He watched her go, then turned his attention to the emaciated man lying unconscious before him. He did the same hand gesture, like he was reaching down for something, though it was nowhere near as violent and sudden as it had been with Edward Sowles (there wasn’t a hurricane blowing into me; in fact, the cold breeze had gone away), and there was the man standing before him in that same watery sunlight and the picture of health. As before, alarms sounded out, and he was instantly surrounded by a doctor and nurses. Instead of trying to revive him, however, they simply turned off the monitors making the noise. The sudden silence slammed against me like a brick wall. Where was his family? Where were his friends?
“Thank you,” he said to Calliel, and then gazed back at his skeletal body. “Christ, look at me.”
“Makes you wonder why you held on so long, doesn’t it?” said Calliel.
“Where to now?” he asked.
“Look behind you.”
The liberated soul turned and looked. He laughed.
“Go on through,” said Calliel. “And welcome to Heaven, James.”
James laughed again and walked towards the window, disappearing before he got to it.
“Wait! Wait!” I yelled. “What did he see? Why didn’t he dissolve like the cop? Why didn’t you welcome him to Heaven? What’s the deal? For that matter, why didn’t you help that lovely old woman on the bus when it was her time, or Floyd’s? Wait! I want answers, damnit!”
Calliel, as before, left the room as though invisible. I found it interesting and telling that no one walked into the space he occupied, either in the room or up in ICU. Did he somehow give off spiritual DO NOT TRESPASS HERE signals that kept people from running into him? I needed to see more interactions to test my hypothesis.
He strode back to the elevator and pressed the button for the second floor. The doctor I’d just seen tending to James hurried in before the doors closed. He glanced at the lighted 2 on the panel and, satisfied, glanced back at Calliel, who said, “Howdy.”
The doc gave a short nod and turned back to face the closing doors. The lift surged upward.
So the doctor could see him here, in the elevator, but not in the room—? Did Calliel the angel possess invisibility superpowers he could call up at will? He walked out behind the doctor, who hurried up the hall to a nurses’ station, while Calliel turned left down a corridor, one I recognized as the one I’d been rolled down after my “suicide attempt.” At my door, which was closed, he composed himself, then muttered a short, angry prayer:
“Dear God, please grant me the strength to keep from tanning this asshole’s hide. Amen.”
He took a deep breath, then opened the door and stepped inside.
There I was in bed, newspaper in hand and reading glasses on, gaping at the man who had chucked me off the Ocean Beach Pier.
Chapter Eight
One Visit, Two Visits … Dead
~~*~~
NOW HERE’S the weird part. The scene before me wasn’t real. At least, not as I had come to know and define the term. “Reality” was this: that I was in fact flat on my back, unconscious, with a ventilator tube stuck in me. I’d taken water into my lungs and was struggling to breathe. That was “reality.”
But while on my back unconscious I had had a vivid, terrifying nightmare that started with me sitting up in bed, reading a newspaper, and staring at Calliel as he strode in. Floating over his shoulder, what I expected to see was me flat on my back, out like a lamp, with the breathing machine laboring to keep my sorry self alive. Somehow he’d walked straight into my dream.
I gawked as the me in bed gawked at Calliel. Everything seemed quite substantial and, well, real: the sun pouring into the room from the thin window to the right, the whir of an air conditioner, the quiet drone of the television on the opposite wall, the details in everything: the starched white linens, the disinfectant smell, the bathroom door slightly ajar, darkness peeking through the two-inch crack, the solid silver gleam of the security slides on the bed.
One of the great conceits of materialists is their utter confidence about what “reality” is, what makes it up, and therefore what “unreality” is. It is in fact foundational to their assertion that no supreme being exists, that the supernatural is bunk, that metaphysics is a fraud. “Reality” is what can be perceived and measured via the five senses, and nothing else. But here as Calliel’s spiritual balloon, and there, staring back at him in bed, all five of my senses were fully engaged, and I knew Calliel’s were too. He had walked straight into “my” so-called unreal dream, implying that it wasn’t solely mine; and the me separated from the me in bed, well, I had a perfect bird’s-eye view of the goings-on, with the setting exactly as the me in bed remembered it.
He closed the door behind him, then crossed his arms, staring angrily down at me.
Before the me in bed freaked out, which was just a second or two away, I—the I over Calliel’s shoulder—noted the headline on the paper’s front page:
SUSPECTS IN BRUTAL MURDER SOUGHT
Victim, 87, attacked as she walked home from bus stop
The paper was “real”; so too the headline. I know because I read the article accompanying that very headline after coming back to consciousness. I remember thinking that gang hadn’t been too far from my home when they did their horrific deed. But I didn’t know who the victim was then. Watching from over Calliel’s shoulder, my heart gave an involuntary jerk of pain. Nora Williamson seemed an entirely wonderful, gentle old woman. Who in their right mind could murder her? Jesus!
No. Not Jesus. Calliel! Why didn’t he walk her home that fateful night? He had given her very specific instructions: forget about her cane, he told her. Just keep walking. Don’t look back for it. Just keep walking. Don’t be afraid at the gates to her apartment complex—just go on through. She’ll be very afraid, he told her. Don’t let it stop her. Just go on through.
The me in bed tossed the paper aside and hit the red panic button on the control pad.
“HELP! HELP! INTRUDER! INTRUDER! OH GOD, IT’S THE ASSHOLE WHO THREW ME OFF THE PIER! HELP! SOMEBODY HELP ME! HELP ME!”
But—of course—no one was coming. It was only a dream, after all.
I continued yelling, continued jamming my finger into the panic button. Calliel watched, silent and still.
“What the hell is WRONG with this thing?” I bellowed, terrified. “Where the hell is everyone? HELP! HEEEEEEEEEEEEELP!”
A grin split his face. I stopped shrieking.
“You got quite a pair of pipes, Professor, I gotta give it to ya.” As I goggled at him, speechless, he prodded, “Go on! Hell, I’ve got all day! Hit me with your best! C’mon!”
I didn’t hit him with more shrieks; instead I reached for the glass of water on the tray over my thighs and heaved it as hard as I could at him. The glass—and I did a double-take—flew right through him and exploded against the door.
He gazed over his shoulder at the mess behind him. I was in fantasyland full on, and the rules had completely changed. The me in bed couldn’t accept what just happened, either.
Calliel’s grin died like the sun behind a building thunderstorm as he brought his attention back to me. He approached the bed slowly. Hovering over his shoulder, I knew what was coming and whimpered with fear. I didn’t want to go through it again.
“I had to break a colt once,” he said with impressively restrained calm. “Goddamn thing had been mistreated by its former owner, and it was my job to train it—or put it down.” He loomed over me. “What do you think I did?”
I hadn’t stopped punching the panic button, and just registered what he said. I snorted out something very stupid and pitiful: “I couldn’t give a fuck about some fucking horse, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY FUCKING ROOM! HELP! HEEEEEEEEEE—”
The room disappeared.
I was in pitch darkness: no light, no sound, no sensation, nothing. I panicked and flailed and tried to cry out, but my larynx didn’t want to work. The lightlessness was so total that it ached, but
infinitely beyond what nerves could possibly feel. I clenched my eyes—or thought I did. I couldn’t be sure. It was a horrific, pitiless, all-consuming void. It was … everything. It was … me.
I don’t know how long I was there. It didn’t matter. I wailed soundlessly, helplessly, fruitlessly.
To my dying day that moment clung to me like Superglue. From that day forward till not long before the plane I was in exploded in the sky, I could scarcely close my eyes for fear of returning to it. It took strong doses of prescribed sleep medication to overcome the gut-clenching anxiety it spawned. Unconsciousness was way too close to that hell, and I couldn’t risk going back.
I—the I watching in horrified fascination over Calliel’s shoulder—couldn’t look away. I tried. But the black terror I knew was coming to the me in bed kept me transfixed. I cried out in selfish sympathy. I watched as the me in bed dissolved away, a blank expression of directionless panic frozen on my face. The room faded for me as well, and black came at me from all sides. I bellowed, “Calliel, no—!”
—and found myself standing on the steps leading up to a large house.
I had a hat on, and adjusted the brim of it back and kicked my shoes against a step. Not shoes, no. Cowboy boots. I kicked the bottoms of them, and chunks of mud flew off. I pushed the chunks gruffly out of the way and turned to look at a man coming up behind me. It was the same man as before: older, with a black hat, which he took off to wipe back sweat-slicked gray hair before pulling it back on.
“What’ve ya got?” he asked.
I heard Calliel’s voice (which was my voice now) answer, “Ten-thirty.”
“Who’s on the crik?”
“Jazzle and a couple of his boys,” said Calliel. “They can’t approach or cross from that direction.”
The old man snorted, spat. “Jazzle ain’t worth two shits on a shingle.”
“We ain’t got a lot of options, Merle. We’ve talked about this.”
Merle spat again. “Tell ya, he steps outta line, I’ve got a mind to deal with him, too.”
“He’ll make good.”
“How’re you so sure?”
“ ‘Cause if he don’t he’s gonna find me a helluva lot less hospitable than the day before yesterday. I ain’t got time for his horseshit, and we’ve got a job to do.”
Merle grunted. “Let’s get to it, then.”
He stepped away, marching up a dirt street lined by run-down rustic edifices, the very kind you’d see in westerns. Calliel came down the steps and reached for the cool, curved metallic handle of what had to be a pistol. He didn’t pull it out, but merely ran his hand over it, as if seeking reassurance from it. There was stinging fear in him, and bottomless anger. They were frightening in their totality, allowing nothing else in—
The vision quavered, then blew away like so much smoke.
I was back in the hospital, floating over his shoulder. The me in bed was back too. I gawked up at the large man glaring back.
I punched bluntly at the panic button. “I … I think I’m having a stroke. I … I’m having a stroke … Please,” I simpered despairingly, “… p-please help me. I haven’t done anything to you. P-p-please … help or … get a n-nurse … or … just … just go away. Please.”
I watched me tremble. Sweat glistened on my forehead.
“Is that what you think you’re having—a stroke?” demanded Calliel.
The me in bed still managed to communicate a stare of contempt, despite feeling utter panic that no one was coming to help, and bewilderment at what just happened. I saw that stare, and it sickened me. For that in the end was what my entire life reduced to: contempt.
“I need help. Please … go get help, or g-go away. That’s all I … that’s all I want. Please. Please! I w-won’t file charges; just go … go away!”
“You do need help,” said Calliel. “But I think in order to get it, you’re going to need more convincing. You aren’t having a stroke, you stupid braying jackass,” he yelled. “You’re havin’ a me!”
Over his shoulder, I cried out. I knew the total darkness was coming again for the me in bed, and I knew that when I returned my very sanity was going to be on the line. Calliel and the room dissolved—
I stood over a man lying partially under scrub brush. He was propped up on his elbow and yelling at me—Calliel—who had a pistol pointed at his head.
“I ain’t said nothin’ to no one!” howled the man, his voice choked with pain. “Calabis ain’t even here! He’s in Bodie! Bodie!”
There it was again: that sense of crushing totality. But it was all anger now. Rage. It blackened Calliel’s mind.
“Good, safe distance to be. Gives the appearance of innocence, don’t it? And yet somehow his hands got the ranch damn well locked down like they’re anticipatin’ trouble. Well, trouble is here. You shoulda thought about that, Jazzle, before you turned traitor on us …”
“NO!” shrieked Jazzle. “NO, CALLIEL, NO! I GOT ME A FAM—”
That crushing rage pulled back on the trigger, and the gun kicked satisfyingly in Calliel’s palm, up along his arm. The bullet tore into Jazzle’s eye, and his head flew back against the sand. Calliel stepped over him and fired again, then again, then again. Blood sprayed up with each shot.
He glared at the dead man at his feet, then spat on him and turned and marched away. His rage hadn’t abated. If anything, it had gotten even heavier. It physically hurt, and I whimpered under it, both against the pain it gave, and the sickening joy of the kicking gun.
The scene faded moments after he found Merle, who was covered in blood and limping, a shotgun over his shoulder—
I was back in the hospital room. The me in bed was back too. My face was blank and drenched. I convulsed and vomited. Puke issued out of my mouth as out of a fire hose, covering the tray and everything down to my feet. When there was nothing left to bring up, I gaped up at him, my jaw dripping. My entire body shook as though struck with a vicious fever.
“Now, if I send you back a third time,” warned Calliel, shaking his head disdainfully, “it’s over. You won’t come back. You’ll die, and I’ll have to report that I failed to save your sorry ass. Not that it’ll make any difference to you, but I’ve got a perfect track record and I’ll really be pissed about losing it. So why don’t you save me the aggravation and—
“ —WAKE UP!—”
His roar wasn’t just loud, it barreled past my ear drums and smashed into my innards and scrambled my senses.
I woke. The ventilator whirred and clicked quietly. I blinked my eyes open to see him standing over me.
Over his shoulder, I watched the dream fade like before, like it was nothing but smoke, and then the hues changed and bled out, revealing the room, colorless and lonesome.
The me in bed couldn’t yell or scream or even talk with a ventilator tube stuck down my throat, and the panic button was out of reach. Calliel reached for the control it was part of and adjusted the bed to a sitting position. I came up like a zombie out of a coffin. The bed moaned to a stop, and he dropped the control on the bedstand—out of reach.
He chuckled with disgust. “Tell ya what, Professor, you look like a two-month-old barrel of bullshit in July. I’m havin’ real trouble at this point thinkin’ you’re worth more’n that. But I was sent to save you. You’re gonna die soon, and the Big Man—” he pointed up—“thinks you’ve got some value. So pay real close attention, y’hear?
“You just visited Oblivion—twice. You went there because I sent you there. That’s the very state you believe awaits everyone after death. I did that, and I can and will do it again. Trouble is, human minds are pretty damn weak. No one has ever survived a third trip. Human minds can’t handle it. They snap. But they snap totally, which means the body snaps too. You die.
“You’re not going to believe it, but I sent you there for no more than a tenth of a second each time. That’s how overwhelming Oblivion is. Three tenths of a second in it, and you’re dead. One visit, two visits, dead.”
> The me in bed stared, the ventilator clicking and wheezing. I stared too as I floated over his shoulder. I’ll never, ever forget that experience. He had our full and undivided attention.
“So here’s what you’re gonna do, Dr. Ray Wilms. The nurses are gonna release you here soon enough, and you’ll be free to go. Get on the Blue Line and go home. On the bus at H Street you’ll see me in the back. You’ll have a choice then: come and sit next to me … or not.”
He leaned in close. His face was an inch away, his hazel eyes fathomless.
“One visit, two visits … dead.”
He straightened up. After holding his steely gaze on me for a very uncomfortable time, he shook his head. “There must be something pretty special about you for Him to want you, for Him to send me to you. Personally, I can’t see it. I’ve got streaks in my shorts with more personality than you.”
He turned and marched out of the room.
~~*~~
The nurse came in not long after. She removed the breathing tube and turned off the ventilator.
“The law requires that you meet with a psychologist,” she told me, pulling the tape off my mouth and washing my face. “He’ll be here in an hour or so. In the meantime, suck on this lozenge. It’ll relieve the sore throat from the tube. Sit tight.”
She left.
The psychologist showed up two hours later. I deluded myself during the interview that I was lying. I told him I’d been very depressed and was tired of my life and longing for a way out. He asked if I’d ever thought of suicide before; I told him yes. He asked what made me act on the impulse now. I shook my head, surprised that tears had bubbled up in my eyes. If I told him I hadn’t acted on the impulse, that a fucking madman tried to fucking kill me, he’d have me committed as one, so I said nothing.
He gave a strong recommendation for immediate counseling, then handed me a list of low- or no-cost psychotherapists in the greater San Diego area. When he walked out I curled up and sobbed like a baby.
They released me five hours later. They had cleaned and dried my clothes. I pulled them on and stumbled out into the night. Half an hour later I got on the Green Line. At America Plaza I boarded the Blue. The city swam past me, unnoticed.
Angel Page 7
