Into This River I Drown

by TJ Klune

  “You’re not going to leave, are you?” I blurt out before I can stop myself.

  He watches me for a moment. “No, Benji. I won’t leave.”

  I nod, my eyes starting to close on their own. “Just don’t leave the house yet,” I mumble to him as I turn. “And if someone knocks on the door, just ignore it. Don’t need you telling them everything about themselves and that you know God personally or some bullshit.”

  “Then what should I tell them?” he asks, sounding confused.

  “I’ll be up in a while,” I say. I close the door behind me.

  “Good morning, Benji,” I think I hear him say quietly through the door, but I can’t be sure if I have imagined it.

  My eyes open and I’m standing at mile marker seventy-seven. Rain falls from

  a gray sky. Thunder rumbles in the distance. The river looks swollen against the banks, the water dark and choppy. I look up to the sky and say, “I am not here.” Rain falls into my mouth and I choke.

  There’s a flash and the rain has turned to feathers.

  Flash. Feathers turn back to rain.

  “I’m haunted,” I say, my voice flat.

  And I am. I know this. I am haunted here at this river.

  There’s another flash and I’m down by the riverbank, mud squishing up against my boots. There’s a cross, starkly white. Then there are a million of them. Then there are none. Another flash. Feathers on the river, covering the surface. Then there are none.

  The river beckons. I take a step toward it.

  A truck on the road, the engine roaring. The sound of metal striking metal, grating and sharp. The truck sails over the edge, bouncing on the bank behind me. It strikes a large boulder. It flips, landing upside down into the river, its back end angled up toward the sky. The rear tires spin lazily until they stop.

  There’s a flash and I’m knee-deep in the water, the current pressing against my legs, my feet sinking in river mud.

  I’ve been here before. I’ve been at this moment before.

  An arm, a strong arm, will slip around my chest, and a voice will tell me I cannot cross, I cannot be allowed to drown. I turn my head swiftly, but there is no one behind me. Movement catches my eye up on the road.

  A figure silhouetted against the gray-white clouds, staring down at me.

  “Help me!” I scream as I wave my arms over my head. “My dad is in there!”

  But the figure does nothing. They don’t call back. They don’t wave back. They just watch. They just watch as the cab of the truck behind me slowly fills with river water. They do nothing. They say nothing.

  I turn back toward my father. I’m going to get him out. I’m going to change this. I’m going to fix this. The future will be changed because I am here. I am here. I am—

  “No, Benji,” a strong voice says from behind me. An arm wraps around my chest, pulling me against a large body filled with so much warmth it’s like he’s burning from the inside out. “You’ll drown. You’ll drown here and I can’t watch that. I can’t let that happen. Not now. Not ever.”

  I struggle against him, but it’s no use. I scream at him to let me go, but he doesn’t. He won’t. He’s too big. Too strong. I moan and sag against him, the fight draining as quickly as it has come.

  “I will help you carry this burden,” he whispers in my ear. “I will carry you.” There’s another flash and the roar of the river and I—

  will carry you

  —open my eyes to a sunlit room. My sunlit room. My heart thumps against my chest, my breathing is rapid. A dream, I think. Everything was a dream. I’m sure of this now. None of what I remember happening did happen. I know it didn’t. There was no storm. No light fell from the sky. I did not cross the river. I did not find an angel.

  Calliel. A name that causes a twinge in my chest.

  I sit up and put my feet on the floor. I listen to Little House. It tells me nothing. But that means nothing. He—

  could be on the roof again

  —was nothing more than a figment of my attention-starved imagination, something my lonely mind created, someone big and solid who said he came here because I called him, because I drew him here. Things like that don’t happen, not in real life.

  So why am I still listening for him?

  I find my resolve buried deep. I stand, my knees popping. I glance at the clock. It’s almost noon. I reach for the doorknob, hesitating. Only the silence of Little House allows me to move forward. I open the door.

  Calliel is splayed out on the floor in the hallway outside my bedroom door. He’s taken the comforter and a pillow off the bed in the spare room and dragged them into the hallway. The blanket has been kicked around in his slumber (I guess angels do sleep, I think). He’s found sweatpants to change into, from somewhere, and they’re a little too small for him, clinging tightly to his thighs. He’s not wearing a shirt, his biceps tight against the top of the comforter. He lies on his side, facing the door. I am mesmerized by the smattering of freckles scattered down his shoulders and his side, light brown and evenly spaced, as if they are forming a pattern. They disappear into the curls of his chest hair. I lose count of them once I reach thirty. I lift my gaze to his face and his dark eyes are open.

  “Hello,” he says.

  “Why are you on the floor?” I ask, though a billion other things are on my mind. “I told you that you could use the bed in there.”

  He sits up and stretches, looking surprised when his back pops loudly. He stands, letting the blanket fall to the floor. I’m hyperaware of how close he is to me and take an involuntary step backward as I struggle to breathe. “I was doing my job,” he says, his voice pitched low, almost defiant.

  “Guarding?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “I don’t need to be guarded.”

  “You do,” Cal assures me.

  “From what?”

  He gives me that exasperated look I’m starting to recognize. It’s almost endearing now. “You know.”

  The river. “You can’t read my thoughts but you can go into my dreams?”

  He says nothing.

  “Why won’t you let me…?”

  His eyes harden. “It’s dangerous, Benji. You don’t know what you’re looking at.”

  Truer words were never spoken, I think as I stare up at him. I need to change the subject. I can’t let him go on with this. It suddenly seems important, this dream. I’d gotten further into the river than I had last time, seen more—the tires spinning on the truck, the figure standing up on the road in the rain. I need to distract him somehow. An idea, something I’d considered as I fell asleep the night before. “What about the others?” I ask.

  This confuses him. “What do you mean?”

  “The other people of Roseland. You said you were the guardian angel to Roseland, right? How can you be protecting everyone if you’re here?”

  He studies me before he speaks, as if gauging my sincerity. Somehow, I don’t think I’ve fooled him. He seems, at times, to have an almost simple demeanor. But other times, like now, the intelligence that flares behind his eyes is a breathtaking thing. He knows my game, but he’s letting it slide. For now.

  “There are shapes,” he says. “Patterns to follow. Designs to read. It’s… hard to explain.”

  I wait.

  He sighs and steps back, leaning against the wall near the spare bedroom door. I try to focus on what he’s saying instead of looking at the muscles carved into his stomach, the lines of his hips, the white that is his skin. “I can’t tell the future,” he says, sounding almost frustrated, as if this fact is the bane of his existence. “I can’t speak to God’s plan. I don’t think anyone can, even the higher-ups, the archangels. Sometimes I wonder what exactly Michael knows, or what Raphael or Gabriel or David can see, but I don’t think even they know what the future will bring. Metatron may have known, but no one has seen him in generations, so I can’t say for sure.”

  My head is starting to hurt again. “Metatron?” I mutter. “More
than meets the eye?”

  Apparently he doesn’t get my feeble attempt at a joke, the seriousness never leaving his face. “Metatron is the highest angel, supposedly the first. But he disappeared and no one knows where he went. He’s more legend now than fact.”

  My weak understanding of any kind of religion is fairly evident. My dad and mom were never ones to go to church. About half of Roseland goes to Our Mother of Sorrows, the local Catholic church. Different faiths head to nearby towns to worship. I asked Big Eddie once why we didn’t go. He told me that a man should be free to choose to do as he pleases on Sundays, even if it meant watching the Seahawks. I never argued with the logic of my father.

  The names are familiar (Raphael and Michael, Gabriel and David) but he might as well be speaking in Latin for all I understand. It might be too early for an angel hierarchy lesson. I shake my head, trying to clear my thoughts. “What does this have to do with Roseland?”

  “It’s the pattern,” he explains. “I can see threads weaving out from Heaven and down toward Earth. They form shapes. An outline. A design for each human being on the planet. Think of it like… like a loom, and these threads are woven, a plan for an individual. While I can’t see them being woven, I pick up the ends of the threads and follow them. There are signs in them, signs that I have to watch for, of actions that I must take, or actions that I must not take. And they’re all connected, some way or another. You humans are more connected to each other than you could ever realize. You may not see it, but I do. I see it every day.”

  “And this is God telling you to do this?” I ask, incredulous. “How can you know if you’ve never even seen him?”

  “Faith, Benji,” Calliel says, like it’s that simple. And maybe to him it is. “I have faith that my Father knows what he is doing, that he knows what is right. That he has a plan for the way things will turn out.” His eyes darken and he frowns at this last, but the moment passes. I almost call him on it, but I don’t know what he’d do. He still scares the royal fuck out of me.

  “And God does this for everyone on this planet?”

  He laughs, and it’s a big sound. “Everyone here and everywhere else.”

  “What do you mean ‘everywhere else’?”

  “Questions,” he growls at me, but there’s a small smirk there. “Always with the questions. There are more… places… than this one.”

  I hold up my hand. “I don’t want to know. I’ve already got too much going on inside my head to know that there are aliens.”

  He grins at me. It’s almost feral.

  “Can you see my thread?” I ask, feeling ridiculous.

  His eyes light up. He nods. “Started again this morning. I can see them. Feel them.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “It’s blue,” he says immediately. “It’s blue and strong. Far stronger than you could ever know. It’s so bright. So bright and strong.”

  “Oh,” I’m unsure what to do with that.

  It’s blue. Everything I have is blue. I don’t know where the thought comes from.

  The river, my father’s voice whispers in my head. It all comes back to the river.

  “One last question,” I say, considering.

  Calliel sighs, but waits.

  “You said I called you and you came, right?”

  He nods, his eyes starting to cloud over.

  “Have others done that before? You know, other angels?”

  At first there’s nothing, and I think I’m not going to get an answer, but then he shakes his head, just once.

  “You’re the first?” My skin feels cold.

  He nods tightly. “That I know of.”

  “How did you—”

  “No more questions, Benji.” He boils over, showing anger for the first time. It’s a deep thing, a dark thing. I shiver again. “I’m doing what I have to do. So many damn questions, all the damn time. That’s all you do. That’s enough for today.” He glares at me, flexing his crossed arms, as if daring me to ask another question.

  “We’ve got to see about getting you some clothes,” is all I say.

  We’re seated at the table, his mood suddenly shifted toward happiness again

  (which might or might not have to do with the Lucky Charms in front of him). My stomach growled as I got dressed and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day, and it was now almost noon. Trying to keep it light and from sounding like a question, I asked him if he ate food. He was still glowering at me after I made him put a shirt on while he told me that he consumed a “sort of energy” around him when he was On High (I started singing “Angels We Have Heard On High” in my head for the hundredth time). I told him I was flat out of “sort-of energy” and told him I had cereal. He scowled at me as I placed a bowl of Lucky Charms in front of him, poking at it with a finger until I told him to stop it and use a damn spoon. I thought he was going to chuck the silverware at my head or shoot me with some kind of angel laser death beam. He did neither, instead gripping the spoon tightly, scooping up a green clover, and touching it with his tongue tentatively. He licked it a few times before he finally put it in his mouth. The look on his face and the sounds that followed suggested he had either never tasted anything so wonderful, or he was literally having an orgasm in my kitchen. This unfortunately led to a billion more questions in my head, wondering if angels could have orgasms, and if it would be like some kind of celestial goo. Then I realized what I was thinking about and immediately put a stop to it.

  “God,” he moans now, milk dribbling down his lips to his beard. “This sure is good. I think I would like some more, please. Can you just give me the green ones this time? I think I’d like a bowl of just those. The other ones are getting in the way of the green ones on my tongue.”

  “I don’t think they make Lucky Charms that way,” I say, somewhat disgusted by the way he’s eating, but still unable to turn away. It’s a sugar disaster in the making.

  “They should,” he says seriously, grabbing the box from my hand and then peering inside. He reaches in and snags a handful and proceeds to pick out the green clovers. One sticks to his lip as he chews and the look he gives me is one of such pleasure that I can’t help but chuckle at him. He flicks his tongue out to snag it and I stop chuckling.

  No . No fucking way that’s going to happen. I’m not even going to— He stills, then jerks his head to the left. His jaw twitches. His eyes are wide as he stares out the kitchen window to the front of Little House. “Pattern,” he whispers. “Shapes. Design.”

  I’m alarmed. “Cal, what is it?” I look out the window but can’t see anything, not that I should be expecting to. Even with my doubt, for a moment I think maybe I’ll see threads falling from the sky, woven intricately with a shining material that causes the heart to ache. But there’s nothing. “What’s going on?”

  “He’s coming here,” Cal growls. “He’s coming here and he should stay away.”

  “Who? Who’s coming here?”

  He glances over at me, eyes hard. “You let me handle this,” he says suddenly.

  I snort nervously. “Like hell. I don’t think you’re quite ready for visitors just yet.”

  “I’m your guar—”

  “I was just fine before you got here,” I remind him, even though we both know it’s a lie. “I don’t need you speaking for me. Not when I can speak for myself. Who’s coming?”

  He doesn’t need to answer—I can hear a car now coming up the drive. It passes by Big House. It stops next to the Ford near the porch, the sun reflecting red and blue off the lights on the top. Sheriff Griggs opens the car door. Cal stands quickly, tipping over his chair.

  “Shit,” I groan. “What the hell is this, now?”

  “George Griggs,” Calliel spits out through gritted teeth. “Fifty years of age. Bastard. Born May 4, 1961 under an emerald moon at 7:45 at night. I must not be blasphemous. Parents are Brian and Jennifer Griggs. I must not decide the definition of sin. Grandparents are Gerald and Molly Jackson
. I am a guardian. I am a servant. I am not the judge. I am not the jury. I am not the executioner. I do not decide fate.” He’s snarling by the end.

  And little blue flashes are starting to appear around him, growing in brightness, here on a spring afternoon in Little House.

  Sheriff Griggs pulls himself out of the car, looking back toward the main house.

  I stumble over to Cal, nearly tripping on his overturned chair. I stand in front of him, pulling the curtains shut over the kitchen window while the sheriff’s back is turned. I reach up and cup Cal’s face in my hands, like Nina had done. His red stubble is rough against my palms. His lips are still moving, saying something that I can’t quite understand. I can’t even be sure it’s in English. I pull on his face until he looks at me, and I almost reel away. There is fire in his eyes, but it is so much more. It’s as if he is burning from the inside out, his body ready to explode. The blue flashing lights get brighter and begin to take their shape behind him, a shape now becoming familiar. If I don’t stop this now, it’ll only get worse from here. The sheriff will be able to see the heavenly explosion occurring in my kitchen and I won’t have words to persuade him otherwise.

  “Do you see me?” I ask Calliel, not knowing how much time we have. He growls at me, the outline of wings taking shape.

  “Do you see me!”

  “I see you,” he snarls into my face.

  “Then you need to calm down. You need to stop this.” I drop my voice lower as I continue, hearing the sheriff’s boots crunching in the gravel as he walks toward Little House. “If he sees you like this, we won’t be able to explain it away. Do you understand me? He’ll try to take you away. You’ve got to calm down.”