by Brian Hodge
Because their eyes were all so weak, he explained, they could hardly see a thing. Even in his presence, he’d realized, they saw nothing but the few years of their own tiny lives.
“And that was a surprise to you?” Gabrielle said.
“Why I might come here? They thought it was for them alone.” He pointed to the petroglyphs, three of the more ghostly figures, the highest off the ground at a dozen feet and among the oldest, he’d said. They were like none of the others, the three bodies long and bladelike, tapering to points. Each dangled one arm at its side and held the other straight out, trailing something the neolithic artist had depicted as thin streamers; from the same arm an arc swept up and overhead and down the other side, like a corona or a single vast wing.
“I’ve been here before,” he said. “The one on the left was me.”
Soon, on the return hike, he did most of the talking.
*
“There are no angels and no devils, not as you believe in them … those of you who believe at all. There are only the Kyyth, and how you see us.
“We shared your birth as a separate species and have walked alongside you ever since, only rarely making ourselves known for what we actually are. Some of us choose to play to your expectations. Some choose to confound them.
“But it is for you that we exist, and for no other reason. We exist so that you become what you were meant to be.
“We began as thoughts in the mind of what you have named God, and Allah, and Brahma, and Ialdabaoth, and Ahura Mazda, and all the other names. We fell from that mind into independence so we could remain here. Because then we were all that was left of what some of you much later named Deus Absconditus — the God Who Went Away…”
*
Late that afternoon he sensed Gabrielle returning before she came into view, and waited for her out behind the shack. She was alone, Memuneh having accompanied her only so far, then turning around again.
She stuck her head beneath the faucet and he levered up a cooling gusher over her neck and scalp. As she stood dripping, the water soaking into already sweaty clothes, she’d look at him and smile, look away and frown, look at her feet and shake her head. A day alone with Memuneh could do that to anyone.
“The thing is,” she said, “I’m not sure that I even believe everything he told me.”
Austin swept sodden hair from her eyes. “I think some things he just makes up … to fit the way he wishes they were.”
“But he believes them, doesn’t he?”
“Oh yeah.”
“So if he acts on them like they are, then doesn’t that make them true? Just a little bit?”
“If you remain inside his tiny sphere, then maybe it does.”
She told him how they’d stopped to watch a hawk, twice — once on the way to the petroglyphs, again on the way back. Maybe it wasn’t the same hawk but that was hardly what mattered. Memuneh’s fascination with its gliding upon the air currents was at least as compelling as the bird itself, she said, and finally she’d watched him instead. His absorption whenever it flapped its wings.
“Even a cat eyeing something it’s about to pounce on doesn’t bring the same degree of focus as he brought to that hawk. I’ve never seen anything like it, to be that enthralled by watching something just go about its business,” she said. “Why did he share these things with me, Austin? I’m not anybody.”
“To me you are. And he draws a distinction between me and the rest of the town. He knew I wanted you to see him. Agreed to it.”
“And now we leave him behind,” she said. “I wish we could do something for him.”
You let him hold you the other night, Austin thought. I imagine he considers that payment enough.
But later, after they’d opened a jar of tamales and were heating them with rice over the fire, Austin began to wonder if the two of them hadn’t, in some benign but significant way, been used. Not to exaggerate his own importance, but Memuneh had nevertheless come to rely on him for companionship, and surely understood that this squalid shack wouldn’t be home forever.
Along comes Gabrielle, then, catalyst of that deliverance. As she was always meant to be. Memuneh might’ve even known it first … and so used her as a test before revealing himself to Miracle all over again. Letting her prove to him that not everyone here was the worst example of the human species.
A day alone with Gabrielle could do that to anyone.
Would Memuneh try again? Even now, somewhere in that glowing red horizon, was he hoping, planning, dreaming?
Austin thought it was one of the worst ideas he’d ever heard. Like Saint Francis when no one would listen, Memuneh belonged with the animals. They were so much less likely to disappoint him.
In the distance they could hear the coming of another train, and smiled at each other for everything the sound brought with it.
“Stars’ll be out soon,” he said.
“Maybe you should watch them by yourself tonight. I think,” she said, “I need to stay at the B-and-B. I have things in my head I need to get sorted out. I need to call Philippe. And if you have any … entanglements … you need to wrap up, maybe you should.”
Scarlett, she’d be thinking of. Wondering what the woman looked like. He didn’t tell her that this severance had already been taken care of, just told her she was right.
“Then tomorrow? We start fresh.” She reached out to touch his braid, the silver streak in his hair, the marks that his life had cut into his face. “I love you, Austin. I always have. But I never knew if that was enough. And I still don’t.”
He understood. So as the sun began to set on his last day in the desert he tried to soak in every diminishing ray. Let him hold them inside and let their fire burn there tonight so that tomorrow he could leave some ashen bit of himself smoldering on the ground, satisfied at last that it had the answers that mattered most.
*
“One of your philosophers — French, like the man you took for your husband — wrote ‘Imagination could never invent as many and varied contradictions as nature has put into each person’s heart.’
“If even the simplest man or woman is such a mass of contradictions, how much more so, then, is what you named God, simultaneously everything and its own opposite. God is life, God is death. God is growth, God is destruction. God is here, God is nowhere, always … and never.
“Deus Absconditus … the loving God Who Went Away.
“And so the Kyyth filled the void between, each of those contradictory thoughts, splintered off from the rest and contained within itself, with a mind of its own. So that we might come to you.
“It’s what our name means in the language of the first people we showed ourselves to, people the world no longer knows of. In their tongue ‘kyyth’ meant ‘bridge.’
“I would never tell this to Austin because there was so much he instinctively understood already, I felt it would benefit him to keep wondering about something.
“But I tell it to you, because I know he’ll be leaving soon and now I want him to know…”
*
The window of Gabrielle’s room faced east, and even through the blinds the light was bright enough to wake her. Sun and clock alike mocked her and the night she’d wasted.
She hated waking up fully clothed atop a made bed — the sleep never really seemed to count then. She hadn’t meant to drop off this way because she hadn’t meant to go to bed before calling Philippe. Which she hadn’t done because it was so much easier to worry about what she could take back to the magazine to possibly justify the trip here. “Interview With the Angel,” first in a three-part series? Have half the readership howling in protest — how gullible does she think we are? — and the other half applauding for all the wrong reasons: looove the irony.
One crisis at a time, please.
She looked at the clock again — 6:26.
Gabrielle heard from the bathroom the heavy plop of water as it dripped from the faucet into the tub. Odd — it sounded as though the tub
were full. Which couldn’t be. She’d always used the shower. Never even stoppered the drain in the first place.
Austin would be here at 10:00. Give or take. He’d follow her to Salt Lake City, where she’d turn in the rental and hope his car was sound enough to endure to the east coast.
That dripping — a full tub, definitely. She listened to it for a few moments, perplexed; but a pleasant sound if you were in the mood. Promise of warmth and steam on a winter day, or a cool soak on one like today. But as her head cleared of the morning groggies the more she realized it shouldn’t have been promising anything right now.
When she got up to check, Gabrielle halted in the bathroom doorway. The tub could wait.
She knew without the slightest prompt that this was Austin’s woman. Scarlett, sitting on the toilet lid. It couldn’t be anyone else. In a town this size, she and Austin would find each other because there was something barbaric about the both of them, although Austin seemed to have bested it. And what had he implied — the relationship was only physical? In that case, she didn’t need to see Scarlett at all. This was a woman whose bodily tenure you really didn’t want to follow.
“How did you get in here?”
The faucet, dripping. The ripples, gentle across the water.
When Scarlett stood up, Gabrielle saw her arm, Hadn’t noticed it until now, the way Scarlett had been holding it down and out of view. Saw the smear of blood along the inside of her forearm. Saw something jutting from — oh god.
“You’re hurt,” Gabrielle said. The woman had come here to commit suicide, was that it? For the statement it made?
But no. It wasn’t Scarlett’s wrist that was the problem. Whatever was stuck into her was emerging from a split across the palm, just above the heel of her hand. Wide and flat and dense, almost blade-like, a cleaver or short machete. But not the color of metal. No, this was pale, almost a bone-white, and—
It was bone. And it was extruding by itself, as though a deformed extension of the bones of her lower arm had grown out through her hand.
Gabrielle understood then. If not everything, enough.
“But your eyes,” she said. “They’re both…”
“You don’t think we have control over them too? When we really don’t want someone to know?”
“Can’t you just leave us alone?” It was the closest thing to a prayer she would offer this creature. Austin’s demon lover. “God damn you, just leave us alone and let us have our lives.”
“Don’t blame us for what’s in your heart,” Scarlett said. “He’s much, much too old for you.”
*
“We have no need of bodies to exist, but will wear them if we wish to. We gather them from the elements around us and manipulate them as we need. The Kyyth have never restricted ourselves to the human body, but we love it most. Because it is you that we are most alike.
“Through these bodies we seek to bring you wonder. More than hope, or healing, even more than comfort, wonder is our greatest gift, because it’s what makes you most like us. We work to teach you to open your eyes to the magnificent mystery all around you, by showing glimpses of possibilities beyond what is familiar and known to you.
“The greater your sense of wonder, the further into our arms you run, and the more like each other we become…”
*
Austin found them as soon as he opened the door to the shack, because sometime late in the night, or not long after dawn, they’d been set there on the weathered planks, side by side like a pair of shoes waiting to be shined.
He collapsed to both knees when they failed him, and crawled forward to pull free the note left behind, weighted down by those first two things he was meant to find.
What a privilege that you were able to see them over so many years, in so many circumstances, the note read. Child-size to full-grown … and now at last in decay.
Her feet. Gabrielle’s feet.
He scrambled off the edge of the porch to fall into dust that caked around his mouth and clogged his nostrils when he screamed.
What a privilege…
Thoughts, they’d only been thoughts — he’d not even spoken them aloud to Gabrielle herself. Who but the Kyyth could steal these things from the deepest wells inside him? Who but the Kyyth could use them so viciously against him? Who but the Kyyth would even think to try?
Who but the Kyyth might invest some deeper purpose in this, perhaps leaving her hobbled but still alive?
Austin began to run along the road as the sun climbed higher and shadows shrank toward their sources, breathing air so still and hot it seemed to lack only fumes of sulfur. The horizon rippled and the world rolled, then he was there on that holy ground named for a dead mule.
He had no time to wonder why Miracle seemed so atypically busy this morning, as though it had shaken off sleep to awaken refreshed and restored. Its residents, old and new, were flinging themselves out the doors of home and shop and diner. They abandoned cars in the street and sometimes even left the engines running. Some laughed like mad fools while others stumbled along with tears streaming from eyes bright with joy. They collided with him. Some kissed him while others even tried to detain him with a hug. He shoved them out of his way and pushed on.
On a quieter block, the doors to the bed-and-breakfast stood wide. Inside he saw meals sitting on the dining room table, half-eaten with no one to finish them. A spindle-back chair lying on its side; a telephone receiver dangling down the wall by its cord.
He called for her but she didn’t answer, and since he didn’t know which room was hers he searched them all until he found her in a tubful of red water. She still wore the shirt and shorts that she’d worn yesterday. Her legs just ended, in blunt tapers, the only sign of the violence that would’ve taken place here. The pale, waxen hand clutching the side of the tub was reposed, no rictus claw, and her head tilted back against the wall, sightless eyes staring toward the door. With confusion. With expectation. With wonder.
He hauled her from the tub, carrying her out into the heat of day, and now he joined that savage and clamorous throng who filled the streets. A straggler, one of the last, with Gabrielle’s head limp on his shoulder and the bled-clean ankles banging against his thigh, and if anyone noticed the condition of her they said nothing, because it was a day of miracles.
Their angel had returned, in the full splendor of their need and expectations.
It was a Memuneh that he’d never seen, stripped now and all but naked except for a white cloth wound modestly about his waist and loins. His skin was as creamy pale as the oil paints of a Botticelli or a Caravaggio, and his thighs chubbier than Austin remembered, plump and pleasing as a cherub’s.
But above the waist he was monstrous, as if he’d attempted to redefine his body to satisfy the demands of both aesthetics and logic. The wingspan he’d grown was huge, some forty feet, and the skeletal additions to anchor it grotesque. A great twin slab of breastbone jutted from the middle of his chest, roped over with muscle mass, and up from his back towered a spine that forced his head forward and stretched the skin of his shoulders into a fin like a dolphin’s.
He held his arms outstretched, wide and inviting, and the wings flapped with such force they could be heard even above the hubbub of the crowd. Whatever song he’d been trying to sing to them was drowned out, and the wings weren’t even white, but a mottled desert brown. Like a hawk’s.
Memuneh hovered where his light had been seen months ago, before the top floor of the hotel, scant yards away from the windows of the room where yesterday morning Austin had tasted a dozen deaths. And where was Scarlett? The entire town, it seemed, was crowded around the hotel’s foundation, screaming and crying and reaching for this messenger of the divine, while trampling those who fell beneath their eager feet.
But was it even happening? The furious unreality — this was only the latest in a lifetime of moments when Austin had wondered if it all hadn’t been some elaborate projection arcing through his mind as he fell from the train toward
its wheels, sure to clip him off at the ankle, if not higher.
Or maybe he was still in the tunnel after falling clear but striking his head, waiting to awaken to the rough hands and reeking breath of the men nobody wanted, driven out and sent to live along the tracks.
Over the heads of the crowd their gazes met, and when the Kyyth’s eyes settled on the bundle in Austin’s arms, Memuneh began to cry. Tears spilled down his cheeks and fell on the crowd like raindrops, and they wailed with delight and waved their hands for more, opening mouths and wagging tongues as if for Eucharists or snowflakes.
The tilt of his wings changed and Memuneh began to drift groundward. Austin hadn’t wanted to believe it and now, with those copious tears, he knew that this murder could not have been Memuneh’s work. Memuneh may have been a liar but his heart was too soft to slay anything.
Yet would he have enough heart to undo the butchery of another? Mend the damage, reinfuse the drained blood? Cheat death?
Memuneh’s bare soles touched down on the asphalt thirty feet away, but before he could take two steps they swarmed him. He was engulfed in a clutching tide of hands and devotion, and soon all that was visible were his wings, beating at the heads of the crowd. Feathers were ripped out in tufts, quills and all, then even these vast limbs disappeared, churned into the frenzied rapture. Moments later, above the mob rose a triumphant fist, clutching a heart.
Austin turned to carry her away from the sight and was in the next block, almost as far as the road home before he dared to turn and look back.
Someone had taken the severed wings to the hotel roof and now stood at its edge. Austin recognized him — a teenage boy with a mongoloid face and a child’s mind, brought here months ago for a healing that had never been bestowed. He now held the skewed twists of membrane and tatter and hollow bone, teetering against blue sky, then he leapt, plummeting toward a crowd that scattered in panic and left him to strike the street alone.
Austin didn’t wait to see what they did with him next.
He carried Gabrielle past the edge of town, into that desert where it seemed he’d always lived. He stared into the face that lay against his shoulder, then looked for it in the sky, in the fleece of passing clouds.