There Is No Wheel

by James Maxey

The place was a mess. Books and canvases were scattered everywhere, and black plastic bags had been hung over the windows. Squat candles guttered at two points of a pentacle that had been laid out on the floor with duct tape. The other candles were extinguished, reduced to shapeless pools of wax. A horrible odor filled the air, like something burning. A cloud of steam rolled from the little curtained-off area at the back of the studio that served as the kitchen.

  “Teakettle,” David said, moving toward the kitchen. He took the shrieking kettle off the tiny electric stove. He opened the top, and all but vanished in the steam cloud that issued forth. The stench gagged me.

  “My herbalist recommended this lizard,” he said. “Reconnect with the dinosaur within. Mainline to the oblongata.” I assumed he was grabbing the wrong words again until I noticed a baggie of dried reptile parts on the counter, labeled with a Chinese script.

  “Sure,” I said, picking up the baggie, staring at the recognizable heads and eyes looking back at me. “My stuff is illegal. Jesus, David, you’ll put anything in your mouth, won’t you?”

  “At least once,” he said, pouring himself a cup of the tea, which trickled from the spout with the speed and thickness of jet black honey. “Want any?”

  “Pass,” I said. I headed away from the kitchen before he actually drank the stuff. I pride myself on a strong stomach, but hey. I looked at the canvases propped up around the room. This was stuff I hadn’t seen before. David had abandoned his realistic style and was painting very dark shapes now, geometric, almost architectural, like shadowy rooms and halls, but off somehow, sinister.

  As David relieved himself in the bathroom, I stooped to take a closer look at his reading material. There were a dozen books propped open on the floor. All his books were stained. The corners of LeVay’s Book of the Living were smudged with mustard. Saint Germaine’s The Door Beyond Death had been dropped into the tub at some point, and was now brown and warped. Crowley’s Magic and Mind had paint-smeared pages ripped out and tacked against the legs of the easel. I got a closer look at the painting on the easel. From across the room, the canvas looked blank. Now, I could see it was glazed with brush-stroked mayonnaise that was starting to turn a little yellow.

  Perched on a small table near the easel was the only pristine book in the room. It was a copy of Into Madness. I’d heard about it, of course. It was the book that had just been published about David’s father, Alex Cambion. I skimmed over the excerpt on the back cover. Alex had been an illustrator for magazines in the seventies, before David was born. Some people said he painted like Norman Rockwell then, but that wasn’t the work that made him famous.

  David came out of the bathroom, naked.

  “You going to stick around?” he asked.

  “You still tripping?”

  “How can I tell?” he asked. “Maybe. I’ve been asleep for three days now.”

  “Awake,” I said.

  “Whatever. I don’t think the acid had any effect. I still feel too grounded.”

  “I think it had more effect than you might be noticing, man.” I studied his face. It was hard to tell if he was fully back. Acid can be surprisingly subtle. Its effects can ebb and flow. “It was good stuff. I play straight with you.”

  He nodded. “You might be the only friend I have left, Buzz. Did you know Celia left me?”

  “I heard.”

  “She thinks I’m crazy,” he said, a sweep of his hand directing my gaze to the duct-tape pentacle. “I’ve been trying to talk to my father.”

  “Nothing crazy there,” I said. “Lot’s of people miss their folks when they pass on.”

  “I can’t remember him,” said David. “He killed himself when I was seven. He was schizophrenic. He’d been living in an asylum since I was five.”

  “Bad break,” I said.

  “Was it? Last week my grandmother auctioned one of Father’s asylum paintings for nine million, and that’s not a record for his work. His suffering has paid for everything I own.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Kind of his gift to you, maybe.”

  “No,” said David. “I’ve been trying to get inside his mind. I’ve been trying to get into his world with the drugs and the sleep and the rituals.” He shook his head. “I’ve gotten on the edge, I think. I keep getting close. But I’m too sane. Father didn’t know his own name at the end. Words were just a maze to him. All he understood by the end was how to put paint onto canvas. Some people say they find a language in his final paintings. I’ve never understood the vocabulary.”

  He seemed lucid now, as lucid as a sweaty naked man with a pentacle on his forehead and lizard on his breath is ever likely to be. I edged my way to the door. “You seem to be feeling better.”

  “Better is so relative,” he said, bending over to place new candles at the points of the pentacle. “Ever since that book came out, I’ve just been so . . .”

  After a moment, I realized he wasn’t going to finish the sentence. He began to light the candles.

  He stood in the middle of the pentacle, his eyes closed, his hands folded before him in a prayer, his paintbrush pointing toward heaven. The way he held his arms, I could see for the first time the deep scratches along the insides of his wrist.

  Wonderful. No wonder Celia had hidden the knives. I decided to stick around until David fell asleep. If he’d really been awake three days, I wouldn’t have to wait long. Acid and lizard tea couldn’t keep a person going forever.

  I snatched a beer from his fridge and plopped onto the couch. David was saying a prayer, mumbling most of the words. I tuned him out. A lot of addicts are into this mystic mumbo-jumbo. They use the acid to try to “rend the veil of reality” as David put it. They’re convinced that there’s something more than their physical body and the world they can see with their eyes. I have no financial incentive to argue. But my years in the business have led me to one pretty solid conclusion: People are nothing but chemistry. There’s no soul or spirit separate from our bodies. We’re just big, walking pots of brain fluid soup. We can change the way we think and feel by adding the right spices, a little acid here, a little pot there, simmer in some beer, and hey, you get happy stew if you don’t set the heat too high and get scorched. All the occult BS, the prayers, the candles, were harmless, but pointless.

  At last, David finished murmuring, opened his eyes, and focused on the canvas.

  He said, “My grandmother says that the first real sign that something was wrong was when Dad began having problems with insomnia. Just after I was born. He was twenty-three. And now I’m twenty-three.”

  He dipped the brush into dark blue paint and began to work. I watched him for a while. I broke into a second beer, then a third. He seemed very calm. The way he painted was almost like a dance. His whole body swayed and dipped as his brush swirled across the canvas. Night fell and the little light that seeped around the trash bags dimmed. The candles cast strange shadows. On the walls, it was almost like two people stood before the canvas, moving independently, one slow and deliberate, the other manic. The air was stuffy and warm. At some point, I must have fallen asleep.

  It was David who woke me.

  “See what I've done,” he said.

  I looked at my watch. He’d been at this all night. I was stiff and dry-mouthed. Blearily, I allowed myself to be led to the canvas. My eyes popped open, wide-awake. I’d seen plenty of David’s work. He was talented, sure, but this was something else. It was rendered with near photographic detail. It seemed like it should have taken days to paint. David must have worked like a demon to finish it in a single night. And from his twisted, drug-altered mind, had sprung . . . tranquility.

  The painting was reminiscent of a Saturday Evening Post cover. A painter sat before his canvas, and his toddler son was in his lap. The painter looked down, beaming with pride, at his son with a brush in his hand and paint all over his clothes. And the canvas they sat before was like a mirror, with a boy and his father painting from the other side, and behind them sat a mirror, in which
the larger painting was recreated, and within this was a canvas recreating the scene, and so on. The detail was amazing, but even more impressive were the expressions on the faces. There was so much happiness captured here. And yeah, corny as it sounds, even love.

  “Whoa,” I said. “This is really good. Really, really good. The faces . . . whoa.”

  “He doesn’t remember this,” said David. “My son was only two at the time. But he used to sit with me for hours. He loved to watch me work. He would fall asleep in my lap.”

  I sighed. He was still tripping. David didn’t have kids.

  “David,” I said, “you’re wearing me thin, man.”

  “He thinks you’re his friend,” said David. “You have to tell him something important for me. He’ll believe you.”

  “Forget it,” I said, rubbing my eyes. I was tired of this trip, tired of puzzling out drug logic. Would this weird mother never crash? “Write yourself a note or something. I’m going home.”

  David grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled us face to face. His grip was unbelievable, the kind of strength you get with PCP or something.

  “Listen to me, punk,” said David. “You know who I am. Don’t play with me.”

  “I know who you think you are,” I said, in the most soothing voice I could muster. “You’re tripping. You’re not Alex Cambion. Snap out of this.”

  “My time remaining is short. I would as soon spit on you as speak to you. You’re a detestable poisoner of souls, but you’re the only one within reach. I pray you have one tiny shred of decency within you.”

  “Dude,” I said. “Chill out. I’m your friend. You know you can trust me.”

  “Then tell him,” said David, his voice trembling on the edge of tears. “Tell him I loved him.”

  “Sure, no problem, I’ll tell him. Trust me.”

  Finally, his eyes closed, and he collapsed in my arms. I dragged him to the couch. He felt light as a skeleton.

  At last I was free to leave. I’d been around enough to know that a crash this hard wouldn’t be over any time soon. He was out at least the next twelve hours, maybe more.

  I went back to my life, happy that the worst of the ordeal was over. I swung back that night to check on him, expecting him to be zonked out, and found him awake. He was sitting on the floor in front of the canvas, his cheeks sunken, dark, heavy bags beneath his eyes.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “This painting is still wet,” he said, staring at his paint-covered fingertips.

  “You painted it last night. No big surprise. Don’t oils take a while to dry?”

  “Oils need a lot of time to dry. It takes weeks to paint some things because of this. Even with a month I couldn’t have painted this,” said David. “I’ve never had his skill.”

  “You never know what you have in you,” I said.

  “It’s signed by him. Alex Cambion.”

  “Huh,” I said, looking at the signature. “Sorry dude, I was here. Watched you work on it. It’s yours. Maybe that acid did you good. Better art through chemistry.”

  “It’s like a message from him,” said David, his voice cracking. “But I was never with him when he painted. This is like something to taunt me, something to remind me of a life I never had.”

  “Maybe you just didn’t get close enough to understand him, man. You still need to do more inner work to touch the space he was in.”

  “Yeah,” said David. “I guess so.”

  “Look, you tripped pretty hard these last few days. If you need it, I got some stuff that will help you sleep. You drink plenty of water, get some rest, and maybe in a week or so you’ll be ready to try again.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s worth a shot. I sold you Sunshine last time. But a shipment of Hearts is coming down next week. It’s pricier, but should give you a little more control, and let you go deeper than your last trip. All you need is the right set and setting.”

  “Maybe,” said David, scratching the scabs along his wrist, his voice distant and tired. “Maybe. I just want to connect with him, you know. I want to know if he even knew I was alive. That’s all I’m asking. Just, maybe, if, you know, he loved me.”

  I nodded, then said, “David . . . maybe . . . next time you’ll find out.”

  I talked a little longer to make sure he was okay. I left him only after I was sure he wasn’t a danger to himself, and with the promise that he would get some sleep. As for what he’d said to me the night before, I guess David is brain-fried enough that he might believe that his father’s ghost borrowed his body. But I know what’s best. David is the sort who can take almost anything and twist it around until it tortures him. What kind of guy would I be if I didn’t watch out for my best customer?

  To Know All Things That Are In The Earth

  ALLEN FROST ASSUMED the first cherub was part of the restaurant’s Valentine decorations. He and Mary sat on the enclosed patio at Zorba’s. He’d taken a pause to sip his wine when he first noticed the small angel behind the string of red foil hearts that hung in the window. The cherub was outside, looking like a baby doll with a pair of pasted-on wings.

  A second cherub fluttered down, wings flapping. A third descended to join them, then a fourth. Allen thought it was a little late in the evening to still be putting up decorations, but he appreciated the work someone had put into the dolls. Their wings moved in a way that struck him as quite realistic, if realistic was a word that could be used to describe a flying baby.

  Then the first cherub punched the window and the glass shattered. Everyone in the room started screaming. The cherubs darted into the restaurant, followed by a half dozen more swooping from the sky. Mary jumped up, her chair falling. Before it clattered against the tile floor, a cherub grabbed her arm. She shrieked, hitting it with her free hand, trying to knock it loose, until another cherub grabbed her by the wrist.

  Allen lunged forward, grabbing one of the cherubs by the leg, trying to pull it free. He felt insane—the higher parts of his brain protested that this couldn’t be happening. Nonetheless, his sensory, animal self knew what was real. His fingers were wrapped around the warm, soft skin of a baby’s leg. White swan wings held the infant aloft. A ring of golden light the size of a coffee cup rim hovered above the angel’s wispy locks. The whole room smelled of ozone and honeysuckle. The cherub’s fat baby belly jiggled as Allen punched it.

  The angel cast a disapproving gaze at Allen, its dark blue eyes looking right down to Allen’s soul. Allen suddenly stopped struggling. He felt inexplicably naked and ashamed in the face of this creature. He averted his eyes, only to find himself staring at the angel’s penis, the tiny organ simultaneously mundane, divine and rude. He still had a death grip on the cherub’s leg. Gently, the cherub’s stubby hands wrapped around Allen’s middle and ring fingers. The cherub jerked Allen’s fingers back with a SNAP, leaving his fingernails flat against the back of his wrist.

  Allen fell to his knees in pain. Mary vanished behind a rush of angels, a flurry of wings white as the cotton in a bottle of aspirin. Her screams vanished beneath the flapping cacophony. Somewhere far in the distance, a trumpet sounded.

  * * *

  The Rapture was badly timed for Allen Frost. He taught biology at the local community college while working on his doctorate. This semester, he had a girl in his class, Rachael Young, who wouldn’t shut up about intelligent design. She monopolized his classroom time. Her endless string of leading questions were thinly disguised arguments trying to prove Darwin was crap. He’d been blowing off steam about Rachael when he’d said something really stupid, in retrospect.

  “People who believe in intelligent design are mush-brained idiots,” he said. “The whole idea of God—”

  “I believe in God,” Mary said.

  “But, you know, not in God God,” Allen explained. “You’re open-minded. You’re spiritual, but not religious.”

  Mary’s eyes narrowed into little slits. “I have very strong beliefs. You just don’t take
them seriously.”

  Allen sighed. “Don’t be like this,” he said. “I’m only saying you’re not a fundamentalist.”

  Mary still looked wounded.

  Allen felt trapped. Most of the time, he and Mary enjoyed a good relationship. They agreed on so much. But when talk turned to religion, he felt, deep in his heart, they were doomed. Their most heartfelt beliefs could never be reconciled.

  Allen lifted his wineglass to his lips and took a long sip, not so much to taste the wine as to shut up before he dug the hole any deeper. He turned his attention to the cherubs outside the window. Then his brains turned to mush.

  Because, when you’re wrestling an angel—its powerful wings beating the air, its dark, all-knowing eyes looking right through you—you can’t help but notice evolution really doesn’t explain such a creature. The most die-hard atheist must swallow his pride and admit the obvious. An angel is the product of design.

  * * *

  A year after the Rapture, Allen tossed his grandmother’s living room furniture onto the lawn, then whitewashed the floor.

  When he was done, Allen went out to the porch to read while the floor dried. It had been four hours eleven minutes since he’d put his current book down. He’d grown addicted to reading, feeling as uncomfortable without a book in hand as a smoker without a cigarette. He purchased his reading material, and the occasional groceries, with income he made reading tarot cards; he was well known to his neighbors as a magician. He always informed his hopeful visitors he didn’t know any real magic. They came anyway. The arcane symbols painted all over the house gave people certain ideas.

  The books that lined the shelves of his library only added to his reputation for mysticism. He was forever studying some new system of magic—from voodoo to alchemy to cabala. Much of the global economy had collapsed after the Rapture, but supernatural literature experienced a boom.

  He did most of his trading over the Internet. The world, for the most part, was intact. It wasn’t as if the angels came down and ripped out power lines or burned cities. They had simply dragged off God’s chosen. No one was even certain how many people were gone—some said a billion, but the official UN estimate was a comically understated one hundred thousand. The real hit to the economy came in the aftermath of the rapture; a lot of people didn’t show up for work the next day. Allen suspected he could have found a reason to do his job if he’d been a fireman or a cop or a doctor. But a biology teacher? There was no reason for him to get out of bed. He’d spent the day hugging Mary’s pillow, wondering how he’d been so wrong. He spent the day after that reading her Bible.