A Flight of Storks and Angels

by Robert Devereaux

  “We’ll get to the how of what has happened here a bit later in the broadcast, but now it’s time for the what. I think there’s no easy way of announcing the subject matter of today’s show without seeming to be a madman or a fool, but as Othello once wanted ‘ocular proof,’ so I believe it best to show you straight off one example, my own, of the phenomenon in question.” Here, obviously prearranged, the camera pulled slowly back until Clancy, beaming and waving to beat the band, shared the screen with Luke. “It’s my pleasure to introduce Clancy, my companion in infancy and my guardian angel.”

  They were awesome, the two of them. Maya felt a rush of love inside her, a cry of joy. At the same time a tiny laugh escaped her at how comical Clancy looked. And, what was odd, she thought she heard that laugh echoing over her headset. Could shock induce laughter? she wondered.

  Um, maybe not. Mister Monopoly looked pensive.

  “Isn’t he beautiful?” she said.

  “More than beautiful,” said Arch Haslun. “The man’s a fucking genius. It’s Harvey all over again. Oh sweet Jesus, the wonder of television!”

  *****

  He drifted in through the foliage, finding paths on automatic because he knew them so well, then moving deep in along byways never taken. Esme kept behind but close enough for comfort, not saying a word. The ground felt peculiar under his feet, like remembrance of pine-covered paths. Then he realized he was wearing his canvas shoes, forgotten for ages in their closet, the shoes he’d first used to learn the forest floor.

  Old growth back here. Trees taller, closer together; more dense and spreading, the heads that swayed above in a wind that did not fall far enough to lay the lightest hand upon Grampa’s face. The only breeze he felt was generated by his incessant walking. He wondered that he wasn’t yet stooping under angled trunks, or brushing his way through an interweave of thin branches. His steps seemed attuned to open walkways, or else the forest pulled away from him as he walked, not wanting to touch the tainted.

  You’re not tainted.

  Her words were soft but startling. He feinted in the direction of giving her a look but it was too much effort. How could he not be tainted? Where grief was expected and awaited, there was only selfish relief: Nora was dead and Ted Jameson was free. He thought he’d been free before, a house in the trees, a limitless canvas upon which to paint word pictures that pleased a gratifyingly distant horde of readers, more riches than a man of his simple tastes could ever hope to need. But now the last albatross had slipped from around his neck. Nora was dead, and he felt glad and hated himself for feeling so.

  No need for hatred, Ted. “I’m okay, you’re okay,” he muttered, bitter venom catching at his throat. But all he could see was her in the window, a wave he’d thought was a gesture of love as he broached the slope of the lawn, his visits to that room, the touch of a hand to Nora’s face—all of that so deep with longing for her, so deep into the pain of separation. Yet it seemed, after all, to judge from the relief her forward-projected empty window held, to have been no more than an elaborate charade. He despised her, he resented the anchor she had become, and all his reputed insight into the human psyche was shown up as just so much rubbish. He was alone in the world, always had been. Everyone on this sorry planet was alone, walking through illusions of community, but waking far too infrequently to the truth of essential isolation. They all marched, day by empty day, to their graves, and no amount of mindless activity could stave off what lay beyond that final moment.

  Above, a bird mocked him. He stopped now to touch a tree trunk, same damned message at his fingertips as there always was. But this time it came through differently. A stiff scrunch of grayish bark buffered the living tree, as his whorled skinpads kept flesh, blood, and bone locked up inside. Delusion of contact. No contact. He brought his other hand up, pressing them treeward as hard as he could, so that ridges of bark dug into his palms. If only he and this tree could pass beyond the buffering, blend bark with skin, allow what lay beneath to slip by and meld, flesh to xylem, blood to sap, phloem to bone. He set his forehead to the tree and at once felt foolish, pulled back, stared at his palms, brushed off black bark-crumbs. One lip of skin had been opened on his left palm. He licked at the trickle of blood, cleaning it. Man’s but a bare, forked animal. Yeah, no shit.

  You’d better find a place to sit down.

  “Oh? And pray tell, my Esme, why is that?”

  It’s on its way.

  He stifled a laugh. Speaking in riddles now.

  It’s not a riddle, Ted.

  “Yeah, you’re so damned solicitous, so bent to do me good. I suppose you must really love me, right?”

  I do.

  “But maybe your love is no more real than mine was, a lie all the way through. Maybe what seems like a deeply held conviction is just a thin skin of delusion covering, I don’t know, a wish to have me gone so you can fly back to heaven or wherever the fuck you come from, dear sweet Esme, and get on with your life. I bet I’m just as much a weight around your neck as my Nora was about . . . as my Nora was . . .” But his throat had begun to clutch and he had to laugh in self-defense at the feelings beginning to radiate out of him, they were so fast and so numerous and so mercilessly jagged. His hands flailed before his face but Esme guided him to soft ground and he stumbled upon a root, falling but catching himself, and then the raw grief began to wash over him.

  *****

  “Sarah Haskell’s ready, Doctor,” Nurse Cruz had said. “Coming on quickly for a primigravida. And I heard about those others last night. It must be an epidemic, because I swear this one too was going on and on about the stork before she caught me gawking at her and clammed up.”

  And of course Laura had said nothing to Maria Cruz to suggest that she wasn’t the least bit surprised. But when they and Nurse Pyne arrived in the birthing room—Sarah on the cusp of a contraction and fully effaced and dilated—a critical mass of the converted came about, and Laura again was pleased to find that the amazement of the nurses there to assist her in no way diminished the speed and precision of their professional ministrations; Nurse Cruz swore once in Spanish and Nurse Pyne made a roller-coaster groin-drop whoah! but then they rallied. Time enough to explain, to get to know their guardians, later. Now there was a child readying to be born, right occiput posterior from the feel of it, the top of its head engaged at Sarah’s pelvic inlet just inside the cervix.

  The contraction ended and she asked Sarah how she was doing. Sarah, her face sweaty and her hair slicked across her forehead, gasped and nodded. Tom Haskell laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder and she gripped it. Her companion angled forward to murmur words of assurance, still in the shape of Sarah’s third-grade teacher but aged into wisdom and cronehood.

  Beautiful, Topsy exclaimed, loud enough for a laugh to move through the room. He waved to Tom’s cherub and to Sarah’s wise-eyed woman, and for a moment their guardians triangulated, each somehow looking straight into the eyes of the others. Then they, and their charges after them, glanced toward the ceiling where a black-feathered stork tufted with white circled long, soft, and lazy overhead, like a long-bladed fan that never seemed quite to come to a stop, its dark eyes gleaming goodness, its beak needled through the knot of a white weighted bundle of swaddling, out of the folds of which poked two fists, two tiny feet, and a flat swirl of light hair atop the hint of a head.

  Sarah’s next contraction, a beaut, brought them back to the bed. They were coming quicker now, so quick that Sarah scarcely had time to recover her breath before the next one was upon her. Laura suggested an episiotomy but Sarah again refused it with a shake of the head, and soon the bulging of the perineum—Laura massaging its tautness as she coached Sarah to push—gave way to glimpses of the child’s scalp at the apex of each contraction and then, as the baby slowly negotiated the birth canal, visible always and becoming increasingly so.

  “Your child’s crowning,” she said. “Can you see it?”

  And Sarah, glancing at the mirror angled over Laura’s left
shoulder, gasped, “Yes!”

  “Time to push, Sarah. Time to push like you’ve never pushed before.”

  *****

  Archer Haslun, roving like a lean and hungry predator behind his engineers, was elated. Luke’s live displays of reportage always made for riveting TV, but Archer harbored a slight distaste for public probings into private misery, however compassionate Luke managed to make them. Give him instead the kind of documentary that Luke only trotted out once in a blue moon, the kind he’d once referred to as his Emperor-has-no-clothes series. In 1989, there’d been that gathering of UFO devotees, garbed in the tackiest of space gear, at the extravagant and well appointed pool-and-patio expanse of an eccentric, unnamed, and conspicuously absent Hollywood personality. Early ‘91 had seen the earnestness and spurs-out hostility of an Arizona debate—devolving by swift degrees into a verbal cockfight—between the hollow earth contingent and the Flat Earth Society. Luke did not mock, neither openly nor with inflective eyebrow, those he interviewed, but committed completely for that hour to the truth of their delusions, insightfully probing, going deep for the pearls of psychic opalescence lesser reporters had no notion even existed.

  But never had Luke tackled a crowd this size, nor one that came across so wholesome in every other respect. And never before had he directly professed to believe the warp of his subjects’ fantasies, a daring gambit and one so far that seemed to be paying off. He’d collared a guy, after that amazing Harveyesque opening, Gregerson, stiff bristle of whitish hair atop a flushed face, cool-blue eyes, owned the ice cream parlor, sixty maybe and a bear, but Marine-trim, Luke calling him Mister Gregerson like he’d probably done when he was a kid: an amazing conversation, partly a mad celebration of non-existent angels, partly a slice of pure American nostalgia for small-town life, and entirely a heart-wrenching and paradoxical snippet of video about Luke Petrakis’ kinship with and love for this man, even as he exposed him to national ridicule.

  “You’re putting me on, right?” Maya was saying, her voice an annoyance over Luke’s trained tones. “You must be seeing all four of them, sharp as a bell.”

  “No problem, Miss Redding,” Archer said broadly. “We copy. Lucky Luke delivers again.”

  “All right then.”

  Perky little lezzie. Luke liked his van jockeys to play along on these jaunts. Something to do, he’d said, with keeping his mind totally open and respectful toward his subjects’ psychosis, giving them their due.

  Now Luke was moving, the camera catching glimpses of what looked like a courthouse across the way and a gazebo or bandstand in the distance. From blanket to blanket he went, dipping into this family and that, some he’d known, some newcomers since he’d left town. He gave them their time on TV, shared their glee over the angels he and they pretended with uncanny conviction were hovering over and behind and around them, then moved on with a blessing and a wave. Recurrent were the names Ward and June, as also the name of T. E. Jameson, the fantasy writer, and without saying so directly it became clear that these three—and surely Jameson, reputedly a nutcase however brilliant his books, had to be the prime mover—were the instigators of the mass delusion that had seized this town. The children were apparently on site, and if Luke’s meanderings took on any form, as they inevitably did, it was in the unhurried direction of an encounter with them.

  Epstein was shaking his head, so Archer went over to him. Hand on shoulder, something wrong? But then he saw Epstein’s face, stun and smile and admiration there, the gleam of gold at his left earlobe. Two thumbs in the air, a slow shake of the head. Fucking awesome. Archer patted the young man’s shoulder and nodded.

  Luke had found one of the kids. June. Pretty girl, maybe fourteen. Reminded Archer of a childhood sweetheart he’d had, violinist, kisses like warm buttercups. “So how exactly did all of this start?” Luke asked, after the poor girl introduced her parents and someone named Jeannie who seemed, from the way they gestured, to be standing at the edge of the blanket. Archer, amazed at how suggestible he was, almost rubbed his eyes: He’d thought it astounding, Jimmy Stewart’s mimed conjuration of an invisible rabbit in Harvey, but when you put whole hosts of Elwood P. Dowds on the screen, it was almost terrifying how ready one’s mind was to go along, to slip into their delusion like a hot bath. Someone needs to rescue Luke, he thought.

  The girl was speaking. No, it hadn’t started with T. E. Jameson so much as with Ward, his grandson, but then it had taken the three of them coming together to set things off. Archer began to question Luke’s judgment, wondering if through Maya he should nudge him away from this child. It was one thing to allow adults to expose themselves to public mockery, quite another to dwell on a little girl’s foray into lunacy in such a way that her life was bound to be forever dogged by it.

  But then there was some commotion in the background, a few pointed fingers and a purposeful drift rightward of those previously seated. An elderly woman in tennis shoes came up to June’s parents and excitedly announced, “Anne, George, it’s the mayor!” Her voice was off-mike but loud enough to spike in under June’s reply so that she finished her sentence early and glanced around.

  “Let’s see what’s going on,” Luke said, an easy hand turning June and guiding her, camera following, toward the elderly woman. But her back was already receding, an odd waddle-hop to her steps, no time to linger, I’m late, I’m late, no pocket watch in paw but Archer wouldn’t have been surprised. “Mister Lockridge,” Luke asked June’s father, “what did she say?”

  “It was about Mayor Cosgrove and her husband doing something very loving and beautiful. I don’t know.” He clearly wanted to talk to Luke—who wouldn’t?—but he was also clearly drawn by the magnetism of the crowd. He had the most wonderful smile on his face, not vapid but abrim with vitality and good will. “Excuse us,” he said, and he and his family hastened after the elderly woman.

  “Let’s follow them, shall we?” Luke asked his viewers rhetorically, as if they had any say in the matter, and as if Lucky Luke had ever failed to pursue a main chance like this one. Some stubborn or lazy folks kept to their spots as he passed them, shouting out their hellos, but the rest of the people appeared, as Luke noted, to be converging on an area near the gazebo. Archer thought he glimpsed a man in the distance, naked. But it happened so fast there was no way to be sure it wasn’t a—

  Epstein hit the arm of the engineer beside him. “Did you catch that streaker?” Nope, he hadn’t. Where?

  “Maya,” said Archer, as the crowd parted like knifed butter for Luke, “did you see a—?”

  “A what, Mister Boss Man?” came her reply, but there were suddenly no words in Archer’s mouth, no thoughts but oh-my-god-no in his head. His eyes stuck to the monitors arrayed before him, most of which were angled in and down upon a blanket, murmurs of delight issuing from the crowd that edged it, and on that blanket, spilling into millions of homes worldwide, a pudgy woman lay atop a sprawled man whose face was covered by the hairy split of her buttocks (my God had he just seen that?) and whose genitals she was doing her best to gag down. “Sweet Jesus,” Luke Petrakis was saying in a voice flooded with feeling, “look at their angels, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful!”

  Archer’s mind raced, going nowhere, larynx paralyzed. But then the thoughts coalesced. Gotta stop it, I’m chief engineer here, I’m in charge, gotta stop it. A phone rang in the distance, then another, and another. “Epstein,” he heard himself say, then engaged behind it, not recognizing his voice, “kill it, kill the feed, go to a commercial, go to something, anything!”

  And then Epstein was fumbling at the controls, clumsy fingers letting one more headbob of filth sneak by before the screens went brain-gray and then a promo for some talk show cut in. Archer couldn’t focus on it. So much verbal and visual noise, none of it mattering much any more. And he had a feeling a few of those incessantly ringing phones were meant for him.

  *****

  Without Esme to comfort him, he might have suffered less. He might have stifled th
e pain, denied it, let it in a trickle at a time over weeks. But Esme was sunblock. She buffered him against the worst of it and, in so doing, emboldened him to open himself completely all at once.

  He clawed at the earth, the moss green and moist and clotted under his nails. He rose and plunged into growth, pushing back when it rebuffed him, snapping branches from young trees, uprooting them when he could, leaving them as so much kindling behind him. And he bellowed and roared, hurling skyward sustained ululations of protest he would not have imagined a human being capable of a week before. But Esme’s soothing let that happen. That thin layer of acceptance and balm she provided both extended his limits and enraged him further. He longed to transcend his cage of flesh, wrench and bend the bars free, and whicker them outward like tossed daggers until they gashed so deep into whatever Prime Force lay beyond, that It hurt as much as he did. So close did Esme hover, so all-surrounding; yet the disconnectedness wracked him through and through.

  He saw it all: the pallid love of his parents, good souls but discomfortable in their bodies; the friends that flickered and died, brief feints at camaraderie, and then memories only; his time with Nora, a rush of love that had settled too soon into ruts, had ushered his precious Laura into the world—but she was grown and gone in a flash, no longer the dear child he hardly remembered, but adolescent and then adult, more distant in some ways from having been his daughter; then Nora’s fall into catalepsy, his retreat into worlds of his own imagining, contact minimized, even his hugs for Joydrop and Ward and June no more than alien gestures that carried and did not carry meaning. He had held his wife once more. He had witnessed the mesh of her angel with his, divinely wept for their intimacy, for the re-animation of her soul. And then, as suddenly as she’d appeared, she was gone, the memory of their hours together fading even now, leaving him bereft.