“Oh, honey, what happened?” she said. “You look so strange.” And was there, or did he imagine it, some trace of hope in her voice? Hope that he did have something strange to offer her, something she would never truly seek out for herself. The kind of hope that could be harbored only by someone who had never been sung to sleep by wolves at the edge of an unsoundable wilderness.
The angel sits at John’s bedside, a quill in her hand that may well be one of her own feathers. She raps the nib against the sheet and says, “John, John, John…” in that singsong, mocking way of hers, her perfect shoulders drooping: He’s boring her. He sits up straighter against the pillows and tries to think, pressing his trembling fingertips to his temples, but inside his head is only a blank, hissing whiteness like a field of shifting snow.
“Imperfect?” she says. “Impious? Imperiled? Impressive?” Her voice has the low resonance of a cat’s purr, so that he often feels it vibrating in his jaw.
“No,” John says, “none of those,” but what the right word is he just can’t remember, it slips his grasp like so many things these days. The rate at which his body has betrayed him is shocking, and in moments like this he feels his age settle on him like a cloak of lead.
“John,” she says, “we will be here all century at this rate. Tell me something or the Old So-and-So will be wroth with us both.”
“Imprudent,” he says, and she nods and moves the quill fluidly across the paper, but returns all too quickly to her posture of waiting, waiting, her anticipatory silence.
John knows he should be glad to see the angel; he has been blind for six years and should be glad to see anything, much less a messenger from Heaven. But she frightens him. Bitter white light seeps from her skin, and she has a faint scent about her like crushed granite and ice. There are times when he wishes he could close his eyes against her and return to the velvet darkness of his blindness.
* * *
—
The first time she appeared to him, John woke from a dream of dark and glassy seas and found the angel sitting in a straight-backed chair by his bedside. Without preamble she said, “I’ve come for your poem.”
“Which one?”
“Oh, you know, the epic,” she said, waving her fingers airily. “Fall of Man, Redemption, Forgiveness, et cetera. Your great work.”
“I haven’t written it.”
“I’m well aware.” A quill appeared in her hand, and a board across her lap with a sheet of parchment and an inkpot. She smiled at him as she dipped the pen into the ink. “Let’s begin.”
Now she looks at him with much less patience. “Something more, John,” she says. “Epics are not made in a day, and for all you know you will be dead tomorrow.”
“I will not be dead tomorrow,” says John. “Else you would not be here with me.” But his conviction does not go further than his voice, and both of them know it.
* * *
—
It is centuries, now, since the angel began her work with humans, and being close to them has invoked her curiosity, if not her admiration. They are just so many stories patched together, so many forgotten days encased in bone and meat. One might unearth almost anything with enough searching. Being a muse is mostly this—a sifting through of memories to find something of merit, hauling it to the surface where it can shine. The endeavor has, at the best of times, an exotic appeal. Forgetting is a concept the angel knows only through observation. Every moment of her long existence echoes through her like the unfading peal of a bell, things she would rather forget every bit as loud as those she would remember.
* * *
—
When John was a young man he traveled across Europe, and found himself one day visiting with Galileo. The great scientist was blind, too, by then, and sick, only a few years from death but still holding court in a borrowed villa in Florence like some gnarled pagan king. If the doting nobles and scientists who surrounded him cared that he had been forced to recant his celestial cartography, that his home was little more than a comfortable prison, they gave no sign of it. Even John, wrapped in the arrogance of his youth, had been tempted to press his forehead to the floor at the astronomer’s feet. But he had resisted, had fallen back on his Latin and his quips and tried to be witty, rather than reverent, until the old man interrupted him.
“A writer, are you?” Galileo said. “Cursed, even more than an astronomer. Full of strong opinions that will leave you cold in your old age.”
“It may be so,” said John, too shaken to think of any other reply.
“It is so. You’re too young to know. Learn to smile in the daytime and write your heresies by candlelight, or you’ll live to regret it.”
Now John dreams he is back in Florence. He and Galileo stand face-to-face, two old men alone in a crowd of chattering admirers. John looks into the astronomer’s dark eyes and the sounds of the room around them drop away. A misty dusk envelops them, until all John can see are the flames of the candles in the chandeliers high above, flaring brighter and brighter and then plunging like a meteor shower, raining down around the two of them to set the room afire.
The angel takes hold of John’s hand and squeezes it until the bones ache. “Old man,” she says, “stop daydreaming,” and he startles awake and finds himself on the divan by the fireplace, the angel watching him as though she could see right through his skin.
* * *
—
Before he became blind, John would never have let someone else write his words down for him, not even an angel. The words were too important. Once upon a time, John fancied himself a killer of kings, and with them injustice, though he struck with sentences and not an executioner’s ax. He could sit down at his desk at night and write until the sky turned gray with morning, mining truth and smelting arguments together until he had built a palace of reason. The talk in Parliament was all about whether the king should be tried as a traitor to the people, and everyone read John’s pamphlets, whether they agreed with him or not. When the king was finally brought to trial and then to the chopping block, still holding his absurd little dog and mewling about his divine rights, John could not help but feel pride in having played a part in bringing it all about.
But these days, John is not so sure he is anything but a slayer of himself. Now he is the one who has been imprisoned. Tried for regicide, robbed of his books, barely saved from hanging by persuasive friends, and finally confined to this damp house, living under a new king despite his best efforts. His young wife and infant daughter dead within the year, he feels the world closing in around him, and wonders how long it can be before he follows them. The bones of John’s feet throb with heat like red coals, and his own head might as well be severed for all the good it’s doing him.
* * *
—
In the afternoons, Andrew, a younger colleague from John’s glory days, sometimes comes to visit, and sits by John’s bedside with a cup of tea rattling against the saucer in his hand. He brings with him all the gossip of Parliament. Andrew has done well for himself, has somehow escaped the censure that John fears will dog him to his grave, but John feels no jealousy, only gratitude that the two of them can still sit together like this and talk. He feels a waft of steam upon his face as he holds his own teacup to his lips; the fragrance of humid Darjeeling plantations rises to greet him.
“Will you write today?” Andrew says. “Shall I scribe for you?” But John shakes his head. He can think of nothing to say, though he knows his time is slipping through his hands like the tail of a rapidly shortening rope. It will burn his fingers with its passing and leave him clutching at empty air. The very thought makes him tired.
“Were we so wrong, Andrew, to want him gone?” he says.
“Hush, John,” Andrew says, and John does not need sight to know the fear in his friend’s face.
* * *
—
When Joh
n sleeps the angel walks long, winding paths through the city, though she could be anywhere she chose, some balmy island or sylvan waterfall. She feels the hardness of the ground beneath her feet, the dust that gathers on everything. She peers into windows and watches the inhabitants of the poorer quarters, their cold, cramped lives. Some are happy, even in their squalor, but so many are sick and weary. And everywhere she sees dirt, filth, such a quantity of ugliness that she cannot find a reason for. She used to know how to accept such things as wisdom, but she has grown weary, too, that dirt has found its way into her somehow. Unspoken blasphemies poke against her insides like shards of stone. She wants to say these things to John, sometimes, while he sits unspooling his stories. She has her own stories to share, but that is not her task. Her task is only to inspire, to help him create. Though she would not tell him so, she is as much John’s slave as she is the Lord’s. In the depths of night, she returns to his room, sits silently by his bedside, watches the dreams scripting themselves against the insides of his eyelids.
* * *
—
John is a boy in school and the master is reciting some dry lesson of history, Pliny or Herodotus beaten to threads and stretched into an endless droning. It is spring and the windows have been opened to air out the classroom; outside the world is alive with the first traces of color and warmth.
In front of John sit two boys who hold the balance of the class in their hands. One, named Hyslop, is the master’s pet, bland and eager and always ready with an answer, sitting with his head cocked like a spaniel’s. The other boy, Reede, is a butcher’s son, here by the charity of a wealthy patron, fiercely proud and, John knows, ten times more intelligent than Hyslop. He rarely speaks but there is a certain dark gravity about him, and the other boys treat him with deference despite his poverty. He is facing the window, and has been for some time when the master asks a question. John has never been the best of students, though he loves books and reading, but even he knows the answer. He tentatively raises his hand as Hyslop leans forward in his seat, straining toward the front of the classroom, but the butcher’s boy does not take his eyes from the window, as though he has not heard.
“Mr. Reede,” says the master, “you seem to be otherwise engaged.”
“It was Carthage, sir,” the boy answers, but still he does not turn his head. John recognizes the audacity of this, but cannot help looking toward the window, searching for whatever holds Reede’s attention, and he sees that many of his classmates are doing the same.
“And what is so interesting that you must leave off our discussion to gaze out the window like some lovesick girl?”
“The biggest hawk I ever seen, sir. In the oak tree. I want to see it fly again.”
The master takes his stick from where it rests and cracks it against the table. All the other boys turn immediately to the front, flinching in their chairs, but John continues to watch Reede, who turns slowly, clearly reluctant to miss his chance at the hawk.
“Come here,” says the master. Hyslop snickers, and in that moment John conceives a loathing for him that will last him the rest of his school days, perhaps the rest of his life.
Reede walks to the front of the room and, without being told, holds out his hands, which the master paints with strokes until they bleed. Reede makes no sound but a rough grunt between clenched teeth, and when his punishment is concluded he returns to his seat, passing the window on his way, and only John catches his triumphant grin as the bird—indeed a magnificent one, dark brown with a mane of golden feathers—launches itself from the crown of the oak and plunges to the field below.
In days to come John will replay this moment, when his reading or his lessons lose his interest, or as he lies in bed at night waiting for sleep. Something about that grin delights and haunts him. Whereas before he might have respected Reede, he treats him now with a hushed reverence. A boy who cares more for the freedom to direct his own gaze than for the master’s anger is a rare creature indeed.
* * *
—
The next morning John wakes early, while the house is still quiet. He reaches for the bedside table and his fingers find a pen, some parchment, his bell, and suddenly his mind flares into full wakefulness. He rings the bell for the maid, and as soon as he hears her footsteps in the doorway, he says, “I woke late last night and wrote. Read it back to me.”
She takes the paper from his hand and the silence stretches out. “I can’t,” she says.
“My penmanship is not what it was, I’m sure, but try.”
“It’s not that, it’s only…you’ve written all your sentences stacked on top of each other. I can’t read a one of them, the paper’s nearly black.” Her voice is filled with sincere regret but something else, too. Call it doubt.
So that is it, then, the fruit of his night’s inspiration, some hundred lines layered together like a surfeit of angels crammed onto a pinhead, crushing each other with their dancing.
* * *
—
Sometimes John thinks he has always known this poem, that it has underlain his life like the seeds of a field, waiting for the ray of sun that will call it forth into the world. Other days he thinks he will weave it together from images and sounds and bits of twine that he has found here and there through the years and stored in his pockets until he had need of them. There was even a time, decades ago now, when he began to write the poem, but it withered in his hands like a plucked flower. And so he learned to leave it alone, to let it grow in silence, until the silence consumed it, until the words fell asleep again beneath his skin. Now he wonders whether he will ever find them.
* * *
—
“Still nothing for me?” the angel asks. John looks especially tired today, but she can summon nothing more than irritation for his frailty. “What can I say, He will not be pleased.”
“I need more time.”
“You all say that. It is like one unending echo down here.”
“I don’t even know where to start.”
“Start with yourself,” she says. “That works for most of you.”
The silence accumulates around them. Her patience is wearing thin. Sometimes she wishes he would simply die, and thereby secure her release.
“Have you always been a muse?” John says.
The angel sits up straighter. “I was a soldier,” she says. “I fought in the Great War. Then I guarded the gates of Heaven. But eventually it was decided I should have some other occupation.”
“It’s only…You don’t seem to like people. We must be very tiresome for you. Or perhaps it is just me.”
“I pity people,” she says. “Your lives are so filled with misery. Even for one such as you it is inescapable. Sometimes this world appears to be designed for suffering. Sometimes—” She stops, draws a sharp breath. Her words shift within her like nervous birds. They long to go winging, and one loud noise will send the whole flock exploding outward, past the paltry gate of her tongue, into the world from whence they cannot be reclaimed. Her silence is all that stands between her and disobedience, and whatever punishment that entails. John is looking at her now with a keenness she has not seen in him before. Instead of a broken old man, he looks like a dog who has scented prey.
“I asked for you especially,” she says. “I heard a rumor about you. That you wrote a pamphlet saying rulers must be measured by their deeds, and prosecuted if they are found lacking.”
“I did. I said that it was right to kill the king.”
“Do you believe that still? That those who rule must give way if they are not just?”
Even she can hear the febrile edge that has crept into her voice, but John does not seem alarmed. For the first time, he looks at her as though he understands her. “I do still believe it,” he says. “How glorious to be an angel, and know you serve the only truly just ruler to be found in all of creation.”
The angel presses her lips together until they blanch, nods tersely, and looks away. “Hosanna,” she says.
* * *
—
“John,” says his mother.
She is somewhere behind him, in a hazy, firelight-soaked kitchen. His friends have gone off to play outside, but he has been sniffling lately and she has kept him home. The room smells of simmered beef bones and parsley. Farther back in the depths of the house John’s father is playing the violoncello, a slow ribbon of notes that weave themselves into the brickwork, punctuated by periods of silence as he writes down the melody. John breathes on the windowpane and swipes at it with the cuff of his shirt to clear the frost away. “John,” his mother says again, but he barely hears her.
Outside, crouched on the windowsill, is the cooper’s cat, a big marmalade brute named Sully, now spotted white with snowflakes. Between his forepaws he holds a bird. It is a plain brown sparrow with rumpled feathers and eyes blinking rapidly. Sully moves his paws apart and the bird sits stunned for several seconds before it leaps for the sky. John swears he can feel those wings tickling against the inside of his chest; his heart leaps with the bird, but before it has risen a handsbreadth, Sully swipes it down again, pins it into the snow. The windowpane slowly frosts over and John does not wipe it clean again.
But John can’t remember this now. It’s too long ago, he’s too old; that snow-dappled cat has faded from his memory, as has the bird and its struggles. Only a pair of ragged wings remain, fluttering in the darkness of his mind, harrying him onward to something he cannot yet name.
* * *
—
The next time John sees the angel, he says, “I had a thought.”
All the Names They Used for God Page 8
