A Better Angel

by Chris Adrian

  She let out a scream when we flew off the ramp. It might have been a word, but I couldn’t tell what. I had barely got my seat belt in my hand when we went through the garage door and hit the wall on the other side. Her car was a Volvo—the safest thing her father could buy her. But she must have disabled the airbag on my side. I went straight through the windshield.

  If I passed out, it was just for a moment. The lights were on in the garage, so when I sat up where I’d fallen across the hood I could see how I was covered in pizza, not blood. When I stood up I was very stiff, and when I touched my nose it was sore. Cindy was cursing and disentangling herself from her airbag. Her door wouldn’t open; she had to come through mine. I was just standing there, looking around at the shelves full of paint and old trophies and gardening tools.

  “I told you!” Cindy shouted, pounding me on the chest, either attacking me or congratulating me, I couldn’t tell which. “I fucking told you!” Behind her a door opened and I saw her sister’s face appear, hovering just to the left of the jamb.

  “Boy, are you going to get it,” she said.

  Cindy had another party. I don’t know how she convinced her mother to leave her home alone again when she went out of town. It had only been two weeks since she wrecked the car, though she was able to explain that by saying that the car skidded on some ice. I had stopped talking to her. When she sent me notes, I sent them back unread, and after practice I would walk home right away, instead of waiting for the bus.

  Nobody went to the party this time. I took the trip down to her house but stayed in the woods, watching. Every once in a while I would see her face at the window. She would stare for a long time at her empty yard, and then disappear. It made me sad to think of Cindy sitting alone in her big house, feeling like everyone had forgotten her father and what had happened just a couple of months ago, her worst suspicions about people validated. But I couldn’t imagine going up to the door, and not just because I was afraid of what she might do next to prove who she thought I was.

  “How was the party?” my mother asked when I got back home. She was sitting at the kitchen table with the dog, who liked to lie on his belly on the table with his head on his crossed paws. While my mother drank they would sit that way for hours, staring into each other’s eyes until it was time to watch television or go for a walk or go to bed.

  “I left early,” I said.

  “Bad time?”

  “Just a little boring.”

  “Well, that’s a shame. How about a little drink?” she asked, both offering one and asking for one. I took her glass and got her some new ice and poured her some more vodka and got some water for myself. When I sat down, the dog turned around, never rising but turning himself by making swimming motions with his paws, so he rotated clockwise until he faced me. My mother batted at his thumping tail. “I’m having a bad night, too,” she said. “Puppy and I have been talking.” I put out my hand to the dog, expecting him to shy away from it, or to growl at me, but he rubbed his face against my palm. “I have been asking him, ‘Where is it written that a woman has got to suffer all her life? Where is it written that your father should die and your mother should die and your brother should die and your sister should die and your husband should die?’”

  “He’s just a dog,” I said.

  “I am not asking him to get an answer,” she said, drawing herself up and looking down her long nose at me. “The table may as well answer me, or the carpet, or the sky. Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?”

  “Did you ever worship the devil?”

  “What? What sort of question is that? Why would you ask such a thing?”

  “I don’t know.” The dog turned back to her, as if he were offended by the question, too.

  “If you don’t want to talk,” she said. “If you’re sick of me, then just say so.” She stood up and snapped her fingers. The dog jumped off the table and ran to their room, and she followed him there without saying anything else and slammed the door. I stayed a little while at the table, drinking my water, then poured myself some of her vodka, and I sat in her chair, drinking and thinking about things, but I knew even as I tried it that it would not be my way, and that it wouldn’t help me any, to sit there like she did. I went to my room.

  I had thrown out the Ouija board five times already, and five times I had gone and gotten it out of the garbage again, and set it in my lap to talk to the mind or the spirit that said it was my father’s. That night I sat for a long while talking to it. It said, You are not a creature, but were born out of my mind and my desire, and the perfect part of you fills you more day by day. One day soon there will be nothing human left. Today a pinprick makes you bleed, a prayer makes you sick to your stomach. Tomorrow you will walk naked on battlefields, and crush houses under your heel. Raise your hand then, and an eagle will perch on your fist. Shout an insult at the sun, it will tremble in the sky. Again and again you have felt it, just for a second you know your power, and you are amazed until the necessary lie wraps you up again, and you forget, and the great astounding truth seems just an idle daydream. One day soon the very opposite will be true, and you will wake upon a mountain of skulls from a daydream of being sullen and ordinary, and wonder, Was I ever that way? I put it away for five minutes and then got it out again and listened again while it spoke to me, letter by letter: Again and again you ask me, over and over I answer. You have always known why. You have always felt it, the wrongness in you going out in great circles to corrupt the whole world. I say corrupt; I mean perfect. So how can you ask me why, when the very problem you lament is its own answer and solution? Beloved son, when will you stop sorrowing after the very thing you should celebrate?

  For two hours I listened, message after message. Like always, when I was finally done I felt as ashamed as if I had been masturbating. I got into bed but only turned from side to side, thinking in turn about Cindy and Paul and my father. When the moon rose high enough to shine in my window, it made the room too bright, even with the shades drawn.

  I went under my bed, something I used to do when I was small, especially if my parents were fighting or there was something else going on that was frightening me. Back then every other kid I knew was scared of the space beneath their bed, but for me it was always the one place where I never felt afraid, and the darker it was, the better I felt. I pulled my blanket so it hung down almost all the way to the ground, blocking out all the light, and then I closed my eyes and hugged my knees. Why Antichrist? I asked, this time not necessarily of anything or anybody. But I wanted to know. Why that? Why did that have to be the answer to the problem in me?

  “I haven’t seen your crazy girlfriend around lately,” Paul said to me after the last practice of the season.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” I said. “She never was.”

  “Well, that girl who is your friend,” he said. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “At home, I guess.”

  “You should leave her alone, anyway. Let her decompress. Let her de-crazy, you know?”

  “I guess. Hey, you know on Thursday when you were running with a Trinity defenseman toward the goal and the guy was trying to check you but he could only get your glove and he was trying so hard to check you he didn’t notice that Malcolm had set himself up as a pick?”

  “Yeah,” he said, not turning around from his locker.

  “And he bounced off of Malcolm and you got that sidearm shot between the legs of the goalie?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That was a great play.”

  “Thanks, man,” he said, and he turned around and smiled. “You’re not so bad yourself.” We were alone in the locker room because he took forever in the shower and I had hung around talking to him the whole time. He turned back to keep packing up his bag, and there was something in the way that he was smiling that made it seem like the only thing in the world I could do was walk over and put my arms around him. It seemed as inevitable as flying through the winds
hield when Cindy’s car hit the wall of her garage; just like that it was something nobody could have stopped. And just for a second, when I stood there with one arm across his chest and another across his belly, and I could feel him relaxing against me, it seemed like everything was right everywhere, and a whole other set of days was opening up in front of me, that had nothing to do with Cindy or her Ouija board or being the son of the Devil. I thought for sure he was going to put his hand on my hand, and say my name, and I had closed my eyes to wait for it. But he knocked me back with his elbow, then turned around and pushed me. “What the fuck?” he said. “What was that? What’s your problem?” I just looked up at him, rubbing my chest where he’d pushed me, because I didn’t have an answer for him.

  I walked home after practice, and went right to my room, and didn’t come out even when my mother knocked on my door and asked what was for dinner. I kept picking up the board and putting it down again, and sat with my back against the wall, staring at the space under my bed, but I didn’t crawl under there, because I was afraid I might not come out again if I did. I listened to my mother making herself something to eat, and talking to the dog, and watching the television. It was after midnight by the time she went to bed. After I heard her door close I left my room and left the house. I walked down the hill, cutting through the woods, to Cindy’s house.

  There was a light in her window, flickering blue and red and orange, like she was watching television. I threw a couple of crab apples lightly against the glass.

  “There you are,” she said. “You want to come up and watch a movie?” I said I did. She came downstairs and let me in, and led me by the hand through her darkened house, past her mom’s bedroom and her sister’s bedroom, careful not even to step on the light that seeped from underneath their doors.

  “The party was last week,” she said, when we were in her room.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Well, better late.” She sat me down on her bed, turned off her television, and then fiddled with her computer. “You want some popcorn?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Good. It wouldn’t be appropriate. I got this for my birthday.” She held up a digital projector, turning it from side to side. “It’s better than just the screen. I’d do it downstairs if my mom and the little rodent weren’t at home. You can make the picture really big in the living room. And you can do this thing where, when one of them jumps, then you jump, too, from off of the stairs. Except you land on the couch, right? Not that you would need to. Here we go.”

  She pressed a button and a whole section of her wall became a harsh digital-blue rectangle, and then a softer-blue rectangle of sky, and then the camera swung down to show a man talking silently at a café table, sipping at his coffee and waving his hand to punctuate his silent exclamations. The towers were clearly visible behind him.

  “I always watch it from the beginning,” she said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, and I took her hand. She pulled it away.

  “Hey, pay attention. This is your education, not mine. I’ve been educated.”

  “Do you watch it every night?” She shrugged.

  “That’s Antonin,” she said, pointing at the man. “That’s his name. I found that out.” The plane flew in behind him, and the explosion seemed to blossom into the whole room. Cindy startled and took my hand back. “Here we go,” she said. We sat and watched, Cindy biting her lips and squeezing my hand. “Now,” she said, standing up just before the second plane hit. “That one never surprises me. Are you feeling anything? Are you remembering anything?”

  “Like what?”

  “You know. Memories. Reasons. Your father.”

  “No,” I said. “Come here.”

  “You can’t see their faces,” she said. “Even on the living room wall. When they jump you can’t see their faces. I thought if I could project it against the side of the house, then maybe. Maybe if you saw a face, then you would know who you are.”

  “I know who I am,” I said. “I know what I want.”

  “You’re the same as always,” she said, shaking her head. “Wait a minute. Take off your shirt. Just your shirt. I didn’t say your pants. Anyway.” She picked up the projector and turned it away from the wall so it shined on me, and, stepping closer while she focused it, she made a rectangle just the size of my chest. I closed my eyes and tried to feel the heat from the fire. “How about now?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Goddamn.” She faced the projector into the mirror, but when I tried to look at it, it was too bright. Then she took off her own shirt, and stood where the images would shine on her. “See?” she said. Now people were jumping, and I saw them fall from her face, disappearing in the black space above her shoulder to rush past her ribs. “Do you see? When you do it this way, then you can almost feel what they were feeling. Isn’t it horrible? Doesn’t it make you remember why you did it?” I walked over and did something that seemed so much the opposite of what I had done with Paul. I held her from the front, and there was nothing tender in it, and it made me feel like everything was wrong, and going to be wrong.

  The projector shined above her bed. When she lay down the light passed over her, but I could feel the towers on my back when I was on her, and when she sat on top of me I could see them reaching up her body, and then suddenly reaching down as the first one fell. We rolled on her bed, and I felt like the projector was wrapping us in light, even as darkness reached in between to enfold us, too, uncoiling from out of the mirror and from the window and from under the bed. It filled up my head, so all I saw was light flashing in the boundless dark. Cindy went away, and the whole world went away, and even the sadness I’d felt, not just since my father died but every day of my life—that went away, too. I heard a voice that said, “There you are. There you are.”

  “There,” Cindy was saying, when I opened my eyes. “There you are. It’s hard. It’s really hard, being the son of the Devil, but you’ll get used to it. People get used to anything.” I stayed where I was, pressing my face into her shoulder, crying, not just because I was sad but because I finally knew who I was, and believed it, grateful and happy for the ruin I had just done, for the ruin I had brought and the ruin I would bring, every catastrophe more beloved to me than the next, thinking that even though I wasn’t looking at them on the wall I could see the buildings in my mind—O father, let them burn their heat is as perfect as my glee—lit up like birthday candles to celebrate the first day of my life.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to the editors whose careful attention greatly improved these individual stories: Cressida Leyshon, Eli Horowitz, Tom Chiarella, Tyler Cabot, Michael Ray, Don Lee, Lois Rosenthal, Lee Montgomery, and Ben George; and especially to Eric Chinski, Eric Simonoff, and Stephanie Paulsell, whose generous investment of time and effort improved the collection as a whole.