The Crossing Point

by August Arrea

  The hunter at first was at a loss for words, but it was clear he was becoming more and more incensed. I could tell by the way the gooey, brown tobacco juice he had been spitting intermittently onto the asphalt was coming in more frequent spurts.

  “I see what you are,” he finally growled. “You’re one of those liberal sissies from Hollyweird? A limp-wristed, tree-hugging—“

  His face became hate-filled as he unleashed a verbal assault on Gotham that was more a laundry list of all the profanity he had added to his vocabulary over his lifetime. I probably would have found it more humorous than I did had it not been for all those guns being within reach of the enraged hunter. “Fair fight. Did you ever hear of such a thing, Harvey?” the man said to his friend with an angry chuckle. Then as he settled a fuming glare on Gotham, I knew instantly what was coming next when he suddenly cried out, “I’ll give you a fair fight."

  I didn’t have the time to warn Gotham, who was looking away from the man, when the hunter suddenly lunged toward him while drawing back his fist. He swung at Gotham with all his might aimed at the side of his turned head. But the assault came to a dead stop when Gotham, without so much as looking, caught the man’s fist in his hand. An immediate look of intense pain swept over the hunter’s face as the sound of bones cracking could be heard.

  “Trust me when I tell you, you’re a fly going up against a flyswatter,” Gotham warned the man. “And as much as I’d love to engage you, it wouldn’t be a fair fight.”

  Gotham then turned back to the deer, leaving the whimpering hunter to nurse the pain of his broken hand. I watched as Gotham placed his hand gently on the buck’s side and closed his eyes as though to block out the man’s continued ranting. A moment later he opened his eyes and looked to me and said it was time to leave. I gave the deer one final glance as I turned to follow, and as I did I could have sworn I saw its dark dead eyes blink. Obviously I was seeing things I told myself and went to follow Gotham. Then, just as we were about halfway across the parking lot, a terrible ruckus erupted behind us. The hunter’s threats which had trailed us suddenly went silent, and as I turned I saw the hunter and his friend standing motionless with their mouths hanging open and staring wide-eyed at the truck that was lurching violently upon its wheels. And within moments I held the same look.

  There, in the back of the truck, the deer that had been lying dead was up on its feet bucking about like mad and thrashing its head wildly while baying loudly. It came bounding out of the truck and began butting and ramming all sides of the hunter's precious truck. Its antlers punched through doors and sliced huge gouges out of the metal exterior as easily as a can opener working through a lid of Campbell’s Soup. Windows exploded in shards of glass and the chrome grill in front of the truck was laid to waste in a matter of seconds. And then the buck took aim at the oversized tires.

  The man with the hunter was the first to find his voice, and screamed to his friend to shoot the deer. The frozen hunter was shaking like crazy and nearly in tears as he attempted to remove the safety from his gun with his wounded hand and take aim. Before he was able, the angry buck set its sights on him and bounded toward him. Both men let out the high-pitched shrieks more suitable for housewives crossing paths with a mouse scurrying across the kitchen floor as they were sent sprawling across the ground by painful butts from the buck who then quickly ran off toward the nearby hills leaving behind two scared men clinging to one another and a completely demolished truck looking like so many that have collided with deer on the highway. Only it was the deer who walked away and the truck that lay dead on the side of the road.

  Still shocked by what I had just witnessed, I looked to Gotham and saw a satisfied smirk on his face. “Thou shall not kill,” I heard him remark. “You will not find a footnote of exceptions etched in the stone upon which that commandment was written.”

  Later, when we had resumed our travel, with the altercation still stuck in his craw, he told me the history of the battle man has waged on animals. It stemmed, he said, from a deep-seated resentment held by man that God had created the animals first, and knowing full-well the immense pride and love God had for these creatures. And it was shortly after man was created and instructed to look after the animals that man turned on them, enslaving them under his dominance and violence in a jealous attempt to gain primary favor with God. It was, Gotham said, a similar jealousy angels would soon feel toward man that would result in the Great War in Heaven.

  “To kill an animal and disrespect the beauty of the creatures that roam this world is to spit in the face of God,” he said to me. No doubt this is the first of many important lessons awaiting me.

  It looks like our train is ready to be boarded. We’re now off to Tatvan— wherever that is.

  ~~~

  The first thing to grab Jacob’s attention when he climbed aboard the Van Gölü Ekspresi and navigated his way down the aisle of one of the passenger cars filled with excited but tired tourists looking forward to a good night’s rest were all the different voices. Polish, Armenian, German, Dutch, Hungarian—the cacophony of languages circulated through the air in a dull drone of chatter, and strangely Jacob found he could understand every single foreign word to find his ears, even Uzbek coming from a young couple sitting towards the front of the car. Was this really happening? Or were his ears—and head—playing tricks on him? he wondered. As he found himself looking to the mouths of those talking, he saw the various lips truly were enunciating what he was hearing. It spooked him somewhat and made his feet move just a bit quicker to catch up with Gotham, who was leading the way at a brisk pace to the adjoining private sleeping car.

  As they proceeded down the car’s narrow corridor, various eyes stole curious glances from inside the neighboring compartments they passed. An elderly woman, with a head of cotton candy white hair that carried a subtle tint of mauve, glanced up from her magazine and over the top of a pair of rectangular-shaped reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. A small boy tapped incessantly against the window of another compartment with a plastic toy dinosaur gripped tightly in his hand while his mother sat slumped in her seat fast asleep from exhaustion. Further down, a heavy-set businessman wearing a rumpled cheap brown tweed suit with a striped tie pulled loose from its strangling hug around his thick neck momentarily ceased his agitated pacing back and forth within the small confines and barking into a cell phone to fix his dark, beady eyes on Jacob before yanking down the shade over the window of his door.

  Once inside their own compartment, Jacob immediately shrugged from his aching shoulder the weight of his duffel bag he had been lugging around for what had seemed like an eternity and collapsed with an exhausted sigh onto one of the waiting seats. Never had his feet been more grateful to be issued a reprieve from taking another single step. The day had been a non-stop blur of planes, trains and taxis punctuated by tedious waiting inside countless stations stretching from London to Budapest and Jacob was never more thankful to leave it behind when he felt the train beneath him finally lurch forward as it slowly pulled out of the station. Outside the window of the compartment, through tired eyes, Jacob caught the last glimmer of the grand cultural mosaic of Istanbul, lit up brightly like a sparkling jewel, growing smaller and fainter until its light was eventually snuffed out like the flame of a candle by the pitch-black darkness of night.

  The train lumbered along the tracks, creeping along at a painfully slow pace, its wheels seemingly timid to pick up a faster speed. The bright lights fixed upon the nose of the engine fought to cut through the thick, almost impregnable inky blackness that swallowed whole the vast, open Turkish landscape with a spooky hunger. Jacob’s eyes quickly grew heavier and heavier, and within moments he surrendered without resistance to the staccato grinding of the train making its way along the tracks which lulled him to sleep.

  ~~~

  He dreamed a dream of flying.

  It began with him rushing toward a cliff’s edge at Penuel Point as he had done many times before with his friend Ty
and leaping into the vast openness of the waiting beauty. Only there was no chute strapped to his back. He did not need one. For he was suddenly fixed with a pair of majestic wings. They took him soaring high along the slopes of the mountain peaks, allowing him to share the sky with the birds circling about him. He had become one of them, darting and diving with ease upon the wind that seemed to hold him up with gentle fingers, and he was filled with a freedom he had never before experienced, as well as a feeling of immense power.

  Then a great dark shadow suddenly materializing above him, spreading across the sky like a tide of spilled black ink slowly dribbling its way across the top of a wooden desk sending the birds scattering in a frightful flurry to all directions of the wind. An intense wave of fear overtook Jacob as he tried to move himself faster through the emptiness that surrounded him, desperate to escape the ominous cloud bearing down on him while slowly saturating the sky and suffocating everything around him in a charred blackness.

  Suddenly from within the darkness emerged a deep rumbling growl driving a horrifying chill deep into his being. And from within the billowing blackness a monstrous face emerged with two red orbs for eyes, brightly illuminated like two coals consumed in the burning flames of fire.

  “Destiny.” The voice came from within in a terrifying roar.

  Jacob fought with all his might to escape the horrifying presence, yet nothing but blackness surrounded him. Everywhere blackness, reeking with the putrid, acrid stench of sulphur. And then there was a great pain, the searing pain of fire across his back and digging its way deep into his shoulder blades. Jacob gave a glance over his shoulder and saw his great wings suddenly ablaze and in a fiery instant the flames had eaten through his brilliant plumage and scattered the disintegrated cinders to the wind.

  The world seemed to suddenly be pulled out from beneath him and he began to fall. Down...down...down.... Deeper into the blackness, and then past it to where the beauty of the green valley below resurfaced, but only for a moment, and then the lush scenery was seen to wilt away in a matter of seconds and transform into a brown, desolate wasteland. It was coming up fast to meet Jacob in a most unpleasant way leaving him to claw at the air whistling loudly past him in a useless attempt to slow his fall. He managed a hopeless wail right before slamming into the ground.

  To his surprise the fall had not obliterated him, but left him sprawled face- down upon the hard, hot ground. With his back still smoldering, Jacob got to his feet and was struck immediately by the unforgiving heat bearing down upon him from the blazing sun. It was suffocating, strangling. Where was he? A desert of some kind, it looked to him. Miles and miles of it. And not a sign of another living thing in sight. And then he heard the voice again, only not as monstrous as it sounded before, but human.

  “Destiny.”

  ~~~

  Jacob awoke with a start, wide-eyed and damp with sweat. His face was pressed up against the cold window where he was greeted with nothing but the dark void of night. For a moment he had forgotten where he was, forgotten about the train he had boarded only a few hours before.

  Destiny.

  Destiny.

  Destiny.

  Destiny.

  The voice echoing its haunting refrain in a far-off distance gradually faded and merged with the rhythmic clamor of the train’s wheels grinding against the rails.

  Dream. It was just a dream.

  And yet so real.

  But a dream nonetheless. One Jacob wished to never revisit again, and yet one he found himself being stalked by beginning a couple nights earlier.

  He righted himself in his seat, tilted back his head and took several deep breaths, trying to calm his heart which was pounding wildly in his chest when he became aware he wasn’t alone.

  His eyes flew open and shot to the seat directly across from him where he found Gotham quietly sitting. The angel’s hawkish eyes, as though lit from within by a candle placed strategically in his skull, burned through the dark pall seeping inside from the night outside and were leveled firmly on the boy.

  “Bad dream?”

  Jacob didn’t want to talk about it.

  “What time is it?” he asked with a yawn.

  “I rarely have use in keeping track of the hour of any given day,” Gotham replied. “But if I had to guess…,” his gaze rolled to the right to sneak a glance at the night through the window, “I would say just a hair past three in the morning.”

  Jacob reached for his phone which momentarily pierced the darkness with its light. “Three after three. Not bad,” said Jacob, to which Gotham nodded in a mocking manner to acknowledge his brilliant feat.

  “So how come you’re sitting here in the dark wide awake?” asked Jacob. “I figured you’d be just as dead tired as I was after such a long day of traveling.”

  Before Gotham could answer, Jacob quickly cut him off before he could speak. “I know, you don’t have a need for food or clocks so I’m guessing sleep is out of the question for you angels as well?”

  “What can I say?” said Gotham. “We just have no use for the creature comforts required by civilians.”

  “Civilians?”

  “Just a term we’ve come to use when speaking of mortals.”

  “No sleep either, huh?” pondered Jacob aloud while staring inquisitively at Gotham. “It must get, among other things, boring for you at times. I mean, what do you do in the middle of the night when everyone around you has fallen asleep?”

  “Strange as you might find it, I quite enjoy these hours, brief as they are, when the world falls away and I am left alone in the stillness and quiet left behind. It gives me time to think and reflect.”

  Jacob didn’t find it strange at all. In fact, he understood quite well the quiet moments Gotham spoke of with a sort of cherished fondness. He, himself, often times found relaxing solace in his own aloneness. There were also times such stillness brought with it a loudness that sent him in search of random clamor to drown out such silence.

  “Aren’t there others around who you could hang with who are…you know… um, like you?” Jacob inquired somewhat clumsily.

  Gotham appeared subtly amused by the way the boy tiptoed his tongue around using certain words.

  “You mean Fallen?” he asked. “It’s alright, you can say the word without fear of being struck by some proverbial bolt of lightning. And yes, there are many of us roaming this world, Fallen and unfallen alike. But, as it is, shame keeps me from one, intense hatred from the other. Unfortunately, that is the best uncomplicated answer I can give to your very complicated question in explaining my self-imposed solitary existence.”

  “Sounds lonely,” said Jacob.

  “I will admit, loneliness has been an unwanted companion to me on more occasions than I have wished it to be.” Gotham took a noticeable pause. At first Jacob thought the angel had suddenly found himself reflecting on the loneliness he had described. Then he saw Gotham’s eyes were fixed hard on something else entirely. Jacob followed the gaze and saw it had fallen upon the brown leather-bound journal, which rested on the seat beside him.

  “It’s one of the very few things angels and civilians share in common, loneliness,” continued Gotham while his eyes remained firmly fixed on the journal. “Where did you get that book?”

  There was cold accusatory tone in his voice.

  “My grandmother gave it to me the night before we left,” answered Jacob. “She thought it was important that I remember all my experiences on this trip by writing them down.”

  While it never left Jacob’s mind the boy the journal once belonged to was his grandmother’s son, it suddenly dawned on him the boy was also the angel’s son as well. And the glimpse of sorrow spied in Gotham’s face as he stared at the journal quickly made sense. Not knowing how to respond, Jacob took the journal in his hand and offered it to Gotham.

  “Maybe it would be better if you were to have it.”

  Gotham didn’t respond to the gesture at first, but eventually rejected it. “Your grandmother
wouldn’t have given it to you if she didn’t feel it the right thing to do,” he said.

  Reluctantly, Jacob kept the journal, though he felt funny about doing so, and quickly tucked it away out of sight in his bag.

  ~~~

  The sound of the train winding its way along the steel tracks was the only thing standing in the way of complete silence engulfing the compartment where Jacob and Gotham sat motionless in their seats across from one another. Gotham had urged Jacob to close his eyes and get some rest. Sleep, however, was the last thing Jacob wanted, for sleep required him to return to the dark canopy of his subconscious where the dream that had been terrorizing him seemed to be patiently lying in wait for him to close his eyes ready to pounce.

  Instead, he rifled through his bag and retrieved from it another book he had tucked away: “Paradise Lost.” Why he decided to pack it away at the last minute before leaving home and bring it along was beyond him. For weeks, he had laboriously been trying to work his way through the tedious read assigned to him by his literature teacher, Mrs. Kretch. Now, reading the book no longer felt like the chore of homework. Instead, it was something tangible which he looked to for some answers to explain this strange turn his life had suddenly taken, despite the unnaturalness of the words that made him feel at times like a first- grader attempting to read for the first time.

  During one of his small victories of finishing one page and turning to the next, he came to one of the many illustrations inside the book and he stopped reading any further. It showed a flock of angels tumbling down from the heavens. They were being driven downward by another group of angels wielding swords. Those falling were shielding their faces from streaks of bright light raining down upon them like lightning bolts.

  Jacob found himself captivated by the picture, and continued to study it for a long time. As he did, he glanced over at Gotham who was quietly occupying his time lost in his own thoughts as he said he usually did when the dead of night had settled upon him.