The Tithe

by Elle Hill

“Who’d the angel take last night?”

  “Trenny. She’s a friend of RJ’s.”

  Tall, broad woman with a daunting bosom. “I remember.” She paused. “How is Lynna?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good.”

  Silence filled the room while Josh waited for him to speak. Finally, she asked, “What happened last night?”

  His voice poured over her, smooth and chilly. “During the angel’s visit, you passed out, so I carried you here.”

  “What about before that?”

  “The angel visited.”

  She sighed in annoyance. “And tried to take Lynna. Then it took me, and you saved me.”

  He remained silent.

  “The angel dragged me by the arm into the air. It should have hurt, but it didn’t. Nothing hurt, not even my legs. I was in the air, looking down on everyone, when you came for me.”

  “It sounds like a dream, Joshua,” he said.

  “You rose in the air,” she whispered. “You came for me, and you made the angel give me back.”

  She waited for him to tell her again she’d had a bad dream, but he remained silent and motionless behind her.

  “It was never me. It’s you. You’re an angel.”

  Blue sighed against the back of her head.

  They lay like that, motionless and quiet. Josh’s eyes traced patterns in the concrete wall.

  “What am I supposed to do?” she asked a long time later.

  “Get up and eat breakfast.”

  “Your deliberate obtuseness is less than amusing this morning,” she said. “Wait. Can I talk to you like that? Am I sinning when I get grumpy? Am I supposed to be singing your praises and writing poetry about you?”

  Her back shook as he chuckled. “Please don’t,” he said.

  “You admit it,” she whispered.

  He was silent.

  “Say it.”

  Blue took a deep breath. “Yes.”

  “You’re an angel.”

  “Yes.”

  “With wings.”

  “Not right now.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Blue sighed. “May I request we not talk about this? Any of it?”

  “No!” Josh cried. “I mean, unless I’m earning Elovah’s wrath by yelling at you.”

  “No,” he said.

  “You’ve met Her?”

  “Let’s get up and talk about this.”

  Did angels pee? They slept, they ate; it made sense they would also urinate.

  Washing her hands after using the facilities, Josh’s brain tangled itself in knots, posing question after question, including, it appeared, the elimination practices of divine beings.

  She returned to Blue’s and her bedroom and locked the door, as he’d urged her to, while he went to the kitchen for breakfast. He returned a few minutes later with several pieces of toast, water, and three aspirin.

  They ate their toast in silence. Josh had so many questions, she couldn’t think of how to begin. Finally, she blurted, “Why?”

  “Why am I here?” Blue sat at the foot of the bed.

  She nodded. Then, feeling especially angry and annoyed because she’d forgotten her usual etiquette with Blue, she said, “Yes.”

  “Because of you.”

  “Tell me,” she said in a low voice.

  “The first night, I came for you. I didn’t know you then, of course. I only knew you were one of the people in the hallway.”

  “You were the angel the first night?” she asked. She didn’t know what to think. The terror she’d felt as the angel drew closer, its wings snapping, the brush of the feather, the rush of contentment before she’d dropped to the floor: All Blue. Blue, the man she cuddled every morning, the man who brought her aspirin and threatened anyone who dared touch her in anything but friendship.

  “Yes. And then you saved them. You saved them all,” he said.

  “I just pushed some people ahead of me. It’s not as though I swooped through the air and rescued them from an angel.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “That’s exactly what you did.”

  “Minus the air part,” she reminded him.

  “Minus that.”

  “I’m sure I’m not the first Tithe to throw around a few others in hopes they make it.”

  “Sometimes they try to save one another, yes, but only later, after they become friends. No one offers themselves on the first night.”

  Her breath turned solid in her chest. “How many Tithes have you taken?” she almost-whispered.

  “A lot,” he said.

  “So,” she said, and her voice was breathless, “you appeared here as a human to get to know me?”

  “I took Blue Lenwood instead of you,” Blue said. “And I became him.”

  Josh found her head shaking in negation. She took a sip of water but had a problem swallowing it.

  “You’re what we fear,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “All those questions I asked you about your childhood. You didn’t even live that life. You lied to me, Blue.” It seemed minor in comparison to everything else . . . yet, it wasn’t.

  “I’ve never lied to you,” he said firmly. “I know everything about Blue Lenwood’s life. I told you the specifics of his life, but everything else has been mine.”

  “You’re getting awfully technical,” she said. “You lied to me in spirit.”

  He remained silent.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Blue Lenwood.”

  “Your real name.”

  “Blue Lenwood. Blue and I aren’t as separate as you think. By becoming him, I inherited his memories, the ways his brain works, the genetic quirks, the habits that have become ingrained in his muscles. I don’t have to remind this body to breathe or to wonder what hunger feels like. I am just as much Blue Lenwood as I am . . .” He trailed off.

  “An angel,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “But what is the angel’s name?” she persisted.

  “We don’t have names the way you do. We don’t communicate the way you do or think like you.”

  Come to think of it, none of the angels in the Bitoran had names. The only named divine being was Elovah.

  “Do you know Her?” she asked.

  Blue inhaled and said as he exhaled, “I would like not to talk about that right now.”

  “Okay,” she said with deliberate patience. “Then please continue with your story.”

  “I became Blue Lenwood. And he made me into the man before you.”

  “You became a human just to study me?” Josh asked. She was reminded of Avery, and her eyes grew moist. There was a spy, my friend, but he was right here among us.

  “No. Well, yes. I wanted to know what made you different. I wanted to know everything about you.”

  Josh heroically resisted pointing out he could have become her to know her that well. Her stomach grew slightly queasy.

  “And because when I touched you that first night . . .” Blue reached a hand toward her. After hesitating a moment, she grabbed it. “I felt your compassion, your kindness, your courage. They scratched my mind. It was like music filling my head. It was loud. It hurt. It was so messy, so cacophonous, so rhythmic and hypnotizing. I wanted more. So I became . . . this.”

  She could have guessed most of this herself. She had so many more questions. “What have you learned?” she finally asked.

  “How to be human,” Blue said very quietly. “The cycle of thoughts and feelings, the way bodily needs shape moods and activities, pain and happiness and how interconnected they are, the tactility of time.”

  Sometimes just the passing of time abrades my skin.

  “But angels have bodies,” she said.

  “Different kinds.”

  “And time is different for you?”

  “Yes. Time and materiality.”

  “How did you change into a human?” she breathed.

  “Try explaining how and why you slee
p to someone who’s never done it. Or emotions to someone who can’t feel. We just do.”

  “Can you really see?” she asked, staring into the frigid blueness of his eyes.

  “No. The Blue before me couldn’t see, so I can’t see.”

  “Did you see as an angel?”

  “We don’t have senses like hu—like you. No, I’ve never seen. I’d never heard before, either, or not in the way you know it. Or felt. I used a musical metaphor because this brain supplied it and it fit, at least a little, but I didn’t know music before.”

  “You’d never felt?” Josh gasped.

  “Not the way you think of it. I’d touched many Tithes, but I’d never felt before touching you that night.”

  “What did it feel like?” she asked. It was an asinine question, she knew, and probably unanswerable, but it was the only way she could think to phrase it.

  Blue smiled at her then. “It hurt so much I thought I would never stop feeling pain. And I was happy. So happy I wondered if I’d cease to exist. I touched you, and I felt you. I knew you. It hurt so much, and I loved you. I didn’t know what any of those sensations meant then, but after becoming Blue, it made more sense.”

  She turned his hand over, looked at it. Still the same long-fingered hand with square fingernails. Josh rubbed a finger in his palm.

  “Does it still hurt?” she asked softly.

  “It never stops,” he said, face as calm as ever. “I think you humans feel this all the time, the background pain and ecstasy of being, and maybe you’ve adapted to it. I wonder sometimes if it’s the benefit of mortality, this sensory overload, the rapture and the despair. Or maybe it’s the price I pay for becoming mortal.”

  His words boomed through her, knocking her breath from her chest, jarring her five senses into momentary silence. After a moment, she leaned forward and put her face in his hand. Within a minute, she placed her head in his lap. Her boots crushed the thin pillow into the mattress. With gentle fingers, Blue stroked her hair from her face.

  “You’re an angel,” she finally whispered.

  “In part, now,” he said.

  “And you gave it up to be here . . . with me?”

  “Yes.”

  She pressed a hand against her eyes. “Were you immortal before?” He’d all but said he was, but she had to know for sure.

  “In the way you know it, yes.”

  “And now?”

  “I’ve tasted life on this plane, felt the beating of hearts and the sensation of time passing linearly. I’ve felt skin cells die and heard words and songs from beings that live with death every day. I can never completely go back, even if I wanted. I will die eventually.”

  “I killed you. I killed an angel,” she whispered.

  “No,” he said quietly. Then, firmer, “No. I chose this.”

  “Do you regret it? Please . . .” Her breath snagged. “Be honest.”

  “I can’t be anything else. And how can you ask?”

  “Uh.” She laughed briefly. “Immortality or seventy days with some unworkable from Barstow. I think the question is perfectly reasonable.”

  His fingers continued to wind their way through her hair. Looking up at him, she could see he smiled very slightly as he faced the head of the bed.

  “I told you you’re better than any imrabi, any angel. You live so loudly and love so intensely. Everyone turns to you, not because you’re the wisest or the tenderest, but because you radiate compassion the way the sun projects heat. You’re so warm, so loud, I had to touch you. Actually feel you, know you. I’ve touched hundreds of Tithes, and no one . . .” He trailed off.

  She captured one of his hands and pressed a kiss into his palm.

  “Did you just call me a dumb loudmouth?” she asked.

  Blue remained rigid for a moment, and then his belly rippled and he erupted in laughter. After a moment, Josh joined him.

  Chapter 12

  Josh is maybe twelve, two years before she would be declared a Tithe. Ima Emm, her usually placid face enlivened, her jowls wobbling wildly, her eyes practically ablaze, leads a sermon on the return of Elovah in Twelve. Disobedience! Fire! Stubbornness! Death and destruction! Finally, as humanity trembles on the verge of extinction, they give in and the pact between god and people is formed.

  Josh has heard this approximately three thousand four hundred eighty-two times before. She picks at her cuticles, since the soap she uses to wash the floor has a tendency to dry her skin. Sometimes she stares at Ima Emm, watching with awe and a little bit of amusement as the woman recites the story with searing passion. It’s almost as though the imrabi wishes to burn the account into the minds of her listeners, to have them feel the pain of the wicked Twelves, who wasted their lives pursuing status and things rather than honoring their connections to one another and the land.

  After the sermon, everyone files out the room. Many stop and kiss Ima Emm’s hand or bow their head over it. They all leave, and she is alone with the imrabi.

  “Yes, Josh?” Ima Emm asks. She always knows when Josh has a question. Sometimes, Josh wonders if Elovah has granted her special powers.

  “I had a question,” Josh says. She looks down, now a little shy.

  Ima Emm stands there, big in every way a person can be. Josh thinks briefly she must look tiny to the woman.

  “Where did the angels come from?” she asks. It’s probably a really dumb question. Her ears burn just a little bit. “I mean, the Bitoran never really says.”

  “They arrived with Elovah in Twelve,” Ima Emm responds patiently.

  “I know, I know.” She hopes the imrabi doesn’t think she hasn’t paid attention any of those three thousand times. “But, I mean, where do they come from?”

  “From Elovah, just as we do,” Ima Emm responds, smiling just a little.

  “Did She give birth to them?” Josh persists. She waits for the imrabi to demonstrate shock or even cuff her for her impertinent question.

  Ima Emm didn’t even blink. “She created them just as She did us. They’re the link between Her and us.”

  “What did She create them out of? Are they like us, but with wings and pretty skin?”

  Ima Emm finally shakes her head. “They’re not like us, Josh. Remember how just one could strike down thousands of humans at a time?”

  “How many are there?”

  The imrabi sighs, very quietly. It’s a sound with which Josh has become quite familiar. “Maybe you should take the night off and read the Bitoran, Josh.”

  She has, maybe more than three thousand times. It says nothing about how many angels exist and what they’re made of. It occurs to her that the imrabi may not know everything.

  They remained in the room till dinnertime. Researcher that she had been, she wished she could write down his answers and file them away for future readers. But here, wrapped in the safety and obscurity of imminent death, they were the only two people who would have access to the questions not answered even in the towns’ holiest of books.

  Not that the questions always enlightened. Many of them Blue refused to answer: where angels came from, their number, anything about Elovah. His responses tended toward the abstract and sometimes the unenlightening “Not as you know it,” or “You couldn’t understand.”

  However, when she asked him anything about the last twenty-six days, his answers sharpened. He considered himself “mostly mortal now.” No, he couldn’t show her how to fly. He considered touching Josh the very best part of being here. No, he had no regrets. (This question he answered perhaps ten times before she finally stopped asking.)

  After just a few hours, he professed himself tired of talking. Josh wanted to ask him questions for the rest of the day and well into the next few, but she understood needing thinking time.

  In the late afternoon, they entered the Great Room. Lynna sat on the round couch in her usual place. Her hair blazed from her head, her greenish eyes squinted in laughter, and her strong arms folded under her bosom. This beautiful woman was still h
ere, in part because of Josh.

  I’m sorry, Trenny.

  “Thanks for finally joining us,” her friend said, smiling.