by L. A. Banks
“Here, try this—scoop some out on your finger. We can get some plastic spoons and forks and napkins and stuff on the way out. In fact, since we’re really shopping, lemme go get us a couple paper bags. I’ll be right back.”
She knew she had to be out of her mind when she rounded the register and decided to take four recycled cloth bags, then filled two of them with large bottles of water, napkins, and plastic cutlery, and headed back to meet Azrael as though they were a couple shopping on a bright Saturday afternoon.
But as odd as this night had been, this was the most fun she’d had in years. Seeing the wonder of something new spread across his handsome face was positively captivating. His perfect, brilliant white smile was magnetic, and his laughter was a balm to her battered spirit.
When she found him, he was sitting on the floor with chocolate ice cream all over his hands and face like a naughty child, dipping a chip into the ice cream, eyes closed, head back, dreadlocks dusting the polished floor.
“I never knew it could be like this,” he said in a thick rasp of pleasure. “If this is just a sample of what is here...”
“Watch it, man,” she said, her smile fading and not sure why. “Be careful not to OD on the good stuff.”
“You are right,” he said, opening his eyes. “Temperance and moderation.”
“Yeah, something like that or you’ll have a bellyache.” But her smile returned as she looked at his sticky face and hands. “Don’t move; don’t touch anything, especially not your new clothes. Let me go get you a Sani-Wipe from the food court, okay?”
“I trust you implicitly, Celeste, my guide.”
Again, he’d made her smile, even though she’d rolled her eyes at him and sucked her teeth. It was a corny line, but cute nonetheless. As promised, she returned and knelt before him, wiping his face as he cleaned off his hands. Something in his eyes made her linger as she rubbed chocolate and potato-chip crumbs away from his full mouth and off his square chin. A thick droplet of chocolate was in the cleft of it, and chocolate stained the beautiful dimples in his cheeks. He was a shade darker than the ice cream she wiped away. She didn’t know where he came from and knew he was crazy, but there was no denying he was a divine work of art.
“Do you want anything else?” she asked more quietly than intended.
“Yes,” he said in a low rumble. “But I do not know how to describe it or name it.”
She sat back on her heels, then stood up. He got to his feet without using his hands, just put his feet flat on the floor and stood. As a diversion, she picked up the empty carton and jammed the soiled Sani-Wipes into it before closing the lid, then held it up to him.
“Just like back in the street, I should probably go find all the trash we left while grazing and chuck this stuff.” She looked away from him, feeling the intensity of his stare. “Uhmmm . . . why don’t you take these bags and get whatever you want for later—no ice cream, though, it’ll melt.”
“All right,” he said, gathering the bags and unloading his pockets into them. “Then can you show me where the bathroom is?”
Chapter 6
She sat on the floor in the vitamin aisle and waited for Azrael, cautioning him to be careful not to be seen in the huge plate-glass windows near the small cafeteria section that had eat-in tables and chairs by the bathroom. A full fifteen minutes had passed before Azrael returned with a delighted look on his face.
“It was simply amazing in there,” he said, gesturing wildly with his hands.
“TMI,” she said, laughing and cutting him off before he could go into details she did not want to know. “Way too much information.”
“No, but you must hear me out, Celeste,” he said, eyes alight with wonder. “Initially I had to really think hard to go through the knowledge you’d allowed me to access from your mind in order to figure out the logistics that went with the sensations.”
“Az, man, I really don’t want to know about this.”
He beamed at her. She simply stared at him.
“But I figured it out! Then I figured out what that big roll of paper was—”
“Tell me you washed your hands with soap and water.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, pressing on. “But when I stood up, the thing had a mind of its own, and whoosh, everything went down and new clean water filled back up. Then I was stumped looking for soap . . . and I could smell it on the wall. When I tried to figure out the little box that contained it, somehow I waved my hand in front of it and a big glob squirted out.”
Now she was laughing in earnest and sprawled out on the floor. “Oh, Azrael . . . I swear you are so crazy.”
“No, but it took me several tries until I had the coordination to master the soap—but did you know the water comes on with a wave, too?” He began to pace, face alight with excitement. “All one has to do is get the soap on one’s hands and then present them under the well spigot and it splashes fresh water into your hands!”
“Did you figure out the hand dryer?” she said, wiping her eyes.
“Yes! Quite amazing! I saw the hieroglyphics and—”
“Hieroglyphics?”
“The drawings . . . the images on the silver box.”
“Yes,” she said, wheezing from laughter.
“I pushed it and hot air blew out!”
“Well, I’m glad you’re back,” she said, standing with effort. “For a moment I thought you’d fallen in.”
“Is such a thing possible? Would it suck me into the tube? Why would humans create something so dangerous? What if I were a small child?”
“Relax, it’s just a saying,” she said, shaking her head as she waved him away. “I’ll explain later. But how come if you can pick up things from touching a person or an object, you just don’t get the full picture or the full comprehension? I don’t understand that about your gift.”
His brow knit as though he was in deep thought for moment, and she watched him closely. Although she was somewhat going along with his self-delusion that he was an angel, she was also quietly trying to help steer him toward the logical fact that he wasn’t. The man was way too fine to be this tripped out. Besides, after tonight it was probable that she’d no longer be able to babysit him, and it would weigh heavily on her heart if she didn’t bring him a little closer to reality so that he could function. Someone ruthless could take advantage of such a gentle soul, yet at the same time, he had the body power of a lion. People like that could be dangerous if they had a sudden fit of anger—so she kept Azrael always within bolt distance.
“I think it is because we absorb so much so quickly that it is all tightly packed into our human minds, and then as we need it, we can access it . . . but we still have this difficult density here to contend with. It creates a delay.”
“Oh,” she said, playing along. “Then I bet a library would blow your mind.”
“What is a library?”
“The biggest one in the city is around the corner—the Parkway Central Library of Philadelphia, which is down the street from the Franklin Institute, where they have all types of scientific stuff, and then there’s the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Rodin, all of that would blow a fuse.”
“Huge repositories of knowledge,” he said in a hushed tone. “Celeste . . . would you please show me those places?”
“Come on, dude,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know how you do this lucky break-in thing, I’ll give you that, and maybe you do have a gift. But there’s such a thing as your luck running out. You don’t have enough time in the world to read all the books and stuff they have in there, anyway.”
“I can’t read,” he said, looking away at the shelves. “I just perceive.”
“You can’t read?” Her question was gentle, not accusatory, as she looked at his massive, athletic frame. He wouldn’t be the first guy from the city that had a ballplayer’s body that coaches and a parent wanted to exploit at the sacrifice of the fundamentals. Then again, if he was from a foreign country, maybe he’d
only learned the language by ear and never had a chance to be taught written English.
“No,” he said quietly, walking down the aisle. “When you gave me the bag of crunchy temptation food, I could not read it. But I knew where you pointed and could touch the words and perceive if there was poison in it or not.”
“Now that’s deep,” she murmured, watching him stop at the beginning of the vitamin-and-supplement aisle.
He took a deep breath and laid his palms flat against a row of bottles, which slowly began to glow. “For example . . . I can perceive that what is in these herbal cures is something that will feed my cells and help nourish every iota of my being. And because they are all natural and plant-based, I can literally ask the plant they were made from if it would allow me to absorb some of it.”
“Whoa . . . but if you touch all the bottles—assuming what you say is true, then people shelling out thirty bucks a bottle or more for some of this stuff won’t get what they bought.”
“No,” he murmured, closing his eyes, and making more bottles light up as he felt his way along the shelves as if he were reading braille. “Lack of abundance in the universe is a myth. If you ask the herb to share itself, it will give me what I need and will give the person who selects a bottle for purchase what they also need. I do not understand why humans battle over resources. There is enough to go around.”
She had an argument ready but it fled her mind as she watched the shelves light bottle by bottle, then watched the thin rimming of light around his body get wider and wider the more bottles he touched.
“This feels so rejuvenating, Celeste,” he said, breathing out the words. “I feel some of my original strength returning...Why don’t all humans eat like this and take in nutrients that will help them? You can all do what we do, if you still your spirits and clean out your temples.”
She wrapped her arms around her waist and hugged herself. It felt so strange to actually be clean, and her hands were slightly trembling.
“All humans cannot afford to eat like this,” she said resentfully. “Not the way the system is currently designed,” she added, knowing that it was important for him to understand. “If you hadn’t noticed, we’re in a different part of town. This is the high-rent district, bro. We’ve got about three hundred dollars’ worth of food in these bags, and I haven’t even thrown in meats, staples, cleaning supplies, or whatever. Plus, if you were to buy all the vitamins you just touched, you’d have to add like another three to five hundred bucks. Most poor people, especially single moms or grandmoms with kids, can’t come into a place like this and keep all the bellies in their household full. So they’ve gotta opt for cheap, and cheap means low-quality stuff that’ll kill you. Basic economics.”
Azrael looked up, studying her gaze with a disquieted frown, then stared at the last shelf again. “This knowledge you are sharing is troubling, Celeste, but very important.”
“It’s true,” she said, relieved that he’d accepted her words without argument. It had been a long time since anyone, especially a guy, had allowed her to share what she’d learned without blowing her off or telling her she was stupid.
“Don’t get me wrong, though,” she said, feeling the freedom of speaking out with her own truth. “Some real political resistance, go-green folks from the neighborhood, have figured it out, and some poor folks have made the lifestyle change for religious reasons. But by and large, the general public remains unaware of just how much of what they find in their normal supermarket and fast-food joints is killing them. Cheap, dirty, processed food is less expensive. People with limited resources are forced to buy it. Nice markets like this are not in impoverished neighborhoods. Fact. The big food corporations make a mint on that cheap food crap, and so do the hospitals and pharmaceutical industry when you have to come to them like a junkie to take meds to correct what the food they sold you all your life gave you.”
He looked at her with a pained expression. “That isn’t fair.”
“No,” she said with a sad smile, “but it is what it is. You asked why humans fight and war over resources—they do because in some parts of the world, just like in some parts of the city, you have such inequity that it will numb your mind. Right next to a five-star restaurant where they throw out thousands of dollars of food every day, a homeless person can starve to death. In India, they walk over dead bodies in the streets of Calcutta. The places in the hood you probably visited today are mansions compared to the squalor some folks live in overseas, man.”
“How do you know this?”
She smiled. “I’m currently unemployed, and the two bills that Brandon paid without fail were his cell phone and cable. You can learn a lot that way.”
“Cable is what?”
“TV—moving pictures . . . shows.”
Azrael stepped away from the shelves. “Can the library show me these things you speak of?”
“Way better than TV, if you feel from a book and learn from the pages.”
“Then, we must go to this library.”
Celeste let out a hard breath. “Okay,” she said in a weary tone, wondering why she was humoring this sweet but crazy man.
“Thank you, Celeste. I know all of this must be very unsettling to you . . . but if you hold my hands, I have a gift for you.”
She arched an eyebrow, but then relented, deciding that allowing him to hold her hands inside the brightly lit Whole Foods aisle was much less daunting than when she’d allowed him to touch her wound on a desolate street in North Philly. Hell, she’d even taken a shower with him lurking around in a deserted church. Plus the cops were around the corner, even though that was the last place she should run to, given that she was no doubt wanted for murder.
After a moment of hesitation, she tentatively slid her hands over Azrael’s outstretched palms. Warmth immediately radiated into her hands as his massive fists gently folded around them. Soon the aftertaste of pungent vitamins coated her tongue, and even the lights in the market seemed brighter. New energy pulsed though her system, making her practically high. Light-headed, she took deep breaths trying to keep from passing out.
“Your cells are so depleted and in such need of regeneration. Your skin and hair will benefit from this sharing, so will every blood cell and your bone marrow, ligaments, muscles, and tissue. Repair begins from the inside out. First we got out the toxins and healed the inner pain and outward injuries trapped in your energetic bodies. Now we will replenish you down to the cellular level.”
He let go of her palms and her ears were buzzing. He picked up a liter bottle of water in each hand and held them out to her. “Drink both down and then go to the bathroom.” He opened the cap on one of the large bottles of room-temperature water and pressed it into her hand, not taking no for an answer.
“Okay, okay, I get the point.”
He looked up quickly and that made her stop drinking. “Coconut water,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Your electrolytes are off, as are mine,” he said, staring at her without blinking for a moment.
He dashed away from her, returning with a full liter carton of coconut water in each hand and one under each arm. “Hayyel is much easier for me to hear now that I’m cleaned out and strengthened. He says we must flush—does your aunt have a juicer? If not, we should also buy one of those and mix the dark green leaves of vegetables for added strength with carrots and items he told me to get.”
“I’m still on the first liter and never was a big water drinker. I feel sick to my stomach.”
He opened the coconut water and watched her down it. “Okay, now water.”
“This is insane,” she muttered, but complied. “Now I really have to pee.”
“Good. That is the purge cycle. Drink the other bottle of water, too. I will go get the rest of the items we need, and then you’ll tell me how much money to leave so that we aren’t stealing.”
How they managed to get out of the supermarket undetected while weighed down with enough produce to open a vending
stand, along with a Vitamix blender, was beyond her. But Azrael insisted they needed it.
Thankfully, he lugged the heavy items and gave her two small bags, then insisted they had to go to the library. Better judgment told her to flee while there was still a chance that she wouldn’t get locked up, but complete fascination had a stranglehold on her.
Just as in all the other venues, he stood at the back door of the Main Library of Philadelphia on tiny Wood Street, bags at his feet, pressing his hands against the door with his eyes closed. But the moment the door clicked open, he slowly slid down to the ground and to his knees.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered, looking around nervously. “You tripped an alarm this time, didn’t you?”
He simply shook his head no with his eyes closed, stroking the door with his palms. “No . . . oh, Celeste.”
“What, dude—like, we have seriously gotta get inside before a cop car rolls by or some conscientious citizen calls 911.”
He looked up at her with tears shimmering in his eyes. “Do you know what’s in here . . . the knowledge that this vault stores?”
Fear of discovery made her grab him by the elbow in an attempt to hoist him to his feet. “Later, inside and out of sight, you can get all philosophical. Right now, we’ll be going to the Round House on Eighth Street, if you don’t haul ass. Then you won’t get to see anything but the inside of a jail cell.”
That got him on his feet. “I will not do anything to jeopardize an opportunity to learn.”
“Good,” she said, hoping that recent city budget cuts meant that the only thing monitoring the library was a security camera instead of patrolling guards.
They hustled inside and Azrael set his bags down on the first long table they came to. “Celeste,” he said, like a kid right before Christmas. “They have cuneiform tablets in the rare-book collection!”
“Okaaaay...”
“Do you know how far back those tablets date?”
“No . . . but I thought you couldn’t read?”
