by Todd Young
“I need to go out.”
Angel stared at him.
“I need to get out of this place. I want to see the sunshine.”
“What did you do with your wings?”
“I don’t know,” Cole said, reaching for them. The bulk of them seemed to be pressed against the small of his back. “You got a jacket or something?”
“It’s pretty hot.”
“Yeah. But I figure, with a jacket, you won’t see these.” He fingered the pale, soft feathers. The frail light he’d been radiating seemed to dim, as though it was connected somehow to the disappearance of his wings, and as the light faded entirely, Angel nodded his head. He got up and handed Cole a jacket from the closet in the bedroom, a red windbreaker decorated with a pair of narrow white stripes. Cole struggled into it and zipped it up, his chest naked beneath it.
“Can you tell?” he said, turning on the spot.
All Angel could see was Cole’s ass, as ripe as a fruit. “No. But you’re going to have to put some jeans on.”
Cole reached for the red briefs, which he’d tossed on the bed. Then he found a clean pair of jeans in the closet and began to push his feet into them.
“Where you going?”
“I don’t know. Prospect Park.”
“How far’s that?”
“It’s a long way.”
Angel twisted his shoulders, strained and writhed, and then, frustrated, gripped his hands into impotent fists.
“It just sort of happened naturally,” Cole said.
“I don’t want you going anywhere without me.”
“Here. Try again.” Cole laid his hands on Angel’s shoulders. “Twist this way and try to slip the joint right down, so it pops up under your shoulder blade.”
Angel did as Cole said and then cried out in pain as the elbow of his left wing locked beneath his shoulder. His eyes streamed tears and he twisted reflexively, releasing the wing with a snap. Fifteen minutes later, he’d managed to withdraw both wings, but it was extraordinarily uncomfortable and he was wincing.
“I think it’s maybe because you only just changed — after me.”
Angel nodded, wiping the tears away. He changed into a T-shirt and jeans and found a hoodie, which along with the T-shirt managed to disguise the mass of his wings.
“Don’t you want to put a T-shirt on?” Angel said.
“I like the feeling of this.” Cole fingered the windbreaker. “It’s all slippery.”
“It’s nylon,” Angel said, drawing a pair of sneakers on. He laced them, stood up, and then they froze, staring at one another.
“You figure we can really go out?” Angel said.
“I don’t see why not.”
50
Outside, the sun was brilliant, the day golden.
After a block or two, Angel said, “The traffic’s pretty light.”
Cole lifted his head inquisitively and glanced along the street.
“And I’m not seeing many dark fuckers.”
“Yeah,” Cole said, “I figured this might happen.”
“You — what?”
“That guy I was telling you about. The John Finn was in love with. He used to speak of the light, of how it was all around us. He used to say it was right here, but we couldn’t see it.”
Angel frowned, uncertain of what Cole meant. He lifted his head at the sound of an engine. A Studebaker Avanti passed, a car he hadn’t seen since he was a child, though this one seemed to be a new model, an updated version of the original, updated in the same way they had updated the Fiat 500. Angel wondered how or when it had been made. It seemed to have slipped into the city from a different world.
Cole was still speaking, speaking of the John who had had some love for Finn. “… and he was a religious nut. He had all this stuff, all these parts of the bible that they’d found sometime — I don’t know, in the 1940s or something.”
“The Nag Hammadi Library.”
“The what?”
“The Nag Hammadi Library. One of the greatest finds of ancient texts. Gnostic gospels, mainly, I think.”
“Gnostic what?”
“Gospels. You know, like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Except they found these other gospels that these people, the Gnostics, had used. The Gospel of Philip. The Gospel of Truth.”
“That’s it. The Gospel of Thomas. That’s what he was always talking about. And there’s this one part he used to say so often that I can quote the whole thing.”
They crossed the street.
“Go on, then,” Angel said.
“What?”
“Tell me what he said.”
Cole put his hand on Angel’s arm and pulled him up the staircase of an old stone building. He stepped backwards, away from the pedestrians and into the shade of the stone veranda. Even here it was hot, and Cole unzipped his jacket, revealing his naked chest. Then he told Angel what the John had said, quoting Jesus from The Gospel of Thomas.
“If those who lead you say, ‘See, the Realm is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Realm is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty.”
“Poverty? It sounds like a description of the dark.”
“Yeah. But the thing I mean about everything looking better right now is this: ‘Jesus says, The Realm will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying “Here it is” or “There it is.” Rather, the Realm of the Father is spread out upon the earth, but men do not see it.”
Cole shivered.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I need the sun.”
They walked back onto the street and rounded the corner into brilliant sunlight. “You see — this is what he was talking about,” Cole said, “the Realm, spread out before us.”
“It looks pretty much like Brooklyn to me.”
“No,” Cole said, shaking his head. “You don’t know. I know these streets. They don’t look like this.”
“So what? You think we’re looking at heaven?”
“Maybe a glimpse of it.”
51
“How far is this park?” Angel said, a few minutes later.
“It’s a long way.”
“Is it that special that we have to walk all this way?”
“It has a lake, and all this forest and stuff. When I first came here, from home, I used to go to Prospect Park all the time. It’d remind me of home. And you can pick up some Johns there.”
Angel nodded. He unzipped his hoodie, thinking he must have been crazy to zip it up in the first place. The day had warmed until it was somewhere in the nineties.
A girl with blond hair advanced toward them and glanced at Cole’s chest. She lifted her eyes and smiled at Angel. Angel felt a flutter in his chest, something he’d never felt in the presence of any girl. It seemed to be a response to something remarkably pure in her, and Angel turned as she passed, wondering where she’d come from. She wasn’t like any girl he’d seen before.
Half an hour later they reached the lake, and Angel plonked onto the grass exhausted. His shoulders hurt now, his wings trapped beneath his shoulder blades painfully, and sitting down didn’t help any. He shucked his shoulders out of the hoodie, perhaps a little angry. Then he lay carefully on the grass, on his back, determined to hide his wings.
“You okay?”
“I’m exhausted.”
“You don’t want to go for a walk around the lake?”
“Cole, we walked miles just to get here, and now you want to keep walking?”
“I feel …”
“What?”
“Full of energy.”
“That glass of Coke did you some good, then?”
Cole grinned. “I don’t think I’ll ever eat again, to tell y
ou the truth.” He stood up, locked his hands behind his head and stared over the lake. The jacket rode up a little and Angel glimpsed a few feathers, which he frowned over, wondering how any of this was possible.
Five minutes later, Cole settled onto the grass beside Angel. He turned onto his side and reached for Angel’s hand, then drew it toward his mouth and kissed it. He shuffled sideways and put his hand on Angel’s chest.
“Cole,” Angel said, in a warning tone.
“What?”
“You shouldn’t. Not in public.”
“Public?” Cole said. “Hell, there’s hardly anyone here.”
Angel closed his eyes, deciding not to argue, though he felt uncomfortable with Cole’s hand on his chest. A family was picnicking a little farther down the slope, near the shore of the lake, with a rug and a hamper of food. Two young children, a girl and a boy, were chasing one another.
“Not your average family,” Cole said.
“What’s that?”
“Those people. Having a picnic. You don’t see that every day.”
Angel lifted his head and squinted at them. It did seem a little unusual, and it was a Wednesday. Shouldn’t the parents have been at work, the children in school?
“My family was like that. When we were young,” Cole said, “we’d go for picnics by the river.”
“Is that the sort of thing you do in Indiana?”
Cole stretched forward and kissed Angel on the mouth. But no sooner had he done it than a shadow fell over them. A deep, guttural voice said, “Faggots!” and spat, the spittle landing on Angel’s lips.
Angel got up quickly. There were two of them, and one had drawn a knife.
“See us can you?”
Angel nodded more out of surprise than anything else, because while he could see them they seemed insubstantial, wavering and not quite real, as though they were reflections in a soiled pain of glass. Without warning, the dark with the knife lunged for Cole, tearing the knife across his throat with a backhanded hacking movement. Cole reached for his neck, and his hand came away bloodied. He stared at it, frozen.
“Get his jugular,” the other dark said.
The guy with the knife lunged for Cole again, but with a speed that surprised him, Angel’s hand shot forward and gripped the guy’s wrist. They tussled for a moment. The blade slashed Angel’s upper arm. He gritted his teeth and grimaced and jerked his arm quickly away. The dark sprang toward him again, aiming for his throat. For a moment, the knife glinted in the sunlight. Then Angel seemed to both hear and feel it as it punctured the skin of his neck, grating against his Adam’s apple and filling his throat with blood. He fell to his knees, coughing and choking. He supposed that was it. He was going to die. He fell onto his side, trying to breathe, though each breath came with a painful, liquid rattle in his throat. He glimpsed Cole turn in a flash of movement, and expected him to collapse onto the grass. He figured they’d die here side by side. Then he caught sight of something red, followed by an expanse of rearing white, and realized that Cole had unfastened his jacket and extended his wings until they were towering over his body.
“Fuck! He’s an angel,” Angel heard, as though from a distance.
Cole’s feet left the grass as if he were being lifted by a crane, his wings beating with a couple of sudden thrusts until he was overhead, gazing down at Angel and the darks, distress distorting his face and blood staining his torso, streaming from his neck.
The pair of darks turned and ran. Angel caught a fleeting glimpse of Cole pursuing them before he coughed, coughed blood, and had to struggle to draw air through his flaming throat. He was keenly aware of warm blood trickling into his lungs, and was about to close his eyes and give up when he heard a sudden beating of wings, a large, black-blue pair of wings, he realized, as he opened his eyes wide. He grimaced in sudden fear and saw a man — an angel like a glittering jewel — gently lower himself to the grass. The angel bent forward, his wings throwing Angel into the shade. Then gently, he reached out and put his hand on Angel’s throat.
Instinctively, he twisted away, but the mysterious angel gripped Angel’s head and laid his other hand against his throat. Angel closed his eyes, overwhelmed by that familiar smell again, as though he were drowning in a sea of it. He gasped for air, strained against the angel’s hand and coughed blood, but soon the pain began to ebb, and Angel relaxed under the stranger’s touch. The unknown angel laid one hand behind Angel’s head while he massaged his throat gently with the other. Angel felt something warm pass over his skin and into his neck, something that came with an electric tingling. When he opened his eyes again, Cole was suspended over them, but coming in to land.
Angel tried to breathe through his nose and coughed again. The angel with the dark blue wings took his hand from Angel’s throat and turned his attention to the slash on his upper arm. He began to massage it, frowning over it in concern for a minute or more before he finally released it and stood up. He stared down at Angel. From the expression on his face, Angel guessed he wasn’t in any immediate danger.
The angel turned to Cole and reached for his neck. He placed one hand behind Cole’s head and began to massage the place where Cole’s neck had been slashed.
Angel lifted himself onto his elbows and stumbled to his feet. A second angel, this one with dusty pink wings, unexpectedly landed in front of him, a girl with strawberry blond hair. As Angel took a step backwards he understood, without having to be told, that this was the other angel’s mate.
The larger angel rubbed his hand over Cole’s throat a final time and Angel was surprised to see, as the angel drew his hand away, that there was no sign of a scar even if Cole’s neck and torso were bloodied. Angel reached for his own throat but could find no wound. His hand came away sticky with blood. When he lifted his eyes, the dark-winged angel stood before him, his mate by his side, both of them with their wings soaring over their bodies.
“Who are you?” the larger angel said, his voice imperial.
52
They explained themselves as best they could. The blue-winged angel was called Darius, and his mate, the female, Sophia.
Angel tried to go back, to the institute, to explain how he had been infected by Hunter, and as he explained, Darius’s face darkened. Angel said what he could about Finn, how he had explained the disease, and when he’d finally finished, Darius said,
“But you are men?”
“Yes,” Angel said, thinking it a strange thing to say.
“An angel does not pair with a male — at least, two male angels do not pair. This is an … abomination.”
Angel swallowed. After what he’d just been through he felt this as a blow to the chest. His eyes began to fill with tears. “But I love him,” he said, finding a sudden strength and daring to defy Darius’s dark eyes, smoldering with murky fire.
“This Hunter. You say he is looking for a male to pair with, that he has been impregnating males?”
Angel nodded, but frowned over the word “impregnating.”
“And without love?”
“Yes.”
Darius turned to Sophia, who shrugged her shoulders and frowned.
“We,” Cole said, starting up, his voice a little shaky, “have the right to love whoever we choose.”
“You are paired. You cannot be unpaired.”
Cole mouthed an, “Oh,” and glanced at Angel.
“I think, perhaps, if you come into the Realm,” Sophia said, “then it will be the wish of the Father.”
“The Realm?”
“You do not know of the Realm?”
“No. We know,” Cole said. “At least, I think so.”
“And what do you see about you here?” Darius said.
Cole swallowed. “A parkland.”
“Can you describe the grass for me?”
“It’s green,” Cole said, after a moment of thought. “And it’s been mown.”
Darius and Sophia exchanged a glance.
“And what of the trees? Can you tell
me how they look?”
Angel shifted his eyes to Cole, and then to the trees, wondering what they were expected to see. A gentle wind lifted, and the wind soughed through the leaves, flickering shadows peppering the grass.
“They’re swaying in the breeze,” Cole said.
“Swaying?”
Cole nodded.
“Nothing else?”
Cole reached for Angel’s hand. “What else would you expect me to see?” he said, a catch in his voice, and Angel realized he’d started to cry.
Darius and Sophia exchanged another glance. They looked at one another for a long moment and then joined hands, peering into each other’s eyes as if they were trying to see — what? Were they telepathic?
They stood for a long time, till it became obvious there was a deep bond between them. They nodded slowly in unison before turning to Angel and Cole again.
“If you come into the Realm,” Sophia said, “you come into the Realm. Our Father will have acknowledged you.”
53
“Can we walk up to the Nethermead?” Cole said.
“The Nethermead?”
“It’s a rolling meadow in the center of the park.”
“Haven’t you had enough?”
“I don’t think I could face,” Cole said, twisting and locking his wings beneath his shoulder blades, “going back home and sitting in that apartment again. I want to be outside, in the sunshine.”
Angel watched in silence as Cole collected the windbreaker from the grass and struggled into it. As Cole was zipping it up, the young girl who had been picnicking with her family appeared beside him. She reached for his hand and held it, swinging back and forth and smiling at him.
“Are you an angel?” she said.
Cole nodded.
“My mom and dad don’t believe that there are angels. They say they live in heaven. But you’re right here.”
Cole smiled. He reached down, lifted the girl onto his hip and began to jounce her.
She giggled. “I saw you flying.”
Cole stared at her fixedly, as though stunned.
“And I saw the other angels too. Bobby says I’m crazy.”
