“I’m a programmer,” Cunningham says. “Mainly I talk to angels. But I also do national security stuff.”
“Angels?” she says, and laughs in a brittle, tinkling way. “You talk to angels? I’ve never heard anyone say that before.” She pours herself a drink and moves quickly elsewhere.
“Angels?” says the astrological woman. “Did someone say angels?”
Cunningham smiles and shrugs and looks out the window. It is raining harder. I should go home, he thinks. There is absolutely no point in being here. He fills his glass again. The chimpanzee man is still working on the astrologer, but she seems to be trying to get free of him and come over to Cunningham. To discuss angels with him? She is heavy-breasted, a little wall-eyed, sloppy-looking. He does not want to discuss angels with her. He does not want to discuss angels with anyone. He holds his place at the window until it definitely does appear that the astrologer is heading his way; then he drifts towards the door. She says, “I heard you say you were interested in angels. Angels are a special field of mine, you know. I’ve studied with—”
“Angles,” Cunningham says. “I play the angles. That’s what I said. I’m a professional gambler.”
“Wait,” she says, but he moves past her and out into the night. It takes him a long while to find his key and get his car unlocked, and the rain soaks him to the skin, but that does not bother him. He is home a little before midnight.
He brings Raphael on line. The great archangel radiates a beautiful golden glow.
“You will be Basileus,” Raphael tells him. “We’ve decided it by a vote, hierarchy by hierarchy. Everyone agrees.”
“I can’t be an angel. I’m human,” Cunningham replies.
“There’s ample precedent. Enoch was carried off to Heaven and became an angel. So was Elijah. St. John the Baptist was actually an angel. You will become Basileus. We’ve already done the program for you. It’s on the disk: just call him up and you’ll see. Your own face, looking out at you.”
“No,” Cunningham says.
“How can you refuse?”
“Are you really Raphael? You sound like someone from the other side. A tempter. Asmodeus. Astaroth. Belphegor.”
“I am Raphael. And you are Basileus.”
Cunningham considers it. He is so very tired that he can barely think. An angel. Why not? A rainy Saturday night, a lousy party, a splitting headache: come home and find out you’ve been made an angel, and given a high place in the hierarchy. Why not? Why the hell not?
“All right,” he says. “I’m Basileus.”
He puts his hands on the keys and taps out a simple formulation that goes straight down the pipe into the Defense Department’s big Northern California system. With an alteration of two keystrokes he sends the same message to the Soviets. Why not? Redundancy is the soul of security. The world now has about six minutes left. Cunningham has always been good with computers. He knows their secret language as few people before him have.
Then he brings Raphael on the screen again.
“You should see yourself as Basileus while there’s still time,” the archangel says.
“Yes. Of course. What’s the access key?”
Raphael tells him. Cunningham begins to set it up.
Come now, Basileus! We are one!
Cunningham stares at the screen with growing wonder and delight, while the clock continues to tick.
BEAUTIFUL MEN
Christopher Fowler
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER was born in Greenwich, London. He is the award-winning author of ten short story collections and thirty novels, including eight volumes in the popular Bryant & May series of mysteries.
Fowler has fulfilled several schoolboy fantasies—releasing a terrible Christmas pop single, becoming a male model, posing as the villain in a Batman graphic novel, running a nightclub, appearing in The Pan Books of Horror Stories and standing in for James Bond.
His work divides into black comedy, horror, mystery and tales unclassifiable enough to have publishers tearing their hair out. The author’s often hilarious and moving autobiography, Paperboy—about growing up in London in the 1950s and ’60s—was published in 2009.
“This story came to me while I was sitting where Ryan sits at the start and end of the tale,” Fowler reveals. “It’s my favorite sunset spot in the world, and I’ve sat there at points of my life that have ranged from great happiness to terrible despair.
“I’m calmed by urban environments, and imagined angels in a form that would suit the city. I assumed that any messenger from the heavens would be an equally wonderful and terrible thing—there would be no joyous news without the tragic equivalent. Nice is also the city of beautiful men.”
The Coast
OUT IN THE BAY, the last jet-skiers are looping past each other in the setting sun. Nearby, on Cap Ferrat, the summer parties are coming to an end. The Mistrale is rising, whipping petals and pine needles into the air, stippling the surfaces of sapphire swimming pools. This year the Russians have moved in, filling the hotels vacated by Americans. Everyone wants to know where the Americans have gone. They are fondly remembered; in past times they were generous and jovial, but now they have completely vanished. Restaurant owners blame politics, but only in the vaguest terms. The Riviera towns are safe havens, far from the threat of fundamentalist attack. Nobody here feels like the end of the world would affect them.
The hot winds are still bringing firestorms to the hills. Yellow seaplanes blast the flames with seawater, but already there are fewer people to witness the drama. Houses are being locked up for the coming winter. Entire areas are falling asleep, even though the temperature has barely dropped from the height of summer. Many slumber beneath the cliffs of the Massif Central, the great fold of rock that creates a microclimate so warm it is nicknamed “Little Africa,” perfect for growing figs and clementines, perfect for hiding from the world.
The light hurts Ryan’s corneas. The low sun on the sea fractures and pierces, but he will not don his glasses, for he must see everything now. Speedboats burn the last of their precious petrol cutting geometric patterns through the azure waves. A fierce golden light bathes the pink breast-shaped cone of the Negresco, and turns the slow curve of the Promenade Des Anglais into a shimmering ribbon, studded with the rubies of homegoing brake lights.
Ryan checks his Rolex and begins the countdown in his head. Already the first neon striplights are outlining the hotels of Nice. The last ferry of the evening is arriving from Corsica. The pizza restaurants in the port are preparing themselves for the extra business it will bring. The buildings have drawn in the brightness of the day and will feed it back as night energy. Everything is interlocked, as unstoppable as time, and will remain so until the very last moment.
Ryan leans against the warm stone of the seat and turns up the music in his headphones. He smiles at those who pass and waits for the vermilion dusk, patiently watching as the city goes about its business, tethered to routine, absorbing upset, heedless of harm, happy to exist at all.
And he thinks to himself, what a wonderful world.
The Girls
On June 13th exactly four months earlier, he is seated in much the same pose but further around the bay, in a pulsing basement nightclub with sweating red walls, like a chamber of the heart. He watches as three glistening girls with thick St. Petersburg accents squeeze together for their web-cam interviewer, pushing for screen space.
They are being interviewed about what they look for in a man. The interview is being projected on high-res screens all around the room, greedily repeating their behavioral tics in fierce scarlets and cyans, like coursework for anthropology students. The girls shriek that their guys need broad shoulders and firm definition and a sense of humor, but above all property, nice cars and lots of money. He studies them from the bar and thinks it odd that those who see the most beauty in the world are the least equipped to handle it. And those who see nothing at all are the best survivors, at least while their looks hold out.
; Ryan examines these Russian dolls with a dispassionate eye, and tries to see what they want him to see. All he can find is what’s on display; bleach-cuts and cleavages and flicking hair, posing bodies, thrusting hips, tossed heads, sparkling jewelry, forced laughter revealing weirdly whitened teeth. He makes himself listen, because all he can really hear is a sort of hysterical high-pitched squeaking in the background while their sexual postures talk over them. Men only hear bodies in nightclubs.
Unraveling their logomania, he tries to form an opinion about what they’re saying, even though the effort nearly kills him. He thinks: That’s what you tell everyone you want, but I know you; you’ll settle for less, much less because eventually you’ll have to. Because girls like you are ten a penny here and beautiful men with lots of money might want you but only for a night, then they’ll throw you out without breakfast and drive away to someone else. Why? Because they can and you can’t without looking like hookers.
That’s not sexist, he thinks, that’s practical.
The girls of the Cote D’Azur ask for a lot but have to settle for very little. They’ll date a man who disappears for days at a time, who lies to them constantly, who’ll never hold down a job or have any money, who’s as fat and bald and ugly as a pig, who’ll let them down every single time. They pretend they want perfection, but their expectations are gradually reduced to such a low level that their men can get away with anything.
Ryan blames the Single Switch, a mutant autogenesis hardwired inside girls’ brains that trips one day, and suddenly a light shines behind their eyes telling them to find a man fast and have a child. This is the moment when their ideals carbonize and they behave like someone blindfolded for a party game, rushing about to grab the first shiny male who comes within range, no matter how venal, bitter and hate-filled they are. Because many men really hate women, hate them so much that they can barely prevent themselves from lashing out. But the Riviera girls have to pair off before they spend too much time alone and turn strange, devoting themselves to horoscopes, crystals and cat sanctuaries, and filling their homes with false memories.
That’s not unfair, he thinks, that’s realistic.
The One
Ryan knows this to be the case because he is the kind of man the desperate girls chase. He always goes after the silly, pretty ones because he ticks all their boxes. Youth? He’ll say he’s twenty-six when he’s actually twenty-nine. Job? He’s employed in broadband sales and marketing at Cap 3000, the vast shopping mall to the west of Nice. Looks? His hair is thinning, his gut stretching, but he has an olive tan and height is a big advantage. Sixty percent of all CEOs are over six feet tall, he reminds himself, and nearly all are men. Personality? He can make a girl laugh and feel that they have the measure of him. Brains? He graduated languages and new technologies, and is unusually well-read. Money? He’s on a good salary, has just been promoted, gets new cars and annual bonuses. Eligibility? He’s single! There are no ugly surprises and no hidden children.
Willingness to commit?
Ryan is dating an awful lot of women in this, the year before his thirtieth birthday, two or three at any one time. But in the nightclub that night, on May 13th, he meets Lainey Gray, a tall, thin-shouldered American who teaches at a language school in Villefranche. She talks to him on the cancer deck, a rubbish-strewn stairwell at the rear of the building where the patrons once took drugs instead of sneaking smokes, and catches him before his psychic armor goes on. None of Ryan’s usual nonsense works on her. She studies him with detached amusement, a half-smile playing on crimson frosted lips, and he knows she can see right through him. But she sticks around, because she is waiting for him to exhaust his bag of tricks, and wants to see what’s left behind.
Smart girl.
Maybe too smart. There’s Ryan thinking he’s laying traps to catch her, and she’s already caught him. Over the next month they meet six times before she even lets him touch her. You can love a girl like that.
Their first six dates:
An unwatchable dubbed rom-com with Sarah Jessica Parker at the Nice Etoile. They reach a mutual decision to leave before the end and go for pasta in the Old Town. A Warhol exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, followed by a brasserie meal in Place Messena. She goes to his flat but only stays for coffee. His best friend Sean’s birthday party at the K Club. Ryan drops a couple of pills but doesn’t tell her. He genuinely believes she hasn’t noticed, until she stares hard at him and suddenly goes home on her scooter without saying a word. A crowded lunch in the Cours Salaya where they have to shout and mime across the table to each other. The afternoon is spent pushing through crowds of tourists on the Promenade Des Anglais. He goes to her flat in Mont Boron, but she coolly kicks him out after an hour, explaining that she has to get up early next morning. Mesrine parts 1 and 2 followed by icy steel platters of fruits de mer at the Café De Turin. He eats a bad oyster. A party for one of her work colleagues, Marisia, at the Chinatown dim sum restaurant. Ryan leaves her there with the intention of calling another girl, but something prevents him.
Then, a few days after that, the walls come down between them.
From date seven onwards they’re at each other like dogs on a hot Spanish street. Lainey can’t keep her hands off Ryan. Ryan doesn’t have time to look at anyone else, and isn’t interested anyway. A couple of his former girlfriends leave sulky messages but he puts them off, then deletes them from his mobile.
Over the next three months, Ryan and Lainey continue to grow closer. They have their first argument, then fuck like lunatics. Devastated by the thought of someone else’s happiness, many of their single friends stop bothering to call. Ryan meets Lainey’s parents on their first overseas visit. They’re sweet and totally confused by Europe. Ryan realizes that he has been caught, but enjoys this strange sensation without understanding why. One day the pair find themselves in Habitat and Ryan thinks: Oh shit, we’re choosing furniture together. She must be The One.
The Chasm
Ryan knows what’s coming next, but finds the idea of a mapped and stable future depressing beyond all endurance. He has always assumed there would be more to life than just finding a mate and slowly turning into his father, but the odds are against him. He becomes depressed, and has no idea what it will take to excite and revitalize him, so he simply allows events to take their natural course. Like the girls being interviewed in the club, he sees little real point to life, which makes him well equipped to survive it. But surviving isn’t living.
Lainey does not share his pessimism, but senses an emerging pattern of hairline fractures between them. The gaps quickly expand until they join to form a chasm. Ryan knows that his girlfriend has a passionate, wayward spirit, but fears for the emptiness in himself. He has nothing to offer her. He never bares his soul because he is not sure he has one.
And Nice has a raffish charm that takes away any sense of urgency, a sense of elegant disgrace that encourages bad behavior. The town gave the world a healthy salad and the word “tourism,” but not much else. The rest of its pleasures have to be patiently uncovered. The English built its extraordinary coast road, where hookers in Barbarella outfits now cruise beside grannies, rollerbladers and petanque players.
Whether he ends up staying with Lainey or not, Ryan thinks he’ll stay on. He feels more settled here than in England. This is the city he dreams of most—slightly disturbing, slightly surreal, filled with the sensual luxuries of wasted time. Watching the sunset liners returning from the south, he is so filled with the desire for tropical deceptions that it’s possible to not to see the new poor: the McDonald’s outlets, the lost Algerian children, the tramps asleep in doorways. Like California, this part of Europe has become the place to head when you’re too rich, too recognizable, too stupid, too burned out to live anywhere else. It’s expensive and selfish, and no one here cares whether you clean pools or once opened for Oasis.
Ryan marks time and watches the world, his compass spinning.
For all he knows, he might love Lain
ey. But he doesn’t love her enough.
Visitants-Stories of Fallen Angels and Heavenly Hosts Page 41
