Dangerous Angels

by Francesca Lia Block

  Because I want him to enjoy my meal a little I go and get some peanut butter.

  “Charlie, how did you deal when your mom died?” I ask.

  “I wrote. I was okay as long as I was writing. Whenever anything hurt me I wrote, but after a while I couldn’t anymore. I just stopped. It was like the sadness stopped filling me up with stuff to turn into art. I was just empty.”

  “That’s how I feel.”

  “Make yourself keep taking pictures and the pictures will start filling you up again. And isn’t there something else you like to do? Come on.”

  We go out of his apartment into the silent, shadowy hall. It seems like nobody else even lives in the whole building. We start down the stairs.

  That’s when I hear them. There on the ninth floor. The drums.

  The sound makes me want to play so bad I have to stop and chew my nails. It’s African drums in waves breaking again and again taking me out of my body.

  A door is open and inside lit by pale winter sun from a big window dancers move in tides toward the drummers. The dancers wear batik sarongs—burnt-orange skies, jade-green jungles, violet-blue flowers—and shell belts that shiver on their hips. Their feet beat the floor like hands on a drum and their hands are bound by invisible ropes behind their backs, then turn into birds as they leap free. There are two little girls, and a woman with braids to her waist and a high dark gloss queen’s forehead holds their hands and leads them down the room, her solid feet talking each step so that even though the kids probably just started walking a little while ago they are getting it. The drummers are men with bare chests and rainbow ribbons around their muscly arms. Some have dreads. Everybody in the room is sweating like it’s summer and the music is setting free their souls into the air so I feel like I can almost see them.

  All I want to do is play drums. I know the dances from when my dad filmed some African dancers and I got to jam with them.

  When they take a break Charlie says, “Go ask him.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Go on. How often do I have the chance to hear my witch baby play drums!”

  Why do I listen to this crazy ghost? I don’t know.

  My witch baby.

  I go over to the head drummer—a tall man wearing full batik pants. His dreadlocks must be as old as he is, thick and wired with his power. I feel like a pale weasel baby staring up at him.

  “Can I sit in?” I ask.

  He looks down at me frowning like, How can this will-o’-the-wisp white child think she can hang with this? “Can you play?”

  “I know Fanga, Kpanlogo, DunDunBa, Kakilamba…”

  He raises his eyebrows. “This is a fast class. If you’re not good it will be bad for everybody.”

  “You’re good,” Charlie whispers.

  “I’m good,” I say.

  The man’s still frowning but he points over to a little drum. It’s perfect. A little heart of the universe.

  They start again and it’s a dance to heal sick spirits. The women throw spirits out of their chests, tossing back their heads with each fling of their hands. Their backs ripple like lanky lizards while their arms reach into the air and pull the healing spirits down into them. It’s my favorite dance and so strong that while I play the drum I feel pain smacked out of me.

  When the class is over the head drummer shakes my hand in his big callused hand. Him doing that is like having a medicine man pull out any other evil spirits that might be left over.

  Charlie is waiting at the doorway, a pulsing golden light. “Yes!” he says. “Phenomenal. You are a beautiful drummer!”

  I feel glowy all over, almost as bright as he is.

  We go outside. I look up at Charlie’s building. I wish I could take off the front of it and look into all the rooms like you do with a dollhouse. From out here it seems almost deserted like you’d never guess that magic-carpet-collecting ghost chasers live here and a whistling ghost in a top hat and that dancers and drummers are flinging bad spirits out of their bodies in one of the rooms.

  I just wonder what my bad spirits look like and where all the flung-out bad spirits go.

  All up and down the avenue shivering junkies are selling things. Ugster vinyl pumps, Partridge Family records, plastic daisy jewelry, old postcards. Where do they get this stuff? It’s a magpie Christmas market.

  “Look at that man,” Charlie says.

  I see a hungry face.

  “No. With your camera.”

  I look through my camera at the man and I can almost feel the veins in my own arms twitch-switching with wanting. In a way the junkies aren’t so much different from me or maybe from everybody.

  I guess in a way Angel Juan is my fix and I’ve been jonesing for him. If he were a needle I’d be shooting up just like these jittery junkies. I’d be flooding my veins with Angel Juan. When we made love it felt like that.

  And doing it can be about as dangerous as shooting up if you think about it.

  And I wasn’t the only one sad and lonely and freaked. There was a whole city of people. Some had to sell other people’s postcards on the street just to buy a needle full of junk so they wouldn’t shatter like the mirror I smashed with a hammer in Charlie Bat’s apartment.

  “Hey,” the man shouts, “I’ve got something for you.”

  The man’s sunken eyes are like Charlie’s. I go over to his table and he holds up a pair of droopy soiled white angel wings. I touch the medallion in the hollow of my neck and think about the saint parade Angel Juan wrote about in his card. The little girls in feathers. I want those wings.

  “How much?”

  “Ten dollars.”

  “Five,” Charlie whispers.

  “Five.”

  “Eight and I’ll throw this in.” He waves a wrinkled postcard in front of his face. It has a picture of two Egyptian mummies on it. They remind me of my walk with Angel Juan when we saw the head of Nefertiti-ti on the piano in the window in the fog once upon time. I wonder if that king and queen ever screamed at each other and cried in the night with pain and desire or if they always looked so sleek and lazy-lotus-eyed.

  I give the man eight dollars I was going to spend on food and he stuffs the bills into his pocket and licks his lips like he’s already feeling what it’s going to be like when the needle hits the vein. He could be a writer like Charlie Bat or a painter or a musician. He could have a kid like Charlie had Weetzie. And all people see is a junkie selling lost wings.

  I flip over the postcard and it’s like the dream I keep waiting to have but better because it’s real. Is it real? Those slanty letters scrunching up toward the bottom like all of a sudden realizing there’s no more space. I know those letters.

  It can’t be.

  But there it is—his name.

  Yo Te Amo, Angel Juan.

  Dearest Niña Bruja,

  I go to the museum and look at the Egypt rooms. The goddesses remind me of you. There are jars with cats’ heads that hold the hearts of the dead.

  This city is like an old forest or house that you think’s just rotting away and then you see there’s magic inside. I try to remember that about life and about my heart in me. I think by being by myself I am learning how to love you more and not be so afraid.

  Yo Te Amo, Niña,

  Angel Juan

  “Where did you get this?” I ask the man, almost screeching.

  “I don’t know. Found it.”

  “Where did you find it?” I growl, pulling feathers out of the wings.

  He shrugs. Then he says, “Somewhere down on Meat Street. It was lying in the gutter like somebody dropped it on the way to the mail.”

  “Meat Street?”

  “The meat-packing district. Somewhere around there.”

  I know I’m not going to get anything else out of him. But here in my hand is a postcard from the Metropolitan Museum addressed to Witch Baby Wigg Bat, stamped, ready to be mailed and written by Angel Juan Perez.

  I know where I’m going tomorrow.

  I
slip the postcard into the pocket next to my heart with the other card and the photo booth strip, sling the wings over my shoulder and try to skate the shakes out of my knees. Charlie twinkles near my ear like a whistling diamond earring.

  Today Charlie and I go up the steps where people from all over the world are huddling in their coats with Christmas shopping at their feet. They’re eating hot dogs and salt-crystaled soft pretzels. The pretzels smell good. Buttery, doughy. But I’m not going to spend any money on food today even though Charlie keeps telling me I am too skinny and I have to eat.

  We go into the big entry that’s high and bright like a church. Perfume and flowers. Voices echo. Warm bodies. Cool marble.

  Egypt first.

  There is so much here I feel like, How am I supposed to even start? Rooms and rooms of glass cases. Mummies. Real bodies inside there. High lotus foreheads. Painted tilted fish-shaped eyes. Smooth flat jewel-collared chests. Lanky limbs. Long desert feet. I bet inside they don’t look like that. Jars with the heads of baboons or cats or jackals for holding the organs like Angel Juan said.

  Cases and cases of tiny things. Secret scarab beetles. Why did the Egyptians have this thing about dung beetles? Mud love. Sludge and mud. It reminds me of me when I was a little kid covering myself with dirt. Slinky cats with golden hoops in their ears. Chalky blue goddesses missing their little arms or legs. Where did the lost parts of them go? Maybe they reminded Angel Juan of me because they’re broken.

  “You know, you look like a little Egyptian queen,” Charlie says. His reflection ripples like water next to mine in the glass case.

  We come out of the dim tomb rooms and at first I can’t see—it’s so flood-bright. The glass walls let in the park and the ceiling lets in the sky. And in the center is this whole temple—this huge white Egyptian palace with the lotus-head people carved on the sides and a shallow pool of water all around full of penny wishes.

  Charlie sighs. “This was Weetzie’s favorite place in the whole city. She did like the dancing chicken in Chinatown too.”

  Could you please stop bat-chattering about when Weetzie visited you.

  I think it and I don’t even care if he can read my mind.

  “I’m sorry, Baby. I’m trying not to be such a clutch pig. Isn’t that what you say? A lankster lizard?”

  I sit down on a bench facing the temple and pretend that I’m in Egypt. I wear a tall headdress, a collar of blue and gold beads and a long sheer pleated tunic. I pray in a gleamy white temple. I ride on the Nile in a barge and play drums. I carve pictures of my family on stone walls. I have a slinkster cat with a gold hoop in its ear that sits on my shoulder and helps me understand mysteries. When I die I’ll be put in a tomb and my organs will be put in jars. If somebody finds me centuries later they will know exactly where my heart is.

  On the way back through, Charlie leads me into a tiny room. Nobody else is here. I’m blind after the brightness of the temple. The darkness feels like it’s seeping into me, drugging me like spooky smoke, mystery incense taking me into an ancient desert.

  Then I see the hipster king and queen from the postcard standing together with their organ jars next to them, staring out at me like, Hello, we are perfect twins and who are you?

  “Hello, we are perfect twins and who are you?”

  “Did you say something, Charlie?”

  “Not me.”

  “Well don’t tell me they said it.” I lower my voice, hiss-whisper. “Charlie, what’s going on?”

  “Maybe you should introduce yourself.”

  “Oh right. Okay. My name is Witch Baby. I shouldn’t be surprised that statues are talking to me. I’ve already seen tree spirits and my best friend almost-grandpa is a ghost. This is Charlie.”

  “Hello, Witch Baby. Charlie.” Two voices—a drum and a flute, one song.

  I look at the pair of statues with their matching smooth golden faces, high eyebrows, far-apart eyes, small noses, graceful necks. Part of me wishes that that was me and Angel Juan—together forever with our hearts in jars. Better than not knowing where his heart is.

  No. Shut your clutch thoughts up, Witch Baby. You don’t wish that.

  “You are alive. Remember. As long as you are alive you’ll know where his heart is. It will be in you.”

  “Like Charlie will always be alive in Weetzie and me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Charlie, did those statues really talk to me?”

  “I’m not in a good position not to believe that, being myself a…well you know. Anyway, you heard what you needed to hear. Maybe I did too.

  “Shall we try China?”

  In China there is a room full of beamy-faced people doing yoga. They make a wreath around me, flower children breathing peace. The Egyptians were so much in the world with all their gold and stuff but these guys are like from some other world. They don’t have wings but they remind me of angels.

  In a room with a high ceiling I stand at the solid feet of a massive Buddha dude. His stone robes are covered with petals and they fall like silk. His hands are gone. I wonder what happened to them.

  He has a topknot, droopy earlobes and a gentle mouth. He is gazing down at me like, Everything will be all right, Baby, no problem.

  “Everything will be all right.”

  “Charlie!”

  “If any statue could talk it would probably be him. Why don’t you ask him something?”

  “Why are your earlobes like that?”

  “Witch Baby, that might not be the best question.”

  “Well it’s hard to think.”

  “I used to wear big earrings when I valued material wealth.”

  “What am I supposed to do about Angel Juan?”

  “Let go.”

  All of a sudden I know just how his hands would be if they were there. One would be held up with the thumb and third finger touching and the pinky in the air. One palm would be open.

  Next Charlie and I go to Greece. In the airy echoing room of dessert-colored marbles we stand in front of a pale boy, so beautiful on his pedestal but so white. The marble muscles mold marble flesh. There are even marble tendons, ridges of marble veins, so real they look like if you pressed on them they’d flatten out for a second. I wonder how the real boy who posed for the statue felt. If he felt like the statue took his soul away, like all that mattered was his pretty body.

  The statue seems to be looking at me like…

  Yes, it’s happening again:

  “Your friend needs to go make music by himself.”

  “You mean he needs to not just be my pounceably beautiful boyfriend who I take pictures of and write songs about.”

  “Yes.”

  “It might be even hard for him to be made into stuff by me until he starts making stuff of his own.”

  “Yes.”

  I take the strip of photos out of my pocket and try to look into Angel Juan’s eyes behind the sunglasses.

  While I’m standing in front of the pedestal boy looking at Angel Juan I hear something behind me.

  “Do you wish that you could turn him into stone? Make him a mummy? Keep his heart in a jar?”

  Another talking statue? But this time the voice makes me feel cold like marble. I turn around.

  No statue but that man—the one in the white coat, the one from the park.

  He slithers behind a wall painted with flower garlands and demon masks.

  I run after him.

  “Witch Baby!” Charlie calls.

  I don’t stop. My footsteps echo through the rooms. The blank eyeless marble eyes are all around.

  But when I get to the lobby the man is gone and I am still marble-slab cold.

  “Who was that ghoulie guy?” I ask the Bat Man back at the apartment.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “But you shouldn’t go chasing after that kind of people. Maybe you should take some pictures.”

  “Of what. Of you?”

  “I’m not very photogenic. You’re going to take pictures of you.”
>
  “What?”

  “Look in the trunk.”

  I jiggle the lock and the leather trunk opens right up. I choke on stink-a-rama mothballs and dust.

  Inside is a bunch of stuff. Clothes. Wigs. Masks. I figure either Charlie got off dressing up weird when he was alive or they were for his plays. Either way the trunk is filled with stuff to make me into all my dreams and all my nightmares.

  I turn into Nefertiti in a gold paper headdress and collar with cool kohl eyes and a pout of my lips.

  I wear a curly blonde wig, a wreath of plastic leaves and a toga sheet and do a Greek-dude-statue-on-a-pedestal thing.

  I keep on the wig and attach the magpie-market wings to my back for a Cupid look holding a rickety bow and arrow from the trunk.

  I put my hair in a topknot and wear an old silk kimono and be Buddha cross-legged and meditating.

  I find a really ugster monster rubber monster mask. I don’t even want to touch it. It looks like some leper-monster’s shed skin all shreddy at the edges. Just like the one Charlie had in Brooklyn. But I put that on too and take a picture of my face with the eyes staring out of two holes gouged in the rubber.

  I slick back my hair, put on my dark glasses, bandana, hooded sweatshirt, leather jacket, Levi’s and chunky shoes.

  Me as Angel Juan.

  Click. Click. Click.

  I stay up all night. The sky is starting to get pale.

  The black top hat that Charlie was wearing when we first met is in the trunk too and I put that on with a black tuxedo jacket, dark eyeliner circles under my eyes: the ghost of Charlie Bat.

  “Do I look like you, Charlie?”

  “You are a lot like me, especially the way I used to be. Even without the costume. You’re more like me than Weetzie and Cherokee. I think you are my real blood granddaughter.”

  I wonder if he knows how slink that makes me feel. How I feel warm for the first time since I’ve been in this city, I mean really warm. From the inside out.

  I hear his crackly voice. “We both believe in monsters. But all the ghosts and demons are you. And all the angels and genies are you. All the kings, queens, Buddhas, beautiful boys. Inside you. No one can take them away.”

  “So then that means nobody can take you away from Weetzie and me even though you’re—”