by Brian Hodge
“How long have you been in this awful place?”
“Nine, ten months. Not long after Miracle started living up to its name last year.”
“Kind of short-lived, wasn’t it?”
“That depends on where you look.”
They waited for the train in the dust and heat. She’d begun to sweat, too aware now of her clothing. Her slacks, her jacket, were all wrong. She was nowhere that labels mattered. They watched the train pass in the distance, engines and boxcars, flatcars and tankers. Listened to the steel rhythm of the wheels. In their clatter lived something soothing, that lulled and rocked until it faded away, leaving a stillness as immense as the heat.
Austin gestured toward the shack. “And now I guess I owe you a wonder or two…?”
She realized now that she’d come not out of expectation, but concern, the only person in the world with a chance of convincing him he needed help. Austin was still young, relatively. He could have many years ahead. Productive years. Fulfilling years. Sane years.
His shack had the suggestion of a porch, scarcely a yard in depth. The boards bowed gently under their weight. He pushed open the door; it squealed on hinges free of rust but thirsty for oil. Past the threshold it was as stifling as she’d expected, and as spare. He kept it touchingly tidy, though, with crates for furniture, clothing and books in their places, along with a few items that had traveled with him, and the tools of obsession that he’d begun to collect even before she’d left him. Mattress on the floor in one corner, cast iron wood stove in another. Lantern and candles; intricate patterns smeared onto the walls and even though they were dry they still drew flies. Best not to think about that.
Eccentric and poverty-stricken, but nothing earth-shaking.
Although there was one more door.
“Ready?” he said. She told him she was.
Austin pushed the door open and took her by the hand. She let herself be drawn in after him, another room of bare rude walls and exposed nailheads and mouse droppings and little windows whose square panes had grown cloudy enough to distort their view of the desert beyond. She looked up at the only thing here to see.
At first she thought Austin must’ve hung the body aloft, but ruled this out. She saw no ropes, no wires. Male, she decided, but she was seeing him from the back, curled into a fetal position like a child cowering in a corner. And corner it was, but a corner made by walls and ceiling, not walls and floor.
Floating. He was floating.
She recalled what Austin had told her on the phone, cryptic though he’d been: It doesn’t have wings and it doesn’t have horns.
Austin, stooping to retrieve something from the floor along one wall … a cue stick, too ratty for the billiards table.
Its voice isn’t anything special, either.
Austin, stepping around her to thrust the cue stick up like a spear, jabbing the floater in the side. The man — she couldn’t yet bring herself to think of him as anything else — twisted, sprawling on his back across the ceiling, trying to shrink from the assault. His face looked miserable, like a child poked and teased to tears.
But it’s got a sense of history like you can’t imagine.
She remembered the things that had been claimed last year about the town of Miracle, or what it had claimed about itself.
“Austin,” she murmured. Unable to shift her eyes from this toppling of reality, man cringing on the ceiling overhead, nothing holding him up there but … but what? Ignorance of gravity?
“There are no such things as angels, Austin. There aren’t.”
“You’re telling me,” he said. Lowering the cue stick, resting its rubberized blunt end on the floor. “There’s only these lying pricks.”
*
Let me tell you about syllogisms.
If, as the more secular among us claim, your only guarantee in life is a measure of pain, and if, as their more pious brethren claim, the only thing in this world you can rely on is God, then what does that tell you about the Almighty’s nature?
Consider the humble fiber of striated muscle. To strengthen it, to build its mass, it must first be worked. Abused to the point of destruction, fibers begin to shred, tearing one from another in an ordeal of burning and exhaustion.
As the body, so the soul.
Let me tell you, then, about God’s work.
Let me tell you about suffering.
Let me tell you about pain.
II. Terra Incognita
As adults they’d argued about it for years, good-natured but insistent and unyielding: Austin swore that Gabrielle had moved in next door the summer he was nine because it was the same year his father had broken his ankle during league softball and the family had done without its annual vacation. Gabrielle claimed it had to have been the following summer, when he was ten and she was nine, because they’d moved a few months after her grandmother had died and left them the money to do it. There was no middle ground to be had here. The argument had eventually been shelved.
They could agree, at least, that it had been a hot summer, humid, but summers in Kentucky always were — all those lakes and rivers. It had been a summer of scabbed knees and the occasional rash. The neighborhood wasn’t so full of kids that he could afford to ignore the one next door, newcomer girl or not, so there’d been no trial period. They’d taken to each other and that was that.
Whichever summer it was, she’d moved in a few years before the town started to grow in earnest, before so much surrounding acreage fell to saws and bulldozers, to be replaced by strip malls and new houses. Austin remembered it as a place of boredom, but a hard ten-minute bicycle ride in any direction could put them into less tamed territory, where there was at least the possibility of adventure.
Gabrielle knew how to swim; would dive into the river from any cliff that he would. She never flinched at scaling the huge-timbered framework of railroad trestles while trains went rumbling directly overhead. She feared no snakes.
But if there was anyplace that defined their partnership, it was the old train tunnel in the hills past the west side of town. It predated the Civil War but hadn’t been used for decades. The tracks had been gone nearly as long, rails and ties removed like stitches out of the rocky channel leading into the tunnel’s mouth, where it plunged through the next half-mile of hillside. No one passing by on the new tracks thirty yards over would have a clue it was even there. The kudzu and vines and trees between were dense enough to screen it from view. The tunnel was all but forgotten by the town, a discovery waiting fresh for each new generation of young local explorers and adult transients seeking shelter along the tracks.
The place invoked an irresistible dread. No degree of familiarity could do away with its delicious threat, less tunnel now than primordial cave exhaling cold earthy breath and housing a thin perpetual layer of mist. No light shone from its other end because years before the center had been walled up to thwart bikers after one had wrecked and died alone in the middle.
Austin and Gabrielle claimed it for their very own that first summer. It was a place for pacts, for secrets too vital to share anywhere less secure. They’d walk in until the last of the daylight faded on their backs, then keep going. Hearts pounding harder than either would admit to, and skin crawling each time it was hit with a chilly splat of water, gravid with minerals and dripping from the roof. They never lit candles until they’d reached the center wall. The flames threw alien shadows across the spray-painted boasts of earlier comers — dead now, must be, eaten by bears and it served them right.
Even today Austin would catch himself opting to recall things differently than they’d really been. Not the what so much as the why. Some kids never want to come home because they don’t have a care in the world; others, just the opposite. He still found it tempting to exchange one for the other.
He always told Gabrielle that the bruises across the backs of his hands were from the kitchen cabinets, shutting before he got clear of the doors. Made him out a klutz but it was a good lie; the
door edges would cause long thin marks same as dowel rods. Gabrielle seemed to suspect otherwise after a few weeks but they never went near the truth — his father, an insistent man when it came to memorizing Bible verses. Just one generation out of the hills. Nobody would speak about it but evidently Austin’s grandfather had lived and died a snake-handler.
He saved that revelation for the tunnel, feeling giddiness and guilt on the way out. Walking toward daylight now, the entrance was so far ahead that all they could make out was the color of vegetation beyond. The archway, seen through a quarter-mile of mist, turned it into a luminescent green egg, something from which a dragon might hatch. Draw closer and this illusion fell apart, only to be replaced by a new one. Now they were the hatchlings, about to emerge into a new world.
On the day it all began, they could hear a train, on the tracks running parallel to this forgotten quarter.
“Let’s hop it,” Austin said, because there was still a lot of walking before they got back to where they’d hidden their bikes, and because neither of them had hopped a train before.
They broke into a run, out of the tunnel and up the path back to the tracks, ferns slapping at arms and legs. They paced the train as it chugged along, stumbling over cinders and the squared ends of the ties.
He still had a clear image of Gabrielle, first to reach the ladder clinging at the front of a boxcar. She might have been the taller one that summer, longer limbed, with a gazelle’s grace. Her hand grasped the steel rung and she pulled, and so did the train; she was swept up and off her feet as cleanly as if scooped by a vast hand. Austin poured on the speed when he saw her carried farther ahead, Gabrielle’s face radiant with the thrill, and she shouted something he couldn’t hear over the clashing wheels.
Next boxcar for sure.
It began to roll past him, and he saw another ladder, lunged for it. Closed one hand on the rung, then the other, same as doing a chin-up in gym class. His shoetips skimmed over cinders as he dangled, until his palm hit grease on the way up.
He always thought there’d been a silent scream on Gabrielle’s face as he fell and got yanked toward those steel wheels, never entirely convinced he hadn’t added that detail later.
But really, what else would she have done — laughed?
*
Austin let her leave the shack and scuff outside in the dust awhile. Better she come to terms with this in her own time.
Kids cope better than adults with witnessing the impossible because their valves are still open on what can and cannot be. The impossible may become instead the improbable, the rare. But it had been a long time since they were kids. Long enough for Gabrielle to have rewritten everything as dreams and runaway imagination.
He watched from the window as she found the water pump out back and levered up a bucketful to rinse her face. Most of the makeup came away and that was a good thing. Her breezy coif wilted around her face and that helped too. She was almost looking like someone he actually remembered, fresh, with wide-spaced eyes and a small nose that used to freckle easily.
Austin rejoined her on the narrow excuse for a porch, in the meager shade of its overhang. Came up behind her as she sat on the edge refusing to look at him in the doorway.
“I spent a lot of years telling myself that you weren’t just weird. That you were a lunatic,” she said to the desert.
“I’m not saying you were wrong.”
Gabrielle hung her head, then with a sigh patted the planking beside her. He sat.
“Back inside, he … it … that’s not just some man,” she said, clarifying for herself. “Not a yogi, or fakir, levitating. That’s not what I saw.”
“It’s male. But a man? No.”
“And not an … an angel. You said that yourself. Right?”
“Not as you and I used to think we understood the term.”
She let that digest. “You’re telling me there’s some basis for calling it — him — one anyway?”
“Let’s say you did. You wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.”
“Here in this part of Utah, you mean?”
Austin patted her arm. Thinking so small. “Or anywhere else over the last ten thousand years. Maybe more.”
“Well. There’s some perspective.” She lowered her head into her hands and laughed into them. “Once you get past the levitation he didn’t look very … powerful, impressive, omnipotent, I guess those are the words I’m looking for.”
“Hottest part of the day, it tends to make them sluggish. Or this one it does.”
It took her awhile longer, but Austin knew she’d get around to it eventually, and did, piecing her composure back together and asking what she was doing here. Why he’d called. Why bring her all this way. Why she’d agreed to it, even.
That he had a being floating in an oven-hot room and that it looked human but wasn’t, that he claimed its pedigree reached beyond history … all well and good and properly astounding, even if only half true.
But what use was it to her, ultimately? Her jaw might drop today, but tomorrow there would still be bills to pay, an employer to satisfy, family to whom she was still accountable. Were these things now disposable while she moved to the desert and worshipped something in a torpor that allowed itself to be jabbed in the side with a stick?
She still had to get up each morning and contend with the woman in the mirror. None of this was the province of angels, real or faux. Why would they bother to stoop so low?
She interrupted herself: “I’m ranting, aren’t I?”
“Or assimilating.”
Austin had no problem looking at this from her perspective, Gabrielle confronted with a thousand questions to which she might want answers, but not answers she’d have to live with. And he knew now why events had conspired to bring her here: to be taught.
Yet still, he wanted only to kiss the sweat from her brow.
“Remember those last days we were together?” he said. “Do you remember what you called me?”
“A lot of things, probably. I give up.”
“You told me I was more deeply alienated from life than any person you’d ever seen. I thought you were right, too. I gave you plenty of reasons to feel that way, I know. But that wasn’t it, I know now. If it was that bad, I’d’ve killed myself, and that was never an option for me.”
“You were doing a good imitation of it, then.”
“It wasn’t that I was losing interest in life. Just the mask that gets nailed over it and mistaken for the real thing.”
“You’re hardly unique in that. But not many people go to your extremes.”
He could do nothing but shrug, and she had to laugh at the understatement. The genuineness of its sound touched him in the same way that the scents of meadows or bread could summon another time. A lesson that he’d had to relearn: Where there was laughter, there was hope.
“Is there no one else in your life, Austin?” she asked, less cheered now. “I don’t mean angels, or devils, or whatever you’ve chased over the years. Just simple … companionship?”
He looked at the rugged wood of the porch, knowing she’d see whatever she feared most in his hesitation. Companionship — and if there was? Why not just tell her? Because he didn’t want to see that it didn’t matter to her?
“Is it someone in the town?” she asked.
He told her yes, leaving it at that because it seemed to prick at her and maybe he wanted it to. Maybe she’d instinctively know how little there was to it, physicality and not much more, because how much else did he have to give? Gabrielle knew he’d never advocated celibacy as a path to anything. If he told her the woman’s name was Scarlett that would only confirm every suspicion.
“What you said earlier,” he said instead, “about bills and obligations, about these being your life … you missed the point and you know it. Those aren’t your life, they’re just the pictures you hang on your wall. You can live with them. You can change the pictures. You can even knock down the whole wall. That’s always your
greatest power, but it’s also the scariest. Haven’t there been days you know you would’ve made different decisions if you’d only known what the consequences were … or weren’t?”
Sure, she told him.
He pointed toward her car and the road.
“Then do you really want to look back on today,” he said, “as another one of those days?”
*
He had awakened to the contrasts of firelight and darkness, remembering the fall from the train and the moment of horrible certainty that he was heading for the wheels … and nothing more.
“No, none of it is a dream,” he was told. “No more than all the rest of it. But by the time you’ve got that one figured out for yourself, I expect you’ll have forgotten I even mentioned it.”
Beneath the blanket he lay on, cool earth. At his feet when he stirred, loose bricks, a century old if they were a day. The pale painted face of the tunnel’s center wall towered overhead, bathed in the shadowdance of a crackling fire whose warmth pushed away the damp chill back here where no summer had ever reached.
Austin sat up and peered down the length of the tunnel. From here, the dim green egg of the entrance looked no bigger than the nail on his little finger.
“I’m alive,” he said.
“You don’t sound very sure about that.”
“But I—” He couldn’t finish, couldn’t say the words.
“I know it’s going to be hard,” he was told from the other side of the fire, “but let me try making this as easy for you to understand as I can. My problem is, I can’t talk to this ten-year-old mind of yours on quite the same level as I can talk to your body and soul.”
These weren’t the sort of words he would expect to hear from the man on the other side of the fire. The man he saw looked dirty and long-bearded, wearing the same rags as the men sometimes seen tramping up and down the railroad tracks. His mother had always told him to steer clear of them, and he had, but she’d never said he couldn’t stare. Everybody knew they stank of wine. Everybody knew they pissed their pants. He’d watched older boys throw rocks at them and it had seemed funny until now.