by Alan Deniro
“What if this is a bomb?” Roger asked.
“I’ve scanned it,” the courier said, waving his black wand. A little too casual for Roger’s taste. “It’s fine.”
Roger pulled the package to him and closed the door. The box was taped over and over again. He set it on the kitchen table and then saw it had a passport from India.
“Shit!” Roger said, swiping at the package and pushing it to the floor. Maybe there was a contact poison. Those stupid wands couldn’t account for everything. He let the package sit there for a few more days, until he summed up the courage to face his own death. Placing the package back on the table, he closed his eyes as he cut it open with scissors and reached inside. It was a manuscript. His manuscript, a copy of it, scribbled upon in red ink. In his haze he had forgotten about it. There was a handwritten letter attached to it.
Dear Sir:
You may be surprised to find this returned to you, as you have not had any dealings with me in the past. However, your agent—who I now fear to be dead—has often utilized my services to doctor your recent synopses and novels, though I am rarely able to make sense of them. It took me great trouble to track you down. I assume you are in hiding.
I have enclosed my transcription and my edits, in order to complete my contract and rid myself of you. I have to say that I found the ideas devoid of meaning, the characters cold, the prose poorly written—like everything else of yours. And yet, in a manner utterly alien to your later projects, there is a vulnerability too. The people that inhabit these pages are shallow but they are not inhuman. You started with something at least honest—in your own fashion—and cast that aside.
You had a letter stuck in the pages of your notebook. Do you remember this letter? You must. It’s a letter of commendation from the last president of the United States, “personally, and with great warmth, thanking you for defending the Constitution and the integrity of the nation during a time of great trial.” The letter goes on to list the names of the bomber pilots who “would vouch for the great effect your writing had on their thoughts as they dropped the collateral payload on the enemies of America and freedom.” These words made me—
Amar felt his wife’s hands on his shoulders in the middle of his composition. He flinched, though he didn’t want to.
“Let it go for now,” she said. “The children are asleep.” She curled closer into him, arms around his neck. He felt that she was naked. A torrent had come into her when he told her everything, about every distant monster he had to face, the innocent blood embedded in every file. The planes taking off, and landing lighter six hours later.
She told him that even monsters needed to be forgiven—not right away, of course. But even Devadatta, the Buddha’s worst enemy, the traitor of his inner circle, was able to be a great enlightened teacher after many successive lives, after many hells and trials. She had told him that calamity was the loom and that all sentient beings were the cords of silk on the loom, interwoven in the warp and the woof, bound tightly together. She struggled to find the spirit of these words, but even this attempt comforted him. It gave him the courage to write the letter to the American—which his wife needed to interrupt. She told him she needed him. He turned around his chair and kissed her neck, then licked each nipple as she pushed herself onto him. She unclasped his pants and slid his cock out, rubbing its head and pressing it against the tangle of her pubic hair. He put his hands on her ass and guided himself into her.
She came first. After he came, she lifted herself off and knelt in front of him. She sucked his softening cock and ran her tongue on the foreskin until it was clean, and then placed her head against his thigh. He stroked her hair and told her he was ready to finish the letter. He wanted to finish strong, vicious, to devastate the author so that he would never be able to write another word again. And then Amar could go on with his life.
After she left, he sat there for a long while. No words came to him. He had no idea what to say next. That girl who thought he lived in Albany—what would she have told him? She would have told Amar (or so he imagined) that he didn’t have the right to say anything, really, even to a war criminal, that he was trying to dredge up memories he didn’t possess of a time he didn’t live through. And that it was better to quit while he was ahead and pretend none of those false memories ever existed.
Really, she would be all right.
The wound on her cheek—he closed his eyes and saw her lean forward—look, Amar, it’s healing.
Plight of the Sycophant
The border between the two worlds is hard to describe but easy to feel under the skin. Even a few miles away, you can sense its effect, in ways that you’ll probably never understand. Much like when a person puts a gun in your mouth (though this has never happened to me). The bullet doesn’t leave the gun—anticipation is its own weapon. And fear. One must never forget fear.
You can have this unsettling feeling on either side of the border, though you will likely prefer one side to the other. One world to the other. The sun will be bright, as it always is in this part of the world—except, perhaps, for September—and the giant angels will be patrolling the mist, as they always do. There will often be rainbows, on account of this bright sun and the mist. They grow boring.
The border is not actually a wall but a waterfall. No one knows where the water comes from; there is never a cloud in the sky. But the water comes. The angels are rather mean and swear a lot. They wear bright, yellow ponchos, with a red script in their language up and down the sleeves. There is only one checkpoint, one place to cross by foot (although it is not advised) or car. The cars have to be coated in a certain type of myrrh, or else the border patrol would not even consider letting you cross. And even then you have to have the right kinds of papers, the right bribes. And—the hardest part—the right attitude. Angels will detain a person trying to cross for months, sometimes years, trying to find out what attitude a border-crosser might have. What desires they have. Their prisons near the gate are little cottages and are actually kind of cute.
Sometimes the angels are satisfied by the answers and sometimes they are not. Some travelers end up leaving their cottages, and some do not.
This is all, of course, from my perspective, from my country. I have never been to the other country. I have not had appropriate business to take me there. And I’m afraid of the angels. They’re not actual angels. That I’ll grant you. They don’t fly, or sing, or help people. But they are certainly tall—seven feet, maybe eight feet in height. They don’t have wings, but their guns do. I’ve seen one of their guns fly, once. I was emptying the grease trap from the store—surely the nastiest job in the history of the world; believe me, there’s a lot of competition—out in the garbage pit closer to the waterfall. One of the angels had to re-strap his boot and the gun flapped furiously to stay aloft, like a hummingbird, and it did. The wings fluttered in a manner that my eye couldn’t catch. I was watching it all with binoculars; the pit wasn’t that close to the waterfall, and anyway, I didn’t have a garbage permit, so I had to watch out for patrols. Fees and levies were designed to keep us safe—but if I actually paid them, then we’d be operating at a loss. Plus the scavengers around the pit liked the grease, and they were bold night and day—green bears and millipedes large as my arm. I was already risking an arm and a leg.
Anyway, the pawn shop where I work is in sight of the border. It’s the last chance for a traveler to get rid of his or her belongings before going over to the other side—or maybe pick up something that might be useful farther down the road. We also sell fuel. By popular demand. And also hot dogs, frozen goods, pop, batteries, and the like. But we’re not a convenience store. We sell a lot of beer and guns. Not the angel’s guns, but regular guns. They’re not allowed across the border, so people get what they can for them. There’s always something going on in the shop—a lot of tourists come through, just to get a look at the waterfall,
but you still get bored at the register. A pawn shop is a pawn shop.
No one comes back from the other side. In case you’re wondering.
And just where does the water go, once it has fallen? You’d think that the ground would flood, but it doesn’t. There might be grates leading into a sewer system, or something. There might be a vast, underground ocean under the surface of the earth, where mer-people live ordinary, screwed up lives in screwed up mer-civilizations, and no one can figure out where that waterfall comes from. I couldn’t say one way or another, and there’s no chance I’ll find out.
There was only one time, years ago, when I came awfully close. Or at least, I thought I did; now I’m not so sure. I’m not sure what side I come down on. It was the time I was a sycophant, and it wasn’t pretty. I was twenty, or thereabouts, young and stupid, and I’d only been at the pawn shop for a year. I had wandered for a while before that, and since I couldn’t find a way past the border, I stopped and looked for a job. No one liked to pump gas and pawn guns in sight of the angels, so the station was always hiring. Turnover is hell. But I kept my nose clean. I had a trailer that I was actually proud of. No one lived around me. I had no idea how lonely I was, especially after my double shifts.
It was at the tail end of one of those double shifts when a woman came in to tell me her car broke down, and could she get some help. It was Sunday, going on evening, and no one credible in town was going to jump-start her car, or fix her flat. Which was where I came in. She had her hair in a beehive bun, and wore a T-shirt that looked wooly and too warm. I figured she was driving from a ways off; she had a funny accent. I asked her where her car was. About three miles that way, she said. She pointed north, parallel to the border. My brother’s still in the car. He’s guarding it.
Like an angel? I said.
I . . . I guess, she said. It was even more obvious she wasn’t from around here.
I smelled her then—acrid, sour raspberries. It didn’t smell like the stench of a long road trip, but neither did it smell like perfume. But I was bored all the time, like I said before, and so the intrigue won out against my better judgment. She was something different. I decided that I could be some use to her, and the blood in my head pounded.
Okay, I said. I’ll help you in 15 minutes. Can you wait 15 minutes? That’s when I get off.
She thanked me, and she seemed sincere, and she smiled. I became aroused. She was perfectly pretty, and I wasn’t ashamed to notice this. It was a reaction—I knew that I wouldn’t act on the reaction ever. It just wasn’t how I operated, to make huge, unyielding assumptions about what a smile meant.
After my replacement came—I forget his name, after all of these years, like I’ve forgotten a lot of things—I took her to my car. A filthy Civic. It was embarrassing, but she didn’t seem to mind the birdcages and miniature sinball games strewn on the floor of the shotgun seat. I also had a gun behind my shotgun seat—just a pistol, a non-angelic gun. The birdcages were from a man who pawned about a dozen parakeets on us. I’d bought them and set them free. I felt pretty bad for them, and no one was going to buy them.
Oh, just move that stuff out of the way, I said, starting the car. I was more ashamed about my vehicle than my erection. The erection was a private matter, while the car was definitely public space.
She smiled, not to me really, and rolled down the window. She was serene, undisturbed.
I love the breeze, she said, sticking her arm out as I pulled out. The mist, too.
The mist is pretty nice, I said. I hadn’t gotten bored of the mist yet. It was fine and soft enough that you would realize, with the right wind, that your face was wet and cool. The mist made the heat bearable.
I drove closer to the waterfall. The land was a wasteland: no hills, no vegetation, all dust and sand and sandstone. After about a minute, she said: turn down that road there.
I tried and tried but couldn’t place her accent at all. I usually had an ear for those kinds of things. My father, right as I left his house to seek my fortune, had told me that I would always be wandering around the bottom of the world. Actually he shouted it as I was walking away. I think he had meant it as a curse, but I never saw him again anyway. I didn’t want to ask her about the accent, where she came from.
But I wondered if I would find out anyway. I’d stupidly hoped that she’d abandon her brother and come with me back to my trailer for a few whiskey sours and she’d clench herself against me on my sofa (brand: “Sof-ahh . . .”), and I’d say, no, the sofa folds out, it’s a hide-a-bed. Or something along those lines. This was breaking my vow of nonintervention that I made when I met her. I know that. But I didn’t know what to expect. I figured there was a chance she wanted me, and that I could help her along the process of wanting me. I was, however, afraid of my own mouth, the bombshells that would pirouette from it.
Her arm hanging out the window did a little dance, a little hand puppetry, and she closed her eyes.
After she closed her eyes, I put away my seduction plan, folded it up like a map. It was a dumb plan anyway.
The road running parallel to the border was a kind of service alley at first, filled with speed bumps, behind fast food restaurants and hotels you’d pay for by the hour. “Hotel” was probably too kind of a word. But then the sprawl stopped and the road turned dirt. Soon we were in the bona fide desert, and the border was a half-mile east of us. I heard the waterfall roar and, peering into the mist, saw the silhouettes of angels—or at least their bright ponchos—here and there.
I hadn’t known about this road at all. (It has since disappeared altogether. The main road fades into pure desert now. The beginning of the service alley that I remember is now an abandoned waterpark. Once a year I go looking for the road she took, but no luck.) It was bumpy, and the Civic’s shocks were horrible. I apologized about the smoothness, or the lack of it, of the ride.
She must have been sleeping, or meditating, or something. She opened her eyes. What did you say?
The road is bumpy, I managed.
She shrugged. I told you I had a brother, right?
I think so, I said. A sudden spray turned the windshield to a fine mud and I turned on the wipers.
He has a birth defect, she said. I think I failed to mention this. Just to warn you, so you don’t become alarmed or anything.
I nodded and smiled, as if to say, no problem, whatever. I was secretly troubled. I wished that the brother wasn’t in the picture at all, that I could take care of her car trouble with no familial witnesses. Perhaps, I reasoned, like I imagined a snake would reason, his birth defect meant that he was only a shell of a person, and could not interfere in any relationship that might develop between me and the stranded woman.
The sun was beginning to set. We hit a pothole and, startled, she grabbed my hand. Hers was warm but mine was warmer. She pulled away and didn’t meet my gaze, even though I was offering it to her.
At last we reached her car, which was actually a Hummer. Maybe they were drug dealers, I thought, or smugglers, although that would have been impossible, on account of the waterfall border and the angels. I pulled up next to the Hummer and we got out.
Thank you so much, she said, sounding like she really meant it. She stretched her arms up.
No problem, I said. Happy to help. Let me look at the engine. Can you pop the hood?
I glanced at the interior of the car, looking for her brother. The windows of the Hummer didn’t have tinting, and I could see her brother lying across one of the backseats. I forget which backseat, as there were three in the SUV. He seemed to be made out of water. He wore dark glasses that didn’t seem to be made of water, but that was it. Water. I could see right through his body. He looked a few years younger than she was. But for crying out loud—gauging such a thing was totally without value. Talk about a birth defect. I wasn’t scared of him though.
She didn’t pop the hood, like I’d asked. She just kept stretching. At first her arms, and then her legs, as if she was getting ready to sprint. I almost wanted to cry. Instead I said: Is this some kind of joke? A prank? Is your car perfectly fine or is it not?
She then told me that I was to drive the Hummer into the waterfall.
But I’d die, I said. You’d die, too. If the angels don’t kill you—and they will—well, you can’t get through the waterfall. It can’t be penetrated. It just can’t.
She then explained to me how she wouldn’t die, because she wouldn’t be in the Hummer. She would just be watching, watching out for angels who might start to get ideas and try to stop them. And then she would stop them.
Even though she didn’t threaten me, per se, I guess I should have been a little afraid of her threat-like statements.
But instead I laughed. I was getting angry, that she only had wanted to use me. Not to fix a car, which was perfectly legitimate. But rather to drive, in suicidal fashion, in reach of the angels. I had worked myself into a lather over this? I wanted to please her, but not at such a steep, ridiculous price.
Stop angels, I said. Huh.
Absolutely, she said. She stopped her stretching and walked toward me. Do you know what’s on the other side? Do you know what’s in the other country?
No, what, I said. Try me.
I was ready, at that point, to drive away, good riddance.
People like me, she said.
She then revealed her true face, which I really don’t want to talk about any more than I absolutely have to.
