woman nearing retirement. Carter had just left his dying child’s bedside when he’d heard the old woman. “They should have taken her to Casa de los Angelos. There, they might have helped her.”
He had been furious, screamed at the woman until security had come. Then he’d complained to the hospital administration, tried to get the old woman fired. Completely over the top, but he’d felt on the verge of insanity, and she’d given him this opportunity to lay specific blame to counter the mystery that had taken his baby away. Later he was relieved the hospital hadn’t done anything to the old woman—no doubt they had to deal with crazed relatives all the time.
Later he’d gone back to ask her more. And she’d told him, and he’d gone looking. Ten years ago, around the same time he had given up on mirrors.
“What do you expect to find there?” His wife had asked him during one of their last real conversations. “Do you think Addie is going to be there? She’s not, you know that don’t you?”
“I know that. I’m not crazy; I just have to do this thing. Don’t ask me to make sense out of it—there’s no sense in any of it. I don’t understand why myself—it’s just something I have to do.”
What he would not talk to her about was the books he had been studying concerning congenital malformations, about children born with not enough or too much to survive, or formed so differently they could not live in a world everyone considered real.
Although she’d looked perfectly normal, “perfect” in his eyes regardless of her frailty, Addie had been some other creature inside. “Never meant to be born,” his father had said as if that was supposed to comfort. His wife had been outraged, and never spoke to her father-in-law again.
Addie could have been a pig or a horse or a bird flying so high and for so long no human eye might ever see her. Angel or devil, she could have been either.
Carter stared at himself in another mirror. Twice in one day. His unrecognizable face. He shuddered. Old skin and new skin, and nothing he had ever seen before. Who was this person, what was this thing looking at him?
There was something about the eyes, some distant ember of recognition, telling him that although they might not be his eyes now, certainly once they had been: soft and unfocused, gray as dust.
Those eyes now focused on the rearview mirror, and the slump-shouldered man cleaning the car’s rear window.
“Anything else for you, señor?”
Carter looked up, startled by the mechanic’s speed. “I … well, no.” The man rubbed at his hands with an oily red rag, staring patiently. For the first time Carter noticed his jaw: too broad, too far forward. The man continued to stare, rubbing. “Oh … yes.” Carter fumbled for his wallet. “Ten dollars, right?” The man grunted, held out a palm rubbed gray. Carter carefully placed a twenty there, staring at the man’s jaw. “Could you tell me? I’ve been told,” he began again. “I heard there might be a house nearby. Casa de los Angelos?”
The mechanic stopped his hand, blinked, and Carter thought that maybe he had insulted him, suggesting that with a jaw like that, he must know.
The man jerked his head to the right. “Down the road.” He waited, the oversize jaw moving as if chewing on a further reply.
“Thank you,” Carter said, taking a deep, ragged breath. “You can keep the change. For your help.” The mechanic turned away.
Carter sat motionless, his hands gripping the wheel. He had been seeking Casa de los Angelos for ten years. Since before he got old, since before he’d lost his face. Thousands of miles, a dozen states. A decade of failed relationships and religious conversions. To have it slip so suddenly into accessibility seemed almost a cruel joke. Nervously, he glanced at the rearview, watched the man walk slowly around the station grounds, sweeping, picking up trash, wiping dust from the surfaces of the pumps. Perhaps he had a prejudice here, but he never expected a mechanic to take such pains about the cleanliness of his station, particularly not in such a place. He saw the man pause, scratching at a defect in the metal of one of the pumps, lean closer as if examining himself in a mirror, making an ape-like face.
Carter started up the car and pulled away.
Carter’s falling out with the mirror was in fact merely the culmination of a life-long conviction about his own ugliness. His wife didn’t think he was ugly, and he really hadn’t been aware of feeling ugly as long as they’d been married. Then came the divorce, and despite the reasons she’d given him—his obsessions, his depressions, his general lack of interest in her and almost everything else with the notable exception of their dead daughter and the things she would never do or see—he’d felt ugly again, and convinced himself that was the real reason she was leaving him.
Actually, Carter was philosophically opposed to the idea of the “ugly.” If it was a thing out of nature, then it was what it was, one instance of the mystery behind all form, so how could that be called ugly? But better than most, Carter knew there was sorrow aplenty in the mystery of things. Perhaps if he were a stronger person he could celebrate it all, but he was not.
Of course things were never the same after their little girl died. How could they be? Even thinking about his sweet child brought a hideous crawling sensation to his belly, as if he were about to give birth to something beyond ugly, like those baby pictures he’d found on the Internet that time—a site named “Pickled Punks”—had saved and examined, those ugly babies, those congenital malformations. Anencephaly, sirenomelia, hydrocephaly, microcephaly, fronto-nasal dysplasia, progeria, cyclopia. A litany of names for the angels.
He pulled quickly to the side of the road, jerked open the door, and heaved the contents of his breakfast into the dusty shoulder. It was raining. He hadn’t even noticed. He raised his head, shut the door, checked his face in the rearview. The eyes too large for his head. The hair damp and sticking out all over, as if to hide a misshapen skull.
Through the dirty windshield he saw a small child approaching. So small, in fact, he wondered where the parents could be. As the child came nearer he could tell it was six or seven. Head bobbing unsteadily on the neck like a young bird’s. But something wrong with its gait that made it totter as it moved, like a younger child, a baby just beginning to walk.
The child moved closer. She placed small hands on the driver’s side window. Her face came forward out of the rain. He thought he should open the door and offer her shelter, but was that the right thing to do? How would people interpret such an act? But the child was in danger of pneumonia, maybe worse. But he still could be wrong. He understood little about the workings of disease.
The child’s breath fogged the glass. He rolled the window down. He’d been thinking of the child as a girl, but he really couldn’t tell for sure—the hair short, but the features so delicate, bird-like. He looked more closely at the hair plastered to the skull. Thin, like an old man’s. Or an old woman losing her hair. He had a growing impression that the hair had not been cut, but had simply stopped growing, and now he could see that some patches of skull were entirely bald, where he didn’t think it had ever grown at all.
But then the child’s eyes embraced and held him—large and dark, cool and shiny like polished stones at the bottom of a stream. Doing more than staring. Seeing him in a way he had never been seen. He realized he had avoided looking into the eyes at first because somehow he had known what their effect would be.
Then the child turned and ran, disappearing into the driving rain.
From the beginning Addie had had trouble breathing. The last year or so of her life he would sit with her, sometimes for hours, just holding h
er hand and witnessing her struggle for breath. Sometimes he would tell her stories during this time, or read to her with one hand awkwardly holding the book so reluctant was he to let go of her hand, but most of the time they would sit, almost silently, a meditation.
It was like holding the hand of a drowning child. But worse—if you had your hand on a drowning child at least you had a chance of saving her. There was no chance of saving his daughter.
He turned around, saw the child’s ghostly form in the rain, swallowed up by the mist clouds formed as the rain hit the hot ground. He pulled forward carefully, able to see very little. He backed up while turning the wheel, slammed on the brakes abruptly when he realized the child could have come up behind the car again—he might have killed her. He rolled down his driver side window and stuck his head out into the rain. The air smelled of ocean and centuries of drowned and rotting vegetation. He twisted his head around, water pouring into his eyes. Elongated shapes writhed and twisted in his vision. Rippling embryonic trees. But no child as far as he could tell. He backed slowly, turning the wheel sharply so as not to go off the road. Then he straightened his wheels and eased forward, head still partway out the window, looking for the child.
The road soon turned to gravel, then went to dirt. Then to a thick mat of grass and small branches, tightly packed leaves and other forest debris. Obviously this road—if it could be called a road—hadn’t been used in some time.
The car bounced and jerked, the steering wheel struggled under his tightening grip. Suddenly the child ran out of the mist, leaping high and then down again, a wing, a wing! Rising out of its back, flapping frantically. The car drew closer, and Carter could see that it wasn’t a wing at all, but a malformed third arm and piece of torso growing high on the child’s back. She turned quickly to look back at him—her shirt was torn, one pale nipple exposed. She screamed and ran toward the trees.
Carter slammed on his brakes and jerked open the door. What have I done? He jumped out of the car and called after her, “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I didn’t want to scare you like this! Please! I don’t mean this!”
The woods ahead of him were still. To his left a threatening sky dropped down momentarily to rest on a small dark lake. The hood of his car steamed—probably a ruptured hose. His heart pounded so that he could hardly breathe. What’s wrong with me? The people who scoured the Internet for sites like “Pickled Punks”—what kind of people were they? Perhaps he himself had an excuse, perhaps not. He had been looking for pictures that reminded him of his daughter, but more frequently they had reminded him of his own, indefinable shape in the mirror.
“Pickled Punks,” as the name implied, did not treat the subject with any great seriousness. Jokes and sarcastic picture captions served as context for screen after screen of medical photographs. Links at the bottom of each screen gave the user access to various gore-filled and pornographic and fetishistic web sites. For some time he had thought these sites must be run by fourteen-year-olds, but as he read paragraph after paragraph of anticipatory prose he considered that some of this material was surely too weary and jaded for teenagers. Then he considered the idea that those responsible for this proliferation of grotesque content might be much like him: older men with wives who have left them. With dead children whose images were just beginning to fade from memory. He found it too painful to consider.
He heard a rustling in the weeds by the lake and walked in that direction, but by the time he reached the water’s edge all was silent again. In the distance, where sky met water, a cloudiness had formed like a clog of undifferentiated tissue. A shape drifted to the surface of the water and looked at him through a single, disease-filled eye, but he felt uncannily as if he were the one in the water, looking at someone who resembled him, but only slightly. A splash of pale and it was gone, the outline of it moving away to a point further down the shore. Carter lifted his head and saw the dilapidated house, the sagging windows and porch broken in two, the small figures gathered there, watching. He started off in that direction, struggling through gray weeds and endless dark mud.
As he neared the house, the figures made no attempt to retreat inside. They stared at him as some backwoods southerners do when viewing the approach of strangers, or like a lost tribe first witnessing the arrival of civilized man. Although Carter knew that in those situations the men were never as civilized as they thought themselves to be.
Carter had a sudden coughing fit, and choked up blood, spat it into his hand. He examined it curiously. He’d never done such a thing before, but he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. Wasn’t this something that happened to old men? He dipped a finger into the sticky pool: something solid in the blood like a piece of pasta.
From one end of the broke-back porch a small angel began to cry, sounding inconsolable. “Hush, hush,” Carter said softly. “It’s okay, honey.”
Wings and beaks and eyes and claws. Heads larger than the dreams inside. Hands like fish like perpetual prayer. Bodies with no arms to embrace even themselves. Devils and angels and contradictions. Nothing and everything. All the ways he might have been.
He recalled some of the worst of the pictures he had seen on the Internet. No worse than these, but they had made him weep. He was deep in his own tears now, feeling he might completely dissolve, but he had no idea if it was out of sadness or fear, or some feeling beyond.
Then he felt their hands and lips on him, and in their wet whispers the answer to a longing he had felt since the day he was born.
THE RAINS
Every time it rained, faces of water and steam formed in the windows of his house: dark ovals with smeared damp for eyes, but no mouths. He never could determine how they’d been made. He’d checked for drafts, imperfect insulation, leaks along the edges of the glass, crumbling putty. He finally gave up trying to figure it out, just watched for the faces. They usually appeared after dark, and with all the rain this fall they’d become virtually permanent decorations. Against the dark glass they looked like negative images, as if the house had taken photographs.
Brett had never felt comfortable with pathetic fallacies so he tried to ignore the rains. They angered him. They turned Nancy’s death into a cliché. Sometimes he thought things would have been a lot easier if she’d died in the middle of the summer, when the air was a furnace and the ground was like cement and it might well have taken a jackhammer to get through it, to get her coffin in. His own tendency toward exaggeration made him wince. However hard he tried, saying things exactly the way they were was the hardest thing of all. Nancy died in September, a year ago, of cancer. And the world has paid no attention.
Again he wondered if he should have had her cremated as he’d originally planned. But he’d wanted to pretend he could actually visit her, that there was a form beneath her marker, although he dared not imagine what that form would look like after a year. He hadn’t even visited the gravesite since the funeral.
Today his skin felt dry, despite the continuous rain. The air seemed to cling to his skin, leaving its dust behind in a thin, gray crust. He thought of her ashes coating him head to toe, forming a layer that the moisture could not penetrate. He felt too dry to live. He felt far too solid. Again he made his way down the long narrow staircase to shower.
The basement bathroom was lined with cool stones to keep the moisture in. Wanting to think of it as a life chamber, a place of survival, he ignored the faint hint of rot in the close air. He put his hand out to touch the stone, and his fingertips came away milky and smelling of salt. He’d gone as far as asking the funeral director what the cremation would have been like, how much the ashes would have weighed, what exactly would have been left behind. He didn’t ask him what a year underground would do to the body, two years, five. He wiped his hand on the stone wall again, conscious of the salty lubrication there, imagining a little more of his flesh melting onto the stones with each swipe of his hand.
When the water first hit him he could not feel its dampness. It was a force against his sk
in, trying unsuccessfully to push itself inside him. He’d been showering at least six times a day since Nancy died.
His skin seemed to swell beneath the force of the warm needle-spray, as if trying to maintain its border against wet erosion. But gradually he sensed the outline of his body growing less distinct. After hours, his skin began to shrink, warp, break down.
He’d read somewhere that during every minute of a casual walk the human body loses tens of thousands of flakes of dead skin. Fewer if you stand still. He wondered how much skin sloughed off during the average shower. Food for the armies of dust mites (ordinarily invisible, but monstrous if you magnified them enough—he’d seen the pictures). He imagined breathing in that dead skin, consuming so much dead flesh during the year that there could hardly be room for any other form of nourishment.
We feed on each other. Nancy always said that. We couldn’t survive otherwise. Nancy had sometimes been a little too honest. Thinking that now, he felt guilty.
The hospital bed had been hard, white, and tightly made. It looked too small for the room. Lots of curtains, and bi-fold doors ready to close everything off. There had been a number of nurses and aides in long uniform gowns, like androgynous monks or nuns. With her hair gone, Nancy had grown to resemble them.
“You let me go, as soon as you can, you hear?” Her whisper was harsh and frayed in the emptiness. “I don’t want you hanging on to me forever. You have to have a life.” Nancy never lied. He bent over to hug her, but held her at a distance. Already he was beginning to pull away from the reality of her, pretending she was gone, barely looking at her. She’d never know, her eyes were almost gone. But he still felt he was acting out a lie, not climbing into bed with her, not holding on to her for all he was worth.
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