by Amanda Leduc
How is it that these words can still excite her, even as the kernel of fear in her stomach threatens to explode? She wants him. She wants him more than any man she’s ever known. How terrifying, that she can be one thing and another all at once. And as Israel takes her hand and pulls her back into the hall, down the stairs and out into the nighttime air, she wonders if perhaps she was wrong about everything. Maybe salvation and damnation do not lie in Israel’s hands after all, but her own.
One
He woke, and the light came off him in waves. Bright light, white light, light that wasn’t warm. He looked up at the ceiling and spread his fingers, and rays leapt out from his fingers like sunshine. In his ears, a constant hum.
Chickenhead sat on top of the dresser, across from the bed. She twitched her tail and stared at him — wary, unsure. He stood and held out his hand. She did not jump down, did not come to him.
“Chickenhead,” he said softly. “Chickenhead.” It’s me. It’s still me. She didn’t move.
Sam flexed his fingers, as he had flexed the wings so many times before, and watched the shadows leap and dance along the floor. Then he was walking, through the doorway, down the hall, down into the kitchen. Father Jim stood by the stove and took something out of the oven. Garlic, chicken, lemon juice. Sam stood at the entrance and watched the scene, the light pooling before him.
“Sam,” said the priest, without looking. “Are you all right?”
The light. He was the light. “Timothy?”
“He just came back,” said the priest. He turned, slid the oven mitts off his hands.
“She was afraid,” Timothy said, coming into the room. The same light shone around his head, his hands. “She told me to go.” Then his face relaxed, and the light dimmed. “She doesn’t hate me.”
“Why was she afraid?” Sam asked. He stepped closer, so that his light meshed with that of the boy.
“She’s in trouble,” Timothy whispered. “I don’t know what to do.” Up close, Sam could see fever in his eyes, hysteria only just kept in check. He lifted a hand and touched Timothy’s forehead out of habit. Touched skin, touched stone, a void, a great gaping black maw. He pulled his hand away.
“Did you sleep well?” asked the priest, oblivious. “I came in and you were dead to the world. The cat wouldn’t leave your side.”
“Yes,” he said. He glanced again at Timothy and then away. “I’m sorry. All I seem to do now is sleep.”
“If you need to sleep, you need to sleep.” Father Jim shrugged. “Who am I to argue?”
“The noise.” Timothy nodded to Sam. “You hear the noise now, don’t you.”
A hum. A light that shone beyond and above him, through it all.
“This is the voice of God,” said the boy. “This is what it has to say.”
Father Jim, who had paused in the act of bringing lettuce freshly washed from the sink, put his hands down on the counter and took up a knife. “That may well be,” he said, calm as ever, “but before God says anything, I suggest we eat. Sit down, both of you.”
“I can’t,” said Timothy.
“Please,” Sam said. They both sat. Sam watched the priest spoon out food and thought of Bryan, who was across an ocean now. He tasted nothing. He saw Timothy spoon a mouthful, close his eyes.
“I can’t taste it,” said the boy. “Every time I saw my sister I had to pretend that I could do it, that I was hungry — but everything I see is full of colour, and everything I touch is grey dust.” He turned to the priest and let his fork fall to the plate. “I can’t see beyond them. Everything is about the wings. Everything is about the light.”
“It’ll be all right, Timothy,” Sam said. He reached across and squeezed the boy’s hand, spoke with a certainty he didn’t feel. “You’ll see.”
“You don’t know.” Timothy wrenched his hand away. “You don’t know what happens next. And neither does he.” He laughed. He pulled himself off the chair, still laughing, then stumbled out of the kitchen, down the hall. The guest bedroom door opened, slammed.
“He’ll be all right,” said the priest. “He just needs to sleep.”
“Sleep won’t help him,” Sam said. “I sleep, and every time I wake up now, things are different.” Light, spilling from his hands. He sighed. Chickenhead meandered over and jumped up into his lap. She went about making a nest, her paws on his legs slow and methodical until she found her spot and nestled in, a soft weight against his thighs. He ran a hand through her fur and felt it, that dark, constant rumble. “Is it better,” he said then, “to believe wholly, or not at all?”
“You can’t believe wholly,” said the priest. “Or not at all. One makes you an idiot, and the other brings you nothing but despair.”
“Which one?”
Father Jim waved his hand. “It changes. All the time.”
Sam thought about this, and ate as much of the chicken as he could. “So which one do you choose, then?” he asked. “How do you know?”
“You don’t know.” Father Jim said, his voice sad and sure. “God changes. And God is always the same. You and me — we’re in God’s shadow, Sam. We’re always one step behind.”
—
Timothy staggered into the kitchen late the next morning, his wings ragged, streaked with ash. They stank. Sam pushed him into the shower and left new clothes on the guest bed. There were feathers between the sheets. Feathers on the bed and a trail of ash leading back to the door.
He stared at it all for a moment and then went back to his room. Yes, there were feathers between his sheets too, and even as he watched, the feathers crumpled into ash. He heard the guest room door open and close, and the scuffle of Timothy pulling on the pants, the shirt. Then footsteps, and the boy knocked on his door.
“Hello,” he said. The door opened.
“Hello.” Timothy held his hand against the door. His other hand, loose against his hip, held Sam’s old, red woollen hat. “My sister,” he said.
“Yes.”
“What do I tell her, Sam? What do I say?”
“Your sister,” he said, remembering. “She’s in trouble.”
“Yes,” Timothy whispered. “How do I tell her that God will save her, so that she knows? How do I make her listen?”
“Maybe God isn’t going to save her,” Sam said gently. “Maybe God’s just waiting. Like us.”
Timothy shook his head. “God will save her,” he said. “I can feel it.”
Sam looked at him and marvelled at how he could know. “It doesn’t matter what you say,” he said. “What you do, when you’re with her — that’s what matters. That’s what she’ll remember.”
Timothy nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m going to find her.”
Sam turned back to his room and listened. The front door opened and closed.
The standing mirror showed him a thin man with hollowed cheeks and long, pale hands. He touched a finger to the glass and it was cool, seamless. The mirror over the bed caught this reflection so that there was another Sam, another finger to the glass. Behind that another, and another. An endless line of men, of wings. Infinity. Forever, right there in front of him, his finger marking the spot where it began.
—
Sometime in the night, the boy came home. Sam, lying awake on his bed, heard the front door open and close, and then the shuffle of the boy’s feet as he moved down the hall. The footsteps slowed as they approached Sam’s door, then stopped.
“Sam?”
He sat up. “Timothy. Come in.”
Timothy pushed the door open a crack and peeked into the room, then opened it further. Light from the hallway, and the boy, slid across the floor and over the bed. His wings cast a quivering shadow into the room.
“Did you find her?” Sam said when Timothy didn’t speak.
The boy paused for a moment and nodded. “I did.” He f
rowned. “She told me to go away.”
He sat up. “What?”
“She’s in trouble, and I don’t think I can save her.” Timothy stepped closer to the bed, whispering now. “It’s all wrong, Sam.”
Sam moved off the bed so that his own light mingled with Timothy’s. The light that shone from both of them was so cold as to be almost blue, while the light from the hallway was golden, inviting, warm. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You don’t know that.”
“I’m supposed to save her,” the boy said. “Isn’t that what God wants me to do?”
“I thought we didn’t know what God wants either of us to do,” Sam said. He took Timothy’s hands and held them fast between his own.
“I hoped.” Timothy’s voice broke. “I prayed so hard. There’s nothing for me if I can’t help her. There’s no reason to stay.”
“Don’t say that,” Sam said. “Chickenhead would be so hurt.” Even as he joked he felt the words become heavy, useless. Terror throbbed in his abdomen, sudden and dark.
Timothy managed half a smile. “Chickenhead has you,” he said. He pulled his hands away. “And I have nobody. Why would God make me so lonely, Sam?”
“You’re not alone.” Sam reached forward and hugged him, careful of the wings, knowing it was not the same thing, being lonely and being alone. He wished for wisdom, for the words of Father Jim. But even words were beginning to desert him now. So instead he held the boy and said nothing.
—
“Sam. Sam.” It wasn’t a shout, and yet the word carried through the house. He threw off the covers, stumbled out of the bed. He would have fallen but the wings pushed out and knocked against the bedside table, the bookcase, and calmed him where he stood. The call came again.
“Sam.”
He ran down the hall and into Timothy’s room. The boy was on the floor, convulsing, his wings crumpled against the wood. Father Jim held his head. He looked up as Sam entered.
“I heard him fall out of bed,” he said. The boy thrashed again, and moaned. “Sam.”
He knelt and spread the wings. “I’m here, Timothy.” He moved in front of Father Jim, sat down, took the boy’s head into his lap. “It’s all right.”
“Is this. What it feels like?” the boy whispered. He shook. “Death?”
“I don’t know. Is this death?” Sam looked up at the priest and remembered a miracle by the side of the road, the deep green stillness of the trees. Chickenhead. The deer. Life and death. And something else.
He touched the boy’s forehead and this time saw a woman with dark hair, a young boy. He could feel their sadness in his bones.
Timothy looked up at him. “I dreamed about them,” he whispered. “The boy — he’s lost. And the mother — she wants to believe in God. But I didn’t know what the dreams meant. I didn’t want to believe them, Sam. I wanted the dreams to be about my sister.” His hand, blue-veined and strong, clutched Sam’s arm. “I think — I think I need to go to them, to where they are.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” He cradled Timothy’s head in his lap. Remembered, as if from a distant war, the face of the student who had died. “Timothy, we’ll call an ambulance. You’ll be all right. You will.”
“But this is not death,” said the boy, suddenly convinced. “You only think that it’s death — you forget who you are. Sam.” He stretched out a hand and the cat licked it calmly. Sam spared a moment to wonder: what else had she seen, did she know? Nine lives. The wings, the light, this boy, strewn across his path. Did she understand any of it? Or did she build her life around it, and make sense of what she could? She was wary, yet she hadn’t stopped purring.
Then Timothy put his own hand against Sam’s forehead. The calm wavered, and for a moment — one scintilla of time — he looked like a boy again. “Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
“Timothy?” said Father Jim, his voice sharp. “Tim — what do you see?”
“I was wrong,” the boy whispered. And he smiled — a smile so dazzling it broke the heart. Then he disappeared.
There was no other word for it — he disappeared. He was there and then not there, just as Chickenhead had been dead and then not-dead those weeks ago. The clothes he’d been wearing crumpled to the ground. Sam held his hands around empty space for one more moment, and then dropped his arms to the floor.
“He’s gone,” he said.
“He’s gone.” Father Jim was shaken, pale. “He just disappeared.”
“Yes.” Sam felt calm. He heard the humming, saw the light stretch out from his fingertips, dance around the face of the priest. Could he see it? “It will be all right, Father.”
“I — I need a drink,” the other man said. He stood, and shook a little on his feet. “Can I get you a drink, Sam?”
“I’ll come with you,” Sam said. He followed the priest out into the hall, down to the kitchen. The room was dark — Sam spread his hands and watched the light from his skin touch the ceiling.
Father Jim had a new bottle of Scotch on the counter. He poured two liberal glasses and handed one to Sam.
Sam twisted his hands around the glass. “I wonder what’s happening to him.” A boy with dark hair and a broken heart. A mother who wanted to believe in God. And an angel, gone to them both. They drank in unison without meaning to, clinked their glasses against the counter at the same time. Chickenhead jumped on the counter and wound between them. He didn’t shoo her off — he didn’t have the energy.
“What should I be feeling right now?” asked the priest. “They don’t teach you about this in seminary.”
“Maybe they don’t know,” said Sam. Timothy, convulsing on the ground. Lying prone on the street, rocking on the other side of the guest room door. Sam reached for the whiskey and topped up his glass, then the priest’s. Light filtered through the glass and the liquid. Eternal, bright. “Maybe this is what we all become.”
“The glory of God,” said the priest suddenly, “is a human being fully alive. St. Irenaeus.”
“This doesn’t feel like being alive.” Yet where else could he see colours like this, be brought to his knees by the sound of the wind? This felt — it felt like much more than being alive. “All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”
“That’s nice,” said the priest. “It sounds biblical.”
Sam shook his head. “It’s Tolstoy. From War and Peace.”
Father Jim shrugged. “No matter,” he said. “I think God would approve.” He took the bottle and upended it over his glass. He poured Sam another glass, and another. They sat like this, silent, and drank the whiskey until it was gone.
—
He lay in bed and thought of what he’d seen. A mother, a child. And that other face that had come to him, just for an instant — deep grey eyes, another sharp nose, a mouth twisted in sorrow.
Then the face dissolved, and in its place came nausea so violent, so overwhelming that he wondered for an instant if he’d also disappeared, become nothing more than roiling dark. When he opened his eyes, his fingers were clenched so hard around his sheets they looked like translucent, blue-streaked bone. Something else here that he was missing — God, elusive, teasing, so far beyond him as to be laughable. Uneasy rumble in the stomach.
Time was ticking forward now, so fast and yet so slow. The cat stood wary guard by the door. Against him, for him, who knew. Only God, and God wasn’t telling.
—
At some point in the early hours of that last Saturday morning, his dick disappeared. He woke up and shuffled into the bathroom, dropped his pants and there it wasn’t. A network of blue veins that arced upwards across his pelvis, spreading out from his groin like some kind of cobalt snowflake. That was it.
He shouted into the bathroom air. Just as he had those few weeks ago — months, years, ages ago — when the wings had first appeared. This time, after Chicke
nhead ambled into the bathroom, there was a sudden thump on the door.
“Sam? Are you all right?”
He leaned against the bathroom counter and tried to breathe. Couldn’t. Dots swam in front of his eyes. Orange dots, red dots. Purple. The world spun. The snowflake did not go away.
“I’m — I’m all right,” he said weakly. “Sorry. I’m okay.”
He could feel the priest’s hesitation on the other side of the door. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I had a — bad dream.”
Pause. “All right. If you need anything, I’m — ”
“Across the hall,” he said, sharper than he meant. “I know.”
Another pause, then footsteps moving away.
He didn’t have to turn on the light but did it anyway, and slumped against the counter, pants pooled at his ankles. He reached down and touched the snowflake. Touched soft skin stretched tight over veins, a shimmer of blue stretching up to his abdomen.
When he looked into the mirror, everything else looked the same. That was his nose. Those were his ears, his eyes. His teeth. Or were they chipped, the teeth, slightly pointed, slightly not quite the same? Were those really his irises — had his eyes always been that dark? He sucked in a breath and grasped the counter. Pressure locked in his knuckles.
His knuckles. The angel’s knuckles. Him. It.
He opened the bathroom door and slipped across the hall, back to his room. He shut the door and spread his palms, so that the light arced above his head and shone out through the window like a flare from the sun. The bedroom was a gallery of dark, muffled shapes, the lattice on the window stark and clear and confining. He closed his eyes and searched for it — the noise, that feeling he’d had when speaking to the boy in the kitchen. The light was Infinite and cold. Timothy was gone now. He was alone.
It. Could he be a man now? Why was it that he couldn’t see Julie’s face at all, couldn’t see his mother but in shadow, felt his thoughts flicker out to the other man in the house with mild curiosity, as though he didn’t actually know who he was? Of course he knew. Father Jim.
