by Joel Varty
“It’s not fair,” says Gabe, the ten-year-old. “We never knew what we were supposed to be doing. It was all just some sort of understanding that we were supposed to know about, instinctively. As if we were supposed to just feel our way around on our hands and knees.”
“And that’s what you ended up doing, anyways, wasn’t it, my friend?” Michael says, in a question that can have no answer. “And now you’ve finally come back to me, you and your brother.”
“We were just following along,” says the boy, obviously upset at his re-transformation.
“Yes. I hoped you wouldn’t be leading him – that wouldn’t be right. Men don’t follow angels. They can’t even do as they’re told. You start expecting a man to follow along behind one of us, and he’s like to just wander off and get lost – more lost than he was when you had to pick him up in the first place.”
This is when it dawns on me where we are – we aren’t lost at all. We’re right back at the spot where we pulled Jonah out of that tomb, days and days ago. And so, while the angels stand there glaring at each other, I get the best idea I’ve had that day: I close my eyes and start walking.
I take about five steps before I trip over something hard and land flat on my face.
In the grass.
In the graveyard.
…
Steven
It takes them longer to get back than Michael said it would, but I never really believed him; what sort of an idiot goes around calling himself an Angel anyways? So we sit in a tight circle around the area left behind from where the blood dropped on the ground. We hold hands, although some of the men are ridiculous and refuse to hold hands with another man and we have to switch around until everyone is happy. It doesn’t seem to matter that this is a life and death situation, we can’t seem to get past the old phobias. Whatever.
Eventually, everything goes quiet, unnaturally quiet, as if some giant hand has taken a huge drinking glass and turned it upside down over us, locking us in, and everything else out. We try to keep our eyes focused inwards, but I can’t help seeing things beyond the other side of the circle: faces, shapes, twisted bodies, pain and agony in all of its manifestations. Eventually I avert my eyes away from everything except the spot in the middle of the circle. The grass is still green there, and it seems to me that it is a spot that still contains a little bit of life.
The younger kids, though, aren’t as affected by all of this wretchedness as the grownups are. They seem to run around with no abandon. After telling them to sit down and be quiet several times, eventually the adults give up and before long there are a half-dozen small children whipping around the circle, tapping on heads and generally making us feel foolish.
Bloody idiot fool calling himself an Angel. What the hell did he expect us to do, sit here forever? I look up and watch the children as they play, and it seems that they are not affected so much by the darkness that is looming outside our little area. One boy, maybe five or six years old, sees something in the distance and runs off, only to disappear in the blackness. One of the men, a slim guy, who has been jumpy and wouldn’t hold hands with another man, takes off after him, only he trips and falls just as he gets out of our little circle of trampled grass.
We watch and hold our breath. He seems to completely evaporate as he slides down the little hill leading down to the road. The darkness resumes where he disappears from and we all stare at it, the children too, as his cries of “No! Stop!” fade away with the memory of his appearance.
“What’s happening, Steven?” says a woman, sobbing. I think it is the one who was holding the man’s hand – maybe her husband or boyfriend. I sit there feeling stupid and useless trying to think up a response, but nothing seems to come out, even though I open my mouth and clear my throat several times.
I don’t know what to think, so how can I know what to say?
We simply stare at each other for a very long minute or so, our eyes trying to say what our mouths cannot. Eventually I have to close my eyes, too, when they run out of ideas about what to see.
“Wait, he’s back!” yells one of the kids, and we all turn our heads to see the little boy run back into the circle, his eyes wide with excitement and wonder.
“Come on, you have to follow me, it’s cool!” He says, and starts to run back the way he came from, but I am too quick for him and grab his arm. The rest of the adults stand up too, and we present a fairly menacing group in front of the boy, our very presence demanding that he explain himself. I actually wonder for a moment why I have counted myself as one of these adults. I find myself thinking that I ought to be more like the boy, and not like the frightened men and women that sit and wait for someone to save them, or to rescue them.
I hold back the others from yelling at the kid, and let go of his arm. “Sorry man,” I say, as he pulls away from me with a hurt look in his eye. “Can you show us what you see?”
“Not with your eyes open like that, you won’t be able to see anything until you close your eyes.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I reply to him. “How can I see where I’m going with my eyes closed?” I’m trying not to sound patronizing or too much like a grown-up. This adult stuff seems way out of my league. Why do they even try to be grown-up, and why would I want to be like them? I decide that I want to be more like the little kid right in front of me; he is full of something that has been draining out of me lately.
“I think you might be able to find your way,” the boy says to me, slowly and ponderingly, and the other kids stop and listen intently to him. They look from him to me, and to the adults around me. We probably look like two groups of kids on a playground, picking teams. “But everyone else is going to end up just like that other guy when he tried to follow me.”
“What happened to him?” I ask.
“Found out that he was blind and then he fell down the hill and bumped his head.”
“Is he still there now?”
“No, he disappeared.”
“Why didn’t you disappear?”
The boy shrugs, and then looks at me like I’m the child and he’s the grown-up. “You’ll have to come see for yourself. All the old people have to hold hands with kids, and no letting go ‘cause that’ll means you disappear, okay?”
And just like that, like a child’s game, we are rounded up by children, wandering to and fro and all over the place. They explore whichever direction is most interesting to their eyes, and we scatter into the darkness. As we cross over the threshold, I feel the fear take hold of me then, and I hold that little hand that clings to mine, those sweaty, pudgy little fingers which are my only lifeline in a sea of emptiness.
When he speaks, it’s as if in a dream, or underwater, or something like that where the lips move but the words come out too slowly, and he’s finished talking before I’ve heard everything. While I am waiting for him to finish speaking, he is watching me, impatiently waiting for me to understand. “Where should we go? Do you want to go on the road or through the fields? Isn’t it nice today? I like the sun.”
I just walk along beside him and try not to feel too much like an adult.
It is a beautiful day under a blue sky with a few puffy clouds. It is bright and clear and we walk slowly, meandering toward the wasted city that we escaped from some days ago.
…
Gwyn
“I see Grandpa! I see Grandpa! Look, look Mummy, there, there! That Grandpa, I not seen him for so long, and that my Grandma! Jewel, Jewel, Jewel come see! Where did everyone go? Why you cry Mummy? Let’s go see Grandma and Grandpa, they right outside! I going outside! It a nice day, I can’t wait. I want ride on Grandpa’s back like a horse. I want ride a real horse. I can. I big. I going outside!
Chapter Three – The Duty of Angels
Gabriel
Now I think I know what it means, again. I seem to remember feeling this way, once, when there was a clear choice for others to join in, to go forth, and to take up arms, and so on. And I am meant to be
content with watching it unfold – not with interfering in the natural way of things. That is what it means to be an angel and not a man. And it seems to me that, somehow, in the vast darkness, that the balance point has been reached again, and is slowly, painstakingly, tipping back into a stable position. The way I should have known it would.
I was just starting to feel a little more normal in the grown-up skin. For standing and watching, as I have learned in my time spent being a child, is what so-called grown-ups spend an awful amount of time and effort on. I haven’t perfected it yet, so I reach over to help Bill to his feet when he trips over a headstone and lands on the grass under the root of the oak tree that Michael is sitting under.
But to my brother’s delight, I myself fall head over heels and land in a tumble with Bill, who immediately begins to wrestle with me on the ground. Lucifer, or Lu, as I have known him to be long ago, immediately joins in and we quickly have ourselves tangled about in fits of laughter and mirth. Unlikely as it may be, we seem to forget the long journey through night, and the great gloom that seemed to invade our thoughts only a short while ago.
But the gap that was nearly closed between the worlds seems to be widening again. The pathway that we walked between the realms of living and death seems to have been stretched out once again far out of reach of mankind. Maybe it’s even far enough for us angels to forget for a moment the deep torture of being in a place that we don’t belong and don’t understand – except I don’t remember the child of my being having such awful dark thoughts as this adult persona I have adopted.
Maybe I should make this younger form more permanent, I think to myself, and start to tickle my brother. He then does something that makes Michael do something I have never seen him do: Lu laughs out in the sheer joy of being a part of the living waking world once more, and Michael cries out with real tears as all of the sorrow and pain of millennia simply drain away in an instant of joy.
And the day is bright and blue once again, just like that.
And I hear children in the distance, and I long to be with them. And so it is that my new friend Bill who has led me out of the depths that I was never meant to dwell in, and my brother, who was pulled out of the bottom reaches of his own despair by Jonah Truth, watch me play. I am again a small child, running through the green grass to meet the group of children leading starry eyed grownups towards us on the run.
It is my duty to stand by, but for now I feel it is alright to be one of them for a while.
…
Jonah
I awaken, as seems to be my new habit, in a confused stupor brought on by loss of blood and lack of food. But, as has become my burden and the obligation of my choosing, I rise without showing signs of my wounds, or my suffering. So it is that I try to seem strong to those whom look to me for guidance.
And I find some of them looking at me with smiles, and the sun shining brightly on their faces.
“We wondered how long you would sleep, so we decided to watch and see.”
“Where are we?”
“At the end of world, would be my guess,” Susan says. “Although it looks familiar, doesn’t it?”
I turn all the way around, trying not to fall over with the dizziness, and I see only big, straight trees around me. Though they stand tall and firm, even so in the slight breeze I can hear them squeak and rub up against each other as they sway back and forth.
“This is the new forest,” I say, trying to catch my breath. “Where the city used to be. Hopefully everyone’s made their way back – everyone that made it out should be able to get back in again.”
Jones walks up to me then, and hands me a tin cup with what seems to be a kind of tea in it. Whatever it may be, it is steaming and smells good, so I take a sip. It scalds the roof of my mouth, but I feel a bit of the life return to my limbs with its warmth.
“Looks like the wind changed a bit. You have some explaining to do, Jonah,” he says to me quietly. “Because the facts don’t add up, from where I stand.”
“What facts?” I ask, a little taken aback at this confrontation. I expect some moments of relief to enjoy the fact that I am still alive, or at the very least a few minutes to regain my composure. But it seems this is his army training, leading to him to interrogate the prisoner before he has a chance to build up his story.
“Like everything that has happened,” he says quietly. “Since these massive trees shot up out of the ground and the better part of the world disappeared and the rest that didn’t went all to hell!”
I’m not ready for this – I don’t have the answers. I have the thoughts in my mind that come to the front, but those aren’t answers. They certainly don’t complete the circle of responsibility that I bring upon myself when I permit myself to walk in front of these few people that follow me. They gather around me in a fairly large circle, their eyes expectant for answers, now that the initial danger seems to have passed.
I try to avert my attention as my instinct to focus on the practical begins to take over. I can’t help but think of the food which we could be gathering, or that we should be preparing to travel back to the farm and my family. We don’t have time to ask these questions – not when the answers don’t really matter anyways.
Or do they?
“I don’t know what happened to the world, man,” I say to Jones directly, but loud enough so that all can hear. “How can I possibly know that? My only thought has been to get as many people to safety as I can, and that meant coming to find you. I’m sorry it got so messed up, with the darkness and no food and no direction, but I didn’t know that any of this was going to happen.”
And that seems to satisfy most of the crowd, for they start to disperse a bit, getting ready to travel again. Jones keeps looking at me, right in the eye, as if to see if I will flinch from my story.
“It doesn’t add up,” he says, still quietly, but with menace beginning to creep into his voice. “This doesn’t match what we were told.”
“And what was that?” I ask. “What were you told?”
“I knew things that Sergeant Thomas didn’t. He only knew that we were supposed to come after you, and that we had to keep you alive, he didn’t know why. Only I was told that, and it came from the man himself. You were supposed to have something with you; something your brother gave you, or told you, that we needed.”
I have a feeling where this is going, yet I don’t know why. I can’t imagine why Jones, whom I seem to remember saving as he was on the brink of death a few days ago, is questioning me on what my brother had given to me.
“But I published everything Ruben sent to me. It was just a formula, a glorified recipe, that’s all.”
“You’re an idiot if you think Ruben would send you the actual formula.”
“Well, obviously it wasn’t complete,” I say, feeling my voice beginning to lose the power of its command. “It just needed another ingredient to complete it.” I finish the tea and hand the cup back to him.
“You really believe that?” Jones asks, and I sense something behind his voice that I don’t like. It is something which tells me that he knows much more than I do about all of this, and hasn’t been telling me. “You think you know what the formula actually is?”
“Was. It’s gone, there’s none left,” I say, trying to convince myself as I do of its truth. “This forest is the product of the last of it. I think it needed my blood, or some aspect of it, as an activator, or a catalyst.”
“Did you read the formula?” he asks, pointing to the trees. “This isn’t what it was tested to do.”
“Well, Ruben hadn’t tested it on large plant-life or anything like that, but it behaved in reality sort of like he described it to me.”
He looks at me for a few moments, his eyes boring directly into mine. “No Jonah. You have it all wrong. You give your brother too much credit. His formula was originally meant to wipe out all life it encountered. I have seen it work, and yes, it did need a catalyst. We thought that it was you, and your blood, but I ca
n see that we may have gotten it right after all, and the catalyst was actually an antidote. The formula was complete, and Ruben did the only thing he thought possible to stop us.”
“And what was that,” I whisper, trying to keep my voice steady.
“He sent you a fake, Jonah,” Jones says, barely audible. “I worked with him. I’m not in the army. I only trained long enough to get into Thomas’s unit, undercover. Ruben knew he was a goner so made up some fancy formula that was supposed to create life where there was no life so that you would publish it on the internet and everyone would think that Ruben Truth was a genius who died trying to bring goodness to this world.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He looks me right in the eye, “it doesn’t matter what you believe in, only what is real.”
“I’m not sure I believe that anymore either,” I say, hating myself for it. For all the doubts, all the confusion, all the unknowns have returned, crashing down on me with this one man’s thoughts. What else was I to learn about my brother that would destroy my world?
“Either way,” Jones goes on. “It doesn’t really matter what’s happened, or why. We are where we are. We’ve followed you this far, and even if you don’t know why or how any of this has happened, you seem to know where you’re going, and some of us are still alive.”
“Some. Not many.”
“No, not many. But a few of us alive is better than all of us dead.”
I’m not sure I agree just now. I’m not sure that I don’t want some of us dead, but the brightness of the day comes over us, and we have to keep moving. So we pack up the remaining bits of gear we have, and set off with the rest of the group. As we walk side by side, I’m sure he’s wondering about me just as much as I am about him.
And I’m also wondering where this forest came from, if not from Ruben’s formula.
Chapter Four – To Kill an Idea