FSF, December 2008

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FSF, December 2008 Page 6

by Spilogale Authors


  A bitter stink of burnt feathers hung in the air and, in fact, Brendan noticed that the trailing vanes on both wings were singed away, revealing a sooty membrane underneath, and her right arm was seared. He rolled her onto her back. Her wide eyes were as sightless as two pieces of turquoise, as if she had drowned in air. He was wondering was she drunk or stoned or in a narcoleptic fit when she stumbled to her feet, knocking him aside. She glared at the skylight and began to howl—a freezing sound that started as a single icy note, solitary at first but soon joined by others all pitched the same and all in different timbres until it seemed a whole orchestra was shivering the room, cracking the windows, exploding bottles, glasses, light bulbs. Brendan had clamped his hands over his ears, had run as far as he could and continued to bang his head against the wall until the desolate cry ended. “Who are you?” he asked, gasping for breath.

  She turned her stone eyes toward him and spoke, or tried to, but all that came out was a kind of mangled music.

  "Stop!” he cried, ducking his head and clapping his hands to his ears again. “Stop!"

  But she went on until there was nothing but shards of sound, then she shrugged and said something like Oh, shit, tripped over the mattress on the floor and plunged into a deep sleep. Brendan wiped the sweat from his eyes and watched to see if she would stir, then he righted the chair under the skylight, stood on it and pulled himself shakily onto the roof with the hope of spying some explanation. There was only the commonplace desert of tar and gravel. He dropped back into his room, chained the door and wedged the chair under the doorknob. He was trembling from exhaustion when he returned to look at her—one long white wing lay folded across her rump and the other spread open like a busted fan across the mattress and onto the floor. He crept slowly from one side of the mattress to the other and watched the light shimmer this way and that on the feathers as he moved, feeling ashamed of himself when he paused at the glimpse of gold hairs at her crotch. He had always understood that there was no difference of sex between angels, that angels were not male or female but pure spirits. Now he didn't know what to think, much less what to do, and it got to be so quiet you could hear the faucet drip. So Brendan retrieved his little tin box of joints from the window ledge and sat on the floor with his back to the wall, struck a match and began to smoke, keeping his dazed eyes on her all the while.

  She slept for two days and two nights, or maybe it was three days and nights, or maybe only that one day and night—Brendan lost track because he fell asleep himself. When he woke up she was sitting cross-legged on the mattress, looking at him with eyes as clear as a summer sky. “You need a shave,” she told him, for her voice had cleared, too.

  "I've been busy,” he said, startled.

  She was looking around at the bare white walls and scuffed wood floor, at the banged-up guitar case and the old record player and the short row of records and books on the floor against the wall. “Yeah? Doing what?” she asked, skeptically.

  "Thinking about things, meditating.” He had gotten to his feet and had begun to search hurriedly for his underwear or his pants or any scrap of cloth to hide himself.

  "You ought to eat more. You look like a fucking bird cage on stilts. What's your name?"

  "Brendan Flood,” he said. He hadn't found his underwear but quickly thrust a leg into his blue jeans anyway. “I've been on a fast. I've been meditating and fasting,” he explained. “Who—"

  "Meditating and fasting? Holy shit!” She laughed. “Who pays the rent here?"

  "Me. I work nights as a programmer. Listen—” he began.

  "So what else have you been doing? Hash? Acid? Come on, Brendan. Don't look so surprised. I know you've been smoking grass. The air is full of it."

  "Listen, who are you?"

  "I'm an escapee, Brendan. Just like you. You can trust me. Jill,” she added as an afterthought.

  "That's your name?"

  "They named me Morning Glory,” she said sarcastically. “But you can call me Jill, yes."

  "How did you get here?"

  "Well, you've got a chair jammed against the door, Brendan. And I didn't scale the walls. I came in over the roof. Remember?"

  He groaned and rubbed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. “What day is today?” he asked, not opening his eyes.

  "How would I know?"

  He looked at those wings that stood like snowdrifts behind her shoulders. “Do those come off?” he asked.

  "Are you being funny? This is me,” she said, glancing down at her breasts, cupping and lifting them. “As fucking naked as I get."

  Her flesh was the color of the dawn horizon, so beautiful it frightened him, but he gathered his courage and looked at her—her face, the hollow of her throat, her breasts and the honey-colored hair of her crotch. Yet at the first surge of desire he felt a chilly counter current, a fear that his lust was a monstrous sacrilege that would bring the wrath of God down on his head like a hammer. He escaped to the bathroom to piss and discovered a long gold hair stuck to the damp wall tile. He filled the washbowl with cold water and doused his privates, thinking to put out the fire and clean himself at the same time, but it was his brain that was ablaze and just when he was dunking his head it came to him that the creature in the next room might not be an angel at all, might be some delusion fabricated by Satan, whereupon his legs gave way and he pitched forward into the faucet and came up choking. He wondered if he were going crazy.

  He went back to the room and found her seated cross-legged on the mattress reading one of his books, The Poetical Works of William Blake, which was where he kept his cigarette papers. She looked up and began reciting, “And when the stars threw down their spears and water'd heaven with their tears—” but saw that Brendan was already aroused, up and rising. “Ah, you devil,” she murmured, tossing aside the book to grasp his shaft. “Did he who made the lamb make thee?"

  Brendan was doomed to remember their lovemaking for the rest of his life. It began simply enough when he threw himself to the mattress and pulled her onto her back, hoping to get a hand on her breast and a knee between her thighs, but before he could make his next move he felt her fingernails pierce his rump and felt his cock being seized as in an oiled fist and he slid in deeper and higher until he couldn't tell whether he was fainting or screaming with pleasure. He had staggered to his feet and was carrying her upright, her legs around him like a vise, stumbling now against the chair and then the table and now crashing against the wall and again the table, carrying her at last as if she were miraculously weightless or as if she were actually carrying him, as if he were on his back, hooped in her arms and legs, her wings beating slowly but just enough to keep them afloat above the mattress and table and chairs. And when he came it was a long, long rush in which his body gave itself completely away, such a long rush that he could feel the marrow being drawn sweetly through his spine from his distant fingers and toes, and at the end of it every one of his bones was hollow and his skull completely empty.

  Later they lay side by side on the sweat-soaked mattress and Brendan, believing he had been turned inside out and the secret lining of his life exposed, told her all about his student days at Cal Tech where he learned Fortran and Cobol and other machine languages of lethal boredom, followed by his years on the road as a Zen guitarist with Zodiac which had nearly driven him crazy, and how for these past three months he had fasted and prayed, waiting for God to give him a message or vision or signal of some sort. When he was finished he looked at Jill and she said, “I'm hungry. Are you hungry? I know I am. I'm starved."

  Of course, there was no food in the place. So Brendan pulled on his clothes and hunted up a pair of jeans and a T-shirt for Jill, but she refused to wear them because, she explained, she couldn't go out. “Going out gives me an anxiety attack,” she said. “I get panicky and throw up or pee in my pants if I go out.” So Brendan went out and came back with three hamburgers and some sliced pickles. He sat across from her at his wobbly table, bit into his hamburger, looked at
her shining breasts and watched her eat. She tore through her food—"Are you going to finish that?” she asked him, glancing at his plate—and when she had downed the last half of his hamburger she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said she wanted to go up on the roof to take a look around. He asked her didn't she want to wear something, anything, to cover up, and so on. “For Christ sake, Brendan, this is 1967! The last dress I owned was made of colored paper.” But she pulled on a pair of his shorts and Brendan set his chair under the skylight, gave her a boost, and pulled himself up behind her.

  Remember, this was Boston's Back Bay where the roofs are flat and the brownstones are built shoulder to shoulder with no space between them, so you can walk from roof to roof to roof for a quarter of a mile before coming to a cross street. Brendan watched her looking around and realized she might have come from just a few roofs away and nowhere more exotic. She had shaded her eyes with her hand and was gazing across the pipe vents, TV aerials, skylights, and chimneys to the soft horizon. “What city is this?” she asked him.

  "What do you mean, what city! This is Boston! Don't you even know what city you're in?"

  She whirled on him, saying, “You're so smart and you don't even know what day it is! I never said I was smart. I never went to college. So fuck off!"

  Brendan flushed. “It's the twelfth. Or the thirteenth. I stayed up all night to watch the meteor shower on the eleventh. So it must be Saturday. I think."

  "What difference does it make what city it is, anyway?” she muttered, sullen.

  So they dropped back into Brendan's place where he stepped out of his blue jeans and she peeled off her shorts and they knelt face to face on the mattress and began to make love again, and it would have been even better than before except that Brendan had begun to doubt that anything could be so good or that he could be so fortunate or that Jill (or Morning Glory or whatever her name was) could be what she appeared to be.

  Three nights a week Brendan crossed the river to Cambridge where he worked as a computer programmer, but other than that, these two slept at night and made love by day, all day, every day. They ate, of course. Jill still refused to go down to the street, saying she had a bad case of agoraphobia and dreaded open space, so Brendan went off for groceries and came back with take-out hamburgers and pizzas and Chinese, plus pasta to cook up right there. Brendan never gained a pound; in fact, he lost a few. “Are you trying to starve yourself to death?” Jill asked him.

  "Food dirties the windows of perception,” he told her.

  "Because, do you know what they do to people who try to kill themselves but fuck up and don't do it right? They strap them down and do things to make them regret their mistakes. Believe me,” she said.

  When he asked her how come she knew about such things she said, “I'm an escapee. Remember?” which was what she usually said whenever he asked her about herself.

  But mostly they made love. There were days when they clowned around, as when they lathered themselves in whipped cream and licked it from each other's flesh, and hours of heavy sensuality when he lingered and she opened to him with the languor of a flower and, to be sure, there were moments when he rushed her like the whippet that he was.

  Her feathers had begun to show color and in November she announced that she was pregnant. Now Brendan noticed that whenever they made love the points at the trailing edge of her wings glowed translucent pink and each successive time they joined the color reached deeper into the feathers, like dye soaking into fabric, until the wings themselves took on a pale rose cast, a shade which deepened each day and, in fact, the hue at the tip of each feather began to alter from red to maculate gold in the way of a spotted trout, and from that to a grassy emerald to an iridescent sapphire such as you see in peacock feathers, thence to a purple so luminous it tinted the room. Her eyes changed, too. Some days they were so clear that when he looked into them he saw sky, clouds, stars, albino doves. Other days they solidified into black mirrors and she would turn her blind face to the skylight and scream, then hurtle from one end of the room to the other, dashing herself ruthlessly against the walls until she dropped, the pulse beating furiously in her neck, her soundless mouth stretched open and her wide eyes like agates. When she'd come to, she'd shiver in his arms and though her teeth were chattering she'd grin and say something like, “I graduated from Boston Psychopathic with a degree in paranoia. What do you think? Am I a fallen angel or what?” He would pull her across his lap and hold her head to his shallow chest, rocking her until she drifted to a peaceful slumber, his brain spinning in confusion.

  Brendan had never wanted a telephone in his place and now he couldn't afford one, so he called from a public booth at the nearby health-food store, searching for a gynecologist or obstetrician or plain medical doctor who would make a house visit, but of course there wasn't one to be found. He did come across a midwife's card on the bulletin board there, so he phoned her and, since she lived only a few blocks away, she said she'd come around to examine Jill the next day. But the next day when Jill found out who was at the door she barricaded herself in the bathroom and refused to come out till the midwife had gone. Jill informed Brendan that she didn't need a doctor or midwife. “What do they know? We can do this ourselves. You're smart. There are books on this,” she said. He broke into a sweat, but bit his tongue so as to say nothing and went out and came back with five books on childbirth.

  "No. Not these,” she told him, exasperated. “There's this French doctor who helps women give birth under water. Get the one by him."

  "You'll drown!” Brendan cried, remembering her face as he had first seen it pressed against the skylight almost twelve months ago.

  "Not the woman, asshole! The baby. The baby gets born under water in a tub. Get that one."

  He didn't go looking for the book but it wouldn't have made any difference if he had, because several years were to go by before women gave birth in tubs of warm water at Dr. Odent's clinic in Pithivier, France. When Brendan awoke on August 11th, Jill was flat on her back in labor beside him, her fingers deep in the mattress ticking, her hair stuck like gold leaf on her damp forehead and cheeks. He pulled on his jeans and jammed his feet into his sneakers and stumbled down the stairway, his loose laces whipping and snapping at each step, and ran to the health-food store where he phoned the midwife. Seven minutes later the midwife's car turned onto Brendan's street and began to nose hesitantly along the row of parked cars, looking for a place to stop, but Brendan pulled her from the wheel and hustled her up the stairway and into his flat. As the midwife later testified, Jill was seated naked on the wood chair under the skylight, the baby wrapped in a bloody dish towel on her lap. “Don't come any closer!” she cried, jumping up. She scrambled awkwardly onto the chair seat and stood wavering there as if under the endless impact of a waterfall, the swaddled infant now crying in her arms. “Brendan, take the baby. It's a girl, like me.—You stay back, lady!” she shouted at the midwife. Brendan received the baby from her. “We crazies are the only true rebels against God,” she said, reaching toward the open rim of the skylight. Then this Jill, or Morning Glory or whatever her name was, pulled herself out to the roof and jumped off, finishing her long dive from the battlements of heaven.

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  Novelet: Leave by Robert Reed

  Our membership in the Reed-of-the-Month Club has served us well this year (as you can see if you check our annual index in this issue). This month's offering is a science fiction story that shows off many of the things that Robert Reed does well.

  Politics doesn't make friendships. I have forgotten the names and faces of almost every other protester, and that's after two years of enduring the elements with those very good people, berating distant politicians as well as the occasional drivers who showed us their middle fingers.

  No, what makes the friendship is when two adult men discover a common, powerful love for skiing and for chess.

  I met Don in front of the old Federal Building. We had foun
d ourselves defending the same street corner, holding high a pair of hand-painted signs demanding that our troops come home. That was seventeen years ago. Our cause was just, and I never doubted the wisdom or glorious nobility of our methods. But every memory is tinged with guilty nostalgia. Of course the war was wrong—a blatant, foolish mistake perpetrated by stupid and criminally arrogant leaders—and hasn't history proved us right? If only more people had stood on enough corners, and then our not-so-good nation would have emerged sooner from that disaster with our reputation only slightly mangled and thousands of our precious young people saved.

  Don was the most ordinary member of our tofu-loving group. With his conservative clothes, the constant shave, and his closely cropped, prematurely gray hair, he was our respectable citizen in a platoon composed of cranks and ideologues. There was some half-serious speculation that poor Don was an agent for the State Patrol or FBI. But beneath that respectable, boring exterior lurked a card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party. Chat with the man for five minutes, and you knew he was genuine. Listen to a thirty-minute lecture, and you'd take away everything you'd ever need to know about personal responsibility and stripping the government from our private lives.

  The fact that our spouses hit it off instantly didn't hurt either. Our wives ended up being as good friends as we were. So it seems that war gave me one good gift: Don and Amanda, and their two children, Morgan and sweet Little Donnie.

  Cheryl and I couldn't have kids—a constant sadness in an otherwise untroubled marriage. So when I mention being close to Don's children, picture a fond uncle.

 

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