The Miracles of Ordinary Men

by Amanda Leduc

  “Hmm,” he says. He winds a hand around the stem of his wine glass and stares at her. “That could be true.” Then he reaches forward with his other hand and strokes the skin on the back of her wrist. “But I think — I think I am not wholly wrong.”

  She looks away and mutters her words in the direction of the floor. “My father left fourteen years ago. I don’t care if I ever see him again.”

  “I see.”

  “Why is it so important?” she says, her eyes still lowered. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Ah,” he says. “As to that — how can I know who you are if I don’t also know what your family think of you? If I don’t know where you come from? I do not have a family, Delilah, so families interest me. It is that simple.”

  Lilah shakes her head. “We’re not that interesting.”

  “You think so? And yet your brother lies trembling on the streets, changing even as you watch. Disintegrating, disappearing, despite all your efforts to save him. And you love him? You’d forgive this sad, ungrateful wretch?”

  She snatches her hand away. “Fuck you. You don’t know anything about my brother.”

  “You’d be surprised what one can learn.” He reaches for her hand again, and this time he does not let her go. “Suppose he disappears, Delilah. Suppose there is no more Timothy. What would you do?”

  “Shut up. Just shut up. He’s not going to disappear.”

  “But what if he does?” His voice pleasant, relentless. “You’d need something else to live for, no? Perhaps your mother, who is also dying? Tell me, Delilah — what happens if she goes too? If you have nothing? Would you not want something else?”

  “They’re not going anywhere,” she says. She cannot move her hand. “Stop it. They’re not gone.”

  “Haven’t you wished, sometimes, on some level, that they would disappear?” He tightens his grip more. “Tell me, Delilah — in your heart of hearts, do you not secretly imagine what life would be if they were not here?”

  Tears spill from her eyes. “Why can’t you just leave it alone?”

  Israel releases her hand. “You’ve left it alone for too long,” he says. “All this guilt you carry — perhaps your brother just deserves to die.”

  She throws her fork at him without thinking. He ducks it easily — the fork hits the kitchen cabinet and clatters to the floor. “Goddamn you.” Her voice cracks with tears and rage. “Goddamn you, you fucking son of a cunt.”

  “What did you say?” His voice is low.

  How she hates him, suddenly, this man who loves his mother. “I said, you fucking son of a no-good cunt. I bet she was nothing more than a whore.”

  He hits her so fast it doesn’t register. The force sends her reeling, knocks the wine glass off the counter so that it shatters on the floor. He hits her again, and her head crashes against the wall. She stumbles from the bar stool, no doily there to save her.

  “Jesus fuck,” she gasps. She should run to the door, call for help. Something.

  “You have a filthy mouth,” he says. He is already standing over her. He rolls the sleeves of his shirt slowly, deliberately, and extends a hand to her. Lilah takes it without thinking. He pulls her back from the wall and then smacks her again. Blue-white stars explode behind her eyes. And suddenly she is humming, glowing, alive with energy. She blinks, breathes hard.

  “I have so much to teach you, Delilah,” he says. “I have so much to give you. But you’re not listening. How long before you pay attention? How long before you learn?”

  She lets him strip her, right there in the kitchen. He leads her into the bedroom and uses the black shawl to bind her hands to the bed. Then he pulls the sheets away — these beautiful sheets, the duvet that probably cost more than she makes in a month.

  “I will teach you,” Israel says. “I will set you free.” He opens the bedside cabinet and brings out a delicate whip. Even the brush of the whip along her thigh makes Lilah shiver.

  “Do it,” and she clenches her teeth, arches her back, waits for the pain and that breath of infinity along her ribs. Small Timothy. Sweet Timothy. The brother, yes, she has wished away a hundred times.

  Israel holds the whip above her, his hands ready. But he tosses it aside and kneels before her, and he traces her face in the dark, his thumbs warm against her wet cheeks, her salty eyes. Over and over, until his fingers are damp and her face feels as raw as if he’d taken the whip to it after all. Then he stretches a band of cloth across her eyes, and ties it gently behind her head.

  She clenches her hands as he draws away, and readies herself. She hears him remove his clothes, feels him stretch out beside her. He places his arm across her breasts and says nothing. She is blind and bound, waiting. Maybe he’ll whip her now. Maybe he’ll make her scream.

  Minutes pass, maybe hours, as they lie there in the dark.

  —

  Finally. “I don’t want him to disappear.” She aches under the weight of his arm and listens to him breathe. The fury has passed through her like a migraine and left her giddy, yet strangely calm. “I get frustrated. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if he wasn’t here. Yes. But I don’t know what I would be without him.”

  “You would find out,” he says. “Eventually.”

  “I don’t want to know what I would be without him.”

  “No one wants to know,” he says. “But who knows, Delilah, what gifts might lie in wait beyond that sadness?”

  “Of course. I forgot. ‘Perhaps God has other plans.’”

  His shrug is soft beside her. “You are quick to blame God,” he says. “I find it amusing.”

  “My mother always said that Timothy would lead us to God,” she says. What is it about this man that draws the words from her? Her throat feels oddly raw. She swallows; the feeling does not go away. “She thought he was destined for . . . something. And she expected that that would change . . . everything.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Some destiny,” she says, bitterly. So much freedom in the darkness of that cloth across her eyes. “He might as well be locked away.”

  “But you follow him anyway,” he says. “You follow, and you hope.” Suddenly he reaches across and takes away the blindfold — the room is so dark that for a moment she can’t tell the difference.

  “Follow who? Timothy? Or God?”

  “Does it matter?” He rests his hand against her cheek; with his other hand he reaches up and pulls her wrist free from the shawl.

  She doesn’t wait for the blood to rush back into her hand — she slaps him, twists her wrist so that her nails catch at the corner of his mouth. Israel grunts. Her arm is a live wire, her own blood pulsing back into her fingers. The pain is brilliant, excruciating.

  Israel swings a leg across her torso and frees her other arm. He places a hand on either side of her ribcage. As her eyes adjust to the light, she watches the energy flow through her arm and explode against his face — fireworks, a supernova that settles into the air around his head. Dark man with a halo of blue-white stars. She is pinned against the bed; she’s never felt more powerful in her life.

  Suddenly, the crack of his palm against her temple. “Let him submit absolutely,” he whispers. “Let him offer his cheek to the one who strikes it, and receive his fill of insults.”

  She shuts her eyes and thinks of Timothy. Israel bends close, puts his mouth to her ear. He presses his hand against her stomach and the sudden pressure makes her arch up in pain. “Can you feel that?” he asks her, still whispering.

  She nods and shakes her head, both. “No.” She vaults up and scratches a line across his face with her free hand. “Hit me harder.” Then she pulls his face toward her own.

  Six

  He went back to school, because there was nothing else to do. He avoided Stacey. He was curt with Emma, almost abrupt. The wings had begun to pulse waves of p
ain across his shoulder blades. He took codeine, which did nothing. Every time he stood in front of the class it was a performance: Sam the magician, Sam the disappearing, winged freak. They watched the puzzle. They watched him.

  He’d begun to get migraines. They were worst in the early morning and came with auras, a terrible sensitivity to light. The students in his morning Shakespeare class had halos. Some were golden. Others shone orange, a few of them a light pink that faded into white. Emma’s halo was purple and sat nicely against the brightness of her hair. Stacey shone yellow and red, like the top two-thirds of a traffic light. Caution. Caution.

  At home, Father Jim — whose own halo was blue, the calm colour that Sam imagined Hindu monks meant when they spoke of nirvana — cooked for him, like a housewife. He even walked the cat. “We’ll call it a sabbatical,” he said. “I can leave whenever you want me to go.”

  “No,” Sam said. It was morning and the priest had made coffee; he stood now in front of the stove and fried sausages, stacked pancakes. Maple syrup drizzled between each layer like glue. “It’s nice, the company.” He’d forgotten how nice. How easy, to slip into the routine of being alone. “What will you do then, while you’re here? Will you give Mass at the cathedral?”

  “Maybe. Pancake?”

  “Do you think they’ll have pancakes in heaven?” Sam asked, only half joking.

  The priest shrugged and slid a stack onto Sam’s plate. “Why not? No sense in giving up on a good thing, I say.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Sam. How the hell am I supposed to know?”

  The pancakes were fuffy, soaked in syrup, delicious. He would have fed a piece to the cat had Father Jim not swatted his hand away.

  “Don’t do that. That’s not good for her.”

  “It’s just a pancake!”

  “All the same.” The priest sat down across from him and began to cut into his own stack. “No wonder she follows you around all of the time. That’s cupboard love, is what that is.”

  “It is not,” Sam said, offended. “And anyway, she’s fond enough of you.”

  The priest shrugged. “Maybe. Have you heard from Doug?”

  “No.” One week, and not a word. Sam had called Janet a few times, just to make sure things were okay. It seemed that she’d taken up permanent residence in the house. She’d also gone back to being the Janet that he’d always mildly disliked; her answers were monosyllabic and irritated, as though calls from him were a ridiculous waste of her time. “But I’m sure we’ll hear if anything happens.”

  “Hmm,” said the priest. He drizzled maple syrup over a piece of sausage and put the whole mess in his mouth.

  “What does that mean, hmm?”

  “Nothing, really,” Father Jim said. “I just wonder how he’s coping.”

  His mother had been gone now for over two weeks. Why did it feel so far away? “He’ll be fine. It will take him a while, sure. But he’ll be fine.”

  “And you?”

  “Me.” A week and a half ago, they’d hit a deer on a twisting Vancouver Island road. A week before that, he’d brought his own cat back from the dead. And a week before that, wings had sprouted from his back like flowers from the ground. He opened doors extra wide now as a matter of course, no longer thought it strange to wear his trench coat at the school. He could see auras. The wings were heavy against his back and yet, somehow, the most natural thing in the world.

  “I’m fine.”

  The priest snorted into his coffee. “You look fine.”

  “What else am I supposed to say?” What did they say, the prophets, during that space of time before acceptance, when the world was still the same around them and they had not yet become lost?

  “Have you spoken to Bryan? Julie?”

  “No,” Sam said. “But I don’t talk to Julie. Not really. And Bryan’s been away.” Against all expectation, an email had come to Sam several days ago. It was characteristically blunt, awkward. Sam. Hope you’re feeling better, see you when I get back.

  “And Emma?” the priest said, watching him. “Looks like there’s unfinished business between the two of you, as well.”

  He was avoiding Emma, considerable feat though that was. The curtness seemed almost to encourage her — she’d become a constant fixture at school. She was first in the room in the afternoons, her face always tense and then slack with relief. You’re still here, she might as well have said.

  He had forgotten about the infinity puzzle, but discovered it one day in class as he was rummaging through his desk during a test. He pulled it out and wound the string around the metal, through and through again. More knots. The room was hushed, save the sound of scratching pencils. He twisted the string again, and when he looked up, Emma was watching him. He tapped the puzzle against the desk and then hooked one finger in each end of the string and pulled. Nothing moved.

  When he looked up, she was bent over her test. He put the puzzle in his pocket, and a few minutes later he forgot about it, again.

  —

  They were reading Graham Greene, and some of the students had issues with Scobie.

  “Makes no sense,” said one of the girls. Clara. He had to do this now, repeat their names to himself whenever they spoke. He was forgetting faces, blurring them all in their auras, in the light. Clara shone red. “If you truly believed as he did, you wouldn’t do it. It’s inconsistent.”

  “What’s inconsistent?” he asked. “Greene was trying to express a different view of spirituality. His work is rife with this struggle. It’s inconsistent against the dogma, not the faith.”

  “But they’re the same thing.” Jodi, the star hockey player with an eye for hard facts. Green. “Faith is all about rules. If you don’t know the rules, or you don’t follow them, then that’s it for you.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “You can’t expect to think a world view that proclaims the ineffability of God could then be contained by a simple set of dos and don’ts.”

  Jodi laughed. “The Ten Commandments? Hello?”

  “Spirituality is supposed to be about journeying,” he said, and he waved the book in his hand. “Greene was fascinated by the struggle to find God — how easily man could discover and lose divinity all at once.” How God could arrive in a rush of white wings and then go, just as quickly, leaving feathers behind Him to trail in the dirt.

  “I still think it sounds strange,” said Jodi. “You’re telling me you don’t find it all at least a little ridiculous?”

  Sam shrugged. “Personally? I’m not sure. I wouldn’t call myself an atheist. But I wouldn’t say that I believe, either.” Mildly surprised that he could still say it, that it still felt true. The wings swept over the floor.

  “Then that makes no sense. If you don’t believe it, why all the talk about journeys and whatever else? You can’t stand up there and expect people to take you seriously if you’re admitting right now that you’re not sure?”

  “Ah,” he said. “But just because I don’t believe it doesn’t mean it isn’t true, or that it couldn’t be true for other people. I also happen to think,” and here was a glimpse of Sam-before-the-wings, that long-ago teaching rock star, “that Paul McCartney died years ago and everything that’s happened to ‘him’ since is an elaborate hoax. But just because I don’t believe in the spectre of Paul McCartney doesn’t mean that he couldn’t still exist. How would I know?”

  They were not convinced.

  “There’s nothing about the world as it is now that can’t be explained by science.” Clara again. “People want to talk about God because they think that science takes all of the mystery out of the world. That’s all it is. People just want a good story.”

  Emma was tracing circles in her notebook. She hadn’t said anything, which wasn’t surprising. What could she say? What could either of them say, really?

  “So science doesn’t
take the mystery out of the world, then?” What would Father Jim say, he wondered. What words were there at times like these?

  Jodi shrugged. “I don’t think so. There’s too much about the world that we still don’t know. It’ll take years. It could take hundreds of years, and for all of that time people will still be thinking about this thing called God and worshipping the air like it’s actually going to do something. I just think it’s a waste of time.”

  Sam dropped his chalk, bent down to pick it up, and spread the wings out so that they touched either side of the floor. When he raised his head, Emma’s face was pink, and no one else had noticed anything. “That may be,” he said calmly. “It may be that there’s no such thing as God, and it’s all been one grand delusion. But you don’t know. You might think that you know, that you have no doubts. But you don’t know what you’re going to see tomorrow.” What might happen to you one morning, when you wake up with feathers in your sheets and down in your hair. “You just don’t know.”

  “Who’s supposed to build their life on something like that?”

  “You’re not supposed to,” he said. “You just do. It just happens.” He scratched his head and strands of hair came away in his hand — he heard a small gasp, a murmur from the girls, and ignored it. He shrugged and gave them the closest truth he could. “God or no God, guys, the world itself is shaky business. You never know what’s going to happen next. And if you never meet God face to face, then that not-knowing is about as close as you’re going to get.”

  —

  He’d half expected her to walk out of class the moment the bell rang, but Emma hung back and stood by his desk. When the last student left, she slammed her bag against a chair. It was loud enough to startle him.

  “You’re a hypocrite,” she said.

  “I’m not a hypocrite. I told them the truth.”

  “‘The truth,’” she mocked. “What truth, exactly? That you don’t believe in God?”

  “I didn’t say that.”