Jane did not like jokes. That was very clear to me; she might have, in youth, enjoyed the odd frivolity, but in old age her mind had hardened into a shell around her frail body, and she did not smile.
“Am I to die, then?” she will have said, and I will have said, “Yes. I have said as much.”
“But when?” she will have asked me. “When?”
But I could not tell her, I could not tell. To do so would make me anathema, and besides, I was not there as a messenger, nor as a servant, nor even as a killer—I was there to record. And it would be then that I heard a knock at the door, and in will have come a great clod of a man wearing his bulk upon him as if it were an expensive suit, tailored to fit, a plain-looking man, aggressive in conversation and almost completely tactless, with a quite unappealing stutter. And he will have said, “You have r-r-r-ruined the Handel.” Stricken, she will have apologized though I am sure she did not wish to. “Indeed,” he will have said, “again please.” And he will have left the room as abruptly as he had entered.
“Mister Harris Bigg-Wither,” I will have stated, and even then words were written, somewhere, in shining gold on pages white as snow. A great clod of a man . . .
“My husband.”
“I know.”
“He proposed after his time in Oxford.”
“I know.”
“Marriage might offer many practical advantages. A permanent home for Cassandra, assistance for my brothers in their careers. . . .”
“I know, Miss Austen,” I might have whispered, and, somewhere, the words many practical advantages . . .
“Do not call me that.”
God, it is said, sees all things at once; for Him there is no such thing as Time, for indeed, He exists outside of Time and for Him all things are immediate, all things perpetual. God has no understanding of narrative; how can He? For narrative is the pleasing arrangement of one incident after another, the compelling build of drama and the proper, appropriate resolution when all things have occurred, as they must, in a certain order.
In Heaven, it is said, there sits the Book of Judgement and each mortal is recorded there so that upon the day of death, Saint Peter might open the book and find ascribed there a full recounting of their deeds. But it is not said, that albeit the words are of the finest gold and they shine like the light of Heaven itself, albeit the parchment is of the finest white vellum, as smooth as newborn flesh, as white as newfallen snow, when one reads from the Book of Judgement it is a fast and simple thing: Missus Clara Crawford lived a good life and is deserving of reward; or Mister Timothy Branton was good for many years but fell under the influence of evil friends.
And I read from the Book and I examined the lives of those I had been sent to watch over, and each of them seemed like such a tiny thing, so tiny, and I would turn the page and ask, “But where are they, the little loves and betrayals, the tests and mishaps and abandonments and reversals?” and Peter, with an infinitely loving look, with the weight of ages sitting upon his poor, beetled brow, would say, “Just leave it, already. We don’t have time for plot.”
Miss Austen played very nicely this second time, and the G major was sweet and pleasing to the ear, her transition to the “Duet” flawless. I said nothing. I simply watched her at the pianoforte, watched the elegant curve of her neck bowing toward the keys, the litheness of her fingers, the way her eyes would close for a moment as she played and then flutter open furiously. She was a beautiful woman, this Miss Austen, or as she preferred, Missus Bigg-Wither, and as one who has seen the many specimens of Creation, I can say with some authority that here was a remarkable creature, here was a creature of virtue and kindness, deserving in every way of the especial attention of one such as myself.
When the piece came to an end, she sat for a moment, utterly composed, and I thought she would speak but she did not, not immediately, she listened as if to some phantom music of her own; but that was not it, it was not some inner symphony she attended to, no, but the creak of the house, the sound of footsteps in the hall. There was none. She relaxed.
“Are you here to haunt me?”
“No,” I said, “this is not one of your Gothic tales, with wild-haired men and buried secrets.”
“I do not have time for stories.”
“No,” I said. “Not any longer.”
“Why do you look at me like that?”
“Like what?” I replied, startled.
“As if you were a child, and I a much sought after sweet that had suddenly turned sour in your mouth.”
I regarded her in silence for a time; her body shuddered with the effort of playing, and I found myself listening too, for the sound of footsteps, for the sound of something beside her breath coming in and out of her lungs in ragged little bursts. There was light streaming in from an open window and it touched her hair, burnished it to gold.
“I think you are very beautiful,” I said.
“You must not say such things.”
“But I am bound to truth in all things.” She was very beautiful. . . .
“I am not,” Miss Austen replied, and she turned her head so that the light slid off her hair, touched her lips, her eyes. “Truth is a not a thing for a woman, or novelists, to be concerned with; it is only the appearance of truth that touches us, for a thing feigned becomes true enough given only sufficient time and inclination for the masquerade.”
“It is different for an angel.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “I would very much like to imagine it is.”
Let us say, now, that her husband, Mister Bigg-Wither, never entered the room; let us say that we sat, the two of us listening, for some time, and we heard only birdsong or, perhaps, the pianoforte, but no footsteps in the hall.
At the beginning of the War—and even I do not remember, good record-keeper, good servant that I am, which it was—Azrael was thrilled.
“It will be good to see action again,” he said, “just to try my hand at it again. A sword is an easy thing to lose touch with, a sword requires practice, effort, and I,” he confessed, “have not done much of either.” Azrael went to the Peninsula where the French were massacring the British and the British were massacring the French, and as I visited Miss Austen, so did he watch the course of the War creep across those other lands; when I saw him, he was gleaming, resplendent, and there was a thrill to his voice when he spoke, as if the crack of cannons had infused him with a thunderous rapture. Azrael was happy with the simple tasks of warfare.
“Let them do as they will,” he would say to us, “it’s all the same. French. English. Not a Joan of Arc to look out for among them, not a vision to dispense with. Just mind the cavalry and keep out the way. Easy work.” He smiled then, happy to have something to do, happy to be of service. But the next time he didn’t bother with bringing his sword. “All muskets now, isn’t it? Not like the old days. Muskets and cannons. Good things, cannons, I’m not complaining, but it’s all a bit imprecise, isn’t it? They just fire and, hey, maybe it’ll hit, maybe it won’t. But never let it be said that I’m complaining, I like a good war, a war is a good thing.”
But he looked sad, somehow, and after that he confided to me, “I don’t know what I’m doing there. I just don’t know. There aren’t any orders. I just watch, now, it’s all just watching. I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean. Shouldn’t I be trying to inspire them? Shouldn’t one side have a moral right over the other?”
“It means that history is advancing, and Creation is more infinitely complex than we can possibly imagine,” I said.
“I stride about the battlefield,” he said, “and I watch the cannons go off, and the charge, and then I sort through the dead, and when I come across one, someone writes down his name and puts a little tick beside the box. And they respect me, the ones from Records, they absolutely respect me, you can see it in their eyes. But all they want to know is did that one manage to hit anything? Because if he did, that’s it then, isn’t it? The little ba
stards know which box to tick.”
When Jane’s beauty left her, she still had the pianoforte, and her skill at it was extreme, sublime. Her fingers were precise if arthritic; and when she played it was as if a tremor rippled through me, as if she were revealing some hidden part of the divine plan, some especial function of grace that I had never been privy to. And I would listen to her, sometimes, and we would speak, sometimes.
“I do not understand why you have come,” she would say to me.
“It is my purpose to discover your secrets, that I might see the truth of you and write it in Heaven.”
“There is no truth to me that you have not seen,” she would say, “for I have no pretensions to that sort of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man, and as such I have laid bare for you whatever you ask.”
“Ah,” I would exclaim, “what I search for is the parts of yourself that you do not yet, and may never, understand; for that is where the true character of a woman is written, not in what she knows she can reveal and does however willingly, but in what she is unaware of, even in herself.”
“Then you assume I do not know myself.”
“No mortal can.”
“And yet I have made a study of it, these long, lonely years, a perfect study so that I could paint a likeness of myself for your Book that, I have no doubt, would be suitable to your purposes.”
“What would you say?”
“That I am a woman.”
“That would not be enough.”
“It was enough for Eve,” she would say, “and it is enough for my husband.”
“It is not enough for you.”
It is said that in Heaven there is an order to things, and we angels understand it perfectly, that we lack the requisite means to question, those of us who stayed, that is, who did not fall in the War. And so I did not question when Azrael came to me, no longer resplendent, the crack of cannon fire gone from his voice.
“They’ve taken me off Warfare,” he said, and his voice was melodious and sad. “They say that I do not understand the New Order, that I am a cog in a perfectly ordered machine but, perhaps, it is the wrong machine, not the machine of Warfare. I don’t even know what that means,” he confessed, “but one of them, one of the dying ones, asked for a sign. And so I appeared to him, I let him see that God’s love was infinite and that he was safe, and that flesh was just a little thing, just a very little thing, and he had a place in the cosmic order. That God was merciful.
“Did you know that they have a Book? And in that Book are the names of the angels—everyone one of us? And it says, Azrael—a good servant for many years. For many years, what does that mean? Am I not eternal? Am I not free of flesh and beyond the scope of Time? For many years. And one of them found me. He said to me, ‘Azrael, you are made to serve.’ And I was. I am. I live to serve, service is the very truth of what I am, that’s what I told him. ‘Good,’ the little bugger said.”
Jane never lost her beauty; let it not be said by anyone that she lost her beauty, for Beauty is an eternal thing, like Truth, and there can be no changing it once it is possessed.
And I said this to Azrael, as he stood by me, I said, “Is she not beautiful, is she not possessed of some higher substance? Does she not deserve something more than that clod of a husband? What a noble mind, what a keen observer of the human condition, what a record-keeper of all that transpires in the hearts of those who surround her.”
And he said, “I was made to serve just like you. This is what they have asked of me, it’s not cannons, it’s not thunder and death, but it’s what they asked me to do.”
“Let me speak with her.”
Let us say that she was sitting at her desk when he came for her; let it not have been the pianoforte where she had laboured, for hours, for the love of a husband who did not love her in return. Let us say that there was no husband. Let us say that she was only passably good at the pianoforte, and that she had, instead, a keen fascination with words, with writing out the hearts of men and women upon the page. Let us call her, not Missus Bigg-Wither, as she herself might have done, but Miss Austen, alone, yes, but beautiful and keen-witted and happy.
Perhaps she would have heard a tolling of a bell, as some do, and she would have turned to see a stranger standing before her, tall, resplendent, with hair as soft as lamb’s wool. Perhaps there would have been a rushing noise in her ears, the sound of a great cataract, more deafening, perhaps, than the crack of a cannon.
And he will have said to her, “Fear not, madam, that I should disturb you at this late hour, for I have come with tidings.”
And she will have been shocked, but that stubborn grace to which she was born will have steeled her resolve, and she will have said, “Indeed, sir.” And he will have said, “You are to die.” And she will have said, “That is known. For is it not that every woman on God’s earth is appointed an hour of death?” And he, with a terrible smile, though not terribly meant, of course, but frightening, nonetheless, to a mortal, will have said, “Yes, Miss Austen. That is so.”
Afterwards, I would say to Azrael, “Why pillars of salt and punishment? Why manna in the wilderness and the twelve plagues of Egypt? Why sadness? Why death?”
And he would shrug, looking uncomfortable. “I don’t know, mate.”
They say, in Heaven, that there is a Book, and in it are written all the names of the universe, that an accounting can be made of each. They say that beside the name of Azrael it is written, He was a good servant. And I know it to be true. And there will be another name, Harris Bigg-Wither, and there will be a very brief account, and there will be another name, Jane Austen, and it will say, She was very beautiful and died too early. Let her fondness for words have never stinted, let her books last for generations, let them be written as truth in the hearts and souls of the generations to come; let her never have feared the footsteps on the hall, let her have known much love, let her have disliked the pianoforte. I do not know if it is a kindness, these things I have written. But it is a record. Of a sort.
They say, in Heaven, that Time is infinite and all things happen at once, that there is no order to events; that there is no such thing as music for all notes sound together and the listener cannot differentiate; music is temporal; music is of the flesh; it is mortal. In Heaven, they say, there is no grandsweeping narrative, for God stands outside the possibility of such things; that He sees all things, the loves, the triumphs, the betrayals and reversals in a single moment, an eternity that renders as chaos for his servants what is perfect order for him. They say that His forgiveness is absolute, his His love is absolute, His observance is absolute. They say this, my many detractors. Let it be a jest between us; let it be the first betrayal; let it be a mark, spilled ink, in that perfect chronicle of His that I should believe otherwise, that I should doubt, that this doubt should run through to the very depths of me.
In Heaven, there is a book, and in that book, there is a name: Lucifer, called Lightbearer, a good servant, once, turned rebel.
[ ribcage ]
THE ART OF DYING
I have only slipped away into the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
that we still are.
—Henry Scott Holland, “What is Death?”
I.
Sitting in the coffee shop, staring at the steady stream of students cruising along Bloor Street, Clarissa knows that in ten days she will be dead.
She always knows when she will die, can tick away the seconds on her finger like a clock winding down.
She can feel the bustling crowd around her, ten days from now, the dark lights of the subway and the sound of guitar music from somewhere in the distance. Young women carry logoed bags, yoga mats, strollers with small children that look like blurry photographs of themselves. Men talk on cell phones, read newspapers, stare at the women. It is a Thursday, and Clarissa has never liked Thursdays. People are in too much of
a hurry to get to the weekend.
Clarissa imagines herself standing a little over the yellow safety line. She looks down, studies the dull gleam of the rails at the bottom of the drop in front her. There are signs nearby warning people not to charge the doors when the bell chimes. People always ignore them.
Distant rumbling. The elbows are hard at her back. She wants to sink back into the crowd. Instead, she leans forward to catch the first sight of lights in the tunnel, bursting out of the darkness.
A whoosh of displaced air, a high-pitched squeal of brakes as the driver slows for the turn to enter the station.
The chatter behind Clarissa hums, but it is impossible to make out what anyone is saying. If she turned around to look, it would be like staring at a muted TV, like people caught naked without words to hide behind. But her eyes are fixed on the approaching lights.
Then it happens.
Behind her, elbows and shoulders bristle in hedgehog anticipation. The muscles of the crowd tense. Someone calls out behind her, but she doesn’t turn.
Clarissa is staring at the lights, watching them grow large as an opening eye. Her pupils dilate. The train is almost here.
Now Clarissa feels the impatience around her. She is impatient too. When the warm bodies finally shove her forward, she wonders why it has taken so long to happen. She teeters, eyes locked with the growing eye of the train.
But there are still ten days, and right now her fingers shake with a different kind of anticipation.
Paul was supposed to be here five minutes ago.
When the door to the coffee shop swings open to reveal him—casual jeans, a button-down dress shirt, apologetic smile—she can’t help but smile back. She doesn’t want to smile. Doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be in her apartment where she has been packing away this body’s possessions so as not to be a burden to her family when they come to clear it out. Her brother, Jamie, is the oldest and would be expected to take charge of her effects. But he’s a sensitive guy, always reading, even now that he’s done school. She doesn’t want him to suffer.
Hair Side, Flesh Side Page 17
