Last Plane to Heaven: The Final Collection

by Jay Lake

  He pushed into the chamber where the main tank was located. It reeked of rust, saltwater, and a thick, animal musk. Ratty red velvet curtains remained drawn over the glass, but the low, sonorous rumblings from within were promising. Likewise the blood-crusted chains hanging from the ceiling. A winch had been bolted up there as well. Russian military surplus, and capable of hoisting several tons, if he was any judge.

  Maxon noted a tense young man who held himself out from the increasingly drunken and naked crowd. No cameras were permitted in here, of course, but the fellow sketched furiously with charcoal pencil in a loose-bound book of foolscap paper.

  Drifting over, the doctor took a look.

  “Who the hell asked you?” growled the artist, covering the page with his forearm. He spoke in German, badly, with an American accent.

  “No one whatsoever,” Maxon replied in the same tongue, well aware of his own overly academic diction. “But then, you did not ask for authorization. Please, indulge me. I am a student of curiosities. Ever on the edge of epiphany.”

  “Redman.” The artist’s voice was grudging.

  “My pardons?”

  “Name’s Redman.” The young man had a truly magnificent scowl. His heavy, dark eyebrows would have given Frida Kahlo pause. He switched to English, with a decidedly Midwestern American accent. “This is the part where you tell me your made-up name, then we pretend to get along.”

  “Oh, I assure you that there is nothing made up about my name.” The doctor offered his hand, for a shake or a kiss as seemed appropriate. “Bentley Y. F. Maxon. Physician, collector, world traveler.”

  Redman did not take the bait, instead eyeing Maxon’s hand suspiciously for a moment. “You part of this freak show?”

  Maxon put aside the temptation to say he was the freak show. In any event, that was not true. At least not here, not tonight. And youth was not to be blamed for its callowness. “I play my roles in life,” he said. “Really, I must insist you permit me to view the sketch on which you are working.”

  With a final, blistering glare, Redman pulled his arm away and showed Maxon the sketchbook while still keeping a firm grip on it.

  Surprisingly, the scene was not naturalistically representative of the increasingly raucous and abandoned crowd. Maxon recognized the face of the woman in the foreground. Here on paper, her breasts were pointed, each nipple exaggerated into the nosecone of a V-2 rocket. But when last he’d seen her, while she had indeed been naked, she had not been astride an orthocone cephalopod like some unicorned squid out of the depths of time. Nor had there been thousand-eyed Buddhist demons in Soviet uniforms dancing behind her.

  Admittedly, anything was possible here.

  Maxon glanced around to be sure. Then, “Do you plan to sketch the performance?”

  “These are studies,” Redman said defensively. “Cartoons. In the old sense of the word.”

  “And excellent studies they are.” He reached out to lightly grasp the young man’s elbow. “I am a patron of the arts. Please do not neglect to inform me of whatever work proceeds from your evening with us tonight.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later, Maxon located Mercer again. She had stripped and was painting her body with whitewash in preparation for the show. It was a surprisingly sensual process with even more surprisingly attractive results. As such Merce had drawn the attention of a portion of the crowd.

  He stepped in close to speak low, pitched for her ears only. “Watch for the angry young man with the sketchbook. You should like to meet him.”

  “I love artists,” Merce replied. Maxon wondered if she would use a human canvas to make her body prints tonight. If so, he had an inkling whom the woman might be rolling back and forth across.

  A quiet signal from the ringmaster summoned the players to their places. Rather to his surprise, Maxon noticed Redman tucking his sketchbook away into a niche in the ancient, slime-crusted stones of a pillar and moving into position.

  Really, the whole point of Golden Dusk was that you never did know.

  When the red velvet parted like the lips of a woman’s vagina in the moment of passion, the thrashing tentacles within were a most satisfying sight indeed. The audience screamed.

  It was only a beginning.

  * * *

  Three days later, a fussy little man from the Swiss embassy made Maxon’s bail. He’d seen or heard nothing about Mercer Amistead while in the custody of the volkspolizei, and had so declined to ask questions lest he draw unwanted attention to his traveling partner.

  The bruises from the drubbing he’d received still smarted. The tear gas, thankfully, was only an unpleasant memory. Maxon still was uncertain whether the raid that had ended the show was planned or unplanned, but he had to admit it was a spectacular conclusion to the whole affair. He hoped the American officers had not been caught up, or at least had been fully clothed by the time they were. The U-Bahn would have saved them if they’d escaped. Courts-martial could be such a messy business.

  His only regret had been his fascination with the specimens. Some of them were clearly part of what he and Merce had been searching for. Possibly even the legendary unchambered heart cross-bred between cephalopods and rodentia by Section Goat’s veterinarians.

  The streets of East Berlin were as obsessively clean as ever. The air was smoggy but cold, a curious combination. As always in this season, the city was redolent with diesel fumes and the pungent aroma of boiled cabbage.

  He determined to head for West Berlin and find a bierstube. Some decent food would be welcome after the GDR’s institutional hospitality.

  Expunging the arrest record was a problem for later. Maxon knew he would have to take the necessary steps; otherwise the Basil Chantilly passport would be useless. He liked that identity, had taken quite some trouble building it out in the sort of elaborate and meaningless detail that made such things convincing.

  Merce caught up with him near the tram line. “Enjoy your stay in the vopo hotel?” she asked with a grin, speaking Arabic to maintain some privacy for their conversation.

  “Naturally,” he answered in the same language. There had been some fine specimens of abnormal psychology among his fellow prisoners. Maxon was never one to pass up an opportunity for a little field research, even under uncontrolled conditions. “I trust you managed to retain your own freedom.”

  “I have just spent three marvelous days with that vile little creature you discovered at the affair.” She took Maxon’s hand.

  “So at least you profited from the business in the basement.” Maxon found himself blushing, both for the messiness there, and for the lingering sense of her in the chambers of his own heart. He was not a jealous man. “I am sorry to have lost those amazing creatures in the tank. Wherever did the ringmaster find them?”

  Mercer shrugged. “This is East Germany. What can’t you find here? But I do have a surprise for you.”

  “I am not so fond of surprises.”

  “You will like this one. I am in the midst of a painting that recaptures the spirit of that evening. Redman is drafting a pen-and-ink piece from the same theme. We shall see which you prefer.”

  “Something was saved, then,” Maxon said. “Will we ever see their like again?”

  “They will live forever in art,” Mercer replied joyously.

  His own heart pounded anew. “So shall we all, my dear. So shall we all.”

  Angels iv: Novus Ordo Angelorum

  * * *

  Here are more angels, wrapped in archetype and heaven’s light.

  * * *

  Desire

  The angel of Desire bares her breasts, nipples hard in the dreaming wind of night. Her hair flows from her head like smoke in the autumn sky. It is every shade of black and gray—desire is the province of each age of life, not just callow youth nor addled dotage nor even obsessed middle years.

  Desire’s wings stretch wide as any angel’s, but their plumage is rare. They look to have been patched together from a very congeries of
birds: the mountain teratornis and the lammergeyer, the great golden eagles of the Arabian desert and the condor in his snowbound fastness. Every child dreams of flight, waking to be mocked by the birds. Her wings bear the burden of those dreams, which unfold in later life to the wretched obsessions that drive men mad.

  But it is in her eyes, the gaze of Desire, where this angel’s true power lies. They are rimmed with kohl, draped with lashes like a dark spray of rust. Their brown depths are drowning pools of lust. To catch her glance is to feel your heart stop, to feel blood cold in your arms and hot in your groin. No one, no age or gender, is safe from her eyes, so Desire wears a mask of silk and leather with a coiled snake worked upon it in tiny rubies formed from the blood of those she has loved.

  In her hooded beauty she reminds us that Love is the greatest and most terrible of God’s gifts.

  Despair

  Desire’s fraternal twin, Despair, is a young man with hollow eyes and a sunken chest. His hair is the eerie pallor of the starving, the icy white frizz grown by a corpse in its coffin. His skin is so pale as to be almost blue. Despair looks like every student pulled from a morgue freezer, caught on the wrong side of that balancing point between potential and disaster.

  His wings are different from his sister’s, composed of what might be called the ghosts of feathers, only brittle shafts and lacy ribs, without soft plumage to fill them out. Despair wears them wound close and tight to his body, just over the leather greatcoat that flaps around his calves. He dresses in torn black denim and an array of ropy scars. Everyone who ever cut themself in his name has inflicted their own wound upon him.

  Despair’s power is in his body. Even in shadow, the angle of his repose can cause a man to slump, a woman to turn away with tear-burned eyes. To meet Despair full on, his every muscle broadcasting the hopeless music of the world, is to lay down meek in the street and end your struggle.

  He is both God’s invitation and warning to stray from faith.

  Chance

  There is another angel, distant cousin to those already named, the angel of Chance. Chance is an elegant young man. His blond hair flips back in a wave. He favors pastel polo shirts and stylish white slacks. His wings are discreet, a clever accessory to be admired by the matrons of River Oaks or Telegraph Hill, while granddaughters at the country club blush behind their Shirley Temples and whisper youthful scandal of Chance’s single silver earring.

  Chance is not concerned with wagering, or the lottery, but rather the common happenstances of life. A missed flight, that relieves the annoyed traveler of death by burning jet fuel hours later in an Iowa cornfield. The flat tire that keeps the family Camry from a patch of black ice, leaving slick, spinning death for someone less favored. Hands bumping together over a book on sale at Powell’s, leading to coffee, then pizza, then a wild night of passion followed by a lifetime of contentment.

  You could pass Chance on the street and never really know him except by the twenty-dollar bill you later find stuck to your shoe. Chance is God’s reminder to us that order is not one of the forces of the world.

  Flora

  Flora is the angel of plants and flowers. Her work is found among the world’s oldest and quietest citizens. She wears flowing silks borrowed from her friends among the mulberry leaves, and crowns of whatever blooms that hour and season, be it the moss rose or the orchid. Her wings are spiders’ webs, pale traceries glimmering by moonlight. It is the sight of Flora moving through the gardens of night that gave rise to legends of fairies.

  Flora’s hair is all the colors of the natural world, a rainbow turned to river. Her eyes are the brown of soil one moment, the blue of water the next. Her smile is tiny, pursed, a soon-to-open rose. Her heart is just as thorny.

  Do not mistake Flora for a benign power. Trees with their roots rend the mightiest works of man. The least lichen is the death of rocks. Your bones will someday be her province, once the worms have cast you out. More patient than Time, she carries worlds in her hands and love of all that grows in her heart.

  No one knows what God thought when He set her into the world, but remember that it was sweet Flora who set the order of the plantings in the Garden. It was she that tended the orchards. It was she that placed the fig leaves where a shamed man might find them, and it was she that grew the apple tree where a woman of intellect might climb on advice of a snake.

  Word

  Word is the oldest angel of all. He is sometimes called “God’s grandfather.” He carries his age well. It shows only in the webbing of lines around his pale, blind eyes, and the stiffness in his step. He has a shock of red hair that lifts in a mutable fire from his head, so that Word is always as tall as he needs to be. His skin is dark as well-baked bread. His face is the face of Everyman.

  Blind as he is, Word needs no cane, for his wings serve him well. They arch high as a house, more like the wings of a moth than a bird. Their sensitive fibers build for him a picture of the world. He wears no clothes for textiles would block his wings and pain his senses. Even in his nakedness Word is wrapped in glory.

  For you see, in the beginning Word made the world upon the waters when God spat Word from His mouth. Later, Word made flesh. Without their tongues, men would be no more than animals. Without Word, men’s tongues would be no more than meat.

  Word is the beacon of our minds and the light of our days, withered proxy for an absent God.

  Descent into Darkness

  The Tentacled Sky

  * * *

  This story is me lightly channeling H. P. Lovecraft and enjoying the generalized weirdness of the life of cities.

  * * *

  The first note was scribbled on a piece of old cardstock, fountain-pen ink splattered carelessly across the fuzzed textures as if it had been written in haste by someone’s elegant grandmother. The handwriting itself was hardly Palmer Method, instead being as sloppy as the inkwork. Again, signaling haste.

  I turned the slightly irregular missive in my well-protected hands, looking at the back where a scrap of printing could just be made out to read “EALOU” in faded vermilion ink that reminded me of old blood. Jealous? I wondered. Or some portmanteau product name such as Sealout. The faint smell of roses emitted from the cardboard, though I was put more in mind of a funeral home than a florist.

  Significantly, neither my name nor my address was on the reverse. Only the faded printing and some wear scars. The note itself simply read, “TUESDAY 7:13 P.M.”

  Unsigned, undated, unadorned. Stuck into my door, just above the latch where I’d be sure to find the note immediately upon my return from my errands about the city.

  Note to gentle readers: I should not like to reveal more about my erstwhile whereabouts for fear of endangering you. Please forgive my lack of specificity concerning such an otherwise elementary matter.

  * * *

  Later on, the rain descended. The matter of climate had much been bruited in the newspapers of late, for so far in the course of this year barely halfway past we had challenged most prior records for annual precipitation. The weather-wise were declaiming that by the end of August this year of rain in the city should be one for the record books. The weather-foolish were proclaiming a need for honest citizens to provision themselves with boats for their porches, and flotation devices that the children might yet swim to school when the curriculum resumed in September.

  This year’s rain had been in general possessed of a distinctly unaqueous elasticity. Instead of washing the streets and clearing the air, the water clung with a nigh gelid tenacity to buildings, gutters, trees, and even the unfortunate birds. I was put much in mind of studies recently published in several lower-tier journals of academics and science regarding the polymerization of water. Ordinarily such drastic pronunciations about novel states of matter are thinly disguised pleas for funding or continued sponsorship, and as such I pay them little mind.

  Our rain of this year in the city was revising my opinions on this particular matter.

  I sat to watch the stree
t through the cracked glazing of my front window. Naturally it was surgically clean on the inside, smelling faintly of surfactants and rubbing alcohol. However, on the outside the glass was somewhat obscured by the persistent sheet of water clinging like a drowning man to the last rope of his hopes. Though I had largely ignored the note of the previous weekend, it continued to perch on my mantel, ungainly harbinger of vague portent.

  My grandfather’s railroad clock had struck the seventh hour of the afternoon not so long ago. Now I peered into the street, looking through the rain that fell like clear aspic to see what might be in store at the hour appointed by my anonymous correspondent.

  A single figure shuffled along the thoroughfare, eschewing the sidewalks in favor of the cobbled expanses where the day’s traffic had so recently wound down to the usual evening trickle. I had to laugh, for the approaching entity was as something designed by children in pretense of threat—long leather car coat that flapped in the wind, the figure beneath shrouded in shadow and rainfall; a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over the face until nothing could be seen from my second-floor vantage except crown surmounting shoulders; and a shambling gait of which any bedtime-story boogeyman would be proud.

  Could this jack-o-the-streets be my mysterious correspondent? Or an agent of theirs?

  No one else appeared—no autobus or taxicab, no private automobiles rushing for medical aid or cruising for the evening air. Just this creature who dropped below my line of sight. I heard my apartment building’s front door creak open, that bad hinge ever worsening in the endless rain. I heard a heavy tread upon the stairs. I heard the floorboard outside my door squeak as always it did when I had a visitor.

  I tensed, waiting for the knock that would doubtless be a thunderous echo. My heart raced despite my airs of amusement, and my breath was harsh in my throat.