A Flight of Storks and Angels

by Robert Devereaux

  *****

  When they made it back home, Ward mumbled an “Excuse me” and shot off into the woods, Timothy tumbling through the air alongside him. Ward expected it hadn’t come as a great surprise. Timothy had, after all, been open in his soothings and the others had joined in, trying not to make too big a deal of it, while showing their concern. Still, Ward felt ashamed even as he bolted, knowing he’d have to apologize to Grampa and June later.

  Weirded out? As Ward ran along paths discovered and reinforced in his years growing up, his companion thinned and slid about intricacies of leaf and bark passing by on either side. The foliage he thus honored might have been lying beneath clear glimmering water, except that nothing stirred under Timothy’s swift slipstream.

  “Yeah, a little,” Ward said. “Okay, a lot. I like being alone. Just the family. And June. And you. Who do those. People think. They are?”

  Slow down. Brisk walk’ll do you fine.

  Ward slowed. Tears came then as he stumbled along, but he was far enough in not to worry about anyone seeing or hearing him. He wiped them on his short sleeves, arms raised like broken elephant trunks one after the other to get at them. An old crushed Kleenex came out of his back pants pocket and he blew his nose, wiping it. A favorite clearing rose up about him, pine needles dead and almond-brown and crunchy where he walked, streaks of sun painting the tall, sparsely-branched trees—a natural ellipse. The path he’d come in on had two counterparts off to his left and right, one heading unhurriedly back to the treehouse, the other skirting a creek and then climbing into rougher, more adventurous terrain. Skewed off-center was a small outcropping of rock, cold stone fitted to his bottom. He sat. His hands found the sun-glinted armrests, a shoot of greenish-gray jutting up from a fissure at his right hand, scepter in sapling stage, one thin leaf and the beginnings of another.

  “They scare me, the way they look at us like we’ve got the answers. The whole thing scares me.” His thumb worked nervously against granite. Timothy’s body twisted like taffy just above the ground, long snakelike silently-ratcheting torso like dough being rolled out and stretched for pretzels; but as playful as these movements were, his face opened and deepened before Ward, genuinely attentive and concerned.

  Not up to it?

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  You know.

  “If you say so. I’m not sure about that.” Timothy was missing the point. “The point is, it’s all changing too fast. I just want my home and my mom and my grampa and Joydrop and June and good old eighth grade in a few weeks, that’s all. Is that asking so much?”

  Not enough.

  Ward struck rock with his palm, a stinging numbing blow. “What do you expect?” Before Timothy could reply, he veered off on a new tack. “Why can’t you go back to what you were? You used to be my best friend, funny and jokey. But now that June can see you, and Grampa, not to mention half the town—it’s like you’re leaving me, like you’re sunk deep in me but somehow part of them too.”

  Not what-I-expect, the voice soothed. What-you’re-capable-of. Timothy’s ropy body suddenly collapsed in at the spine, fanning left and right like water unrestrained by a burst of surface tension. Ward watched as he swept two ways about the clearing, meeting behind Ward’s back. He saturated the ground with his grace, rippling out past the trees in a thin but sturdy wash of light. His head, bobbing upon an attenuated stalk to Ward’s right, should have been laughable but wasn’t.

  “Cute, real cute.”

  Hold your water.

  Before he could ask what that might mean, Ward felt suddenly as if he were back in the fake ocean with his mom at Water World, but instead of the warning whistle and the gradual swell of artificial waves as the still water began to lap at their inner tubes, Ward’s craggy throne rode the crest of an unexpected wave straight up, smooth yet sudden enough to drop the pit of his stomach into his groin. The needled floor hillocked upward like some great fur-backed beast roused from sleep. The trees defining the clearing and those ranked behind rode the groundswell, pointing to the heavens still, not collapsing under geologic seizure, but standing tall, riding out at stepped levels below him the mountainizing of the plane. All boats rise, came the phrase. Instead of the earth-groan of rock and root under massive strain, the sounds that scoured his ears were more like massive leaf-rustle or the sway of unharvested wheat.

  The forest terrain telescoped below him, at once as he knew it and transformed. There was his house, so tiny it was as if he were looking at it from a balloon; there were Grampa and June in the backyard near the treehouse, sharp miniatures moving over the green grass; through the roof he saw his mother back now from the hospital, and his gramma being fed by Joydrop, and they were so small and so precious and so distant he ached for the love of them and feared for their loss.

  No loss. You’re okay.

  And that was true. “What are you doing?”

  Time enough. Timothy’s disembodied head gestured everywhichway-ward at once, a subtle impossibility pulled off with ease. Ward gasped at how quickly Auroville came under his purview, its valley setting unmoved yet uprising as building after building backlit the scrim of brick and board that usually, but now no longer, hid the scurryings of those inside. Ward’s vision of the earth and the earth itself rippled swiftly outward like stone in pond: on his left, the forest lands leading up to Lake Tahoe and Carson City and the Nevada deserts beyond; on his right the gray tape of I-50 pulling up little towns whose names he didn’t know, and Sacramento knotted in a crisscross of highways, and swiftly the land between it and San Francisco, and by God the blue-white sheen of the ocean beyond. Chittering humanity spilled into him—not invasive but welcomed—as the great earth unglobed itself, the horizon unbending at the rush of Hawaii and the Philippines and Japan and then the overwhelming landmass of Asia. Ward’s mind felt full of light. The world had become a visible plane, exposing itself to his amazed unblinking stare. Not power had he been granted, so much as privilege. He was still the same thirteen-year-old boy, rough granite under his hands, the ordeal he’d endured downtown still nagging at him; but he no longer had to turn his head to fix on new directions, but encompassed the elaborate writhe of humankind in the distinctness of its multitudinous threads. It was almost as if, instead of the world coming to him, really he had been spread—as thin and sturdy as Timothy surf-slapping through the forest—about the planet or had tapped into a shell of ethereal benevolence encircling the globe.

  Ward?

  “Yes?”

  Had Timothy spoken his name? Had he replied?

  Here’s how things are. He’d been enmeshed in the beauty of the vision granted him, too caught up in wonder to notice particular patterns. Now it was as if Timothy had dropped a filter over his eyes, or removed one. Not real time either, this, but rapid-fire visions of cruelty unfolding out of the recent past and manifesting at that moment throughout the world, deaths and manglings in the name of noble or venal causes, the sufferings of victims, the grievings of family and friends, the brain warps and justifications of perpetrators acting alone or in concert. He saw a man and a woman, faces ghastly normal, planting explosives in a subway station; the life-threads of twenty luckless people being drawn to one moment and then cut in the noise and meat-mangle of detonation; its tremor heard in the locked bodies of the young couple who had done it, her with her eyes on the clock and her legs tight around him in the hotel bed as she frantically clutched handfuls of tufted hair, him feeling drenched in shit and blood at the dull broomph, his enthusiasm having steadily dwindled as the plan had gone forward, until now he felt trapped in and forever tied to the monstrous woman beneath him. And he saw men in silk suits whose beefy nods and ruby-studded fingers set in motion a dance of acts that flared outward through the world, rippling here and there ceaselessly, an exchange of money, a theft, a mugging, the sinking of thin steel beneath marked skin upon millions of arms, the rush of violent pleasure, and sometimes more, into their veins. He saw armies shouting words he could not
understand pour righteously into places that hated them, rip clothes from caught women, unlimb their babies before their eyes, hold the weeping women down and force their penises into them, and hack their heads from their shoulders for refusing to disgorge secrets they didn’t know. Ward was staggered by the sheer weight of scheming and hatred that echoed and re-echoed throughout the world, distilled thereafter into print and broadcast, endless biffs and boffs and brawls bleeding onto front pages and spewing from talking heads on the tube. Worse, each vision delved sufficiently deep into the lives of those involved, that easy condemnation of this or that faction proved impossible.

  “Stop it, Timothy, please,” Ward pleaded. “Shut it out. I can’t look at it any more.”

  And here’s how things might be. His guardian’s words were as balm to his soul, zinging out across the world in a shuttered eyelid’s blink precisely along that shell of ethereal benevolence Ward had only thought he’d imagined before. As one, the planet’s billions paused, looked up, bloomed everywhere a colorful wash of guardianship. The first tentative steps into faith breezed by in time-lapse until Ward saw, without exception, the full engagement of earth’s populace in the strengthened companions by their sides and the falling away of tried-and-false patterns of behavior in favor of new ones. He saw the will rise, saw it in the dance of the guardianship, and watched that will translate itself into action—to revere all religions and to love them for the beauteous contraptions they were, but not to kill or die for them; to bend every human effort to control the size of the planet’s population and to provide for every stork-delivered baby dropped into this world; to bring new modes of being to outmoded nations, that each of them willingly—and as one, racked with fever and ranting, rises at last to the pure sun-washed sweat of health—beat their bellicosity into appropriately submissive service to the greater good. But as wondrous as these sights were to Ward’s madly enhanced eyes, it wasn’t the change in macro-behavior that touched his heart so much as the individual shifts that gave rise to it. The crusty old senator from New England who realized how ineptly comical he’d become, found the wisest woman in his state, threw his support to her, and saw her seated in what was swiftly becoming what the Senate had always proclaimed itself to be, but hadn’t been for generations, an august body worthy of reverence and respect; the abusive husband and his submissive wife, who together cast off their shells of sickness and found beneath all the pain a love that took, and grew, and made an interwovenness firm enough to depend on, but flexible enough to thrive on, an inspiration to those who hitherto had felt nothing but upset and rancor over what they had seen and heard of the couple’s doings; the lesbian lover who renounced all jealousy, indeed encouraged her mate to explore and enjoy anything and everything, however beyond the pale it might appear, that made her happy, who in fact persuaded whole nations in her book No Possessions that no good ever came of stifling the guardian-inspired urges of a loved one; the military man who, in an effort to save a crumbling empire, brought his world counterparts together in their blinding uniforms, all different, and discovered by the time the weekend was over that these brothers were soulmates, that weapons indeed were superfluous, that all he and they really needed was an annual weekend together to boast over past glories, to mock-wrestle naked in mud, and later to wander off in twos and threes to explore deep delights they’d scorned in a previous life but found they loved in this one—all these and millions more, interwoven yet distinct to his heightened vision, did Ward thrill to, the individual and net effect of the embrace of beings who had too long been invisible, but who had once, before the beginning of memory, guided humankind about the earth. It was with dismay, but a dismay that dimmed but slightly the hum and buzz of his brain, that Ward watched the reversal of Timothy’s magic then, the planet once again enwrapped over curved horizons, the returning opacity of roofs and minds, the slow silent hydraulic collapse of the landscape about him and beneath him, and the regather of Timothy’s body, unsurfing, unfanning, unsnaking, until he was once more hovering in his more-or-less usual state.

  Turning to Timothy, Ward tried to speak but found he couldn’t. The rock beneath was making his buttock bones ache, so he shifted about, leaning more weight now on the right than the left.

  Really truly possible.

  “I, um . . . I don’t know whether to shout for joy or throw a fit.”

  Do neither.

  “Yeah, okay.” He rose, woozy on his feet. Too much oxygen to the brain maybe, forest rich with wind, sunshine falling like gold pieces through the trees. “Well I guess I’ll go find the others. Timothy?”

  What?

  “Am I still thirteen?”

  Sure.

  Ward shook his head. “Part of me sure doesn’t feel thirteen any more.”

  Still miss the old ways?

  “You bet I do. But I guess it seems, I don’t know, kind of childish. I have a feeling June and Grampa don’t have a big problem with my running off like that. I also have a feeling the three of us have some serious things to discuss this afternoon.” He headed for the path that led back to the treehouse, needles snapping as he walked.

  Timothy swirled like lightning about the perimeter of the clearing, curved bands of color behind a spermiculate head. Leaven with levity, he said, skidding to a cartoon halt beside Ward, bunching folds of air like endless rug. And remember, their guardians need time to grow. Not as strong as yours.

  The more he thought about it, passing squirrels with claws frozen in tree bark, the more sense that made. June had lost Jeannie for years, had (in those early days) only a strong belief in her, but no sight or sound until today. Grampa had enjoyed Esme for many years but only as a muse, a constricted if worthy view of her. Would one or both of them revert? Would June’s parents, when they got wind of what had happened today, let her return tomorrow, or ever? And was he perhaps as mad as his grampa, totally over the edge at this point, all delusion and nothing in his future but straitjackets and electroshock?

  Nuts to that. Timothy had split and was filtering himself through brambles and bushes to either side along the path. Patches of long, soft, beaten-down grass mixed with dry brown creases where he walked.

  “Very funny.”

  Halfway back, he sensed the goodness coming toward him before he heard or saw anything. Then a glimmer of Jeannie bubbled up like a brief burst of daydream ahead, then vanished, advance guard, and he knew that June at least was not far behind. When he rounded a bend and saw her coming toward him, sandals and shorts and shirt and beautiful, wide-open face, its echo in Jeannie above and about her, he wanted to cry at how perfect she was.

  She ran to him, slowing as she neared. “Are you—?”

  “Yes,” Ward said. “Everything’s fine.” He drew her close, hugged her, felt the long warmth of her against his body, smelled and kissed the delicious aroma of her neck. Her arms tightened around him and he squeezed the air from her, then eased up. His right hand glided over her back, her waist, her buttocks, found the warm downy skin of her left thigh, feeling how good she felt.

  “We were worried about you.” Her voice softened at his ear, kissed his lobe.

  “Me too.” Ward kissed her cheek, her lips, long and lingering, then he hugged her again. “But there’s no need for worry anymore.” In the air, Jeannie was meshing with Timothy again, sunlight playing amazing games with their malleable spirit-flesh. “You still have those condoms?”

  He felt her smile against his cheek, the to-and-fro circular nod brushing her face against his. Ward backed off just enough to get a hand on her hip pack zipper and ease it slowly open.

  *****

  Carver Haskell’s life had shifted from nightmare to dream all in an instant.

  First there’d been the bruising hell of Tom’s fists pummeling his face, the liquor bottle a dull bone digging into his thigh where his son’s leg had trapped it. Then, through a crowd of faceless fascinated used-to-knows had walked the miracle, angels ballooning everywhere and that novelist with an Amazon towering
over him and the two kids with their odd angels and Mindy Rutherford, lovely Mindy—though he’d never realized how lovely before—with hers. Tom, backlit in sunlight, had flared out an angel of his own, and even as he marveled at how like distant memories of baby Tom it seemed, the faint gold gleam at the far end of his dark tunnel hurtled forward and through him and out into the air, sweet metallic vomitus of his soul with the eyes of a heartful android, a Metropolis robot-lady though he’d never seen that movie, only stills. Now here he lay, sloshing in Mindy’s bathtub, not a stitch on, while she, kneeling on a throw rug with her sleeves rolled up, soaped his body, her fingers now on his penis but not an ounce of sensuality in the act, just this distant benevolence as if she were bestowing her kindness on someone else and it was his privilege merely to witness it.

  “No need to thank me,” she said, but the way she said it made him notice he’d been droning “thank you thank you” for God knows how long. He willed himself to stop and the phrase trickled to a halt. Up where the tiles misted from the water’s warmth, his golden lady lazed, still full-size but see-through and no longer audible like she’d been when the writer fellow had been by. He started to ask if Mindy could see her, but then he remembered already asking that. She couldn’t, not anymore, just like he couldn’t see hers, though Mindy insisted she was there next to her.

  “Carver, you sure got yourself in some state,” Mindy said, like a mom for a moment but he didn’t mind. A wavy strand of hair fell in her face but she whipped it up and back with a toss of her head.