The Angel's Cut

by Elizabeth Knox

  Flora climbed into the back seat.

  Three hours later Millie got up from their table saying, ‘I’m going to break formation. I’m going to waggle my wings and peel off. Okay?’ She left.

  After a few minutes Flora made a suggestion. ‘Shall we go to the movies?’

  ‘We,’ said Xas, musing.

  ‘Was that “yes” in French?’

  ‘No, it was “we”. But, yes, let us go to the movies.’

  They came out late and stood for a time on a patch of pavement studded with glossy stars of polished, dropped chewing gum. Then the lights on the canopy went out, followed by the light in the ticket booth. Xas waited to see which way Flora would turn, and when she came out of her daze and started walking he went with her.

  They had seen newsreels, Movietone footage with narration. They had watched shorts, all silent. And they had seen two features by a German working in America.

  As Xas walked he thought about a scene in one film. It took place at night, on a lake, after a storm. A boat had gone down and people were searching the lake. A man leaning out from the bow of one boat, a lantern in his hand, spotted a bundle of cut reeds, a crude buoyancy device, collapsed and coming apart, afloat on otherwise empty black water.

  Like poetry, stories and novels and plays, film proved to Xas that more often than not people saw as he saw, and felt as he felt. He thought about the film, and remembered Hell, its corrosive air and light, its ceaselessly milling shadows—a motion wearying to the eye and brain. He remembered how the fallen angels would shut themselves away and read, how they built all the time, like wasps, mixing mortar and shaping stones and piling them one upon another to make more rooms to house the books, to make shade and seclusion to house themselves in order to read the books. Lucifer’s palace was a library, a repository of copies of every work ever copied, from papyrus scrolls, through vellum, to paper and leather, paper and cloth. The fallen angels would read the books before they dried out and crumbled. And they remembered what they read—for angels never forget anything. But in Heaven, where everyone was in bliss, even fierce archangels in fierce bliss, no one read.

  As Xas walked with Flora he wondered whether films, like books, found their way into Hell. Films were copied for distribution, so might. But, Xas wondered, without a projector, how would his brothers watch one?

  He was thinking about all this, to the point where he began to feel that it was his responsibility to find out what the situation was, when Flora McLeod saved him from his thoughts. She said she was sorry he’d seen The Four Devils in that version. ‘That was its second release. With sound.’ She sighed. ‘You see—the silent version is a grown-up film. It’s fluid and mature, and it trusts its storytelling. For instance, Charles isn’t late because he’s hit by a car—that’s such an expedient bit of plotting! In the silent version he makes a choice. He chooses the slinky siren over the heroine—or at least a final night with the siren, one last bout of bewitched lovemaking.’

  ‘I liked it anyway,’ Xas said. ‘I liked the trapeze, the Leap of Death. But I liked Sunrise better.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Flora. ‘When the wife and husband are wandering around the city together, miserable. The way they sit in that café, dazed and indifferent to other people. It’s so real. The way she clutches the slice of cake he’s bought her and cries.’

  ‘I liked the bit when he’s on his bed thinking of drowning her and he’s so haunted and histrionic that he imagines the water, and it appears below him.’

  ‘That’s a lap dissolve,’ said Flora. ‘And then he thinks of the city girl and she’s there, embracing him, ghostly, hanging under his face like his own breath.’ Flora turned toward Xas as she spoke; her face blurred and bright and beautiful. Her shoes had plates on their heels, and her footsteps sounded definite, but she was only ambling along, stepping sideways each time she turned to look at him. She was walking with an odd, stiff gait. She said, ‘That scene was filmed on the reservoir out at Silverlake—but it looks like Bavaria, or something.’

  Xas told her that he also really liked the speckled enamel bowl on the supper table in the couple’s house.

  She laughed. ‘Now you’re down to admiring the props.’

  ‘I’m sure some thought went into them. The speckled enamel bowl was chosen and coincidentally preserved. I love how film does that to things, how film can wind up times within time. If I say, as people do, that time is a river, then, since the first films, that river is carrying the larvae of countless little rivers—reels of film like time bundled-up. So, while my favourite thing I saw this evening was the bunch of reeds floating on the water, the thing I was happiest to see captured was Alfredo Cordona’s Sauf de Mort, which I saw him perform in Peru some years ago.’

  Flora asked, ‘Where are you from originally?’

  ‘Heaven.’

  ‘Millie wasn’t kidding,’ Flora said, ‘you are religious. I suppose you’re letting me know that the important thing about you is your religious beliefs, not where you’re from.’

  ‘I do hope it turns out that my religious beliefs aren’t the most important thing about me,’ Xas said, then regarded Flora, waiting for further speculation.

  ‘I’ve been wondering how you square your Christianity with—’ Flora began, then sucked in a breath and let it out as a slow whistle. She mustered her courage. ‘Well—with Cole,’ she said. Then, in a rush, as if she wanted to prevent Xas answering her, ‘And how do you square Heaven with being so darn happy that film has captured Cordona’s leap of death?’

  Xas chose to answer only her second question. ‘I don’t know what Heaven’s policy is on film. Heaven may not look after film. For that matter Heaven may not look after Alfredo Cordona.’

  ‘Isn’t that up to him?’

  ‘Yes—it’s up to him whether he goes to Heaven or not. But Heaven probably won’t care to preserve his desire to jump through flaming hoops one hundred and fifty feet from the sawdust of the centre ring. I don’t think circus acts go to Heaven, even when circus performers do.’

  Flora laughed. ‘You have your own theology, don’t you?’

  They had reached a lighted building, a stop of the Venice short line train. There were people sitting about on wooden benches. The floor was covered in a confetti of punched paper.

  Flora said, ‘This is my stop.’

  Several sleepy-eyed people looked up at Xas—who instinctively turned from them. He knew he always looked more like what he was to people who were alone, or to people in the early hours of the morning when—once—their ancestors would be surrendering to sleep despite the wild night noises. Over the years he had been greeted by lonely night travellers as ghost, god, and vampire. He had learned that it was always best to call out to any solitary traveller: ‘God save you!’ or the local equivalent. But on small groups he tended to turn his back.

  Xas swung away from the seated people. Flora looked alarmed, and then she said, ‘Goodnight,’ and hurried to the ticket booth.

  Xas realised he had spooked her. She’d seen him hide his face from the other people at her trolley stop, and she’d imagined he meant to harm her.

  He left the station, crossed the gravel strip where the tracks lay and went to stand out of the light. The trolley came, the small group of late-night passengers mounted its steps and settled in its yellow-lit interior. Flora McLeod took the steps like an old and arthritic woman, her jaw clenched with suppressed pain. She was still finding a seat as the trolley pulled away and took a corner, its wheels splashing the road with white sparks.

  Xas followed the trolley, walking between the tracks. The vehicle drew further ahead, a focal point in the long perspective of the boulevard, one warmer light between bright streetlamps. Then the trolley seemed to dissolve, its lights fading and dying away. A few minutes later Xas came to the place where the tracks vanished into the base of a great, dank fogbank.

  He stopped walking. He thought about what he was doing. He thought: ‘I am going around in circles, pursuing Conrad
Cole as though God wants me to find him.’ It occurred to Xas that he wasn’t acting like a human or an angel. A human would ask Flora McLeod, Cole’s editor, whether she thought Cole needed a test pilot. An angel would drop down into the man’s life and make some kind of bargain.

  The latter was impossible for Xas now, but he was incapable of practising ordinary human opportunism. What’s more, it occurred to him that he was acting as though Cole had all the time in the world, as if he—Xas—had forgotten his hardest-learned lesson.

  *

  When, in 1801, Xas met his friend Apharah she was still quite young and recently widowed. Her elderly husband had taken a bride only late in life, when he was in poor health and his eyesight was failing. Apharah could read, and had a beautiful speaking voice, and her husband had wanted company, and someone to read to him. After his death, Apharah lived, solitary and secluded, in a house in Damascus. Her house had a beautiful garden.

  Xas’s own garden in Hell—at an altitude, sheltered by two spurs of rock, and enclosed in a dome of glass as dark as flaked obsidian—had growing conditions similar to those of the gardens of Damascus. The Damascus gardens were walled, had fountains, were filled with plants that weren’t too thirsty. Xas had, over some hundreds of years, developed the habit of dropping in on those gardens to get ideas for his own. And to steal plants.

  Over the years most of the people he met, he met because he was stealing for his garden. An Irish monk, Niall, had caught the angel trying to carry off one of his beehives. Xas had wanted the bees for pollination, but it turned out that the hive was too heavy for him to carry. When he dropped it the bees swarmed and the angel had to stoop on Niall and use his wings to shelter the man from the swarm. Niall later gave Xas a newly established hive of a more manageable size.

  A Polish baron had shot at Xas when he caught the angel pulling pieces of flowering vine off his castle walls. Xas took the man’s gun and returned it only after it had passed through the hands of every angel in Hell. For some time thereafter the fallen angels had sent Xas out after other novelties, so that for several decades he would enter at upper windows to steal whatever took his fancy: clockwork toys and clever tools, weapons and scientific apparatus, hand mirrors, hair brushes, wigs, walking sticks, spectacles and false teeth.

  On that night in 1801, a night with a full moon, when Xas first flew over Apharah’s garden, he saw what looked like a white star suspended in a pool as black as oil. It was a waterlily. He decided to break roots from the plant once it had finished blooming, and see if he could get it to grow in the pool in his own garden. The following full moon when he returned he was so focused on his thievery that he didn’t see or hear or smell the woman sitting in a dark alcove in her garden wall. He didn’t know she was there till she spoke up, proposing, in her lovely calm voice, that he pay for what he was taking. As payment Apharah suggested he sing to her—then she objected to his choice of music, and insisted on teaching him her favourite song. She detained him with searches through songbooks, comparisons between different versions of the song, a singing lesson, and a history lesson. She treated him as she had the peddlers invited into her father’s harem—as though he were a novelty, but quite legitimately there for her entertainment. She bossed Xas about, and he decided he liked her. Of course he came back, but, being an angel, he forgot to come back with sufficient regularity. Once, when a whole year had elapsed between his visits, Apharah met him with tears and reproaches. She’d missed him. She was worried about him. She valued his visits.

  After that she seemed to set out to find some way to have Xas learn to experience time as people do. She said to him: ‘It might be good for you to pace out a human life. But—’ she said, ‘that is a poor analogy for someone who hasn’t ever had to measure a stretch of ground by walking across it. Rather, let me say that it might be good for you if, next time you happen to meet someone who interests you, you make an arrangement to meet them again, on the same day and in the same place the following year.’

  Xas said, ‘Or every year.’

  ‘Yes, but,’ she said, ‘perhaps every year of a life is too much of an undertaking, even for an angel.’

  Shortly after Apharah made her suggestion, when Xas was on a flight from Denmark to a certain salt dome in Turkey (the passage into and out of Hell) he stopped to take a rest. He was carrying a rose bush. It was heavy, its roots intact and wrapped in damp sackcloth. He’d been flying at a low altitude so the plant wouldn’t ice over. But at a low altitude the atmosphere was thicker, and it was heavy going, so he stopped to rest on the crest of a rolling rise near the Saône River, in a vineyard. It was night, the moon fat, but waning. As Xas sat there, a young man appeared from the low stone house at the foot of the slope. The man was carrying two wine bottles. He wore patched woollen trousers, a linen tunic, and clogs. Before he left the yard he set the bottles down on a bench and used a knife to ease out their corks. He left his knife on the bench, replaced one cork, and came up the slope stopping now and then to throw back his head and swig from the open bottle. He drank the wine as though it were water, drank with capacity and appetite. Halfway up the slope he sat down with his back to the angel and finished the bottle, then moaned, dropped it, put his head in his hands and dug his fingers into the roots of his hair so that it seemed to flood out under his hands like a gushing wound he was trying to stem. Xas watched this—the young man, drunk, and in a rapture of demonstrative misery. Xas enjoyed watching the man, and so didn’t move when he climbed to his feet again and continued toward the ridge. When the man finally noticed Xas, he didn’t believe his eyes. He came on, frowning and peering and waiting for the angel to disappear or turn into something ordinary. Then his face turned white, as though the moon had suddenly rushed closer to the hillside. Xas saw that he would fall and jumped up to catch him. The man was unexpectedly heavy—his blood full, not foam like an angel’s—his bones as dense as hardwood, and full too, of greasy animal goodness. Xas caught the man and was carried down with him so that they lay together. The bottle and Xas’s rose bush rolled a little way down the slope and stopped. Xas sat and cradled the man and waited for him to wake up.

  When he did wake the man told the angel his troubles—just blurted them all out. Xas gave him counsel (bad, as it turned out), and then he had the man—Sobran—promise to meet him again the following year, and every year after that, and made the same promise himself.

  And so Xas learned to measure time by Sobran’s life. By the time of Sobran’s death at seventy-three, Xas was living from year to year. He had lost his wings, was on the ground, and knew what miles were. There were morning and evening hours, there were days and weeks, and he could make no real progress any more against the spin of the earth.

  There was time. And, in time, there were the weeks after Sobran’s death which the angel spent in an attic room in a house near the walls of Beaune, a room with a window, a bed, a chair, a candlestick. In those weeks Xas wanted time to be gone too. He waited for time to go, and willed it to go, until he felt that he almost understood how that might be accomplished—an end to time. But he went out of the room and nearly the first thing he encountered in the street made him gain substance again, a substance that might be only curiosity, the curiosity that now led him about, led him to enthusiasms he could pace out, could live, as he had lived Sobran’s life.

  Xas made a choice. He chose to surrender to his latest enthusiasm—the talk of an aircraft designer, and the taste of the mouth that talked. He followed the edge of the fogbank toward the ocean. He crossed streets and sandlots and another trolley line. He passed over a drain with an inch of green scum floating on its surface. When he reached the coast he followed it up to the pier where, more than a week before, Millie had told him to turn inland. He turned inland. Eventually he found the unsealed road along which he had walked away from Mines Field. He jumped over a fence—concealed in fog now and free to move as he could. He crossed a field between the shapes of the planes. It was like passing through a segment of a time, tw
elve years back. Some airfield in Europe, an airfield that hadn’t ever existed, where a Sopwith Camel might be found standing in the shelter of a Gotha bomber. (Except Xas saw that the bomber wasn’t a Gotha, only a Sikorsky in costume.)

  Xas located the hangar and stood for a moment peering up at the roof above one end wall. He crouched back on his heels and rocked from foot to foot while staring at the place he was aiming for. He made his leap—thirty feet up—and clamped on to the roof with both hands. His boots skittered on the plate iron and he slammed stomach-first against the steep slope. He held on and hauled himself up, hand-overh-and, and scrabbling with his toes.

  The hangar’s hollow interior boomed. A light went on nearby in the fog. Xas swarmed up, reached the apex of the roof and flattened his body against the metal. Someone came across the field sweeping the beam of a torch back and forth through the fog. They rattled the lock on the hangar door, stalked around the building, checked the lock again, then went away.

  Later, much later, when he had some covering noise—a plane taking off—Xas pulled a bolt from the roof and worked it around in its own hole to increase the hole’s size. He looked down on darkness and a hint of silver—Cole’s experimental plane.

  He stayed on the roof. He lay in wait like a tiger at a waterhole.

  *

  Cole said, ‘Close that door.’ He said, ‘You have rust on your shirt.’ He said, ‘You smell of the open air.’