Falling Idols

by Brian Hodge

  “You know what your soul is, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Austin said. “It’s inside my body and it’s invisible and it’s what makes me me.”

  That earned him a smile. “You’ve their places switched, but that’ll do. That’ll do nicely.” The man reached toward the fire, pulled up from beside it an open can of beans he’d been warming. The label was singed. He stirred them with a spoon. “Your body knows things your mind doesn’t. Like how to heal a scraped knee. You don’t have to think about it, or tell it to work. It just does the job. You follow me so far?”

  Austin nodded.

  “Let’s keep going, then. Your soul remembers things that even your body doesn’t. Don’t be getting yourself a big swelled head over it, it’s not just you. Everybody’s does. What’s different about you is, your soul’s gotten to the stage that it’s remembered one of the last things it needs to.” He blew on a thick spoonful of beans before shoving them into his mouth. Gravy dribbled down his wiry beard. “It’s remembered how to talk to your body and work with it, and share some of those other things it knows.”

  “Things like … what?”

  “Today, for instance? How to keep a clumsy boy like you from cutting himself in half.”

  Austin started to ask if that meant he’d bounced clear of the tracks, but the man began shaking his head and touched a finger to his lips, mouthing No, no, no. Austin looked harder at his face, now noticing something peculiar about his eyes. They were two different colors — one blue, the other brown.

  “Don’t try remembering the moment if you don’t want to. It’s a thing no boy should dwell on if he can help it. Think about this instead: Can you cut air? Can you cut water?”

  Austin shook his head no.

  “You may feel solid. But you’re not as solid as you think.” The man grinned, firelight glinting off his teeth. “It’s a world of illusion you live in. You may not have always known it but your soul did. Remembered how to spread the word just in time, too, by the looks of it.”

  The lessons of hundreds of Sundays began to seep through at last. This man may have looked like a stew bum but that was just a disguise.

  “Are you an angel?” Austin whispered.

  The man turned one way, then another, looking over either shoulder. He shrugged at Austin. “Do you see any wings?”

  “I don’t see no trumpets neither, but that don’t mean you haven’t got one somewhere.”

  “Well observed. Then I expect maybe I am.”

  “But—” Now he was having some problems. “My momma says angels only sing and make big announcements and test people and save them if they want to, but they don’t come sit around and jaw. Not like this.”

  The man laughed and slapped both hands down on his knees. “Nothing against your dear mother but she sounds like a stupid woman to me, one who lets books and other people do her thinking for her instead of making up her own mind about what’s right in front of her. But if that’s her way, then you can’t take it from her, no more than she can set yours for you. You have to realize she’s not nearly as old inside as you are, and that can make a difference. So you’ll just have to be patient with her.”

  Austin tried telling the man that he was wrong, that she was almost thirty, kids weren’t older than their mothers, but the man just grinned again as though he had a secret and ate more beans.

  “Sir?” Austin said. “Will you answer me a question? Does this mean I can’t ever be hurt or nothing?”

  “You can hurt yourself. You can always hurt yourself. I were you, I’d not go jumping in front of any more locomotives just to see what I could get away with. And in a few years when you start shaving, don’t get the idea you need never worry about nicking your chin. It’s all a matter of degree.”

  He recalled feeling like Superman at the time, or maybe Superman dreaming of being a boy again.

  “I never heard of nobody else being this way. Why me?”

  “Well now, there’d be two answers to that. The short one and the long one, but young as your mind is, neither one would do you much good today.” The man shook his shaggy head. “Besides, it’s a thing you should really be figuring out for yourself.”

  The man, if a man he was, treated himself to another helping of beans, then sighed and gazed toward the faint greenish glow at the opposite end of the tunnel. Telling Austin that he had to go back outside now, there would be people looking for him and that the kindest thing he could do for them all was turn up alive. For Gabrielle especially, inconsolable Gabrielle who was sure she’d watched him die.

  Austin trudged through mist and chill, and the nearer he got to the entrance, the brighter grew daylight’s sheen upon the moist and dripping walls. He looked back only once, and saw a fading glow of embers.

  At the entrance he blinked away the glare in his eyes. The world had never looked so clear, so green. But he and Gabrielle said so every time they came out. He walked farther, until he could hear voices calling to each other over on the tracks, and none of them sounded as though they were having a very good day.

  It was nothing he would have noticed back in the dark of the tunnel, with other things vying for attention, but out in the daylight he spotted it the first time he looked down: Slashed across the front of his jeans, along the top of both thighs, was a fat stripe of oiled grime, as though he’d draped his empty pantlegs over the rail and waited for the train wheels to grind it in.

  Whipping for sure. His mother would never get a stain like that out in the wash.

  *

  “They’re called the Kyyth,” he told Gabrielle. “If there was ever a language it meant something in, it’s dead and long gone by now. He hasn’t said much about that. He gets evasive about certain things.”

  “So what you’ve got back there floating in that room is the same as whatever you said talked to you in the tunnel.”

  “Same species, different individual. The big difference is, the one thirty years ago had his shit together, I think. This one, he’s a bit … touched in the head, is how our families might’ve put it.”

  “All these years I’d decided that never happened, that you’d dreamed it or had a concussion from the fall,” she said. “So what you have back there sleeping on your ceiling—”

  “He has a name, why don’t we use that. Memuneh. Or it’s what he likes to be called now. I get the impression they don’t keep the same names indefinitely.”

  “Memuneh, then. Memuneh was responsible for the things that happened in the town last year.”

  “Sad, but true.”

  “Why sad?”

  Austin almost told her but reconsidered. “Maybe you should make up your own mind about that after you talk to him. You might see it differently. You might not think it’s sad after all.”

  “You called him a lying prick.”

  Austin grinned. “I did, didn’t I? Don’t let it bias you, it wasn’t without affection.”

  She was up and off the porch in another moment, going nowhere but in circles, compelled to move all the same. He knew the urge. You couldn’t take these things in and just sit on your ass. You felt you had to do something with the knowledge, right that very moment, and there was nothing to be done but let it settle in and begin reweaving the fabric of the world you thought you knew. Some days he believed that being given hints of a higher design was far crueler than the coldest shoulder an indifferent universe would have to offer.

  Gabrielle was barefoot now with her slacks rolled up, and he watched her feet on the warm ground, watched the dust cake between her toes. What a privilege that he’d been able to see them over so many years, in so many circumstances — child-size to full-grown, wading in streams and kicking in lakes, running through grass and skipping over hot pavement, and, more languidly, tracing chills of pleasure along his legs, his chest. Her feet. He thought of them in New York, crammed aching into professional shoes, and could scarcely tolerate the thought. Her dear feet.

  Congratulations, she was telling him, and h
e knew she meant it but there was bitterness too. Congratulations, you solved the grand mystery of your life, and was it worth everything you gave up to do it? Worth your blood and scarred skin and the pain you caused others when they realized they could never possess you more than a vision from a head injury? Congratulations, after years of obsessive pursuit you tracked down your angel, and is he all you hoped he would be? Does his conversation answer all the questions that roasted your heart alive? Now you must know things the rest of us can only guess at or dream about, and how pleased with your choices that must make you feel. So congratulations. Was it worth the life with me you traded for it? Was it worth the children we never had?

  Suddenly Austin wasn’t sure if she was saying all this, or only part of it and he was filling in the rest with everything she left unsaid but smoldering in her eyes. Or maybe she’d said none of it and this had lain in his heart all along, waiting until the sight of her would make it scream.

  He wasn’t even sure she was really here.

  It’s a world of illusion you live in.

  Was it worth it — and what price Paradise for those who refuse to wait?

  My god, he thought, what have I done?

  He left the splintery porch, found Gabrielle to be as solid as anything he could hope to believe in. Her jacket was gone now and she wore a sleeveless top, buttery-gold skin of her shoulders so real to the touch, hot with the sun. Stiff and resistant at first but this was good; illusions wouldn’t bother to fight. No illusion would give in so sublimely. And then, such quiet bliss to hold each other again after eleven years of forever.

  “I hate you,” she murmured into the side of his neck, her eyes and nose almost as wet as her mouth.

  They held each other in the silent heat, before towering watchers of red stone, their bare feet curled firm into kingdoms of dust.

  And for now — and only now, he feared — it was enough. It was the world, or at least the best this one had to offer.

  *

  After that day on the tracks and in the tunnel, he had a harder time finding anyone who believed him than he thought he would. Disturbed kids looking for attention, some said, and making a bad joke of it in the doing. While it had happened before Austin’s time, the town still felt a persistent soreness over three boys even younger, killed on those same tracks.

  Believers? Certainly not his parents. The intercession of a divine guardian made no difference. Angels didn’t eat beans from cans. Period. He’d hoped that the preacher at his parents’ church would take his side, but while Reverend Hollis showed no annoyance over suspicions of hoax or the price of a ruined pair of Levi’s, even at that age Austin knew when he was being talked down to.

  Believers? Even then there was only Gabrielle.

  Over the next few years they looked for angels in the clouds, in the trees, in the tall fields of summer corn. They hunted for them in the black dust of coal piles and in the muddy waters of river, pond, and stream. They watched for them among the stars that flickered or streaked in night skies, and it was here they always felt closest to their quarry, but still too far away.

  Year by year they grew taller, grew hair in places they’d never had it before, as the world grew wider to accommodate them, then swallow them altogether. Humanity’s seething mass and the questions it forced about slaughters and plagues and planes that fell from the sky — none of it boded well for the presence of holy messengers.

  He was willing to admit defeat — maybe it really had been a dream — but Gabrielle wouldn’t let him. Telling him, “Even if you did fall and hit your head, so what? I know what I saw happen to you and I never fell.”

  It was years before he walked the tunnel all the way back to the wall again, and when at last he did, he did it alone because that was the way he was spending much of his time anymore, gawky and bespotted with acne that no prayer seemed able to scrub away, and Gabrielle by now had friends who’d never had ten words for him and never would.

  Over the years he’d entered the tunnel often but only so far, as if stayed by some inner hand from violating the sanctity of a chamber whose threshold should not be crossed until he was ready. It had, of course, been checked out by the rescuers he hadn’t needed after his fall from the train. He heard they’d found nothing. The cold ashes of a dead fire — meaningless in an area known for transients. No bedroll, no empty can of beans.

  Once a child, now an adolescent, he remembered a declivity in the ground, in one corner where the defaced concrete wall met the wall of rock. Seepage had always filled it before, a wide pool of cold, inky water. He’d chucked his share of rocks into it, taking pains to never get too close. It could be a bottomless well for all they knew. Anything could crawl out of it.

  But when he turned his flashlight on it now, it was nothing but a hollow, sharply sloping walls of moist earth with a few inches of stagnant water in the bottom. And a body. It lay on its side, curled like a discarded fetus, little more than bones, rags, scraps of leathery hide, and the scraggly seaweed of a wild beard. Something about it — the scorching of an exposed collarbone splitting through the thin flesh, maybe — seemed seared to him, as if it had charred halfway to mummification, then fell in the pool and sank to the bottom. Preserved by minerals, maybe, and waiting to be found. Time capsule. Message in a water bottle. A cold gust of laughter blown into his face from the past.

  There was no rational reason to step into that shallow grave, feel the chilly water flood his sneakers, sluice at his ankles. No rational reason to lay hands on that soggy husk or peel back the shriveled flaps of its eyelids. He did it anyway.

  Because there was no rational reason to expect those peculiar eyes to be anything but ooze by now … yet they’d survived to stare from their otherwise ruined sockets, the whites untarnished by rot, the irises unfaded — one brown, the other blue. It occurred to him this time — it would not have before — that these were eyes for two worlds, one turned toward earth, the other toward sky.

  Now it seemed they had closed on both.

  Certainly they’d closed on him.

  *

  A few weeks earlier, when during one of his hikes Austin encountered the Kyyth weeping in the desert, he’d first thought it was simply a man. Another hiker, lost or with a turned ankle, frightened of dying of thirst. Or a freight-hopper who’d left the train before it passed by Miracle, then gone the wrong direction.

  Then he’d seen its eyes.

  “I knew,” he told Gabrielle. “Right then, I knew.”

  “David Bowie’s eyes are different colors. Would you have had the same reaction if you’d met him?”

  “There was more to it than the eyes, I just don’t know how to convey it in a way that would make sense. There’s no vocabulary for these things, not in English. Maybe in Hindustani. But not here.”

  He understood that Gabrielle expected him to be more or less the same man she’d left eleven years ago to his bitterness and dementia. Not necessarily in the worst excesses of the temperament she remembered, but at least in his capabilities and limitations. Yet even here he was not the same man she’d known.

  How to explain moments of a knowledge that asserted itself like instinct, something inborn rather than learned? How to explain the growing manipulation of the properties of earth and air and fire and water? How to explain periods of monumental silence, brimming with lucidity? He felt like a tuning fork, set to vibrating but thrown by mistake into a drawerful of flatware.

  Hardly the same man, which was for the better. The old Austin might never even have noticed Memuneh at all. It had been such an inauspicious summit. The Austin she remembered — an Austin he no longer even regarded as alive — would only have been disappointed by his initial encounter with the Kyyth. Appalled by its tears, disgusted by its display of weakness. That younger Austin she remembered would’ve expected no less than glare and thunder as the reward for his evocations, and if the being they heralded had no wingspan to unfurl, like a vain peacock, then by god he would send it back until it retur
ned with the proper plumage.

  What a wiener he’d been.

  So maybe she wasn’t here to be taught after all. Maybe she was here to forgive him for what he must’ve put her through.

  “I haven’t even asked you where you’re staying,” he said.

  “At the bed-and-breakfast in Miracle.”

  “How many days?”

  “I left that loose. They accommodated.”

  “I can imagine. Not the waiting list there was last year.” He laughed. “It’s like an Old West boom town where they struck angels instead of silver, and then it went bust really quick.”

  “It has that feeling. A ghost town in the making.”

  “You can stay here if you want. I know it’s not as tastefully appointed. But the offer’s there.”

  Her refusal was softened by her smile and the bead of sweat at the tip of her nose. “It’s not even on my tab, Austin, now why would I choose splinters over a mattress?”

  “Well, it’s purifying,” he said, and they laughed, then spoke for the next hour or more as the sun fell toward the stone spires and anvils in the west. The worst of the heat began to ebb from the day and he figured Memuneh should rouse soon. The first time he turned, impelled by some benign inner alarm, Austin saw him in the square of the front window, watching them in silence. Studying their conversation, maybe even their bodies.

  Memuneh was so androgynous as to be a stereotype. Worse, he was familiar. After encountering him in the desert, Austin had combed through books in one of the silly shops that had sprung up like mushrooms last year and found the face he’d recognized: identical to the harpist in a centuries-old painting entitled Musician Angels.

  Inspiration and artist’s muse? Hardly. As Austin understood, the Kyyth were not by nature corporeal, but when opting otherwise, they engineered bodies from the elements around them. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen … their comprehension of molecular biology was intuitive but staggeringly complex. Yet they had a refined sense of aesthetics. So long as they were shaping bodies, undoubtedly they’d make those shapes pleasing to themselves, and they weren’t too proud to mimic. There was no reason to believe they restricted themselves to human form, either, if others suited their purposes or whims. A Kyyth could theoretically incubate itself into a wolf or a Sequoia; into something extinct, or even otherwise nonexistent.