“He’s just excited we’re almost there.”
“If he could manage to bottle that excitement—and I hope like heck he will—we’d make a mint!” The cheer had filtered back into Grampa’s voice, and Ward nodded toward Timothy, whose hand was clapped over his mouth as he swam at a slower pace through the back surface of the driver’s seat, his eager eyes lit like votive candles.
The big day had finally arrived: Tuesday, September twenty-first, nearly four weeks since they’d borrowed the nimbus-gray Studebaker Champion from Callie Severance and headed east. They had had a few close calls early in the trip across country. But being wombed up, day after day, mile after mile, in this sturdy, smooth-running, lovingly maintained relic of an era long past had quickly begun an amazing process of transformation in them, a process that had immeasurably improved their chances of remaining free, even after those inevitable times they had to stop for gas or meals or lodging. They had sensed and quickly begun to savor a new unity, a fluid strength that built upon itself and made it plain, almost without words, that their angels while asserting more of what made them delightfully unique were also part of an encompassing, embracing whole. Folks they chanced upon—in small cafes, at early-houred filling stations, and behind randomly chosen doors at dusk in out-of-the-way places—increasingly bloomed less abruptly and far more intricately and indelibly than had been the case early on. Less back-slippage, they suspected, and almost no chance of being reported once they were gone, Grampa’s frank plea falling on highly receptive ears. By the time they reached the Catskills, found Grampa’s friends’ well-stocked and perfectly isolated cabin, and settled in for the remaining few weeks, they’d gained a sense of purpose and a serenity about their success that no amount of fear, uncertainty, or doubt could assail.
A mini-van shoofed by on the left.
Grampa pointed. “There’s the skyline.”
Ward took June’s hand. She was craning her neck to see, Jeannie beside her with the most loving gaze on her face. “Where’s the UN?” she asked.
“Not visible yet. I’ll let you know.”
“Are we gonna wow them, Grampa, or what?” said Ward. There was a sweet edge of frenzy to his voice, delicious and bubbly throughout his entire body.
“That’s the plan.” Grampa slapped the steering wheel and laughed. “Opening plenary session, we stroll right in on the force of our charm, trailing a small army of people who’ve come up to stop us but changed their minds, we wave to the thousands of representatives and the same number of angels sweeping out above the suited multitudes—and won’t that be a sight!—”
June said, “And then we give our speeches.”
Oh boy oh boy oh boy—!
“Sorry, Grampa.” Ward tried to shush his companion, but the quietest Timothy could go was a low drone, mostly drowned out by the steady hum of rubber on roadway. The New York skyline was a marvelous mix of lofty aspiration and geometric jumble.
“Yes, then come the speeches—June, followed by Ward, then me. After which, we formally request and are granted sanctuary, we camp out there in the General Assembly for a very interesting couple of weeks, and then we go home—”
“We fly home,” said June.
“I stand corrected, we fly home and resume our normal lives, though if I’m not mistaken, our definition—and the world’s definition—of ‘normal’ is about to enjoy a series of swift and positive revisions. Look there.”
“Where?” Ward strained forward.
“The Secretariat Building. That tall thin frameless mirror on the river, the one with the brilliant gleam.”
“It’s all tall,” said Ward. “Everything’s gleaming.”
“We’re too far away,” June protested.
“It’s gone,” said Grampa. “The road’s veering west again. I’ll point it out when it swings back into view. Forty, fifty blocks north of the UN, as I recall, there’s an underpass. We emerge from that, we should be able to see it fairly well.”
Ward relaxed into his seat. He missed his mom and he missed Joydrop. The two-minute call they’d chanced a week before from a Quik-Stop phone booth an hour’s drive east of the cabin had merely whetted his homesickness. “And don’t forget Mom and Joy and June’s parents.”
“Yes, yes,” Grampa assured. “Soon as our speeches are over and we get a break from whatever follows, we demand a phone. You two get to invite, my expense, anyone you like to come to New York. And I, at long last, get to call my agent, deliver this disk—” he tapped his shirt pocket so they could hear the hard plastic, “—request that he bring my three favorite editors and three freshly minted, unread copies of Oedipus Aroused into the General Assembly, to be mulled, marveled over, and bid upon by these three wise, powerful, and, most importantly, bloomed professionals, who will be reading it with angeled eyes, as will my readership by the time spring rolls around and our efforts here have started their exponential spread.”
“But what if my parents try to drag me away?” June’s hand tightened in Ward’s.
Grampa gave a concerned look over his right shoulder, then returned his gaze to the highway ahead and the trucks and cars shoofing by on the left. “Bringing pain to your parents, no matter how much assurance Ward’s mom has tried to give them, has been the one thing I regret about taking you from Auroville. It was clear from the radio broadcast we heard driving through the Midwest that this hasn’t been an easy time for them; and I hope they’ll forgive me. But for all the trauma and humiliation the people of Auroville endured last month, I have no doubt—given the changes you and I have undergone, the deepening and strengthening sway of our angelic power—that they, and Joydrop, are going to bloom anew, and that, looking at our situation in that new light, they will have no qualms about letting you stay for as long as it takes us to do what needs doing.”
“I love you both,” she said, “but I miss them a whole bunch.” Jeannie soothed her, her whispered words soft and gentle as a fluting brook from where Ward sat.
“I know you do, June,” said Grampa. “Just a few more days and they’ll be sweeping you into their arms.” Grampa turned south on Harlem River Drive. “Homestretch.” A new mood: You two have your notes?”
June waved her banded pack of three-by-five cards and Ward touched his on the seat next to him and said yes. He thought it strange how in-drawn he’d been up until the day June returned from camp, and now here he was—assuming the next hour ran as smoothly as it did in Grampa’s imaginings—about to address pretty much the whole world through its many representatives, roughly seven hundred from what he’d read, Grampa’s inflated figure notwithstanding.
“One last rehearsal?” Grampa said, only half serious.
“Oh come on, Grampa,” said Ward, “there’s no time and we don’t need it.” They’d been drilled, prompted, coached into the earth, speechifying out across Ken and Eve’s pond to rapt frogs and dragonflies. Listen to me, he’d say, do as I tell you. Later, when you’ve learned the tricks, you can ignore my advice, and trust Timothy and Jeannie. This isn’t a casual chat, it’s elevated speech, and yet it must appear—and be—natural.
“A quickie,” said June.
“Fire away, June my lovely,” said Grampa.
Unbanding her cards, she wristed the rubber band and fanned the multicolored cards out like a magician coaxing a volunteer to choose one. “Hiya, folks.”
Ward laughed.
“Good start!” said Grampa.
June eased back against her seat and perorated toward a rusted scow on the river. “We claim today no nation but the nation of Hope. We’re emissaries from that state only and we hope (no pun intended)—”
“That’s it, girl,” said Grampa, striking the steering wheel gleefully. “Give those poor beleaguered translators a collective coronary.”
“—you will offer our new nation-state membership in this august body—” Jeannie whispered something and June’s eyes lit up “(though it be September) and that you’ll then embrace and actively espouse dual citizenshi
p, all however many hundred of you there are. Blah blah blah. The three of us came together—”
“Need one more blah in there,” said Ward.
“Nope,” June countered, “rule of three. Where was I? We came together, magic stuff happened—”
“Put that on a bumpersticker!” said Grampa.
“—then the bad TV thing happened and we did too many days of a cross-country car chase; only nobody, thank God, chased us. We hung out in a cabin, blah blah blah—oh now this is my favorite part—we did not, as the news reported it, hide from the world, but we hid the world from us, hid it so we could concentrate on what we had, undistracted by the raucous noise of its unbelief. Then, well,” June gave the cards a fast flutter, closed them up, and banded them, “blah blah blah blah blah (rule of five), it goes downhill from there.”
“Bravo!” said Ward.
“It’s ‘Brava’ for a lady, Ward, and well she deserves it. Your turn, my awesome grandson.”
Play it short.
“No fair, Timothy gave away my game.”
“I didn’t hear him. Did you, June?”
“Not much I didn’t.” He couldn’t recall June looking so beautiful as she did at this moment.
“Okay, here goes: My name is Ward, I’m really quite young—” (inspiration) “—And something else you ought to know about me, I’m very well hung.”
June groaned. “That’ll go over big.”
“You say that to the General Assembly, little fella, and they’ll hang you from the dome. And me’n’ June’ll help them do it!”
Ward went on: “The UN was young once, As young as a youth, These angels you’re hearing, Embody the truth. So let us stay by you, Oh let us hang out, And let us erase, That one last little doubt. We mean what we say, And we say what we mean, um, An elephant’s faithful, One hundred perseen . . . t.”
“Lousy poetry—”
“Rotten poetry,” said June.
“—but I guess you hit the highlights. Tough act to follow, Ward, and me without recourse to notes. Ah, this is the underpass, if I’m not mistaken.” The sky vanished and the river. The dingy, artificially lit tunnel curved rightward.
“C’mon, Grampa. It’s your turn.”
“Yeah.”
“Hold your horses, kids. I’m marshalling my forces—a pun before your time, I’m afraid. All right. I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” Then a rectangle of sunlight and river-glint curved into view. The Studebaker’s winged medallion burst through it, and Ward saw unmistakably the tall flat reflective face of the Secretariat Building, many streets distant and obscured some by a bridge—Grampa said it was the Queensboro Bridge—but no less impressive for that and growing more so as they approached. “Ah, she’s so lovely. The entire complex is majestic. We’ll have to hustle into the building we want—it squats in front, you can only see a curved corner of it—but when it’s safe to, we’ll take a tour. We’ll take many. But okay, the gist of my speech.” His voice went soft. “UN, my UN, faltering gal of my best hope, I was seventeen when you were founded; had a brother and a good friend and a whole lot of older boys who ran my high school when I got to ninth grade die in Europe or the Pacific. I lived as if I expected to die there too, and I was ready to go; but then peace came and you gave new hope while you fumbled along doing good, being ineffectual, but always holding high the beacon of freedom and human rights and cooperation among those who otherwise would have gone to war to bloody out their differences.”
Ward could see the UN drawing near, slowly, so slowly as if across the years. Beyond the bridge another briefer underpass vanished it. And then there it was again in all its majesty.
“Today, the words we speak don’t matter. I who live by my words say that in all candor. What matters is that you listen to your angels, listen to their words, follow their promptings, allowing the three of us to live among you for a span of days, helping you strengthen the newly apparent bond between you and your deepest selves, until it becomes so strong that your discussions and decisions are informed by it, and your return to your native lands serves to seed and similarly enliven everyone privileged enough to encounter you. If you will only grant us this opportunity, some small corner of this great hall to sit and observe and catalyze . . . Jesus, this is better than the speech I’ve been rehearsing for two weeks.”
Ward put a hand on his grampa’s shoulder. “Follow your own advice: Trust Esme and throw away your notes. You’re going to wow them, Grampa. I know it.”
Grampa glanced back, then forward again. He smiled, and his eyes were moist. “A gentle sustained wow will be sufficient. A silent detonation in the heart followed by day after day of glow and spread. That, and a convenient shower, will do me fine. Ah, 49th Street.” Turning off, he negotiated the blocks, taking a left-handed way about, hitting Second Avenue, then left on 42nd Street and left again onto United Nations Plaza. “Grab your packs, stow your notes, and get ready to kiss this baby goodbye.”
The next many moments were a vividly confusing time for Ward, so full of sense impressions he could scarcely remember living through them. Grampa jerked to a double-park, killed the engine, and sidled over to the passenger side, grabbing his suitcase from the floor and yanking the door open. June and Jeannie were out with the floral case in June’s hand, and Timothy urged him to hustle, his pack a drag at his hand. But he made it out into the noisy air and slammed the door behind him. The crowd buttered aside for them, their angels new and bright as billowing flowers to either side. Grampa, still strolling, put an arm about one of their early enthralled followers, and said, “Please park that Studebaker back there in a parking garage, bring me the key and the stub, or mail it to me, care of the UN, if they won’t let you in to see us. You know who we are?” The man nodded and stopped, a stricken look on his face, as Grampa hustled Ward and June along and the stream of crowd swallowed him and his statuesque guardian up. An official came toward them, stern-faced and perplexed. But then his features softened and a feathered angel enwrapped him like a banner, and he melted into the crowd. Seven doors lined up in front of them. They passed through the center door, spearhead on a human spear. A colorful needlepoint graced a wall to their left and Esme lofted by it. A wall curved in front of them, doors, guards looking hard, then melting as if they’d just realized a truth, holding open the doors for them to pass. A vast dome overhead, a man standing at a dais, a rustle of cloth and murmurs as all heads turned: Ward’s head bristled with the solid lightness of it.
And in that moment, the world began anew.
About the Author
From his vantage point in northern Colorado, Robert Devereaux attempts to improve the world a tiny bit through the magic of fiction. His first two novels, Deadweight and Walking Wounded, were released in the Dell Abyss horror line (1994, 1996). Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, made its controversial appearance in two editions, a top-notch, acid-free, illustrated hardcover from Dark Highway Press (1998) and a mass-market paperback from Leisure Books (2000). Two years later, Leisure Books brought out Caliban and Other Tales, five previously published stories plus a retelling of The Tempest from Caliban's point of view. Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes, a stand-alone sequel to his earlier Santa novel, came along in 2008. Robert's latest is Slaughterhouse High: A Tale of Love and Sacrifice (2010) from Eraserhead Press. You can contact him on Facebook or at www.robertdevereaux.com
Table of Contents
Part I. A Confluence of Faith
Chapter 1. Love Is a Rose of Snow
Chapter 2. Flesh, Faith, and Fame
Chapter 3. Easy Love, Tough Love
Chapter 4. How Three Turned Into Six and One
Part II. The Blooming of a Community
Chapter 5. Monday Afternoon in Downtown Auroville
Chapter 6. Town Meeting
Chapter 7. Auroville Finds Its Center
Chapter 8. Awakenings and Losses
Part III. Imperfections in a Glass Eye
Chapter 9. The Rest of the World Takes a Peek
Chapter 10. Bubbleburst
Chapter 11. Auroville Fallen
Chapter 12. Goatscape
Epilogue
Saturday Morning and Beyond
About the Author
A Flight of Storks and Angels Page 30
