by Paula Guran
* * *
The Fourth Angel says:
Of this order I am made one,
From Mankind to guard this place
That through their Guilt they have foregone
For they have forfeited His Grace;
Therefore all this must they shun
Or else my Sword they shall embrace
And myself will be their Foe
To flame them in the Face.
– Chester Mystery Cycle:
The Creation and Adam and Eve, 1461
This is true.
Ten years ago, give or take a year, I found myself on an enforced stopover in Los Angeles, a long way from home. It was December, and the California weather was warm and pleasant. England, however, was in the grip of fogs and snowstorms, and no planes were landing there. Each day I’d phone the airport, and each day I’d be told to wait another day.
This had gone on for almost a week.
I was barely out of my teens. Looking around today at the parts of my life left over from those days, I feel uncomfortable, as if I’ve received a gift, unasked, from another person: a house, a wife, children, a vocation. Nothing to do with me, I could say, innocently. If it’s true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.
I was in Los Angeles. Yes.
On the sixth day, I received a message from an old sort-ofgirlfriend from Seattle: she was in LA, too, and she had heard I was around on the friends-of-friends network. Would I come over?
I left a message on her machine. Sure.
That evening: a small, blonde woman approached me as I came out of the place I was staying. It was already dark.
She stared at me, as if she was trying to match me to a description, and then, hesitantly, she said my name.
“That’s me. Are you Tink’s friend?”
“Yeah. Car’s out back. C’mon. She’s really looking forward to seeing you.”
The woman’s car was one of the huge old boatlike jobs you only ever seem to see in California. It smelled of cracked and flaking leather upholstery. We drove out from wherever we were to wherever we were going.
Los Angeles was at that time a complete mystery to me; and I cannot say I understand it much better now. I understand London, and New York, and Paris: you can walk around them, get a sense of what’s where in just a morning of wandering, maybe catch the subway. But Los Angeles is about cars. Back then I didn’t drive at all; even today I will not drive in America. Memories of LA for me are linked by rides in other people’s cars with no sense there of the shape of the city, of the relationships between the people and the place. The regularity of the roads, the repetition of structure and form mean that when I try to remember it as an entity, all I have is the boundless profusion of tiny lights I saw from the hill of Griffith Park one night, on my first trip to the city. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, from that distance.
“See that building?” said my blonde driver, Tink’s friend. It was a redbrick art deco house, charming and quite ugly.
“Yes.”
“Built in the thirties,” she said, with respect and pride.
I said something polite, trying to comprehend a city inside which fifty years could be considered a long time.
“Tink’s real excited. When she heard you were in town. She was so excited.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing her again.”
Tink’s real name was Tinkerbell Richmond. No lie.
She was staying with friends in a small apartment clump, somewhere an hour’s drive from downtown LA.
What you need to know about Tink: she was ten years older than me, in her early thirties; she had glossy black hair and red, puzzled lips, and very white skin, like Snow White in the fairy stories; the first time I met her I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Tink had been married for a while at some point in her life and had a five-year-old daughter called Susan. I had never met Susan – when Tink had been in England, Susan had been staying on in Seattle with her father.
People named Tinkerbell name their daughters Susan.
Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: the parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely.
I do not remember arriving at Tink’s house, nor where her flatmate went.
What I remember next is sitting in Tink’s lounge with the lights low, the two of us next to each other, on her sofa.
We made small talk. It had been perhaps a year since we had seen one another. But a twenty-one-year-old boy has little to say to a thirty-two-year-old woman, and soon, having nothing in common, I pulled her to me.
She snuggled close with a kind of sigh, and presented her lips to be kissed. In the half-light her lips were black. We kissed for a little on the couch, and I stroked her breasts through her blouse and then she said:
“We can’t fuck. I’m on my period.”
“Fine.”
“I can give you a blowjob, if you’d like.”
I nodded assent, and she unzipped my jeans, and lowered her head to my lap.
After I had come, she got up and ran into the kitchen. I heard her spitting into the sink, and the sound of runnling water: I remember wondering why she did it, if she hated the taste that much.
Then she returned and we sat next to each other on the couch.
“Susan’s upstairs, asleep,” said Tink. “She’s all I live for. Would you like to see her?”
“I don’t mind.”
We went upstairs. Tink led me into a darkened bedroom. There were child-scrawl pictures all over the walls – wax-crayoned drawings of winged fairies and little palaces – and a small fair-haired girl was asleep in the bed.
“She’s very beautiful,” said Tink, and kissed me. Her lips were still slightly sticky. “She takes after her father.”
We went downstairs. We had nothing else to say, nothing else to do. Tink turned on the main light. For the first time, I noticed tiny crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, incongruous on her perfect Barbie doll face.
“I love you,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Would you like a ride back?”
“If you don’t mind leaving Susan alone . . .?”
She shrugged, and I pulled her to me for the last time.
At night Los Angles is all lights. And shadows.
A blank, here, in my mind. I simply don’t remember what happened next. She must have driven me back to the place where I was staying – how else would I have gotten there? I do not even remember kissing her goodbye. Perhaps I simply waited on the sidewalk and watched her drive away.
Perhaps.
I do know, however, that once I reached the place I was staying, I just stood there, unable to go inside, to wash, and then to sleep, unwilling to do anything else.
I was not hungry. I did not want alcohol. I did not want to read or talk. I was scared of walking too far in case I became lost, bedeviled by the repeating motifs of Los Angeles, spun around and sucked in so I could never find my way home again. Central Los Angeles sometimes seems to me to be nothing more than a pattern, like a set of repeating blocks: a gas station, a few homes, a mini-mall (doughnuts, photo developers, Laundromats, fast foods), and repeat until hypnotized and the tiny changes in the mini-malls and the houses only serve to reinforce the structure.
I thought of Tink’s lips. Then I fumbled in a pocket of my jacket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.
I lit one, inhaled, blew blue smoke into the warm night air.
There was a stunted palm tree growing outside the place I was staying, and I resolved to walk for a way, keeping th
e tree in sight, to smoke my cigarette, perhaps even to think; but I felt too drained to think. I felt very sexless, and very alone.
A block or so down the road there was a bench, and when I reached it I sat down. I threw the stub of the cigarette onto the pavement, hard, and watched it shower orange sparks.
Someone said, “I’ll buy a cigarette off you, pal. Here.”
A hand in front of my face, holding a quarter. I looked up.
He did not look old, although I would not have been prepared to say how old he was. Late thirties, perhaps. Mid-forties. He wore a long, shabby coat, colorless under the yellow street lamps, and his eyes were dark.
“Here. A quarter. That’s a good price.”
I shook my head, pulled out the packet of Marlboros, offered him one. “Keep your money. It’s free. Have it.”
He took the cigarette. I passed him a book of matches (it advertised a telephone sex line; I remember that), and he lit the cigarette. He offered me the matches back, and I shook my head. “Keep them. I always wind up accumulating books of matches in America.”
“Uh-huh.” He sat next to me and smoked his cigarette. When he had smoked it halfway down, he tapped the lighted end off on the concrete, stubbed out the glow, and placed the butt of the cigarette behind his ear
“I don’t smoke much,” he said. “Seems a pity to waste it, though.”
A car careened down the road, veering from one side to the other. There were four young men in the car; the two in the front were both pulling at the wheel and laughing. The windows were wound down, and I could hear their laughter, and the two in the back seat (“Gaary you asshole! What the fuck are you onnn, mannnn?”) and the pulsing beat of a rock song. Not a song I recognized. The car looped around a corner, out of sight.
Soon the sounds were gone, too.
“I owe you,” said the man on the bench.
“Sorry?”
“I owe you something. For the cigarette. And the matches. You wouldn’t take the money. I owe you.”
I shrugged, embarrassed. “Really, it’s just a cigarette. I figure, if I give people cigarettes, then if ever I’m out, maybe people will give me cigarettes.” I laughed, to show I didn’t really mean it, although I did. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Mm. You want to hear a story? True story? Stories always used to be good payment. These days—” he shrugged “—not so much.”
I sat back on the bench, and the night was warm, and I looked at my watch: it was almost one in the morning. In England, a freezing new day would already have begun: a workday would be starting for those who could beat the snow and get into work; another handful of old people, and those without homes, would have died in the night from the cold.
“Sure,” I said to the man. “Sure. Tell me a story.”
He coughed, grinned white teeth – a flash in the darkness – and he began.
“First thing I remember was the Word. And the Word was God. Sometimes, when I get really down, I remember the sound of the Word in my head, shaping me, forming me, giving me life.
“The Word gave me a body, gave me eyes. And I opened my eyes, and I saw the light of the Silver City.
“I was in a room – a silver room – and there wasn’t anything in it except me. In front of me was a window that went from floor to ceiling, open to the sky, and through the window I could see the spires of the City, and at the edge of the City, the Dark.
“I don’t know how long I waited there. I wasn’t impatient or anything, though. I remember that. It was like I was waiting until I was called; and I knew that some time I would be called. And if I had to wait until the end of everything and never be called, why, that was fine, too. But I’d be called, I was certain of that. And then I’d know my name and my function.
“Through the window I could see silver spires, and in many of the other spires were windows; and in the windows I could see others like me. That was how I knew what I looked like.
“You wouldn’t think it of me, seeing me now, but I was beautiful. I’ve come down in the world a way since then.
“I was taller then, and I had wings.
“They were huge and powerful wings, with feathers the color of mother-of-pearl. They came out from just between my shoulder blades. They were so good. My wings.
“Sometimes I’d see others like me, the ones who’d left their rooms, who were already fulfilling their duties. I’d watch them soar through the sky from spire to spire, performing errands I could barely imagine.
“The sky above the City was a wonderful thing. It was always light, although lit by no sun – lit, perhaps, by the City itself; but the quality of light was forever changing. Now pewter-colored light, then brass, then a gentle gold, or a soft and quiet amethyst . . .”
The man stopped talking. He looked at me, his head on one side. There was a glitter in his eyes that scared me. “You know what amethyst is? A kind of purple stone?”
I nodded . . .
My crotch felt uncomfortable.
It occurred to me then that the man might not be mad; I found this far more disquieting than the alternative.
The man began talking once more. “I don’t know how long it was that I waited in my room. But time didn’t mean anything. Not back then. We had all the time in the world.
“The next thing that happened to me, was when the Angel Lucifer came to my cell. He was taller than me, and his wings were imposing, his plumage perfect. He had skin the color of sea mist, and curly silver hair, and these wonderful gray eyes . . .
“I say he, but you should understand that none of us had any sex, to speak of.” He gestured toward his lap. “Smooth and empty. Nothing there. You know.
“Lucifer shone. I mean it – he glowed from inside. All angels do. They’re lit up from within, and in my cell the Angel Lucifer burned like a lightning storm.
“He looked at me. And he named me.
“‘You are Raguel,’ he said. ‘The Vengeance of the Lord.’
“I bowed my head, because I knew it was true. That was my name. That was my function.
“‘There has been a . . . a wrong thing,’ he, said. ‘The first of its kind. You are needed.’
“He turned and pushed himself into space, and I followed him, flew behind him across the Silver City to the outskirts, where the City stops and the Darkness begins; and it was there, under a vast silver spire, that we descended to the street, and I saw the dead angel.
“The body lay, crumpled and broken, on the silver sidewalk. Its wings were crushed underneath it and a few loose feathers had already blown into the silver gutter.
“The body was almost dark. Now and again a light would flash inside it, an occasional flicker of cold fire in the chest, or in the eyes, or in the sexless groin, as the last of the glow of life left it forever.
“Blood pooled in rubies on its chest and stained its white wing feathers crimson. It was very beautiful, even in death.
“It would have broken your heart.
“Lucifer spoke to me then. ‘You must find who was responsible for this, and how; and take the Vengeance of the Name on whosoever caused this thing to happen.’
“He really didn’t have to say anything. I knew that already. The hunt, and the retribution: it was what I was created for, in the Beginning; it was what I was.
“‘I have work to attend to,’ said the Angel Lucifer.
“He flapped his wings once, hard, and rose upward; the gust of wind sent the dead angel’s loose feathers blowing across the street.
“I leaned down to examine the body. All luminescence had by now left it. It was a dark thing, a parody of an angel. It had a perfect, sexless face, framed by silver hair. One of the eyelids was open, revealing a placid gray eye; the other was closed. There were no nipples on the chest and only smoothness between the legs.
“I lifted the body up.
“The back of the angel was a mess. The wings were broken and twisted, the back of the head staved in; there was a floppiness to the corpse that made me thi
nk its spine had been broken as well. The back of the angel was all blood.
“The only blood on its front was in the chest area. I probed it with my forefinger, and it entered the body without difficulty.
“He fell, I thought. And he was dead before he fell.
“And I looked up at the windows that ranked the street. I stared across the Silver City. You did this, I thought. I will find you, whoever you are. And I will take the Lord’s vengeance upon you.”
The man took the cigarette stub from behind his ear, lit it with a match. Briefly I smelled the ashtray smell of a dead cigarette, acrid and harsh; then he pulled down to the unburnt tobacco, exhaled blue smoke into the night air.
“The angel who had first discovered the body was called Phanuel.
“I spoke to him in the Hall of Being. That was the spire beside which the dead angel lay. In the Hall hung the . . . the blueprints, maybe, for what was going to be . . . all this.” He gestured with the hand that held the stubby cigarette, pointing to the night sky and the parked cars and the world. “You know. The universe.
“Phanuel was the senior designer; working under him were a multitude of angels laboring on the details of the Creation. I watched him from the floor of the Hall. He hung in the air below the Plan, and angels flew down to him, waiting politely in turn as they asked him questions, checked things with him, invited comment on their work. Eventually he left them and descended to the floor.
“‘You are Raguel,’ he said. His voice was high and fussy. ‘What need have you of me?’
“‘You found the body?’
“‘Poor Carasel? Indeed I did. I was leaving the Hall – there are a number of concepts we are currently constructing, and I wished to ponder one of them, Regret by name. I was planning to get a little distance from the City – to fly above it, I mean, not to go into the Dark outside, I wouldn’t do that, although there has been some loose talk amongst . . . but, yes. I was going to rise and contemplate.
