Future on Fire

by Orson Scott Card

  One of the wings knocked me to the ground—I screamed, afraid I’d hit my head—and then his long fingers started fumbling at my clothes, stiff and clumsy like he didn’t know what he was doing. I thought of Mary Tunache, who made out with that exchange student and later told us all he didn’t even know how to get her bra off.

  He didn’t mean to knock me over, not like he wanted to force me or anything like that, he just couldn’t use his hands very well, our world was too clumsy for him. I know that, because once he’d got my clothes off he just started stroking me, long strokes with his fingers all spread out, like the way my piano teacher used to hold her hands over the keys before she began. At first his fingers seemed horribly cold, and it wasn’t until I saw the lines of blood down my breasts and stomach that I realized they weren’t fingers at all, but claws, long and thin, a pale gold that picked up reddish highlights from the sun, like my friend Marie’s hair that everyone envies so much.

  The claws just touched my skin but they reached into me too, and they stirred up something all the way down. I started making noises, they sounded like animal imitations, but they weren’t. I was talking his language, his people’s talk, nor talk but shrieks and whistles that didn’t mean anything like our words do, they just said everything they needed to say. Everything.

  I want to get this right, put it down just like it happened, but I can’t. It’s not fair. I know what to say, but I don’t know the words. Whatever I saw makes it something else. How can I use human words to describe angel language? If I could only speak that again I wouldn’t have to describe.

  The funny thing was, nobody heard me, the one or two people I could see in the lot didn’t even turn, some woman walked past only an aisle away, in the middle of my screams I could hear the click of her heels. But she didn’t hear me, she couldn’t even see the angel spread over me, with his wings curving over the tops of the cars.

  Reading this it strikes me how crazy it sounds. If no one else saw it, then it didn’t happen, right? Well, I think that no matter how crazy a person is, he’s got to know, secretly anyway, when he’s made something up. Maybe that’s what makes them unhappy and violent, because inside they know it’s not true, yet outside they can’t get away from it.

  But the angel was real all the way down, so much that for weeks afterward my mother and my friends looked and sounded fake to me, like people on television saying words that someone else has written and no one cares about.

  I don’t really know when the angel…entered me. I know he did because later when I checked I wasn’t a virgin anymore, but I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter. Can you understand? What really counted was speaking the angel’s language.

  I don’t even know when it ended. Suddenly I was lying alone, between my mother’s car and some Cadillac, my body all scratched, as much by the pebbles under me as by the claws, and in the sky I could see the angel, his back and legs incredibly bright, getting larger and larger until they covered the whole sun and sky. And then they were gone.

  I grabbed up my clothes, found the car keys on the ground, and scrambled inside. I lay there on the back seat, still not excited or frightened or happy or sad, or anything like that. What the angel did, what he showed me, made me, you can’t find any feelings to go with it. I’ve got a kind of thing about feelings. I think they make up a sort of language we use, just like words, to tell ourselves what’s happened to us. They explain things. Happiness says, this was a good experience, you enjoyed it, sadness says, this one was crummy, you didn’t like it.

  But the angel didn’t need any explanations. I’d spoken his language. If I could have I would have given up feelings, and words, forever. But you try to do that without the angel’s language and you just become fake.

  But that came later. Lying there on the back seat I tried to hold on to what the angel had given me. I tried making those sounds again, only they came out stupid so I stopped right away. I tried to remember the things I’d seen in his eyes and that came a little clearer, except it was only a memory.

  One thing real remained. The angel’s message. His promise. The angel wanted a child. No, the angel never wanted anything. He was going to have a child. And he’d chosen me as the mother. That’s not right either. He didn’t choose, didn’t find me worthy or anything like that. In the angel’s world nothing gets chosen or picked out. You’d think I would wonder why he picked me. But I’d seen that world, I’d talked it, and I knew you didn’t need any reason for anything.

  I was going to have the angel’s child. Except I couldn’t do it right away. My human body couldn’t hold his angel seed. It wouldn’t burn up or anything, the two things just wouldn’t fit together. So the first time he came just to prepare me. What he did would change me, not all at once, but slowly, over years until I was ready for him. The only thing I had to do was allow it to work. That meant no husband or lovers, no human disturbing that slow movement all the way through me. Lying there in the car I had to laugh a little. It reminded me of my mother telling me that “virginity still matters. No man wants soiled goods, no matter what he says.”

  Well, the angel had certainly soiled me, and whatever any man might want I was going to make sure that dirt soiled me all the way down. The angel had promised me a child and I planned to get it.

  The strange thing was, I knew that wanting the angel’s child already cut me off from him. Wanting things, that’s what makes us people and not angels. But I couldn’t help it.

  I lay there for a while, breathing the hot stuffy air of the car but not wanting to open the windows, watching the sky darken. Finally I heard a couple of men laughing and hid on the floor while I pulled my clothes on. When they’d gone I got up and drove home.

  For the next few days I tried, like I said, not to feel anything. I thought it would help me hold on to the angel language. But that was gone. Finished. The angel had dropped me back in the human world and I had to teach myself all over how to work in it. Besides, I could see my mother was getting suspicious.

  At first her job and the summer heat kept her so wrapped up she didn’t notice anything. I was really glad of that. I’d spent hours scrubbing the blood stains off my clothes and the back seat of the car. But the next evening, when I called my mother after she’d driven to work, she just went on about the heat and the men in her department wanting a young secretary with big tits instead of someone who could type and cared about her work, and how I shouldn’t forget to water the lawn before it got dark.

  For a few days it went like that, but then she started to ask did I feel okay, why didn’t I go visit my friends or go to a movie, get away from the heat. I didn’t say anything, just made a face and moved away when she tried to touch me. One day she told me of a dance the Lutheran Center was giving at Speckled Lake, and all my friends were going, why didn’t I go, maybe I’d meet someone there, if I sat at home every night I’d just get depressed.

  I could see her watching me closely, and it took me a minute to realize the test she’d set up. She didn’t care about the dance, well, she did, but more, she wanted to see how I’d react to her interfering. Almost too late I shouted, “You called all my friends? Jesus, how could you do that? Didn’t I tell you I hate it when you butt in like that?” She had to fight not to smirk as she apologized and went on to say, even so, maybe I should go to the dance anyway, now that the damage was done, no sense in my denying myself.

  The funny thing was, she was playing a part just as much as I was. It made me wonder how much she knew. For just a second the crazy idea hit me that an angel (or the angel, maybe there was only one, except it made no difference how many there were, they were all the same), maybe the angel had come to her, to everybody, and everyone kept it hidden, thinking no one would understand, so that if I told the truth, everyone else would want to.

  But no, I could see in my mother’s face, and later, in other people’s faces when I looked at them in the street, she’d never seen those eyes. I could tell by looking at hers. You could go a certain way
into them and then they stopped.

  Later, after my mother had apologized again, I lay up in my room with the fan on, and thought about my feelings, like anger or sadness, and how they only described things, but how, without the angel talk, I couldn’t do anything else. It’s all fake, I thought, no matter which way I go. If I acted like other people, that wasn’t real, but if I tried not to, if I tried to act like the angel, that made me even more fake. The best I could do, I decided, was act like ordinary people but at least remember the truth. I got up and went to the mirror and looked at my eyes. I thought they looked different than they used to, but how could I tell without seeing them from before at the same time, I thought they went all the way down, but I could only see them in the glass which made everything flat and dull. If only I could really look in my own eyes. The angel can, I thought. He can look at himself from the outside and in at the same time.

  The next day I went into town, to Woolworth’s, and bought a diary, one of those blue plastic things with thick gold-edged paper and a lock on the cover. If I couldn’t act like the angel, I thought, I should at least write it all down so I wouldn’t forget. I planned to write something every day, all my thoughts and feelings, even if I had to use human language, so when the angel came back I’d have stayed close to him.

  The first couple of days I must have filled up half the book. I imagined ending up with a whole stock of diaries and giving them to the angel or maybe saving them for the baby. But then my daily writing started getting shorter. I found myself trying to think of things to say, or writing about my mother or people I saw or something like that, just to fill up the pages. So I told myself I didn’t need to write every day, I would just put things in when they came to me, like if I remembered something about the wings or the claws then I could put it down with the date.

  For a few weeks I kept doing it, then I just sort of forgot. I’ve still got it. I read it recently, while Jimmy was out playing with his toy cars. I thought I’d hate it, thought it would sound stupid. But it said so much, so many beautiful things, almost like some little piece of angel language translated into English. Why didn’t I keep doing it, I thought, and began to cry, angry at the same time, because tears, and even anger had nothing to do with it, they pushed aside the angel voice, leaving nothing but human talk in its place.

  Around the time I got the diary I also made the claw. I got some clay (at first I thought of papier mâché, but decided I wanted something better and besides, I couldn’t remember how to make papier mâché) and spent hours bending, twisting, pinching, sometimes screaming and throwing it at the wall (I waited till my mother went to work) because I couldn’t get it right.

  Finally I told myself I’d never get it right, and settled for a version that didn’t try to look just like it, but instead gave me a kind of memory of it. I’d bought a little book on clay which told me how to bake it, and then I painted it, gold with a bit of red glitter, but afterwards I was sorry because the paint took away from the memory. It looked too fake. I thought of using turpentine but decided I’d better leave it alone.

  I kept the claw in my drawer, underneath my underwear. Sometimes, sitting in school, or watching television, I imagined the claw inside my clothes, touching me, and I’d get so excited I couldn’t stand it. I’d feel like I could burn right through my skin. One time Mrs. Becker called on me in English class, to say what some character in Shakespeare said to his mother or something, and I just stammered at her, my mouth half hanging open, while everybody tried not to laugh, whispering things back and forth, until finally Mrs. Becker called on Chris Bloom, who always knew everything.

  Other times, if my mother or the kids at school were bothering me, I would go home and take out the claw and hold it against me or make it stroke my body, just like his had done, sometimes hard enough to make blood come out. Or else I would just put it next to me while I slept.

  My mother kept after me a lot. She wanted me to date more, to go to dances, have lots of boy friends, she wanted all the girls to envy me, and she was scared they pitied me instead. She couldn’t stand that.

  The funny thing was, I didn’t really mind dating. I thought at first that I could never do it again because I had to keep myself clean for the angel, for the baby. And I thought that all the boys would look so clumsy and stupid and thick, their voices all hard and ugly. I thought any time they’d ask me I’d want to laugh or gag. But then I discovered they didn’t touch each other at all, boys and the angel. They had nothing to do with each other, despite my being in the middle, like a kind of bridge connecting them. I saw it almost as two different mes, the one that belonged to the angel, and the one that went to the movies with Billy Glaston or Jeffrey Sterner.

  But if I didn’t mind dating, I didn’t care either. I made no effort, and like my mother told me, the bees’ll fly around a pot of warm honey, not a glass of cold water. It wasn’t like I dressed sloppy or didn’t use makeup, that would have made more trouble than it was worth, it was just that I paid no special attention to what boys said, and didn’t try to laugh in a nice way, or give boys any special looks, things like that.

  But I got dates anyway, sometimes with boys too ugly or dumb or just clumsy to try for the popular girls, boys who automatically looked for someone in their range. I didn’t care. If someone asked me to the movies and I wanted to see the picture I went. I knew I couldn’t let any boys do anything with me, so what difference did it made who took me? Only, I avoided the really ugly boys, not for myself, but so people wouldn’t make fun of me.

  One boy got to me, at least a little. His name was Jim Kinney, though around that time he told everyone to call him James, figuring it sounded more adult or intellectual or something. Jim—James—knew more about computers than half of IBM. In fact, when he was just a junior in high school he got permission to use the big computers down in the factory and wrote some program or other that IBM bought for a huge pile of money. He planned to use some of it, he said, to publish a book of his poetry. Poetry and science, Jim said, were “two horses pulling the same chariot.” He often talked like that. He even showed me some of his poems. He didn’t write about nature or love or stuff like that. Jim wrote about truth and knowledge and God, though he said he didn’t mean God like in the church.

  What he did mean was what got me excited about him. When I read his poems carefully, getting around the fancy words, like “the sheer blank wall of mortal ignorance”, I saw he was writing about the difference between human talk and angel language. He knows, I thought, and got goosepimples, almost like when I could feel the angel claw under my clothes.

  But how could an angel visit him? Did they visit boys? The thought upset me the same time it excited me. Maybe a woman angel needed a human man to make her pregnant. Maybe he was also waiting. Out of breath I looked up at him. And saw it wasn’t true. He should have been looking at my face, my eyes, testing me the way I would have done him. Instead, he was reading his own poem over my shoulder. “Should I explain it to you?” he said, when he should have waited for me to say something. I could see he really cared about the human words, whatever he pretended.

  That day I gave him back his poems and told him I didn’t feel well, and ran home. (Later he told me he thought his poems had made me sick, and we both laughed.) But over the next few days I kept thinking about him.

  I’m not sure what made Jim interested in me. He wasn’t ugly, and he sure wasn’t stupid, he could even play sports pretty good, and for a while he had a car, but it broke down. You’d think he could have gotten any girl he wanted, and wouldn’t look at someone like me who never made an effort. But maybe the other girls found him too weird, writing poetry and playing tricks with computers. Too smart. Anyway, his car was already gone by the time he started taking me out.

  Once Jim and I got started my mother just bounced off the walls with happiness. Not only was I acting more normal, but I was doing it with someone who had “rich” written all over him.

  Myself, I didn’t really know why
I was doing it. I liked being with Jim, I liked when he called me, when he helped me with my homework, or when we went to the movies (which he called “cinema”), but it still confused me when I thought about the angel. One night Jim and I had gone to a carnival and got home late. I said goodnight to him, and then to my mother (she always waited up for me), and went upstairs laughing at the way some boy had looked so sick coming off the snap-the-whip.

  I opened the drawer with my nightgown in it. And then suddenly I started to cry. I’d forgotten the angel. A whole night had gone by and I hadn’t thought about him at all. I pushed aside my clothes and grabbed the claw, but then I just threw it down again.

  I sat down on the bed and rubbed the tears away, feeling my eye makeup smear. Did I still care? Did I still believe? I opened my diary and stared at the last date. Two years ago. For two whole years I’d had nothing to say. I knew I didn’t really stop believing. I couldn’t. But I wondered—now that years had gone by, did it still mean anything? Anything more than Jim’s poems? Maybe the angel had lied to me and would never come back. Or maybe it had meant what it said, but had forgotten as soon as it left me. Maybe only humans remembered things. How could memory exist in a sky full of fire?

  The whole time Jim and I had gone around together I hadn’t let him touch me. Well, sometimes we’d hold hands and he’d put an arm around me, but whenever he moved in for something more, even just a kiss, I pushed him away. I had to make up a whole story about how my mother hadn’t kissed my father until they were almost engaged, and I really wanted to act different than that but I couldn’t help it. I could tell a couple of times Jim was fed up and didn’t want to see me any more, but I guess he liked me, or liked having a girlfriend, because he always came back.