Of course he wasn’t an angel.
No, the use of the past tense wasn’t speaking to the end of my life, I rationalized, but to the fact that I hadn’t been more like Al Snow because, goddamnit, I was proud to be me. So I wasn’t popular or even liked by my students. So fucking what? So I didn’t have Al’s caring or compassion. Did those things really matter? Al’s paygrade was barely above mine. It seemed all that effort didn’t really have a good return on it.
“Sing all you want to them,” I murmured as the city flew by. “They’re pimple-faced fuckheads who won’t remember your fucking name in five fucking years, if not a month after the fucking class ends.”
The city was an orange constellation. The traffic this time of night was thin and the freeway wide. Random cars or trucks ambled by, red lights receding, receding … The oncoming yellow lights across the median were like mated comets set to a steady course towards destinations unknown. I’d turned on the radio (I didn’t remember doing so), and that was the song playing.
Life is so strange
Destination unknown
When you don’t know
Your destination
I didn’t want to go home yet, and I certainly didn’t want to go to Mexico. I took the Palm Avenue exit just eight miles from the US-Mexico border, and ten minutes later took a left at Seacoast Drive. The Imperial Beach Pier stretched over the water, its receding walkway lights lonely and welcoming. I parked across from it, then got out and walked through the plaza to the walkway. I couldn’t go too far on the Pier, because it was gated off for the night a hundred feet farther up. I turned back and climbed up the sea wall next to it and crossed my legs. Despite the fact that I had been awake going on thirty-six hours, I felt completely alert.
“My life is …” I muttered to the calmly roaring sea. “My life is …”
Fill in the blank.
“My life is my own, asshole!” I shouted.
The sea listened without comment.
I tried another.
“My life is happy!”
But that was a blatant lie, even when I forced myself to think of happy moments I’d had.
“My life is complete!”
But that felt vaguely hopeless and meaningless. What does it mean to have a “complete” life? What would an “incomplete” life look like? I tried trading them, and found myself feeling the same thing: vague, hopeless, and meaningless.
“My life is damned!”
That too felt false, for it implied that either a moral agency had damned it, or that I had. I was an atheist, and I hadn’t thoughtfully lived in a way that purposely damned me. I’d done my very best to live with integrity, with rigorous honesty and an uncompromising moral center. For the most part, and with a few glaring exceptions, I believed I had done all right on that score.
“My life is over!”
That felt true enough, scarily enough, and I fought with panic and the cold touch of “Oblivion” again. But just because something feels true does not make it so, and I sneered towards the long stretch of dark pier: “Tick tock, motherfucker. I’m still here!”
I took a deep breath of briny air.
“My life … is unlived.”
I barely registered that I said it. It was entirely possible I’d said it a number of times before I became aware of it. When awareness came, a very sullen, very still calm stole over me. Like a patient, steady tide, it washed me back to my car and in.
The sun was rising when I parked across the street from a pawn shop in Chula Vista. I watched the proprietor unlock the door and step inside, and the OPEN sign come on. I got out and crossed the street and went in. He gave me a grumpy: “Can I help you with something?”
My life is unlived.
Twenty minutes later I left. On the passenger seat was a .38 and bullets, both in plain brown cardboard boxes. I took a right on Fifth, not noticing or caring that the cross street was Naples.
Chapter Ten
Justice
~~*~~
IT WAS difficult watching me get off the bus. I knew what was coming, and the look on my face seemed to reflect it, too. Calliel had spoken the words: “Naples and Fifth.” They chilled me to depths I never knew I had. I think they did the same thing to the version of moi staring back at him. But I was so confused standing there, so pathetic, so lost…. I stumbled off; the doors closed; and the bus rumbled on. Calliel settled in his seat and angrily crossed his arms again.
I expected that he would return to his home, kick his boots off, grab a beer, and perhaps surf the Holynet, as I had termed it. He had “googled” me last time, and I didn’t want that to happen again: video after video of my misdeeds played in crystal-clear stereo. The me sitting on the park bench right now, getting soaked … well, he was quite convinced of his goodness and purity and virtue. But he had forgotten about a lot of shit. I wondered if that was what most people do.
I also wondered about the effect that words have on people. Not generally, but as a specific combination uttered or written with the intent of producing a desired action. “My life is …” and “Naples and Fifth,” for example. Right now they were gestating inside the me sitting despondently on the bench out there in the drizzle. Not too long from now the me out there would fill in the blank to “My life is …” and it would almost magically send me to Naples and Fifth, where I would buy a handgun and bullets.
Calliel had uttered the spell, for lack of a better word. I could have chosen to ignore it, even with the terror of Oblivion waiting just behind my eyelids. But I had played his game, to consider answers to “My life is …” No spell, then, I concluded, literal or otherwise, could work without the initial consent of the free will of its intended target.
I laughed. “Listen to me! Spells, magic, free will!”
The bus took a right on First and stopped at the corner to pick up a passenger. Calliel rose suddenly and got off. He marched up the sidewalk, then cut across a band of dirt to a curb fronting the parking lot of a darkened strip mall. A single detached building stood to the right; he jumped the curb and made quickly for it, his head bent against the drizzle.
It was a bar. The battered neon sign above it read “First QT,” and below it “Cocktails.”
I always wondered what this place was like. It wasn’t seedy; it would have to improve eight or ten grades to be called seedy. It seemed that whenever a violent crime occurred in Chula Vista, it had its genesis, if not its conclusion, at this dive. Chula Vista’s city council had debated closing it down on several occasions; citizen petitions had circulated in years past calling for just that. But somehow it survived. The owner was a shady tax-evading blob of a man, if memory served. It was obvious whenever TV cameras pointed in his direction that he loved the notoriety. He never made any attempt to upgrade or improve his little shithole.
“You must be crazy!” I scolded. “You’re seriously not considering going into this place. I thought you had more scruples than that, Calliel!”
He got to the double doors, which were wood with big black vertical handles. He grabbed the right handle, pulled the door open, and stepped inside.
The scene made me laugh with its rich cliche. It was just as if it were planned: the actors seated here and there in the darkness all turned sullenly to stare at the stranger who’d strode in. They stared, then turned lifelessly back to their drinks. Calliel looked around as if searching for someone, then marched to the bar and sat. The air smelled of stale cigarette smoke mixed with must mixed with bad 70s disco. Staggering hopelessness and angry vanquishment was its decor.
The bartender spied him, approached. He was a bald, portly man with a permanent five o’ clock shadow over drooping cheeks and tattoos covering his arms and crawling up his neck. He offered no greeting or welcome; he rolled to a stop and waited.
“Beer and a whiskey,” murmured Calliel.
No nod of acknowledgement, no “Coming right up,” no clarification of what kind of beer or what brand of whiskey, nothing. The bartender turned and p
oured a glass, dropped it on the counter, then fetched a random bottle and poured a shot glass, which he dropped with a small splash on a napkin at Calliel’s elbow.
“Five,” he grumbled.
Calliel reached around and pulled his wallet out, opened it and slapped a fifty down. “Keep ‘em coming.”
The bartender stalked off with his money. The angel beneath me took a long swig of beer, then with a single motion knocked back the whiskey.
Did angels become discouraged? Did they have bad days? Did they ever wish for a stiff drink and a quiet hour to enjoy it? I considered the day he’d had. I tried to look at it from his point of view. I tried to empathize, which, I realized with shame, was something I’d virtuously claimed to do when I was alive but never really bothered actually doing.
He had met me: Dr. Ray Wilms, Distinguished Professor of Assholeness with Special Emphases on Obstinance, Churlishness, Disregard, & Petulance.
I was also good at math.
He had helped numerous people, or, as with Floyd and others, saw to their departure from this mortal coil. I had been a passive observer and it was all way too much for me! I couldn’t imagine the impact had I been a principal actor in it, like he had been.
With a nod to his occupation, he’d had the day from hell. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to lubricate it away.
I considered what was happening to the me out there, and how there wasn’t an atom of empathy inside that guy. He was struggling with the terror of Oblivion and depression like a ten-ton blanket. He was the perfect diaper: completely self-absorbed. He was a spiritual black hole. Calliel said I might’ve been the biggest pain in the ass he’d ever been sent to save. I might very well have been worse than watching a deputy’s head explode, or his assailant’s to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. That’s how much of a pain in the ass I’d been.
And he had just met me!
I thought I might get bored watching him drink. I couldn’t join him, after all. Truthfully, I probably wouldn’t have anyway, even if I were corporeal and on speaking terms with him. I didn’t drink. Oh, I enjoyed the odd glass of wine or the occasional bottle of beer, but nothing beyond that. I didn’t like how I felt with too much alcohol in me. I didn’t like giving up control of myself.
The bar’s patrons were as dejected a lot as I’d ever seen. I could sense their solipsism, their nihilism. It felt like individual gravity wells sucking at my soul. The me out there: the one I’d called a spiritual black hole. These people were his kindred spirits! The realization felt like a punch in my chest. It left me breathless and woozy.
The barkeep plopped the fifth or sixth beer down when Calliel glanced up, said, “Shelton.”
The bartender scowled. “What about him?”
“What’s he pay you?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Tell me.”
“It’s none of your damn business what Shelton pays me.”
He loomed over Calliel threateningly. “I think you’ve had enough.”
“Not even close,” said Calliel, very obviously not threatened. “Tell you what. I’ve drunk twenty-five dollars of your pisswater. You set me up one more time and you can keep the last twenty of that fifty I gave you. Just tell me how much the owner of this cesspool pays you to stand behind this bar. Deal?”
He knocked back the shot.
The barkeep tried to maintain the loom, but it deflated. Like the patrons he served (there was a waitress taking care of those not sitting at the bar; she was a rail-thin ghost with bloodshot eyes and stringy black hair and needle tracks up and down her arms. She’d appear seemingly at random, sag lifelessly about, then disappear again), hopelessness was his mode of being. It takes energy to give a shit, and this hick just wasn’t worth the effort.
“Four plus tips,” he groused.
“Four—an hour?”
“What the fuck else would it be?”
Calliel nodded thoughtfully. “He pays Casey twenty-five.”
Darkness descended over the bartender’s face like a sewer lid dropped over the hole. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”
“Twenty-five. But not for an hour—for half an hour,” said Calliel, who continued nodding. “But he tacks on an extra fiver for a snickerdoodle.”
The bartender lunged for him.
In that half-second Calliel stood and kicked the stool under his ass away. He grabbed the man by his meaty throat and pulled him over the bar until his legs were off the ground. The barkeep squealed like a stuck pig and kicked wildly, knocking bottles and glasses behind him to the floor, where they smashed. He grabbed Calliel’s forearm and tried to pry himself loose, but to no avail.
“She’s been spreadin’ ‘em for him for years now. She’s never told you,” said Calliel with lethal coolness, nose to nose with him. “Oh, she loves those snickerdoodles. Especially from Shelton. He’s big. He’s rough. He’s rich. He’s got a whole stable of fillies, your little missy included. She’s also got hep C and hasn’t told you or him or the women she joins for a little group action now and again. Now here’s what I want to know: How does that make you feel? Hmm?”
The bartender’s face was turning blue. He couldn’t speak a word. The patrons in the dark watched. No one tried to break it up.
“Want proof?” continued Calliel. “Go to Shelton’s right now and take a look through his back porch window.” He squeezed harder. The fat man appeared close to passing out. “Do it! There’s a real shindig goin’ on—and you aren’t invited!”
He launched the barkeep backward. The lumpy man crashed into the back counter, spilling glasses and bottles and smashing mugs and wine glasses. He slumped to the floor wheezing and coughing.
Calliel moved to the next stool over and sat. The bartender eventually stood. He appeared half as tall as he did sixty seconds ago. He gazed with terror at Calliel, who bellowed, “Go!”
He stumbled off, hacking and massaging his neck. The stringy waitress appeared in his stead sometime later. She gaped at Calliel as though at a scene of violent death. She wouldn’t get closer than ten feet from him. There was one other man at the bar; he sat at the far corner on the other side and hadn’t bothered looking up during the entire commotion. His and the other patrons’ apathy stifled the air with a surreal tinge. It was, in fact, Oblivion. Spiritual Oblivion.
The me out there trying to get some sleep and failing believed there was no such thing as a spirit, which made spiritual nonsensical. The me out there had bought fully into the thinking proffered in the pages of The Skeptic and The Humanist and Scientific American and a hundred other publications and websites. As for Oblivion, the me out there did not believe in it. It was a physical impossibility! The me out there thought everything ultimately quantifiable and therefore ultimately predictable and controllable.
The me out there and I in here: we were two very different people.
I can’t adequately describe what I felt then. Dr. Ray Wilms, moments from death, had truly changed. And, for once, for the better!
I laughed with joy. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.
“Come here,” ordered Calliel.
I swung around. He was talking to the waitress.
She gawked, rooted to the spot.
“Come on, I won’t hurt you,” he said. He put down his drink and motioned with his hand. “Come on …”
“I …” she squeaked, “… I … I have to get others their drinks …”
“They can wait. Come on. I want to ask you something, and I don’t want anybody else to hear it.”
She hesitated, then opened a drawer at her hip and pulled out a cleaver. She held it up and very cautiously approached.
She waited for him to put down his beer. He swallowed and asked, “Why are you a junkie, Electra?”
I thought she might tell him off, but I think her fear of him forestalled that reaction, which very clearly reflected on her face for a moment. She almost certainly knew he could reach her before she could retreat, which show
ed in the almost dejected manner in which she relaxed. The arm holding the cleaver dropped limply to her side.
She gave a listless, desperate smile that wilted and died before it reached full bloom. “How … how do you know my name?”
She wasn’t wearing a tag, but looked down to make sure.
“I know it like I know it isn’t your real one. What is your name—your real one?” he asked.
She chuckled without humor. “Apple.”
He didn’t return the chuckle, or even crack a grin. “Apple? Like the fruit?”
She nodded demoralizingly. “Fuckin’ parents …”
“Put down the cleaver, Apple. I’m not gonna hurt you. I promise.”
She set the cleaver on the counter behind her, turned back around.
“Why are you a junkie, Apple?” he demanded.
She stared at her arms, then him, then back at them before shrugging. “Don’t know … I kinda got mixed up with the wrong crowd in high school. I dated a pusher; he turned me on to it.”
“Where’s he now?”
She glanced shamefully down at her feet.
“Overdose?”
She nodded sadly, looked up. “I never saw no one take on Tommy like that before. No one scares Tommy. Not till you.”
“I want you to stop taking drugs, Apple. For good and forever.”
She stared. Her eyes glistened.
“Tommy’s going to die tonight,” he said in a doom-laden matter-of-fact tone. “That’s where he’s going right now—to his death. He’s going to kill Shelton and his girlfriend and everybody else at that orgy. He’s going to succeed, and then he’s going to eat his own gun. You were supposed to be there tonight, right? The only reason you’re here is because Shelton had no one else to wait tables, and has never thought much of you. So here you are. You’re alive. I want you to stay that way.”
I thought Apple might run away. It was obvious she was thinking about it. “Who … who are you?”
“I’m Calliel. I’m an angel of death.” He let that sink in. “I don’t want to come for you, too, Apple. Do you understand me?”
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