“I’m jealous of you sometimes,” I said. I thought of the empty space where her name should be carved inside my heart. “Not knowing things can be a gift, too.”
“That is something I never thought I’d hear you say,” she said, laughing. “I know plenty, Etz; no need to tempt me.” She got up, then, and began to wander down a tree-lined path, toward the sound of humming.
I rolled my eyes and rose to follow her. Babylon, always with the allegory. An allegory herself, like all of us here, waiting for Exodus or the Ark or Judgment Day.
“It’s just—the names in here—I may as well be an etched rock. There’s no changing them. No adding, no subtracting.” I brought up my hands and eyed them, a flash of light skittering across my palms, letters darkening in the shadows. “Those mortals—Adam, Eve?—they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They bought their free will. Why? What is the point, if the names have already been chosen? Even with free will, what could they possibly do to change their fate?”
I thought of everyone in this garden: Babylon and I, the woman with the crown of stars, the Horsemen, the cavalry, the Four Living Creatures, the Elders, the Beast and the Serpent and the Dragon, the locusts and Abaddon, their king. The Woe-Eagle, the Bride. The not-quite-humans. I knew the ultimate fate of each—even, terribly enough, the fate of Babylon, although I had yet to be able to admit it to myself. But I didn’t yet know the story that came between now and the end. I didn’t know what would change them from card-playing cacklers in these gardens to whatever role and purpose they would serve someday on Earth.
“Have you ever met Him?” Babylon asked.
“God, you mean?”
“The Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, the Alpha and the Omega—yes. God.”
“Of course not. None of us have. It’s the mortals He’s concerned with; you know that.”
“If you do—no—when you do, you should ask Him about that, about free will. Maybe His answer will surprise you.” Babylon turned a cartwheel on the path, her long hair streaming like a river of blood behind her. “Maybe He’s been changing the names the whole time without you knowing.”
“I would know,” I snorted, and punched her in the arm as she fell back in step with me. She rubbed her arm.
“Would you?” she asked. “He’s God. And it’s not as if you’ve got them memorized, anyway.”
I remember yours, Babylon. And it hasn’t shown up.
“Maybe,” was all I said.
Ahead of us on the path walked Jerusalem, dark and quiet and chaste, flowers in her hair. She was the source of the humming. Here was a woman who had been invited to one of our games once—flag football or something, I think—and, for no reason that I could see, had never been invited back. Bizarre, as even Abaddon the locust-king made a regular appearance at bridge games, and yet Babylon would never again suffer the presence of this woman.
Babylon melted into a walking sneer, low to the ground, lips curled. She claimed, always, that she was jealous of no one, but today her eyes were treasonous green.
“Why does she bother you so much?” I asked, arms crossed, remaining erect at Babylon’s side as she crept along in that absurd position.
A shrug. “She rubs me the wrong way,” Babylon said. “Not a word out of her. She just wanders around here all meek and pretty, never questions anything. She’s the only one He visits, you know. The only one who knows exactly everything that’s going to happen. And she won’t even tell anyone. Why her? All she does is smile and nod. What’s so special about her?”
I wondered that Babylon had seen Jerusalem smiling and nodding at God in all His glory; the Bride was the only one able to withstand the sight of Him, I was sure. He gave us free will in Second Eden, without having to eat from any tree. We were sinners, sure as any mortal, slight as the sins might be. Jerusalem was the only one of us who might qualify as truly good.
Her name was written in my ventricles. Babylon’s wasn’t. I couldn’t help but feel anxious that the latter should take a leaf from the former’s book.
“Those are hardly flaws worth condemning,” I said. “And, you know, she is the future wife of the Alpha and the Omega. She hardly has to worry about what you think of her—not until she’s a widow.”
“She won’t ever be a widow,” Babylon said. “And neither will I.”
My translation, not the New American’s.
You don’t have a husband, I wanted to say, but there were other things to marry; and Jerusalem was only a symbol after all, a pretty consolidation of mortals.
And Babylon—what was she? Why was she here, a red-haired woman in a valley of white drapes, a questioner, a lover of noise and trouble and beautiful and complicated things?
Babylon sprang ahead, playing her favorite game of all, which was to creep up silently behind the always-oblivious Jerusalem to yank at her hair. The Bride gave the same ear-splitting scream every time, and I covered my ears in preparation.
When the cry sounded out across the garden, I wondered why God gave us free will, too, when our purposes were already decided.
Four
Babylon was a fickle queen, but a queen she was. She would pull feathers out of my hair, tickle my inkpot fingers with the tips, and scrawl on beautiful bleached leaves her invitations to parties, tournaments, general events of revelry born from boredom and borne happily by Edenites. One week she’d be in love with the Eagle, the next, the star-crowned woman we all called Constellations. The four-winged Creatures would bicker amongst themselves over who would sit before Babylon as she braided wildflowers into their hair and feathers.
If anyone was her favorite, it was me, and I reveled in that secretly—that a person such as me, an inadvertently messy and rather introverted personification of a textbook, sat at her right hand. I was always with her, leaning on her shoulder, proofing the rules of her games, listening to her complaints about some facet or another of Second Eden that would soon be mysteriously rectified: too-sweet apples turned tart, bare patches of ground bursting into miniature wildflower gardens, the dimming of the bright sky at a complaint of a headache from all the wash of colors.
Although Babylon loved me dearly and I was a favorite, I was an inarguably neutral force in this garden full of symbols of good and evil. The bad ones were Babylon’s treasures, the apples of her eyes. They were not bad here, most of the time (except Abaddon, the Locust King, had a terrible penchant for pranks), but there were other cues. They had disfigured faces, ragged uniforms, names that rolled off the tongue heavy with implication. They had ways of walking, low and swaying, that made you uneasy when they approached; they had dark narrow eyes and long nails, or taut skin and stretching shadows. God may not have granted us knowledge of the story to come on Earth, but He gave us some stark hints as to what kind of roles we’d play on Ground Zero.
When the Beast approached us, Babylon gave him the biggest smile she possessed. Her delight, her vibrancy, was brighter and lovelier than it ever could have been on any of the washed-out, white-clothed Edenites.
The Beast was about as lovely as his name suggested. He had the great thick torso of a lion and long-webbed wings, wickedly curved claws that caught and pulled up clods of soil with every step he took. Huge horns protruded from his spine, three of them; the other seven were situated on a different, unfortunate spot on each of his seven heads. Two of the heads were vaguely human, hairy, and couldn’t have been loved by even his mother, had he had one. One matched his leonine body, another his bat-like wings, and the three remaining were strange, mismatched conglomerations of animal features. From what I knew of humans and their love of mythology, I’d have called him the Chimera’s homely boyfriend.
Each of the seven heads of the Beast had chosen his own name. Babylon and I were the only two in the garden who could be bothered to remember each one and to which head it belonged, instead of just calling them all “the Beast.” Me, because I dealt in names and it would be shameful if I was bad at rememberi
ng them, and Babylon because she loved the contradiction of him. Also, because she’d helped the heads name themselves.
“Hello, Shadow, Poison, Harry, Dean, Carnage, Blanket, and Friendly.” She smiled.
Babylon had never been overly concerned with eloquence or ceremony. Had never had any sense of awe of the Beast and his unknown purpose. “Friendly” was not the way I’d describe any one of those faces, but then, “able to comprehend irony” wasn’t, either.
All the heads nodded their greeting, and he sat down on his powerful haunches, his huge feet sinking into the ground.
“What are you up to?” asked Shadow, the bat-like head.
“Trying to figure out a way to get the Horsemen to lend us their mounts,” she answered, puckering her crimson lips.
“Babylon has an idea for a new game,” I said. “Like croquet but with horses.”
“I almost got Pestilence and War to agree with me—you know how they love a show—but then Death said no and you know how obsessed they are with following his lead,” Babylon said and sighed heavily.
“I don’t know how much fun it’d be if we only had four, anyway. That’s only a two-person team, you know,” I said, trying to console her.
Babylon blew me a raspberry. “The point wasn’t the game. The point was getting to ride one of the Horses.”
“You don’t want to go near one of those,” said Poison, one of the feature collages of various strange creatures.
“They’re filthy,” said Blanket.
“Well, of course Pestilence’s Horse is dirty,” Babylon admitted. “But War’s? I really wanted to see if getting on that one would make me some crazy, blood-thirsty barbarian.”
“No, all of them are terrible,” snorted Harry (whose name I spelled, in my head, as “Hairy”). “Relieving themselves everywhere—in mid-gallop sometimes. It sprays. And they make ridiculous noises at night, all except for Death’s—that one never makes a sound. That man should probably be arrested for animal abuse.”
Babylon heaved a sigh. From so long at her side, I recognized it as a calculated noise, a carefully-chosen tool rather than a careless slip of breath.
“I just really wanted to ride one,” she said. “I mean, I’ve never ridden anything. Can you imagine? Eternities in paradise and I’ve never ridden anything.”
The Beast tossed his heads in faint sympathy for her plight.
“Never felt the wind in my hair from up high like that. Never gone that fast, never felt the adrenaline of it. I mean, I’d love to be a magnificent quadruped like you all, but it just wasn’t in God’s plan, I suppose … ”
“Babylon,” Shadow said, deadpan, “how long is it that you’ve known us, and still expect us not to see through your tricks?”
Babylon blinked and beamed her smile at them all.
“Long enough, I guess,” she said. “Look, I’m just trying to milk what’s left of my puppy-dog eyes before everyone gets savvy to them.”
“Everyone is savvy to them,” I told her. “They just put up with you anyway. Probably because they’re bored and your simpering is entertaining.”
Babylon swiped a kiss on my cheek, which quickly turned into a raspberry. I swiped at her long red hair.
“Simpering,” she scoffed. “I do not simper. Do I?”
“You do,” replied Dean, sage with his wide, dark eyes shut, almost hidden in the folds of his misshapen face.
“Well, crap.”
“You know, you could ask.”
“I thought that might offend you all,” Babylon replied.
Friendly cackled. “No more than your simpering, as if you’re trying to make it our idea,” he said.
“Just ask, Babylon,” I said.
“Alright, alright. Shadow, Poison, Harry, Dean, Carnage, Blanket, and Friendly, would you take me for a ride?”
“Only because we’ve got nothing better to do,” said Carnage.
Fourteen twinkling eyes made a constellation. Sitting on his haunches, the Beast leaned his torso forward and down, making the towering height of his back a manageable climb.
I watched Babylon clamber onto the Beast’s back and watched him rise to full height as she straddled him between two of the huge, wicked spine-horns.
Looking at the two of them, I forgot to breathe. In my mind I knew that Babylon was troublesome and fun-loving, threatening only if you had a sense of vanity. I knew, too, that the Beast was a gentle, fair, and indulgent creature who would hurt a fly only with his sense of sarcasm. But the two of them, together, before me, rose higher than ten feet. Babylon, straight-backed, her silken drape roiling Hell-smoke, her long nails flush against the bleached-bone horns on the back of a creature whose seven heads protruded growths and dripped blood, whose weight sank acidic depressions into the soil under his feet, and whose fire-flicking tail curled high with his rider, casting a halo of flame around the crimson mane of her hair. A crown for a queen. A vision in vengeance and damnation.
No wonder she hated Jerusalem, the Bride. Like this, Babylon looked like the bride of Satan. Not because she was this tall, dark-colored formidable figure, not because she looked like she could kill a man with a look or a blown kiss, but because this image was where she seemed to belong.
“Babylon,” I whispered. “Babylon, get down.”
She looked at me from under long lashes with those amethyst eyes. “Sefer,” she said, the melody of her voice dripping an echo of condescension.
“It’s stupid, I know, but please get down.”
I didn’t know how to explain it to her, any of it. How to tell her that her name was one of the few that was not written inside me, not guaranteed a place in Heaven after Second Eden and after Earth. How to tell her how I knew, somehow, without knowing how, that what she did now was signing her lease in an apartment in Hell.
I didn’t need to explain it. Silence hung thick between us; the Beast’s tail blazed; Babylon’s hair tossed around her, independent of the wind. Both of them could feel it. Both of them knew that this was exactly where she was supposed to be, where she was always meant to be, and that whatever came as the result was simply God’s will.
“Get down, Babylon,” I said.
“I’ll be back later, Sefer,” she said. And without her telling him, the Beast knew to turn and bolt across the long prairie, under the multicolored sky, the hues darkening above them as they passed.
After that, she was never without him.
Five
One time she decided to arrange a game of poker—an intimate game. Just the two of us and the Four Horsemen and the Beast, who wouldn’t be playing. So very cozy.
The Four were not my first choice, as far as companions went. They ambled into Babylon’s favorite clearing single file. First came Pestilence, dressed in pristine white, perhaps just for the irony. A couple of flies buzzed idly round his head, and he gave off a faint sour smell. I hoped that he’d be sitting between two of his colleagues, rather than anywhere near me. He smiled at the two of us in his greeting, showing his yellow-stained teeth.
Second was War, gargantuan, barrel-chested, his bare arms cut with tattoos and scars. His hair was a long braid the same color as Babylon’s; the two of them could have been mistaken for siblings, until War greeted her by sweeping her backwards into a dramatic dip and a long French kiss. I cleared my throat and dodged his grinning embrace before he could do the same thing to me. He had only one eye set into a square face, and it was deep black.
Famine was right behind War, bony and sliver-thin, draped in black. Their robes almost matching, he and Babylon would have made a terrifying couple—her on the Beast, him on his tall and trembling horse. “Hello, ladies,” he said, his voice thinner than his waistline. He bent to kiss Babylon’s hand and I could swear that afterwards her knuckles bulged as they never had before. He nodded to the Beast as well, who did not bother with verbal greetings because seven inclines of mottled chins were easier to manage than seven hellos.
And finally, of course, Death, in a color that could only be described as “pale,” one that didn’t belong to the light spectrum—as it shouldn’t. When people died, when they “saw the light,” they were making a feeble attempt to give a name to the color of the soft folds of Death’s cloak, or the glow that lit his eyes. He did not give a greeting, and even Babylon didn’t dare to bat her eyes or deliver some witty little quip.
“Where are the Horses?” I asked them. It was not all that unusual to see the Four on foot, since not even personified metaphors of tragedies wanted to stay sitting on horseback for a couple of eternities, but I had at least expected the looming, unnerving, and, according to the Beast, unkempt and drooling animals to be wandering nearby.
“They are where they are,” shrugged War, cracking his knuckles.
“They will come when they are needed,” added Pestilence.
Famine nodded in agreement. Death said nothing, gave no indication of even having heard, although we all knew better than to think him anything less than semi-omniscient. War was the only one who did not allow himself to act at all awestruck by Death, and probably only because he did not have the patience for it.
“In any case,” said Babylon with her usual dazzling smile, “shall we play?”
And so we did. The Four settled themselves into a semicircle—thankfully with Death and Pestilence in the center. War wedged himself next to Babylon; I found myself between Babylon and Famine. The Beast hung back, reclining behind Babylon. It was almost comical to see the Horsemen seated cross-legged in the grass, except for Death, who made it seem as if the bare brown circle of moldering vegetation around him where he sat was his throne.
Babylon dealt, as always. The chips were flattish, faintly-colored stones. We played for a long time. War played as recklessly one might expect, but bluffed better than I’d anticipated. Pestilence turned out a shocking number of flushes. Famine’s pile of chips kept seeming to dwindle away, divide, thin out, but never ran out. Mine was small as well. Death and Babylon were the ones with the lions’ shares.
In the Beginning (Anthology) Page 5
